Even being called in unexpectedly to work last night can not prevent me from giving you a ton comics this week!

There are so many comics by PDR this week that yesterday I gave the bulk of it to you. That story stars myself as Agent Durning and the Honourable Kiiip Williams as Reg Lincoln, Hunter of Evil Monsters. What’s more, the pictures of Kiiip were taken like eight years ago for a photo story that I never ended up doing on Contains2. They have finally lived up to their destiny. This also means that those comics are in keeping this month’s unintentional theme of PDR Nostalgia.

And as I hinted at in that post about old PDR stories, here’s a comic strip I wrote when I was nine or ten that was redrawn yesterday:

It presupposes that you are familiar with that whole sword in the stone concept. Do kids today still know about that? I do like that even at that age I was amused by completely oblivious idiots.

Also in that post I mentioned Little Choy. I got to thinking “I’ve been meaning to do a new Little Choy” and so then I did.

Although I have had a color scheme in my head for Little Choy since the very beginning, I refuse to color him. It would probably be hideous.

And I also made this:

That is not technically any nostalgic PDR reference, but I did create it in the style of Photoshop-drawn comic that I used to do much more often in the Contains2 days.

Also, the Phone Guys are doing something too:

Can you handle how many comics there are?

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, today we hit the Hal-Con I mentioned a few posts back. I’d be lying if I didn’t say we were a touch disappointed. As hard as it is for me just to be in a place with that many people, the location seemed rather small and crowded. And while I’m sure there must have been stuff there that would have interested me, none of it was going on while we were there. I suspect that plenty of people did enjoy it more, though. It seemed like it anyway. I’m hoping that the event was successful and that we’ve got the thing poised to become an annual event. Especially if they can get a bigger venue next year.

Frankly, I had more fun while we were sitting at the Dairy Queen across the street and identifying what costumes people walking past were wearing. I can now say I’ve seen a man in a Cookie Monster costume on a motorcycle. Another plus of the day: I saw a guy in a Dr. McNinja costume. Dear guy in a Dr. McNinja costume: You made me happy.

It is currently not decided if we will be trying again tomorrow. If we do, I’ll let you know. If we don’t I might also let you know. Thus, these last few sentences are pretty unnecessary.

Also, I’d like to take a moment to complain about something I’ve seen on the Internet but today was the first time I heard about it in person: Using the term “genre” to refer to things like fantasy and science fiction. Like a website will say it has the latest news on “genre fiction” and it means it covers comics and sci-fi shows and just in general nerdy stuff. It’s downright stupid to me. Fantasy and sci-fi are genres, certainly, but to refer to them as “genre” first of all doesn’t specify what genre they are and secondly doesn’t acknowledge all the genres that those things aren’t. I am sure I have absolutely no chance of stopping this from continuing, but I can swear right here that I’m never going to play along! NEVA SURRENDA!!!

I just saw two people running up the street carrying yoga mats. What kind of society are we living in where people need to rush to a relaxing thing like yoga. Shame on everybody.

Anyway, since I haven’t really got much else to say, now is as good a time as any to mention that Kiiip, Marq and Yours Truly are planning on going to a Science Fiction Convention later this month. I don’t know if this is something that has been happening every year and I just never noticed or if this is the first time we’ve had one in Halifax since my childhood. Either way I will be at this one, and I will be too poor to afford anything. But I might see Chekov. So that’s pretty awesome.

Hey, you know what is awesome? When I was getting on the elevator to go see Kip earlier today and just I was getting on a little boy (about four years of age, I would guess) and his father were stepping off. The little boy looked up at me then asked his father “Why is he really tall?” It was awesome. His father apparently had no reply.

You’ll note that I mentioned Kip just then. I would like to clarify right now that I am mentioning him in a poor light. That’s right, Kip. I am disparaging you. Suck it.

