Guest Comic By Natalie Metzger

CALGARY FANCY BASTARDS!

Thank you so much for treating me so kindly while I visited your fine city, and thank you to my friends/brothers from Cyanide & Happiness for hosting me and letting me play in there sandbox once again. I worked harder and drew more at this con than I ever have in my entire life. We, Rob Denbleyker and I, literally sketched for 9 hours a day, 4 days in a row with no more than a 15 minute break each day. My hands are sore, my brain is tired, and my heart is full of Alberta beaf… no, wait. My stomach… no, pretty sure it’s my heart.

I hope to see you again next year, Calgary!

RE: This comic
When I was at Emerald City Comicon last month, I received the first ever piece of “post-reboot” HE fan art (WARNING: ADORBS) from Fancy Bastard Natalie Metzger. She contacted me and offered a guest comic for my Calgary trip and I was all too happy to accept. Oh, little bottles of booze, you will surely be my undoing. You and the Great Old Ones. But mostly you.

Natalie has two webcomics going on right now:

http://cthulhuslippers.com and http://over-encumbered.com

She also has a website/hub here: http://thefuzzyslug.com

STORE STUFF!
There are some great PRINTS and POSTERS in the store. Your walls cry out for them. Appease your lamenting walls!

Tentaculr.

Today, Monday June 3rd is my birthday! I am 32 years older than some dumb baby that was just born today. SUCK ON THAT, BABY! I can drive and rent a car and get car insurance and… do other stuff that involves cars. If you want to say “HAPPY FANCY BIRTHDAY!” might I suggest sharing HE with your friends via your link medium of choice? Might I also point you to my Amazon Wishlist and my donation page? I might? Well, good then. I just did. CELEBRATE ME FOREVER!!!

Lar made this for my birthday because he loves me… and also he might hate me… and you… and people with eyes.

Yahoo buying Tumblr is like Napster buying Spotify. Or did Napter eventually become Spotify? After the 4th or 5th sell off and rebranding I kind of lost track. I know for a while it was a brand of pocket internet radios and vacuum sealers to keep deli meats and cheeses fresh.

It’s weird to watch a company with no real relevance or identity struggle to recapture some perceived essential usefulness in the mind of the online public that they lost a decade ago. I say it’s weird because any other company that didn’t survive the DotCom bubble and come out with billions would just disappear into total obscurity. Yahoo somehow persists, buying things people like, ruining them then wondering why we move to a different table when they sit next to us at lunch.

COMMENTERS: Are you worried Yahoo is going to ruin Tumblr? Do you care? Haven’t Tumblr users been doing a pretty good job of ruining Tumblr by themselves? Has any site, service or brand you’ve loved gotten better after a buyout?

Comments (34)

@BenMS· 104 weeks ago

The thing Josh is putting vodka and chocolate sauce on – is it mac’n’cheese? It looks amazing.

On topic, Yahoo buying Tumblr is basically going to have to result in the significant watering down of Tumblr. I can’t remember where I read this, but I’ll quote: “A significant minority of Tumblr is soft-core porn, and at least a single-digit percentage of it is hardcore porn.” Yahoo won’t be able to square that away with its shareholders easily.

8 replies · active 104 weeks ago

Candace· 104 weeks ago

It looks like it might be Fritos to me. There is a long, proud tradition of putting stuff on Fritos and making something even more awesome than just plain Fritos. 😉

hijinksensue· 104 weeks ago

It’s definitely mac n’ cheese.

Tom327Cat· 104 weeks ago

No it’s not, It is Mac and Cheese and Chocolate and Vodka. Seriously Joel, you need to keep up, after all, you are writing the darn thing.

@lzyglutenfremom· 104 weeks ago

why doesn’t he just buy the store brand chocolate vodka mac and cheese?? it’s so much easier, and comes in bulk packages…

Tom327Cat· 104 weeks ago

Go with the name brands on that, You will always be disappointed buying the Kroger or Safeway stuff.
Ugh, don’t even get me started on Kirkland’s Best Mac n’ Choc n’ Vod ‘n Cheese.

Sam· 104 weeks ago

Yahoo has shareholders? huh. Who knew.

@JBSiegelMD· 104 weeks ago

Joel….Joel…Joel… You know that Josh and chocolate-anything don’t go together…. Peanut butter and vodka would be a Josh-winning combo though…. IRL Josh ordered the Frito Bandito chili and frito burger at Twisted Root last weekend and had them add peanut butter… I kind of threw up a little 🙂

hijinksensue· 104 weeks ago

I thought about being true to reality, but I decided comic Josh, like every other regular human, likes chocolate.

James· 104 weeks ago

The good about Yahoo buying Tumblr: One less site with a poorly chosen name I have to worry about not caring about.

The bad about Yahoo buying Tumblr: I forgot.

Will Tumblr survive? Not if Yahoo tries to put their login page in front of it… Seriously.. who coded that thing? It wasn’t a code monkey (*sings* maybe manager wanna write god damn login page himself)… it’s the only page I’ve ever been to on my phone that seems to be intentionally written to be completely useless from a mobile device.

