Well, I didn't win the contest. I guess the jokes were too obscure, and using Flash wasn't much of an advantage. Though I can't figure out, if I think Flash is better than Paint, why I keep returning to Paint. I mean, Paint pixelates everything, and redrawing a portion usually involves deleting the offending bit, meaning the... OK, I'll just get to the pictures.

The first is a lateral symbiotogram (to take John Langdon's terminology) of the words "true" and "false." ( First image )

The next one is an experimental 120-degree rotational ambigram. I actually worked on this in Flash, but put it into Paint for some reason. I really should have exported it, and then as a GIF, but it's a jpeg screenshot instead.( Second cut )

This next one is a rotational figure-ground relation set on a gray background. If you're not logged into LJ, try to guess the words in it before opening the lj-cut. ( CutforBandWidth )

All right. This fourth and last idea is something I actually lifted from ceruleanst. However, since today's Chinese New Year, and since he hasn't posted about it yet, I think I can safely post it here without being accused of theft. (Though maybe I shouldn't, since he's just gone through that thing with that other ambigrammist and it only got settled four days ago, but I'm hoping to start up a friendly competition. Hmm, maybe I should wait on this last one.)

UPDATE, FEBRUARY 10: ( Grand Finale below )

Spell-check watch: "pixelates" and "screenshot." But at least it caught "imbedded." FURTHER UPDATE: Which is an accepted variant.

If you're looking for Nucleus, it's in the entry chronologically previous to this, which makes it the one below this nine times out of ten. I asked Ed to change the link on his site, but I guess he hasn't checked his mail yet. For now, I'll talk about TV and puzzles in about that order.

I haven't been keeping up with Heroes and Chuck, partly because I can catch up on those easily. Tonight, I was going to watch one of them on the computer and the other on G4, but my family decided to watch home decorating shows, so I just watched both on the computer. I noticed the pinch of the WGA strike in the way Sylar found Suresh's place. Spoiler: ( it's a little disappointing. )


Now, NUMB3RS I have kept up on. I started playing Chain Factor almost as soon as I saw that, yes, there was indeed an ARG associated with the episode "Primacy." I uncovered a couple of Error Codes (capitalized because of course they're planted), though I was only chasing my tail on the Key Codes. It's winding down now, what with eleven of twelve Shutdown Keys having been discovered. About the episode "Graphic"... ( I wonder )


Well, I'd better wrap up before midnight. Here's the name of a president. Decode it.

13 83 86 67 13 25

EDIT: Corrected a probability and added a hint.

It just occurred to me that I haven't posted any traditional ambigrams here yet. By which I mean neither of the two already here is symmetrical in the purely visual sense. Well, here's where I shall remedy that, at least with tonight's first sample.
( Wide ambigram & commentary )

Well, now that that's settled, here's my other ambigram for tonight. You almost certainly won't recognize this, so here's a link about that mathematical paradox.


I created this one by working my way forward from the beginning, and the upper-/lower-case inversion just suggested itself as a way to differentiate the two reading frames. I theoretically had a lot of leeway on this one, considering that the dot at the end could absorb as many letters as I needed, but I managed to limit myself to three. I'm amazed how distinct the large letters are from a distance.

Good night, and good luck.

I just participated in the Google U.S. Puzzle Championship and boy are my arms tired. Ha! But seriously, folks, I need to apologize to whomever made puzzle 7, Circuit Maze. Here, let me start at the beginning.

A few months ago (March 23, apparently), I was browsing the Google group at http://groups.google.com/group/rec.puzzles/topics and saw this post by one Mark Steere. His puzzle seemed interesting, but it was too big for anyone to contemplate. That post spawned a 60-post thread of arguments with Mr. Steere about why he refused to make a smaller maze, finally concluding with Walter D. Pullen using his program Daedalus to find the solution path.

