Archives

Dumb And Number

I accidentally watched all of The Number 23 a couple of days ago. I non-accidentally live tweeted it in order to share my confusion and pain with as many human beings as possible. I was made aware of the movie’s horrific curse early on, but still I persevered. SPOILERS: It was truly a massive turd. It was a turd pie. It was a pie made entirely NOT of delicious pie filling and crust, but of turd.

One Tweeter pointed out my Twitter user # is 12,331,382, and 1+2+3+3+1+3+8+2=23. I refuse to check his facts or his math because that was a perfect bookend to an abismal movie-watching experience.

I’m trying out a new, simplified art style for the LoFi comics in hopes that I can bring them back as a regular feature on HE. The goal for the Lofi’s was always to be a supplemental strip that I could bang out in an hour or so vs. the 4-6 hours it takes to make a regular comic. In the end the only difference in complexity was that they were black and white, which honestly took longer than my normal coloring because I couldn’t use the standard color pallet I was used to.

With the new engine driving the backend of the site (thanks Phil!) I should be able to post LoFi’s whenever I want. Even if it’s on the same day as the regular comic. I’m working on having a permanent URL for the most recent Lofi comic (something like hijinksensue.com/lofi). Lofi’s do not show up in the regular archive. You can see a list of all of them HERE. They’ll show up in the regular RSS feed because the idea of multiple feeds seems dumb to me. It’s all funny pictures with funny words. Shouldn’t matter to the reader if the hard was easy or hard on the artist as long as the material is solid.

I’m also hoping to use the Lofi’s as a way to react to something in the world of Geekdom quickly and timely if I’m in the middle of a mini-storyline. Here’s hoping it all works out the way I want.

Robotripping At The Gates Of Hell

UPDATE: New Lo-FiJinks Comic! 

A NEW EPISODE OF THE HIJINKS ENSUE PODCAST!!!
Episode 88 – Wizardo And The Hot Dog Guy

As I mentioned earlier on Twitter, I can tell if I’m more sick today or just more annoyed about being the same amount of sick as I was yesterday. The result is the same. I make a lot of “UNNGH…” sounds and generally feel like fuck on toast. Two days ago I couldn’t decide if this was an actual legitimate illness or just an allergy attack. I decided to hedge my bets and take some allergy meds and chase them with some cold meds and toss in a little headache pill action just to balance things out. I will give you exactly zero guesses as to how bad of an idea that was. I’m being so stingy with the number of guesses because they aren’t required because I will come right out and tell you THAT IT WAS AN AWFUL IDEA.

Zyrtec and Sudaphed (the good “you have to give your driver’s license to get it” kind) are not pleasant bedfellows. I spent the next 8 hours or so just sort of floating 4 feet beneath my giant balloon head. Every time I would turn to look at something, I would have to wait for my eyes to actually turn the same direction as my face which was usually about a 10 – WAY MORE THAN 10 second delay. The most accurate analogy I can muster for the haze my brain dwelled in that day is this: my mind felt like my eyes do when I’m not wearing my glasses. It still worked and it still knew what was going on, but it was slow to focus and had a hard time pointing in one direction for very long.

COMMENTERS: Last time we shared our worst “here’s what I did while I was WAY too sick to do it” stories. How about your worst “I took some medicine to feel better and THINGS GOT MUCH WORSE!” stories? Drug interactions, poor attempts to self medicate, etc.

One time I had a sore throat and ate an entire bag of cough drops (the “every cough drop has 100% of your daily vitamin C” kind) in about 8 hours. In doing so I overdosed on one of the ingredients in said cough drops (possibly the vitamin C) and my entire body turned into one big swollen rash. It was FUCKING terrifying. I went to hospital and got a steroid shot at least a day AFTER I should have.

