Lady Sabre and the Pirates of the Ineffable Aether part 2

It's time to revisit our friends in the world of Lady Sabre and the Pirates of the ineffable Aether by Greg Rucka and Rick Burchett. I'll post the rest of the first part of the map-related storyline here and then in a little bit I'll post the more recent update:

So where we left off was our intrepid heroine explaining to our new dashing hero about the significance of the map that is central to the plotline:

A few days/months later Marshal Drake wants more answers.  I'm loving the globe in the corner: 

But will he get them?

You'll have to go to the site to see the feisty in-between bits that explain Drake's expression there in panel one.  Sabre can be quite a handful. 

A little later they're under attack by the Iron Crown, commanded by an "old friend" of Sabre's 

This fight could get tricky:

We'll get to the next part of the map-related plotline in a bit.

It's Alive!!

As we begin October here is a classic monster-themed Lio by Mark Tatulli with a TV weather map.

Florida political weather

With the political campaigns in full swing we can throw up as many map-based editorial cartoons as you'd like.  In this one by Jim Morin we have Romney-as-weatherman keeping Florida Governor Rick Scott in check, a reference to Scott's comments about how Obama's policies have helped his state.

Lady Sabre and the Pirates of the Ineffable Aether

This is simply a delicious treat of a webcomic that has been running for just less than a year now.  Lady Sabre and the Pirates of the ineffable Aether by Greg Rucka and Rick Burchett (note the map in the background of their drawing/photo).  The story is in a decidedly Steampunk style that has very Old West, if not "WIld, Wild, West", elements. The plot has so far focused on the acquisition of a prophetic map (because what's a proper pirate tale without a treasure map... of sorts), which will very likely play a key role in much of the rest of the story.  Here's the episode with the money-shot of the map:

Here's where she begins the explanation of the power of the map:

Note the fun cartographic elements in the form of the globe in the heroine-captain's cabin... but that's not Earth, and with floating islands of land and flying, hyperspace-travelling sailing ships, this is a very different place than where we live:

I'd suggest starting at the beginning of the story and enjoying the whole thing. Avast mateys! Map-based Webcomic Ho!

Game of Thrones weatherman

I have not seen Game of Thrones nor read the books.  I suspect that I'd very much enjoy both.  However in the meantime there's this mash-up which I still find humorous, though true fans might be actually LOL-ing:

Here's an article, actually, that discusses whether the years-long seasons in the Game of Thrones world might somehow be meteorologically/astronomically possible.

Weather bailout

What with JP Morgan Chase giving us a reminder of the 2008 bank bail out crash, I figured we could have this installment from from Dan Piraro's Bizarro.

Too many hurricanes

I don't know that this is going to be a particularly heavy hurricane season, but Mr. Munroe's XKCD has this take on hurricane naming

At the actual webcomic, hovering over the image reveals this additional message in the "title-text":

After exhausting the OED, we started numbering them. When overlapping hurricanes formed at all points on the Earth's surface, and our scheme was foiled by Cantor diagonalization, we just decided to name them all "Steve". Your local forecast tomorrow is "Steve". Good luck.

I have no idea what "Cantor's diagonalization" is, and that's even after I looked it up on Wikipedia.

Also, I thought that I would mention this Kickstarter project to make a documentary about cartoonists:

Mathy weather

Another item from the webcomic Abstruse Goose.This one is somewhat like the xkcd comic that paid homage to everything ... and the Discovery channel ad.

Coastal Weather

Here's a comic suggested by reader Heather from Adrian Raeside's The Other Coast strip. It's got the weather theme as well as the map theme.

This, of course, isn't Mr. Raeside's first use of a map gag in a comic.  Here's one from 2008 when GPS technology in phones was beginning to become mainstream:

Just messin' with ya

Here's an XKCD by Randall Munroe that is in keeping with the recent round of storms. The U.S. had it's snowstorms, but Australia had a monster of a cyclone at the same time. A hurricane map like this one would be fun.

At this actual webcomic, hovering over the image reveals this additional message in the "title-text":

I'd like to see more damage assessments for hurricanes hitting New York and flooding Manhattan -- something like the 1938 Long Island Express, but aimed a bit more to the west. It's just a matter of time.

If you want a map showing all of the hurricane paths each year, this site is pretty great for that:

http://www.solar.ifa.hawaii.edu/Tropical/

...although it missed the freaky one that hit Brazil a few years ago. Brazil doesn't get hurricanes because there's just not enough ocean between it and Africa to give such storms time to form. But a few years ago brazil got a full-fledged hurricane for the first time ever... well the first time it was ever called a hurricane. There's a small chance that maybe some of the storms described hundreds of years ago might have been hurricanes, but even those descriptions don't seem to fit the bill. It was only Catagory 1, but still.

Worst case

We'll finish the week with another XKCD by Randall Munroe.  That map of Louisiana is nice, but somewhat inaccurate.  I had a geology professor in college who could accurately draw a very quick California coastline on a chalkboard in a single swipe.  Always impressive. 

 Go to the actual xckd site, hover over the image, and there will be an additional message in the "title-text" . This one says:

To get serious analyses of hurricanes and oil slicks, see Jeff Masters' blog. To get serious discussions of worst-case scenario thinking, see Bruce Schneier's blog. To get enough Vitamin D, don't read any blogs and go outside instead.

So here's Jeff Master's blog, and Bruce Schneier's blog.  And I'm going to step outside for a bit ...even though it's cold, cloudy, windy, threatening to snow, and in winter it's impossible to produce vitamin D from the sun if you live north of Phoenix because the sun never gets high enough in the sky for its ultraviolet B rays to penetrate the atmosphere.... it's just that going outside sometimes is a good thing to do no matter what.  You should do the same. 

BS forecast

Bill Greenhead, also known as Stik (the artist behind World of Cow), gives us a weather forecast.

Rubber isobars

Wow, three weather-related comics in one week!  And two of them are about isobars.  Impressive!  This is Adey Bryant's work.