Let him that hath a web connection look up the number of the beast

Forgot my book at home today, so I sketched fellow passengers on the return trip. The guy in the lower right saw me drawing the others, and asked me to draw him. It’s rare that I sketch people in the wild who aren’t either sleeping or reading.

A lot of people seem to be making a big deal over today’s being 6/6/06, as if they’d all totally missed the news about last year’s discovery of the earliest known fragmentary of a copy of the Revelation of St John, in which the Number of the Beast is given as 616. Shows how persistent typos can be. Added bonus: The fragment was found in an ancient garbage dump in an Egyptian town called Oxyrhynchus, named after the fish that’s supposed to have eaten Osiris’s penis!

Also, 616 is the area code for Grand Rapids, Michigan (home of the teenaged Gillian Anderson), but sadly not for Hell, Michigan. And Earth-616 is the primary Marvel universe.

And speaking of the Revelation of St John, y’all may have heard about the Left Behind computer game, that supposedly has the player killing infidels who refuse to convert? Turns out it’s actually more complicated than that. The game involves trying to save as many people as possible, by boosting their spirituality (a game stat that runs from 0 to 100; units rated 40-60 are neutral in the fight). Dead enemy units are losses, because victory is based on number of conversions, not number of enemy killed. Still pretty simplistic, but not as bad as I’d been hearing.

On Saturday, bugsybanana dragged me off to her 20th high school reunion. I didn’t know hardly anybody, so I just sketched:

( Two sketches )

AD&D in Hindi

Via mcroft: Add your own subtitles to a short Bollywood movie clip! Here’s mine, from a script by E Gary Gygax!