I got no ideas, so let’s have some Cthulhu. Seriously, though, if someone tells you that (or just about any other Lovecraft story) isn’t incredibly creepy and unnerving probably never sat down and seriously thought about the events detailed therein.

Actually, Ness is named for the Scottish lake. You know, the one that’s supposed to have the giant fish lizard in it. Jay’s name is completely random, and Max is named for Max Quordlepleen, the host at the Restaurant at the End of the Universe in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy¹ books.²

¹ Or Hitch-Hiker’s Guide or Hitch Hiker’s Guide, depending on your proximity to a small chain of European islands who can’t decide how to speak the language they invented. Or so I’ve been told.
² Actually, he only really shows up in the second book, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, but I already said that once in that sentence.
³ One could argue that I go out of my way to use footnotes when talking about the Guide.

If this seems poorly written, that’s just because I did it in under 15 minutes. Having to leave for work in fifteen minutes will do that.

Jerry, if you’re reading this, I want to make it clear that this is, in fact, that damn .wps file you sent to my mom. Today’s comic is brought to you by the letters R, T, and F. =P

This is almost word for word truth. It would be literally word for word, but it had to be edited for space, and I was high as a kite at the time so I can’t quite remember exactly what was said. But I had to walk my mom through opening a file with XP’s “Open With” dialogue, only to find that Abiword, an open source word processor, isn’t listed, so I had to walk her through finding it manually. (The path in the comic is the actual default location, that executable file is fucking buried.) And bear in mind it took me a good ten to fifteen minutes to teach her to click and drag files between folders. And to top it all off, Abiword asked her for a password.

Note that this doesn’t mean my mother is unintelligent, just that she’s not very computer-literate. (And what I walked her through was beyond the scope of most normal users’ computer-literacy, though it should be common knowledge.) This is the woman who taught me how to drive, do laundry, dishes, and make tuna salad. So the comic isn’t a dig on my mother. It’s a dig on Jerry, who should’ve known better than to send anyone, much less my mother, a document in a proprietary format. ^_^

EDIT: It later occurred to me that this might just be a virus. Pretty sure it isn’t, but if it was, then Jerry should’ve known better than to open an email attachment. ^_^

That last bit is only funny if you’ve read Watchmen. I can’t really recommend it as one of my favorite comics, but it’s pretty good, and it’s one of those things comics fans should be required to read, regardless of how entertaining you find it. The title comes from an old Something Positive comic. (That was a bitch and a half to find, too. I went through Year 2 and Year 3 twice before I remembered that it was Eva and not Bran in the strip. The sad thing is that I was able to track it down by who the main character was dating at the time. I think I may have read the S*P archives one too many times. >_>)

Last year, Irony-chan said she was ending Get Medieval due to a lawsuit, as an April Fool’s joke. Though my interest was waning at the time anyway, I stopped reading because of that stunt. That shit is not funny nor is it entertaining.

Funny thing is that nobody ever tries to play April Fool’s pranks on me, personally. Either people think I’m too clever, or too scary to pull pranks on. Sometimes people are really, really weird.

This should pop up at 6AM rather than 10PM as usual. April fucking fools.

I think it’s sad that when I walk up to the 7-Eleven with a cigarette in my mouth, I think up all these good comebacks to anti-smoking people, but nobody ever gives me any shit about smoking. A rare case of people being more decent than expected.

Before you fire up your email clients, allow me to explain that I used to be hardcore anti-smoking, so I know from personal experience that we were all cocksuckers. In this day and age, there’s nobody in this country that hasn’t been appraised of the health risks of tobacco smoke, so if a consenting adult wants to do it, more power to ‘em. The really odd thing is that considering how vehement the anti-smokers are (myself included, back when I was younger and knew everything), smokers are generally pretty considerate about keeping their smoke away from nonsmokers. At least, that’s been my experience.

I hate to admit it, but the PA website being down (at my end, at least) was really annoying for some reason. Probably because Penny Arcade, like Slashdot, breaks other websites. Somehow that volume of traffic, in my mind, never has an adverse effect on their own servers.

I didn’t pay it much mind, but apparently the first meatspace gathering for Anonymous’s little war on Scientology turned out to be a couple dozen skinny white nerds. Anon seemed so much more intimidating when the only proof they existed outside of 4chan was that Fox News special. (Incidentally, that video is hilarious to anyone more knowledgeable about technology than Fox News was. So, anyone with a functioning brain from age six and up. But then, I have to laugh at people’s technofear, because the only alternative is a level of rage at their sheer stupidity that would surely kill me. Wait, was I talking about a comic?)

The nice thing about the insults in this strip (only a sick man would call them “jokes”) is that the people who won’t have a sense of humor about this are likely the ones who have no actual skills outside of whining on a blog. (Don’t let that stop you, Blog Hero. Be sure to link to this on 4chan and the PA forums in order to get your buddies to back you up on just how awful I am. I mean, you can’t buy that kind of advertising.)

I think we’ve all been in that situation before. A perfectly good comeback cockblocked because the other party didn’t say the thing you came up with the comeback to.

I don’t know if the rewiring in the second panel is even possible, much less whether it works as described. In theory, you could wire a pair of humbuckers to act as four single-coil pickups, though I’m pretty sure gutting a cat with a rusty butter knife would be quicker and produce about the same tone.

For those who care, Jay presumably wants a Les Paul for the same reasons I want one: a fixed bridge and the tone (and hum-cancelling) of the pickups. Her stated reason falls apart when you consider that Eric Clapton could probably make a kazoo sound pretty damn nice.

This was inspired by a YouTube comment on a video set to Working Class Hero, but as much as I like John Lennon (and that song in particular), I had to go with a George Harrison song for this.

(The comment was, in a nutshell, how “Green Day has gotten so popular that even The Beatles are covering them.” You’ll notice that I now have a Firefox extension that hides the comments on YouTube videos now. And for the record, the Green Day version of Working Class Hero doesn’t even come close to the original.)

For the curious, the photos are from the Light Rail station at the Englewood Civic Center or whatever they’re calling City Hall and the Library now. Not a bad place, though the nearby apartments always seem to have at least one set of idiots drinking and yelling on their balcony.

Hey, it’s strip number 42, you should’ve known I’d do something like this. It might just be me, but I think this would be the ultimate horror movie. (But only if they use the original Marvin, not the whiny Alan Rickman version.) Hopefully I captured the feel of a trailer for one of those generic horror flicks.

Apologies for lateness. I spaced doing today’s HOD on Friday, when I was supposed to (I’d like to be at least one strip ahead) and then forgot that what little buffer I had was completely exhausted while I was out and about during the weekend.

If you don’t get this, I can say with complete honestly that I don’t give a fuck, you poorly read swine. (Though if you want to rectify your complete and utter failure at life, you’ll find The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams enlightening.)