An Oscar Caliber Performance

I still haven’t seen “There Will Be Blood” yet. And for that I am sorry. After “Gangs of New York” I wanted to find out the exact moment I would die, so that I could arrange to be murdered by Daniel Day Lewis (as Bill the Butcher) 5 minutes prior to my death. That would really be the best possible way to go out. Moments before I succumb to the grips of cancer or heart disease, Day Lewis appears behind me with a waxed up mustache, waxed down hair and a top hat and runs me through with a skewer. Then he would climb atop a nearby potato box or tree stump and make a short speech about what an honor it was to kill me. Classy. That’s all there is to it. Classy.

Twenty years later (Day Lewis is still 45 or so because he’s also a Highlander or some sort of Vampire) my daughter would infiltrate his ranks, befriend him, earn his trust, then stick him like a pig when he least expects it. She’s a good girl like that.

OK, wait… that’s basically EXACTLY the plot of “Gangs of New York.” I guess if I had to pick a different movie-themed death I would want to be sent into space and set on a collision course with earth so that Bruce Willis could fly a rocket to me, land on me, drill a hole in my face and plant a nuclear warhead in my skull then save the rest of his crew by staying behind to make sure I blew up. He’s an American hero.

I tried hand-drawing the speech bubbles for the first time with this comic. I think it looks pretty cool. I also liked the hand lettering in the last panel. Let me know what you think in the comments. Also, (this may be a morbid question) but what movie-themed death would you choose? Die Hard? Dukes of Hazard? Hannah Montana?

Go check out the Podcast. People seem to like it.

UPDATE: JOEL’s JOCULARITY EXPLANATION CORNER!
Since I’m getting a lot of “Whuh?” and “Buh?” in regard to this comic, I’m just going to spell it out. This is a parody of the (apparently not so) popular meme “I drink your milkshake,” which is based on the movie “There Will Be Blood” for which Daniel Day Lewis just won Best Actor at the 2008 Academy Awards. Sorry for the confusion.

Battleship: The Movie, The Game, The Breakfast Cereal

Ever hungry for new (old) intellectual properties to exploit, Universal is now working on taking classic Hasbro board games like Monopoly and Battleship to the big screen. I only foresee positive outcomes. I want these movies greenlit, and rushed into production so I can enjoy them by X-Mas. In fact, I’m so enthusiastic that I’m pitching my own spin on these movies and a few others to the studios later this month:

Monopoly: Matt Damon is an up and coming real estate executive that uncovers a nefarious plot by his firm to destroy all of their competition. Ends with climactic train, car, top hat chase through the Boardwalk.

Uno – Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are rival card sharks in Mexico. A tale of sex, action and intrigue. You can cut the sexual tension between them with a single card.

Connect 4 – A family (2 brothers and 2 sisters) separated at birth must cross the country to reunite after their biological mother’s death. In finding each other they find themselves. Sundance 2008. Fox Searchlight will produce. Stars are Philip Seymour Hoffman, Paul Giamatti, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Hillary Swank. Meryl Streep in the mom in a flashback.

Jenga – Gripping, too-real tale of the heroes, heroines and horrors of 9/11 (you were thinking it too).

Risk – Clint Eastwood directs. Its 14 hours long. Donnie Wahlberg and Ron Livingston star.

Guess Who – Ben Afleck has a list of 40 individuals, some with glasses, some with brown hair, only one of them is the killer. Can he “Guess Who” before they strike again?

Speaking of board games: if you are into them and would like to try something new, check out Cheap Ass Games. They are, well, inexpensive games that generally require you to provide the game pieces, dice, etc. from other games you have around the house.

Personal favorites are:

Kill Dr. Lucky – It’s like Clue in reverse. You must find a room and a weapon and murder the good doctor without anyone seeing)

Captain Park’s Imaginary Polar Expedition – You did not go on a fascinating polar expedition, but you must convince the wealthy elite that you did with tails of daring do and false artifacts.

U.S. Patent Number 1 – Build your time machine, outfit it with weaponry then race your rivals to the patent office, not only to be the first to patent the time machine, but also the first to patent ANYTHING!

