This day in Great Outdoor Fight history: Ray is getting a bit full of himself with Beef and showing depths that, if not quite hidden, reveal insight into his heritage. Also, we learn all there is to know about Bob Raffles.

• If I didn’t have a strict policy about what goes at the top of posts where there is an anniversary strip from the Great Outdoor Fight, I know for an absolute fact that today’s post would be the results of me playing around with my new favorite online toy. Which toy? I hear you ask — let’s let Kate Beaton fill you in:
  

  now you can actually play with my @TorontoComics paper doll! torontocomics.com/news/announcing-the-kate-beaton-digital-paper-doll/

  Yes! The delightful show poster that Beaton did for TCAF is now interactive, complete with music, encouraging voice-overs, and screenshot capability. And in case the pictures are just too darn small for you, creator (and TCAF staffer) Kim Hoang made a fullscreen version available at her site. Just don’t blame me if you’re playing dress-up for the rest of the day.

• It’s Will Eisner Week, an annual recognition of the innumerable contributions made to comics by Will Eisner, timed to coincide with his 6 March birthday¹. Events are going on around the world between now and next Monday, and the good folks at the Cartoon Art Museum aren’t letting a little thing like a lack of gallery space keep from recognizing the master and his works. CAM invites you out to Mission: Comics and Art (2250 Mission Street, San Francisco) on Sunday for their celebration.

  The centerpiece of the event (which runs 2:00pm to 4:00pm) will be a panel discussion between prominent Bay Area creators Steve Englehart, Al Gordon, John Heebink, Mario Hernandez, and Steve Leialoha, free and open to the public. For those that might have favorite stories and characters created by these longtime pros, there will be a signing that follows immediately after. And heck, it’s The Mission, so I imagine people will be going for drinks after.

Spam of the day:

Prevent Your Fatal Heart Attack: Watch For These Signs

Sorry, but for some reason I don’t believe that “Princeton Health” (is that supposed to make me think you’re actually University Medical Center of Princeton at Plainsboro, or possibly Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital, which is the fictional hosptial from House?) really has an email address at mkvtqh2.[redacted].xyz … call it a hunch. Try harder, spammers.

________________
¹ Eisner would have been 99 this year, which means you should start planning on how to celebrate his centenary next year, oh, now-ish.

This day in Great Outdoor Fight history: No strip; there was no 29th of February in 2006.

Please forgive any autocorrections that remain.

• Happy twelfth birthday to my Evil Twin, Howard Tayler. It’s gotta be rough only having a birthday every four years, but aging at one fourth the rate of the rest of us is a decent tradeoff. He’s youthful to the point that I suspect he may actually be aging backwards. In any event, may I suggest that you celebrate by reading his entire archive from the beginning? If you read four strips a day, you should be done by the next time his birthday comes around.
• It entirely makes sense that The Woz is starting a comics convention in Silicon Valley. It makes even more sense that a passel of Bay Area webcomickers will be doing a podcast panel together On whether a webcomickers can form the basis of an arts career. The panel in question will take place at high noon on Sunday, 20 March at the inaugural Silicon Valley Comic Con, in the San Jose Convention Center’s Room 2. New shows are always an unknown factor, but I’m guessing that the well-known geek tendencies of The Woz, plus the fact that he’s pretty damn rich, give SVCC a better than even shot at being well-run out of the gate.
• Well, dammit. I had a whole bit here about how Thought Bubble had announced its first slate of guests, including Faith Erin Hicks and The Toronto Man-Mountain, but a mis-timed choice to pay attention to the jury room manager means I wiped it accidentally. Look, just get your tickets for Leeds the first week of November (with the comic convention proper on the 5th and 6th); the middle part of England is nice then.

Spam of the day:

This is Genovera Killings. I’m in town. SHALL WE MEET Gary Ty Rrell?

