Radial-Symmetry Man

Powers & Abilities: arm regeneration, has two stomachs, can be divided into similar halves by any plane that contains the main axis, Olympic-level tumbler

Mary

"The judge smiled."

Judge Holden, from Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian. For my money, just about the greatest antagonist in literary history...

the multiverse?

Physicists don’t like coincidences. They like even less the notion that life is somehow central to the universe, and yet recent discoveries are forcing them to confront that very idea. Life, it seems, is not an incidental component of the universe, burped up out of a random chemical brew on a lonely planet to endure for a few fleeting ticks of the cosmic clock. In some strange sense, it appears that we are not adapted to the universe; the universe is adapted to us.

Call it a fluke, a mystery, a miracle. Or call it the biggest problem in physics. Short of invoking a benevolent creator, many physicists see only one possible explanation: Our universe may be but one of perhaps infinitely many universes in an inconceivably vast multiverse. Most of those universes are barren, but some, like ours, have conditions suitable for life.

The idea is controversial. Critics say it doesn’t even qualify as a scientific theory because the existence of other universes cannot be proved or disproved. Advocates argue that, like it or not, the multiverse may well be the only viable non­religious explanation for what is often called the “fine-tuning problem”—the baffling observation that the laws of the universe seem custom-tailored to favor the emergence of life.

From a really amazing article in the latest Discover magazine...read it all here

a paladin in hell

Here's a scan of a photocopy of a drawing I did based on David Sutherland's "A Paladin in Hell" illustration from the AD&D Player's Handbook...


And here's the Sutherland original...


Did you know?: Sutherland created Wemic (lion-centaurs). In D&D, not in real-life (though man, wouldn't that be something!)

blasphemous fish-frog

"I think their predominant colour was a greyish-green, though they had white bellies. They were mostly shiny and slippery, but the ridges of their backs were scaly. Their forms vaguely suggested the anthropoid, while their heads were the heads of fish, with prodigious bulging eyes that never closed. At the sides of their necks were palpitating gills, and their long paws were webbed. They hopped irregularly, sometimes on two legs and sometimes on four. I was somehow glad that they had no more than four limbs. Their croaking, baying voices, clearly used for articulate speech, held all the dark shades of expression which their staring faces lacked ... They were the blasphemous fish-frogs of the nameless design - living and horrible."

--The Shadow over Innsmouth

silhouette

night-gaunt

"When I was 6 or 7 I used to be tormented constantly with a peculiar type of recurrent nightmare in which a monstrous race of entities (called by me 'night-gaunts'—I don't know where I got hold of the name) used to snatch me up [and] carry me off..."

--H.P. Lovecraft

mystery girl

Trying to figure out the face of a character in "The Big Black"...

sketchbook page

lady

president-elect

Also, what has Dax been listening to lately?

What has Dax been reading lately?