Moe Lane

I like Howard Tayler and I enjoy the living heck out of Schlock Mercenary – but I really do hope that the man doesn’t think that Sunday’s strip is not blatantly telegraphing that Things Are About To Go Pear-Shaped.

Because it is.  And they are.

…(Howard Tayler, Schlock Mercenary) would at least get a personalized rejection slip for his short story, instead of a form letter.  Particularly when it’s been submitted to, and forgive me for saying this, an online SF magazine that is not perhaps as well known as Taylor’s webcomic.

Please understand, I’m not in any sort of nerdrage over this; for all I know, the story was crap.  It’s just a little… startling that the publisher didn’t jump on the chance to get a “name.”  Possibly it’s a good startling, but it’s startling all the same.

…I grabbed John Ringo’s Citadel: Troy Rising II out of the local library.  Read the previous one; it was good stuff, and so is this.  Basically, John Ringo decided that he liked the hinted-at history of Howard Tayler’s excellent Schlock Mercenary space-opera webcomic enough to use it for an alien-invasion military science fiction series, which in itself is enough to start a self-sustaining Synergistic Crescendo of Awesome.  That it’s also well written alien-invasion military science fiction is merely gravy.

I also grabbed a couple of Charlie Stross books, but that’ll be for next week.
(more…)

Words cannot describe how much you have lost that argument. Correction: one word can.

DOOM.

God, I love Schlock Mercenary.

It should have occurred to me already, though: Howard Tayler shouldn’t have had to spell it out.

Admittedly, not many.

Live Free Or Die (Troy Rising) amused me not least for the fact that when I checked it out of the library* I had no idea that it was a probably-end-up-being-canon prehistory of the Schlock Mercenary universe. If you don’t know what that webcomic is: well, like John Ringo I’ll wait for you to get caught up.

Pack a lunch.

Moe Lane

*Stay-at-home dad now, remember?  So if that moves you to pity, hey, there’s always the tip jar…

Take today’s little quick examination of evil, and how our various definitions of it and its origins is going to run into the thorny problem of created sapience like a sports car running into a brick wall, and how this entire conversation drives practical men mad – since they want to know the answer, yet don’t want to listen to the implications of the question…

Well. It’s Howard Tayler. That Hugo nomination was for a reason.

Despite their ultimately-sincere protestations to the contrary, it’s a well-deserved award: Girl Genius is one of those indispensable webcomics, and doubly indispensable for those of a steampunk or neo-Victorian inclination.  My (few) interactions with Studio Foglio have always been very amiable, as well.  In fact, my only regret on this is that Girl Genius winning meant that Schlock Mercenary did not, and I’d be writing a broadly similar post if Howard Tayler had won and Kaja & Phil Foglio had not.

Again, congratulations.

Moe Lane

PS: Now GO FINISH GURPS GIRL GENIUS, DAMMIT.  We wants it, we does.

…examples found here and here is how accessible the concept is to people like myself: i.e., one step above pig-ignorant about philosophy. Dresden Codak in general is like that; it’d be one of my favorite webcomics if he’d just buckle down and get to work on it on a regular basis.

Hey, Schlock Mercenary demonstrates that you can combine quality with professional-level reliability…