We’ve got a confluence of comicking anniversaries (and anniversary-like events) going on just now, so let’s run ’em down.

• First up, the person whose work I’ve been reading longest without actually ever meeting in person is possibly Christopher Wright of Help Desk. It’s been around forever, although punctuated with numerous (and sometimes lengthy) periods of hiatus¹, and remains my favorite editorial comment on the world of computer vendors and technical trends. And when I say forever, I mean it:
  

  There were a few comic strips posted in online bulletin boards like CompuServe² (that’s where Kevin & Kell came from). A web magazine ought to have one too! After a few conversations with my father, where we traded horror stories of trying to get tech support to actually address the problems we were having, I made an off-the-cuff comment that it seemed like Help Desks were actually trained to convince the customer that the problem is their own fault instead of a product defect, and suddenly I realized I had a Theme.

  I created a few comics and sent them to Trevor Smith. He generally liked the idea, though he was wary about posting images that were as large as 13k (in 1996, 13k was a huge freaking file). But on March 31, 1996, the very first Help Desk was posted on line, in the archives section of OS/2 eZine. When the April edition came out, it actually appeared as a link on the front page.

  Heady days! They won’t last forever, though:

  That said, Help Desk is definitely winding down. I’m not ending it tomorrow or anything, but there’s not much chance it going 40 years. The computer industry isn’t nearly as much fun to make fun of as it used to be, because most of the relevant jokes involve courtrooms and lawyers and while the jokes aren’t bad the reality is depressing.

  …

  [A]nd anyway I’ve developed other interests: I’m much better writer than I ever was as a cartoonist, and this whole storytelling thing is awfully compelling, so I’m pretty sure as time goes on there will be more and more of that and less and less of clipart comics about Evil Computer Demons.

  All good things come to an end; it was worth it if only for Clippy³ getting cloned and various iterations going on perpetual tequila benders and/or murderous blood harvests.

• And as long as we’re talking about things coming to an end, we’ve mentioned that Meredith Gran’s Octopus Pie (which keeps getting better and weirder and more magical-realist I mean have you seen the last half–dozen updates?) is in the end stages. Pretty much every character has gotten their own story arc (some more than others — Marigold and Jane have become far more key to the story than I would have guessed when either was introduced) except for Manuel, and he wouldn’t stand still long enough for you to watch him anyway.

  But over on her Tumblr, Gran took some time to talk about her theory of endings and why they matter:

  My worst case scenario would be that it DOESN’T end. If it was one for the webcomic graveyard.

  You know that end. Frozen in time on its final page, that unremarkable page that neither resolves nor provokes. The page that perfectly encapsulates an artist’s final gasping shred of interest. The drawings on par with everything you’ve ever seen. The layouts woefully consistent. The facial expressions of characters you loved, eyes dead, lightly singed into your mind like a former desktop or lockscreen. Like a poster from your childhood bedroom that you see on Google Images once in a while.
  …
  That’s why when the OP cast is redesigned in hideous 3D and sings “Livin’ La Vida Loca” on the final page, I’ll feel I’ve done things right.

  I love that woman, I love her work, and I’m taking bets right now as to whether or not she actually does what she threatens for the final page. I’m putting the odds at 8:5 in favor.

• We’ve previously mentioned that KB Spangler of A Girl And Her Fed will be running commentary on old strips three times weekly starting Monday, in recognition that she’s been at this for ten years and all. Today, she let us in on some of her plans [she doesn’t do permalinks on her strip’s newsposts]:
  

  Anyhow. Beginning Monday, there’ll be the usual Big Anniversary Sale in the store, and I’ll be running the comics from the beginning with author commentary at agirlandherfed.tumblr.com. This should be fun! I love yelling at Past Me. She was a dick. [emphasis original]

  I hope that her yelling is restricted to things like Why did I decide to draw this thing that I hated drawing and now I’ve been drawing it for a decade, because honestly? She’s as far from being a dick as I can imagine, and Past Her was no different. She did have a wicked sense of humor, though.

