Comics addendum

A follow-up on the Online Comics I Read post from earlier in the week …

I’ve figured out how to get independent comics RSS flows for the comics I read that don’t have their own RSS feeds, and dug up a few I hadn’t found before.

The following I get through Comics Alert, a really clever aggregating site.  If you want all your comics squished together into a single RSS feed, this is the way to do it.  But if you want the called out separately, simply generate separate accounts, one for each comic.  The addition to their overhead is trivial, and I find it a lot more convenient for me:

• 9 Chickweed Lane
• Bizarro
• Funky Winkerbean
• Dilbert*

* The Dilbert Feedburner feed I was previously using has stopped working in Google Reader, as have most of the Feedburner feeds.  Annoying.

The following now also have their own RSS feed:

• Wapsi Square
• Tom Toles

Another aggregating/scraping service I’ve dug up is Dapper.  It’s got feeds for several comics, including the following:

• Nodwick
• Full Frontal Nerdityj

They’re experimental feeds that people have worked up, so not all of them work (and there’s no guarantee they will continue to if the site changes its posting structure).

I also have to add in a hearty recommendation for Russell’s Teapot.  It’s unabashed in its criticism of religion in general, Christianity in particular, but it tends to do so within the framework of religious dogma and beliefs themselves (with an occasional theological error), and it’s often just freaking hilarious.   (Not always, and plowing through the whole collection does become a bit tedious, which may be why the earlier strips seem better than the late rones — but there are enough tweaks toward Biblical literalism and sketchy theology to give me a serious chuckle most of the time.)

The comic title comes from an essay by Bertrand Russell:

Many orthodox people speak as though it were the business of sceptics to disprove received dogmas rather than of dogmatists to prove them. This is, of course, a mistake. If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.

To which I’ll add:

“The truth of our faith becomes a matter of ridicule among the infidels if any Catholic, not gifted with the necessary scientific learning, presents as dogma what scientific scrutiny shows to be false.”
— St Thomas Aquinas

“It is the test of a good religion whether you can make a joke about it.”
— G,K. Chesterton

As with all media choices, Your Mileage May (and Probably Should) Vary.