Hoo boy, when Dr Dante Shepherd posted to Twitter last night about the hate mail that today’s Surviving the World would bring, he wasn’t kidding. Because — professor that he is — he’s laid out the rhetorical equivalent of a chemical reaction that describes freedom on one side, lives on the other, and asks if the two parts are actually in balance.

Just … just read the whole thing, and then take five minutes to think about what he’s actually saying before you decide he’s an enemy of freedom and needs to die, okay? To quote my favorite line from one of my favorite movies on the topic of freedom, Well, in all my years I ain’t never heard, seen nor smelled an issue that was so dangerous it couldn’t be talked about. Hell yeah! I’m for debating anything. His position is that the freedom that some demand requires (as does all freedom) a sacrifice that is being paid by others who don’t have the chance to object; if you’re going to contact him in high dudgeon, answer that point.

On decidedly lighter notes:

• I smell crossover! The latest storyline at Not Invented Here is about to collide with Unshelved, which isn’t totally surprising given that a) they’re both written by Bill Barnes, and b) NIH launched with an explicit acknowledgment that it and Unshelved share a reality. To the book depository!
• Promised Kickstarter updates: the Oh Joy, Sex Toy print collection and Girls With Slingshots book tour campaigns wrapped up last night, with totals of US$69,270¹ and US$36,676 respectively. In both cases, they fell within the margin of error of the original FFF, but not the new, stil-under-development FFFmk2. Nobody said that it would be easy to reduce something as complex as Kickstarter funding to a simple calculation, but I shall persist.

  But let’s not lose fact of the important part: Danielle Corsetto and Erika Moen will both be giving considerably more money to guest artists than they would have otherwise, and both demolished their original goals (GWS: 367% of goal OJST: 385% of goal), and that’s worth celebrating in any circumstances. Well done, ladies, now get your ass on the road/get bare asses in print!

Spam of the day:

Ralph Lauren is definitely an outline to the American dream: the long grass, antique crystal , the name Marble horse . His product , no matter whether clothing or furniture , deciding on perfume or containers, have focused on the top of the class customers yearning for an ideal life .

I don’t know; I’ve always found Ralph Lauren to be kind of schizophrenic, yo-yoing back and forth between cowboy kitsch and snooty aristocratic aesthetics. I guess they both feature lots of horsies.

_______________
¹ Damn you, anonymous donor that gave US$1 at the last minute and ruined the US$69,269 total!

A number of Kickstarts to follow up on today. Let’s take a look, shall we?

• We’ve just reached the midpoint of Augie and the Green Knight’s campaign, and is flirting with US$260,000 in funding. At this point in their 30-day campaigns, To Be Or Not To Be: That Is The Adventure was sitting about US$250,000 (43% of an eventual US$581K) and The Tomorrow Girl was about US$320,000 (or 61% of an eventual US$535K). I chose those two projects for comparison because of the similar level of popularity of their creators, and the similarity of the project: a pure book in fancy packaging (like TTG) that spawned lots of related-media spinoffs (like TBoNTB).

  Assuming a similar trajectory, AatGK is about 52% +/- 9% of its way to final total, putting it in the range of US$498K +/- let’s call it US$45K. Given my original prediction was US$400K +/- US$134K, we certainly seem to be heading for the high end of that range, and the 3rd or 4th most-funded publishing project¹ of all time (and probably the #1 children’s book).

  Oh, yeah, and the audiobook is going to be narrated by Ellen McClain, a factor which isn’t actually juicing the total. See, author Zach Weinersmith and Breadpig have decided that all supporters of any reward (that’s US$10 and up) will get the audiobook. Had they required supporters to get a physical reward (US$25 and up), I’m pretty sure you would have seen a majority of the nearly 700 bottom-tier backers upping their pledges by US$15 each — but Weinersmith isn’t in this for the money. He just wants to get a story with a kick-ass heroine out into as many hands as possible.

