Now that that’s over with…

by

I’m not trying the trick I used last night to post the strip again. Actually I think I got Yet Another reason I need to leave Freehostia. For a while now, for whatever reason, I think they think I have a virus or something because a lot of the images I’ve submitted – images that were created on my desktop and only ever were on my USB drive and laptop en route to their servers – have had their permissions changed so that no one can “execute” them (not the same as “read”). Execute images. It might be something having to do with FTP, I don’t know, but using the trick I tried last night I first had the FTP connection crap out on me (either I hope IE8 fixed how Windows handles uploading to FTP or Freehostia needs to fix their FTP system) then I saw that the strip had been uploaded after all but it was no good, so I uploaded it to the file manager and it seemed to work okay but I find out today that the strip image was completely missing so I had to upload it AGAIN around 7 PM. As far as I’m concerned the strip was up so I’m plowing forward.

So after the past weekend’s expletive-laden rant let’s get into details. My ideal Plan A is to work on the web site and Da Blog and everything from home, but that hasn’t been an option, for whatever reason, for nearly if not over a year. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts I go to my Dad’s workplace and mooch off an Internet connection that’s not even the workplace’s. The place itself is supposed to have a connection but that hasn’t worked since virtually the instant it was instituted. So earlier this month the place I normally mooch off of decided to secure their connection, but they’re fine with me mooching off them, which would be great if my laptop could get past the “detecting network type” stage without spitting out a “network doesn’t seem to exist” error despite the fact it’s staying on the list of networks the whole time. So now BOTH my Plan B and C, accessed from the same location, aren’t working, and while both are nominally working on the problem it’s at a glacial pace (and I don’t think it’s a good idea to only have one guy who knows the security code who’s not always working there if you intend for actual patrons to use the connection) and to varying extents I get a vibe from them that it’s my problem, forcing me to use my battery for Plans D and E, which for whatever reason tend to be pretty slow, perhaps slower than normal, at least for Plan D.

On the plus side, those annoying downstairs neighbors are finally gone, so if you move in directly downstairs from me and set up an unsecured Internet connection I can use fairly reliably I’ll give you a gazillion dollars. (Gazillion dollars to be paid in varying amounts at varying intervals over whatever period of time the payer deems adequate including never.) Or at the very least you can chip in your IT expertise at Dad’s workplace or the place next door and get at least one Internet connection working enough to be useful.

Not for kids. Or anyone.

by

Fucking neighborhood with its fucking college students and poor people and fucking Freehostia with its fucking file manager and fucking Blogger for eating my first attempt at the last fucking post and fucking me for not backing it up when I know how much Blogger fucking sucks and fucking Blogger and Internet Explorer for not backing it up instead of assuming everyone is fucking online every last fucking bit of the time because it’s not as if there aren’t people still on dialup or even not even on the Internet is there? and fucking laptop for sucking so fucking much and fucking laptop battery for sucking so fucking much fucking first-choice connection for being so fucking slow and fucking me for screwing up my fucking sleep schedule and fucking me for putting too much work on myself and fucking owner of the place where fucking Dad fucking works to not fucking be there to work on the fucking connection and fucking people to prevent Dad from getting the needed info for the other fucking connection and fucking place providing said other fucking connection and fucking me and/or Mom for losing the fucking info in the first place and fucking me for getting into the fucking situation to need either of those in the fucking first place and fucking society for its fucking intolerance of people like me because it fucking suppresses anger rather than fucking understands it.

Fuck the whole wide world and every last fucking person in it. I’m sure I speak for a lot of people when I say that the world and the people in it would be so much better if it weren’t for all the fucking people. I’ve been driven so insane by all my fucking overwork I can’t even leave the house even after being cooped up in it doing nothing all day cause all the fucking people drive me fucking insane.

And fuck it, now that I’ve fucking let all this out I’m probably going to not believe a fucking word of it and I’m probably going to go back to nicely going along with the fucking crowd and believing the same fucking things as every-fucking-one else and meanwhile everyone’s going to look at this as more than the fucking theraputic excersize it is and think I’m some kind of fucking monster that’s going to become a fucking serial killer some day and it’s probably going to fucking cost me any shot at a fucking real job and some people might say I shouldn’t fucking post it in the fucking first place but I’m fucking doing it anyway because the world needs to fucking know this mindset and what fucking drives me to it and that they need to fucking steer clear of me and it’s probably more common than they fucking realize and people like me are probably fucking driven to this fucking mindset all the time and I hate fucking needing to add this fucking disclaimer to every one of these fucking posts.

