Episode 414

Read the comic here.

Blogger was really acting up yesterday - posts scheduled to go up at noon went up at nine in the evening. Not good. Things hopefully are back to normal, but we'll have to just wait and see. I'm looking into alternatives if things don't improve quickly.

As to today's strip: The flame in panel 3 isn't digitally enhanced - it was a lucky shot where to get Whiskey's face in focus I had to lose focus on the front edge of the flames...Looks pretty neat, if I do say so myself.

Well, dang.

My Steampunk Falcon didn't even make cut to the second round of the FBTB contest. If the other entries weren't so great, I'd be quite depressed.

As it is, I'm bummed. But whatchagonnado?

*sigh*

Had a good time at the convention - still not home yet.

Here are two Bonus Strips I worked up for the Convention Booklet. It was the first time I'd ever been asked to contribute something like this, and I was more than happy to help out. For those of you looking for a RC fix before Tuesday, here you go.

Strip 1 | Strip 2

Why does the universe hate me?

At my office we're doing "Secret Santas". It's a gift exchange were you buy small items for a randomly-selected co-worker for a week.

In our office we try and make things easier for our Secret Santa by writing out a short list of gift ideas. Of course, at the top of my list was "LEGO."

My Santa missed Tuesday, and promised to make it up to me with a very nice gift on Wednesday.

Yesterday, I got this:

In case you can't make it out, those are four small bags of MEGA BLOKS.

The evil opposite of LEGO bricks.

And I'll have to be nice, because odds are the person who bought me these just didn't know better. I mean, it's not reasonable to expect them to know how MEGA BLOKS make my skin crawl.

But, man, it still stings.

Advent Review: Day 1

VS

Each day, in addition to the comic, I'll take a look at each calendar's offering in more detail here in a separate post. In these posts I'll be taking a look at the two Calendars and evaluating them on General Coolness, Holiday Theme, and Nifty LEGO Pieces.

Each day, one Calendar will WIN and one will LOSE. And at the end of the month, we'll total up the daily results and declare a WINNER.

Hope this doesn't suck.

Okay, with that out of the way, let's take a look at the prizes behind

DOOR NUMBER ONE

I had a feeling.

Right out of the gate, like the past few years, we get a Mini-Figure to begin our adventure. If I were to look for a bright side, at least it's a heroic Firefighter and not a bum or something else City-Themed.

The sad part? There's nothing at all new about this figure. If the only LEGO products you ever received in your life were the Advent Calendars, you'd already have all of these parts from two years ago. As a matter of fact, the ONLY difference between December 1, 2007 and December 1, 2005 is that this year we get a saw accessory instead of an axe.

Shame on you, LEGO. Very, very LAME.

DOOR NUMBER ONE

So what do the Belvilleians get on December 1st? A Christmas Fairy!

Now, this is more like it. Sure, there are only two pieces, the sadly non-articulated Fairy and her pink wand - but at least there something festive about this present. You get a feeling that after a few drinks she might be the life of the party. (No, wait, that's the Green Fairy.)

True, she's not in scale with the standard LEGO mini-figure. The Belville theme has much larger figures, however, making her size "cute" rather than "hulking."

Today's CITY door may have the advantage in part count and playability, but I'm still giving today's WIN to Belville. The cheap repeat nature of the CITY door is just too loathesome to do otherwise.


TODAY'S WINNER:

LEGO Sucks.

Grrrrr.

I'm really annoyed at how LEGO shop-at-home is handling orders. If I put things into my cart as "in stock", go through the whole checkout process as "in stock" and get a confirmation that they are "in stock and shipping soon" I should be fine, right?

Nope. First the status went to "On backorder - will ship in 30 days". A real problem as these were Christmas gifts. But still workable.

Then the second email: "Canceled. We will not be getting any more of item X. Your credit card will not be charged." NOW what am I to do?

Since they moved their distribution center I've had nothing but problems with Shop-at-Home.

First I get someone else's order in my box - I had a huge clearance order and instead I get some low-end Star Wars stuff. By the time I get the box to report the problem all the items I had ordered had gone out of stock, so no LEGO clearance joy for me.

And this will make the third time I've lost out on items (sometimes not even clearance stuff, just IN STOCK items!) because their on-line inventory system apparently has no basis in real stocking levels.

Why even order from them if all you're really doing is putting a hold on funds on your credit card while they decide that "whoops! Once again we actually don't have any of that stuff in our warehouse after all"?

But I know I'll be on their site again soon, putting stuff into their shopping cart and hoping for a miracle.

Because I am LEGO's Bitch.

Blog about the Blog

You may have noticed that this page was getting...shall we say...infrequent updates over the last couple of days. This was due to a problem on the Blogger.com side of things. If you FTP your blog to host it on your own site, as I do, their servers weren't completing the request for some reason.

Things appear to be running smoothly now, though. Hopefully things will stay that way for a bit.

Small bit of housekeeping news: I'm going to be at OmegaCon over the weekend. Related travel issues means I may not have web-access (or time) to update the strip on Friday and Monday. I'm considering just posting all the strips through Monday to the web tomorrow morning - it seems nicer than making anyone wait until Tuesday sometime to get their fix. I'll post links here in the Blog - so if you would rather read things "one day at a time" you still can.

Episode 253

Read the comic here.

Back to the storyline by way of a bit of exposition. Of course, Wash and Mary Sue were in the room and probably should have overheard what Whiskey told Morpheus. But Whiskey is one of those people who will repeat a conversation over and over if it suits his purpose.

You probably know someone like that in your life, right?

Whiskey seems to be working the system here. If he can't clear out the Zombies, he'll find someone to do it for him. He's cranky, but clever.

In possibly related news, the Blogger site I use to maintain these updates is having trouble publishing to blogs hosted on site other than theirs. So who knows when this update will show up.

Episode 240

Read the strip here.

It was only once I had the strip assembled that I realized I never really got a good shot of Wash's missing arm. Oh, you can tell he's missing it, but it's not nearly as graphic as it probably should have been.

Oh well. I'll make sure Friday's strip has a nice gory view of things. I'm not up for taking more photos tonight.

Episode 235

Episode 235 is now up - and in it I take an easy swipe at a comic strip that could crush me like a bug.

For those of you who don't follow it, For Better or For Worse used to be an amazingly insightful, well written, well illustrated comic. Over the past few years, though, it's really gone downhill. The characters have been reduced to stereotypes, one-note-wonders who have lost all touch with current events and "the real world" they used to inhabit. The plot lines have gone from caring to ham-fisted angst fests. And, worst of all, the subtle commentary has been replaced with dialog that can only be described as "preachy".

Then word came down that the strip was ending. Or so we thought.

Lynn Johnston (the strip's creator, now head-of-workshop-that-makes-the-strip-for-her) decided on a unique way end end her strip, yet still retain her space on the comic's page. Rather than retire (like Watterson) or even semi-retire to Sundays like Foxtrot's Amend, Lynn has decided to go "hybrid."

Up until now the characters in FBoFW have aged in close to "real time". In the hybrid they enter the more common "ageless universe" where the characters never change from week to week. Now they will just "think back" over their lives, opening the door for Lynn-n-co to republish strips from their archives with minor editing and art tweaks.

Many people feel that LnC should end the strip while she has some dignity left - and make room for new talent on the comic's page. Apparently, Whiskey is one of them.

Personally, I still read FBoFW every day. I don't enjoy it. But I read it because I like to have stuff to bitch about that, in the long run, doesn't really have any impact on my life at all.

I'm strange like that.