Aris Katsaris

Gunnerkrigg Court has become my favorite web comic by far. Though art and storylines begin off very simply in the first few chapters, these keep improving -- and the increasing set of characters and ever-developing plot and art all have something unique to offer.

The SP Studio is a lovely site that allows you to create South-Park style characters.

( I decided to use the latter to make some fanart tribute for the former. )

Google Chrome
Gave Google Chrome a few minutes' try when it first came out, but some oddities gave me a bad first taste of it -- bookmarks only appearing when you click the "new tab" button for example. I wasn't in the mood of fiddling with it, so I dropped it and went back to Firefox.

A few days ago I gave it another try. This time I fiddled with the options -- added the things that were not present in the defaults: bookmarks now appearing as a toolbar all the time, homepage icon added. And voila -- I'm suddenly loving it. Chrome is fast, elegant, and I keep loving that Google-style simplicity of its interface. I made it my new default browser.

Only one major failing compared to Firefox, and one minor one. The major failing is that when I'm downloading a file it doesn't seem to store the location for my next download -- that makes it a burden when I'm e.g. downloading five dozen wallpapers into one particular folder - I ended up switching to Firefox for that task.

Minor failing is some search-engine oddity. I've not seen yet as easy way to search wikipedia as there was in Firefox.

Mystery series
Ended up downloading several crime/mystery series lately. "Jonathan Creek" - a British series about a magician's assistant solving mysteries. "Numb3rs" - a series about a mathematician using the power of um, mathematics to solve crimes. And "Medium" - a series about a psychic using her own powers to solve (or prevent, or punish) crimes.

I abandoned Numb3rs after a few eps, once I realized that the *only* thing I liked about it was the application of the math, skipping everything that wasn't math. I disliked pretty much every character, with the possible exception of the mathematician's physicist mentor.

Jonathan Creek had both great and lame eps -- at its best an ep has several interconnected mysteries, none of them with obvious solutions (or with several obvious solutions, none of which are actually workable), and punctuated with humor. At its lamest (and the writers' laziest), an ep only has one mystery that I solved in five secs flat -- and it was utterly implausible that Creek wouldn't solve it even faster. Creek's female co-protagonist (Maddy) is utterly unlikeable to me though -- a lying manipulative scumbag who lies more often than tells the truth, even to Creek himself. I'm glad they switched her away eventually, though I'd have been even gladder if they'd had her, you know, apologize to him, grow as a person, forgo her evil ways, etc.

I've only seen five or six eps of Medium so far, but up to this point I seriously like: Much more likable characters than either Jonathan Creek or Numb3rs -- the medium's daughters especially are cute as hell. But in that series there's *nobody* I don't like so far. The medium, her boss at the DA's office, the husband, the kids... all great characters.

Sea of Insanity
Sea of Insanity is back. This was one of my top favorite webcomics some years back -- but it suddenly and inexplicably stopped updating. Turns out the reason was the creator's personal life meltdown. Anyway, it's back now. Enjoy.

Online comics seem to be currently suffering:
Sluggy Freelance has gone to random-filler mode, after a long period of what its creator himself admitted to be an uninspired writer's-block period where humour was largely humourless, and one of the comic's best elements, the comedic timing, was horribly off.

Clan of the Cats is in a brief hiatus, following creator's medical problems.

Graphic Smash and all its connected comics ("Fans!", "Rip & Terri", etc) suffered a meltdown which they're still trying to fix.

CRFH has stopped being interesting to me for some years now.

Gah.

Atleast the Shortpacked joke concerning the pope was funny. :-) Hope it offends none of my Catholic friends.

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"The Incredibles" (saw this last week) is the most fun superhero film I ever remember seeing -- better than the Spiderman flicks by far. And kinda sweet and cute without ever becoming saccharine. It's also one of the few animated films I remember seeing where the chief villain *doesn't* die by falling from a great height. Saw it on DVD last week and utterly loved it.

"The Cube" on the other hand was one of the most depressingly claustrophobic movies I remember. Gah. Mathematical cruelty, nasty randomness, bureaucratic evil and human savagery. Saw this one yesterday, and I need to go and watch something comparatively happy and fluffy now. "CSI" episodes or something. Those ones may be still filled with depictions of human evil, but technology and science and logic atleast serve the good guys and humanity is never absent. And quirkiness exists to relieve the tension, not to burn off your face with acid when you're not expecting it.

"Constantine", which I saw in the cinema, was slightly less Constantine-like than I'd have liked -- but still a decent enough approximation of the character I think (i.e. from what I can judge, far closer to the original character than Peter Jackson's LOTR character were to Tolkien).

( Very mild spoilers about Constantine )