• Lastly, the reason that I’m here talking to some number of people on the internet is that one day Jon Rosenberg suggested it over beers and it seemed like a good idea at the time. Jon’s also been at this webcomics thing for a long time:
  

  Friday is my 19th anniversary in comics. Fuck, I’m getting old.

  Bah. I just turned grunkle for the second time last week, so I don’t want to hear it, youngster. Also, happy strippingversary, you magnificent bastard.

Spam of the day:

Moving? See how Verizon makes it easier.

A) I’m not moving, and 2) The only thing Verizon makes is my inevitable death seem preferable to trying to get them to get this shit together and fix my fucking landline.

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¹ Similar to the other serious contender for the longest/never met title: Owen Dunne of You Damn Kid! and other fine comics.

² Ask your parents, or click here.

³ Don’t ask your parents, the wounds are still too fresh.

Sometimes, it’s the things that you didn’t even look for that you realize you wanted the most. After a series of tentative steps back into comicking — new art, new blogs — Achewood has come back with three new strips in three weeks. Reached for comment, Achewood fan and Fleen editor Gary Tyrrell described himself as cautiously optimistic.

The hiatus — unlooked-for when it happens, often equally unlooked-for when it ends — it by no means a phenomenon unique to the knuckleheads of Achewood Heights. The various denizens of Ubersoft have spent long stretches apart from prying eyes, but just as Achewood was getting back up to speed, Help Desk has not only been dropping new strips, but has done so daily this week. Regard: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and today. The strips are listed as being one-off rather than part of a storyline, but one likes to think that just perhaps we’ll get a nice chunk of tech support shenanigans to make the dreary wintertide less dreary.

Fleen thanks Chris Onstad and Christopher B Wright for their efforts, and appreciates any future strips in advance.

Spam of the day:

From hair oil to cricket, wherever Amitabh Bachchan has his name hooked up in just one way or perhaps the other he assures achievement.

Ohhhhh-kay.

There are things that you want to get right, I mean really right. Like when Robert Khoo sits you down in front of a laptop and says I’m going to show you the beginning of the first episode of Strip Search, you want to make sure that your scribbled notes get bashed into something resembling actual coherence before they see the light of day. It’s just polite, and while I’m pretty sure that Khoo hasn’t ever had a blogger killed for badly mangling information, I also don’t want to be the test case. So Strip Search news tomorrow, and other things today.

• Firstly, Christopher Wright (of Help Desk and other computery comics) got down to some serious technical forensics over the weekend, looking at a latter-day webring/ad service called InkOUTBREAK and what appears to be a mechanism whereby they deliver ads that are not visible to the reader, to the webcomic that they’re running on, or anybody other than the mechanical code that counts up things like impressions. There’s no part of this that I can quote without lessening the impact that it should have, so go read the entire thing now, please.

  Wright’s key points, as I read them, are:

  • Ads that a webcomic creator cannot see, and did not agree to, are running without the knowledge of anybody outside of InkOUTBREAK
  • Since the creator can’t see them, if there’s a dangerous payload in one of those ads, they have no way of dealing with the issue, and will be the ones blamed by malware warnings when they can’t clear them out
  • Ads that aren’t visible but which appear to be counting towards impressions skate a line between “questionably ethical” and “fraudulent”

  Brian King of InkOUTBREAK responds to Wright’s analysis in the comments, and his argument boils down to Oops, old code, was supposed to be removed, sorry you encountered an old build. Given Wright’s conclusion that the code in question was designed to specifically hide the extra ads from any casual (or not so casual) inspection, you can decide for yourself how much King’s explanation is plausible. Whatever the truth of the matter is, InkOUTBREAK is going to have its code very closely examined by a large number of people in the future, I’d imagine.