To me and many posters (to be sure, I'm not a member of that group), this refusal was absurd, or at least expressed absurdly. (The attraction of trolls was inevitable, and of course not helpful.) These two paragraphs from this post best describe the two sides of the argument:

MARK STEERE: I'm just getting tired of all the baby complaints. I heard them all already before posting. "I want a smaller one." "I want a colored one." "I can't fill in the dead ends with a pencil." This is like saying that you want to run in the marathon, but only if you can hop on a moped at some point and cut across town. It's cheating.

SIMON TATHAM: Well, hold on there; not all of those are alike. 'I want a smaller one' is like saying that you want to run in the marathon, but only if you can practise on shorter courses first- which is an eminently sensible thing to do if you want to run a marathon and have no previous running experience!

In retrospect, I could have checked this maze again before starting the test, but it slipped my mind. What I want to apologize for is this comment I submitted with my answers:
Whoever designed "Circuit Maze" is an insufferable blowhard. He should be told that while Marathons don't come in graduated sizes, races do, and so should his mazes.

So there's more than one problem with this. Not only did I not specifically target Mark Steere (due to not remembering his name (also, I'd be lying if I said I hadn't wanted to target him)), but puzzle 7 actually is much smaller than the original maze. So even ignoring the (comparatively levelheaded) rough tone, my comment was likely undeserved.

So to whomever I insulted, I'm sorry. Once I find out whether it was Mark Steere or someone else who created this particular maze, I'll apologize again.

BELATED EDIT: Turns out Mark did make that other maze. I'll just be standing by my comment.

All right, it's later. Apparently, I don't have class today. So let's get started.

The most problematic part of the "Heroes" timeline (at least in my mind) is whether "save the cheerleader" was carried out. Future-Suresh certainly remembers that Peter received the prophecy, but future-Peter's scar implies he never met Claire. (Actually, there might be something embedded in his skull, causing a cyst, but I'm trying to prevent a single closed time-loop from arising in this analysis.) Therefore, I claim that Claire would have escaped without Peter's help, and Sylar would have been captured anyway from Isaac's paintings.

But that leaves unanswered why Peter didn't arrive to save Claire. My candidate answer is that Ando is a wildcard, able to alter events as I suggested in my last entry. This is an ill-defined premise, but it may be refined so as to allow Ando's two intervening interactions with Peter to steer him away from Claire.

Whether there is more than one timeline is probably a matter of contention on the forums, but this has a simple answer. In the second episode, Hiro called Ando in Japan from America, but Ando at least has to be in New York around the (proposed) time of the explosion. This cannot reasonably be a single timeline; if it is, it would certainly require a lot of unsatisfactory finagling. (Also, the gunshot in the episode I think is called "Unexpected" both happened and did not happen.)

Now, what about Sylar? Did/will Hiro kill him or not? How did/does he survive future-Hiro's sword without Claire's ability? I have two short answers which rely on information not yet available.
FIRST POSSIBILITY: Linderman revives him. This makes no sense, but he did order that Sylar be kept alive (for a while) for unknown reasons. Perhaps Sylar is going to be a backup bomb, though Sylar will only thank him by slitting his forehead.
SECOND POSSIBILITY: Sylar meets Candice before Hiro tries to kill him again. It's not important to this theory whether she survives this encounter, since her power can fool all six common senses (where I count the sense of balance along with the other five). If she somehow survives, then she might be impersonating Sylar herself when she gets killed, for reasons not yet known.

Other things I've been thinking include that there are now three possible bombs (Peter, Sylar, & Ted), that I should cross-check my day-of-the-week comparison with the "two days after the election" figure, and that my next entry should relate to the Colorado Math Olympiad.

Edit: P.P.S. (because this whole entry is like a P.S.) "Heroes" was originally about "ordinary people with extraordinary abilities." No way are the writers throwing that away for an immutable dystopian future.
Also, I call retcon! I wrote that the date on the newspaper was November 5, whereas Election Day 2006 was November 7... and the date of the election was just shown to be November 7! ...Ha!