Well gosh, how can I say no to somebody that says she saw my pictures on Facebook and needs a real cutie to give her “luv” and also is totally named like a James Bond femme fatale that fucks dudes to death? Sign me up, totally legit Russian dating site!

This day in Great Outdoor Fight history: Vlad is entirely correct. Is SO cool.

But mostly because I feel like it, dammit.

• David Malki ! is in the mood to give stuff away, and you’re in a position to take advantage. For the obsessive completists out there (cough, cough), Malki ! has announced that his new series of “cast cards” — little plaques of what appears to be fiberboard, with a colorful, Wondermarkesque character attached to the front — is about to get larger, thanks to the introduction of a subscription program at his Patreon. But there is also a new, non-subscription-based card that some of you can get for free right now:
  

  If you own five or more Wondermark books, you are a Library Ace right now! You qualify to get one of these cards, for free, to commemorate your great achievement!

  To claim your card, take a cool picture of your five (or more) Wondermark books. I wanna see what you got, and show your collection to other people too!

  Then: tweet your picture with #libraryace, and tag either @malki or @wondermarkfeed. (And make sure you’re following one or both of of those accounts, so I can DM you your claim instructions once I see your post!)

  And if you don’t own at least five Wondermark books, Malki ! is coincidentally running a 13-day sale in advance of Wondermark’s 13th anniversary; it’s also approximately the 10th anniversary of the Machine of Death (the original Dinosaur Comics strip was run in December of 2005, but the idea for an anthology of MoD stories dates to about this time, 2006), so you can get MoD stuff for cheaps, too.

  Specifically, you can get any three Wondermark books for eighteen dollars, and ten bucks will get you either MoD anthology, the base card game, or the expansion set. Everything’s at the Wondermark store until 9 March.

• We at Fleen have mentioned Josh Fruhlinger’s delightful debut novel, The Enthusiast, on several occasions. It was the hit of the publishing season among people that heard of it and bought it and read it and enjoyed it; now those same people can drag their friends to the just-announced Enthusiast book tour, which will take Fruhlinger to four cities of personal significance.

  He’ll start on 26 April in Washington, DC (where the book takes place), then making his way to Baltimore (Frulinger was a longtime Charm City resident, including the time he wrote the book), Brooklyn (home of his cover illustrator, Matt Lubchansky, plus who doesn’t want to visit Brooklyn in the spring?), and finishing in Buffalo (home of the future Josh Fruhlinger Birthplace National Monument) on 5 May. Come meet Fruhlinger (enthusiastically), get your book signed (enthusiastically), shoot the shit about Mary Worth or whatever (enthusiastically), and let other people know where your enthusiasms lie.

Spam of the day:

We have had so many people wanting to help run or support blood drives for Free Tickets to the Vans Warped Tour, our staff is working over time. All free tickets will be earned and set up with the blood centers. With this many of you committed to helping, it’s going to take us a couple weeks to sort through everyone and connect you to running blood drives.

Why am I being offered a shot at free and VIP tickets for the Warped Tour? Oh shit, did I sign up to run a blood drive and forget it? Do I have to be a sneering, hipster-glasses-wearing, Day-Glo snakeheaded Medusa to qualify? That’s what your email implies.

This day in Great Outdoor Fight history: No strip; I imagine that the residents of 62 Achewood Court are starting to gather around Téodor’s computer.

Typing this via phone because I still don’t have phone or network. Reminder: Monday, I have jury duty and may not be able to post.

Spam Goddamned lie of the day:

Thank you for choosing Verizon, we appreciate the opportunity to serve you.

First of all, you have a monopoly, there’s no choice at all. Second, you have nothing but contempt for your customers and appreciate nothing but the multiple billions of profit you make each quarter. Lastly, fuck you.

This day in Great Outdoor Fight history: no strip; the Tenmen are rocking it, though.

Three (3) returns to form that I wanted to mention today, as three (3) of my favorite webcomickers release evidence of getting back to their roots after far too long away. Plus one technology story because sometimes things don’t fit into the theme neatly.

