Today sucked, and sucked hard. Like, homicidal tendencies hard. And I could’ve acted on them, but noooo, I have to believe in an invisible sky wizard who poisons our minds with “morality.” (Just kidding. Everyone knows that atheists are too busy being all holier-than-thou to be immoral.) Also, I’m sick. And beer, predictably, made me feel sicker. Long before it made me feel drunk. And nobody’s online to bitch at. Which means that the invisible sky wizard probably likes them better than me.

(Note: In case “invisible sky wizard” wasn’t a dead giveaway, I’m being silly, if for no reason other than to pass the time. And for the record, I can think of several very good answers to the “why good things happen to bad people” question, but the only one I’ll share is “how sure are we that I’m good people, exactly?” Because I’m not a preacher. Well, legally I am, but that’s beside the point. Interested parties, AIM “genderbunny,” because I’m bored and lonely. And slowly eating chicken soup, which works surprisingly well. Yay home remedies.)

I seem to be pulling an all-nighter again. At least I’ll be on time for work for once. Which seems kinda backwards when you think about it.

Anyhow, I mentioned Ficlets a while back, and never actually explained it. Basically, it’s a writing community where authors submit stories of 64-1024 characters, usually with an attached image, phrase, or prequel/sequel indicating what inspired the piece. I have an account there, but you need to log in to see the stories that I tagged as mature for naughty language. If you have an AOL/AIM screen name, you can just sign in with that.

Even if you don’t read my stuff (though I’m rather proud of what little I have up there), check it out. It’s pretty fun to write those tiny stories, and there’s some good reading there. I recommend Ben Paddon, creator of Jump Leads. (For that matter, Jump Leads is also worth reading.)

I’ve been talking about The Next Project for a while now. And recently, I’ve also been talking about the “technically-doesn’t-exist-yet” forum. As it turns out, some small bit of information about TNP has surfaced in the forum. If you’ve got questions, feel free to help me make sure all the kinks are worked out of the forum before it officially exists. (No registration needed, but making an account takes an extra sixty seconds at best.)

Working on more concept shit for TNP. Just felt the need to clarify one important point:

I FUCKING HATE DRAWING MEN.

Typically male of me, I know.

EEEEEEE!

EEEEEEE!

I’m not a huge roleplaying fan, but (largely thanks to Futurama)I do know who Gary Gygax is. But no heartfelt sentiments here, you’ll have read the one at Websnark because he’s a better writer (and roleplayer) than I am, and I have to leave for work in about… one minute from now. Scratch that, right this second. Seems that sentence took more than a minute to write.

Anyhow, this is probably the best (but not most heartfelt, that would be the one at Websnark) sendoff for the good mister Gygax. (Of course, what self-respecting geek doesn’t read xkcd? You probably saw it before I did.)

“Oh jesus, he’s getting out another rulebook.”

The Firefox 3 beta 3 has managed to impress me with sheer stupidity. Gushing praise to follow, though.

So I’m reading the new features and bugs and shit, because the whole point here is to see the new hotness. I’m damn sure not going to be using FF3 seriously until Mouse Gestures is updated to support it. That’s seriously a dealbreaker. Anyhow, I see this: “The new Location Bar, Add Bookmark dialog, and Download Manager information popup behave inconsistently with Window-Eyes. JAWS 8.0 or better is recommended for this beta. (bug 393398)” My question is this: do these people have any idea at all how much a screen reader fucking costs? If their solution is to tell people to buy a $900 program, they better come up with a different solution, and fucking fast. (Of course, this is a beta, so this falls under the heading of “this will probably be fixed by the time it’s released.”) Also, the new bookmark dialogue is a bit cumbersome in regards to folders, though the system seems to be tooled more toward using tags rather than manually arranging shit into folders. Still, I make heavy use of “Open folder in tabs” so this irks me.

(Incidentally, while writing this, a bit about Window-Eyes came up in NHB’s automation. The same bit, in fact, that made me start listening to NHB in the first place.)

Now, that said, Firefox 3 is fast. Stupid fast. And the commands to increase and decrease text size have been replaced with full page zoom, like they have in Opera. Fucking win. I have been waiting for this feature for so long, it’s not even funny. Though adding commands to zoom by 100% increments as well would be nice. But either way, I’m stoked that I’ll be able to finally get rid of the “zoom images in” bookmarklet, an ugly hack at best. And I’ve seen, at long last, the Acid2 test rendered correctly. (Which means nothing more than “FF3 can render this one page correctly,” but it’s marginally indicative of standards compliance, and it’s still pretty cool regardless.)

And now off to uninstall. Gonna be nice when this thing is released, though.

Sometimes you make comics to entertain. Sometimes you make comics to deal with shit that bothers you. And sometimes you make comics because the world needs to know just how much of a fucking idiot you are.

I’m confident that I will screw my hair up many, many more times before I figure this out, but I refuse to pay someone for a fucking trim. But, as was mentioned under that crushing wall of text, the shit will grow back. And if that’s the worst thing that happens to me this month… (It isn’t.)

I swear I didn’t mean to make Ness look like a bitch in that last panel. Yay for me being too lazy to draw a new, non-bitchy sprite.

When clearing a bunch of “to be dealt with” shit off my computer’s desktop, I found a text file with a bunch of strip ideas for a couple of strips I was thinking about starting before I decided to restart HoD. So I have a handful of ideas that I can make into HoD strips, the first of which is this one. I’ve got another one, which I won’t be using, about the electronic drums in the background there, featuring the phrase “I can’t drum very well, but it turns out that sucking at the drums is just as fun.” Not really useful without doing yet another photocomic, but damned if it ain’t true. Hitting things with sticks is hella fun.

If you don’t recognize the lyrics, it’s because they’re French and therefore not pronounced like they look like they’re pronounced. And / or you’re not a Freezepop fan. The song is entitled Parlez-vous Freezepop? Also note that Spectre Verde doesn’t include the special foreign characters, so the little fiddly bit on the C in garçons is missing. I apologize to French readers for being too cheap to get a Blambot Pro font.

(The lyric is roughly “It’s the boys and me, voila, it’s our life.” I only mention this to point out that I can just barely speak a little French.)

www.heartshapedskull.com.
www.heartshapedskull.com!
…
www.heartshapedskull.com!!

Oh fuck yes.