And fucking “K” key.

Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr… another retype. I thought I made myself immune to this bullshit.

by

If the Super Bowl were covered the same way the NFL Draft is:

  • It would last two days.
  • It would be covered by TWO networks.
  • It would be preceded by a five-hour pregame show. Same (or less) than now, right? Well, there would be pregame shows on both networks.
  • One of the two networks would have analysis throughout the entire game on a sister channel.
  • There would be cameras inside each team’s locker room which each broadcast could switch to whenever they needed to, AND cameras inside the houses of players who could be called in at any moment to fly to the game and pitch in for either team.
  • There would be in-game interviews with coaches and team executives, and an interview with one player after every play either early or late in the game.
  • Each network’s broadcast team would include an expert who has analyzed every single play each team could possibly use during the game and has drawn up a “mock game” scripting every move of the entire game (or at least the first quarter).

On another note, Al Davis is now officially certifiably insane.

Idle, tweet-worthy thought.

by

A notice to Seattle’s Metro transit system:

If you’re going to have a rule saying “Wear headphones”, it should come with an implicit corollary: “Don’t play your music so loud it’s like you’re NOT wearing headphones.”

Of course, such rules are only as good as the drivers’ willingness to enforce them and the extent the passengers care about them…

If it weren’t for David Morgan-Mar’s large buffer I’d think he was responding to my last IWC post.

by

(From Irregular Webcomic! Click for full-sized things beyond mortal ken.)

So by all appearances, my theory that IWC just underwent a permanent reboot to the beginning has been shot to hell.

The funny thing is, though, every theme that has had at least two strips since the reboot – Space, Shakespeare, Martians, Cliffhangers, and Steve and Terry, especially Space, Martians, and Steve and Terry (Cliffhangers seems to want it both ways) – has backed up the idea of starting over from the beginning.

So the likeliest idea is that – uh oh – the Irregular Crisis isn’t over yet and there’s still more madness yet to come.

But I like the idea that the last four months of the Fantasy theme, the entire destruction of the universe, stay in the afterlife, and brief flashback to a tavern, has all been part of an extended flashback sequence and we’re only now picking up the plot thread from this strip.

Although… is that the Balrog I see in the last panel? Is Kyros not telling the whole truth?

Random Internet Discovery of the Week

by

I don’t see how this is any different from a spiffier version of this. I mean, it’s barely been two months since that earlier RID! The alternative is to get insane, and probably hypnotized.

The Random Internet Discovery is a colossal failure compared to what I originally had in mind for it. I hoped I would have a bunch of interesting sites that would appeal to me and that I would want to disseminate and expose to the teeming masses flooding Da Blog. Back when I had my political series last fall I hoped to bring in whatever interesting political sites I could find. Maybe I could find interesting webcomics or other interesting things.

Instead the RID has been a parade of funny astronomical stuff, cat pictures, other funny pictures, sites that should probably be illegal, religious sites not worth commenting on, interesting lists and tools, and just plain incomprehensible stuff. There have been maybe one or two RIDs worth commenting on since I started it in August or so.

The RID hasn’t been part of the “enlighten the world” plan I had for Da Blog at all. Its main value has been in giving me one less day that I have to think about posting. The irony of that is that I had planned to write rather interesting commentary for the sites I actually found relevant and interesting. By and large, the RID has been incredibly disappointing and pointless.

So I’ve started a new Da Blog Poll, the first since the new year. It’ll run for two weeks and ask whether or not I should continue the RID, stop it, or introduce biases into my StumbleUpon account. I ran a similar poll when I started the RID and the consensus seemed to be that I should allow all interests in, and I didn’t intend to introduce any biases by flagging it whenever I encountered a site I liked, but that system doesn’t seem to have worked that well. “Fixing” RID by introducing such biases could make RIDs slightly rarer, by bringing in sites I would need to actually write something about, but it would also make RID more meaningful to me and to my audience.

Your thoughts?

One of these days I’m going to stop putting these "If you meet me in real life" posts on Da Blog. Most of them, anyway.

by

If I have to hear someone playing music on their headphones loud enough for me to hear it anyway it drives me right up the wall.

