We Interrupt This Comic for Important Announcements

Howdy kids!

Next episode should be up in a couple of days; in the meantime, some bits of news. This just in: my fanart has higher production values than my actual art:

I don’t know about you but I think it’s AWESOME. Babbage looks way hotter than he has any right to do, but you’ll never find me objecting to that.

In other Epic Feature Film news, why no, I hadn’t heard they were making an Ada Lovelace biopic, Enchantress of Numbers. Someone should send me an email or a twitter or something about that! Almost certainly it will not contain Salamander People I’m sorry to say. I’m feeling strangely proprietary about those crazy kids now so they better get them right! Title by the way from a letter from Babbage to Lovelace, that he intends to visit her and- “forget this world and all its troubles and if possible its multitudinous Charlatans– everything in short but the Enchantress of Numbers.” Babbage! If he’d been blind, he could have been a poet you know!

Having fended off the Giant Monsters (my shots are some of the ones where the thing is attacking the guy, and some of the ones where it’s smashing things!), I now find myself with a mouse infestation. Building better mousetraps will keep comics production at its usual blistering pace, but hey if you read this comic you already know enough not to be holding your breath between episodes, or you’d be an alarming shade of blue by now.

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22 Comments

  1. Mouse Borg on October 15, 2013 at 10:35 pm

    I really want to see this awesome thing, but when I click on it it says “this video does not exist”. The page on Youtube just says that it is unavailable. Am I not allowed to see it because I’m in the wrong country or something?



    • sydney on October 15, 2013 at 11:19 pm

      Odd… should be okay.. Is it this link? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBWloh5txyY



      • Zeta on October 16, 2014 at 9:30 pm

        Not that link, either, I’m afraid. I’ve tried my Google Fu to find this video and had no luck, either. Too bad, it sounds like it must be terrific!



  2. Molly on June 18, 2010 at 10:02 pm

    I really like your comics! The drawings are so expressive and the dialogue/storyline is really clever!

    I include doodles in my blog but they are nothing as awesome as yours.

    I’d love it if you could check out my blog sometime! withmonsters.blogspot.com



  3. Jim Ryan on May 10, 2010 at 4:00 am

    Um, silly question: Is there a reason why the difference engine’s housing, under the title at 0:09 on the clip, looks like the main lobby of Grand Central Station? Seriously, I mean…

    http://img.allposters.com/6/LRG/27/2744/O2BTD00Z.jpg



  4. Ken on May 4, 2010 at 2:02 pm

    Really? I reckon I must have been able to keep up, back then. ;-)

    Exeunt, singing: “Wot a draaaaag it iiiis, gett’ing owld” (which would have been a lot better had Ray Davies written it)



  5. Kaptain Kobold on May 2, 2010 at 1:49 pm

    “I must be getting old, though: those jump cuts are too fast for my taste”

    They were all the rage in the 1960/70s. With Gerry Anderson, anyway :)



  6. Professor_Briar2 on May 1, 2010 at 1:37 pm

    Brilliant of course, but to harp on a theme – where is Ada’s pipe??? Epithumia, please take note! I do agree that the cuts are way to fast for the older crowd, but with pause and start, I have been able to parse through.



  7. John O. on April 30, 2010 at 3:14 pm

    That is an excellent animation, and an excellent tribute to an excellent blog-comic and it’s excellent creator. Did I mention that all of this is excellent? Excellent. Cannot recommend highly enough.



  8. Nexxo on April 29, 2010 at 8:15 pm

    That is the most AWESOME Space: 1999 steampunk-themed intro spoof I have ever seen. Excellent!



  9. Paul on April 27, 2010 at 11:32 pm

    Oh! Is that set in Oxford? I’m sure I saw the Radcliffe Camera in amongst all the explosions. I didn’t know that sort of thing went on in Oxford.



