There Once Was A Man From Kirkjuvágr

“…Whose flerhghrn was so long he could sklargk it!”

More info about Tolkien’s “new” book of harsh, frigid, Nordic verse, “The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún,” if you follow this link:

Zombie Tolkien Releases New Book 36 Years After Death

In the notes that accompany the manuscript Tolkien basically says, “I was looking for a way to practice being more long-winded and boring in an effort to stifle the flow of my narratives, so I tossed off some Norse poetry (obeying all the standard harsh and bitter guidelines) on these pages. It should be regarded as cat box liner or perhaps tissues to clense the anus.”

OK, that’s a little harsh, but he does state that the “NEW FABULOUS PREVIOUSLY UNKNOWN TOLKIEN WORK!!!LOLONE” was merely an exercise in a new (boring) medium for him. I’ve gone on record (especially on the HE Podcast) as saying Peter Jackson SAVED “Lord of The Rings” from Tolkien’s own inane rambling. He turned those stories into something a human person could actually digest in one life time. The mass of material he cut out, while of vital importance to some, did nothing for me but strangle the story. When I finally read LOTR: TFotR AFTER seeing the films, I was struck dumb at the level of unnecessary and distracting detail the “Hobbitpedia” went into. Not that I would want to, but rest assured I know how best to cultivate Pipe Weed, what type of soil to use, when to plant, when to harvest, how much to put in a dime bag, etc etc.

My point is, just because it has the “Tolkien” stamp of approval, doesn’t mean it’s fit for release or mass consumption. Tolkien himself probably never intended for the public to read it. It reminds me of 9th grade when I was obsessed with Foo Fighters. This was pre-internet so I was tracking down every B-Side, import and rarity on CD in record stores, at record conventions and in catalogs. A year or so and a few hundred dollars later I had every song they had ever released (and many they hadn’t). Lots of the Japanese B-Sides and rare live recordings were actually pretty crappy. I was just being a completest. There was a reason these songs didn’t make it to the albums. So if this is Tolkiens B-Side, I hope the Hobbit-hungry public treats it as such.

UPDATE:

A Reddit commenter finished the limerick:

A Blatant Disregard For Canon

I’d like to clarify that I am not “humping” the screen, as it were. I’m merely mashing my junk up against it in appreciation. As of this post I haven’t seen J.J. Abram’s “Star Trek” yet. It was actually occasional HE Podcast guest host and full time Mexican, Alex that got in to a sneak peak (ALLLLLEEEEEX!), but you don’t have to be a half-Betazoid [have you ever stopped to think how ridiculous the word “Betazoid” is? It’s space-donkulous.] to know that this movie is going to rock out with it’s Spock out. Even Ensign Wil Wheaton said, “Star Trek has been reborn, and it is SPECTACULAR.”

I saw J.J. on Colbert a few nights ago. You should watch the clip just to meet Stephen’s Romulan doppelganger. Knowing that J.J. bought one of my Groverfield shirts, I can’t help but assume that he is wearing it under his regular clothes at all times. That practically makes us brothers. He did me a solid by buying my shirt. The least I can do is go see his movie, right?

UPDATE: Apparently this comic shares a title with a PA comic from a few years back. I have been listening to their podcasts, one of which featured said comic. I guess it was in the back of my mind. Oh well.

Have you seen it yet? What did you think? NO SPOILERS!!!

Mixing Metaphors

Today’s HijiNKS Ensue brought to you buy Cmd+C/Cmd+V Comics.
That’s Cmd+C/Cmd+V Comics, when your comic absolutely, positively has to be posted 12 hours late!

[having dinner with the family then posting more… but the thing you need to understand is that Alan Tudyk KICKED AMAZING SHINY AMOUNTS OF ASS in his guest roll on “Dollhouse,” thus ensuring my undying love for the series and it’s emanent demise.]

And just like bacon bits, Alan Tudyk somehow enhances the performances (flavors) of all those around him while simultaneously stealing the show. I don’t want to spoil the most recent episode of “Dollhouse” for those that haven’t seen it yet, but I will say that Joss couldn’t have picked a better actor (than Alan) for the part.

Not only is Tudyk an amazing TV actor, but he is also a fantastic song and dance man. When I saw “Spamalot” on Broadway, I was a little pissed that Hank Azaria was absent from the cast. That is until I learned that his replacement was my favorite Hawaiian shirt wearing space pilot. WashAlan took over the roll of Lancelot (who liked to dance a lot) and (all together now) HE STOLE THE EFFING SHOW.

We met him briefly after the show and I managed to utter something like, “…uhhhh….we….brown coat…. love….[throw up].” Upon hearing the “B” word his face changed from the “Im smiling because people are taking lots of pictures of my head” smile to a more somber and heartfelt visage that said, “you and I have both experienced love and loss. We are kindred souls, forever bound in a brotherhood of space piracy and plastic dinosaurs. Would you like to come to my house and play Apples To Apples?” He said all of that with a look, but his mouth said something like “oh, hey man. thanks.” Also he went to high school like 15 miles from here, so that practically makes us BFF’s.

Tudyk’s appearance on “Dollhouse” was important for two reasons. A) He just kicked so much ass, and B) It signified the show finally getting to the meat of it’s primary story arch. The same meat that was missing entirely from the first 5 episodes. NOW this is a show that I really want to see play out… also, it’s totally cancelled. [even though Dushku says it’s not cancelled “yet”]

Hamdemic

THE HE PODCAST HAS MOVED!!!
UPDATE YOUR BOOKSMARKS AND FEEDS!
IT’S RIGHT HERE: podcast.hijinksensue.com
iTunes Listeners should probably unsubscribe then resubscribe

Have you heard about this swine flu? It’s like the regular flu but with the added power of PIGS! Depending on who you ask, we are either all doomed to die a paranoid, hammy death (which sounds delicious), or we are just as fine and hammy as ever and every one is freaking the pork out over nothing.

