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Domain: schlockmercenary.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to schlockmercenary.com.
Comments · 263
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Gravity guns == Gravy guns
Oh! Gravy guns!
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Err.
Megatokyo is a comic for nerds? What about Schlock Mercenary?
As with most webcomics, it has started to go slack a bit, but a lot of it is top-notch. -
Re:Sales?it's too bad all Mr. Simmons writes anymore is thrillers and horror.
Google for "Children of the Helix". Simmons said in some forum a couple of months back (found it via the Open Letters column in Schlock Mercenary) that he's writing a sequel to the Hyperion Cantos. I don't know how he's going to pull that off, since the end of The Rise Of Endymion was... er, pretty final.
Speaking of good science fiction, that link above contains some pretty decent looks at various science fiction topics. Yes, the art isn't as good as it could be, but that's beside the point....
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The cartoonist pokes his nose in
The damage on the ground depends on a couple of things: first, how much heat can the cable take before evaporating, and second, what is the length of the cable, rotational speed, etc.
The comic in question (this reference has footnotes) deals with a space elevator on a terraformed Luna sometime in the 31st century, and makes quietly implicit speculative assumptions about strength of materials. No, the strip was not rigorously researched. The research was borrowed from Kim Stanley Robinson, in whose Red Mars novel we are treated to the spectacle of a space elevator coming down hard.
The elevator in Schlock Mercenary never does come down, though. After all, Kim Robinson already DID that gag.
--Howard -
see what happens when one of these break...
as shown in full gory detail here. note the counterweight too.
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Schlock Mercenary
This wonderful name for a trinary bit was first brought to my attention by the wonderful commentary that accompanies this strip of one of my favorite web-comics.
Howard Tayler writes:
Note: Just as the hard-wiring of binary mathematics spun the entire twentieth century about a simple yes-no axis, the invention of the three-state switch promised to revolutionize twenty-fifth century computing. After all, with three states (negative, positive, and null charges) on nanoswitches, computers could now think in terms of yes, no, and maybe, greatly humanizing their internal logic.
This would have brought many, many more female engineers into the field of computer science (hence accelerating the pace at which computers could do useful things besides transmit, compress, and enhance pornography), except that the same abbreviational logic that turned "binary digit" into "bit" turned "trinary digit" into "tit." This nomenclatural error set computing back nearly three hundred years, and two entire generations of promising computer scientists were lost trying to keep abreast of bad puns.
Enjoy!
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Trinary Digits
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Re:Clarification...?The webcomic "Shlock Mercenary" (www.schlockmercenary.com) briefly explored this a few months ago. They took it one further, though. In the Schlock universe, interstellar travel is handled in a similar fashion, but it is controlled by one ancient race who allows no one else to see the inner workings of its operation. The reason for that is that rather than automatically destroying the original, the wormgate race interrogates the clone, extracting all conceivably useful info, and then destroys the original. The motive, and effect of this policy is that they gain detailed inside knowledge of the plans and discoveries of all the races who use their transport, which is to say all the powerful races; the wormgate aliens use this to prop up their rather shadowy empire. That's the main backstory, at least; "Schlock" proceeds like a conventional webcomic, returning only occasionally to the core of the plot advancement, namely the cast has invented a new warp drive that does not rely on the wormgate platform, and has growing evidence of the copying and interrogation.
I haven't seen any of this in classic sci-fi, so jms's question still stands.
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Re:I think we're OK here...
From way above:
Microsoft spends more than $5.3 Billion on R&D per year.
And now we know where it goes - Flying Lawyer Monkeys. Or maybe it goes to research into a different advanced type of lawyer? -
Re:online the equalizer
Apparently, PNG is the new trendy format for online comics.
Finally, a trend I can get behind! -
Trib's listed strips; more of my favorites
The Trib picked a few strips as a survey of the field. No such list would get everything good. The links I added were meta-sites and mega-sites, not individual strips.
Having said that, here are some more that might appeal to fellow Slashers:
o Goats: nominally a couple of Web developers, mostly about
o Freefall: A captain of a starship (that's only flown once in the history of the strip), his robot sidekick, and his furry engineer. SF meets Dilbert in a kindler, gentler way.
o GPF: life at a software development company with an unfortunate name.
o Help Desk: life at the tech support desk of a software megacompany named Ubersoft (with products such as Nifty Doorways and Tactile Basic).
(The last two recently had a crossover, a pretty common occurence in online strips.)
o Acid Reflux (previously here): vaguely-D&D-ish strip about a young god trying to restore the universe her sister abandoned.
o Mega Tokyo: a couple of American gamers stranded in Japan.
o Real Life: a couple of American gamers who know they're comic strip characters.
o Schlock Mercenary: light SF strip.
All have complete archives back to the first strip, so you can catch up at your leisure. Enjoy! -
Schlock MercenarySchlock Mercenary is a definite winner. Very funny, and the artist includes real science in every strip. Also potty humor.
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About Lawyers (slightly OT)
Have a look at Schlock Mercenary. There you'll learn how to treat them. The server already has problems, so be nice... *g*