• Finishing soon: Danielle Corsetto’s summer tour funding, and Hurricane Erika’s book-kicker, both of whom are about three days from finishing, both of whom are getting into the end-of-campaign uptick, and both of whom at this point are applying pretty much every extra dollar to other people.

  Thanks to their backers, Corsetto (as of this writing) is paying each of her guest artists an extra US$100 per strip while she’s on tour, and Moen (ditto) is bumping her guest artists (future and — crucially — also past guest artists) to US$90 per page (the average strip being 4-5 pages). Both ladies are at their top of their respective games, both of them deserve your support for their own work, and both of them deserve it even more because they’re supporting other creators in a tangible, food-and-rent fashion.

• Long since finished, but you can still get in on the Kickstart backing because they’re nice guys: the Christopher Hastings-inspired card game of ninja combat and awesomeness is about to start shipping, meaning you have mere days left to pre-order at the same pricepoints and bundles as the original Kickstart. You might not have gotten your act together last November, but now your can get KS-exclusive rewards because they think you’re still pretty cool.
• Not Kickstarter-related, but worth your attention in its own terrifying way: Paradox Space, the official place for official works set in the Homestuck offical extended universe, has finally gotten around to a Sweet Bro and Hell Of Jeff story. The madness descends once again, this time springing from the fertile, febrile imagination of KC Green, a match so perfect that it defies imagination. Dear readers: Summer Sea Fun is the last comic you need ever read.

Spam of the day:

aspect each in the costs for that mortgage, particularly when it is possible to find unnecessary service fees apart from the fascination. [sic throughout]

Apart from the fascination? Is the fascination not enough for you?

_______________
¹ That Planet Money shirt is still not publishing, and screw squirrels anyway.

Ian Jones-Quartey is an old friend of this page; we at Fleen have followed him since before there was a Fleen, even before mention of his first webcomic didn’t cause him to threaten to delay its return by a month. We have bar-crawled with him, attended weddings with him, discussed tacos with him, and been generally impressed to hell and back with him.

All that history just got reset; today is the first day of Anno Jones-Quartey, a new calendar marked by the time that Ian JQ dropped some serious wisdom:

[Tumblr question]: Being that you’re an industry expert, I was hoping if there were any tips or advice you can give to an aspiring Animation Series creator. Any lessons you’ve learned from working in the industry from so many years. What advice would you give yourself if you were starting out trying to get you’re animation picked up by a major network?

[Answer]:Yeah I have a big piece of advice! Stop “aspiring”!!!!! Your aspirations end now!!!!

YES YOU! DON’T WAIT! START NOW! [emphasis original]

Jones-Quartey goes on for some length, and every bit of it is worth reading and absorbing, whatever field of creative endeavour you may find yourself in. If you can read through the entire thing and not feel compelled to murder Aspiration in favor of Doing, then you weren’t ever going to Do anyway. Well done, Mr JQ; if nothing else you’ve prompted me to get off my ass about a particular project I’ve been kicking around for way too damn long.

• No note, no celebration, just another strip (the 5114th if my math is correct): 14 years of Schlock Mercenary from my evil twin, who has come a considerable way from Day One (or Day Minus 5114, BJ-Q). Thanks for all the laughs and mayhem, Howard.
• As many suspected might happen, STRIPPED will be showing at San Diego Comic Con on Friday night:
  

  Cool! @strippedfilm will be screening at the official San Diego Comic-Con Film Festival, Friday July 25th. Join us if you’re at SDCC!

  I’ve seen it a bunch of times now, but I think I want to see it on a large screen surrounded by people.

• Oh, nuthin’, just an awesome Bee & Puppycat by Becky Dreistadt, no big deal.

Advance warning: almost no chance of a posting tomorrow, as I have to get up stupid-early for a cross-continent flight that will occupy me pretty much all day. Enjoy the weekend.

You wouldn’t think so, but it is — that’s the number of pieces in the latest Baffler! from Chris Yates, the 3000th in the series. Five layers deep, colors all but indistinguishable from layer to layer, it’s a work of art. Serious enquiries only, please.

