Quick item #1, because I’m required to: today’s moustache vs moustache webcomics battle! If Angela Melick actually did what she portrays in that second link, I just fell in love a little.

Quick item #2, because sometimes we like to watch stuff happening: video of Ryan North being smart at last month’s ACM conference vs video of the Tweet Me Harder dudes live on stage in Hollywood.

• Okay, so the deal is this — on the internet, you’re constantly bombarded with calls of “watch this” and “this is great”, particularly when you (as we at Fleen do) ask for people to send you notifications of stuff. Unfortunately, whatever the field of endeavour, most of it isn’t very good (c.f.: Sturgeon’s Revelation). What to do?

  Find voices that you consistently trust and mentally assign them a heavier weighting when trying to decide if what they recommend is worth following up on; note that this model neatly demonstrates a paradox in Information Theory that posits that a frequently wrong source actually conveys more information than one that’s sometimes right, sometimes wrong.

  For example, a movie reviewer in a newspaper that I used to subscribe to I trusted to consistently have her head up her ass; thus I could take her pans as hearty recommendations for my time and movie dollar, and her raves as a signal to avoid at all costs.

  All this is a fancy way of saying, sometimes a voice cuts through the noise and the recommendation is sufficient on its face. Case in point, Evan Dahm wrote to me recently, and I’m taking the following recommendation pretty seriously because his work is impeccably good:

  Liz Baillie, who has been publishing minicomics for years, has just recently started publishing her comic Freewheel as a webcomic.

  There isn’t much online yet, but I’ve read the first few chapters as they were originally published as minicomics and it is a very interesting, surreal comic.

  That’s all I needed; I was unfamiliar with Ms Baille’s minicomic work, but three pages in, I am intrigued and ready for more.

• John Baird’s been busy with the Create A Comic Project; let’s let him tell you the news:
  

  On November 6, 9, and 11th, the Create a Comic Project gave its first series of academic presentations! The first was at the 60th Annual Meeting of the Society of Public Health Education (SOPHE) on Friday and the others were at the 137th Annual Meeting of the American Public Health Association (APHA), both held in Philadelphia, PA.

  The presentations — two 15-minute talks and a 40-minute round table discussion — covered background information about the Create a Comic Project and two of its educational outreach efforts in the past year, which were conducted in partnership with the University of Pittsburgh. The roundtable had health professionals join in with a participatory demonstration of the comic project in action!

  As part of the presentations, Baird acknowledged a number of webcomics for their support of the project, along with the Guest Strip Project as an example of large-scale (and international) collaboration. Take a minute to scan one or two of those links, and 10 or 15 to look at something that you’re not familiar with; there almost certainly something you’ll like in there.

• Sometimes, email has just a hint of Yay, me!; sometimes it’s because you’ve perfected your life’s work, sometimes just because you went further with something than maybe you guessed when you started, and are still going strong. From Chris Flick:
  

  Friday Nov. 13, 2009 marks my Two Year Anniversary of doing Capes & Babes. Technically, my two year anniversary is REALLY November 12th, but that falls on a Thursday so I have to wait one extra day for my 2 year anniversary (damn those Monday, Wednesday & Friday schedules!).

  Also, I have collected the first 200 strips (see a pattern here?) of Capes & Babes in a 165 page TPB called You Can’t Print Flick.

  Warning to anybody that buys Flick’s book — it is my understanding that Brad Guigar, well-known paronomasiac, wrote the introduction. Tread carefully.