furtive explorations

All that blitters isn't graphics.

Gia plus Tomb Raider == Gia Croft! She doesn't just shoot, she shoots up! She isn't just fighting monsters, she's fighting inner demons! When she takes it to the grave she REALLY takes it to the grave!

hungry hungry hippies

shit, I forgot two and can't remember them at all now. Shit. =(

• Moved Okashina Okashi, aka "strangecandy" up to Occasional so I'll remember to check it more often. (And fixed it's URL to reflect the move to keenspace.)
• Moved Life on Forbez down to Occasional so I'll remember to check it less often. *sigh*
• A coupla more URL fixes like sticking slashes on the end and things. Also updated URLs for Down To Earth which has a main url and a direct comic url that are completely different, and fixed the link to Life of Riley on Clan Bob.
• Beetle Classic, Press Start, Lost And Found and Tonja Steele all pop up as planned a coupla days ago...

And yes I didn't post for the whole day yesterday. Fuck you. You try keeping a multipost a day blog going. I have 8 extra friends signed up to help out around here and I've still missed multiple days this year. Plus, work really sucked. =)

And I'm going to try this weekend to move many of the "watching comics" into time categories and simply mark the ones I read regularly and irregularly with some sort of symbols. If you use my page as a launching point for all but one or two comics, let me know and I'll add them too.

Lightyear Communications Inc. said it laid off 100 employees today in response to slow first-quarter sales, which it attributed to the slowdown in the national economy.

The layoffs follow an earlier round of job cuts that eliminated six executive-level positions. Prior to today's layoffs, the company had about 550 employees, said company spokeswoman Vicki Glass.

Still, I suppose 1/5th is better that 1/2, huh? Or going out of business altogether. Any friends in the circle let me know if you got cut and I'll start putting out feelers for you. Got a couple of types of leads already. And I finally thought I was getting close to getting all my outta work friends jobs and this crap comes up over there and screws the pooch. =(

First we will be ripping the comics off the sidebar here. This will reduce the page size about 10KB and the complexity by half or so. The comics links now dominate the base template on blogger and it is making simple changes to my template delicate as hell. Ptooey.

A link and short note will appear in it's place and a "comics" link will pop up in the "head" block at the top of most pages on this site eventually. For the time being I'm keeping the change notices and short notes on comics here in the main blog. If you were hoping to rid yourselves of that detrius you will just have to wait till I build my own blog system and can filter and pull out topical streams of content.

Notes on comic switches follow:

• Added scads of "industry sites" to the community listings.
• Fricking Creators Syndicate where Liberty Meadows resides (along with some other fine comic content, BTW) has changed from fairly crappy ASP based pages to even crappier ColdFusion based pages. Thus the simple "/comics/lib/" link has become the ugly and cache breaking "/comics_show.cfm?comicname=lib". Oh well, at least they fixed the stupid code that was blocking Mozilla/Netscape 6 from seeing any images...
• Natrual Selection and Ballard Street make it to the Daily List, speaking of Creators Syndicate. Charlie I'll just keep and eye on for now.
• Scott McCloud gets added to Community (special notice for him. =)
• Wendy and Free Fall move to MWF. Bad for Wendy-fans since we are down to 3 Cute-Wendys a week but Good for FF fans since it wasn't supposed to be M-F. oops. Oh, and BunniSpace makes the same move. You aren't losing on that one tho since the comic is double sized now it is like getting it 6 times a week, or something...
• NeoBaka moves to the Graveyard, it is just archives now. *sniff*
• Road Waffles moves to Occasional till he comes back from self-imposed exile or hiatus or the dark-side of the moon.
• I fixed a lot of minor URL tweaks like adding "/"s on the ends of domains and chopping off useless "index.htm" bits...
• Resident Life Gets added to daily because it rocks.
• Life of Riley on Clan Bob gets a new URL and the site gets a major facelift. Also, notice this new comic (only three there right now) called K'VaDyn. Two other ok comics there as well, deadseasquirrels and Karasu maybe worth keeping an eye on as well. I'll hook em all up together and leave them in the "I dunno" schedule category.
• I'll be expanding abbreviated names and tweaking with the format later on. And I have a buncha changes for the "Watching" section still to add/do. AND I'll need to start digging through the blog archives for quotes and mini-reviews of particular comics to start adding to subpages...

Interestingly, another thing that won't load right is my roommate's sister's CD-player. They have one of those 6-disk spinning platter changer types. They put this new disk in and it wouldn't play. When they ejected it, there was no disk on the platter! In any spot! Then, when closing the door, it jammed open a bit and refused to move. So they called hoping John or I (the tech/audiophile geeks that we are) would know what to do.

