Snips and Snails and Puppy Dog Tales

My recs for webcomics are few and far between. For me to recommend something, both the art and the storyline have to hook me, and it's rare that one succeeds at both. I've only recommended two or three webcomics in the thirteen or so years I've been writing this blog, and this one is on par with those.

Age of Mortality is one of the few that hits every single note right for me.

I can't say enough good things about the art -- I spent so much time admiring each page.



There are some really interesting character designs as well:



(Though there are dragons and people who change into animals, it is not a furry comic.)

( One last image: The cast )

The one small (yet painful!) downside is that it's still in progress. I want more more MORE pages right now!

There's so much I love about this comic, so many little details I enjoyed (even things like the choice of font!). I hope you all will enjoy it too.

LJ recommendation: antarctic_sue. She posts a photo a day while at McMurdo Station in Antarctica. So cool it's frozen!

For some reason, ever since I was a little kid, I wanted to live in Alaska or Antarctica (I was too young to know the latter wasn't an option). I'd still like to, though as I can't stand being cold, I'm not sure how practical that wish is. Looking at blogs like that, full of everyday pictures, makes me very happy. Wistful, but happy.

And in 100 things that make cats happy news:


What a good idea! I'm surprised sellers haven't targeted pets directly sooner.

And lastly, I like Tom Hiddleston as much as the next person, but I don't get some people. Someone posted this picture of him with the caption of "so beautiful :3". I... I just don't get it. He can look attractive, but that picture? His eyes look sunken in, the lighting makes his skin look dirty, and the way the photo is cropped? tilted? makes him look like he's balding. Different people have different opinions, I guess...

Edit: Bonus happy thing: I love this icon, it's one of my favorites, but I never have reason to use it. It makes me happy just looking at it! The background is so well done, especially knowing it took him only seconds to do. Such a cool snow/sky effect! (Should this count as #3? WHY NOT!) Edit 2: I just wish the wolf eyes were colored. Wonder if I can touch it up myself...

I found an interesting LJ comm yesterday, market_finder. Publications put up posts looking for short stories, listing details, price offered, and contact info. Of course non-writer me can't tell you how well it works, but the comm has more than 250 followers, so I'd guess its on the up-and-up.

The second site is one I'm using myself. e-rewards.com. Once you sign up on the site, you set up how often you'd like to be contacted (twice a day to once a week or less). Then they send you surveys to fill out. You either get the full amount offered or some partial amount of it, depending on if you qualify to take it or not. The least you get is 25 cents, the most I've personally seen is $15.

The surveys are surprisingly not too boring (though I don't often qualify for them, they've been mostly music-based for me so far and I don't listen to much music).

When you've made enough money, you cash it out in the form of a gift card or a discount card. (For the most part, you're going to want the gift card. The discount card is like "15% off X Airline going to Y location" -- not generally useful to most folks.) The places you can get gift cards is limited, but as both Starbucks and GameStop are on the list, I think it's safe to say that there's something for everyone on my friends list. :)

Note: I haven't actually tried to cash out yet, I've only made $7.60 so far (in maybe two weeks; yes it's slow, but it's nearly effortless, so...). However, before starting this I did my research, and it does seem like it's valid.

Downside: For some odd reason, a dollar on the site doesn't mean a dollar towards a gift card. Both the $25 GameStop and Starbucks cards cost $75 e-rewards dollars.

Upside: Once you figure out how the surveys work, you can adjust your answers so you're more likely to qualify, if you don't have issues with doing that.

Go ahead, boggle with me! I've not read HP fanfic in years. I haven't seen the last movies. I'm not into the fandom at all anymore. I have zero interest in reading fanfic from it.

Then I came across a post on my friendsfriends page. I've never done this before, but credit for everything between the two lines goes to themountaingoat. Below is her post, copied from her LJ, full credit to her. Her post is what sold me on trying the fic, and I know I can't write it better than her, so here goes. themountaingoat's post:

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I spent most of Saturday reading Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. HOLY SHIT! It may be fan fiction but it is still a work of genius. Well written, intelligent (apart from a few goofy moments), thought provoking (even if it is guilty of a couple of straw men here and there) with a far more complex plot with more complicated characters than J K Rowlings' books. Of course it totally riffs off the original and pokes fun at all the stuff that did not make any sense (like Quidditch) but it is so radically different that it could be argued that it should be considered a work of art on it's own merits.

