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!

What Did You Blu, Ray?

I’m fairly certain “Batman and Robin” was never actually unleashed on the public in 1080p super-crisp-bat-nipple-ocular-assault format, but the possibility alone is enough to make me wear a welder’s mask at all times. If you are foolish enough to watch “BatNips” please do so through an appropriate Rifftrax filter.

I honestly thought I would never have to comment on the HD format war again, but in an unprecedented and uncharacteristic display of non-douche behavior, Warner Brothers is letting you trade your Warner HD-DVD’s for their BluRay equivalent. You do have to pay $5 + shipping and send in the paper insert from each disc, but you get to keep your HD-DVD’s. I think it’s WB’s way of saying “we don’t want that busted shit in your house.”

Warner Bros. is obviously admitting a mistake here. They are apologizing for their unfortunate part in a partisan war that was designed from the ground up to divide the geek population and cause heavy casualties. Given this new found conscience, I would like to formally ask Warners to provide reparations for anyone that purchased any of the following WB items:

Metallica’s “St. Anger”
Paris Hilton’s Album (I refuse to look up the title, but let’s just assume it’s called “MoneyTitsVagFlash”)
Dawson’s Creek on DVD (Why did Joey have to end up with Pasey!? Why didn’t Dawson show her how much she meant to him when he had the chance?!)
One Tree Hill on DVD (Why did Chad Michael Murray have to leave Dawson’s Creek!? Why!?)
“Comedy” albums by any of the “Blue Collar” dudes… actually, no. I take that back. If you bought these you deserve no mercy. Wallow in the anguish you have created for yourself. Despair for all eternity in loneliness and shame.

If you have a stack of dusty maroon boxes and want to get nice new shiny blu ones, check out red2blu.com for instructions. I wonder if the other studios like Universal will jump on board with this concept. I wonder if now might be a good time to go pick up a bunch of WB HD-DVD’s for $10 in bargain bins and start trading them in. The whole Harry Potter series? Anyone? I’m just sayin’.

Crank Dat

Full Title: “Watch Me Crank Dat Statham Boy, Then IronMan Dat Hoe”
[the hoe in question being either Amy Smart or Pepper Potts]

Maybe Iron Man should call his friend, James “BROdey” Rhodes.

Guys, come in close. Closer. I want to level with you for a minute. I want to bare my soul. This comic was extremely difficult to make. Not because the art was particularly challenging, and not because I tripped over the verbage. It was the subject matter. Making fun of “Crank 2” is like making fun of a movie where a guy has his heart removed (for some reason) and replaced with a robot heart that runs on a laptop battery which must constantly be recharged through a series of escalating violent and sexual exploits. Ridiculous, right?

The premise already so comical that in order to make a joke about it I had to reach into a parallel universe and pluck out a character that might be able to relate to Jason Statham (I think his name in teh film is Crank-O) through the shared experience of having one’s pulmonary system artificially and forcibly augmented by foreigners. Sometimes my job is hard.

I was pleased to read, however, that “Crank 2” doesn’t take itself seriously enough to get caught up in the trappings of it’s own absurd plot devices. It seems, rather, that the movie has fun with it’s own stupidity by constantly upping the anty in terms of over the top violence (strippers shot in the chest leak breast implant goo… seriously), action and sex (Statham is at one point urged to “rub up against some one” to create enough static electricity to “charge his battery… the battery is his penis).

So I suppose if you want to replace your brain with an artificial brain that has to be fed a steady stream of tits, gore, car chases and explosions (that REALLY doesn’t sound all that bad actually), “Crank 2” might be just the thing to keep your robo-brain from entering sleep mode.

WHO WANTS TO PLAY “CRANK MAD LIBS”?

In “Crank 3,” [group/ethnicity/organization] steal Jason Statham’s [body part/penis] and replace with with a [noun] that has to be [verb]ed every hour or it [someting bad]’s all over the place.

The Tigh’s That Blind

Last weekend was Dallas Comic Con. I didn’t go but Denise and Eli made it out to take some pics. Colonel Tigh (Michael Hogan) was there sans eye patch which seemed like a problem that should have been rectified. I can only hope that he answered each question in the affirmative by letting out that famous Caprican strip club “YEEAAAARRRGGGGHHH!” from the BSG finale.

Episode VI: Return Of The Creative Accounting Practices

Lucas has a discreet taxidermist who stuffed and mounted all of the Ewoks. Apparently their outer coat of fur is easily removed with a naturally occurring zipper, but their inner “skin-layer” is more difficult. Also midgets don’t like being stuffed.

David Prowse, who portrayed Darth Vader‘s torso and limbs in the original Star Wars trilogy, says he has never been paid residuals on “Return of The Jedi“ because the film has never made a profit. I’m calling bantha shit. Or at least space-shenanigans. I’m sure Deathstars are quite expensive, and I know the per diem rate for an Ewok wrangler is pretty high, but to say a film that cost $32 million and has made $475 million HASN’T made a profit verges on space-madness.

Apparently this type of shaft-the-actor contract isn’t all that uncommon in Hollywood. It’s also standard practice to make sure a film stays in the red [on paper] indefinitely. Maybe Prowse should have fought for a better contract, but seeing as how neither his face nor his voice actually appear in the film, it would have been pretty easy for Lucas to replace in with another gigantically huge actor (it seems England is full of them).

I’m sure Lucas will do right by Prowse eventually. “David, your checks all came in. Their in the garbage masher on the detention level. Just slide down this shoot…”

QUESTION: What other expenses might Lucas have written off to keep “Jedi” from making any profit? Droid lube? 400 cases of malt liquor (per Dee Williams’ contract rider). Flanel polish?

“Darth Vader” Actor, David Prowse Asks: “Where’s My Money?”