i’ve stopped counting

Shameful plummet to being a normal weblog.
Hopefully it won’t last.
Holy Crap Click This.
You may want to click here next.
And then click here because it’s neat.

This week I induced that it is impossible to lose on the first click of a minesweeper game. Try setting the game to 9 by 9 with 64 mines. Now try to click on a mine right away. Click the mine field, click the smiley face. Click the mine field, click the smiley face. You’ll never ’splode on the first click. Clearly this is a little-known feature in good ol’ winmine.exe. The problem is that I don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes. Does the program just move the first unfortunate mine to an unused spot? Does the program re-roll the minefield until the the first click isn’t disastrous? Does the code rotate the minefield so that the click hits a non-mine space? Dear god, what does it do? I must know this. I just may have to get a job at Microsoft to gain the proper amount of access to dig up the winmine project archives. Before I’ll consider that, though, I’ll probably have to put in another 15 years or so at my current position. Eureka! At the growth rate of these two companies, I can just wait for my company to buy the MS game division outright! It’s a perfect plan!

Or I could just ask my friend to ask Aquaman how the code works.

E-Rock: Resolutions
Well, now I have a closer friendship and I’m going to be less frustrated and angry at myself, which means I’ll be less frustrated and angry around other people. That’s good. Not quite how Nora Ephron would have written it, but not bad. Mildly poopy though. For those of you keeping track, this corresponds to the [chasing the American Dream] task listed at the bottom of this page.

Oh yeah, the Hurricane Charley thing: The only significant tree parts down in the neighborhood were two large tree branches (large being several hundred to a thousand pounds) which both came down next to my house. That’s not a good thing to hear in the dark when you’re hiding from uncertain doom. But I didn’t hear walls crashing or windows breaking. I was lucky there. Although our neighborhood winds were strong enough to bend decades-old Oak trees to the ground, the bad hurricane parts went by about 5 miles to the east. Power was out for my neighborhood for around 20 hours, roughly 9pm to 5pm. City water stayed functional throughout. Sprint has shown itself as the wild failure among cellphone companies. I’ve heard other companies had constant connections throughout the storm. Currently still, Sprint barely connects while the analog roaming mode has perfect signal strength.

Even though the hurricane damage was bad, it was reassuring to see how well society functions with partial power and busted traffic lights. Literal armies of electrical crews coated every group of downed lines in the area. Other smaller armies of chainsaw maniacs took care of whatever downed trees were blocking any amount of traffic. Cars on 436 grouped as usual and periodically stopped together at intersections, only difference being this weekend the lights weren’t powered. Strange thing, the American ability to function normally amidst chaos. I guess when you really analyze it (maybe just when I analyze it), our freedom provides an environment of controlled anarchy. So when you take the control away, it’s relatively simple to pretend it’s still there and keep on truckin’.

The other day Dave pointed out to me that my writing style is similar to the autistic main character of the book “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time” by Mark Haddon. It was fairly eerie to read since so many things in the book matched my style. Like me, the main character Christopher does things like playing Minesweeper on Expert, doing maths to occupy thought, and disliking France. I think this is a fantastic book and anybody should read it. Unless they are autistic also and dislike books written by fictional autistic people who dislike France and call everything stupid.

I was reminiscing about my poopsmith-like elevator sailor, so here’s (the horribly named) Robert E. l33t! in its entirety.

First, a note on the whole comic. Maybe just a rule of thumb for other people planning to do a comic. Don’t try to come up with a clever comic name, then try to create a comic around it. You’ll end up with a clever first few letters, followed by rubbish, and eventually followed by four nonsensical cartoons. If I make another comic, I’m going to finish ten strips before deciding on the name. That way hopefully I won’t decide on something hopelessly retarded.

Impostor Among Us - September 30, 2001
The first entry in my cartoon marathon. It started with the middle panel sketch. The sketch order was right guy, table, right chair, left guy and chair, clock, dialogue, DyNoMite. You can probably tell that halfway into drawing the table, I decided the whole sketch really sucked. The round table got curvy, the left guy didn’t match the right (conventiently leading to him being “in disguise”, a.k.a. “couldn’t be drawn twice”), I decided to destroy the guy on the right that couldn’t be drawn twice, and finally the clock hastily appeared to end the sketch so I could move on to something else. Beyond the lack of art skill, there are several things very wrong with the finished comic.

• I’ve never had to type ‘run’ in DOS. Maybe on my Apple IIe.
• ‘run aborted’ should have never been there. Once you kill something with ^C in DOS, it’s just done.
• ‘rm’ is clearly a unix-based command. This doesn’t match the obvious DOS environs. (To clarify, I’m pretty
  sure I made this cartoon before I learned about Cygwin.)
• DOS never had such vivid colors, and I’m sure Steve didn’t have enough mad skills to make so many colors. The purple-green-orangeburst just doesn’t make sense. I think that style went out when Hypercolor shirts stopped costing so much.

Aside from the whole thing being crap, I’m still mostly proud of the cell division and layout. I’m also happy for going with the JJ Walker spelling rather than something boring like ‘TNT’. If I were to label that cannister now, I’d probably go with my recent homstar obsessions and just write “Caution: This can a-splode.”