I haven't found out why my net connection is so crappy but I knew the exact, technical steps for solving the CD problem. I outlined the basics steps for her and told her to call me back with the results. 5 minutes later the call comes through, turning it upside-down and shaking it worked fine. If only network administration was so easy...

Update: Some nastiness on UUNet would seem to be the verdict. Rotten luck, too much of web is accessible over their net, from here at least. =(

The worst part was enduring a TRL-like show with a -- digging around on MTV's site furtively -- Carson Daly clone. I've never been able to sit thru 10 minutes of Total Request Live, why would I ever want to sit through a cheap-countrified knock-off? Well, basically the food is too good hot to have wrapped up and taken home and it is nice to know that they have perfected robot-replacement technology well enough to get Dolly's cute little giggle down pat.

In all honesty, till last night sending mail on my hostile accounts was rather tedius until I found the fix for my mailer. And yes I could load other mailers but I *sniff* hate them now. And I'm a horrible, lazy, useless fuck who spent all night reading comics rather than working on my comics page or mailing friends and urine-laden canadian goth-hotties.

Heck I bought a new domain name more than a week ago and haven't even set up a "construction" page or asked dave to stick it in the DNS servers for me. I'll link the new domain when I get something there... and I promise to be better about returning personal mail, without even needing to be threatened. Oh yeah, remember kids, don't threaten to burn down my apartment to get my attention, threaten to burn down other people's apartments (or even better an ironic target like the firestation across the street from my apartment =) in order to get me to perk up and take notice.

And our warping a pack animal till it thinks we are its pack isn't proof that they are less tasty or less deserving of slaughter. I've loved dogs, cats and even one cow but stick me in nowhere for a week and I'd happily roast any of them to live another day. Serve me dog in my Thai food and I'm more likely to be upset about the service or them not getting the sauce right.

Humans have rights, animals have recipes...

To be precise, I said that certain types of hate were moral, while others were immoral. It is perfectly moral to hate evil. Your argument seems to be that we should get upset about evil, but not too upset, which is a fairly tepid response to evil.

• Gaping Maw from the wacky guys that bring you Rotton.com. Amusing, amusing, rude commentary.
• Bob and Satanmonkey has to be one of the catchier titles on a comic today...
• Dangernauts.com should be checked back in on soon. The Glen Garry GlenDarth bit is pretty dang good.
• AOL.exe virus alert joke/hoax makes me laugh, any way.

Today, it occured to me to think "Why are all the cute ones completely insane?" I mulled this thought over for a while and finally decided that being cute drives women insane. I think there are a number of factors involved in them being pushed over the edge. See, as little girls, they rightfully perceive themselves as the center of the universe. Then they hit the early teens and become awkward and gangly and clumsy and horrble things happen to their bodies. Field hockey is popular these days with girls of that age, how cruel is that? Then just as they are figuring out that they aren't a galactic centroid they turn out to be little hotties and suddenly they have boys in orbit around them.

The way I see it, too much attention drives these young women insane. Some of them are still nice, some of them turn out evil and mean but all are certifiably bonkers. They even push each other over the edge with vicious back-biting as they struggle to the absolute center.

Of course, as an intelligent being I have to double check these thoughts against the internal "mistake-o-meter". In my case, that piece of sensitive equipment best able to spot flaws in thought is the "sarcastometer". So I mentally play back that first thought as though someone else had said it to me, "How come all the cute ones are completely insane," and see what I would have said to them when they asked it. My retort to my internal self? "Why do you think only the cute ones are all completely insane?" And so we determine that we have once again made a horrible mistake, it mustn't be attention that drives women insane. At most, it would seem to be a contributing factor.

Updated: I am going to go sleepy-bye now. Too much booze and too little energy after blowing my creative wad on the poem and other goofiness. And if you are waiting for an e-mail from me, well I fucked up my mailer so that waits till tomorrow too. =P

Also, so long as I'm looking on the bright side of things, I can now tell people who call me fat that it isn't me, it's Felix. I'd be all skinny if he wasn't in there, I'm sure of it. Double benefit there since if they believe the Felix stuff they will believe all the overlord stuff I'd segue into next and if they don't believe me they will no doubt stop fucking bothering me.

With my luck it will turn out that the chicks dig Felix but can't stand me. He'll head off to the bright lights of some famous bastard's gut out in Hollywood and leave me friendless and alone and bitter that my chance at the big time was robbed by a damn little gut eating freak.