My friend, Wes, introduced me to Cheap Ass Games about 7 years ago. They are inventive, imaginative and quite funny. Simpler and cheaper than Halo, they offer a pretty good way to spend an afternoon.

Any other ideas for board game movies? Post yours in the comments.

Call it a going away present

Back up in your ass with the resurrection.

Back when things really started to look bleak for Toshiba and HD-DVD I said I had always been rooting for them, but I really didn’t care who won as long as there was a clear winner and we could stop all this foolishness. Well, finally the troops are pulling out and coming home. The war is officially over.

I’m still not ready to buy a Blu-Ray player. Let’s pretend this format war never happened and consider this to be the day High Definition optical media is first released. Essentially it is, because the war stifled the format adoption, market growth, title availability, etc for the last 2 years. We would probably be looking at sub $300 Blu-Ray players and $15-17 Discs by now if not for the unforgivable stupidity of the movie and technology industries. Instead we are looking at the PS3 being the only Blu-Ray player worth buying (t’s firmware upgradable and has the online connectivity that most other current players do not offer) and $25-30 for new titles at big box retailers.

The price drops we saw from the HD-DVD camp around November and December of 2007 were false so they don’t count. By that I mean they were slashing retail prices for players WAY below the cost to produce them in the hopes early adopters would flock in and secure their position as the de facto HiDef disc. Instead of a viable consumer install base they now have about a half a million angry Wal-Mart customers that want to beat them to death with their shiny, obsolete “Ayche-Dee-DeeBeeDee” boxes.

Josh said, “I don’t care! I want to watch beautiful moving pictures on my new giant HD-TV!” and bought a decent sized library of HD-DVD’s. He contends that the are still playable, no matter who won. I contend that his choice was bad and he should feel bad. Those of you in the same predicament may want to consider converting your HD-DVD collection to Blu-Ray. All you need is a bunch of money, nearly unlimited time, and a master’s degree in computer science. You could also just pretend it was a fancy DVD player and play like it never happened.

I can’t think too hard about the contestants and the outcome, because Blu-Ray winning makes no fucking sense. HD-DVD was cheaper to produce, cheaper to buy, higher capacity (at first), region free, more interactive right out of the gate, and posessed the foresight to give their product a LOGICAL name people could understand. If we are looking for a replacement for sandwiches and the contenders are “Sandwich-2” and “Purple Explosion Ninja” I am certainly going to be curious about the PEN format but I’m also not going to immediately recognize it as something tasty and nutritious for my lunch time enjoyment.

The thing that really bugs the shit out of me is the fact that Sony actually won a format war. God damnit.

Bluehost.com: I invite you to eat a dick

The story of how Bluehost.com fired me for getting Dugg.

When I started this site in May of 2007 I did quite a lot of research as to the technology I should employ and the companies I should trust. I read countless reviews of publishing solutions and hosting companies. Settling on WordPress with ComicPress, I only needed a place to pitch my proverbial tent.

Bluehost.com was well reviewed and even listed in several places as being a Digg-stable or Digg-proof (this is important later in the story). I signed up with them, prepaid a year and Hijinks Ensue was born.

Lesson 1: Hosting for $10 a month is cheap. How often does “cheap” have a positive connotation?

Right off the bat the problems started. 30 min to an hour a day the site was down. This wasn’t much of a problem when I had 50 readers, but it was certainly annoying. Every time I called tech support I was introduced to a new kind of stupid. Well, less “stupid” and more “I can’t wait to get off work so I can masturbate into a Red Bull can, eat a ham and pass out on the couch to Family Matters reruns.”

I’d say, “My site is down, again.”
He’d reply, “Really? Did you look at the error logs? What did they say?”
“No Morpheus, I don’t read Matrix. Take your typing finger out of your asshole and look them up yourself.”
“Yeah, your site’s down. There must be a problem.”

And so on and so forth until my head would literally pull a “Scanners” and my wife would have to clean up the mess and get me a new head.