So, remember a few months back when I thought that I’d lost all the cable networks that I don’t pay for? Well, it appears that I was too quick to assume that someone had noticed I was getting an odd assortment of things I’m not meant to. It turns out that the cable was just unplugged and I’ve still got them all. So I am back in the business of being able to flip through the channels as a form of relaxation.

Shame about how there really isn’t anything good on them.

Looks like we’ve been found out, and we’re most likely going to be punished when Pat gets home. Oh well. He’s going to have his hands full with Francesco anyway. I’m not dealing with that surly raccoon again.

And apparently I forgot it was Kip’s birthday, which is a cardinal sin or something, but that means Kip is as old as me now, so sinning should be fine at this point. For him and for me. Because we’re old, or something. Older than Pat, now, but his birthday is also this month, but he doesn’t like announcing that fact, so this is probably going to be censored. Boo! Censorship for censorship’s sake! Just because he has a printing press and I don’t. Totally not fair.

And I also don’t know when he’s coming home, because he told me the eighth before he left, but I found out that Terry will be home on the tenth, and Pat was coming home with him (but not on the same flight or something), so I may get a couple more days out of it? Maybe? It would be good since I am still trying to clean up parts of the apartment, but it’s been slow going since the vacuum became a teenager, or something. It just refuses to pick up stuff. Needs a new filter, or something. But darn, if I don’t like rearranging things. Also forces you to clean up, really clean up. Or something.

Be kind to children and small animals,
–me.

I was thinking recently about the times I’ve been in the hospital. For my own benefit I am going to try to make a list of them. I’m going to go reverse-chronologically, because I’m working on my tachyon impression.

• About two years ago, I think (so 2006ish) I crushed my hand in a machine at work. Hours later the bleeding had not stopped and when I got to ER, I found out I’d lost a fingernail. Not a terribly long wait time. Some X-Rays and some poking and I got called a very good patient. It did take the convincing of like eleven people at work to get me to bother taking that trip. And even then I didn’t go straight from work. I went home to check my email and got a slice of pizza before I finally walked to the hospital.
• Around Summer 2001 I had what appeared to be blood in bodily functions that blood is not supposed to be a part of. It was my mother’s idea to get it checked out at the emergency room, plus I got to miss a day of work (I was a security guard then). So… this trip was essentially me getting probed in those certain regions. I remember making lots of jokes that the doctors and nurses either didn’t get or weren’t paying attention to. I don’t remember the wait being too long and the problem went away on its own immediately after that with me never actually getting an answer what caused it (though the doctor mentioned that some cereals have dye that can look like blood when it comes out…) More importantly I remember we decided to stop at KFC on the way home from the hospital and they were out of chicken. No fooling. Also when I called my employers to tell them I’d miss a day, they demanded I get a note from the doctor. They never came to get the note from me and I think I still have it around here somewhere (I keep it because like a week later Kip wrote his medical opinion of me, “Yer ah jackass!” on it).
• Another time, I think I was about sixteen, but don’t ask me to figure out what year that would have been, I was taking out the garbage on a snowy day and slipped in the ditch and twisted my ankle. I remember my brother asking me if I was okay and, being embarrassed I just told him to go inside. I literally crawled up the stairs to the house and eventually went to bed. I lived in the basement back then, so the next morning I again had to literally crawl up some stairs to get and my mother, seeing this, brought me to the hospital. I remember being impressed by the fact that when they saw me limping my way to the door with my mother’s help some orderlies greeted me with a wheelchair. I suppose that they do that stuff every day, though, so they know what they’re doing. The wait this time was really bad. Hours of sitting in that wheelchair and waiting. I got some X-rays but nothing was broken, so it was ice and not using the leg. Made sense.
• Junior High I got a weird rash one day. It was all over my legs. I don’t remember all that much of that particular trip, aside from the female doctor seeing my junk. I do remember that the rash was because of something which Sounded like “Hypo-purple-itis” and that made sense because the rash was purplish, but of course I don’t know what the thing actually was called.
• And once a very, very young PDR had some manner of dehydration and actually had to spend a couple nights in the hospital. It was over the holidays and, the way I remembered it growing up I missed Christmas. I have been assured though that I was actually home at Christmas and it was New Years Eve that I missed. I guess my child-mind equated not getting to play with all his (no doubt awesome) presents as essentially missing Christmas. The only important thing to come out of this is now, when I get a physical and they ask if I’ve ever had a stay in the hospital I have to answer about this vague thing instead of just saying that I’ve not.
• Also, my understanding is that I was born in a hospital. I’m taking other people’s word for that one, though because I sure don’t remember that. And you’d think you’d remember something that important.