This is just something I want to get in before the final episode of "Heroes." Nothing profound (unfortunately).

If they stop the bomb, it's because Ando can change the past (witness: they didn't get shot in that one episode). I'm guessing the blast is replaced with an EMP.


UPDATE, TUESDAY: First of all, my mistake. There are two more episodes for the season, and probably several more seasons. I made a mistake.

Second, this episode was weak, IMHO. The lack of thinking at the end might be explained by a flood of emotions, but that's sort of hand-wavy. Speaking of which, Dr. Suresh's biobabble struck me as very hand-wavy.

Third, I don't think Peter's scar in the episode "Five Years Gone" should come about, since he has Claire's healing factor, but that raises serious questions about the timeline. I'll outline them later.

It is 12:30 in the morning, and the Word of the Day is dysphemism. Merriam-Webster defines it as

the substitution of a disagreeable, offensive, or disparaging expression for an agreeable or inoffensive one; also: an expression so substituted.

For example, somebody may say "This is some great s***!" Clearly, the speaker thinks highly of whatever was referred to as "s***," despite referring to it as such.
Let's see what spell-check says!

Edit: Hmm. That's never happened before. Spell-check picked up only on "dysphemism," but didn't have any suggestions for fixing the word.
Edit 2: Ha! For "Hmm," it has the suggestions HM, Hm, MM, Mm, HMO, Ham, H'm, Hem, Him, Hum, HMS, and Hm's.

(Edit: Figures. Three days after I posted an essay, not only have the comics moved, invalidating thirteen of my links, but for more than a week after, I can't be bothered to change the links. Well, at least deleting one of those included parenthetically isn't too hard. Edit 2: The links should now direct correctly.)

Ah, politics. A subject I don't particularly like talking about. And yet it's practically unavoidable when talking about the work of one rhjunior.

Mr. Hayes, as you may know, has three webcomics: Nip & Tuck, Goblin Hollow (formerly "Under the Lemon Tree"), and Tales of the Questor. The first two are frequently conservative in their view; the third, not so much. I bring this up because the current story in "Nip & Tuck" has a somewhat different direction.

A bit of background: about a year ago, Nip (the brother without the hat) was hired to be the lead of a movie nearly sight unseen (on both ends-- the director didn't put much thought into the selection, and the actors don't see more than a few pages at a time). Some weeks into the filming, Nip gets his hands on a director's copy of the script and discovers the movie is an offensively, flamingly liberal piece of garbage.

(An aside here: this movie idea is obviously based off of "Syriana," the only movie I truly regret not walking out on. I have managed to walk out on "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" and "What the Bleep Do We Know!?" because I didn't care for the central concepts. As for "Syriana," the plot didn't make any sense. Hey Mr. Gaghan! You're supposed to connect everything before it's more than the audience can handle! I mean, "You're the Canadian"? What the #$*!!?)

Anyway, unable to escape the movie, he hatches a cunning scheme to completely hijack it. The result is a movie poised at the opposite political extreme that parallels George W.'s war in Iraq rather nicely. So, politics.

In fast-forwarding to today (mid-July 2006, actually), we see that Purloined Letter, the guys credited with that revamped film, has a new movie out-- sci-fi, hyperdrive, evil empire, and such. The premise is that a resistance against the oppressive Interstellar Federation has just lost a war thereagainst, and the rebels have been taken back into the IF in an uncomfortable manner (also click next). Among the space battles, we see that plenty of just-plain-folks have been unfairly affected by the war. It's clear, by the way, that we're supposed to sympathize with these characters, the lead and the kiddie sidekick.

"Rebel Cry" strikes me as considerably more liberal than "Man on the Border" for coming out against that war, but then, something similar has been said about "The Phantom Menace." So what's going on here? Is the story (an unabashed B-movie) generic enough that it slipped under Ralph's radar? Does he have some twists that will drive me away? Do I just not understand politics? What?