Another time an ER doc that wasn’t paying any attention to me at all just shot me up with some random painkiller without telling me what he was doing. Turns out I am allergic to it and I FREAKED THE MISERABLE FUCK OUT. I immediately had a panic attack (something I am not used to at all) and started to feel like I was in horrible danger if I stayed there. I couldn’t sit still or stand still and my every thought was focused on fleeing the hospital. I called my wife who was in the waiting room and she later said I sounded completely manic. I told several doctors over the course of the next couple of hours that something was wrong and I felt like I was losing my mind. They all dismissed me and went about their business. Finally a different doctor comes over and looks at what I was given (wish I knew exactly what drug it was) and says, “Oh yeah, that can happen.” Gives me some Benadryl and I instantly felt better.

Though I can’t really feel too bad considering the one story I saw on the Discovery Channel about the lady who took a standard antibiotic and all her skin fell off. ALL OF IT.

My Hands Felt Just Like Two Balloons

I’ve been sick for the last few days. This particular recurring, seasonal illness bares such a resemblance to both A) A REALLY bad allergy attack and B) actual viral illness that I never really know what I have. Luckily the treatment for both is the same. Lots of sleep, fluids, procrastination of work-related responsibilities, complaining and Seinfeld reruns. So that’s how I’ve been spending my time. Oh, and I also made you:

A NEW EPISODE OF THE HIJINKS ENSUE PODCAST!!!
Episode 88 – Wizardo And The Hot Dog Guy. Listen to the ep, then check out Alex’s fancy Photoshoppery which deftly illustrate one of our bits.

To get into more about exactly how miserable I am, I would like to explain how unbearably shitty I feel. Sometimes (often in fact) my cat, Replay, will eat his dry food so fast that he almost immediately throws it up on the carpet. Never one to let a hot meal (how NOW, anyway) go to waste he usually gobbles down nearly all of the pre-eaten partially digested mess then goes about his marry way. These 12 hours naps aren’t going to take themselves, you know. I say he re-eats NEARLY all of the food, because he usually leaves somewhere between 10 and 15 nuggets of food to resolidify on the floor and become one with the carpet’s collective hive mind. I feel like THAT food. I feel like I have been eaten, thrown up, left to stew in my own juices and a healthy portion of feline bile for a few minutes, then nibbled at and pushed around with a coarse cat tongue for a few minutes, only to be ultimately judged unworthy of a second eating and left to crack and dry on the unforgiving carpet never to fulfill my purpose. The rejection at the end it what really seals the deal in determining which is worse: The twice eaten food, or the once eaten, once vomited, eternally rejected food.

In the next comic I think I’ll get into how much of a mistake it was to take a handful of allergy meds AND cold meds at the same time, hoping they would just figure it out for themselves. Listen to the podcast linked above to hear what I sound like while trying to forge coherent thoughts under their influences. This will be a short storyline. 3 or 4 comics at most.

COMMENTERS: What’s the worst thing you ever had to do while sick? Or rather, what’s the thing that you did that you REALLY should have stayed home from due to illness?

A Few Minor Bugs

Josh is ever the early adopter. He’s the perpetual volunteer technology guinea pig, especially where iDevices and Apple operating systems are concerned. Most times the only consequences he has to endure for his enthusiasm are a couple of “restores from backup” or maybe a total factory reset. Other times he ends up with no skin. Still, I bet he enjoyed that new panorama feature in iOS 6 at least once or twice before he was flayed.

WIL WHEATON PLUSHIE UPDATE!

If you ordered the Lil’ Wil plushie, the order page has been updated with an estimated delivery date (to us) of November. Once they’re in hand, they’ll start shipping from Blind Ferret out to you.

Speaking of Blind Ferret and Wil Wheaton, they’re all at Montreal Comiccon this weekend.

You can find my shirts and books at the Blind Ferret Booth (506 and 508). If sales are good when I’m not even there, I might try to come to the show next year. Canada is always incredibly expensive to get to (from Texas) and to stay in, but it’s also always a blast.

COMMENTERS: Are you a firmware hacker, a jailbreaker a boot loader or a rom flasher? Or are you a skittish software installer like me who waits for the OS cookies to be fully baked and cooled before biting into them? Any particular triumphs or horror stories? Back in the days of dumb phones when dumb phones were JUST starting to get smarter I had a Symbian OS Nokia. It was the first phone I’d ever even held that you could install apps on. I think they were all java apps that random dudes coded in their basements and uploaded to usenet, but they were MORE than what I paid for which was neat. The phone also shared the same internals as the Nokia N-gage (Taco Talkin’ Time!), so I was able to load 1 or 2 N-gage games at a time onto the flash card. Games that were impossible to play without a proper D-pad. Still, it was pretty neat.

