What’s In The Box?!

UPDATE! Check out this new shirt I made: THE PENTAPPLEGRAM! There will probably be stickers as well in the future.

Many of us more technologically inclined individuals have certain habbitual behaviors concerning the delivery, unboxing, first use and subsequent treatment of new toys. Josh has apparently found a way to monetize his. If you do good work, the audience will find you. If you do unspeakable things with brushed aluminum and glossy touch screens, Klaus und Deter und all der friends vil gladly pay $40 Euros per minute to vitness it.

Despite being quite the technophile, and always purchasing the newest Apple toy/game console/erotic defribulator/ etc on launch day, Josh is actually quite hard on his gadgets (NDJI – No Dick Joke Intended… oh wait… HARD! I get it. Yeah, dick joke definitely intended – YDJDI). He’s a no case, no screen protector, shit’s gonna get scratches, just freeball the phone in my pocket with my keys kind of guy. The only thing he’s treats worse than phones is cameras. He once tried to gift me his point and shoot digital camera which was barely recognizable as anything but a lump of plastic scar tissue with a couple of LEDs. It might have been a tumor removed from a robot. Robot cancer is a serious problem. Educate yourself, people.

COMMENTERS: Are you a ginger gadget grabber? Do you wear the kiddest of kid gloves with your phone/iPod/tablet/whatever or do you toss it around all caseless and willy nilly and let fate determine its… fate? Any particularly interesting stories about being too careful or not careful enough with expensive toys?

I’m a “put that shit in a case the moment it comes out of the box” kinda dude. When I got my 30gb iPod as a gift from my boss around 2003, I actually held a microfiber cloth in my hand when I used it as not to get finger prints on it. As soon as I got home with the new Ipod, mere hours after unboxing it, I pulled out my giant sheets of gadget screen protector that custom cut yourself to fit any device. I did my measurements, got one the right size, peeled back one edge and began to apply. I didn’t have a credit card handy, so I grabbed a sample of linoleum counter top left over from remodeling our kitchen and used it to squeegie on the screen protector. There must have been a chip in the sample because it gouged a trench across the entire face of that iPod deep enough to fill with enough “first world problem” tears to then drown yourself with. I hadn’t even loaded any music on it yet.

My daughter has been drawing characters from the Tiny Titans comics and I have been posting them on my Tumblr. They are, in a word, cutedorable.

A website called ComicMix is doing a webcomics March Madness with over 100 comics. I am on the list of competitors. I only know of about 10 comics on the list, and I don’t care about the outcome, but it’s neat to see your friends win stuff, even if it’s silly. Go vote or whatever.

You Ain’t Got To Lie, Craig

NEWT FOR PRESIDENT!!! GET AWAY FROM HER, YOU BITCH!!!

I wish there was even an ounce of exaggeration in this comic. Of the last 20 things I’ve sold on Craigslist the other party has flaked out with no reply or response of any kind at least 15 times. Some of them have gone so far as to schedule a pickup time and place and simply not show. You… you just can’t do that to people. You can’t just fuck with peoples’ lives like that. I mean, you KNOW I am sitting in that Target parking lot off the freeway and you don’t even bother to let me know that you just aren’t coming? That’s sociopathic behavior. That’s worse than murder and should be punished accordingly.

One guy went as far as to tell me he was coming to get whatever I was selling (probably something computer related), call me when he was on the way, call me AGAIN telling me he was close and STILL NOT SHOW UP! What happened to him? Was he kidnapped by a family of Yeti? Was he completely incased in cement and buried on the Moon? Did he simply just cease to be? WAS HE EVER REAL TO BEGIN WITH?! IS CRAIGSLIST EVEN A REAL THING?! Oh, right… all those hookers got murdered, so it must be real. But that hooker murderer went to jail. These flake-out, no-show pieces of shit just get to go on with their merry, narcissistic lives. That isn’t justice and it isn’t America. In the Founding Fathers’ day, if you placed an ad in the local almanac offering to trade your silver smithery services in exchange for a gently used ox yoke or a half hour of discrete accompaniment to the alley behind Ye Olde Denny’s and you didn’t hold up your part of the bargain, they would chop your head off with a crossbow! Do you know how long that would take? A really god damn long time.

My daughter has been drawing characters from the Tiny Titans comics and I have been posting them on my Tumblr. They are, in a word, cutedorable.

Some website is doing a webcomics March Madness with over 100 comics. I am on the list and I am currently against a comic called Trenches. I only know of about 10 comics on the list, and I don’t care about the outcome, but it’s neat to see your friends win stuff, even if it’s silly. Go vote or whatever.

COMMENTERS: Am I alone? Is it just me? Does my email give off some kind of “I am not a person and do not serve common courtesy” vibe? Have you ever had this experience with Craigslist, eBay or any other type of classified ad situation? What about crazy Craigslist stories? Do you ever think people buy cheap stuff on Craigslist just to case your house for eventual home invasion? No? Just me? Well you do now.

Fetch A Pail Of Water

Groverfield T-Shirt and MORE in the HijiNKS ENSUE STORE!