• First up, Karl Kerschl wrapped up his contributions to Gotham Academy with issue #12 back in December, leading people like me to wonder when we’d see new updates to The Abominable Charles Christopher; as he told me about 18 months ago, he’s got about a year of storyline left to go, and that means he’s got just about the perfect amount of time to finish the story, put together Book 3, and debut it for the Summer 2017 con season.

  Granted, he hasn’t made any formal announcement yet, but why else would he be drawing critters? It could only be more obvious if this fox were instead my beloved Luga, or perhaps Sissi Skunk. Time will tell, but we at Fleen are cautiously optimistic.

• It’s been too long time since Boy On A Stick And Slither was a regular thing, with bursts of strips in Spring 2015, pre-Summer 2011, and Halloweenish 2010 tiding us over. Steven Cloud, beard-haver extraordinaire and world traveler of renown, is signaling that public-type drawing is perhaps becoming a regular thing again. Instead of comics leading to a punchline or a philosophical point, Cloudy is Instagramming space bases and dream houses along with the occasional cryptozoological treatise. These drawings will make you find your inner 11 year old dreamer.
• Rich Stevens, having hit 4000 comics last week, has been running some of his favorite comics from days past (with a plan to do so for a couple of weeks) while he retools and decides how to relaunch. He doesn’t seem to be talking about a reboot (which he did before, in conjunction with his foray into syndication back around Aught-Seven) so much as redoing his infrastructure. What will make his comics look as they should on a phone or a tablet, as you can no longer count on everybody browsing by with a monitor at least 1024 pixels wide?

  He’s been talking about the need to rework his site with adaptability in mind on his podcast with Danielle Corsetto, and he’s determined to make things as simple and functional as possible. I believe I heard him mention a standard of being able to update with a text editor and a phone — no fancy CMS for Stevens, no sir; I only just hope that the need to make things look good on phones doesn’t mean we lose out on strips like this one¹.

• What may turn out to be a decent method of distributing longer comic book-type comics to phones (with the promise of payments to creators, but I guarantee it’s not updateable with a text editor) gets off to a start today: Stela is all about mobile delivery, and that is the entire extent of what I know about it because it’s not launching with an Android version. Somebody with an iPhone let me know if it’s worth anything because hell if I know.

Spam of the day:

Thank you garytyrrellat Red Lobster SurveyPartners!

Why am I being invited to Red Lobster? Oh shit, did I fuck someone good and manage to forget it?

_______________
¹ We will leave his uncharitable attitude towards New Jersey to the side for the moment.

Correction The entry appears below originally and mistakenly ran yesterday; there was no strip on 23 February 2006, leaving us all in a cruel, two-day interval where we did not know what happened after Ray ripped a guy’s face off. We at Fleen regret the error and run the correct entry below with the appropriate image above

This day in Great Outdoor Fight history: Ray faces up to what he’s done. Watching Cody Travis eat heavily sauced pastas cannot possibly be more unpleasant than that pun I just dropped, I’m so sorry. Let’s just go check out The Tenmen and forget I said anything.

• We are nearing the end of the 30 day campaign for the Smut Peddler Double Header, and my initial guess that the books would clear US$150K (and therefore page rates of US$130) has come true, what with the balance sitting at US$152K as of this writing.

  The per-backer average continues to exceed that of the prior two Smut Peddler Kickstarts, although the backer count is about a third lower than that of SP1024, so the total for these two books will likely fall short of that tome’s US$185K. The midpoint of the projected finish for this campaign was US$162.5, and history shows that Spike’s audience is more than capable of making up nine grand in six hours, but we’ll see. In any event, hooray porn, many people are going to be very happy some time around the end of summer.