Other Big Round Numbers to note:

• If I’ve followed the news a’right, today marks the 4000th strip at Unshelved. That’s a lot of stories from the library (what, didn’t you know that every single Unshelved strip, including the most horrifying ones, are completely true and taken directly from writer Gene Ambaum’s life?). Congrats to the webcomics power duo of Ambaum and Bill Barnes, and here’s to another 4000.
• Hey, know what’s almost the same as 4000 strips? 400. What? It’s only one digit different. Anyways, fans of the Greatest Superhero Ever will want to make a special effort to see what Wonderella’s up to on Saturday, as that will be strip #400. I bet she jumps hella high and also yells at Hitlerlla and maybe also teaches a lesson. It’s what superheroes do.

Not big round numbers:

• Boulet paints the iconic image from Augie and the Green Knight in only five and a half minutes (with a little help from YouTube).
• Huh, accidentally called it: last time I mentioned Jeph Jacques it was also in proximity to Augie and the Green Knight, where I speculated that the second strip (which his burgeoning Patreon would prompt) might deal with the concept of AI rights in his QC-verse. Looks like he’s not waiting for the as-yet unnamed second strip to tackle some of those issues, as today’s QC reveals. This is going to be good.

Spam of the day:

fleen.com, with region cricket, a well known fact their co-workers may state in order to as well as bemoan within equivalent amounts.

I spend a tidy sum to spray for region crickets, so I’ll thank you not to imply we have them.

Before we start, a quick note — next week work will take me to the Left Coast, and in particular to a client where I may have extremely limited access to … well, anything, really. It’s a Bring your passport if you want to make it past Security kind of place, although I’ve been assured that I will most likely be permitted to make bathroom trips unescorted¹. Bottom line, expect late and/or minimal posting next week.

• I see that Dante Shepherd will be braving the den of Reddit for an Ask Me Anything tomorrow morning at 10:00am. I’m not on the Reddit, but I did recall that you can see who’s upcoming for AMAs² and I took a peek — turns out that Shepherd’s not the only webcomicker due to take on all comers. A few hours from now (sorry for the late notice), Box Brown will be doing the AMA thang at 4:20pm EST.

  The timing makes me think that Maureen Dowd’s now-infamous column may come up in conversation, along with hopefully lots of questions about André The Giant: The Life and Legend. Drop by and say hi! And ask Dante about his preposterous claim that velociraptors would never square dance. I’m calling bullshit on that one.

• Final update on the Cuttings Kickstart: US$73,264, meaning that they overran the Stretch Goal list and will in fact be adding 64 pages to the book. Also overrunning the Stretch Goal list (it’s missing at least one, maybe two disclosed goals if the US$10K interval holds): Augie and the Green Knight. Just a reminder, this project has blown through funding and more than a dozen stretch goals in three days, or a grand total of 10% of its campaign run time. At this point, I’m giving Augie a 50/50 chance to make it to To Be Or Not To Be territory.

  Put another way, Augie is (as of this writing) already the 12th most-funded publishing project in Kickstarter history. For reference, at this point in its campaign, TBONTB had raised about two thirds as much as Augie has, with approximately the same number of backers. Yeah, calling it: Augie breaks into Top 5 in the Publishing category, and if Weinersmith can keep up the interest with stretch goals, may well challenge for the top spot.

Spam of the day:

your doing such amazing things

It’s good to be loved.

_______________
¹ Don’t laugh; I knew a guy that worked for a Three-Letter Agency in the vicinity of Washington, DC. Contractors at his site not only had to be escorted everywhere beyond the bounds of the cubicle they were working in, during those travels they had to carry a “squawker” — a device which emitted an obnoxious beeping sound that meant Somebody is being escorted, if you can hear this stop talking about secret things.

He had a cube near the bathroom and hated the squawker because it was guaranteed to interrupt him every five minutes and so he tried to force all contractors to have a single coordinated bathroom break per day. In case you’ve ever wondered what could make somebody so psychologically damaged as to spy on their fellow citizen indiscriminately, it was probably having to listen to a squawker all day long.