Actually it was Microsoft that emailed me about being able to watch Jack And Jill on my Xbox. At first I thought it was a threat. Like if I didn’t sign up for Xbox Live Gold they were going to somehow forcibly push Adam Sandler’s most recent unforgivable curse into my home. I immediately started digging through my pockets to see how much cash I had on hand. Maybe it I crammed it in the heat vents on my router I could convince them to stem the foul tide they were threatening to unleash on my otherwise unsullied by Sandler home. Even if Microsoft are contractually obligated to offer Jack and Jill to Xbox users as some sort of assisted suicide outreach program, the option to initiate the stream should be buried a hundred submenus deep, hidden behind dozens of “Are you sure” buttons, “do you realize what’s going to happen if you keep replying in the affirmative” check boxes and perhaps a dragon. A dragon with a thousand flaming dicks. I’m all for freedom of choice, but sometimes you have to save people from themselves.

I’m trying some new things with my art and posting a bit of the experimenting and progress on my Tumblr. Go follow that thing if you follow such things. Also, I posted this comic with no bubbles since I thought the fire was pretty.

I don’t care about arbitrary webcomic popularity contests, but David does and I don’t want him to win. So go vote for me, or anyone else besides David.

COMMENTERS: Adam Sandler used to make some extremely funny movies in the 90’s. Now it’s like he just wants to watch the world burn. Who else (movies, music or otherwise) used to produce high quality entertainment but traded it in for big money and watered down mass appeal?

Get Off My Lido Deck!

Wil Wheaton and I got excited and made this “Fighting Time Lords” shirt! Wiblum Wablum Tempus Wempus!

MAN, it feels good to be drawing comics again. After a week of guest comics, and two weeks of Fancy Photo Comics I am pleased to be back putting pen to pixels. Still, I thought it best to transition from thinking about NOTHING BUT JoCo Cruise Crazy for the last month with a cruise-related comic.

The old people on the cruise (Snorks, as we called them) seemed to be on vacation solely to have different shit to complain about. They said some truly and remarkably horrible things. Many of them racist. Most of the dialog above is a direct Snork quote with slight to extreme embellishments. Honestly I don’t really remember which Snorkisms were real and which we made up any more. By the end of the week we were hearing a bunch of heinous and terrible stuff as well as coming up with a bunch of heinous and terrible stuff. It’s all sort of blurred together. Or rather blended in a tall frosty glass with a pretty paper umbrella, a wedge of pineapple and not an ounce of regret.

After a week of listening the elderly spend thousands of dollars to be upset, we sort of came to a collective conclusion. Being old is just shitty. Life, after a certain point, is complete shit and just gets shittier every single day until you die. Being awake hurts. Getting dressed hurts. Taking a crap hurts. Taking a shower is a near impossibility, hurts, and you are likely to die while doing it. This is why the extremely old get so upset about minor problems. If the one thing in your entire shitty life that is going to provide you a glimmer of happiness for 5 minutes (say, a blueberry muffin with breakfast) isn’t perfect, or isn’t available, then you pretty much have no reason not to eat a bullet right then and there. Guys, can we all agree to check out around 75? Or can we at least focus all of our medical technology and resources on developing a system of tests that tells you, within a month or so, that EVERY SINGLE DAY from a certain point onward is going to be shittier than the day before it? Then we would at least be able to make informed decisions.

Super special thanks to Wil and Atom for (from what I can remember, at least) writing half of this comic. I will leave you with a few other all too true Snorkisms:

“I took pictures when this [buffet tray] was empty! And when this one was empty, AND this one! They don’t got their SHIT together!”

“I really like this theater better before you changed it. Why did you change it?”
“I didn’t personally change it sir, so I’m not sure.”
“Well I liked it better. You shouldn’t have changed it.”

“They [the staff] tell you one thing when they really mean the other! You gotta take whatever they say AND DO THE OPPOSITE!”

“You gotta tell him [the drink waiter] that your gonna have to talk to his manager! It’s the only way they’ll listen!”

COMMENTERS: What’s the damndest thing you ever heard an elderly person say, shout, demand or otherwise enOLDen on some unsuspecting bystander? Were you on the JoCo Cruise or any other cruise? Do you have any Snorkisms of your own?

JoCo Cruise Crazy 2 Fancy Photo Comic BONUS!

NEWT FOR PRESIDENT!!! GET AWAY FROM HER, YOU BITCH!!!

OK, NOW I’m actually done with the JoCo Cruise Crazy 2 photo comics. I’ve had a ton of fun reliving that amazing week through the medium of sequentialized funny time panels, but I’m anxious to get back to drawing dudes talking about TV. EXCITING! This comic in particular was really a blast to create since I went into it with absolutely ZERO ideas of what it was going to be about. I just started placing photos and loose narrative started to form around them. Consider this an incredibly complex Rorschach test that reveals my latent abandonment issues with women, trust issues with my wife, fear of the water and intense frugality [none of those are true except for the last one, which is true enough for all of them].

Swimming with dolphins was a singular experience. It was INCREDIBLY expensive and certainly not something I would rush to do again, but it was definitely worth it, and I have no regrets concerning my ocean mammal frolicking experience. I hesitate to even describe it, since it’s one of those experiences you kind of have to… experience before the explanation takes on any greater meaning than, “WE WERE TOTALLY SWIMMING WITH DOLPHINS, BRO! IT WAS HELLA DOLPHINS ALL OVER THE PLACE!” We (6 people) swam with them (6 dolphins) for about an hour separated from the open ocean only by a manmade rock reef. The dolphins themselves were equal parts intimidating and childlike, but the overall situation was exhilarating. I think I understand Aquaman a little better. He’s still the worst super hero, but I get where he’s coming from.

COMMENTERS: Have you ever had an unusual animal experience or an experience with an unusual animal?