This is a little thing I've cobbled together from memory and the Comixpedia comics wiki (which, by the way, is in desperate need of editing (which is why I relied on memory)). I had not seen such a graph of crossovers before, and I found this to be a terrible omission. To remedy that, here is the Reb Webcomic Crossover graph!

Absurd Notions     HOSERS
        |            |
General Protection Fault--Help
         |    |           Desk
Clan of  | Kevin & Kell
the Cats |
   |     | The Class Menagerie
   |     |  |*        |      |
   | Funny Farm---Newshounds |
   | |                       |
  CRfH!--- --Life at Bayside |
  ||      |                  |
 Fans!   Joe      The Suburban
 |  |  Average       Jungle
 |  |
 | Knights of the Dinner Table
 |
It’s Walky!--Melonpool--Zortic

Dork Tower   Beyond   Parallel
     |       Reality  Dementia
    PvP         |        |
              Emergency Exit
 The
Wotch--The Accidental Centaurs

Of course, I ignored cameos, one-ways, spinoffs, and anything else I may have forgotten (which made ignoring them easier). Here are explanations for some of the symbols, plus a running commentary.

|
Starting slow. This is just a vertical connector.
I started the graph by going from A (Absurd Notions) to Z (Zortic).

-
A hyphen, though it's not used like that in the graph (yet). In groups of two or more, it's a horizontal connector.
I've included links to those webcomics I read on a regular basis. (Dropped GPF a while after Eric Burns did, right before the main cast jumped to the evil twin universe.)

|*
This is an unorthodox crossover; while characters from "Funny Farm" appeared in "The Class Menagerie" at about the same time, in about the same place, as characters from the latter appeared in the former, this is much more like two one-way crossovers. (So is that more like half-duplex or full-duplex?) Good thing it's not on the main line!
The GPF/Funny Farm crossover was one of the stranger attempts IMO, since the main characters of the latter look like furries. (Actually, R. Smith has said that's only to differentiate the main characters. I wonder how that works with the "Newshounds" crossover. Ah well, I guess it's flexible.) I was fully expecting another comparison between Mr. Westone (FF) and Sean Connery (GPF).


This is the only instance I have seen of more than two comics (three, obviously) in the same crossover. Form follows function.
This is where I toss up my hands and say, "What's the deal?" Comixpedia has bios for nearly all the "CRfH!" characters, but nothing about the crossovers. It's not as if it hasn't reached a threshold; the "GPF" article lists five crossovers with five webcomics, and "CRfH!" has had that many, in a configuration that should be considered much more interesting but is instead ignored! By the way, the current "This Week!" article on the front page is no less than six months old! There's just no excuse for that! (pant pant wheeze)

||
These two vertical connectors simply represent two crossovers between the same two comics. This counts for two crossovers and the fifth webcomic for "CRfH!"
In my opinion, the most underappreciated (read: I enjoy them, but Eric Burns doesn't read them) comics on this graph are "Absurd Notions" and "The Wotch."


Empty space (I know, I know. I'm running out of symbols.) means there is no crossover.
I have made a little effort to alphabetize the titles in small areas, subverted by my efforts to keep the lines straight and the graph compact. Final size: 25 lines x 30 characters, about 600 total characters. The top connected portion's only 18 lines.

EDIT, 12-23-07: Nuts. The helpful Snap Shots are interfering with the three-way and the Class Menagerie/Suburban Jungle connectors. Rather than edit the graph (since the icon is like 2 2/3 characters wide), here's a link to the latest version as of this date. Alternatively, click the "comics" tag above.

I saw "NUMB3RS" just a few hours ago. (I just want to say that I used some of the time following to reset my password, because it somehow changed.) This episode was a rerun, "Undercurrents." (New episodes start September 22.) A couple things bothered me about that episode when I first saw it.

( Spoiler )