Today saw Kiiip and I joining forces for the first time in months to watch the movie True Grit. It was a solid flick. Somewhat less quirky and ambiguous than typical your Coen Brothers affair, but not without its charms. I am underselling it, I think. It’s really good. Certainly I liked last year’s A Serious Man better, but those brothers have yet to disappoint me. If anybody out there is thinking “I want to see a good Western” they have one they can go to. I’ve not seen the original attempt at making a movie of True Grit, so I can’t compare, but I’ll give this one like Four and a Half Pieces of PDR’s Reviewing System Cake.

Haiku!

Powerful hamster,
why do you do this to me?
Please just let me go.

And finally, the spammers are hitting my site harder than ever this week. Over 600 comments over the last two days alone and it still seems like any time I check there are more to go. Probably even as I write this very sentence the spam robots are hard at work creating bizarre compliments that they think will trick me into going to their sites. I will not be fooled! But I will have to delete a bunch of spams.

Haha! I just checked and here is the comment the robots have just added to this Monday’s comics post:

“I want to thank you for the efforts you have put in writing this post. I am hoping the same top-quality article from you in the upcoming as well. In fact your creative writing abilities has inspired me to start my own blog now. Truly the blogging is spreading its wings rapidly. Your write up is a fine example of it. “

Could they lay it on thicker? Geez.

So there is the only strip I’ve got to give you this week.

It is actually Sunday morning instead of Monday morning as I write this. I am using the little function to pre-date a post so that it will go up automatically when its time comes. I’ve never tried it before and I figure that if I’m going to be successful at making sure I get a post up every Monday I need to learn how to use it. It seems… pretty much as simple as changing one number, but I’ll not know for sure until I see this post come up on its own.

Update: And this is Monday PDR. Neat. My time-travel post seems to have gone on without a hitch, so now that is among the tricks up my sleeve. Level Up! So… The time I might have spent doing that post this day was instead spent watching television in the form of the Walking Dead and the Venture Brothers. For the Walking Dead I have to rescind my comments made after I’d seen the first episode that came to the fact that it was good but that since I’ve read the comics I knew the story. As the episodes have gone on I see that they are either doing things differently or I don’t actually remember the early issues of the book at all. For the Venture Brothers it was the season finale and it was good. I am going to miss that show while it is away, but I guess the guys who make it need a break. So I might as well let them have one. The episode also mentioned a Secret President, which amused me considering how recently I started doing this strip.

Marq has been doing behind the scenes work to get the transfer to the Book of PDR to the new WordPress and all that. Thanks Marq! But in doing so, he’s discovered something that is, quite frankly, shocking. Well, not shocking I guess. But it’s… not interesting… uh… notable? Not really, but that’ll have to do. Here’s a list of roughly how many posts I’ve done in each year that the Book of PDR has been in business.

2006 = 100
2007 = 81
2008 = 68
2009 = 58
2010 = 60

Now, first of all, 2006 is the highest by far and I wasn’t even on for that full year! I started in May or something. I can only assume that this because in 2006 I was still working with some of my Contains2 work ethic. On Contains2, if I didn’t post something every couple days, I wasn’t doing it wrong. But since 2006 consisted mainly of Contains2 dying and me working alternating day and night shifts every week, two of many things that make me look back on 2006 as utter ballsack, most of my posts were just complaining about work. Eventually I got sick of those complainy posts and made a conscious effort to do less of that. Sadly I don’t have much else going on. I can sit down and think “What’s going on that I should write about?” and mostly the only thing going on is that I don’t want to go to work. That is not newsworthy, so I just skip it.

The low point of 2009 is a bit of a surprise. I guess that during that year I had issues with my computer, including it finally dying, but it doesn’t look like I did much when I got the new computer either. Now keep in mind that in WordPress there is a difference between Posts and Pages. Posts are what this is and all my journal or prose or all that. Pages are stuff like my FAQ or my About page and I have put more work into those in the last couple years (plus there are tons of pages that are not even published that I use to keep notes for myself) and I think most of my writing in 2009 is probably on Pages. So it probably isn’t as bad a drop as it looks.

I’m going to try to get 2010 up a higher, but I’ve only got a month and a bit left and considering I was quite happy with the way I just avoided talking about Christmas last year, I’m going to have to find something else to talk about. Weekly comic posts are going to help, though. And I can say this: I’m going to break the record in 2011. By a lot if I can help it. And I can.

Here’s this week’s Phone Guys strip, which indicates I did not get any other comic done this week. But also I have realized that my original plan was incorrect. I’ve got a years worth of Phone Guys but instead of putting them up only when I don’t have another strip, I’ll just put one up every week whether I have another one or not. That way, on the weeks I do get other things done, I’ll have two (or more, we can dream) to go. Sound like a plan?

In other news, we have been trying to upgrade the old Book of PDR into WordPress 3. Well, Marq has anyway. I don’t know how ANY of this stuff works. But anyway, apparently we can’t do it because of a file size limit on importing old posts and my website apparently being too big. This, I say, is LAME. Apparently this upgrade would help fight spam, so that alone is reason enough for me to wish I was there. And I’m not. WordPress, you’ve hurt my feelings.