² As of this writing, Shepherd is not listed, but I’m sure that’s just a matter of the page needing a refresh.

You Damn Kid! was maybe not the first webcomic I followed, but it was the first that I got a reprint collection for, and the first that I got a sketch from, and there will never be a day that I don’t think that the frog rocket wiener is the funniest damn thing ever. I don’t care how many times he’s gone on hiatus, I know that Owen Dunne — like King Arthur before him — will always return in our time of greatest need. And apparently that time will be the first of September.

• This page has been of the opinion that one of the better-curated comics awards programs out there would be the Joe Shuster Awards; perhaps it’s because of a reasonable number of categories, perhaps because of its tight focus on Canadian creators¹, perhaps because Canada produces an outsize crop of really talented writers and artists. This year’s nominees have been announced, and it’s the usual distinct lack of wondering How the hell did that get nominated?

  Webcomickers (past and present) getting nods from the Shusters include Ed Brisson (various titles for Image and Marvel) and Ryan North (Adventure Time) as Writer/Scénariste, Stuart Immonen (two different X-Men series) and Chip Zdarsky (Sex Criminals) for Artist/Dessinateur, Faith Erin Hicks both solo (The Adventures of Superhero Girl) and with J Torres (Bigfoot Boy vol 2) for The Dragon Award (Comics for Kids)/Le Prix Dragon (Bandes Dessinées pour Enfants), and the Cloudscape Comic Collective (Waterlogged: Tales from the Seventh Sea) for the Gene Day Award (Self-Publishers)/Prix Gene Day (Auto-éditeurs).

  The actual award for Webcomics Creator/Créateur de Bandes Dessinées Web is the usual strong lineup featuring Attila Adorjany, Jayd Aït-Kaci (with Christina Strain), Olivier Carpentier and Gautier Langevin, Emily Carroll, Kadi Fedoruk, Canaan Grall, Dakota McFadzean, and Ty Templeton (half of whom are repeat nominees, meaning they’re keeping up quality work over the long term).

  What I love about the Shuster nods for Webcomics/Bandes Dessinées Web is that I always learn about something good that I hadn’t been reading — they really do dig for outstanding work. That said, I think that Emily Carroll will take her third win in three nominations (2011, 2012), but any of the nominees are worthy of recognition. Time and date of the announcement of the winners will be announced later.

• This page has also long been of the opinion that there’s possibly no single creator working in more different story styles than Dave Roman. While almost always working in an all-ages (or at least YA) mode, his stories have run the gamut from SF school stories to spooky mystery, from be-true-to-yourself character studies (with boats) to fantasy. And sometimes, he just opts for maximum adorableness, as in the case of the Cupcake Helicopter The Great Bunny Migration minis.

  The latter has now spawned a new ongoing webcomic in the form of Starbunny, Inc, which launched today with a time jump and corporate intrigue, leading one to suspect that this won’t be just adorable bunnies and having fun all day with their galactic milkshake industry. You can bet there will be twists and turns (but not too twisty or scary), and the good-hearted will win out in the end (but not too easily) over the mean bullies (maybe those birds? they suck), who just might be convinced to change their ways.

  So grab a little one that you want to introduce to comics — if you don’t want to be see reading it by yourself — and follow along together as Blue tries to find his place in a galaxy that doesn’t know what to do with a lactose-intolerant bunny. OMG I just read that last line back to myself and I almost squealed, it’s so adorable.

Spam of the day:

FIFA coins

The filters were actually empty until just after I hit Publish, but the spammers came through. A little terse (that’s the entirety of the message), but beautiful in its own way.
________________
¹ Non-Canadians working on a comic don’t disqualify it from consideration, but you will see things like a nominated anthology listed as by [Canadian] and [Canadian] (with various non-Canadian artists).

Received in the mail today: one copy of Meredith Gran’s latest Octopus Pie collection, Dead Again. I can’t wait to read it tonight¹; I think this is the pivot pint where Gran went from Damn good comic take on life to Amazingly revealing examination of our lives and times (with jokes). Highest recommendation.

