Burn Ban

Wil Wheaton and I got excited and made a thing! Check out our University of Gallifrey Fighting Time Lords Shirt over at Sharksplode.

CONVENTION NEWS: Connecticon is almost right now!!!. Come see me and David and Ryan and Lar and the Explosm quadruplets and much many mores!

My daughter only likes fireworks in 2 ways: big and far away or tiny and close up. We tried some bottle rockets and such last year, but she found the whole ordeal pretty terrifying. So this year we kept our incendiary festivities low key. Just a few smoke bombs, spinning flowers, sparklers, poppers and those little ones that spin around then shoot up into the air. We waited for dusk, then went down to the end of the cul de sac with our neighbors who have a son about our daughter’s age. All was going swimmingly. Things were smoking and sparkling and changing colors. Chemicals were reacting like nobody’s business. The founding fathers would have been proud.

Then, right as we were about to pack up and head out to watch the town fireworks display, one of the spinny-shooty jobber’s fuse backfired (I am still trying to figure out exactly how this happened). Basically I lit the end of the fuse and instead of spraying sparks outward as the previous dozen had done, it shot sparks down at my hand. It was like the fuse burned incredibly fast, or somehow the actual firework began to ignite as soon as the flame hit the fuse. I was burned on the left thumb pretty severely. I grabbed a popsicle, the only icy thing we had on hand, and kept it against my newly seared digit.

I’m not going to lie, I bitched and moaned like a little moany bitch. It fucking hurt. I mean IT. FUCKING. HURT. I kept a cold compress on it, and my wife went to the pharmacy to look for a miracle salve or a box of replacement thumbs. Here’s where the comedy comes in. She finds these little gel pads that you stick on the burned area with medical tape (which worked like a charm incidentally), heads to the check out (this is just before midnight on July 4) and three out of three people in line were buying burn remedies. HAPPY BIRTHDAY, AMERICA! WE SET OURSELVES ON FIRE FOR YOU!

I feel like on the fourth and new years the pharmacy should put all the creams, salves, aloe and bandages right up by the front door like Wal-Mart does with the umbrellas when it’s raining or the cranberry sauce on Thanksgiving. These are high demand items and we don’t need to be searching all over the store for them! Especially considering the shopper or one of their loved ones is probably still a little bit on fire.

COME ON DOWN TO THE CVS PHARMACY FOURTH OF JULY MEGA BLOWOUT SALE! We’ve got aloe! We’ve got ointments! We got 50% off disinfectant sprays and buy one get one free bandages! We’ve got gauze so sterile, you’ll have to wrap it loosely around your seeping wounds to believe it!

COMMENTERS: Have you ever been involved in or witnessed a fireworks disaster? What about non-disastrous fireworks related shenanigans?

STORE NEWS: The HijiNKS ENSUE Store is closed for a few weeks so I can make some big, exciting changes. [READ MORE HERE] In the meantime you can still get shirts from Sharksplode and HE Book 2 from this very site.

Wheaton Comic Dare: Wheaton Plushie Dare

Wil Wheaton and I got excited and made a thing! Check out our Wesley’s Big Adventure Shirt over at Sharksplode.

CONVENTION NEWS: Connecticon is almost right now!!!. Come see me and David and Ryan and Lar and the Explosm quadruplets and much many mores!

I also posted a new comic last night, in case you missed it.

Much like the Sphinx, or that one guy from Labyrinth that must answer each question truthfully, I am cursed to answer each Wheaton Comic Dare in the affirmative. WHEEEAAAAAATOOOONNNNNNNN!!! When will your comic lust be satiated? Will you never lift this hex? Will my children and my children’s children forever be putting pen to Internet at your beck and call? Also, we should totally make these plushies. We would sell like a hundred thousand of them. CURSE YOU!!!!

Short story even shorter: I drew a fun little sketch of what Josh would look like if I ever made a plushie of him. Wil retorted via Twitter suggesting I plushify him as well. Wheaton’s will [wil] be done, so here we are.

Speaking of dares, I dared my friend Gordon to turn this Tweet into a shirt, and he did. That’s some funny ass shirt.

Speaking again of plushies, it is entirely a real thing that I could make HE plushies before too long. I have to start thinking about who, or what in the HExicon would make for good stuffed lovin’. Feel free to COMMENT below.

The Möbius Explosion

Wil Wheaton and I got excited and made a thing! Check out our Wesley’s Big Adventure Shirt over at Sharksplode.

CONVENTION NEWS: Connecticon is almost right now!!!. Come see me and David and Ryan and Lar and the Explosm quadruplets and much many mores!

[I am contemplating whether I want to write a post about Transformers: Dance With The Devil In The Pale Moonlight, or just tie Josh’s dick to a railroad track for making me sit through it. If you refresh this page later and see a post, you will know my decision.]