• And looking back a year to the batshit insane success of the Exploding Kittens Kickstart, part of what Matt Inman, Elan Lee, and Shane Small said as that funding wrapped up was that they expected to spend two years or more on the project. Now fulfillment is done (and has been for half a year or so), but we got some inkling of what the EK team is up to on (where else?) Twitter:
  

  Psst … #TheCrate is now open http://explodingkittens.com/thecrate

  Following the link, The Crate is described as:

  The Crate is our Secret Club.
  If you get in, we’ll send you cool prototype stuff we’re working on.
  FOR FREE.

  Between now and 11:59pm CST on Friday night, if you catch their attention with a special professment of love for the Exploding Kittens, you get in. This looks to be an ongoing endeavour and shows every indication of going past the promised two years (we’re coming up on the end of Year One, anno kitten, after all). More details at The Crate’s site, but at this point, I’d say an entire line of casual card-type games are in our future. Go nuts.

• Not Kickstarter related, because not everything is Kickstarter related: Nimona — right beloved by all who have read it — has been included in the nominations for the 2015 Nebula Awards, specifically for the Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy.

  It appears to be the only work of comics in any category (unlike the Hugos, the Nebulas do not have a category for words + pictures), and the Andre Norton Award appears to be the most hotly-contested (every other category has six or seven nominees, the ANA has nine), so Noelle Stevenson is by definition a longshot … but given all the other prestigious awards she’s been nominated for (and the Eisners are still pending¹), Stevenson’s no stranger to tough competition. Here’s wishing her luck, because it really is a damn good book.

Spam of the day:

Monster Energy Women’s Ultra Mixer brings together like-minded musicians, artists and media tastemakers in entertainment, lifestyle/fashion/health/fitness/sports/business as well as women that are key industry players in an intimate setting. The evening offers a unique opportunity for a small group to meet and share ideas with other women working in entertainment that are ultra-connected as well as re-unite with friends.

Two things: first, the boldface-underline is original and consistently used in the original email. Second, they want me to RSVP to an event strictly limited to 40 people, for moving/shaking/tastemaking women in the entertainment industry.

Should I tell them?

_______________
¹ Yes, yes, she was nominated last year, for Best Digital/Web Comic, a schizophrenic category that mashes up presentation and format. I think the Eisner voters might actually understand what they’re voting for if Stevenson gets a nomination in a print category.

Correction The entry that originally ran below should have run tomorrow; there was no strip on 23 February 2006, leaving us all in a cruel, two-day interval where we did not know what happened after Ray ripped a guy’s face off. We at Fleen regret the error and have indicated the deletion below and replaced the image above.

This day in Great Outdoor Fight history: Ray faces up to what he’s done. Watching Cody Travis eat heavily sauced pastas cannot possibly be more unpleasant than that pun I just dropped, I’m so sorry. Let’s just go check out The Tenmen and forget I said anything.

• The thing that I love about Kate Beaton’s work — as if there were just one thing, but let’s pretend for a moment — is how often I end up learning as much as laughing. I count myself fairly well versed in history and for every Matthew Henson, Miyamoto Musashi, or Emperor Norton that I know about, there’s a Catherine Sui Fun Cheung¹, Dr Sara Josephine Baker, or Tom Longboat that I’ve never heard of.

  Today she tops them, bringing us the story of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, who was probably the first person to argue for LGBT equality. In 1867, when he had to come up with his own word to substitute for the now-commonplace homosexual because the latter hadn’t been invented yet. As Beaton notes, I only found out about him last fall, which is surprising and also sadly not surprising; I’m certain that pretty much none of us would have found out about Ulrichs without her cartoon today. It’s the most optimistic, affirming thing you’ll read today.

• There’s also optimistic and affirming in the work of Meredith Gran — lots of it, in fact — but the characters that feel that optimism and affirmation might insist that there’s none to find. As previously noted, Image Comics is doing a comprehensive reprint of Octopus Pie from the beginning, and that process starts tomorrow with Octopus Pie, Volume 1, which I will not be buying.

