This comic was originally posted in 2008.

Thoughts from 1/25/2020: I did this far more often than I should have and was a terrible example of safety - to be fair, I was following the culture that was set at the time. Now I teach safety and so it's very much a case of "Look at me, kids, do you want to be as pathetic and awful as me?"

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This comic was originally posted in 2017.

Thoughts from 1/26/2020: Continues to apply in all things.

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This comic was originally posted in 2008.

Thoughts from 1/27/2020: There were three comics of this "Sports vs." theme. This is probably the best of the three? I used to play several sports in high school for my Catholic high school, and they would want us to pray as a team before each game, and then we'd usually follow with someone saying the name of a saint, and then the rest of the team responding "pray for us". Usually someone would say "St. Sebastian", who was the patron saint of sports, so the "pray for us" made sense. There'd be a "St. Bernard", since that was the name of our school, and the "pray for us" was obvious. And since we were terrible in almost all sports, I'd throw in a "St. Jude", and everyone would readily respond with a "pray for us", as a matter of practice ... not knowing that St. Jude was the patron saint of hopeless causes. It is fair to say that St. Jude did not come through for us in most cases, or perhaps he stayed true to his cause and thus did come through? Anyway high school sucked.

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This comic was originally posted in 2010.

Thoughts from 1/28/2020: The dumbest thing I did was ending recitations on the site, and I did that just 2 or 3 years in. At that point, I was getting 10 to 20 emails a day from people trying to get a question on the site, and when I ended it, that dropped off completely. Ah well! Of course, I realized this and tried to recapture the connection not long after with 'homeworks' or 'big questions', but it was too late. On the other hand, my actual students would have had a field day with recitations if I was still doing these by the time I became a professor.

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This comic was originally posted in 2018.

Thoughts from 1/29/2020: The day after STW ended, my youngest child, Torpedo, lectured the hungry hungry hippos on making sure to share the food. I remain endlessly delighted by this memory.

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This comic was originally posted in 2018.

Thoughts from 1/30/2020: I think this came out the day after my joke about Batman and Conditioner Gordon that continues to pop up and send out Google alerts with my last name that continue to irritate my Dad.

A few months after STW ended, I did a way-too-long thread on Twitter that ran with and completely beat into the ground this rhyming wordplay scheme.

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This comic was originally posted in 2012.

Thoughts from 1/31/2020: This seems like the totally mature comic that a person would publish just two months before they became a dad. Setting a strong example for the youth of near-tomorrow!

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This comic was originally posted in 2008.

Thoughts from 2/2/2020: The first raptor impression on the site! I totally stole the whole raptor thing from a guy I knew freshman year of college, and he was perfect at the noise and movement, but he transferred out after that year anyway.

There was no re-run yesterday because I briefly participated in Hourly Comic Day. Here are eight I made before giving up on it. Not sure I'll do it again, unless I start actually drawing.

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This comic was originally posted in 2017.

Thoughts from 2/3/2020: This was very hard to make, given a 10-second timer on the camera, and needing to get the book prepared in-between my monkey toes, let alone raising everything to the right height. Also no one appreciated how clever this was, because, alas, that's the way of things.

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This comic was originally posted in 2016.

Thoughts from 2/4/2020: There is a real problem with making endless comics for ten straight years that have your face in them, as you will get set in your mind that is what you look like, and anyway I'm 37 today and I'm now trying to remind myself that that's the way of things. The sad thing is I know I somehow got a little more mature along the way, and that's the real depressing thing. Hurray!

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This comic was originally posted in 2016.

Thoughts from 2/14/2020: Westley was a good dog and he was forced into a labcoat far too many times.

The 'roses are red' rhyming scheme joke is my favorite part of this stupid holiday.

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This comic was originally posted in 2014.

Thoughts from 2/16/2020: This comic was made in honor of my sixth wedding anniversary. I then self-plagiarized it for when I officiated my friend Ron's wedding this past summer, and then self-plagiarized it again for when I officiated my sister's wedding last fall. And now I'm posting it on the day of my parents' 40th wedding anniversary. I have better comics about love but this one kind of drives the message home better than any of them.

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This comic was originally posted in 2017.

Thoughts from 2/18/2020: I just spent my weekend grading 148 exams for two classes and I'm brain numb right now. So here's an old comic about grading.

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This comic was originally posted in 2018.

Thoughts from 3/8/2020: It's International Women's Day so let's destroy the old system, if that's okay with all of you.

Both Torpedo and Cannonball seem likely to continue on this path, as most people of their generation will be, I assume.

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This comic was originally posted in 2014.

Thoughts from 3/10/2020: I remember making this comic six years ago but I did not remember that 'file under' tag, I must have been feeling particularly blasphemous that day.

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This comic was originally posted in 2012.

Thoughts from 4/12/2020: I remember this comic coming out just days before Cannonball was born and even though I was hallucinating to the point that the chair I was sleeping on was literally talking to me, those were certainly simply times than right now.

I hope that all of you and your families are healthy, both physically and mentally. May we all make it through these times as best we can.

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This comic was originally posted in 2010.

Thoughts from 4/13/2020: This was originally thought of in 2003 after a bad summer camp experience, and was developed in response to dumb political talking points in 2010. I have no possible idea why I've been reminded of it now ...

I hope that all of you and your families are healthy, both physically and mentally. May we all make it through these times as best we can.

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This comic was originally posted in 2017.

Thoughts from 5/8/2020: Hey, it's my mom's birthday! Happy birthday, mom. Thanks for not throwing me into the sun.