• Scott Kurtz’s long-teased Table Titans launches today, and it is one handsome site. I’m still hunting around and finding new content, which includes gaming stories; creatures and gaming techniques from contributors to gaming systems; bloggings; and oh yeah — a longform story comic running Tuesdays and Thursdays. It’s a heck of a lot more than I was expecting, and looks to be a labor of love that Kurtz will value at least as much as PvP. With the variety and volume of content (daily!), it’s less a “webcomic” and more a “full-service portal” and one that a lot of people I know will be watching very closely.
• Received in the mail over the weekend along with an unrelated book order: one Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff collector’s coin, such as one might find in the SBAHJ Hardcover extravaganza. The obverse has a three-quarters bust of Sweet Bro¹, and the reverse proclaims WINNER. It is the most pointlessly beautiful thing I have ever seen and will become an heirloom of my house, passed down the line of descent like even unto the Ring of Barahir².

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¹ The spot where the artist’s signature or initials would normally appear on a coin reads “sign”. That’s with the quotes and everything.

² That one was for you, Aaron.

One of the most fascinating discussions I’ve ever had with a creator was when Jim Zub were chatting off the record at NYCC 2011 and he broke down the numbers on making Skullkickers, with the somewhat depressing conclusion that it was costing him money to put out each issue. When I spoke to him after Skullkickers launched on Keenspot, giving away what he was already in the hole for, his readership was (comparatively) through the roof:

In our first week at Keenspot we had more unique IP visits (i.e.: new readers) than all three printings of Skullkickers #1 combined.

All those readers for free, instead of paying out of pocket to reach them! By SDCC 2012, while it still cost him out of pocket to put out the floppies (to those of us that needs our fix of mayhem), there was now an upside in trade sales:

I’m at a show and somebody says, “I love Skullkickers!”, so I ask them where they know if from, and it’s always online. So then I get to tell them, “Oh, we’re running pages from issue three online now … and we just released issue thirteen to stores.” Ten issues they haven’t seen, and there’s the trade collection sitting on the table and they have to have it.

The hard numbers are what make up the by now widely-spread blogpost that Zub put up yesterday on the economics of creator-owned comics, using a 5000-copy print run of a single issue costing three bucks. He’s adjusted some numbers to make it more accurate than in its original incarnation, which has had the effect of changing the money left over for the creative team (after distribution, printing, and publishing costs) from the pathetic US$31.50 to the slightly less pathetic US$37.50 per page on a 20 page comic. I’ve heard you’re doing pretty good in the comics game if you can produce a single finished page per day, so yeah — we’re talking well below minimum wage (split among all the creators, not just the artist), and approaching restaurant waiter with no tips territory.

For everybody who’s ever wondered, why webcomics? There’s your answer — the webcomics angle is what drives enough readers to the reprints to make this a not-quite-break-even enterprise; were Zub to abandon the monthly floppies and adopt a purely web+reprint volumes model (aka “Going Foglio”), he might even make a modest sum (in the future, well after paying his artists). We’ll have to wait until Zub shares the numbers on trade sales, convention sales (no distributor! no store!), digital sales, and website ad revenue to draw real conclusions, but for those who are wondering what kind of madman would go to all that work and not make any money:

Believe it or not, I’m not bitter about all of this. It’s the price of doing business in the mainstream comic industry via retail outlets and international distribution. That’s how it works. I just want to make it very clear so people understand what I mean when I say I’m not getting rich making my own comic. Skullkickers is the most expensive hobby I’ve ever had.

It’s that compulsion to create, even without material reward (and figuring out the slowest way to lose money on that creation) that also gets a discussion in Christopher Wright’s discussion of how he learned to stop worrying and love self-publishing. Wright found himself unable to Chucke aside the notion that self-publishing was for

• Deluded authors who were being played by vanity press outfits
• Failed authors who had more ego than talent

getting scammed by vanity presses. Even with more than a dozen years of producing Help Desk under his belt, it took a period of years to realize that webcomicking is self-publishing, and all of the arguments made against it (at least, where you aren’t paying a vanity press thousands of dollars to do things you could easily do yourself) are essentially the same as the arguments made against webcomics in their infancy. It’s an excellent companion piece to Zub’s thoughts, and well worth your time.

