This comic was originally posted in 2012.

Thoughts from 2020: Sprite the cat is still with us, by the way. She's at least 14 now and we've had her for 13 years as of last October. She is still the greatest cat ever created. And she pretty much always hated being put in the labcoat like this.

The STW Book!

This comic was originally posted in 2014 on the "I Love Charts" Medium site - I was allowed to repost comics on STW but I don't think I ever did, so this is the first time this comic has appeared on STW.

Thoughts from 2020: The worst part about being in every STW means that I get to see how freakishly young I looked even just six years ago. Stupid children stealing my youth.

"Hark" was the four-letter new-slang insult that a reader suggested adopting sometime in 2011, and it remains a stupidly fun curse word for me, especially around the holidays.

I got 2 cents for every view of the comics on the Medium site during the first 3 months it ran, and then got 1 cent for every view during the last 3 months (incidentally, also why I started making 2 additional comics per week for them as opposed to 1). I think I spent most of the income on comics.

The STW Book!

This comic was originally posted in 2016.

Thoughts from 1/14/2020: I developed IBS-like symptoms, or what is essentially an allergy, to caffeine about 8 months ago. Looking back on all the comics that involve coffee like this one, I'm not surprised why. By the way, it's difficult to get through the day without caffeine and caffeine-free tea just doesn't cut it.

The STW Book!

This comic was originally posted in 2008.

Thoughts from 1/15/2020: I don't continue to hold that you will get the same grade in ChemE whether you study all night or get drunk the night before, but I use that line with my students all the time. That said, electrical engineering remains black magic.

The STW Book!

This comic was originally posted in 2011.

Thoughts from 1/16/2020: I made this comic when I was still 27. What the hell was I focusing on at that point?

The STW Book!

This comic was originally posted in 2014.

Thoughts from 1/17/2020: Considering this now pedagogically ... I'm not sure this is helpful for students at all.

The STW Book!

This comic was originally posted in 2016.

Thoughts from 1/18/2020: This comic was kind of simple and dumb and yet you still maybe learned something from it, so all in all it was kind of the perfect STW.

The STW Book!

This comic was originally posted in 2009.

Thoughts from 1/19/2020: This comic came out in December of 2009, about six months after STW got really popular, and I remember someone shared the image on Twitter and Neil Gaiman retweeted it, and that led to another brief boost in popularity. It's weird to think that STW started at exactly the right time - I don't think it would have made a dent if it started today, and I don't think something like this really could have started today. Anyway, life and history are weird.

Get the STW Book!

This comic was originally posted in 2016.

Thoughts from 1/20/2020: My smile in this one perfectly captures my true delight in this terrible pun. In so many ways, this is one of my favorite STWs. It's also in the STW book. Speaking of ...

Get the STW Book!

This comic was originally posted in 2014.

Thoughts from 1/21/2020: There was a brief period of time when I was being asked to submit various chart jokes to WIRED. One got in - a pie chart showing Vin Diesel's moods were 50% fast and 50% furious. This one was one that got rejected so screw it, I made it into a STW.

Get the STW Book!

This comic was originally posted in 2015.

Thoughts from 1/22/2020: I look ridiculous.

Get the STW Book!

This comic was originally posted in 2012.

Thoughts from 1/23/2020: It's a living.

I only had one newly born baby at the time of this comic. Remember people asking for updates about Cannonball as we were doing our best to keep her from arriving early? Now she's got a sibling and Cannonball is almost 8. Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana.

Get the STW Book!

This comic was originally posted in 2013.

Thoughts from 1/24/2020: One of my students, the semester this comic was released, drunkenly typed this up and submitted it as a comment in my course evaluations, which means the text here has been a part of every promotion dossier I've had to submit.

Oh, look, you can see I'm kneeling, like I was in about 60-70% of all the comics I made. That's just bad cropping, there.

Get the STW Book!

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?"

Get the STW Book!

This comic was originally posted in 2017.

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

Get the STW Book!

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.

Get the STW Book!

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.

Get the STW Book!

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.

Get the STW Book!

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.

Get the STW Book!

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!

Get the STW Book!

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.

Get the STW Book!

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.

Get the STW Book!

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!

Get the STW Book!

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.

Get the STW Book!

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.

Get the STW Book!

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.

Get the STW Book!

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.

Get the STW Book!

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.

Get the STW Book!

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.

Get the STW Book!

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.

Get the STW Book!

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.

Get the STW Book!

UPDATE: Both workshops filled very quickly. I only do these about once a year; apologies for the imbalance. I have set up a system so people who are potentially interested in future small-class lighting workshops can receive advance notice. More info here.

__________
I'll be teaching two, full-day lighting workshops in the suburban Baltimore/DC area on December 6 and 7.

They are two separate one-day events. These are small-group workshops, with a maximum class size of 12 people each day. These are shooting workshops, and you'll be behind (and/or in front of!) a camera for most of the day.

Assuming you arrive at this class with a basic understanding of f/stops and shutter speeds, you will leave with a strong foundation in the fundamentals of off-camera lighting. You will be comfortable using single and multiple lights both alone and/or balanced with a mix of ambient lighting.

All lighting gear will be provided. We will also provide lunch.

You will need to bring a camera that is adjustable in manual mode and has a hot shoe connection for a flash, a lens that covers normal and/or portrait range, one or two fully charged batteries and an empty storage card. Maybe a notebook and pen if you like.

That's it. Just show up ready to learn and to have fun. Leave the rest to me.