@JustinHoskie· 104 weeks ago

No, I’m not worried about it at all. If I’m correct, and I believe I am, the reason the buy-out happened in the first place is because the site was starting to cost too much to run, and it was either sell it to someone and have them worry about the bills, or just shut it down.

As it stands now, Yahoo has agreed to let Tumblr run as an independent company and not mess with it; the terms and conditions aren’t changing, and there isn’t gonna be a major shake-up in terms of who runs it.

Tumblr is gonna be fine. It has too much fan-girling, pizza, and smut not to be.

Candace· 104 weeks ago

I think Chipotle got better after McDonald’s spun them off.

thevoxpopuli· 104 weeks ago

I know it’s not the point of the comic but the slightly out of focus Josh in the background of panel two is amazeaballs. I love little art things like this.

1 · active 104 weeks ago

hijinksensue· 104 weeks ago

Hey thanks! I try to make it interesting to look at.

Junkyard· 104 weeks ago

Hah, this is fantastic! My first genuine laugh-out-loud moment from a webcomic in a while. 🙂

1 · active 104 weeks ago

hijinksensue· 104 weeks ago

Thanks!

@ShayneF· 104 weeks ago

“It was four things. Trust me.” I’m gonna be chuckling all damn day.

1 · active 104 weeks ago

hijinksensue· 104 weeks ago

I was happy with that line too.

Bill Murphy· 104 weeks ago

I’ve never used Tumblr, but hearing that they are in trouble makes me glad I didn’t focus any time on it.

Sam· 104 weeks ago

“Yahoo somehow persists, buying things people like, ruining them then wondering why we move to a different table when they sit next to us at lunch.”

That. is. Gold.

Happy Birthday Joel.

2 replies · active 104 weeks ago

lou· 104 weeks ago

Who else did they buy?

hijinksensue· 104 weeks ago

Most notedly flickr.

@bucknam· 104 weeks ago

Yahoo! is just buying anything with a missing vowel in it, since it has a surfeit of them in its name. This way Flickr can become Flickyr and Tumblr can become Tumbloor, leaving Yahoo! a somewhat smaller but still somewhat pronounceable Ah!

Snag· 104 weeks ago

Tumblr was ruined the moment it went live.

Kryss LaBryn· 104 weeks ago

Gotten better after a buy-out? Not that I’m aware of. Gotten worse? Yeah, a buy-out ruined my perfect job.

It was well-paid, and got me in amazing shape; I really liked it. But then it got bought out by a huge American, and very litigation-conscious, firm, and went straight to hell. Suddenly we all had to wear hard hats and steel toed boots, even in the parking lot, and all the middle management guys who had been fairly relaxed beforehand suddenly were (legitimately) in fear of their jobs and cracked down on us like a tonne of bricks.

This in a place where the equivalent rules beforehand went “No open-toed shoes out on the floor.” And pants, while encouraged, seemed to be pretty optional.

Yeah, I kind of hate buy-outs. Also, Cargill sucks.

Daniel J. Hogan· 104 weeks ago

It didn’t bother me when Yahoo! bought Tumblr, as I only causally use it to begin with. I am interested to see what happens though.

Ryan· 104 weeks ago

I think you meant ensure instead of insure in the third panel.

1 · active 104 weeks ago

hijinksensue· 104 weeks ago

yikes.

Sam· 104 weeks ago

It’s technical, so probably most folks won’t understand it, but yeah… most of my career I’ve worked with ColdFusion. It was created by Allaire Corp which was later bought by Macromedia, who made it a whole lot better and then Macromedia was bought by Adobe who also made it a whole lot better. Each company in turn was larger and more popular than the one before and each company in turn did real well by the product.

lou· 104 weeks ago

I’m not a tumblr user or visit it very often, so I don’t have a strong opinion one way or the other (I sound like I’m from the Neutral planet from Futurama). As for a service getting better after a buyout, did youtube get better or worse after Google bought them? But troubles with cartoons aside, Disney buying Marvel really didn’t change much. They kept on like they been doing since before.

Oh, and happy birthday, Joel!

Siirenias· 104 weeks ago

I…never really understood what Tumblr is. I don’t get it, and I shrug non-commitally, as if someone asked me about football or something.

Chipotle unsold-out. I think that’s the closest thing I can think of. Some years ago, McDonalds went through a process of tidying up, selling stocks that they did not want. So, Chipotle, who sold their stock in order to fund them in the beginning, had the golden opportunity of purging that stain upon their reputation. They seized that opportunity, and bought back that stock. Years later…soft corn tortillas and lime cilantro lime rice.

Things are looking up.

1 · active 104 weeks ago

Siirenias· 104 weeks ago

*lime cilantro BROWN rice.

Liam· 104 weeks ago

I don’t even know what Tumbler is.

1 · active 97 weeks ago

emperorbailey· 97 weeks ago

It’s what you put rocks in to polish them.

The Unsearchable Ones

The HIJINKS ENSUE STORE Is where you can buy stuff that I made! It supports me and my family and keeps this little operation going.

