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I'd like to point out that a considerable number of on-line graphic stories (and sometimes they are also very comical) have been published by their authors as dead-tree editions. Therefore those stories, at least, can be enjoyed either way. Some of them have been getting produced for enough years that multiple volumes are available, while the complete archive is usually also accessible on-line.
Since personal tastes differ, I'm not going to especially recommend particular comics. However, here are a few that I personally have enjoyed (in no particular order):
SchlockMercenary
Questionable Content
Sluggy Freelance (you might want to turn off Javascript for this archive)
A Girl And Her Fed
Girl Genius (has won multiple Hugo awards)
Freefall
Yet Another Fantasy Gamer Comic
The Monster Under The Bed
Grrl Power
General Protection Fault
Be warned, some are not particularly safe for work, and some have archives large enough to keep you busy reading for months.

http://www.sluggy.com/comics/a...

Wasted Talent is about an girl getting through engineering school and then in the real world. It's great art and really funny! My personal favorite is hugo-nominated Schlock Mercenary, which I consider the best overall. It's been around a while, and is always funny, and always updates (no missed comics in over 12 years, even when his datacenter exploded). For best artwork, and a great story, I agree with many other posters in saying that multiple-Hugo-winning Girl Genius wins hands down. I do love xkcd, and most of the other ones mentioned. I should also mention Foxtrot, which is not strictly a webcomic (it's also in newspaper syndication). I also read Sluggy Freelance, another really long-running webcomic. Lastly, I like Free Fall, a little less well-known comic about a genetically modified wolf who gets a job as an engineer for a petty crook, and tries to stop the robot apocalypse.

While it lasted, Rusty and Co. (TVTropes) was consistently funny and had good art. The lawyers took it offline because of too many D&D references, particularly the author selling a plush doll of his Rusty character. I'm giving it extra credit for the YRO issue.

My runners-up for best overall comic would include Unsounded (first mentioned here -- mod up that comment if you agree), Gunnerkrigg Court (mentioned here), Magellan, Widdershins, and KiLA iLO.

And if nobody's mentioned it yet, TopWebComics is a site listing what webcomics are popular. Anybody can vote through a really simple captcha; you don't need to log in or anything.

For *funniest* web comic, Rusty and Co. made me laugh more than anything else. Runners-up are DMFA, Moron County, EGS, and Sluggy.

For *best art*, I would say it's A Redtail's Dream with Unsounded and Dresden Codak competing for second place, and a dark horse candidacy by Cucumber Quest for its uniquely cute art.

For the web comic *most relevant to me* as a reluctant hero space alien mad scientist vampire elf magical-sex-change victim, it's really hard to find a web comic that speaks to me, you know?

#1 and #2, best and funniest both belong to Sluggy Freelance in my opinion. #3, best art, is a lot harder to pin down. Pete Abrams on Sluggy Freelance can do some pretty good art, but he's not the best. There are a few possibilities from the stuff I peruse: Charby the Vampirate has some pretty good art or maybe No Need for Bushido. #4, most relevant to me, is definitely very, very subjective. I'm probably just going to have to go with xkcd.

If I can't make money off of the music I create, it will continue to be made only in the spare time I have. I will produce it slowly and sparingly.

For a non-musician example, I'll hold up Pete Abrams, creator and author of "Sluggy Freelance". (I have to imagine plenty of people here are familiar with his work.) Faced with the challenge of supporting himself and his young family several years ago while still trying to do the work he loved (and that was in quite a bit of demand from his fans), Pete mustered up a patronage-style program along with a renewed marketing effort on his merchandise. He made it quite plain that if things didn't change with the money coming in from "Sluggy," he wouldn't be able to keep it up as his primary occupation - meaning the fans would have to deal with significantly less output or possibly the folding of the entire effort.

The fanbase responded accordingly - many of them, faced with the extinction of something that was of value to them (a creative work they enjoyed), decided to pay more than the "minimum market value" by "subscribing" to his "Defenders of the Nifty" group, often giving more than the minimum requested donation. Many others went on merchandise purchasing sprees, and picked up lots of stuffed toys, books, and t-shirts.

In the vast and nebulous world of entertainment delivered via tubes of ones and zeroes, I believe the bulk of people are likely to keep consuming for free or for the occasional minimum purchase price. For the career independent artist (in just about any medium) to succeed in the future, though, there will have to be a class of patron-level fans who make more than an iTunes track purchase now and then - people who recognize that if they want their favorite artists to keep making art, those artists are going to need support.

http://sluggy.com/comics/archives/daily/20090911

Sounds like we can drop a miniature version of a N.U.K.E. of sorts (two parter) instead of just one or two leaflets. "The argument is weak but the repetition is compelling."

