Even though I’ve got excellent, real-time backups, there’s still a moment of uncertainty as my finger hovers over the button that says Update Now.

• Speaking of fingers, mine is doing much better, thanks for asking; if you looked at it today you’d figure I’d had a particularly nasty papercut combined with an overly-aggressive session with the nail clippers. It’s still kinda painful if I get overly exciting while typing, but nothing too terrible. I bring this up because we are approaching open enrollment time for health insurance, and if you’re new to having insurance (thank you, ACA), you may not have had experience with renewing insurance.

  Long story short, there will be a fixed period of time that your insurer will notify you of, and that’s when you have to decide what kind of plan you want for next year. Guys, you want a plan. How much do you want a plan? Consider this — I got my insurance benefit statement for my little trip to the Emergency Department two weeks ago, and if not for that insurance my momentary bout of kitchen stupidity would have cost me nearly two thousand damn dollars.

  So consider this my semi-regular plea that you self-employed folks take the time to investigate this very carefully, because guess what? A cheapo high-deductible plan that’s meant to cover only catastrophes wouldn’t help in a situation like this; until we get this entirely bitched-up system of healthcare delivery properly fixed, you’ve got to have insurance if you don’t want something small to put you into potentially crippling debt.

• So what should I do with all the money I saved on EMERGENCY SERVICES and STERILE SUPPLIES and DRUGS/OTHER¹? How about buying a metric crap-load² of cartoonist interviews? Hivemind filmmaker Freddave Kellett-Schroeder have a limited-time sale going on for all the extras associated with STRIPPED:
  

  STRIPPED SUPER AWESOME DELUXE EDITION

  ON SALE UNTIL FRIDAY! SAVE 39%!
  Get over 26 HOURS of additional content!
  WHAAAAAAT

  Compare to other editions:

  • Basic film: US$14.99 (10 DCPWH)
  • Deluxe Edition (film plus director’s commentary, 30 minutes of various interviews, full Jim Davis interview): US$19.99 (5.7 DCPWH)
  • Bonus Material 1 (Deluxe Edition plus 14 more interviews adding up to 16 hours): US$34.99 (2 DCPWH)
  • Bonus Material 2 (seven more interviews, including a nearly three hour extravaganza with Kurtz, Straub & Guigar, almost 12 hours inall): US$16 (1.3 DCPWH)

  Those numbers in parentheses after the prices are the dollar cost per watchable hours ratios; At US$40 and equal to the content of both Bonus Material packages, the SADE features almost 29 hours of video for less than 75 cents per hour. The only reason to hold off on this is if — like me — you hold out hope for a full release of all 300 hours of footage, in an Ultra Super Awesome Deluxe 75 disc boxed set.

• Speaking of Brad Guigar (and honestly, why wouldn’t we speak of Brad Guigar?), if you’re like me you miss regular Guigar-heavy podcasts. Well, this is your lucky day, because the only thing better than a Guigar podcast is a multi-Guigar podcast:
  

  It’s official. The boys and I are podcasters. Subscribe to “Hey Comics — Kids!” on iTunes: http://ow.ly/BCMLv

  Everybody that always thought those other guys were holding Brad back during Webcomics Weekly, now’s your chance to swim in pure, uncut Guigar: Brad’s teamed up with his sons, Alex and Max, to talk about comics (or honestly, whatever pops into their heads … they are Guigars, after all) and they now have the imprimatur of Apple. Just listen carefully: science has hypothesized that if three or more Guigars end up in simultaneous laugh loops (click here, skip forward to the seven and a half minute mark, and glob have mercy), insanity may be the result.

Spam of the day:

Inspiring story there. What occurred after? Thanks!

nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnd.

I’m sorry, what was the question?

________________
¹ The DRUGS/OTHER category featured a charge of one (1) dollar, and hell if I can figure out what it was for. I didn’t get any drugs. Oh, and it’s worth mentioning that the billing category that equates to you showed up in the ER and sat on a bed was the largest charge; the one that represented the PA fixed your damn-fool finger was a couple hundo less.

² Or 2.54 imperial crap-loads, if you prefer.