  10. Jha on April 27, 2010 at 8:37 pm

    My face right now: :OOOOOOOO



  11. MattT on April 27, 2010 at 7:57 pm

    You know why this is even more brilliant than it seems, don’t you?

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WZW4groJro

    epithumia2007, I salute you!



  12. Owen Fleet on April 27, 2010 at 1:13 pm

    Bloody hellfire! That was brilliant! When do we get the TV series? :)



  13. Daniel Demski on April 27, 2010 at 4:52 am

    OK I should prolly ask this on twitter or something, but are there any good lists of specific tables of numbers Babbage wanted to exist, which he wasn’t able to create? It pretty much seems like we are in the Age of Tables of Numbers now, and it would be a shame if there were any hoped-for tables which modern society has failed to create. So I’m curious what he wanted. :)



    • sydney on April 27, 2010 at 10:59 am

      Luke– curses!!

      Gil– heh now you shouldn’t be tempting me with huge game time-sucks when I have comics to draw! Now YOU will be responsible for the breakdown in Kaaz’s marriage, hah!

      Daniel– heh I think I’ll need more than 140 characters to answer that..

      One of Babbage’s many problems with his Difference Engine project (along with the personality problems, financial problems, and 25,000 precision-moving-part-in-the-mid-19th century problems) was that his tables wouldn’t be new, they would be more accurate versions of existing tables. In fact, he himself supervised a set of tables of unprecedented accuracy, rendering the Difference Engine that he was designing at the same time redundant, in the eyes of the government at least. There is an excellent and brief explanation of how logarithm tables work here. Before the age of pocket calculators anyone doing complicated math would use tables; the most obvious people being ships navigators (like Eleanor Cressy!).

      The Analytical Engine (the one with the punchards, not the Difference Engine! this comic only adds to the confusion over the engines I’m afraid) on the other hand was designed to be able to do complicated and original calculations. The Sketch of the Analytical Engine goes into huge detail of what sort of calculations it might be used for. Lovelace in note F uses the example of the Three Body Problem as one that might be solved by sheer volume of calculation; ironically, this turns out not to be the case, though modern machines can make approximations… there’s an episode in there somewhere…



  14. Luke on April 27, 2010 at 3:51 am

    Aha! You called it a comic! (maybe this isn’t the first time you’ve validated it as such, but I do remember running across implications that it “wasn’t actually”)



  15. Gil on April 27, 2010 at 12:53 am

    By that way, have your ever heard of Castle Falkenstein? It’s an old school steam-punk RPG (non-eletronic)set in an alternate Victorian Age. Babbage and Lovelace are there. You can download the books (4shared). It’s an amazing material totally worth it reading and if you’re look playing.



  16. Gil on April 27, 2010 at 12:47 am

    The animation is AWESOME.I loved the clothes. Babbage looks hot, but your Brunel is hotter than the one in the video. Who’s the lady in red?



  17. Kaaz on April 26, 2010 at 7:06 pm

    OH yeah! Babbage is hot! But Brunel’s sideburns are not nearly Mutton-chop-ey enough!! Your Brunel is hotter. ;-)

    Thought I’m not holding my breath waiting for the next episode, I am starting to get a bit grouchy, not having my next fix! For the sake of my marriage, I hope you get the next episode published soon. (No pressure – you just hold the fate of a marriage in your hands….)

    BTW, the scorpion kicked A**! I’m looking forward to seeing your work on Reepicheep & kin.



  18. Ken on April 26, 2010 at 4:05 pm

    That’s very nice work there. I must be getting old, though: those jump cuts are too fast for my taste. Another few years, and I’m just gonna flat explode, like the couch potato exposed to the blipverts in the original Max Headroom: 20 Minutes into the Future.

    Don’t sell your drafts(person)ship short, either. As I said before: very Eisner (I know no higher praise for sequential art).



  19. Leifbk on April 26, 2010 at 3:31 pm

    That clip’s really awesome. Can’t wait to see the full feature show :)