Awesome, I might get to use the naked wrestler guy graphic again! Longtime readers of this page may recall that Steven “Cloudy” Cloud, he of fiercesome beardery and hiatused comicking once drove to Mongolia from London in a Nissan Micra for charity and adventure.

Apparently, every half decade some webcomiker or other has to do this damn-fool thing this is now a tradition, and Pontus Madsen & Christian Fundin from Little Gamers will, with friends, be fielding two three-man teams in the 2013 Mongol Charity Rally This involves driving from Sweden to Ulan Baator, Mongolia in two tiny-ass cars via central Europe, Russia, and a series of countries whose names end in -stan.

Want to see six grown men do something incredibly unpredictable to benefit two charities? Team Venture has an Indiegogo page set up so you can kick a few bucks in and send them on the adventure of a lifetime and/or hurtling to their dooms. I suppose it depends on whether you like them or not.

Oh, and should you, like the members of Team Venture, ever find yourself at an ex-Soviet checkpoint in the middle of absolutely nowhere, being pestered by a man with a uniform and a Kalashnikov¹ for a bribe? Cloudy says the secret is to enthusiastically smile and nod and thank them profusely until they figure that you just don’t understand them and send you on your way. It’s possible at some point in the negotiation they just decide to shoot you, but I’m pretty sure that Cloud’s beard made him bulletproof, so maybe that’s why he made it home safe. Look, just don’t die out there and we’ll call it good, okay?

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¹ Fun fact: Mikhail Kalashnikov is still alive.

Who likes numbers? Sure, we all do, but what numbers should we talk about?

• From the wilds of the Pacific Northwest comes the news that Penny Arcade are shifting publishers, with Oni Press getting the nod this time. On the one hand, this shift¹ could lead some to wonder if Mike and Jerry are capable of forming long-lasting bonds of commitment. It’s not you, baby, they tell Random House imprint Del Rey, it’s us. Alas, the trail of broken hearts is long, with other exes in their history, but considering one of them was a vanity press that screwed Jerry and Mike sideways, maybe a little fear of commitment is a good thing.

  On the other hand, Oni Press means that they’re getting the love and attention of a good man — the best man — in the person of George Rohac. Besides shepherding the Benign Kingdom project to Kickstarter superstar statues, George is a man who cannot be destroyed except that he returns under his own power. His smiles last through anything, and good thing too for us all. He reserves his hatred for forces of nature and his punchings for problems². And Yuko. What I am saying is that Penny Arcade are likely in good hands.

• I think I can be forgiven for missing the date (especially seeing as how the creator missed it as well), but Help Desk turned sixteen years old on three days ago. Granted, a chunk of that history was in print, or subject to occasionally-lengthy hiatuses (hiati?), but it’s been there in one form or another, finding new variations on the theme for 2065 comics³ and counting. Happy (belated) birthday to Help Desk, and happy stripperversary to Christopher Wright.

  Edit to correct: As Mr Wight points out in the comments, Help Desk was never in print and I am an idiot; it was originally published as part of an online magazine. Fleen regrets the error.

• If there were only 72 websites in the world that you should pay attention to in 2012, what would #61 (alphabetically) be? TopatoCo. From the Maximum PC list/declaration/manifesto:
  

  Topatoco Web artists make our lives better by publishing their work on the web for free. You can make sure your favorite artist has food, shelter, online access, ink, paper, and other necessities of life by shopping at Topatoco; buy T-shirts, books, coffee cups, and lots of other art-emblazoned goodies.

  All of which are valid points, but which I think might miss the most wonderful thing about TopatoCo — the customer service experience, which is snarky, informative, timely, and offers the opportunity to interact with members of the Great and Bountiful TopatoCo Empire in curious and wonderful ways. Well done, you crazy, magnificent bastards.

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¹ By my count, this would make Oni the fourth publisher of Penny Arcade books, but I’ll have to check my bookshelf when I get home.

² Which wisely decide it’s a good time to be elsewhere.

³ Which is equivalent to one comic every 2.83 days on average across the total time period.

