Jaime's Corner

Fleep

2010-12-22T14:20:00.000-08:00

I read Fleep a while ago and I really liked it. It's a relatively short (10 minutes, tops) comic about a guy who is trapped in a phone booth by concrete walls and has no idea what happened. Using nothing but whatever items he has at hand and his own brain, he manages to figure out where he is and why he is trapped. The reason I enjoyed it is because the deductions are for the most part logical rather than contrived, and it is nice to read a story about a person actually thinking their actions through and executing plans that make sense given the available information and limited options. It is also very suspenseful, maybe even a little scary at first. Here's the author's description:

Fleep
Fleep made its debut in the weekly newspaper, "Asian Week" in Feburary of 2001. It's about a boy who wakes up in a telephone booth which has been mysteriously selaed in an envelope of concrete. Using only the contents of his pockets (two pens, a paperback novel, three coins and 20 ft of unwaxed dental floss) our hero must fashion and execute an escape plan before he runs out of oxygen. Believe it or not, I try to end each strip on a cliffhanger which is very challanging considering most of the 42 strips take place inside this one phone booth.

While it was running, Fleep was everything I wished that a comic strip could be. It was ambitous, mysterious and utterly masturbatory. About a quarter of the strips feature the main character working through various math problems. They are some of the most dramatic math problems you'll ever see in a comic strip. Unfortunately, the arts editor at Asian week didn't see it that way and canceled "Fleep" two thirds into its run because it wasn't asian enough.

Read it here. I don't think you will be disappointed.

The Salvation War

2010-12-11T07:00:00.000-08:00

The Salvation War is a pretty cool ongoing trilogy of web novels. The basic premise is that God decides to reveal himself as real to all of humanity, announces that the gates of heaven are closed and damns all remaining human beings to hell. While many people decide to lay down and die in the wake of this revelation, they are in the minority, and the remaining humans, feeling angry and betrayed by receiving the message after a lifetime of religious devotion to Yahweh, decide to wage war against the forces of hell which shortly thereafter come to collect them.

It's a very nice bit of freely available military fiction, and I would recommend it to anyone who is sick of seeing stories where the world's military forces are magically rendered useless because their opponents happen to have a few supernatural powers; the author keeps things as realistic as possible, and pulls absolutely no punches in demonstrating exactly how mind-boggingly lethal modern weapons really are. Unfortunately, this has led some people to accuse the fic of playing favorites and making things too easy for the human side, but the upshot is that some of the received criticism has been hilarious, do not skip on reading The Tar Pit's hateblog of the first book once you are done with it.

Currently, Armageddon? and Pantheocide are finished and The Lords of War has yet to begin. Below are the links where the novels may be read (the third one is a side story fanfic). And below that is an excerpt from the first novel, so that you may judge the writing style and find out whether it is to your liking.

Armageddon???

Pantheocide

Don't Wake me While I'm Quiet

He saw the answer over his shoulder, on their way through to the threads, they had crossed a field covered with bars that exploded when a demon stepped on them. Many of them had been killed and their mutilated corpses littered the ground. Others writhed in pain from the traumatic amputations the bars had caused. Yet, Abigor thought, even the dead and the half-dead could still serve him. “Get those bodies. Throw them on the threads and use them as a bridge.”

The noise was too great for his words to carry far but some heard and started to collect bodies and throw them on top of the coils of threads. Others saw what was happening, understood and copied them. Soon the wire was sagging under the weight and the first of the demon infantry was running across, clear of the wire and into the open ground beyond.

“Sire, there are problems on our left!” One of the lesser demons, a legion commander by the look of him, carried the message but could barely make himself heard.

The left, Abigor thought, ten minutes fast ride away. He had better get there and find out what was happening. “Take over here, keep driving them forward.” Then, he turned his Great Beast’s head and started the ride up to his left flank. This was a problem he hadn’t thought of, in the traditional formation he could see all of his forces, in this new style of attack, he could see only a small portion of the battle at any one time. He was spending all his time running from one crisis to the next, trying to solve each one before it became a major problem. Time he should have been spending in finding the enemy commander so Abigor could have the pleasure of killing him.

There was another shrieking howl and the terrifying ripple of explosions that were the trade-mark of the fire-lances. Abigor felt the blast and the sting as stray fragments at the end of their trajectory flicked at him. Behind him, the area where he had just been had vanished under a rolling cloud of dust and smoke. Abigor had already seen enough fire-lance breaths to know that nothing was left alive in the area he had been in just a few minutes before. Then it struck him, he might not have time to find the enemy commander, but the enemy commander had found him.

A Practical Pizza Box

2010-12-04T17:42:00.000-08:00

The Green Box is an interesting spin on the old concept of a pizza box. Rather than wasting all the perfectly good cardboard which it is made of, it comes with perforated holes so that the lid may be split into four plates, and the remaining box folded over into itself to contain any leftover pizza while occupying less space. Watch this video to see it in action.