• Statistically speaking, Danielle Corsetto will be coming to a place near you this summer, as she heads off on a ten-year stippiversary signing tour of more than 20 cities. Naturally, such an undertaking requires time, planning, and plenty of gas-and-toll money (if my map-reading skills are up to par, she’ll be passing through 30 different states, with stops in 18 of them across a period of six weeks and some 14,500 km).

  And yet her biggest concern is having enough money to pay artists to put up guest strips in her absence, so she’s Kickstarting the whole shebang and has hit about 75% funding in the past four hours or so. She won’t be getting rich on this tour, and considering six weeks away means six weeks of not working on strips that could fill her next book or other merch that would pay for little things like rent and groceries, it seems like a break-even proposition at best. Giving a few bucks to this campaign isn’t to benefit Corsetto — it’s to benefit your fellow fans. Just sayin’.

• One place that Corsetto won’t hit on her tour (mostly because she’ll be back home for a month by the time it rolls around): SPX in Bethesda, Maryland (but that doesn’t mean she won’t hit it after her tour). But lots of other people will be, and I went down the initial exhibitor list to see which creators you might want to make plans to see. As always, this is a preliminary listing, produced by scanning more than 700 names, so my apologies if I’ve missed anybody. That being said, webcomickers and natural allies at the show will include:

  Amanda Lafrenais, Ananth Panagariya & Yuko Ota, Audrey & Jamie Noguchi, Blue Delliquanti, Box Brown, Braden Lamb & Shelli Paroline, C Spike Trotman, Carla Speed McNeil, Christopher Hastings, Danielle Corsetto (told you), Darryl Ayo, Dave Roman, David McGuire, Dean Trippe, Drew Weing, Dustin Harbin, Eric Colossal, Evan Dahm, Jess Fink, John Green, Julia Wertz, Katie Sekelsky, KC Green, Kel McDonald, Kory Bing …

  [inhale]

  … Madeleine Flores, Magnolia Porter, Matthew Bennardo, Meredith Gran, MK Reed, Molly Ostertag, Monica Ray, Phil McAndrew, Rachel Dukes, Raina Telgemeier, Rebecca Mock, Sara McHenry, Shmorky, Sophie Goldstein, Sylvan Migdal, Tom McHenry, Tom Siddell, and Tony Breed, not to mention your Firsts Second, Topatos Co, Tops Shelf, and other quality publishers. Drop by and tell ’em you enjoy their work.

_______________
¹ Or, more properly, reread it, since I read each of these strips as they updated, and frequently went back to read entire story arcs because they’re that good.

Oh my goodness you people have never heard of long holiday weekends, have you? When you consider that :01 Books managed to place three (out of ten) books on the New York Times softcover graphic novel bestseller list (including the #1 slot to Ben Hatke’s The Return of Zita the Spacegirl, This One Summer by Mariko and Jillian Tamaki at #7, and André The Giant by Box Brown in position #9), that’s pretty damn impressive¹, and that’s just where we’re starting today.

• Anybody that reads this page will have seen Poorcraft mentioned more than once; it was an early webcomics Kickstarter (a full four and a half years ago, raising US$13,000 for a comics project was nigh-unheard of), and it’s been mentioned time and again for its clear, lucid advice for making it suck less to not have a lot of money. You can buy a copy for US$10, a scratch-and-dent copy for US$5 (a classic Poorcraft strategy), or a PDF for US$5, but if you were in desperate need of Poorcraft’s lessons and couldn’t even scrape up a spare fiver, what were you to do?

  Be patient, basically, and see your patience pay off: Poorcraft (the book) is now Poorcraft (the webcomic), with daily updates from now until the entire thing is posted:

  Poorcraft was Kickstarted in 2009 and completed in 2012. And now, I’m posting the whole thing online for everyone to enjoy. I’ll be updating it every day with a new page, until the entire comic’s been posted. Where applicable, I’ll also be adding author’s comments and updates here in the text section.

  This should take a few months. About five, to be exact.