Got GoT?

Wil Wheaton and I got excited and made a thing! Check out our Wesley’s Big Adventure Shirt over at Sharksplode.

My Friend Lar saw this shirt and drew THIS. It’s amazingly wonderful.

Anybody hear about this Game Of Thrones show? No? I guess it sort of flew under the radar, because people haven’t been talking about it on the Internet non-stop for months and months or anything.

I had been purposefully ignoring the glowing reviews of Game Of Thrones because I didn’t have HBO and I didn’t want to bother trying to acquire the show through other means. As I get older I look at every Torrent and ask myself, “Is this hour of entertainment going to be the one that costs me a $35,000 settlement?” I am old.

When I noticed an HBO free preview weekend on my HD Fiber TVmawhosits I hoped I might luck into a GoT marathon that I could record for later viewing at my leisure. Alas, there was no such marathon, but the entire series was available via On Demand. I had a very important decision to make. The free preview only lasted another 26 hours, and there were 10 one hour episodes to devour. In order to consume a media-meal this large I would have to forsake all other responsibilities. Sleep, work, my family, all liabilities that were keeping me from being caught up on the new thing all the Internet kids are Internetting about. “Eff it! I’m going for it!” And for it go I did… go.

I was surprised how little the show resembled Lord Of the Rings in tone. LoTR is very grand. The scope of the story, the settings and the characters are equally vast. GoT is almost the opposite. Instead of an epic struggle against ultimate evil for the fate of the world, GoT focusses on about 40 characters internal struggle to “get theirs.” The story masquerades as grand because there are kings and castles and knights and wars and talk of dragons, but it is actually very small and very human. It’s a tale of selfishness and petty jealously. The only great evil resides in the schemes and machinations of nearly every characters in the show. They’re all just terrible people (except for most of the Starks).

One thing I find confusing about the series (and the books too, I suppose) is the fact that [SPOILERS] nearly everyone dies. Like everyone. Just as you are saying to yourself, ” Oh man, if that guy gets to do the thing he wants to do, it’s totally going to fuck up the things those other guys want to do,” he dies. Then the other guys die. Major plot threads just build and fizzle due to character death. I understand this is Martin’s thing and all, but it’s… jarring? [/SPOILERS] Regardless I really enjoyed the series and look forward to season two. I might even sign up for HBO for a few months just to watch it in real time. Though I admit, seeing 5 eps back to back was SO much more satisfying than waiting week to week. Also, Peter Dinklage fucking rules.

Anyway, here are some GoT greeting cards slogans I made up on Twitter:

“You put the IMP in PIMP.”

“Congrats Graduate! Once you take The Black, you never go back… to having sex.”

“Happy Fathuncle’s Day!”

“You’re Hodorable!”

MUSIC!: My friend Tom Brislin has started a Kickstarter to raise money to record his first solo album. Fans of the HE Podcast will know his music from… the HE Podcast. Tom is a fantastic song writer, a virtuoso piano player and one of my favorite creative people on the planet. Please back his project so that I may hear the wonderful musics that are currently stuck in his brain.

COMMENTERS: Feel free to post your SPOILER FREE thoughts on Game Of Thrones or make up your own G0T greeting card slogans.

There’s No Basement On The Enterprise

Wil Wheaton and I got excited and made a thing! Check out our Wesley’s Big Adventure Shirt over at Sharksplode.

There also aren’t any bathrooms.

Last night Wil tweeted a bit about watching Pee Wee’s Big Adventure. It reminded me a line in his book, Memories of The Future, where he compared a particularly indignant and slightly snotty Wesley line read to the way Pee Wee informed Dottie that they would NOT, in fact, be knocking platform bar-dancing boots in the back of the bike shop. I found myself sitting at my desk, trying to convince myself to draw a comic about shotgunning the whole first season of Game of Thrones in less than 36 hours (a thing which I really did), INSTEAD of drawing the weird thing you see above. It seems that I lost my internal battle of wills, logic was thrown to the wind and common sense did not prevail.

If you are now or were ever a fan of Star Trek: TNG, I can’t recommend Memories of The Future more highly. I have enjoyed reliving the first half of the first season of TNG through Wil’s eyes (both the ones he had as a naive child in an adult’s world, and those he has now, which look back at the series with fond reflection, a little regret, and a ton of snark) more than I would have thought possible.

HEY A THING!: Someone familiar pops up in this Weregeek comic.

ANOTHER THING!: My friend Tom Brislin has started a Kickstarter to raise money to record his first solo album. Fans of the HE Podcast will know his music from… the HE Podcast. Tom is a fantastic song writer, a virtuoso piano player and one of my favorite creative people on the planet. Please back his project so that I may hear the wonderful musics that are currently stuck in his brain.