Details

Dates:
December 6 and 7, 2019

Time:
9:30am - 5:30pm

Price:
$259

Location:
Sandy Spring Friends Lyceum
17715 Meeting House Road
Sandy Spring, MD 20860


Note; These are the only small-class lighting workshops I'll be teaching in the US this year. In the past, these have tended to fill very quickly. So if this is something you'd like to do, I'd suggest signing up sooner rather than later.


Sign-Up Links

Friday, December 6 [FRIDAY'S CLASS HAS BEEN FILLED]

Saturday, December 7 [SATURDAY'S CLASS HAS BEEN FILLED]

One-shot between Harry and Ginny a day before his Auror-training began. Canon, R&R

Six-year-old Teddy Lupin was feeling unnaturally nervous. One-shot Teddy's speech for his primary school about his parents, or people like his parents. R&R!

One-shot,*not what you might think* Now that Harry and Ginny are dating, Ron needs to get his brotherly duties out of way, but who is he going to talk to if not Harry? Read to find out... R&R!

Next quarter, starting March 30, I will be teaching “Math 247B: Classical Fourier Analysis” here at UCLA.  (The course should more accurately be named “Modern real-variable harmonic analysis”, but we have not gotten around to implementing such a name change.) This class (a continuation of Math 247A from previous quarter, taught by my colleague, Monica […]

Darth Sidious’s master plan becomes reality, and the galaxy will never be the same.

In the chilling series finale, Ahsoka and Rex try to survive Order 66 and plot one final escape.

The pandemic is putting America’s deepening class divide into stark relief. Four classes are...

Shaenon: Claire writes, “I redraw bits of the strip almost every evening; it started as a way to get nice avatar images, but has ended up being a longer term project.” That is…amazing, and thank you very much for this[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry...

Flushed with the feeling of success that comes from having cleaned my office to such a degree that the rugs are now visible, I thought today that I would take on the problem of excess books. Surely there are some I don't actually need. So I chose a shelf at near-random (it was one of those actually accessible without moving the boxes of books stacked before it to another location), and started going through both rows (the shelves are double-stacked, of course) to see what they contained.

Only to discover that the shelf was stocked with books placed there at seeming random. Mr. Evelyn's diary lies cheek-to-jowl with Gertrude Stein's Picasso. Jeff Danziger's Teed Tales abuts, appropriately enough, a history of Vermont. There is a collection of stories by T. Corgahesson Boyle, Zora Neale Hurston's autobiography, a novel by Sean Stewart, and a collection of essays by Ursula K. Le Guin. These last two, by the way, are misfiled since I have a science fiction section arranged almost alphabetically by author and a designated place for stacks of SF criticism and related essays. Which is where Gwyneth Jones' Joanna Russ should be as well.

Here's T. H. White's wonderful collection of mythical animals from medieval bestiaries, The Book of Beasts. The Return of Fursey! Mosses from an Old Manse. Flann O'Brien's The Best of Myles reappears from hiding; after I've obsessively reread it a few times,  I'll have to hide it somewhere else among my books, if I'm ever to read anything else. Oh, but there's also John McPhee's The Pine Barrens, which some of us persist in thinking his best book. Though it has competition. And here is a battered but charming old hardcover of Charles Fort's The Book of the Damned. I have a biography of Fort around here somewhere, though I doubt I'll find it today. Some few of these I haven't read--Fishing from Earliest Times is one example, though I'm sure I'll get to it soon. But I've read every story in The Corrector of Destinies, Melville Davidson Post's extremely odd collection of detective fiction (sort of), and I'll have to blog about it here someday.

There are thirty shelves of books on one wall of my office and my first attack upon the one provided me with nothing to cull,  And I've put aside a short stack of books to read or reacquaint myself with. Not have I done much to organize it--but wait! Here, just one shelf below is Damon Knight's Charles Fort. Up it goes, alongside The Book of the Damned, so nobody could say the last hour was wasted. Though it came close.

Nor was I able to impose a theme upon the shelf, other than Books I Am Delighted to Possess. But maybe that's enough.

In any case, it will have to do.


Above: For technical reasons, I'm having difficulty uploading a picture of the wall of books in my office. So here's a pic of part of the wall of books in my bedroom. 

As Thailand's capital cautiously reopens many restaurants shuttered over coronavirus fears, the feline "employees" of the Caturday Cafe are back at work.

What's your grandma cooking for Thanksgiving? These lucky people are dancing, parodying and rapping about all the delicious potential for tasty holiday foods.

The deep sea, areas of the ocean below 200 meters, is the largest biome on Earth‐‐vast, remote, and inhospitable. These conditions create unique challenges for…

In a preprint Modular Classes of Q-Manifolds, Part II: Riemannian Structures & Odd Killing Vectors Fields, I examine the notion of a supermanifold equipped with an even Riemannian metric and an odd Killing vector field that is also homological. Background In a previous post, I briefly disscussed the notion of a Q-manifold and their modular...

Talking Social Work was an event held on 13 September 2018 to mark the 50th Anniversary of the Social Work (Scotland) Act 1968 - to celebrate, reflect on the journey so far and look to the future.

Claire Ferrier, social worker with Perth and Kinross Council within the Adult Care Team talks about the risk of not demonstrating care, the risk of not demonstrating trust and the culture of social work and relationships with service users.

Claire won the Jo Campling Memorial essay prize from the journal of Ethics and Social Welfare. The award was for Claire's practice study on 'risk' in social work which was subsequently published in the journal.

Transcript of episode

Music Credit: Make your dream a reality by Scott Holmes

These memes will make you us want to quit Stalin and overthrow capitalism right Mao.