  Kudos to Spike for sharing the wealth, so to speak.

• I first noticed via the twitterfeed of Maki Naro a link to Tumblr that shared the news: Zach Weinersmith has released his latest collection of SMBC strips in French, and he’s got the incomparable Boulet to provide a preface, as well as to illustrate one of the pages in the book.

  And because Boulet is very, very kind to we whose command of French is less than complete, you can read his contribution both en Français and in English. I’m glad these two creators seem to have buried their differences and hope to see them work together more in the future.

• Jeff Smith won a pretty big award over the weekend, and I’m honestly a little conflicted about it. I want to be very careful about this, partly because I stand second to no man in my admiration of Smith’s body of work (I hold him to be analogous to what the Japanese would call a Living National Treasure), partly because he’s always been gracious to me in person², and partly because I’m a part of the process that led to Tüki being nominated for the NCS Online — Long Form division award. Understand that I congratulate him most sincerely and I would begrudge that gentleman nothing in this life, but I think he got the wrong award.

  I think that the NCS membership voted him a lifetime achievement award instead of an award for the quality of work in a single year. Tüki Save The Humans has, to date, published 26 pages (chapter two is yet to start after the post-chapter one hiatus), with perhaps a third of them actually in calendar year 2013. I’m pretty sure that Smith would be the first to say that he’s only gotten started and the best work on Tüki is still to come.

  Much like Steve Purcell’s Eisner win, I think I would not have these misgivings if Tüki had run all year, or if it had won out over work that was of poor quality — but anybody that would characterize Family Man, Dicebox, or Red’s Planet in such terms would be thoroughly mistaken.

  Did Smith benefit from name recognition? Undoubtedly. Would it be easier for the NCS voting membership to look at a work with fewer updates from the start of a story, instead of one with dozens of updates and a storyline stretching back years? Almost certainly. Does it take anything away from a career to say I lost an award to Jeff Smith? At the risk of cliche, that’s a nomination that’s an honor by itself. But I do think that this result undervalues the potential of Smith’s future work as well as the present work of his co-nominees Dylan Meconis, Jenn Manley Lee, and Eddie Pittman.

  Of course, the purpose of the NCS Awards is not to reward my personal preferences (although they did with the selection of Ryan Pagelow’s Buni, which was my favorite of the three nominees in the Online — Short Form division), but for the the membership of the NCS to recognize what they think is the best work in a given discipline. A few short years ago we would not be having this discussion at all, as online comics were not considered by the NCS, with the members of that organization the worse off for their narrower focus. In just those few short years they’ve been exposed to — and recognized — work that is incredibly different from the vast majority of what the NCS honored for the majority of its existence, and that in and of itself is worthy of celebration.

________________
¹ Especially when one considers that :01 is essentially a four-person operation, and typically puts out fewer than two dozen books a year. Quality over quantity, my friends.

² We are far from hanging-out-on-a-Wednesday-night buddies, but for more than a decade now Jeff Smith has taken the time to greet me and ask how I’m doing on the infrequent occasions when we see each other, and it would kill me to repay that kindness with discourtesy.

As of this writing, STRIPPED is sitting at #2 on the iTunes Canada Documentary charts¹ which is good and all, but not good enough. Back and the end of the 18th century, political scientists figured the next nation to escalate to world domination would not be the United States; the 20th century, they declared, would be The Canadian Century. Alas, Canada did not come to dominate the world in that century, but there is still time in the 21st. Drive STRIPPED to #1 Canada! Then surpass your large, heavily-armed, somewhat rude southern neighbors and find a way to take STRIPPED to #0. That’ll show us!

And when you’ve done so, perhaps you’ll find some time to attend VanCAF, one of the newer crop of TCAF-emulating, modest-scale, community-involving, public-space-inhabiting, no-entry-fee comics festivals. As a bonus, VanCAF is the brainchild of onetime Tower of Babel² writer Shannon Campbell.