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The Badminton World Federation said the 2021 world championships will run from Nov. 29-Dec. 5 to avoid a schedule conflict with the Tokyo Olympics.

The Swiss hockey federation says it won't seek to host the 2021 men's world championship after losing this year's event because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Thanks to ambyr's rec, we watched Dukhtar ['Daughter'], (2014, directed Afia Nathaniel).

ambyr described this very well: it does include misogyny and violence, but ultimately it's a hopeful film. The film feels almost like a stage play; it is almost entirely about the characters, a mother trying to save her young daughter, and the roadster who reluctantly helps them. The camera doesn't dwell either on the beautiful scenery (there are mountains in the background, but no gorgeous cinematic shots) or on the violence; there are quite a few shootings in the film, but it's never gory because it's not about gun porn, it's about trying to escape from that violent world of gang / tribal violence. Quite a bit of it is filmed in shaky-cam style as if it were just incidental video of people's lives.

The characters are all really vivid, and I cared about them a lot, partly because the film is so careful to avoid piling on the drama. The tribal enforcers who go around shooting almost-random people in order to make people fear them are squalid, not glamorous. The elder who is desperate enough to sell his 10-year-old daughter for protection is basically pathetic rather than evil. The main character, Samiya Mumtaz' Allah Rakhi is beautiful and brave, but not really a heroine, she's desperate and runs away with her daughter with almost no plan for how they're going to survive. In other words she's really plausible for a barely literate woman married at 15 and sent to a remote, very patriarchal village in the mountains.

The romance between Allah Rakhi and Sohail is likewise really understated. He's not a white knight saving the princess, and in fact they even joke about how much he doesn't fit that romantic stereotype. He's a troubled person who has survived and escaped from the Taliban training camps, and he doesn't really want to get involved but can't just abandon a desperate mother and daughter to their fate. They have a certain amount of tenderness, but don't instantly fall in love and it's not clear whether their relationship will last, or whether it will end up being romantic or more friend-based. I also really liked that the dashing, handsome man who is avuncular with the kid and flirts with the mother in a rather aggressive way turns out to be a bad guy, not the love interest.

The ending is really odd. The credits just happen in the middle of a desperate car-ride taking the heroine to hospital bleeding from a gunshot wound. I think we're meant to infer that she survives but it's really not clear.

Next up: Nigeria, our first African country. Any recommendations of Nigerian films? Ideally from the 21^st century, and not primarily about violence or depressing real-world history.

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Nobody had any recs for Nigeria, so we poked around a bunch of internet best of lists and came up with Lionheart, (2018, dir Genevieve Nnaji), which turned out to be a great choice.

Lionheart is about a young business woman, Adaeze, who has to overcome sexism and save her father's struggling transport business. The director, Nnaji, also plays the title role and does a brilliant job. What I particularly loved about this film was that it undermined my genre expectations of feel-good feminist films. Adaeze doesn't have to outsmart and triumph over the sexist men, she has to learn to collaborate with people different from herself. And the company doesn't win by beating its rivals but by conducting a merger that at the start seemed unthinkable, requiring cooperation between her Igbo, Christian family and some Hausa (I think?) Muslims.

In particular, the eccentric uncle who is inexplicably appointed as acting MD when everybody knows it should have been Adaeze turns out to have some key strengths. He is in fact only annoying, and not a jerk. His people skills and intuition perfectly complement Adaeze's business acumen. (And how nice to have a female lead be the excessively competent and rational one!)

Adaeze does experience some sexism, particularly creepy men who expect sexual favours in return for investment in the business. But most of the antagonists are just nasty in a gender neutral way, like they want to sell the business to a conniving rival for quick money.

Anyway that was a really sweet date-night movie and I do feel our film project is back on track

Any recs for Bangladeshi films? We are most excited about 21^st century films not primarily about violence or depressing real-world history.

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OK! I did manage to finish the video I described in the last few posts. It's this:

30 Weird Chess Algorithms: Elo World

I felt pretty down on this video as I was finishing it, I think mostly in the same way that one does about their dissertation, just because of the slog. I started it just thinking, I'll make a quick fun video about all those chess topics, but then once I had set out to fill in the entire tournament table, this sort of dictated the flow of the video even if I wanted to just get it over with. So it was way longer than I was planning, at 42 minutes, and my stress about this just led to more tedium as I would micro-optimize in editing to shorten it. RIP some mediocre jokes. But it turns out there are plenty of people on the internet who enjoy long-form nerdy content like this, and it was well-received, which is encouraging. (But now I am perplexed that it seems to be more popular than NaN Gates and Flip-FLOPS, which IMO is far more intetersting/original. I guess the real lesson is just make what you feel like making, and post it!) The 50+ hours programming, drawing, recording and editing did have the desired effect of getting chess out of my system for now, at least.

Since last post I played Gato Roboto which is a straightforward and easy but still very charming "Metroidvania." Now I'm working my way through Deux Ex: Mankind Divided, which (aside from the crashing) is a a very solid sequel to Human Revolution. Although none of these games is likely to capture the magic of the original (one of my all-time faves), they do definitely have the property that you can play them in ways that the developer didn't explicitly set out for you, and as you know I get a big kick out of that.

Aside from the video games, I've picked back up a 10 year-old project that I never finished because it was a little bit outside my skillset. But having gotten significantly better at electronics and CNC, it is seeming pretty doable now. Stay tuned!

The Worst Things For Sale is Drew's blog. It updates every day. Subscribe to the Worst Things For Sale RSS!