The main draw of the box is supposed to be its ecologically friendly qualities, since it re-uses cardboard which is normally thrown away, is made of recycled materials, and is easy to recycle itself. However, since I don't really care much for the environment one way or the other, what attracts me the most about the idea is the simplicity and ingenuity of the solution. Built-in plates in a box... what a concept!

Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, the Green Box never took off. Ah, well.

The Order of the Stick

2010-12-01T04:29:00.000-08:00

The Order of the Stick is my favorite webcomic. If nothing else, the author sure knows how to tell an awesome story with great characters, an engaging narrative, and an interesting deconstruction of the D&D alignment system. Unfortunately, the comic begins very slowly, suffering in particular from having a paper-thin plot and fairly unpolished art. However, this only lasts until first arc, taking place inside the Dungeon of Durokan, is complete. Afterward, the plot begins to grow to the epic proportions it eventually achieves, the art becomes very pleasing for being made of stick figures, and the character development and interactions start becoming more and more pronounced until they form integral parts of the storyline. Plus, the strips usually end with a amusing bit, which is one thing that hasn't changed even as the comic became more serious and complex. Definitely recommended.

Portable Apps

2010-11-21T22:13:00.001-08:00

If you don't have PortableApps on your USB flash drive, you aren't taking full advantage of it.

The PortableApps project contains a collection of portable versions of free and freeware software programs. "Portable" means that the programs can be kept in arbitrary locations (including USB drives and SD cards) and run as executables without any need for installing them in your machine. However, the project also publishes a software platform (pictured above) which can be installed in your removable storage device to manage your apps by installing and uninstalling them, provide a handy menu from which to launch them, and so on. Combined, the platform and the apps create an incredibly useful set of tools which you can carry and use on any Windows machine, from a personal version of Firefox containing all your favorite add-ons and personal settings to a much better version of the command prompt for those times when you have to do something by hand. So go ahead, install the suite to your USB drive and give this thing a test drive; you won't regret it!

Legally Free Content

2010-02-14T14:27:00.000-08:00

Music & Radio: Pandora, Last.fm, Grooveshark, Deezer, MeeMix, Musicovery, Jango, Jamendo, Opsound, Democracy Now, Amazon Songs, Amazon Albums, NPR, VEVO, YouTube, MTV Music Videos, MTV Radio, BBC iPlayer, Sveriges Radio, Illegal Art, Wikipedia Sound List, Internet Archive, Music Library, Mutopia, A-M Classical, Classical, Prometheus Music, Incompetech Royalty Free Music, Dan-O, Jimmy G, Jonathon Roberts, MC Plus+, Ambient Music, Muxtape, MTV Music, The WIRED CD, Ghosts I-IV, The Slip, Bob Powell Anthology, The United States Army Band, The United States Navy Band, The United States Air Force Band, The United States Air Force Academy Band, United States Marine Band, The United States Coast Guard Band, National Anthems And Ceremonial Music

Anime: FUNimation (YouTube), Crunchyroll, Anime News Network, Hulu, The D2 Brigade Stream Portal, Madman Screening Room

TV Shows: Hulu, Crackle, YouTube, Joost, Crunchyroll, Clan, Syfy Rewind, ABC, CBS, FOX, NBC, PBS, MTV, BBC iPlayer, SVT Play, TV.com, South Park Studios, Adult Swim, Cartoon Network, Democracy Now, Discovery Channel, The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, Drawn Together, Mind Of Mencia, Premium Blend, Strangers With Candy

Movies: Hulu, Crackle, YouTube, Joost, Internet Archive, Public Domain Flicks, SnagFilms, Sita Sings The Blues, Cactuses, Nasty Old People, Michael Moore's Slacker Uprising

Books & Audiobooks: Project Gutenberg, Project Gutenberg Australia, Project Gutenberg Canada, Smashwords, Feedbooks, ManyBooks, Planet eBook, epubBooks, Bartleby, Kobo, Reader Store, Google Ebookstore, Amazon, LibriVox, Podiobooks, Audiocite, Litterature Audio, Audio Literature Odyssey, Literal Systems, Maria Lectrix, Storynory, The Drabblecast, Escape Pod, PodCastle, Pseudopod, SteamPod, Lightspeed Magazine, Fantasy Magazine, Apex Magazine, Clarkesworld Magazine, Daily Science Fiction, Redstone Science Fiction, StarShipSofa, Tales To Terrify, Bull Spec, Albedo One, Cadaverine Magazine, Voices Of Tomorrow, 365 Tomorrows, Flashquake, 10Flash Quarterly, Flash Fiction Online, Subterranean, Transcriptase, Infinity Plus, Strange Horizons, Byzarium, Crossed Genres, Fantastic Metropolis, Night Shade Books, Tor.com, Ghostwheel, WebScriptions, Baen Free Library, Baen CDs, Peter Watt's Backlist, Greg Egan's Short Stories, Cory Doctorow's Craphound, Karl Schroeder, Charles Stross, Wu Ming, Xuepolis, Elcenia, Lessig, Things of Interest, Localroger, The Metamorphosis Of Prime Intellect, The Public Domain: Enclosing The Commons Of The Mind, Against Intellectual Monopoly, The Future of the Internet, Wealth of Networks, Freedomain Radio Books, Ludwig von Mises Institute, Trigger Happy, Accelerando, The Complete Works Of William Shakespeare, Everyone In Silico, Move Under Ground, Free as in Feedom, The Honour Of The Knights, Diamonds In The Sky, Star Dragon, The Prize In The Game, Warbreaker, Jeffrey A. Carver, Peter McWilliams, Mary Robinette Kowal, A Briefer History Of Time, After Life, Why Won't God Heal Amputees?, How to Make A Complete Map Of Every Thought You Think, The Hacker's Diet

