Creative Output

The other day, I made a comment on a Spiked Math comic. I thought about modifying said comic to make one which would match my comment, but before I even had a chance to, Mike from Spiked Math had made one. Excellent, less ‘work’ for me! Here it is:

Well, I still felt like making my own comic based on the comment, so I extended this storyline to its logical conclusion:

So there you go. Don’t mess with the man.

I’d feel horribly unfunny explaining the jokes, which might not be very funny in the first place, so I’m just going to leave a few links here for those of you who are not familiar with all the subjects:

LaTeX

man page

Perl

Solution of the Poincaré conjecture (by Perelman, not perlman, but what’s a factor of e between friends?)

xkcd comic I borrowed the perlman/Perelman image from

The Man

Linux From Scratch (I know, you can install some Linux distributions quite easily these days; I was just teasing.)

Richard Stallman

GNU/Linux naming controversy

Life Imitates xkcd, Part II: Richard Stallman

Things which should be in this comic, but aren’t:

• Stallman’s halo (I forgot about it, though I still sort of gave RMS a halo anyway.)
• Varied text on the computer screens; I couldn’t find a font which would be legible.
• A line showing the attempts at assembling Linux Man, resulting in hilarious half-penguin, half-gnu monsters, or something. I didn’t have time.

Also, the first frame on the third line should read ‘Wow. On Mac OS X, even the command line is user-friendly’ to avoid ambiguity and avoid splitting ‘Mac OS X’ over two lines.

Feel free to make your own version of the comic with or without these missing things; it’s licensed under Creative Commons, as usual (and so are the two comics I borrowed from.)

This paragraph has been edited significantly since the original post, so if this is your second time reading it, the fact that it seems different is no guarantee that you’re going crazy. In case you do make your own version, it might be useful to know that I used 10 point bold Comic Sans for the dialogue (I’m allowed to, because it’s a comic. And what’s a comic sans Comic Sans?) 10 point bold Helvetica for the URLs, and 18 point bold Helvetica CY for the command line. I tried to match Spiked Math’s original strip. I think it was absurdly large Courier for Richard Stallman’s dialogue. I wanted to use the same font he uses on his slides (he gave a presentation at CERN once, using slides with nothing but white text on a black background) but 20 seconds of Googling didn’t yield any images of them, and I was tired by that stage. The ‘Ka-TANA!’ was written with my index finger on an iPad. You don’t have to copy this ‘font’ if you make a derivative comic. I just thought it would be amusing to mention that I drew Stallman’s big moment on such an ‘evil’ system.

Ah, I almost forgot to mention: This is my 100th post on this blog, which is significant because it’s the square of the base of our number system.