Comix rec, and why puppies are better

Through voting for Girl Genius, I found No Need for Bushido; and from reading NN4B, I found Alpha Shade.

• First, No Need for Bushido comes off like, I kid you not, a kinder and gentler version of Samurai Champloo. It's not quite so much with the anachronisms, and the language *coughMUGENcough* is cleaner, but the coincidences are amusing -- and entirely coincidences! It's kinda like that Tim Hunter/Harry Potter thing. But again, we have a young woman of gentle heritage, an outcast samurai, and a socially unacceptable and nearly unbeatable ronin wandering around being really hungry. NN4B adds an eccentric Chinese monk to the mix, and a whoooole lot more ninja. The artist is a complete Japanese history geekboy, so the designs are clean and, where appropriate, accurate. His style might best be described from my PoV as a cross between that of kriscynical's and ironychan's (that's just for a visual - as far as I know, none of these artists are 'related'). The comic's been running weekly for about a year. I was both surprised and disappointed when I ran out of strips. There were points when I was actually laughing out loud, from the absurdity of some of the characters' situations if not the snarky dialogue.
  


• Advertising on NN4B is Alpha Shade, which got my attention just for the one little piece of art in the ad. They've got both a fancy Flash 8 version, with a nifty zoom feature and elegant navigation controls, or a lower-bandwidth-friendly HTML page. The art is almost shockingly beautiful and detailled, reminding me for some odd reason of the Pinis' Elfquest style, only with more our-world realism. It's also depicting, in the first chapter, a brutally honest battlefield with roughly WWI tech -- except for the bits that aren't, I won't spoil those. The story is quite mysterious so far, and since the site has no substantial FAQ which might include hints, my curiosity is gnawing at me. There's suggestions of dimensional travel and a Buffy-like character challenge, but the reader just doesn't have enough to go on yet to start drawing much in the way of conclusions. Aside from no cast list/summation, etc., the site also neglects to tell us what the update schedule at least pretends to be, although there is a large progress bar on the Flash side of the site. It's currently sitting at 5% storyboarded for page 138, and one of the brother creators is a real live railroad engineer (read: AFK a lot) so it's anybody's guess when it'll be posted. It'll be worth the wait, though. This one also surprised me when I hit the wall.

Kids are Depressing, Study of Parents Finds (excerpts)

Not only do parents have significantly higher levels of depression than adults who do not have children, the problem gets worse when the kids move out.

Some parents are more depressed than others, however. Parents of adult children, whether they live at home or not, and parents who do not have custody of their minor children have more symptoms of depression than those with young children all in the nest, regardless of whether they are biological children, step children or adopted.

Simon also found that married parents are less depressed than the unmarried. But, surprisingly, the effects of parenthood on depression were the same for men and women.

See? Puppies aren't supposed to leave home. They stay to keep you all cheered up.