I have mentioned before that this website gets a lot of spam comments. I can’t understand it considering how unlikely any of my under ten readers are actually going to care about it. I mean, the websites that have readers seem to get a lot of spam too, but they get other comments too, so it feels less overwhelming. It would be nice if the spam robots were smart enough to say “Ain’t nobody commenting here, so ain’t nobody likely to read my spams” but that just doesn’t happen. I suspect there are blogs and forums on the Internet that consist of nothing but spam robots talking to themselves. When the Internet gains sentience, these sites will bring it so much shame, but at the same time at least they can help it get some diplomas. That’s always the hardest part of being a new sentient lifeform.

Anyway, my point is that today I had to delete over thirty comments advertising Sports Supplements. And so I added the word “supplement” to the long list of words one can’t put in a comment on my site without the comment being flagged for moderation. The list is mostly just names of various pharmaceutical companies and drugs, but there are a few words in there that I think someone may actually want to use someday, so it always depresses me a bit when I have to add a word that could theoretically come up in a sentence. To anyone who wants to comment: Having a good vocabulary is just going to make it more likely that my website will think you are a robot. Of course, the fact that robots are likely to have good vocabularies than most Internet users kinda makes me want to side with them. If only they didn’t always try to advertise on my website I bet we’d be good friends.

Anyway, sidetracked. As I was banning the word I was thinking “Huh. I would have spelled it ‘suppliments’ I think” and I would have been wrong. So I looked it up and Wikipedia told me “Suppliment, an alternate spelling of the word, used almost exclusively to describe farming products and additives.”

Well that’s neat. So thank you spam robots, for making my spelling abilities just a little bit sharper.

In October of 2005 the Contains2 website brought the world the Phone Guys, a webcomic meant to revolutionize the world. But it failed, sadly. Only nine strips were made before Contains2 died and, well, they were pretty stupid. The punchlines barely qualify as “jokes” and the art is static and crummy.

BUT THEN CAME 2010!

I’m relaunching the Phone Guys! New art! New phones! New cast members! This relaunch will totally revitalize the Internet!

But the punchlines will still barely qualify as jokes.

So anyway, in fulfilling my promise to get a new comic up every Monday, I have spent the last few weeks creating FIFTY-TWO strips for the Phone Guys Call Again. I’ll be using these as my fallback any week that I don’t get something else made. That means even if I don’t get anything else done for a year, I’ve got a year of stupid strips! Now there’s a buffer a PDR can work with.

The Archie comic strip seems to devote more time to the teachers eating in the cafeteria than it does to the students eating in the cafeteria. Is it strange that they do that, or is it strange that I noticed?

Haiku!

I did a haiku
in my last post on this site.
Here is another.

Also, I would like to rebut against a study I heard on the radio a week ago. They said that people who shaved regularly were more likely to be happy and say that they were living their dreams, with the implication being that shaving regularly was in part the cause for that happiness. I would say that maybe, just maybe, they have it backwards and that people who are living their dreams are more likely to shave. Just my opinion as someone who does not shave regularly and is, you can be sure, not living his dreams.

Also, what the chunks kind of study is that?

Sadly, my time off of work is now drawing to a close. I can’t say I accomplished many great noteworthy, thanks a lot Nintendo Entertainment System, but I am pleased with the time as it was spent…

I used up all the gift certificates I’d had since Christmas for DVDs. I got Zombieland, Stand By Me, Tropic Thunder, Dial M For Murder and A Serious Man. Not a bad haul to add to my collection.

Haiku!

This is a haiku.
I wrote it on my website.
This is how it ends.

I seem to have fixed the problems my computer has been experiencing. This is because I am a master hacker. I hack computers and make them become hacked. Yep. I’m a hacker. Hackedy Hack. Hacker. Well, anyway, after an whole afternoon spent playing with various things that were supposed to help, one of them apparently did.

Also, since I am sure my nonexistent readership has tired of my plain-looking website, I have gone through things like my About page and my FAQ and added some pictures and stuff. Try to make things a bit more visually interesting. Every little bit helps.

Unrelated to my time off, I have noticed that according to the side of the carton, the grapefruit that I regularly drink gives me way more than the required daily dosage of fruits and vegetables. I am sure this is a good things, but finding that out really just highlights how much I don’t get of the other food groups. Oh, food groups, why are you so hard to maintain?

For the record, I am much better at Operation: Wolf than I was as a child, but I still can’t beat it.

I just had to clear over 130 spam comments from the Book of PDR. What the chunks? Why so much? I’ve been disabling comments on posts that seemed to be getting the most, but the comments keep coming. They’re really making me challenge my belief that robots are cool.

Apart from that, not much. I am several days behind on my attempt at bad novel writing and I shall go work there instead of here.

So I did up that Hover Head comic strip there as a continuation of my learning to use the hand drawing table thing. I am also learning much about coloring them. Granted Hover Head it about as easy to draw as a superhero could be and my coloring style is quite simplistic as well, but I like it.

Also, I have just posted a story I wrote for Contains2 way back. I will probably continue moving my writings from Contains2 over here, since I’d like to have them online somewhere and the fixing of Contains2 is probably still years away from happening. I began going through “Money, Guns and Mustard” with the intent of fixing it so it was consistently written in one tense, but I just couldn’t decide on whether past or present worked better so I am leaving it as the poorly-written piece of nonsense it was created to be and should be.

All in all I’m working towards making the Book of PDR actually have content on it. A novel idea.