There are two lies in the above comic. 1) Josh would never “Bing” anything, and 2) The Apple Store would never deny Josh anything. They simply pull up his purchase history, count the copious amounts of zeroes, and immediately start peeling grapes for him. I, on the other hand, being the guy that buys a new computer every 4+ years, a new pair of phones every other generation and a new ABSOLUTELY NOTHING ELSE EVER, get the standard “this is out of warranty and even though there was a recall it only applies to everyone in the world BUT you” treatment.

When the Macbook Pros came out in 2007, I made my switch to Mac as did my wife. A little over a year later people were noticing that the power supply cables were coming unsheathed and fraying all over the place and, in some cases, catching fire. Apple started replacing them free of charge to avoid a class action suit (though I believe there was eventually a suit and a settlement). Once day my wife’s power supply cable up and caught on fire while it was plugged into her computer. It burst into flame EXACTLY where her leg would have been, had she been using it at the time. I knew about the issue and brought both of our power supplies in for replacement. The Genius on hand told me he could replace the one that had already combusted, but not the one that was in grave danger of combusting since it was still in it’s pre-combusted state. So I went home, set it on fire with a lighter, brought it back to the Apple store and got a replacement.

COMMENTERS: Give me your best computer repair/ tech support/ massive malfunction story. Was the dumbness on your head or theirs? Every try to return something that you clearly ruined through your own stupidity? A buddy of mine once returned a CF-Card sized micro hard drive that his cat had peed on. Luckily the Best Buy employees aren’t in the habit of sniffing every return.

If you used to get HE in your email inbox through Feedburner (a service I stopped using this year because Google stopped supporting it), this service seems to offer the same functionality for free.

Just plugin the HE RSS feed [http://hijinksensue.com/feed/] and your email address.

JoCo Cruise Crazy 2 Fancy Photo Comic Part 4

EWOK STAAAAAAAAARE!!!!!

My “2 or 3 JoCo Cruise Crazy Photo Comics” plan has evolved into a “stop when you run out of photos” plan. Luckily, I am nearly out of photos. I have one more proper Fancy Photo Comic planned for tomorrow and perhaps a special Dolphi-jinks photo comic for the weekend. THEN I can return to crafting actual comic’d laugh panels from raw pixel ore and pen sweat.

I thank you all for indulging me during this unusually long stretch of irregular HE content. It really helps me to process the JoCo Cruise Crazy experience by getting it out in these comics. And, for those of you that appreciate them, it’s a way to give you something back for allowing me to take the trip in the first place.

John Hodgman was actually trying to photo bomb (Hodg-bomb) our “prom pics” on the stairs. That in itself should be the recruitment slogan for JCCC3. “John Hodgman tried to photo bomb us! Oh, the whole boat is sold out now because of how fantastic that slogan was? Ok. Neat.”

I really wish you could have seen David psyching himself up to ask for DOUBLE THE LOBSTER MEAT with his dinner. “It’s supposed to be unlimited, right? I mean how can they say no? I PAID TO BE TREATED LIKE A SPECIAL BOY GOD DAMNIT! SPECIAL BOY WANTS TWO LOBSTERS! SPECIAL BOY WANTS TWO LOBSTERS!” When he finally got to pop the shameful question and the waiter just kind of shrugged an “of course you want two lobsters you piece of shit” shrug and nodded his head in apathetic acknowledgement that every action in his life had lead him to this point, I’m pretty sure David’s boner exploded. He really did tear into it like a bear cracking open a turtle with a river rock. He was sucking every pore of that bottom feeding creature for any remnant of succulent butter-meats. It was like dinner and a freak show.

COMMENTERS: What’s the craziest request you’ve ever been obliged in a service situation? It could be a restaurant, hotel, vacation, car dealership, etc. Anything that proves, “You’ll never know until you ask.” Do you work in service? What’s the craziest request you’ve ever received? Did you do it?

UPDATE: Here’s a closeup of the TARDIS fezzes my wife and I made.

Expanding Our Culinary Horizons (Guest Comic by Tindómiel Muinamir)

Denise is actually quite the cook. I’ve always been OMNOMingly impressed with her culinary concoctions in the past. Though her people do have a nagging tendency to eat bile, and blood and unborn baby ducks and occasionally send a species to extinction for the sake of a good sammich. Though it might be beyond even her iron pallet to take on a hybrid Bacon Explosion/Great Old One. Maybe if it had more bile. Mmmmm… biley.

A gigantic FB thank you to Tindómiel for another fantastically fancy guest comic. Based on this and her last one, I now have a working theory that she has a thing for drawing tentacles and tongues.

Friday I leave for New England Webcomics Weekend, but I am working on having a new HE comic complete before I leave. I realized that I couldn’t let the BSG series finale go by without a proper HE send off. Who knows if I’ll actually see it on Friday or if I’ll have to wait until I get home. There is some Twitter talk of a showing after the Friday Night Pub Crawl.

Speaking of, If you want to communicate or keep up with what I’m doing while I’m away at NEWW, you should probably follow me on Twitter.

I won’t be back in Dallas until Monday, so I really don’t know if there will be a Monday comic or not. I am hoping to find some time to whip one out either at the Hotel or at the show, but I have no idea how much down time I’ll have. Maybe I’ll so a “con-sketchbook” style comic like Penny Arcade does.