The comic will be up tonight

Posted on February 21, 2008February 21, 2008 | 5 Comments

The comic is going to be finished and uploaded tonight (dinner-time-ish). The idea I had ended up being a lot more complicated than i expected and my procrastination instinct got the better of me.

That said, the extra effort should be worth it. I think you guys are going to dig this one.

Here’s some internet to tide you over:

Steampunk Justice League: these guys are my new favorite guys
Zero Punctuation: Yahtzee Goes to GDC
Live Action Akira Movie
Bionic Woman Disassembled
iBand
Kids Batman Suit WITH WINGS! I WANT THIS NOW!!!!
Steampunk Taxidermy
That’s no moon. It’s the biggest Star Wars Collection Ever
M$ RROD@GDC
I’m Sorry, But We Didn’t Order The “Suck My Dick Fuck Face.”
The Sharper Image is closing half their stores because playing with shitty, pointless gadgets then going back to the food court doesn’t make them any money

New Comment System

Posted on February 13, 2008February 13, 2008 | 2 Comments

The comments are different. More on this later today. Should be fun.

Check out Intense Debate to learn more in the meantime.

UPDATE:

Ok, so here’s the deal. WordPress (the engine that drives this beast of a website) has a pretty terrible comment system. No avatars, no ratings, no profiles, no threads, etc, etc. It’s just bad. I’ve added some functionality to it (like threading) but it’s still hard to tell who’s saying what to whom and harder still to get to know regular commenters on the site. I want to foster the sense of community developing around Hijinks Ensue and I think commenting has to be fun and friendly to make that a reality.

Enter Intense Debate. Basically ID replaces the default WordPress comment system with a better one.

2008-02-13-intense-debate-preview

Features:

Threaded comments
RSS feeds per comment thread OR PER USER!
Emailed Updates
User Friends
User Profiles with avatars, and links to your other social networks
User rankng system with D&D XP or some such nonsense!
Your profile follows you to other blogs using ID (no one is using it so don’t worry about this)

Signing Up:

If you are a regular commenter, I suggest you sign up with ID. It takes about 30 seconds and has some pretty cool benefits for interacting with other Hijinks Ensue readers.

The coolest part is that you can sign up with your OpenID. You probably have one and don’t know it. Sites like Yahoo, Flickr, Livejournal and pretty much everyone else use OpenID.

You can also choose to NOT sign up and comment just like always by typing in your nick and email address. The best part is if you ever decide to sign up you get to inherit all your previous comments.

The End Result:

I’m going to try this for at least a couple of weeks. If it sucks I can import all the ID comments back into WordPress and get rid of ID.

You guys are going to decide if this is the way we want to go. Try it out, put ID through its paces and let me know what you think.

All comments on posts prior to TODAY will remain WordPress standard comments. ID says you can import them, but I don’t trust that feature yet so I am leaving well enough alone in that respect. If this takes off, I may contact them about importing and somehow trying to associate previous comments with current commenters.

TV IS BACK!!!

Posted on February 8, 2008February 8, 2008 | 16 Comments

2008-02-08-strike-over

I guess you can untie the virgin from the pike and stop stoking the fires at her feet. We also won’t need to sacrifice these goats and suckling pigs to our golden TV idol after all.

Damn it.

That’s right, the strike is (probably close to) over. Why? Because some Disney fuck wad said so. A part of me hoped that it would go on forever and this lack of TV would cause us to evolve into a new society governed by intellect and good will rather than greed and self destruction. Then I realized that only SCRIPTED TV was effected. If this had continued any longer, we would have nothing to watch but game shows and reality TV. Personally, I’ve seen enough of “Are You Sluttier Than a Fifth Grader,” “Who’s Dad has the Bigger Dick?,” “Celebrity Coke Addicts in Thunderdome,” “Celebrity Coke Addicts at the Bottom of Well,” and “Celebrity Coke Addicts Work at a Jamba Juice and the prize is Cocaine.”

It will be nice to see a new The Office or Heroes at some point, but I hope I emerge from this ordeal forever changed. I would like to less dependent on TV for entertainment. Oh shits! “Admit Which Ethnic Groups You Hate (For Money)” is coming on FOX.

iTunes Feed for the Hijinks Ensue Podcast

Posted on February 5, 2008February 27, 2008 | 3 Comments

Just got the email from Steve. The iTunes Feed for the Hijinks Ensue Podcast is live!

If you subscribe via RSS you will get all the posts in the Podcast Category which will include each episode of the Podcast. This is the route to go if you want to listen in your browser, or download the MP3.

If you subscribe via iTunes, Steve Jobs will lovingly gift wrap and hand deliver each Hijinks Ensue Podcast to your door in a crystal box atop a satin pillow filled with goose down.

Thursday new comics will resume their regular schedule. Saturday we will be recording a new podcast so PLEASE send in your questions, thoughts and ideas to podcast(at)hijinksensue(dot)com.

Podcasting is harder than it sounds

Posted on February 3, 2008February 4, 2008 | 4 Comments

Hijinks Ensue giveth and Hijinks Ensue taketh away. Monday it will taketh away a new comic and giveth you a podcast. This initial Podcastery took up most of my weekend, so I’ll only be doing one comic this week (Thursday). Having never done this before, there was a tonne of trial and error. Josh and Eli came over on Saturday to record. We spent about an hour setting up and working through technical difficulties. A few false starts, then we winged it (wung it?). I will post the fruits of our labor first thing Monday.

I am working on the iTunes feed for the podcast but you can have the podcast RSS feed right now. You can also get the podcasts, along with comics and blog posts in the regular “everything” RSS feed.

So how did it go?

Having a funny conversation when no one is listening = easy. Having a funny conversation when you feel like you have to = teh h4rdz. I had plans to talk about topics, read mail from you guys and, oh I don’t know, have coherent discourse that human beings could understand. Well, I forgot all the topics, and forgot to read the emails. Speaking of, I am saving those for next time, so if you emailed with a question I will get to them. I did read and almost answer a question from Kip. I think I came off sounding like I was being a dick to Kip. I wasn’t trying to. I was just confused and frightened.

Things should go smoother next time. I think the more questions we have to answer, the better we will do. So email your questions to podcast(at)hijinksensue.com. You can even email a recording of a question and we might play it on the show.

Of the 3 of us, Eli was the most pleased with how things turned out. He was riding that train wreck off into the sunset with a shit eating grin on his face. Every time I threatened to cut something out, he baulked and insisted “the worse it is, the better it is.” That must be what they teach you in Mexican public schools.

Anyway, give it a listen and let me know what you think. I really do appreciate the emails and comments I got with suggestions and questions. There were some really good questions and I hope to answer them next week.

Update:
You can download/ listen to the podcast here.