Oh somebody's thinking of the cubs alright. It's when the bunny gets involved that you have a problem.

Maybe I should post this anonymously, but it's only karma, yeah?

Relevant Sluggy comic (read parent comment subject)

Its very FIRST strip in 1997 tells it like it is: http://www.sluggy.com/daily.php?date=970825

"Years of Yarncraft" is the epic MMO in the Sluggyverse

Well, I guess that explains Bun-Bun. Oh wait, I guess he chewed on power cords after Torg bought him at the pet store.

Well, I guess that explains Bun-Bun. Oh wait, I guess he chewed on power cords after Torg bought him at the pet store.

I want my rights to tell kids to get off my lawn and if they don't I should be able to pull out a shotgun.

Sorry, for adults in the house it's the shotgun, but for kids on the lawn you only get to use the cane. It is vital not to confuse these.

Oh, it's an AD&D comic. Then I guess that one would be an improvement.

If you haven't yet, check out Sluggy Freelance: http://www.sluggy.com/comics/archives/daily/970825

Imperative code in Haskell looks and behaves just like imperative code in every other programming language. But because Haskell gives a name (monad) to something which imperative languages take for granted, people get confused trying to understand what that name "means" (it just means a type with associated functions named ">>=" and "return", and that's *all* it means).

What do >>= and return do? If the answer is, "anything you want," that's not the right answer. How are they intended to be used?

And can you explain what that "something" is that monads make explicit, without delving into category theory? Because while most mathematicians know what category theory is (I assume), most software engineers do not.

You can never abstract too much. You're probably used to creating functions which have a very specific use case. E.g. not only do all of the parameters have concrete types (e.g. date), but represent a very specific piece of information (e.g. date of birth).

Yes. Exactly. You can have too much abstraction, because, at the end of the day, you want to accomplish a specific task.

It is extra cognitive load to figure out which abstractions — or combination of abstractions — in your toolkit are even applicable, and more effort to decide which of those is the best choice. You want a specific use case, because that makes it easy to figure out a solution. You want to avoid choice paralysis.

It is also additional cognitive load to try to figure out how your own code can be made more abstract. It is easy and fast to crank out something that will do a specific task. It is considerably more difficult to consider if and how that code can be altered to work in the abstract task space, with arbitrary data and performance characteristics. Haskell development is the antithesis of the ideas behind extreme programming and rapid application development. Haskell software design is all about the analysis stage of the waterfall model.

Additionally, you can't easily learn a set of abstractions directly. You have to learn them by example, or by discussion. The documentation needs to lay out a set of examples or use cases and explain what the commonality is. This kind of documentation seems to be missing from Haskell, which should probably be using the GoF Patterns book as a model. But even with documentation, you need to work with these tools and experiment until they finally click.

Mathematicians — and math aficionados — love Haskell, because they do this kind of thing on a daily basis. It is their job and/or passion. They are good at dealing with the house of cards that comes from piling abstraction upon abstraction, because they get lots of practice. This is not true of the software industry as a whole. Most of us prefer to build a house of Legos (to extend the metaphor).

Coding function with undocumented one-liners seems to be considered a virtue.

In most languages, people only comment that which isn't blatantly obvious. As with most languages, Haskell programmers tend to consider "obvious" from the point of someone who is at least moderately familiar with the language, rather than a novice.

I don't know how hard it is to get to that "blatantly obvious" point. But I will point out an appropriate comic: "I don't document things that are 'no-brainers.'"

Really? I thought it was because they all learned driving from GTA and Carmageddon.

But will they be able to change US' customers mindset?

Probably depends on the price point. People bought Pintos - even used ones. But you're right: If this isn't vaporware, these guys have a lot of social inertia to overcome. I confess I'm surprised at how much resistance there is to the idea here - the general public will probably be much harsher.

Side note: What's wrong with you people?!? One hundred and nine comments and not a single Dr. Schlock reference?

The web comic Sluggy Freelance ( http://www.sluggy.com/ ) has had an ongoing character for years that developed all sorts of inflatable tech. I was halfway expecting to see the name Dr. Schlock in the article.

Dave.

Like this one?

You think that's crazy-awesome, try the zombie head on a stick!

Obligatory obscure comic reference.

http://sluggy.com/daily.php?date=990517/

Depends on both the game and the gamer

Can you imagine the scale of the machinery this battery is supposed to be powering?

Something like this?

Sorry, I have to agree with the parent of this thread... many people who have experienced this game get bored because of the repetitive nature of the gameplay. Check out sluggy.com for a nice series of commentary jokes about it.
http://www.sluggy.com/daily.php?date=080820

Your comments about him being irrelevent are trollish - he does have experience with the product, and decided for himself. I'm sorry you've chosen to take a complex argument and make it "you haven't been there TODAY, have you".

