@KorvinStarmast International Cat Day is a real thing today apparently. Lying Cat is a big sphinx-like cat from a species that knows when people are lying (because magic) and they say so.
A whole lot of people have fallen in love with Lying Cat because it's a little bit meme-worthy (see especially that second image, the confused "lying?" one) but especially because this sequence which stole some peoples' hearts:
Context: the girl in the yellow dress here was a child trafficking victim in the comic who wound up in something like a bordello. Lying Cat's owner rescued her, and she's been travelling with a few people including her rescuer and Lying Cat for a few months at this point. She's still dealing with the emotional trauma from that experience.
@doppelgreener Ah. I wonder if any made the (heavy handed) pun on where the girl was being kept/enslaved as a cat house ... OK, context of lying cat better understood. (Not a fan of cats, but some of the internet cat memes are funny ... universally so).
@KorvinStarmast No cats were at the bordello. Lying Cat's owner is a bounty hunter. He went there for business, trashed the place (or some of it, I don't recall the details), and left with the kid.
So that pun wouldn't really work.
The comic deals with some super real and heavy themes, so I don't find people making light of it and the stuff that happens in it much, except for the things that are already funny. Like, the bordello place she's at is messed up and presented off the bat in ways that are deliberately unnerving; there's not much room left to really make fun of it.
@KorvinStarmast It's pretty great, so I'd recommend it. :) Brace for NSFW stuff though. The comic follows a couple who are parents on either side of an intergalactic war and their child -- and the first scene of the comic is the scene of the child's birth.
From what I recall the writer+artist pair deliberately included some things that would squick out Hollywood producers so they wouldn't try to mess with the comic or turn it into a movie.
Peeve of the day week: graphic artists who don't know math, but who should. Dear graphic artists for news programs: the set of locations 6000km (measured along the surface) from Pyongyang does form a circle. But when you plot it on a Mercator projection, it looks nothing like the circle you're thinking of. Conversely, when you just drop a nice-looking circle onto a Mercator map, you do grave injustice to truth.
Actual distance between North Korea and a point on the west coast of the USA: 8547.3278 km. Actual distance between North Korea and a point on the north coast of Australia: 5819.0109 km. According to that map: the second distance is much greater.
Alternately... NK to Darwin: https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/distanceresult.html?p1=205&p2=72 -- Distance is 5724 kilometers or 3557 miles or 3091 nautical miles NK to Seattle: https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/distanceresult.html?p1=205&p2=234 -- Distance is 8288 kilometers or 5150 miles or 4475 nautical miles
@doppelgreener Right--that's what my map confirms. 6000km grabs Indonesia and the north coast of Australia and Alaska, but doesn't come anywhere close to California and Mexico, for instance.
(Darwin is a city on the northern central edge of Australia.)
@nitsua60 Yeah
Our Guamanian friends came across a different issue yesterday: in response to reports North Korea might attack Guam, Fox produced a report that it might affect "3,000 Americans" and some other major news outlets estimated a few tens of thousands. Guam is an American territory -- everyone in Guam is American -- and its population is well over a hundred thousand.
This has made a lot of people in Guam very annoyed.
@nitsua60 Well...... certain storms on Twitter are occurring at those involved in producing those stats, I am told, so they might have a hard time continuing to not admit their existence.
@nitsua60 I'm not! The function you used omits the fact that NK is closer to the north pole than 6000km, which allows it to threaten the wildlife on the part of the Arctic that appears above Canada on your map.
@nwp Yeah, they've got some strange not-quite-Mercater projection they're using. It's like the opposite of a Robinson projection, best I can tell. In any case, it appears to be a projection that would make lines-of-const-distance-from-Pyongyang look even less circular to the eye, not more.
@doppelgreener North Korea can't hit the sun out of respect - it would be an insult to the Great and Honorable Leader to threaten any violence against him.
@eimyr So it doesn't ignore it, but it clearly doesn't display it correctly. You can see that the 6000km "circle" hits the top, so it understands that it should "wrap over" the north pole. But my "circle" plot has a "twist" in it because of that, and I didn't take the extra time to sort that out. (It's the wedges you see impinging around the Arctic Circle.)
@doppelgreener FWIW, doppel, back in college my friends from Guam preferred to be called "Guamanian" rather than Guamese, but perhaps that usage has changed, or is different in Aus.
I wondered about what stuff looks like on a grid. Like if you take the rules that 1 field costs 1 movement and diagonals also cost 1 movement. If you draw a circle (all the fields you can reach from a certain point) you get a square. Now, what if you were to draw a square in that world? What happens if you tilt the square into a diamond shape?
@eimyr (btw it was when you said "the bit at the bottom" that I got confused. I thought you were joking about a missile that passes the North Pole getting to wrap, Pac-Man-style, down to the South Pole.)
@NautArch Hmm, an interesting point, but in the year 2525, if man is still alive, they'll look back at all of this and either laugh, or flap their flippers together because we'll have returned to the sea and are mating with whales ... or something like that.
@doppelgreener Nitsua's later point indicates to me that usage has changed again, and that he's seeing a different adjective in use. Guamaian. (Isn't BESW on guam?)
I know enough about TBMD to know that you can set up an Aegis class ship or two and, given Guam's size, have a pretty good defensive footprint. I hope the 7th fleet commander has been ordered to do something along those lines.
@doppelgreener (Sorry, TBMD = Theater Ballistic Missile Defense) which is a sub set of BMD (ballistic missile defense) which is where the Aegis ship thing comes in.
@NautArch From where I live, I kept getting told that digging straight through the earth would bet me into China. That isn't so. It would be somewhere in the Southern Hemisphere.
@KorvinStarmast Apparently basically anywhere in the USA has the Indian Ocean as its antipode, unless you're living on the central northern Montana border in which case you're vaguely within swimming distance of a remote island.
Hmmm, Google search techniques I am trying to nail down a weapon I remember from a Space RPG (Not Traveler) from the mid to late 1970's. In an old search system we used capitalized AND as part of the syntax, but that does not seem to work at Google.
@nwp I wonder if I am going about this incorrectly. Maybe I need to do a search at DriveThrough RPG or RPG.net, or something, with "sci-fi" or "science Fiction" as the search term. Hmmm.
@NautArch Thank you to everyone for the well-wishes. North Korea's been threatening Guam for as long as I can remember, and so (in common with most of the world) foreign military action is just another thing on the list of Reasons To Live Well Because Worrying Isn't Going To Help.
The most upset I've seen any of my local friends about this most recent iteration is the thing Greener mentioned earlier: a news graphic that seems to be claiming only the active military personnel on one of our two US bases count as Americans.
Even setting aside the fact that people born on Guam are US citizens just like most US soil, that graphic isn't counting all the military stationed here--or their families.
(And yes, it's "Guamanian." Though that word was originally created to replace the indigenous peoples' term for themselves, it's coming to mean "lives on Guam" without implying the person's background. Kind of generational now.)
