Chapters: HijiNKS ENSUE Classic

In Recovery

Wrapping up this short storyline this week, assuming Game Of Thrones premiers this weekend. I’m pretty sure it’s this weekend, but I was also pretty sure yesterday’s date was somewhere around the 20th (SPOILERS: it was the 26th), so I have apparently lost a little time due to staying up all night watching mediocre movies (moviocres) and thus I have become an unreliable judge of when things are and are not.

 COMMENTERS: Have you ever purposefully deprived yourself of something that, while not life threatening, probably wasn’t that good for you? Did you succeed? Have you had any self-imposed restrictions that might seem silly to others? No Hot Pockets on odd numbered days? No dating people you met during a hostage crisis? No driving past the home where you murdered that transient? That’s just goofy. Transients can’t haunt you because they don’t have souls.

Emergency Protocol

Taxicab Confessions was one of those “awakening” moments for me as a young teen. Through those covertly mounted lipstick cameras I saw and learned things that I was not necessarily seeking out, and I was forever changed. The series filmed from the time I was in high school up until the early 2000’s. I’ve watched a few of the latter episodes since I’ve had the free HBO (acquired in anticipation of Game Of Thrones), and only now do I realize the answer to 14 year old me’s question, “Why are these people acting like this?!” was always, “Oh, they’re on drugs.” The over sharing, the lack of inhibitions, the… having sex in a dirty ass cab. Yeah. Drugs. I guess when I was 14 I thought only hardened criminals did drugs. There was this one episode where this couple get in the cab (I believe this was a Las Vegas episode) and the man played with his new magic light up thumbs (a trick illusion he had just purchased at a magic shop) while his lady friend took her boobs out and mashed them all over the place. He was transfixed on his thumbs and she was… well, mashing her boobs all over the place. If you don’t want young kids to experiment with drugs, don’t try to scare them straight. Just show them the video of the coked out wanna-be magician and his free spirited companion. That shit freaked me out.

COMMENTERS: TWO QUESTIONS!  1) Was there anything (a joke in a movie, a tv show premise) that just didn’t register with your younger self? I didn’t know the premise of Three’s Company, despite having seen every single episode when it originally aired, until I was in my twenties. 2) Did you have any movies/shows/albums/website (for you young-uns) that taught you about something in the world that you just weren’t ready to know?

A House Is Not A Home Box Office

Nearly everything Joel says in this comic is true, in so much as I got HBO for free (so I could watch Game Of Thrones) a few days ago and I’ve since gone on a “watching things that are bad for me” spree.

Here are some incredibly short reviews of the movies I have subjected myself to via HBO this week:

Battleship: 45 minutes into Battleship, the movie has just barely started. Everything before that is unnecessary exposition. Everything after that is unnecessary explosion. Liam “John Taken” Neeson is in it for maybe 90 seconds. This comic was 100% accurate.

The Matrix Sequels: There are levels on which I can enjoy some parts of The Matrix: Reloaded. The end.

Alien Resurrection: The first 30 minutes of this movie are like the lost original pilot to Firefly. The reasons for this are numerous and obvious. Despite that, the very first time Dan Hedaya (General Perez) opens his mouth you know that something is terribly wrong. He plays like the evil real estate tycoon in a made-for-TV Goonies sequel that never happened who’s trying to shut down the kids’ rec center because it was built on top of a vault full of pirate treasure. In this fictional film the asian kid has been replaced by a robot. The robot was built by the asian kid and only speaks in catch phrases. Oh yeah. Alien Resurrection. After whatever I just said happens, then everything else that happens is terrible.

I really shouldn’t be left alone with HBO.

Regarding Girls, it’s actually one of my favorite new(ish) shows. I stand by my generalization in panel 3 above, but it’s fantastically written and acted by an extremely talented group of New York hipsters. Essentially every single character is a deplorable piece of garbage, but… in a good way. Or at least in an interesting way. I feel like in real life people have maybe one person in their lives who’s as self centered and myopic as every single character on Girls. Any more an life would be entirely unbearable. In a Girlsiverse scenario, where everyone you know is as horrible as you are, everyone would immediately enter into a murder/suicide pact and the show would only last about 4 minutes. Does that sound like a resoundingly positive recommendation? Well, it is. Watch it. Good stuff.

COMMENTERS: Has a new service (TV, Internet, magazine, mail order or otherwise) ever taken you down a long, deep, dark rabbit hole of time wasting? 

The Ruse

I just find it highly suspicious that two years running AT&T has offered free HBO exactly when Game Of Thrones starts for exactly as long as Game Of Thrones runs. It’s like they want me to… watch their channel and… enjoy it. Enjoy it so much that I decide to keep paying $16 a month to watch it AFTER the free preview is over. Those magnificent bastards. They nearly had the perfect plan. Of course they weren’t expecting to go up against my vastly superior intellect and unparalleled tightwadedness. Oh man, is my wad ever tight. I sure hope Veep season two runs during those three months. Pirating shows is just too hard these days.

COMMETNERS: What’s the best deal/worst deal you’ve ever gotten out of a “free preview/ no interest/ quadruple coupon” situation? Ever been given the world in order to keep you from canceling a service? Ever gotten the “Don’t let the ETF hit you in the ass on the way out!” routine?

The Boy Who Cried Happy Ending

Mine and Wil’s T-Shirt site, Sharksplode, is involved in the Reddit T-Shirt Exchange this year, and to get these started we’re launching a brand new shirt.

The Reddit “Reddshirt“… shirt! 

sharksplode-t-shirt-redshirt-reddit-high-new

In the last comic, I invented the concept of coffee waffles or “coffles.” Shut up forever if someone has already come up with that before, because I INVENTED IT. IN INVENTED IT WITH MY BRAIN!

My challenge to you is to come up with a real recipe for coffles and share it with the Fancy Bastards in the comments of this comic or on the FB Facebook group.

COMMENTERS: Have you ever created, or been treated to a dish with an unexpected SECRET INGREDIENT? A reader from Seattle sent me a chocolate bar with cayenne pepper. It seemed super wrong, but it was super duper right.

ANOTHER THING: On Joco Cruise Crazy 3, I led a panel called “The Quitting Panel: Keep Calm And Quit Your Job,” where a group of creatives from the worlds of animation, music, programming, cartooning, and game design told stories and answered audience questions about how they quit their day jobs to pursue their passion for a living.

I created a Youtube playlist of the uploaded videos uploaded by Sea Monkey Angela. The whole thing is an hour long and I think we threw out some good information about the realities of “living the dream.” This is a must watch for anyone interested in The Experiment.