A more important issue is what this says about the bloat and inefficiency at NASA. If an employee can spend years working on their blog at work, it is because they are not being given enough real work to do.

http://beta.sluggy.com/daily.php?date=050622

Much better to name one Bun-Bun of course, but that one has already been discovered. In mass quantities it is incredibly soft but far more reactive than similar quantities of U-235, and all alfalfa related reactions proceed with extreme rapidity in its presence.
http://www.sluggy.com/

I thought it was one of Intel's chipsets.

Today's Sluggy Freelance references the movie too. I'd never heard of it. The poster is cut off in the frame, and just reads "rfield", and I was wondering if there was a new Garfield movie. With a shaky-cam. And I figured that would make me pretty ill too, but I was still pretty puzzled at the whole idea. Now I know.

(whaddya know, sluggy's down, so this post won't have a proper permalink, but that was pretty much the whole joke in the post above)

"Rise of the Roombas," as portrayed by Sluggy Freelance.

This sounds like a job for emergency pants!

Amusingly enough -- no, it really isn't these days. And one of the big reasons for that is Amazon either carrying itself or the multitudinous small "New and Used" bookstores you used to have to try to find which now have partnered with Amazon. [Yes, I'm sure there are issues with that partnership and this implies Amazon can cut them out of the market when it wishes, but
in general we're back to: "The Internet. More than just fun and games. It has become the global source of practical uses!" http://www.sluggy.com/daily.php?date=970825 ]

(... is it not nifty?)

This really goes to the heart of the free market argument to some extent -- as it shows that if a market exists (rare / eclectic books), businesses that can figure out ways to meet
that market and make a profit will do just that -- without the need for government intervention. The small bookstores dramatically expanded their customer base by moving on-line and
their marketing dollars by partnering with a known search engine (Amazon).

Is it sad that the first thing I thought of after reading how they say we may all just "run out of time", was a storyline from Sluggy Freelance? http://sluggy.com/daily.php?date=050210&&mode=weekly

(May want to continue on to the next week to complete the explaination of the science/logic behind the 'timeless zone')

Before the journalists were led away by police, one of them could be heard yelling, "My nipples explode with delight!"

Why does that pickle you?

Are we sure that this isn't a Sluggy Freelance plug?

bunbun FTW
http://sluggy.com/images/comics/980326a.gif

... and so say all of us.

Oops, wrong 10th birthday celebration.

Happy birthday Slashy anyway!

Heh. Monkeys!

No one does anything clever like "accio testicles"

You mean Liften Separatis Crotchum, right?

The iPhone is not for business... It's not a business phone, it's a PERSONAL phone. Apple makes PERSONAL computers.

The problem with that argument is that most people WORK for a living. What good is a personal phone if I can't have it with me eight hours or more a day because its oh-so-bling features result in it being banned at work? Maybe for you work and personal lives don't overlap--for many of us, they do.

Ask yourself, with a 5 year head start, why are "smartphones" still only "Geek" toys?

Maybe because the carriers charge too damn much for the privelage? Or maybe because the carriers always slap poorly-designed, unstable tweaks onto the OS to disable features that compete with their over-priced, piss-poor alternatives? Ooh, ooh, I know! It's because many businesses refuse to allow the damn things on-site.

I used to carry both a PDA and my trusty old StarTAC; now I carry a bare-bones LG. I really miss the functionality of my PDA, but I just couldn't handle double dorking anymore. I would LOVE to have a smartphone, but I can't find one that my company or my clients will allow in the building (why again do we need a fucking camera in everything?), and that won't cost me an extra 50% a month for web features I DON'T WANT.

Incompetence would be trying to operate a car without knowing how to drive. Malice would be trying to run over as many people as possible.

What if the person believes that the right way to drive is to run over as many people as possible?

Yes, there are *some* people who will not produce information-products (including software, music, images, or what-have-you) if they cannot globally enforce copy restrictions. Agreed. Such people should, IMO, go in to a different line of work. That is perfectly acceptable for a very simple reason: there will be more than enough people who find good reasons to produce such works in the absence of copyright restrictions. Some people will find an alternative means of making money off freely-duplicated works, and others just because they are altruistic.

Remember that people pay good money for their hardware, and copyright restrictions mean they cannot make full use of it. Copyright isn't actually a "freedom" for the person producing a work....people will still be completely free to produce works without copyright restrictions. Copright may be a "benefit" to the producers of a work (though in practice it is not; it is only a benefit to the distributors of the work, but I won't get into that here), but to call it a "freedom" is incorrect. Copyright law is a restriction on freedom to everyone in the world, and if such a freedom is going to be globally sacrificed, there had better be a damn good reason for it.

