Know what’s even better than Chris Hallbeck achieving the ur– Big Round Number (aka “1000 strips”) for Maximumble? The fact that he did it on a secondary strip. Recall: Maximumble (and its companion, Minimumble) are offshoots of the long-running The Book of Biff, which has itself accumulated 1902 strips back to the start of 2006. Add in the more than 500 Minimumbles and today’s achievement isn’t so much a 100th strip as it is a 3449^th. That’s a lotta damn cartoons, and congrats Mr Hallbeck.

• I’ve spent more than one moment of my life over the past 18 months or so trying to figure out exactly how Erika Moen approaches her work on Oh Joy, Sex Toy, and I think I’ve finally got it nailed down. In talking to Laura Hudson in the hallowed pages of Wired¹, Moen is gleeful, patient, instructional, and above all, evangelical. She’s got a mission to spread the good word about sex & reproduction, and all the myriad aspects of how they work and why we should enjoy them. Sex is fun is a simple truth that waaaay too many people need to be reminded of, and Moen’s just the one to do it.

  Plus it led to this exchange on Twitter:

  Deleted joke about Erika liking her old sex toys best: “she discovered that the things she wanted the most had been inside her all along”

  @laura_hudson Booooooo

  @dmeconis @laura_hudson YOU TAKE BACK THAT BOO RIGHT NOW, MECONIS.

  I live for moments like that.

• You know what I like to see? Kickstarters that run more smoothly than the creator anticipated; it helps when the creator’s done the crowdfunding production/fulfillment dance before, or when they’ve built in very generous timelines to be sure as to succeed, but it’s still a thrill². Now I don’t want to put pressure on, or set a creator up for unrealistic expectations, or maybe cause a jinx that makes a container ship founder at sea. But! It appears that Evan Dahm has had some unexpected good luck in the production of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz:
  

  Received the bookplates today and they look PERFECT. And I got proofs a little while ago, including some prints of individual pages to check the color. I was anticipating some back-and-forth on that, but in fact we are GOOD TO GO. Paying for the print run later this week!

  That’s great news — you pretty much never hear of a print run going with so little difficulty; there’s always several rounds of corrections and fixes, which can take weeks or months. The fact that Dahm (who has a keen eye for artwork and no patience for poor print jobs) struck gold on the first go-around is great news. The fact that he gave himself six months (from end of campaign in November to promised delivery date in May) to make good on his obligations doesn’t hurt. Underpromise and overdeliver and you’ll have happy customers.

Spam of the day:

Your children being privy to Safe Eyes monitoring their online activity will cooperate in undertaking healthy discussions that what exactly is safe and what on earth is unsafe.

You’re creeping me out and I don’t even have children. Stay the hell away from my entirely theoretical children.

_______________
¹ Hudson convinced her bosses to run the story on the basis of it’s kind of like talking about gadgets.

² Like all crowdfunding backers, I’m due some rewards waaaay past their promised dates. Out of the 40 projects I’ve backed on Kickstarter, I’d estimate maybe a third delivered as promised on time; 36 of the 40 have promised delivery dates in the past, with 8 of them yet to completely or partially fulfill, going back as far as early 2012.