The basic premise is that in this version Petunia did not marry Vernon Dursley and instead dumped him for an Oxford University professor and so Harry Potter grows up in a highly educational environment and becomes a child prodigy who has studied maths, science, philosophy, psychology, politics and much more to a university degree level and is also a huge fan of Lord of the Rings and all the SF classics. So this Harry is a completely different character by the time he reaches 11 years of age, however everyone else remains the same at the start of the story but because of the way things unfold they react and change over time in a completely believable way because of more or less interaction with Harry. For instance Harry considers Ron to be too stupid to be his friend so he never spends time with him. Hermonie becomes Harry's intellectual rival. And with his grounding in SF Harry immediately recognises the pattern of this story he is in and realises Voldemort must still be alive and Draco is a pawn of his father so he resolves to redeem Draco and use him for his own ends.

This Harry is perhaps less likeable, even as he uses logic and rational thought to deconstruct the magical world and get the better of all the teachers. It would have been really easy for the author to write this Harry as a total gary-stu but he does not get everything go his own way, not at all. In fact his methods of rationality often gets him into very deep trouble. Although he did not grow up living underneath the stairs and his parents provided every opportunity for him to learn they were still emotionally distant from Harry and so he does not make friends easily and has very different psychological problems to overcome.

There are many scenes which are genuinely laugh out loud moments. We get chapters written from the point of view of character's other than Harry such as Hermonie, Draco and Professor McGonagal which make for a refreshing change of pace. Something which elevates this above 99.9% of all other fan fiction is that it pokes fun at the whole fan fiction sub-culture. For example one girl has a crush on Snape and her heart flutters when he tells her to stay after class and see him. Usually in fan fiction this would prompt something really icky but here Snape crushes her dreams saying he does not return her affections and tells her to stop it immediately. With all seven books of the original series complete the author has the entire source material to go at and he uses it in very different ways, for example the Deathly Hallows get mentioned and other plot elements and characters from later books are introduced early for comic effect.

I am about half way through the 78 chapters that have been written so far and the author (enigmatically known as Less Wrong) is still on the first year at Hogwarts. He releases new chapters as and when he can, usually every couple of weeks or so. Not sure if he will write up all seven years of the story or if this Harry will defeat the Dark Lord in half the time it took the original Harry. But then when the rules are this different anything could happen, maybe Voldemort will win, or maybe Harry really will become the next Dark Lord and have to be defeated by the other characters. It genuinely could go anywhere and that makes this interesting and worth reading.

The first 63 chapters are available in a neatly typeset PDF.

New chapters are released on this website (they don't look anywhere near as nice but they do come with author notes).
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I'm only six chapters in, and boy does it make me happy that there are so many more to read! This is AMAZING. Really, really amazing. This Harry is so much more interesting! The whole "book" is! It has laugh out loud moments, and the writing is really, really good. See how many 'really's I'm using!

Even if, like me, you're not really interested in HP anymore, it's very much worth a read. I've been reading all afternoon and loving every moment of it.

I'm reading it here instead of on fanfic.net.

I have no idea who this is, I found it on one of the random LJ image sites. Whoever you are, I love you!



*snickersnerks*

Okay, and on to the rec part of this post!



Pill Pockets are the best things ever. My cat has to get two pills a day (for her entire life). In the beginning it was easy enough, I even have her trained to come up on my desk and sit so I can give it to her. It's been a year though, and she's starting to refuse. Who can blame her? She's a tiny little cat with a little mouth, and I keep sticking my big ol' finger down her throat.

I had been avoiding the Pill Pockets because I figured she'd eat the treat part and spit the pill out, but nope! She bites it once or twice and swallows it whole! Though we just started using them today, so it's possible she might discover the trick of them in the future. I don't think that's too likely. She LOVES these. I mean goes wild for them! (I got the salmon flavored ones instead of the pictured chicken.) I can't see her not gobbling them down.