This comic is dedicated to all of the pigs that died in Josh’s pursuit of the perfect strip of crispy deliciousness:

Sir Francis Bacon
AbraHAM Lincoln
Simon and River Ham
Porkins
Sparkling White Swine (an albino pig)
Alien pig visitor Pork from Ork
Vince with Ham-Wow!
and finally, Icelandic Pig Singer Pjork

HE COMMENT CHALLENGE: What was Josh doing to make the hybrid bacon so potent, so addictive and so delicious? Was it hydroponically grown? What was it a hybrid of? My guess is he fed the pigs nothing but bacon… THERE OWN BACON! DUH DUH DUHNNNNN!

UPDATE: FB Wendell picked up the pig naming meme. You can see his efforts HERE. I am partial to “Amy Swinehouse.”

Saying Goodbye Is The Hardest Partition

As many of you already know, the hard drive in my Macbook Pro died last week. It was working just fine then all of a sudden my machine locked up. I had just plugged in an external webcam so I assumed this caused some sort of conflict and rebooted the machine.

…click ….click ….click … ka-thunk

That’s never a good sign. Luckily I use SuperDuper! to make frequent bootable backups of my entire hard drive. I plugged that sucker in and GODDAMNITMYMOSTRECENTBACKUPISTWOWEEKSOLDWTFBSG!!!! I normally try to back up at least after every comic is finished. That way I can never lose more than a couple of days of data and typically nothing too important. For some reason I had neglected my backup duties for 2 weeks and in return the universe punished me by taking six comics forever into the darkness. What I actually lost were the original PSD’s, and print sized jpg’s. The web sized jpgs are safe on the server.

Desperate and panicing (I couldn’t find my towel either), I removed the drive and hooked it up to another machine in the house.

wrrrrrrz… click… wrrrrrrrzzz… ka-click ….click … ka-thunk

I realized that the frequent wrrrrzzz’s, pauses and clicks must be caused by armed Vietcong soldiers inside the drive forcing Robert Deniro and Christopher Walken to play a sadistic game of Russian Roulette. That makes sense right?

I took my sad tale to the Twitters and almost immediately you guys started telling me to put the drive in the freezer. I appreciate a good practical joke as much as anyone, but this was clearly not the time and I was not amused. Reassured that this method was indeed sound, I did a little research on my own. Holy shit. It was the real deal. Nerds all over were reporting that dead drives could be temporarily reanimated after a few hours of freezing. What did I have to lose? So in the chill chest it went. 2 hours later it emerged frosty and lifeless. I hooked it up to another machine and… waiting… waiting… it showed up. Well, fuck me sideways. I was able to navigate the folders (very slowly), so I tried to repair/rebuild the partition tables. Hardware failure seemed likely but I needed to rule out the less dire possibilities first. About 20 minutes in the clicks-o-sadness returned and all was for naught. A few re-freezes later I realized that drive was failing every time it reached room temp or above. I tried putting cold things on top of the drive while reading from it (frozen sausages, ice packs, etc… not sure why I tried the frozen sausage first), but nothing worked. Then the Tweeps suggested (and the rest of the internet confirmed) that I needed to try to read from the drive while it was actually IN THE FREEZER.

Again, what did I have to lose? A few ziplock bags and some extension cables later and I was off and running. Reading was unbearably slow, but I was able to retrieve some data. 20-30 minutes would yield anywhere from 10-40 mb. The six comics I was most concerned about were over 100mb each. After multiple attempts I eventually retrieved them all… or what was left of them. All of the PSD’s were corrupt and turned out looking something like this:

With the worst of them, well.. worse:

Not having the orignal full-res files for these comics means I will never be able to make prints of them or put them in a book. That’s no good for me, so at some point I am going to attempt to either rescue them through digital trickery or recreate them from scratch. That prospect doesn’t excite me, but hey, it could have been SO MUCH worse. At least I had a two week old backup. Now before you start lecturing me about the importance of backups, all of my important files are on a mirrored RAID file server in my office… just… not… my comics. I have no idea why I didn’t deem those important enough to backup in 160 different places. IR teh dUmbz.

The silver lining of this whole nasty affair is that I was once again shown how incredible my readers are. Not only did I get a flood of suggestions from tech-savy Fancy Bastards on Twitter, but FB Bill (who I am going to call “Number 1” or possibly “The Lieutenant” from now on) took to the Forum to organize a fund raiser for new hardware. In just a few hours you guys raised enough for me to replace every old HD in my machines and get backup drives for all of them. I say this a lot, but I am constantly reminded of how lucky I am to have such supportive and generous readers. I can’t begin to thank you all enough. Please know that I am infinitely grateful and humbled by your selflessness and unyielding support of my silly comic.

So here I am, a few days older and much more paranoid about backups and hard drive failures. That counts as “wiser,” right? Going forward I will be making SuperDuper! backups after EVERY comic and possibly implementing Time Machine for daily partial backups. I would also like to employ some kind of offsite storage solution. Do they rent out that hollowed out mountain bunker from the end of “Terminator 3.” If you have a suggestion for one that you’ve used and had succes with, please let me know in the comments.

I leave you with this thought:

YOUR HARD DRIVE IS GOING TO DIE WITHOUT WARNING! THERE IS NOTHING YOU CAN DO TO STOP IT! YOU CAN ONLY BE PREPARED WHEN IT HAPPENS! BACK ALL YOUR SHIT UP OR YOU WILL LOSE IT!