One time a Bluehost rep told me I was on a “messed up” box that always had a lot of problems. I told him to move me off of it and he refused. There was some sort of moratorium on moving people away from Box 269. “Why?” I asked.

“Cuz everyone that’s on it wants to move cuz it’s always messed up and stuff.”
More solid an argument I have never heard.

Fast forward to the first time one of my comics got a front page Digg. 100,000 people trying to ping a shitty server all at once is a lot like 6 rhinos trying to fuck the same watermelon. In this analogy my server was not one of the rhinos.

This time I saw it coming and called Bluehost support as soon as the site went down. Let me use my “I shit you not” voice when I say this. The tech guy told me I should upgrade to a dedicated box. I asked how much that was, and he said they didn’t offer them. I asked why and he replied (here’s the part where I’m not shitting you in the least), “Our three owners are making so much money, they really don’t care if you need a better server.”

Then the douche-taster asks me how to get on Digg because it sounded like something he would like to do. I assume he hosted elsewhere.

After my next front page Digg had me down for almost a day, I paid to move to a “High CPU” box. The moment they “upgraded” me my IMAP email accounts went shitballs, spitting out errors left and right. I sent in a trouble ticket (knowing good and well that most of my previous TT’s went completely unanswered). They responded to the ticket 3 weeks later saying they couldn’t replicate the problem. Think about that for a second. Let it stew. That’s like me bleeding to death in my garage, my arm severed by a chain saw, and 911 refusing to respond. Instead they send my loved ones a letter a month later saying they couldn’t replicate the problem.

So Valentine’s Day 2008 rolls around and I prepare a token of my love to my readers in the form of a special Valentine’s card. Come about 10 pm it hits the front page of Digg (sensing a pattern?). The site screeches to a halt and bursts into flames. I expect to go through the same BS to get my site turned back on, but this time the bullshit is new. Not only do they refuse to turn my site back on, but they try to convince me it’s impossible to do so even if they wanted to. As if they had cast cement shoes around my site and sunk it to the bottom of the ocean. Hey, insult! Here comes injury!

“We’ve left FTP access active so you can get your files and move them to a different server.”
“You’re firing me?!”
“Did I stutter, mother fucker? Get your shit and get the fuck off our box!”

At least that’s how I remember it.

I screamed at that guy so loud, I think he peed. In the end, his manager agreed to a 48 hour stay of execution while I found a new home. The site is now safe and sound (?) at Media Temple. DNS is still resolving for various parts of the world, but it should clear up in a day or so.

So tell me, what are your hosting horror stories?

UPDATE 2/19/08
Cheese it! They know!

UPDATE 2/21/08
UnCheese It! They know nothing! And what they don’t know, they make up! And by THEY I mean THIS ONE DUDE! Several readers pointed out that Weasy had amended his statement about my dealings with Bluehost.I sent him this email:

Hey, Weasy. Have all the opinions you want, but one thing I don’t appreciate is lying. You show me one “illegal material” on www.hijinksensue.com and I will remove it. How you can misconstrue getting Dugg as “abusing bandwidth” is beyond me. Somehow that implies malicious intent and, as I’m sure you know, getting a first page Digg is a passive act. I have no control over whether it happens or not. I think you just gave me some insight into why I was getting the caliber of service from Bluehost that I was.

Here’s the whole thread as of this posting. I wonder if someone at Bluehost lied to this dude, or if he is making this up as he goes along.

Again, STAY THE EVERLOVING ‘EFF AWAY FROM BLUEHOST!

If Loving You is Wrong…

Dear Readers, Here is my St. Valentine’s Day present to you:

A Valentine’s card of today’s comic you print out, inscribe with proclamations of love and give to your sweet heart. Just don’t give this to your twin sibling. They might get the wrong idea.

(1.5mb – Print this out landscape style on 8.5 x 11 paper and fold it over to complete the romantic magic)

UPDATE: There’s a better version HERE. The margins are a bit off on the original.

You can also partake in one of these lovely desktop backgrounds, presented in both sqaurely and rectangulish formats: [removed since updated versions are in The Vault]