Scalzi Comic Dare: All My Sweet Pitches

HijiNKS ENSUE PODCAST Episode 87 “ZombieWhatever.com” is live!

Alternate Title: Pitch Slapped
Alternate Alternate Title: Pitch Slapped 2: Pitch Better Have My Money

In the past, only Wil Wheaton has been deemed worthy to wield the power of THE COMIC DARE. This week, however, another was found who possessed the strength of will and the Strength Of Wil (TM) required to harness The Comic Dare’s awesome might and use it for its most righteous purpose: SAYING DUMB STUFF ON TWITTER THEN FORCING ME TO DRAW IT! That person, the Beta Ray Bill to Wheaton’s mighty Thor is noted sci-fi author, Internet opinions haver, and celebrated balding ukester JOHN SCALZI (hold for applause).

Scalzi occasionally finds himself in the precarious position of being asked by TV executives how to put things on our watching boxes that are not overwhelming terrible, reprehensible and offensive. So far they don’t seem to be taking his advice to heart. He had just one such meeting earlier this week at which he pitched original ideas for shows, and clarified via INTERNET SHOUTING that said shows would not involve “goats, vampires or sleuths with mental issues.” As we all know, these are the three cornerstones of modern televised shenanigans. Well, the last two are. The goats… must be an Ohio thing. Subsequently he issued the challenge to bring Sherlock: Vampire Goat to life and I, obliged by my 1000 year curse… uh, obliged.

TV is at an all-time weirdness juncture. It is currently producing fictional dramas and comedies that will certainly go down in history as “the best things humanity was able to accomplish before The Fire Ocean cleansed the Earth of all Mankind” (Breaking Bad, Sherlock, Game Of Thrones, Community). But it is also falling prey to a dangerous trend in which networks do not simply steal genre ideas from each other (“You got a cop show, a medical show and a medical cop show? We got those too! Suck it!”), but they now steal ENTIRE SHOWS from each other and put them on the air AT THE SAME TIME. Sherlock is a modernized version of A.C.D.’s Holmes and it is essentially perfect. CBS saw that show and thought, “Yeah! Let’s do exactly that right now while they’re still doing it try to stop us you can’t HAHAHAHAH!” And now we will soon have Elementary. House M.D. (which was also based on Holmes… so in addition to the remaking current shows epidemic, we also have the “Every show is about Sherlock Holmes” epidemic) was off the air for many 15 minutes before another 3 or 4 “I’m kind of crazy, but also brilliant, but it’s my craziness that lets me see the world in a particular way and catch things others miss and it also makes relationships hard and it also makes me seem like a jerk because I am” shows got the green light. Perception is the only one that comes to mind immediately, but I am almost certain and totally unwilling to further research that there are more. LOTS more. Is Numb3rs still on TV?

At least every network tried their hand at the “fairytales are totally real” genre this year. Vampires? Forget about it. The CW just started making “Twilight: The Horrible Show on TV instead of the HORRIBLE movies in the theater” before Edward even married that werewolf frankenstein or whatever happens in those things. I know that doesn’t fit the premise I’m trying to establish because I don’t think there are any other vampire romance shows besides The Vampire Diaries… oh wait, Trueblood. There you go. I’m still right.

Anyway, what I’m saying is that televised fiction is currently straddling the finest of lines between its crowning achievement and it’s most uninspired dreck.  There’s lots of middle ground, but most of it is so unremarkable it isn’t worth mentioning. By not being quite as bad and the worst stuff on the air, it becomes wholly forgettable. Save us, Scalzi! Save us from the Hollywood Industrial Machine that you are now apparently a part of! Oh, and call me about SH:VG. I’ve got some ideas for Moriarty.

COMMENTERS: Feel free to pitch your own “Current TV Trend Mashup” show idea.  

UPDATE: Scalzi speaks.