Sometimes Liz Draws

My friends Emily and Bailes are getting married this weekend, and I am chronicling their relationship each day iin an xkcd-style web comic.

It can be found at:
www.xkcEB.wordpress.com

The beginning, Day One, starts here:
http://xkceb.wordpress.com/2009/08/10/4/

To view the alt-text in Internet Explorer, hover over the image. To view the alt-text in Firefox, switch to Internet Explorer.

NYT Fail

In the NY Times Book Review tomorrow, a review of the book "Digital Barbarism" begins as follows:

One of the more trenchant cartoons of the Internet era features a stick-figure man typing furiously at his keyboard. From somewhere beyond the panel floats the irritated voice of his wife.

“Are you coming to bed?”

“I can’t,” he replies. “This is important.”

“What?”

“Someone is wrong on the Internet.”

Anyone familiar with, well, the internet will immediately recognize this as the work of everyone's internet crush Randall Munroe, in xkcd #386.


But uncredited.

The article in question, which can be found here, is about copyright in the internet age, fair use, and outraged internet denizens. Fail.

Also note the interesting assumptions the article's author makes about the relationship and gender of the xkcd characters.

Jenny noted that the article was written by a Ross Douthat, which must clearly be the pseudonym of xkcd's black hat guy. Douthat is pretty much as close to douche-hat as one can print in the NY Times, so I'm gonna go with this explanation. Stay tuned to next week's book review for an extended series on velociraptors.


Major fail, NYT.

Hello, strangers.

I seem to have accumulated a rather significant amount of google traffic, thanks almost entirely to the "ate a violin" post and everyone's internet crush Randall Munroe. I made that post not actually to draw people to my blog - seriously, if that were the intent, I'd have more consistent content round these parts - but because I was curious how many people would read the XKCD blog, search the first term in that post, and then follow through to the resulting links.

The answer: a lot.

Hullo, xkcd fans! ::waves::

And while I'm getting all this random international traffic...

Can anyone recommend a graduate-level dramatic writing program in the U.K.?

I'd like to consider studying in the U.K., but my anglophilia does not extend to the university system and have absolutely no idea how to go about finding good programs. I'm talking to you, random Welsh stranger reading this - if you're thinking "well obviously she knows about the blahdiblah program, but I don't know of anything other than that", then you should leave a comment telling me about the blahdiblah program, because I in fact do not know about it.

In other news, the Doctor Who Christmas special airs in six days. (which is to say, there are six days till Christmas). This is excellent because:
1) new Doctor Who to reward me in the middle of my awful never-ending application slog!
2) spoilers, real actually spoiling-y spoilers, now abound on the internet, which means I have to avoid the internet, which means I am forced to focus on my awful never-ending application slog. Yay?

Ate a violin

The xkcd blog yesterday featured a list of phrases with no google hits, like "aww, a baby hooker!" and "unlike normal furries." At the top of the list was "ate a violin." How could there be no google hits for violin-eating?!

I sorta feel... jipped? In a way. That radio play I wrote senior year, it featured a space monster that ate a violin. It was a decent little gag. But if only there were a proper description of the radio play on the Pops website (and perhaps then they'd remember to sell it at concerts?), then I could have ever so briefly gotten Randall Munroe's attention! Which would be like winning the internet.

Follow-up: Hello, strangers!

I have no pictures of our violin-eating monster, since it was radio, but here's our man-eating viola: