Seriously, though, Venn diagrams are a concise and satisfyingly geeky way to convey complex information. Instead of writing a paragraph about how some of the people in my life are geeks, and some of the people in my life are artsy, and explaining that those groups overlap , and further that some subset of the overlapping region will find my webcomic project viscerally satisfying, I can draw three circles in a square and you know exactly what I’m talking about.

And Venn diagrams are versatile! You don’t even have to mouth off to anyone any more if you can just scribble some pithy circles on a bar napkin. Draw three interlocking circles titled “smart people”, “sexy people” and “talented people”, then enclose them in a circle labeled “people who aren’t you” within a larger rectangle labeled “everybody”. See? It’s that easy!

Yes, the Venn diagram could be the key to an new, utopic, entirely non-verbal society. Keep your eye on it!

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.

I love this bag: it is rugged, has six compartments, sits flat on the table — beautiful. And it’s 10$, which is nothing to sniff at, but isn’t as much as I would have expected. Of course, it’s meant as a utility item, not as a luxury, so that makes sense. Seriously, check this out:

Rob’s Fantastic Dice Bag

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]

Everything is interdependant, so changing the number of bees will change the rate at which flowers get pollinated, and so on. From the article:

“It’s very sensitive to very small changes,” [creator Laukosargas Svarog] says, “like if a gene emerges which gives a plant an extra seed in its lifetime, that can cause huge growth in its locale. And the opposite of course, one less causes thinning growth. I’ve also seen the same color become a dominant gene so all the meadow cup plants became blue once. Simple things like that emerge quite often.”

This blows my mind! Check it out on Wagner James Au’s blog.