  But this is only because I already own it twice, in the form of the original three self-published books (subtitled A Brooklyn Drama, A Brownstone Companion, and An Interstate Oasis, which between them comprise chapters 1-12), as well as the Villard-published There Are No Stars In Brooklyn (chapters 1-12 again, plus the bonus story The End Of The World; while I’m not above buying a story twice, I draw the line at three times².

  I also have the self-published Listen At Home With Octopus Pie and Dead Again, which between them cover chapters 13-38, meaning that I need not pick up Volume 2 or Volume 3 (due at the end of March and April, respectively), and may pick up with Volume 4 at the end of May which will print stories never before collected.

  Four volumes in four months! This is the ideal situation for somebody that needs to catch up with the best ongoing story of the past ten years. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Meredith Gran gets better every single update, and however good you thought her storytelling was, it’s so much deeper and richer than you thought. Grab V1 tomorrow, and put the others on your pull list.

• Apropos of nothing, today’s Wondermark (number 1200, as it happens) is entirely true to life, in that it closely resembles the struggle I’ve had over the past five months to get Verizon to fix my DSL (which escalated to them pooching my landline to the point it isn’t usable whenever it rains). The only difference being I haven’t (yet!) reached the creepy old crow, but then again I expect to find one when I get high enough in the corporate complaint structure. Webcomics be damned, getting satisfaction from a company that’s been happy to cash my checks is my new hobby.

Spam of the day:

Please accept this Panera Bread gift

I don’t eat at Panera Bread because, ironically, their bread is awful. Really ought to be better at what’s right there in your name.

_______________
¹ With a bonus appearance by Beaton’s best running gag — Top Gun and beach volleyball.

² Although it appears that Volume 1 will be better than TANSIB on the key issue of sparklebutt; V1 has it, TANSIB doesn’t. Then again, my copy of ABD is better than either of the other two as it has sparklebutt made from glitter and highlighter that Gran did by hand.

This day in Great Outdoor Fight history: Over the weekend, Ray revealed himself to be rude and Téodor was confused. But those are not why we’re here — today is why we’re running this series, in fact.

Today, ten years ago today, everything changed.

Ray, we all know, cheated (or at least greased) his way into the Fight. Heck, even at the end it was revealed he was ready to buy his way out if necessary, for why else would one keep nine grand in the Fite-Tight Elastoband of one’s hat¹? But today he changed when a Guaranteeed Honky-Tonk-Style Blowjob went south and Ray ripped a guy’s face off².

He found something new in himself that day; he didn’t like what he saw, he reverted on Day Two before going on a rampage, he fooled himself and even his father³, but for a period of time Ray was not merely a spoiled, rich⁴ coward who would desert a dying man. Today is the start of Ray truly being Blood of Champion.

• Friday afternoon, about three minutes after that day’s post went live, I came across a really nice piece at The AV Club by Oliver Sava, who’s become one of the people I pay close attention to with respect to comics. In the weekly feature of the most significant new comic, Sava went online and found two comics he wanted to talk about; specifically, two comics by black women, which isn’t a creator profile you just trip over in print.

  Mildred Louis has been working on Agents of the Realm for just under two years; I remember hearing about it when it launched, looking over the first few pages, and promptly misplacing the link. Truth be told, a magical girl series is pretty far down my list of interests, but the work is frankly gorgeous and I’m putting it on my list for an archive binge the next time I’ve got a block of hours to spare.

  I was more interested in Nilah Magruder’s MFK because I hadn’t heard of it before (much like the golden age of TV, there are too many webcomics that I probably should be reading that I simply haven’t come across, or if I have, don’t have the time to keep up with), all the more distressing because a) it’s been running for four years, and b), this description sounds like it’s tailor-made for me:

  In a world of sleeping gods, a broken government, and a fragile peace held in the hands of the corrupt, one youth must find the strength to stand up against evil and save humanity.

