Couple of Howards to talk about today. Weird how that works out.

• I’m either one day late or two days early on this, but there’s something fairly tremendous is going on with my evil twin:
  

  Calling it: 6pm, July 21, 2020, I finished inking the last Schlock Mercenary strip of my 7,345-day run of daily-without-fail updates.

  Except I got the math wrong. 7,348. Because Friday is still three days off.

  I speak, naturally, of the fact that Howard Tayler, the indefatigable machine of webcomics, was working with only a two day buffer.

  Oh, and the 20 years, 1 month, 1 week, and 5 day streak, that’s important too.

  MET will be taking some well-earned time off and some overdue attention to his health, which has been challenging for some time now. And I want to be very clear about something as I add my congratulations to those of pert-near everybody: Howard, buddy, evil twin from a mirror dimension, you waited too long to take these three months. I think that somewhere along the line the idea of having a single, uninterrupted story became more important than it should have, and you neglected yourself to a degree you should not have.

  And while Tayler is being lauded for his achievement — and rightfully so! — we, all of us who are holding up this achievement and maybe shifting our expectations a little bit to the no skip days ever side of the spectrum need to remember that behind that beloved strip we never want to wait for an update from? There’s one or more people whose obligations is first and foremost to their own well being.

  I’m guilty of over-emphasizing the streak aspect of Tayler’s longevity in webcomics as much as anybody, and wish I could go back to every anniversary or Big Round Number when I extolled his achievement and excise however many mentions of and he did it without skipping any days, with its unspoken, not serious (but not entirely unserious) subtext of now get back to the drawing board, Comic Boy, and entertain me.

  You done good, Howard. I expect that you are going to sleep in until next Tuesday or so, and I expect everybody that is making noise about the capital-A Achievement to resolve to purchase stuff from his store, as well as to resolve that we don’t place such expectations on his next project, or any other creator, ever again. Deal? Deal.

• Speaking of misplaced emphasis, I want to point you to the most clueless, self-proclaimed Kickstarter expert of 2020. Dude (of course it’s a dude) emailed C Spike Trotman with a mealy-mouthed, faintly negging description of the latest Iron Circus Kickstart, offering to make it successful.

  Spike. This Spike, who apparently would be incapable of making a success from a horror anthology by Abby freakin’ Howard without taking the extremely important step of … paying some rando thirty five bucks.

  Don’t be this guy. And get a copy of The Crossroads At Midnight which, granted, has a pretty hefty shipping charge associated but it’s also 380 damn pages long full of Howardian goodness unsettling creepiness. Maybe don’t read it alone in the dark.

Today In SDCC@Home:
The virtual show floor is live, which allows you to click on a booth’s exhibitor and see if they have any merch specials. Panels start in a couple of hours (as I write this).

Spam of the day:

Sterilizes and cleans your room within 30-60 minutes

Ooooh, a UV gizmo with a rechargable battery! Know what’ll sterilize and clean (those are actually different things) my room in 30-60 minutes? Me, with a rag and a 10% bleach solution in a bucket.

Scared by fancy percent-type numbers? Get a bucket of water, add bleach until it smells about twice as strong as the chlorine a pool. Wipe surfaces, allow to air-dry at least four minutes. Kills everything you’re promising plus more stuff including the novel coronavirus. Used exactly this method last night to clean up all the blood that a trauma patient with a head injury thoughtfully left on our stretcher cushion.