The only reason you have given is the false premise that without these restrictions, no-one will produce knowledge-products. Not only is this false in theory (since some people will produce stuff for free, and since some people will find ways of making money off knowledge-products in the absence of copyright restrictions), but there are lots of examples of businesses that make money off a free end-product, and of profoundly useful products made without any profit motive. And there are more where those came from.

That last set of links is pretty important. Google gives all of its services away for free, and yet has a market cap of over 100 billion. Not only are there business models built around free products, but they are very profitable and fiercely competitive.

Also check out this and this. Copyright is still there, but it is unenforced upon the consumer. It will be interesting to see how this selective approach to enforcement will pan out.

It is true that a farmer who gives away his crops for free would go broke, and if farmers could not legally force people to pay for their products then there would be no farmers. However, this observation not apply to information products. Information is fundamentally different from physical products, and business models surrounding it wind up taking a different form than traditional business models (a form which includes a free and/or freely redistributable product).

What we are dealing with is a new kind of abundance. Oxygen is an abundant resource, (anyone can get it for free because it just never runs out). Traditional capitalistic wisdom says that it is not possible to build a business around such resources, and further that no one will produce them because of that. Information is also abundant, once it exists (since it can be duplicated at zero cost by anyone). But it is also strangely non-abundant, since it's initial production requires an expenditure of resources. Traditional capitalistic models have a very hard time categorizing it...is it abundant or isn't it? Copyright law is an attempt at forcing it in to the "limited" category so that the traditional models wil

Sure, it takes money to produce it. Once it is produced, however, it can be duplicated ad infinitum at zero cost.

The fact that it takes money to produce does not justify limiting the freedoms of all computer-owners on the planet. They paid good money for their hardware, and they should be free to make full use of its features. This includes duplicating the data to which they have been given access.

Having expended your resources to produce some bit of information does not give you a *moral* right to control what everyone else in the world does with that information. Just because it was expensive doesn't mean you can then use it to justify robbing billions of people of their freedoms. Morally speaking, data duplication is in the clear.

The economic justification is that this unrealistic level of control over all the hardware in the world is necessary in order to ensure that such works are still created in the future. That is bunk, it has been proven so both in theory and in practice (Here are some examples).

So, the notion that data duplication is morally wrong and economically harmful just doesn't stand up to criticism. Like it or not, the bottom line is simple: you simply cannot give people access to information and yet control what they do with it. The misguided laws that try to do just that harm the many for the needless benefit of the few, and hence they are unjust. The world must adapt to the abundance that new technology has brought.

As we head into the new millenium, we'd like to applaud the winner of our voter's choice awaed for the greatest movie of the entire millenium:"POKEMON: THE FIRST MOVIE".
There is still time to vote for the most influential person of the millenium.
The contenders are: Britney Spears, Nostradamus, Will Smith, Michaelangelo (The turtle), and Pikachu!
We now present you the ultimate rock anthem which has stood the test of time, Kid Rock's "Bawitadaba!".

http://www.sluggy.com/daily.php?date=000102

I would rather stuff Kiki (from Sluggy) hopped up on pixie sticks down my pants than read the Silmarillion again.

'Cause you suck! :) **

I have read the Hobbit and LOTR numerous times. The Silmarillion I have read once, and will never EVER read again.

It's kind of funny going back and reading *any* Tolkein again nowadays. Many of us read it as children before we read much else. Reread it, and it kind of comes across as one overused cliche after another. However, it's not really Tolkein's fault. I refer to it as "Tolkein Syndrome": they weren't cliches when he wrote them. In fact, it was all quite inventive -- a major shift on fantasy elements. Elves, for example, used to be somewhat evil creatures that would kidnap children. Nowadays, the fantasy standard is Tolkein, and if you tow to that standard too closely, you're just falling into cliche-land. Since Tolkein basically wrote that standard, it's wrong to judge him by it.

It doesn't just apply to Tolkein. Marion Zimmer Bradley's feminist-fantasy style established a number of tropes that have been relentlessly copied by subsequent feminist and pagan authors. A year ago, I heard someone who recently read them for the first time describing them as cliche, and then listed examples of the cliches. Many of them were things which she helped pioneer decades ago. I'd consider that Tolkein Syndrome applies to her as well. And many other authors, really.

... that you take proper care of your fingernails before handling inflatable moon bases.

I'm sure he can help then...

Responding to your sig...

2. Do not eat iPod shuffle.

You DID see the Sluggy Freelance iSophagus thread, didn't you? (Where the sleepy main character mistakes his roommate's new "iPodling" for a vitamin pill and gets it stuck in his throat.)

(It's mixed with a couple other subplots so read forward for a total of 10 episodes to get it all.)