So if you need to pill your pet, these are totally worth getting. They come in dog sized, too! They're a bit expensive ($7 for 45 of them), but if they make things easier on my cat, I can cope.

It's quite a trick when a site makes you feel like you're currently reading a book, either the really great experiences with it, or saving you the pain of actually reading it yourself.

I started with Mark Reads Twilight. Every day he read a chapter of the book series, reviewing it as he went along. Highly amusing.

After a while though, I wanted something more positive, so I checked out Mark Reads The Hunger Games. Seeing the books read for the first time through someone else's eyes... man. :D It's the joy of reading it the first time yourself plus the fun of someone else not seeing the plot twists coming.

I'm currently in the middle of Mark Reads Harry Potter, which reminds me of all the reasons I loved the books way back when.

There are also Mark Watches... reviews, though I haven't read nearly as many of those. He really liked Firefly though!

It's so fun to see him be blindsided by plot twists! To go through discoveries with him! And there's soooo much reading to do. :D I've spent days on his site and I'm not even close to having read all his reviews. A highly recommended way to pass large chunks of time!

Every time I finish a good book, I always feel like I can't start another. Hunger Games, in this case. "How could I read another book? There'll never be another one like Hunger Games! It'll never be the same!"

As soon as I started the book, I knew I'd want the next one, so I two-day shipped it from Amazon. Unfortunately that was on Friday and two-day shipping doesn't count the weekend, so the second isn't coming until Tuesday but I finished the first last night. Boo!

"I could never read another book! It'll never be perfect like X was!".

My to-read pile is actually shrinking. I still have 20-something books waiting to be read (including King's latest 475895747825420 page one), but I can probably go back to being freer with buying new ones!

I sure did love Hunger Games. It's just too bad reviews on the second one are mixed.

Hunger Games on Amazon, where it got 585 five star and 152 four star reviews out of 795 reviews!

I'm starting to think all the trouble I had setting up the Wii (and buying a new TV, Tivo, etc because of it) was worth it. On a whim, after seeing one commercial on TV, I bought Just Dance. It claimed it would teach you how do dance to all sorts of songs from the 80s and 90s -- 'teaching' may or may not be true, but it's a ton of fun while being very active!

What the commercial didn't say was that there were also some songs from the 70s (and I think 60s?). Beach Boys and some kind of odd song about mashed potatoes. I didn't mind the potato song, it just wasn't active enough to really count as exercise (mostly you made arm movements as if peeling and mashing potatoes...). The Beach Boys song was surprisingly fun (I Get Around -- mime driving in a car!). Plus there were tons of fun songs from later years, like U Can't Touch This, Pump Up The Jam, and older songs I didn't think I would like but ended up being a hell of a lot of fun (Girls Just Want to Have Fun and Eye of the Tiger).

This is the first time, out of all my new exercises, that I smiled the whole entire time. They suggest it be used at parties, but I'd die of embarrassment if I tried to do this in front of anyone else... if I didn't kill them with random flailings of my arms first.

So, if you're looking for a fun game that gets your heart going, check out Just Dance!

How's this for timing? This afternoon I posted about not liking dogs, this evening I'm posting a recommendation for a LJ about dogs!

campcanine is a journal kept by people who run one of those (very cool) programs where they bring dogs and people in prison together. The men get training, but also learn new ways to deal with the world around them, and the dogs get training so they'll be more attractive to families looking to adopt a pet. Win-win!

There aren't too many posts yet, but the ones that are there are really interesting!

It's rare for me to rec something before I finish reading it, but I knew I'd recommend this just a couple pages in.

Gunnerkrigg Court, link to the archive so you can start at page one!

Picture Tim Burton with a dash of Harry Potter.

Young girl goes to a school where all sorts or strange things happen. While the students don't have magic (as far as I've seen, but I'm only up to June 2006 right now, just over a year into it), the whole story is full of it. Monsters, ghosts, dragons and dragon hunters are all real, just not in the way you'd expect.

It's really, really a unique story/world. "Magical" is the best word I have to sum it up.

One small warning: In general, the art is outstanding. I almost stopped reading on page one though, because the main character has no nose and thus reminded me of one of those Bratz dolls. Do not give up on it! It's really, really good!