Regular readers of this page (both of you — hi, Rick; hi, Helen) know that I don’t let Javascript load on my browser without a damn good reason, but when Jess Fink tweets about awesome comics that can only be done online, and they require it? That’s a damn good reason.

Hobo Lobo of Hamelin is a take on the old Pied Piper story, but one that achieves a depth (both visually and storywise) that’s almost unique. The art is laid out in different planes, at varying distances from the viewer, and which move at different rates as you scroll from left to right. It would look like a storybook without the Javascript effects, but with it, you become an observer — but not quite a participant — in something that’s not animated in the usual sense of the word, but in the original sense: the scene has been brought to life.

Hobo Lobo is made by Stevan Živadinović, and you can see the progress of the story on his About page; he’s powered through a nominal three pages since 26 Jan 2011, but considering that a “page” consists of as many as 17th multi-field “panels” (which run continuously together, not like the panels you’re used to), the updates every couple days are a pretty impressive feat. Best of all, Živadinović is open to sharing his code which makes this parallax-as-comics possible, so we may see more sites that merit the inclusion of Javascript for actual reasons in the future.

Speaking of Neat Things:

• Shopping for the various end-of-year holidays continues apace, and webcomickers (many of whom derive from these end-of-year sales intangibles like rent) want you to remember to buy stuff from them. But because they’re a collegial bunch, all over the place you’ll find creators that a pointing their readers towards colleagues with neat stuff. You got your neatly-formatted, easy-to-browse version from Mr Willis, your full-of-pictures version from Mr Guigar, your enthusiastic version from Ms Corsetto … basically, start at any of those pages (or from your favorite webcomicker’s front page), follow a link to an esteemed colleague, and you’ll likely find more recommendations to follow. Happy Propping Up of a Tottering Economy with Consumer Spending Holidays!
• The third chapter of Tyler Page’s Raised on Ritalin has released, and hoo boy, it’s a good ‘un. Moving away from the personal history portion of the story for a bit, Page engages in a Larry Gonick-like exploration of brain function, the history of amphetamines, and how Ritalin in particular came to be used for ADD and similar disorders in children (despite the fact that we’re not quite sure how it works). Fascinating stuff, and just the breather necessary before we dive back into Page’s personal story.
• Webcomics readers may recall that Help Desk creator Christopher Wright has, on occasion, been slightly erratic with his timetable. From a starting point in 1996, he’s sometimes gone months or even most of a year between updates. But (and this is a big but), he’s always come back. And when his life permits him to get into the proverbial groove, he knocks down updates like nobody’s business.

  Which is pretty much what he’s been doing since the end of October, cranking out the Monday-to-Friday releases like they were going out of style. As a result, he dropped the 1997th episode of Help Desk today, putting him on track to hit the Big Round Number of 2000 on Friday. As we all know, 2000 updates is the number that separates the adults from the children, and if there are a few more comics to have hit that threshold than back in 2008, it’s still pretty damn impressive.

Missed it in my trawl yesterday, only found it in clearing out RSS entries, and it would have been perfect in my discussion of longevity and migrating to webcomicking:

Fifteen years ago today Help Desk was born. To be more specific, on March 31, 1996, Help Desk debuted in OS/2 e-Zine!, a web magazine covering the OS/2 operating system.

A’course, Christopher Wright had a bit of a different journey than Larry Lewis, and there have been lengthy hiatuses (hiatii?) but still … fifteen years. That’s a long damn time. and Wright and Lewis probably have a lot more in common than they have different:

I feel incredibly lucky to have been able to do this for as long as I have. The last few years haven’t been particularly easy for me, or for this comic. This is an out-of-pocket venture—at best, revenue generated from banner ads offsets my server fees, more commonly it simply mitigates them, and I operate at a loss—and as I’ve mentioned before there are risks associated with working this way. That said, the advantage is that I’ve had the freedom to pursue this comic and my additional projects exactly the way I wanted to, and how many people can actually say that about anything in their lives?

