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The Nib

Impressions

Not quite reviews, I talk about books I read and enjoyed.

The Nib is a daily comic publication and political magazine.

Okay, that doesn’t quite capture it, let me try again.

The Nib is a website that delivers a daily political comic. It also publishes a print magazine. But it’s not a words-magazine, it’s a comics-magazine.  By that I mean the whole magazine is the size of a short graphic novel, with various sections covering infographics about that issue’s topic, short comics related to the topic, feature (longer) comics about specific items, a “letters to the editor” of one-panels on a related topic or question, etc. etc.

It’s what you’d get if you converted a political magazine from strictly words and the occasional image to sequential art and then published it on a regular basis. For me, it’s about a 45 minute read per issue.

In the first three issues (I bought the back issues from Topatoco after I subscribed to the magazine), themed Death, Family, and Empire, they cover topics from how the Day of the Dead is merging with Halloween in Latino communities to the current humanitarian crisis at our borders to Filipino cheese pimento. In other words not only do these issues teach me about the politics of the world I live in, they educate me about the people I don’t see or hear from on a daily basis. And that’s pretty damn cool.

The Nib does a fantastic job of providing context to where we are and why we’re here, without being a five-thousand-word article. It makes politics approachable for young adult and adult readers. It definitely has a position, and that position is that we’re all in this together, on one earth, and families and working together and not being toxic assholes matter.

Readers can subscribe to the daily comic email for free, or become a member at a couple of different tiers.

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Day 602: just digging, and contemplating

One Among the Dead

Sometimes you need a project that’s just for, y’know, goofing around. This is the ongoing saga of my Minecraft character. For lack of a better title, we’re going with “One Among the Dead”. 

Day 602:

Digging is my top priority today so I dug and dug and dug… and got attacked by zombies and skeletons and rock rats and exploding giraffe corgis.

If there was some way to tame the exploding giraffe corgis and make them explode on command, this would be done a lot faster.

The skeletons are actually pretty handy because most of the time I can salvage arrows from them that are better than the ones I make myself… and to be honest it feels somewhat fitting to kill them with their own weapons.

The zombies have no purpose except to annoy me.

Oh, well, actually, they’re also really good at telling me that there’s a cavern in a particular direction, because they’re already in the cavern somehow yelling their fool heads off.

And the rock rats are great at biting shoelaces apart and damaging boots. But they also have sharp quill-like spines… and I’m trying to figure out if that could come in handy.

Because those quills look a lot like carding tines…

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Day 601: more digging, more carding

One Among the Dead

Sometimes you need a project that’s just for, y’know, goofing around. This is the ongoing saga of my Minecraft character. For lack of a better title, we’re going with “One Among the Dead”. 

Day 601:

Still digging, and it’s going well. I think, based on my estimates of distance, that I should be almost all the way out to the big mountain.

It helps that it turns out some of my deepest tunnels were already most of the way there. Part of the reason I know I’m close is because today I ran out of tunnel, dug straight up, and found myself nearer the mountain than I’d imagined.

It’s not as helpful that apparently mapping to scale is still not something I’m very good at.

The carding isn’t going as well. I’m still good at making nail-thickness iron, and still really bad at anything smaller. I might have to sit back and think about my technique for a day or two.

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Day 600: carding and spinning

One Among the Dead

Sometimes you need a project that’s just for, y’know, goofing around. This is the ongoing saga of my Minecraft character. For lack of a better title, we’re going with “One Among the Dead”. 

Day 600:

During the day, I dig toward the big mountain.

At night, I’m learning how to make a carder for wool.

I’m kind of glad my parents used to drag me to all those historical reenactment sites as a kid. I mean, I don’t have any idea how to make all the fancy complex tools that they had, most of which looked so old and rotted away I’m not sure I would have understood them anyway.

But I do remember that to make the wool long and spinnable you had to brush it between two things called cards, which were like two big flat hairbrushes with metal tines.

So like everything else here, it’s not as easy as run down to the local storage synthesizer, where as long as the computer had a 3-d image of a thing it could produce it. I’ve got to melt the iron down and then roll it while it’s hot until i have thin enough chunks that I can cut them into nail lengths, then hammer the nail lengths into the wood.

(I did try to weld a set onto metal, but let me tell you, I don’t have the energy or patience to do that kind of delicate work after digging all day. It’s hot and smelly and hammering is more fun. )

Tonight’s attempt made nails that were too thick, so tomorrow I’ll try again.

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Day 599: The llamas are back!

One Among the Dead

Sometimes you need a project that’s just for, y’know, goofing around. This is the ongoing saga of my Minecraft character. For lack of a better title, we’re going with “One Among the Dead”. 

Day 599:

The llamas are back! And this time they were accompanied by a man – humanoid at least. He was holding their leashes. (Are they called leashes when they’re on llamas?) The llama man turned out to have a limited vocabulary of mostly “Huh?” and “Ahhh” but between his hand gestures and mine I figured out he was some sort of trader. He wouldn’t come inside, but he was willing to trade some of my emeralds for what appears to be dye — black and hot pink!

I can make colorful socks, folks! This is amazing!

Of course, now it means that I have to cut the wool off the sheep again to dye it…

Anyway, that wasn’t the only amazing thing. As dark was falling I tried to invite the trader in again, to keep him safe, and he shook his head no. He pulled out a bottle from his cloak and drank it… and disappeared.

I kid you not.

Freakin’ disappeared, invisible except for the llama leashes.

So it was him! Or someone like him! Who visited me the last time!

If there was ever a day that made me think the falling cow gave me a concussion it was this one.