I also go crazy at having to see people’s involuntary foot vibrations even though I do it.

I don’t think this sort of thing used to drive me quite this insane. Then again, I seem to be noticing it happening more often recently. I think I need to spend a week this summer where I don’t leave the house at all except to post the strip.

Rich probably had this strip’s title prepared before he even knew much about the circumstances.

by

(From The Order of the Stick. Click for full-sized reunion.)

The Order of the Stick – with the exception of a living Roy – is in one piece once again. The great, overriding problem driving much of the action of the current book has, at long last and at much cost and after many story months (and a year and a half real time), been solved.

And – with the exception of the heartfelt reunion between Elan and Haley at the end of this strip – it’s largely an afterthought, its main purpose seemingly to frustrate Vaarsuvius with another case of a problem being solved without her.

An Order of the Stick split in twain? Anymore, that’s child’s play. We’ve got a Vaarsuvius powered up with more power than he could ever imagine… and no place to use it, driving him further and further into the mouth of madness. There’s the real story at this point. The reunion of the Order is the end of a story, but V’s journey is only beginning, and this reunion is only a part of V’s larger story.

This seems to be underscored by what Roy does in this strip: make contact with the two remaining souls spliced to V. They, and V, have kept the Order (except for Belkar, but he doesn’t care) unsuspecting of V’s new nature so far, and they’ll probably do so for a while by the rules of drama. With everyone there, Roy’s resurrection seems to be imminent, so if that’s going to have an impact other than Roy knowing there are two souls spliced to V, it better have one fast.

I’ve vascillated for a while on how long V is going to hold on to the two remaining souls – would it last into the next book, or end right before this book did? Paradoxically, when V lost the first splice it moved me from the former camp into the latter, not the other way around, to best make V’s story self-contained. But as the opportunities for a lost splice have dwindled recently (and as the reunion of the Order has been treated as an afterthought), I’ve moved back into the former camp, and depending on what happens next I could still be moved back to the latter camp.

On another note, it’ll be interesting to see what Rich does with the remaining 20-plus strips in the current book. Normally Rich ends the book with a relative cooldown from the hot, plot-advancing action immediately preceding, if the past two books are any indication. But there’s a lot of space to fill and I don’t think Rich can fill it all with talking and resurrection. Rich does often fill this space with set-up for the situation for much of the next book, not just in the final strip, and I’m beginning to think V has one more teleportation in her, considering she still hasn’t lost a second splice despite already using a second epic spell.

The Order’s back, but Rich is already thinking about the next book.

My departure from Irregular Webcomic may not be long in coming.

by

(From Irregular Webcomic! Click for full-sized inverse cube law.)

I’ve been waiting for nearly three weeks for some indication of exactly what happened when the universe was recreated, and I may have gotten my answer.

I wondered for a while if there would be some historical “glitches” that would continue the theme of the Irregular Crisis, until I read the Pirates theme from beginning to end. After that, my main hypothesis was that all the themes that had started in medias res in some way (which is to say, almost all of them except Espionage, with the caveat that Harry Potter and Star Wars are out of order and order of events doesn’t matter in other, more gag-a-day themes like Shakespeare) were rebooted from the beginning and would be carried up to about the point when Irregular Webcomic! had taken them up originally.

Death of Inhaling Hatmaking Chemicals’ explanation doesn’t really contradict that hypothesis, and it seems to suggest there won’t be any glitches that require a furthering of the crisis storyline, the “scrambled history” serving as an excuse for any accidental inconsistencies Morgan-Mar may introduce. Like this. Or this.

On the other hand, it could prove to be a case of overconfidence and saying “it’s probably nothing” to something that very much is something…

Or it really is nothing, and merely a reference to the influences events on the Infinite Featureless Plane of Death have on the new universe, such as in the new Scientific Revolution theme, or with the Cliffhangers’ heroes having dropped to Charon.

Regardless, were it not for the curious disappearance of the Me theme from the list of themes after the white-blue-red-black transition, I’d wonder if a reappearance of Me was in the offing, and perhaps a (possibly fictionalized) account of Morgan-Mar’s life up to 2002 in the works… setting up a truly great final strip (whited out to avoid interfering with or otherwise influencing Morgan-Mar’s plans):

“Hey, there’s comics on the Internet! Ha ha ha! What a waste of time.”

Hey, I didn’t say it was going to be original…