  This story is not about that youth. [emphasis original]

  There is, for reals, nothing I’d rather read more than a story of somebody that is desperately trying to stay out of the way of Chosen Ones, apocalypses, oppressors, liberators, and self-appointed helpers, all of whom are in the damn way. This comic is why everybody that whines about inclusion and diversity in the creator ranks needs to shut the hell up: diverse creators don’t lead to the death of stories, they lead to different stories getting told.

  Every cliche and trope that you’re sick of? I can pretty much guarantee that there’s somebody out there who is telling a story that’s new and you’d like a lot — the thing is, they don’t look like you, sound like you, act like you, or come from a background like you. Seek them out because all of the sameness is really boring.

• And sometimes, a creator that you do know decides to change things up just because, and I love them all the more for it. The latest case at Bad Machinery — the case that wasn’t a case — has wrapped up, and John Allison is today launching a story inspired by ’70s and ’80s takes on supernatural horror comics, Mordawwa: Queen of Hell in Kill It Before it Grow.

  Or, you know, Erin from Tackleford, if you care about such things. Allison makes a particular kind of comics (characterized by his playful language and love of the absurd being taken completely at face value), but he uses those comics to tell many different kinds of story.

  To summarize the last two years or so: Robert Cop. Destroy History. Expecting To Fly. Bobbins. Bobbins.horse. Space Is The Place. And, in print, Giant Days — they may share a common DNA, but they exist to tell different kinds of stories. More than ten years back, I compared Allison to Frank Tashlin, and while that’s still a decent comparison I’m coming around to thinking of him more as Edgar Wright: one vision, common archetypes, a repertory cast of players, distinct stories. I’ll always go see one of Wright’s movies, and I will always click every day to see what Allison’s up to today.

Spam of the day:

This opportunity is set for those people who were
thinking of how to become rich and famous as a Son Of Doom of the great
Illuminati contact us now

Everybody knows about haiku — a Japanese poem of three lines, 17 syllables in a 5-7-5 pattern — but there are other forms of set numbers of lines and syllables. Here we have three lines, 42 syllables in a 14-19-9 pattern, and on the theme of batshit insane conspiracy theory. I think we have a new poetry form for the modern age.

_______________
¹ Why nine grand? Because he couldn’t cram in ten.

² I maintain that his grip was instinctively similar to that used when Ramses Luther tore off Fancy Mark Clancy’s entire middle. I also maintain that Ramses Luther was involved in taking down keys to one of the Jeeps.

³ Since small times Beef certainly used brains, but Ray didn’t use brawns … he used money.

⁴ I further maintain that the question Ray, Ray … you’a the rich boy, or you’a the jerk? reveals a false dichotomy. Pat is certainly the jerk, but so is Ray by all objective measures.

This day in Great Outdoor Fight history: No strip; I believe that Sound And Motion is getting up from his Downward Dog or some such.

It’s nearly the weekend and by way of advance notice, the next couple of weeks look to be a little weird. My teaching schedule next week will be to accommodate students who are variously located in Holland, India, and Australia. The week after that is jury duty (one day or one trial; really hoping for the former). Starting the week after that will be a fairly lengthy period of travel. Apologies in advance for any interruptions.

• However, the day I anticipate sitting around in a room waiting to find out if I’m part of a jury, I intend to catch up on some reading. Stacked up and waiting to be read: no fewer than four review copies from the good folks at :01 Books (by Ben Hatke, Tony Cliff, Faith Erin Hicks, and James Kochalka¹). I’ve also got a PDF of the second part of Sophie Goldstein’s House of Women (the first part of which garnered a 2013 Ignatz), which Ms Goldstein was kind enough to send along. Everybody else in the jury room can stare glumly into their phones, I’ma get my comics on.
• I’ve expressed this before, but I really need to learn to draw one of these days. And, were I not on jury duty, I just might spend that week in San Francisco² seeing as how the Cartoon Art Museum is kicking off their latest education program on Thursday, 3 March, at 7:00pm. To be more specific, Mark Badger will be running a class on drawing, in conjunction with CAM, each Thursday night in March.

