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.

Well, first and foremost, we’ve got the Phone Guys.

Just strange this week, I guess. But that is okay, because I have more to give:

I know I said that Secret Government Robots was going to be a monthly strip, but I figure I should at least cram one more into 2010 so that, at the very least, we can get to know some more of the cast.

So now we have seen the Secret VP and his assistant Ephraim, who is pretty much the sanest robot in the entire organization. Once the stable of characters is fleshed out enough, I may try to do an actual story.

But this week, even that is not enough! I’ve had a half-finished Hover Head strip on my computer for some time so I figured that it was time to get it done and finished.

This is the last of my run of Hover Head strips, though. I’d planned at least six more, but now that I’ve got a new font and the ability to hand-draw layouts before I computerfy them, I am going to halt production. Hover Head and his inability to quip properly will return in the form of complete stories, roughly 22 pages like proper comics. Expect the first story as soon as I can get it completed.

And there is more! I had to delve into the old Contains2 archives for something this week and I stumbled upon a comic that I’d put up there but had neglected to bring here. I now remedy this. It employs some manner of play on words!

As you can see, I managed to get a new Secret Government Robots strip done. I guess, for now, this is a monthly comic? Someday I hope to do better. But for weeklies I still have the Phone Guys:

Someday I hope to do better.

This week brings us the first installment of my new strip, Secret Government Robots:

I plan to make this a recurring one, but I know myself well enough that I’m not going to say that I’ll be doing it weekly. But on the plus side, that means I won’t make forced and stupid punchlines because I can’t think of anything better before the deadline. Speaking of which:

New Phone Guys as well:

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.