New fallacy

There’s a joke you may have heard:

I was walking home the other night, and I saw a guy wandering around a parking lot, looking intently at the ground. “Looking for something?” I asked. “I lost my car keys,” he replied. So I helped him out, and we spent another half hour searching every damn inch of blacktop in that part of the lot, till finally I got tired of it. “I don’t think they’re here,” I said, “Are you sure you dropped them here?” “Oh, not at all,” he told me, “I dropped them over there, on the other side of the lot.” “What? Why the hell were you wasting time looking over here?” “The light’s better here,” he said.

I’ve used this joke for a while as an example of a particular kind of thinking, where one makes a judgment based on a bad measurement just because it’s easier then trying to gather useful data. Now, thanks to Slacktivist, I find it has a name. Alfred North Whitehead dubbed it the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness”.

Sketches and lycanthropy

I discovered, while trying to do some sketching during drcpunk’s game on Saturday, that the new weapon dries out if I don’t use it for a few days. I’ll have to either keep refilling it, or carry a bottle of ink around with me. I don’t like the latter idea, though Pelikan’s ink bottles seem pretty sturdy. I also think I’m handling ordinary brush markers a bit better now. (Of the four drawings below, the one on the lower-left was done with the new brush marker, the others with a cheaper Faber-Castell Pitt brush marker. And the one up above was done with a Pitt finepoint.)

( More sketches )

In the course of this week’s Cthulhupunk adventure, one of my characters was wounded by a werewolf. There are emergency anti-lycanthropy treatments one can take to try and prevent infection, but we’ve decided that they didn’t work, and my character will be in for a surprise next full moon, and I’ve drafted some Over the Edge-compatible rules for therianthropy. This new development ought to make her more combat-capable, especially since she’ll retain her ability to electrocute people on touch. Silver’s an excellent conductor....

Comics

The second Kane book, Rabbbit Hunt, is really good, though the flashbacks are still a bit confusing. (Hint: The Flashback scenes all have a thick black band running down the middle of the page.) Grist combines comedy and drama very smoothly. Details establish that New Eden is located in the US, but occasional Britishisms (“plasters” instead of “bandaids”, or “bandages” for the trademark-suit averse) crop up. I haven’t found books three or four at Cosmic or Midtown, or the Brooklyn branch of St Marks (which used to be Metro Comics). I haven’t looked in Forbidden Planet yet, or Jim Henley’s, or the Manhattan St Marks. Does Village Comics still exist?

I’d been looking forward to Heaven’s War, Micah Harris’s and Michael Gaydos’s story about a spiritual battle between Aleistair Crowley and the Inklings. The actual comic turns out a bit dry and talky. It’s pretty clearly heavily inspired by Moore and Campbell’s From Hell, but Harris lets his narrative sections just drag.

Midnight Mover is a crime drama with strong sexual elements (still the equivalent of an R rating, though — tits get shown, and people having sex, but no actual visible penetration or showing of below-the-belt naughty bits), since the plot revolves around the sex trade and porn movies. The plot works as a story, though the ending is odd and abrupt. The art is clean and attractive. Yet I couldn’t get excited about this comic. (Also, the editing seems to be non-existent. Not only the usual “you’re” instead of “your”, but “formerly” instead of “formally”.)

I’ve read about halfway through the first volume of Shaman King, yet another imported manga title. I haven’t been liking most of the recent crop of imported manga (but then, I’m not really the target audience), but this one’s not bad. Yeah, some of the usual tedious manga tropes show up (the protagonist’s sidekick seems just too easily amazed, and emotes at 11), but the premise is clever, and the pages put together a bit better than is typical for manga. But now I’ve got a distracting fragmentary parody of “Oh, Better Far to Live and Die” running through my head.