  Mark Badger’s Just Draw is for older teens, adults, runs two hours per session, held at the temporary educational space in the Renaissance Entrepreneurship Center at 275 Fifth Street. It’ll cover everything from four-page minis to the four hundred page magnum opus, with a veteran cartoonist/teacher (thirty years and fifteen years, respectively) for the low, low price of US$200 (US$175 for CAM members), with enrollment available here.

• Now that the thirteen part travel halfway round the world and get married epic is done at Johnny Wander, Ananth Hirsh and Yuko Ota are getting ready to drop their next project on us, and it looks like a doozy. It’s tempting to think of them as one Voltron-like single entity, but they are actually separate people! And sometimes they work on their own projects! And starting Tuesday, the latest of these will begin serialization. Let’s let Hirsh tell us all about it:
  

  Beginning next week we’ll be running the first chapter of IS THIS WHAT YOU WANTED, a comic I’ve been collaborating on with Tessa Stone and Sarah Stone! I’ve worked with Tess previously on BUZZ!, a graphic novel about full-contact spelling bees (available through Oni Press). Tessa currently does Not Drunk Enough, and Sarah Stone has worked on a huge range of projects, including Transformers: Windblade!

  We’ll be running the first chapter on Johnny Wander, at which point the comic will migrate to its own website. The first four pages will run on Tuesday, and then we’ll post a comic per update like normal.

  One chapter to get us hooked, eh? I’m onto you, Hirsh, and if your previous collab with Tessa Stone wasn’t so good, I’d be getting the hell out of here before you got your greedy hooks in me. But BUZZ! was good — very, very good — and so I’m willingly coming back to you. I trust you’ll make it worth my while.

• And, from Fleen Senior French Correspondent Pierre Lebeaupin:
  

  Sorry, it turns out my reference for [the end of Notes on paper](http://fleen.com/archives/2016/02/17/happy-returns-of-the-day/) was outdated, as more recently Boulet indicated that « [Volume 9 was a “pentimento” after I planned to stop after volume 8](http://www.bouletcorp.com/#answer54) » and that he even had extra pages that would end up in a volume 10, where we are today. It is probably best to consider each volume of Notes as being potentially the last, while leaving open the possibility of future volumes, much like these singers who always claim this is their last tour but can’t seem to actually bring themselves to stop.

  Duly noted; on the plus side, we’re gonna get several hundred pages of Boulet, so that’s all right. Have a good weekend, everybody.

Spam of the day:

Keep your bait possibilities different by pking a couple dozen leeches just in case.

Gotta say, leeches are a welcome respite from the slutty moms in my area that want to have sex with me. Pretty sure that combination of words has never been uttered in any context throughout human history.

_______________
¹ Which is in all likelihood the greatest book in history.

² Okay, not really — if I don’t get picked for trial, I have to head to Dallas for work later that week.

This day in Great Outdoor Fight history: No strip; must be taking a while to find Sound And Motion.

So I’m about to go to the eye doctor and may not be able to see things clearly when I get back, so let me leave you with this before I go: Zach Weinersmith has some ideas for new chess pieces; I expect to see some of you playing on a board with Bishop-Kickers, Wilderness Preservers, and Gortak The World-Eater at the next BAH!Fest. Get to it, nerds.

Spam of the day:

your cheating partner notice

See, this isn’t very clear. Are you notifying me that my partner is cheating, or is this notice that I have been assigned a cheating partner? If it’s the latter, is this a random thing?

your partner cheating on you

Thank you for the clarification. I’m not sure what you’re getting at, though — Chuck, my EMT partner, doesn’t ride on any other nights or with any other crew. I think maybe you got me confused with somebody else!