Rebooting

Soon this place is going to be crawling with entities...

While I was doing these ones I remembered what Arthur C. Clarke once said about any technology that was sufficiently advanced being indistinguishable from magic. I'd always seen this statement in terms of myself waking up 500 years in the future or some poor, hapless Neanderthal being reanimated from his 30,000 year long suspended animation and having his mind totally blown by the sight of a light bulb or something.
Then it struck me that we're already there and that, for all practical purposes, our technology actually is magic. But the sad irony is that almost all of us take it totally for granted.We have little magic boxes which can store the voices of people who have been dead for a century, we travel further in a day in a different kind of magic box than most of our ancestors did in a lifetime and we can sit in a chair inside a big metal bird-like magic box 3 kilometres up in the air and totally ignore a vista outside our window which would probably have reduced a Leonardo or a Michelangelo to tears of rapture. And most of us have utterly no idea what makes this possible.

Magic!

Mr Clever Clogs fails again

Um.

I read an article in New Scientist a while ago about this stuff and kind of fell into a mild panic about the state of the world. It seems all the sexy new technology we love so much (and a lot of the 'green' technology we'll be relying on to preserve our comfy lifestyles in a post-oil world) is totally dependant on a group of rare metallic elements that most of us have never heard of and of which we're running out. And instead of carefully recovering what we can from the carcasses of our 2-years-old-but-completely-redundant computers and mobile phones, we throw them over our metaphorical shoulders and buy new ones.
We live in a very interesting, very complicated world, I suppose.
Then there's this where you have an ongoing civil war in the Congo in which access to tantalum supplies is a crucial factor. Wow. We have no idea. I'm going to set fire to my brain.

Taking responsibility

When you're on a roll, the great ideas just keep coming...

...and the hole just keeps getting deeper.

Aftermath

An elegant way out

BIG task

On task

A question of motivations

A test of commitment

And here I was promising I'd get less wordy.

Not pulse-pounding adventure!

God - what am I doing?! One thing that can really make me glaze over (and I know I'm not alone) is comic strips where the characters just stand around talking to each other all the time. And here am I filling these 4 little panels with far too many words. And you can't even see who he's talking to! Never mind. Next time there will be pulse-pounding, senses-shattering action. Maybe.

..and then you reveal the secret weapon

It's simple - you start with a list