Wright concludes with a list of goals, and I must draw your attention to one of them, because I think it neatly encompasses the feelings of not just webcomickers, not just creative types, but of everybody. It’s a universal desire, and one that I’m pretty sure Wright will make good on, and sooner rather than later:

Show them. Show them all.

Feel free to insert maniacal laughter, and join me in congratulating Christopher Wright on fifteen years.

Also, it’s on pretty serious hiatus right now, but today marks fourteen years of Goats. The art started, um, a trifle rough, but it got much better pretty quickly. I don’t know when Rosenberg will have the time to get back to Goats (there’s some family health issues that should resolve themselves in the coming weeks¹), but that’s okay.

In the fourteen years since comic-Jon and comic-Phillip started their comic-love affair with slackery and beer (real-Jon and real-Phillip, naturally, were well established in those patterns years prior), Rosenberg started and finished multiple other webcomics (look up Patent Pending or Worlds of Peril via the Wayback Machine, or browse through the MEGAGAMERZ 3133t archives, or enjoy the funky-fresh Scenes From A Multiverse), and continues to have more ideas per second squared than any three other people you’ve ever heard of².

Jon’s also the reason you’re reading this — he was the one that prompted me to take on the writing/editing duties here at Fleen, and it’s because of his introductions that I’ve met so many of the best, most creative, and generally wonderful people in the world. So if you’ve ever found anything I’ve ever written here to be even slightly of interest, he is a big part of why. Do me a favor and give @jonrosenberg a little love³, hey?

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¹ Go, Team Babies!
² Except for Rich Stevens; dude’s a caffeine-fueled idea machine with no off switch.
³ Also, expect him to freak out slightly if you tell him that I told you to give him some love. Despite our history, I’m not allowed to touch him; long story.

If you thought that Ryan Estrada was going to go heads-down and radio silent during the One Month Animated Feature challenge and we’d see what he had been up to on New Year’s Day, we got a treat for you. No, not you, Christopher Wright who has placed my moustache on notice, this information isn’t for you¹. For everybody else, Estrada has released teaser designs of his major characters and linked them to their voice actors, including some webcomics luminaries. You got yer Kurtz ‘n’ Straub, naturally, but also Steve Wolfhard, animator Barney Wornoff, and nemesis to podcasters/John Allison lackey/semi-pro Stan Lee Channeller Kevin McShane.

And for your listening pleasure, a voice track of Straub and Kurtz that hints at the plot of what may be called The Alias Men. It appears that the aliens want to rob Earth of its most precious resource, scarce throughout the known universe: free WiFi. More, including Estrada’s MacGyvering-up of a lightbox out of string and chewing gum, at the project’s Tumblr or Estrada’s Ell-Jay.

• Meanwhile, there’s a pretty nifty, not-quite-noirish murder mystery webcomic that wrapped up today — She Died In Terrebonne ran for just about a year, and it featured a beginning, middle, end, and coda in just over fifty pages. If you’ve got a spare hour, read the whole thing through from the beginning, and maybe check out the other webcomics work from writer Kevin Church, of which there are multiple worthy examples, with a variety of talented artists.
• I have mentioned Skin Horse by Shaenon Garrity and Jeffrey Wells on this page plenty of times, mostly because it’s awesome. On my more restrained days (such as back in July of 2009) I may describe it as:
  

  [O]ne of the highlights of my day, because what can possibly be wrong about a webcomic that deals primarily with paranormal-managing government bureaucrats who subtly recall the less-well-known Oz books and gets regularly cranked up to about 14 on the Insane-o-Meter? Unstoppable zombies, talking dogs, killer robots, crystalline entities, baby cobras that only want hugs, opera-loving silverfish, a likely-undiagnosed-Asperger’s brain transplanted into a military airframe, and a transvestite psychologist who bags all the babes?

  And it’s drawn by Shaenon Garrity, the one person able to compete with Ryan North for the title of Nexus of All Webcomics Realities?