The Narrator - October 5, 2001
Number two in the series introduces The Narrator. He’s a crab with force powers. He also has a low attention span. This leads him to declare himself King of the Jungle and write poems about Steve. I drew Steve on my computer. That I regret. I can’t draw on my computer as [rehmeyer] and I can by hand. That should have been obvious. The only other thing I could have done better on this one is to put another exclamation point after the maniacal laughter. There should never be 2 exclamation points after anything. Either just use one or go crazy. Two of them says “I’m cautiously trying to express excitement while being to afraid to risk losing an accidental ‘1′ in a long row of ‘!’s.”

The third pane, in which soul-staring occurs, has to be the greatest moment in the history of art. I’m particularly proud of the coloring in the background between the eyes. It makes me so dizzy to look at I hardly notice something is digging into my psyche. Take a moment to soak it in.

Slappy’s Song - October 12, 2001
To this day I am unable to keep a straight face while showing the original sketch of Slappy, the
crap-dispensing elevator sailor. I usually lose it around the hyphen. I never decided how Steve got to the fifth floor without noticing Slappy’s operations. Maybe Steve is really unobservant before his coffee. Maybe Slappy didn’t move in until after Steve got to work. I know he’s at work because there used to be a water cooler where all the text is.

The last stanza — “The last stanza” … reading that out loud in my head while I type it, I hear “The Last Danza”. Tony really would have been a better fit for that Samurai role — only had three lines, and didn’t match the other three paragraphs. When I originally wrote the poem, I thought it sounded right to abruptly stop the song. But now I’m thinking I missed an opportunity for another poop joke. Surely there has to be something eight syllables long that ends in a long E sound. Hmm…

• And help reduce my invent’ry!
• And practice some podiatry.
• I’ll rip one out for you to see!
• I got poo. What’dya have for me?

Maybe not. But I do like the 24-48 hours line. (A good artist always does his homework and isn’t afraid to get his hands dirty. Unless he has OCD in which case he probably is.)

Robot v Bunny - December 11, 2001
Ah yes, the Robot versus the Bunny strip. This one was terrible. I think it was so bad it single-handedly killed any remaining motivation to continue with the strip. There’s just so much about this that isn’t funny. The wall art in the stairway is pretty. Here again we see my inability to draw things more twice. Kinda strange that the bunny looks the same in the two frames despite different viewing angles. When I drew this I knew rabbits were three-dimensional. An inability to draw the same thing twice means I shouldn’t have recurring characters. Maybe this realization is how people like Gary Larson got their styles.

My next comic should be called something like ‘Valley of the Squishy-Faces’ or ‘Clipart on Parade’ or ‘Nevermind the Talent, Just Come Back Tomorrow’ or ‘Rectangle and Rhombus’.

Alien versus Predator is rated PG-13.

Alien - Rated R.
This thing bled acid, who knows what it’s gonna do when it’s dead.
Aliens - Rated R.
We’re on an express elevator to Hell, goin’ down!
Alien 3 - Rated R.
It’s an 8-foot creature, some kind with acid for blood, kills on sight, and is generally unpleasant.
Alien Resurrection - Rated R.
…it’s going to burst its way through your ribcage, and you’re gonna die. Any questions?
Predator - Rated R.
This stuff’ll make you a –damn sexual Tyrannosaurus!
Predator 2 - Rated R.
Come and get it! El Scorpio is ready!

I’m not completely opposed to the upcoming AvP movie, mostly because it’s one step closer to the greatest movie of all time, and its obvious sequels, “Alien vs Predator vs Bronson Pinchot vs Patrick Swayze”, “Alien vs Predator vs lampshade vs mailbox” and “Alien vs Predator vs orange vs sunlight”. This reminds me of a website I haven’t been to in a while.

Anyway, back to the theme: Alien vs Predator is rated PG-13. Apparently some marketing turd someplace realized that if you make a movie PG-13 instead of R, like forty times as many people see the thing, and it’ll make a ridiculous profit no matter what instead of just breaking even. This in my opinion is precisely not what they should have done. If you’re going to make a movie as pandering and unoriginal as Big Space Alien vs Other Big Space Alien, the only way you can rescue the project is to make it a true ‘Earth is Screwed’ sort of movie where everybody on the planet becomes food or fodder through a horrific series of brutal, violent, graphic, curse-filled events. Think all the bad parts of 28 Days Later, Reign of Fire, and Glitter put together.

---

Being rated PG-13 means the movie will be more like this:

Soldier 1: What room was this again?
Soldier 2: The sacrificial chamber.
[The doors slam shut, the eggs hatch revealing full-grown Aliens, and dozens of shimmering Predators rappel from the rafters]
Soldier 1: Oh goodness, I believe we are in peril.
Soldier 3: I have indigestion and several mosquito bites.
Alien: My that sounds unpleasant. Have you tried Blue Star Ointment?
Predator: This reminds me of that vacation in Tahiti… hit it boys!
[A saloon piano rises from behind the broken egg field. Ms. Piggy is at the keys, and starts hammering out a Rodgers and Hammerstein classic. The Predators uncloak and provide laser lighting. Several aliens line up and tap out a ditty that’d make Michael Flatley swoon.]
Soldier 1: Time for a low-carb C2 cola!
[Everyone starts to laugh, then click their heels as the screen freezes and the Dennis the Menace outro jingle sounds.]

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The R-rated nightmare the American public deserves:

Soldier 214: God, I’ve never seen so many fellow soldiers horrifically killed by aliens. What room was this again?
[haunting silence]
Soldier 214: I’m the last one?!? Gaaah! Accc… gasp … nooooo
[Soldier 214 is eaten over the next several minutes. The doors didn’t even have to close. Humanity is doomed, and the opening credits are still rolling.]