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One Day To Go And Finding The Good Where We Can

We live, damn it all, at a time of great transition; things are ending and other … things … are starting. As it turns out, such is occurring in Webomicstan as well.

  • It’s been a long time coming, more than eleven and a half years since we first met Dr McNinja, as written & pencilled by Christopher Hastings and inked by Kent Archer. In the decade-plus since, color duties have been assumed by (briefly) Carly Monardo and Anthony Clark, and Doc has been written/drawn by everybody from Benito Cereno & Les McClane to Kate Beaton to Becky & Frank.

    A good 18 months back, Hastings warned us that Dr McNinja would be ending sooner rather than later; he warned us as well that there were no guarantees which characters would survive (spoiler warning, it’s all bad guys that died; it looked like Gordito might but he got better and thankfully Gary The Barber appeared to never be in danger).

    Since the announcement, Hastings has only increased his comic book writing, having graduated from miniseries (various humor-tinged 3- or 4-issue runs at Marvel) to ongoing (Adventure Time, and being the originating writer/person most responsible for shaping Gwenpool). He’s got lots of irons in lots of fires, and when things finish up — as is imminent — it will be with the knowledge that damn, this was completely a thing¹.

    You done good, Doc (both docs, Hastings and McNinja). The world will be a bit less radical and insanely fun next week, but you’ve taken us on a hell of a ride in the meantime. Thank you.

  • Announced today: the imminent start of an administration that has no truck with capital-s Science will not stop Zach Weinersmith from promoting a love of knowledge and critical thought. Namely, the latest iteration of BAH!Fest will take place at the hallowed Kresge Auditorium on the campus of MIT. The call for submissions is now open, and this show will have an open theme — any bad ad-hoc hypothesis, on any topic, is fair game.

    The most exciting part? The keynote will be delivered by Marc Abrahams, co-founder and editor of the Annals of Improbable Research and founder of the Ig Nobel Prize. It’s probably fair to say that there’s no inspiration for BAH!Fest that Abrahams hasn’t had a hand in², so this is very exciting … there’s pretty much a straight line from the seminal A Stress Analysis of a Strapless Evening Gown (Seim, 1956) to BAH!Fest, so if you’re anywhere near MIT on 23 April 2017, 7:00pm-ish³, tell Zach & the rest they’re doing great things.

  • Speaking of great things, we’re down to the waning hours of the Fleen Fight For Fungible Futures Fund, which will cease its activities at noon EST tomorrow as Barrack Obama leaves the office of President of the United States and glob help us all. The next while is going to be a struggle (genteel for some of us, existential for far too many), so the Six-F will be matching any donations you make from Election Day to Inauguration Day to:

    American Civil Liberties Union
    Brennan Center for Justice
    Campaign Zero
    Electronic Frontier Foundation
    International Rescue Committee
    NAACP Legal Defense Fund
    National Resources Defense Council
    Planned Parenthood
    Pro Publica
    Sacred Stone Camp’s GoFundMe
    Syrian Civil Defense aka The White Helmets
    The Trevor Project

    As of this writing, you have approximately 19 hours to send me (that would be gary) a receipt at the address of this website right here (which is a dot-com). I’ll match it. And as needs require (and I am able) between now and the end of the retrograde nightmare about to break upon us, I’ll repeat this exercise.


Spam of the day:

McDonalds Breakfast wants you to try all day breakfast – Free on us!

Not even if it was McBonalds.

_______________
¹ Reminder: I met Hastings for the first time at an Andy Bell art show, where he was wearing a Great Outdoor Fight t-shirt. I would, by coincidence, be standing next to him at the Great Outdoor Fight signing in Brooklyn, when he and Onstad met. It was an entirely appropriate bookending.

² The other likely inspiration: the Journal of Irreproducible Results (which I was very fond of reading back in college), which Abrahams edited for a time before leaving and founding AIR. Alas, the JIR is not what it once was.

³ It’s doubtful I’ll be able to be there, as I’m applying for the Alaska Robotics Minicon Camp in Juneau that same weekend.

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