  But not enough of you are reading it. I say this not because I have any inside information on what Skin Horse’s readership numbers are like, but merely because not every person on the planet is revelling in the fun. For a limited time, you may now get in on said fun for a super-bargain discount — for December only, get both Skin Horse books (two full years of strips) for twenty dollars American cash money (plus shipping and handling), representing a nearly 30% discount. If nothing else entices you, it is the one webcomic I know of that has ever paid proper respect to New Jersey’s contribution to traffic engineering: the dedicated left-turn lane/jughandle. Thank you Mr Wells and Ms Garrity, and you’re welcome, rest of the world.

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¹ Oh boy, is this my new Internet Feud? My previous nemesis, The Midnight Cartooner over at Digital Strips, has been really quiet about our internet grudgery for a while now.

NEWW2 (Electric Boogaloo) is nearly upon us! Glee! Also, you have approximately 43.5 hours as of this writing to pre-order your badge, after which it’s first-come, first-serve.

• Ryan Pequin: nascent moustache guy. Mr Pequin is growing out the facial hair for charity during the month of November (although not reekin’ of tainted CO-LOG-NUM). Which just kind of begs the question — wouldn’t a November-based moustachery effort call for The Zappa? I’m telling you nice peoples, The Zappa always gets overlooked, even when moustaches get the love (photo courtesy David Willis).
• Spread far and wide via twittering over Halloween weekend: His Face All Red by Emily Carroll. Moody, spooky, gorgeously illustrated, and subject to multiple interpretations. This is incredibly good work and if you’re the one person that statistically hasn’t seen it yet, let me add my voice to the chorus that you really ought to.
• The possibly-annual-again Friends of Lulu Awards were held over the weekend at the Long Beach Comic Con, and the Lulu of the Year award (“For the creator, book or other entity whose work best exemplifies Friends of Lulu’s mission statement”) went to Kate Beaton. Since Ms Beaton is ridiculously talented, and is becoming more and more widely recognized with each passing day, this seems only meet and proper. Everybody be happy for Kate!
• If you’ve been over to the (recently rebuilt) site of Christopher Wright’s long-running (and recently back from hiatus) Help Desk, you may have noticed a series of posts regarding some technical aspects of running independent websites. Something about “encrypted cookies” and “signed certificates” and my head hurts, ouch (that last part was me, not Wright). Fortunately, he broke the issue into short sentences in an email:
  

  So here’s the deal. A lot of us who run our own sites don’t really have a really technical background or any deep knowledge of the finer points in securing a website. Unfortunately, the plugin I’m talking about in my post potentially hurts us and our readers more than your average web administrator because we don’t know these things, and it’s something we’re going to have to start thinking about.

  Larger sites are probably more at risk because they have users who are more likely to register accounts, but at the same time they probably have more resources (and tech-savvy assistance) to work around the problem. The rest of us either have to take the time to learn how to adapt, or to get used to driving down a back road at 150mph in a car without seatbelts that can swerve off the road without warning.

  The plugin that Wright mentioned is for Firefox, and it’s called Firesheep; in a nutshell, it allows somebody to piggyback onto the logged-in sessions of others (primarily over WiFi) by sniffing cookies out of the air. There’s a very good primer on what it all means over at El Reg, and the aforementioned series of posts (which really won’t hurt your head) detail Wright’s attempts to secure his site against the threat that Firesheep represents. The last one is pretty close to a step-by-step guide, so make sure you read it carefully even if you just skim the others.

  Bottom line (and Wright is to be commended for both recognizing the threat, and wanting to spread the word in the webcomics community), if you run your own site and have accounts, you need to re-think your processes. If you don’t run your own site and have accounts, you need to get the people that run it for you to re-think your processes. Do it now before you get compromised.

Work crisis, things are on fire (only half-metaphorically). Briefly:

• Achewood is on the verge of upending a relationship that’s been there since Day One. Phillippe going back to live with his mother? Almost inconceivable.
• Today, Help Desk turns 14.
• Tomorrow, Goats turns thirteen, and per the the traditions of its creator, becomes a man. I guess that means that if this was the first Goats, then this would be the day of its bris.
• That mental image you have stuck in your head right now? You’re welcome.