Only in its third year, VanCAF has attracted a wide swath of (mostly west of the Continental Divide) comics talent, including a decent chunk of Pacific Daylight webcomickers. One may, for example, find Special Guests like Natasha Allegri, Becky Dreistadt & Frank Gibson, Tony Cliff, Ed Brisson, Aaron Diaz³, Madeleine Flores, Tyson Hesse, Jeph Jacques, and Kris Straub⁴.

Exhibitors (who are not necessarily special guests, but are still special in our hearts) include the likes of Kory Bing, Lars Brown, Erin Burt, Blue Delliquanti, Amy T Falcone⁶, Hazel & Bell, Kathleen Jacques⁷, Steve LeCouillard, Kel McDonald, David McGuire, Angela Melick, Alina Pete, Doug Savage, Katie & Steve Shanahan, and Anise Shaw.

Also some guy named Sam that just gets in because he’s sleeping with the showrunner. Scandal!

But apart from that lack of judgment, Campbell has done great things in only a few years, and from my mind two things stand out as the greatest:

1. VanCAF is in a reasonably-sized space, so floor maps and booth numbers aren’t needed to make sure you find your favorite creators (but there’s still one provided).
2. Every single one of those creators up there? Campbell clearly included a link to their website so I didn’t have to hunt them down. She’s gettin’ a high-five from me next time I see her.

We didn’t even mention the programming, or the fact that Campbell’s got a food cart coming to set up immediately off the showfloor. If you’re anywhere within reach of the northern Pacific ocean this weekend, VanCAF is the place to be.

_______________
¹ DÉPOUILLÉ est assis à #2 sur les graphiques documentaires du iTunes Canada.

² That link will still be good for a while, then it will pass the way of all things.

³ Professional dapper gentleman, Tolkien scholar par excellence, and Latin Art-Throb.

⁴ Professional handsome man, I don’t know about his knowledge of Tolkien, and he ain’t Latin, but he’s dreamy. Like, Brad Guigar⁵ dreamy.

⁵ Ladies.

⁶ Twitter has it that Ms T Falcone’s fellow Strip Searchmonaut and roomie Abby Howard will be wandering the halls as an attendee.

⁷ No relation.

I’ve finally gotten around to fixing the fact that my main PC was running a now-dead operating system and getting a more modern one on there.

• Lesson #1: This is the last Windows system I’ll ever install¹. Holy glob, “no direct update” from the most popular O/S you’ve ever made? Are you high,e very single person in Redmond, Washington?
• Lesson #2: Repopulating my feeds, getting my apps installed again², and figuring out why iTunes is pooching my podcasts is a project that will take more than a weekend.
• Lesson #3: You are never done applying fresh updates and patches. This disc of Windows 7 was pressed in the past few months, it should not need more than a hundred damn patches.
• Lesson #4: But if you have to do all this crap (instead of keeping up on what’s happening at TCAF), dual-booting to make the old data easily accessible is marginally less painful than any of the Microsoft-supplied alternatives.

So here’s what I know about webcomics today:

• TCAF was awesome. Just check out the Twitterfeed of anybody that was there, and you will quickly come to the conclusion that the only problems TCAF has is the over-abundance of situations that require a high-five, potentially leaving your high-fiving hand sore. Plus, there was a last-minute (literally, in the last hour before show wrap-up) unannounced Ryan North/Randall Munroe panel & signing, and George was sighted on the grounds of the Toronto Reference Library with something he should never, ever have: puppets of Yuko Ota & Ananth Panagariya, meaning he now has his own private Yuko & Ananth. If you ever meet “Yuko” or “Ananth” at a convention and George is hovering nearby, maybe check for a healthy skin color, un-felty hair, and a pulse, just sayin’.
• Time’s almost up for comics professionals to nominate worthy works for this year’s Harvey Awards. How about we make sure that the utterly inexplicable absence of Dean Trippe’s Something Terrible from the Eisner ballots isn’t repeated at the Harveys?

_______________
¹ I am already in talks with these fine nerds.

² I haven’t even gone near getting Steam migrated yet. If I lose my cheevos, I’ma be pissed.