Audio & Video Lectures: Open Yale Courses (YouTube), Khan Academy (YouTube), Midnight Tutor (YouTube), Just Math Tutorials (YouTube), Math TV (YouTube), NPTEL (YouTube), TED (YouTube), TEDx (YouTube), MIT OCW (YouTube), MIT World, Stanford Engineering Everywhere (YouTube), Stanford Online Courses, Stanford Graduate School Of Business, Berkeley Webcast, Open Learning Initiative, Open.Michigan, NROC, Academic Earth, Computer Science, Video Calculus, Tutorials For The Calculus Phobe, The Calculus Lifesaver, Calculus Student Support Site

Textbooks & Course Notes: America, The University of Michigan Historical Mathematics Collection, Lecture Notes For Most Math Classes Taught At Lake Tahoe Community College, Center for Excellence and Equity in Education, Princeton University Press, MIT OCW, SparkNotes, Connexions, O'Reilly Open Books Project, Basic Books In Science, For The Love Of Science, Free High School Science Texts, CK-12, Flat World Knowledge, The Global Text Project, Stitz Zeager Open Source Mathematics, Bookboon.com, The Trillia Group, Green Tea Press, Paul's Online Math Notes, Karl's Calculus Tutor, Kenneth Kuttler, Michael Corral, Gerald Teschl, John Erdman, Jerry Shurman, Allen Hatcher, Robert B. Ash, Herbert Wilf, Jim Herod, Richard Fitzpatrick, Shlomo Sternberg, Jason Grout, Jiří Lebl, Jerry Veeh, Cleve Moler, Lawrence Craig Evans, Synechism, Electronic Teaching Materials, A Gentle Introduction To The Art Of Mathematics, The Free Encyclopædia Of Mathematics, Euclid's Elements, Geometry Unbound, PreAlgebra, Prealgebra Textbook, Elementary Algebra With Applications, Intermediate Algebra, Trig Without Tears, Precalculus, Calculus, e-Calculus, Calculus Refresher, Calculus For Beginners And Artists, Elementary Calculus: An Infinitesimal Approach, Understanding Calculus, Notes On Diﬀerential Equations, Linear Algebra, A First Course In Linear Algebra, Linear Algebra Done Wrong, Elements Of Abstract And Linear Algebra, Abstract Algebra: Theory And Applications, Analysis Of Functions Of A Single Variable: A Detailed Development, Introduction To Real Analysis, A First Course In Complex Analysis, Complex Analysis, Elementary Number Theory: Primes, Congruences, And Secrets, Graph Theory, Group Theory, Introduction To Mathematical Philosophy, Forall X: An Introduction To Formal Logic, An Introduction To Proofs And The Mathematical Vernacular, Book Of Proof, Proofs And Concepts, A=B, A Problem Course In Mathematical Logic, Math In Society, Metaheuristics, Principles of Uncertainty, Stat Trek, Numerical Analysis For Engineering, Numerical Methods Course Notes, Applied Discrete Structures, Introduction To Information Retrieval, Information Theory, Inference, And Learning Algorithms, Computer Vision: Algorithms And Applications, Gaussian Processes For Machine Learning, Operating Systems And Middleware: Supporting Controlled Interaction, Computer Organization And Design Fundamentals, Structure And Interpretation Of Computer Programs, SCIP, Algorithms, Clever Algorithms, Data Structures And Algorithms, The Design Of Approximation Algorithms, Programming Languages: Application And Interpretation, Introduction To Programming Using Java, Dive Into Python, The Python Tutorial, A Byte Of Python, Learn Python The Hard Way, Invent Your Own Computer Games With Python, Simply Scheme: Introducing Computer Science, On Lisp, Real World Haskell, Modern Perl, Programming Ruby, Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby, The Not So Short Introduction To LaTeX2e, The Art Of Unix Programming, Advanced Linux Programming, Beej's Guide To Network Programming, The Architecture Of Open Source Applications, Dive Into Accessibility, W3Schools, Out Of Control, Calculus-Based Physics, Motion Mountain, Light And Matter, Chemistry Virtual Textbook, Organic Chemistry, Biochemistry, On-Line Biology Book, The World Brain, HIV Medicine, Hepatology, Introduction To Climate Dynamics And climate Modeling, Introduction To Economic Analysis, Larry Reynolds's Economics, Networks, Crowds, And Markets, Principles Of Accounting, Capture. Deliver. Excel., College Writing, Hypertext History, Europe In Retrospect