17.Bf5 exf5 18.Rxe7 Bxe7 19.c4 1–0

I'm just going to come out and say it...I've been obsessed with human vs. computer chess lately!  I watched the documentary Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine which documents the events leading up to the 1997 chess match between then world champion Garry Kasparov and the then state of the art IBM super computer Deep Blue.  First off, I'm obsessed with super computers.  I think there is a really interesting lineage that you can trace from super computer to super computer.  It's one of our most tangible links to science fiction!  Hal 9000 here we come!

The way that these chess tournaments are handled reminds me, in some fashion, of the Turing tests that are held every year.  In the Turing tests, computers and humans interact anonymously with judges who have to figure out which is the computer and which is the human.  It's pretty cool.

Well, that's all I have for now.  I've been finishing up my secret minicomic project that I hope to be able to talk about sooooooon.

Mid-Wersternly Bound...

...or, "Two Birds with One Stone".  I'm off to Chicago in a couple hours for the CAKE comics convention.  Not only am I prepared to have a whiz-bang of a time with my half-table-mate Colleen Frakes, and old pals Beth Hetland, Josh Kramer, Pranas Naujokaitis, Jeremy Sorese etc etc etc, but I am ALSO going to be participating in the age old tradition of overnight road trips.  Part of me is terrified of a 16-hour drive, and the other part of me is pumped.  There's also the part of me that is a masochist and actually brought work to do during the car ride.

So, for those in the Chicago or nearby areas, why not saunter your beautiful hide down to the CAKE comics convention and hang out with some real cartooning rock stars.

CAKE! - June 16 & 17

Columbia College's Ludington Building
1104 S Wabash, Chicago, Illinois
Saturday & Sunday 11am - 6pm
Free and Open to the Public!

Whoa!  It doesn't get much better than that!  To sweeten the deal, though, I'm going back to my roots...

As you might remember from THIS blog post, Leo Geo used to come in a kraft quart liquor bag.  Keeping the comic in a bag was one of my favorite parts of the presentation.  It invited the reader to open it on their own term and explore into the book.

Well, after some finagling, I've found that the new hardcover Leo Geo ALSO fits into a kraft quart liquor bag.  So I've done a special bag for Leo Geo's picked up at CAKE.  Take a peep:

 Wahoo!  Halftone printing!  See you at CAKE!!

When the well runs dry...

WHOA, that title looks way more depressing than it is supposed to be!  What it is referring to is something I brought up a week ago; the first printing of Leo Geo is gone, kaput, sold out.  I'm not sure as to how big the first print run was, but I'm still pretty pumped.  As we speak, the second printing is being drawn out of the inter-dimensional space between the science fact dimension and the science fiction dimension (to editor: that's where books come from, right?).  In the meantime, I've been working hard on Leo Geo 2 as well as some Leo Geo sketches!

 

I'm going to come clean and say that I have no idea where this came from.  I mean, I'm pretty tapped into what goes on here at the institute, but even I have no idea why you'd put a perfectly good burger and fries in a radioactive container...UNLESS, this was something that the boys down at the Nutrition Augmentation Program put together to make a GIANT version of burger and fries.  Okay, that makes sense.  I can totally get behind a giant b&f.