So that’s that. The stuff of future medical textbooks.

Tachyons are the one that move backwards in time right? Am I making that up?

Okay, it’s not really so much a snow storm as it is some snow, but I thought it best to continue the weather themed titles. But anyway, we got snow and I don’t want it there. But I’m not too upset about it yet. I mean we barely got snow last winter, so my tolerance is a little higher. But give it time. And for the record, that hurricane last week turned out to be a bit of a wuss, really. I guess some places lost power for a few hours and some more rural ones for a day or more, but the PDR went no longer than ten minutes without it. Granted it cut out when I was a minute away from the end of the movie I was watching, but that’s just a minor annoyance.

Anyway, in other news I have been playing a free trial for Star Wars Galaxies. It’s got some major flaws, but I have been able to say “omgstarwarz lol” on four different planets now, which amuses me. What doesn’t amuse me is having a character (a Jedi no less) trapped behind knee-high barriers that he cannot jump over and between openings that look larger than him, but he cannot walk through. I ended up just making another character and joining the Empire.

And before I go I want to I want to mention this so I don’t forget it. I was hanging with Kip the other day and mentioned that I had hit myself in the face with ice cream last week. He asked if anyone had been around to see it and I said that Marq was sitting next to me, but watching the television, so he didn’t see it. Kip then pointed out, and I don’t remember his exact words but something like “When I lived with you, I always kept one eye on you, because I knew you were always seconds away from doing something stupid”. That makes me happy for some reason.

Let’s see… Kip and I saw that Across the Universe movie. Not bad. Not much in the way of a plot, really, but maybe all musicals are like that, what do I know?

As I was walking home from the bus stop tonight some guys drove by yelling incoherently. The only thing I made out was “Allahu Akbar!” While I thought it was hilarious, I wondered shortly after if they were trying to be vaguely threatening by acting like “terrorists” or something. How drunk they clearly were really negated anything malicious they were trying to get across.

My ideal situation though would be that they were actually just really drunk and really thought God Was Great and felt like sharing. That would be nice.

In other news, I ate way too much candy today. I would do it again too. Try and stop me.

And finally: Inspirational lyrics to end my pose:

Kick, Punch, Turn,
I got the funky flow,
M-I-X the flour into the bowl.

Peace out.

Since last weekend I have been without my computer. I’ve gone that long without the Internet, but with no computer at all, it was killing me. And the fear that I had lost everything on my hard drive (which includes all manner of music/pictures/tv shows and things I’ve written dating back at least as far as ten years) made me even more upset. I’m an empty, lonely man and having no computer only made that worse.

What had happened was the mouse locked up while I was playing Counterstrike with Kip. I tried rebooting it to get it working again and it just never came back on. It would come up with a black screen with that little flashing dash where you’re supposed to type, but could not type or do anything. But when it was taken in to be looked at it came up fine for them and now as I try it again here and I haven’t lost my files. I guess that means there was nothing wrong with it beyond “It wasn’t working for a while and now it’s better.” Awesomeness. This makes me happy. I think maybe I’ll start backing stuff up on CDs maybe.

That said, I didn’t miss anything much, it would seem. Two emails and one MSN message. And 38 spam comments on this site. But still, I feel better knowing that.

In other news, tomorrow I shall be getting the last signature needed for my passport application. Soon the PDR shall be spreading his self all over the globe!

I guess that is enough for tonight. I am going to re-enter myself into the World’s Widest Web.