The amusing thing about this is that, as I work on it and tweak it, the art will retroactively get better. For instance, if a particular character’s template is badly drawn, and I update it as I create new strips, the old strips will automagically get an art update as well :)

Anyway, I’ve been having fun so far, working on this for an hour at a time, once every couple of months over the past year. Now I’ve got a framework that looks like it’ll speed up development immensely. So long as I create a database schema that conveys all the information I need it to.

“Enjoy your own company. If you don’t, who will?”

But the French side was sexay:

“Il faut savoir se plaire à soi-même. Sinon, qui d’autre peut le faire?”

Until recently it seemed like a cool project that wasn’t really going anywhere, but the author has been writing a bunch of production notes on his blag, and the Evil Hat folks are on board too. This look like it’s going to not only be a real, live product but also be the sort of professional, good-looking product we have learned to expect from Evil Hat Productions.

Check this summary out:

She is the strongest human being alive, her muscles super-charged by her own scientific processes. She’s fought dinosaurs barehanded and lived to tell the tale. But she can’t join any professional society for engineers, or even hold the patents for her inventions in her own name.

He is a supernaturally good poet. He can smell truth and lies from across the street. He’s saved the life of one president, two prime ministers, and a future pope. But if he goes out for a gourmet meal with friends, managers will insist he go in through the servants’ entrance.

Two men share a mystical union, pooling their health, knowledge, and magical essence. They bind demons and champion the falsely accused in courts on three continents. But if they ever once acknowledge the love they share along with their power, they’ll be disbarred and shunned by decent people everywhere.

The band of five fought in two wars for liberty, first against invading armies and then against tyrants at home. They free serfs, fight the architects of murder, and have twice stopped mad schemes of genocide. But they’re communists, and can’t even get visas to visit other heroes and scholars in the US.

Brother and sister are heirs to a millennia-old family tradition of serving justice and knowledge. Their ancestors commanded armies, delved into ancient tombs to lay ghosts—and worse things—to rest, taught the founders of new schools of philosophy and military strategy. But in the New World, he’s barely tolerated as a ditch digger—and she’ll be deported if she teaches English to other immigrants.

These are the other heroes, the ones who must fight for their dignity and liberty just as fiercely as they take on the challenges all pulp heroes face.

New Horizons is a new supplement for Spirit of the Century. Each chapter addresses a marginalized group from the pulps, kept outside by their sex, their race, their lifestyle, or their beliefs. In New Horizons you’ll find information about real-life heroic individuals and teams, the challenges they face and some of the solutions they find to the problems of dealing with 1920s society. You’ll also find heroes and villains ready for use, plot hooks, and ties to the mysteries around the Century Club. The life of heroes outside the mainstream may seem as strange as the secret language of Atlantis, but can be as exciting and powerful in play as a zeppelin armada.

1. cracked pepper
2. with a little glam
3. lucy at the river
4. the word is good
5. kelly watch the hole
6. she’s slipping
7. love kite
8. it’s far too late
9. hawaii 64
10. struttin’ rita
11. good pressure
12. cracked pepper (reprise)
13. a sky blue rhapsody

And for your enjoyment:

Hi-res artwork: full - cover

And all of the tracks and artwork in a tarball.

[insert joke about inheriting the earth]

The topic this month was “Nature vs Nurture Revisited: New research is changing the age-old debate.” The expert panel was Robert Gerlai, Ph.D (Dept. of psychology, UofT) and Christopher E. Pearson, Ph.D (Dept. of genetics and genome biology, SickKids Research Institute). I expected there to be more talk about specific issues of NvN, like sexual orientation or intelligence. Instead, the talk mostly dealt (as far as I saw) with the biological mechanisms that come into play.

IANAEB, but in a nutshell there are two processes being discussed here: Darwinian evolution and Lamarckian evolution¹. Darwinian evolution is of course the process by which a gene or group of genes that produces a phenotype conducive to its own propagation will tend to be better represented in the gene pool, beating out its allele rivals. Lamarckian evolution is the theory that an organism can pass on traits it has acquired during its own lifetime.

Sounds weird, right? Our DNA sequence is fixed — how could we possibly pass on genes we weren’t born with? Well, it turns out that cytosine (the “C” in GATTACA) can be methylated or de-methylated by the introduction of certain substances, and that this new form can have different phenotypic effects. This process is referred to as epigenetics. So what happens is, someone eats a diet² containing a substance that toggles the methylation state of a certain sequence in some of their cells, including germ cells. It doesn’t affect them, or not much, because they have already developed into a human. However, the new methylation state is persistent. So when one of those germ cells becomes another person, there is a chance that the altered sequence will trigger some aberrant effect.

This has all sorts of implications, some good and some bad. On the one hand, we might find that certain diseases are caused or exacerbated by a certain methylated state on a certain gene, and that simply making sure that the population gets a certain amount of some nutrient will reduce the incidence of that disease. On the other hand, this may increase the amount of medicating that we do. Drug companies and “alternative medicine” manufacturers may jump on the band wagon, marketing products that claim to “de-methylate your cancer genes” or whatever, playing on people’s ignorance and fear to get them to eat more pills. What’s more, there may be even more pressure than there already is on women to treat their bodies like baby machines and to make sure that even before they start thinking about reproducing they maintain a diet that will produce the optimal methylation state in their bodies.

Just as with any new technology or discovery, the recent findings in epigenetics contain potential for a lot of good and a lot of evil. The talk today was very informative, and I’m grateful to the two panelists for taking the time to make it out. Today I learned about a facet of evolution that I would never have imagined existed.