Vigorish: Touche Dilbert!

I thought I was the only cartoonist who tried to educate his audience with GRE vocabulary lessons in my strips, but lo! Today's Dilbert impressed me with its rather improbable use of the word vigorish - a word I had to look up (something I haven't had to do since I stopped getting Zippy the Pinhead in my local paper). Bravo Scott Adams, bravo.

Groggy Brainstorming

I keep a pad of paper and a pen on my nightstand so that when I get a creative idea while lying in bed, I can write it down before I forget it. This has sometimes been useful in brainstorming gags for my web comic, but lately... I don't know.

Not only is my handwriting almost indecipherable after years of exclusively using a keyboard for written communication, but I'm usually in some half-asleep dream state when I write stuff down. Here are my latest two entries: "Domingo (our cat) why do you meow all the time?" and "Funny pie restaurant." What on earth was I thinking?

Late Comic Excuse Du Jour

Hey everybody - I'm sorry that the next comic is taking so long to publish. For this week's excuse I will throw our good friends Todd and Bethany under the bus :). They did us the great honor of visiting Julia and me here in Denver for the last few days, and we had a great time sampling microbrewed beers, watching endangered animals in captivity, and wandering through hoary government institutions. However, since I have the feeling that Todd is approximately 1/2 of my readership, I don't feel too bad...

Evil Video Game + Vieques!

My friend Kristian pointed me to a Dueling Analogs webcomic, which satirizes an article stating that the Animal Crossing video game is only useful to adults as a vehicle for child predation. I was confounded for two reasons: 1. I used to play Animal Crossing all the time on my Gamecube, and it is truly a fun, open-ended persistent world that has absolutely nothing to do with perversion. 2. Kristian asked rhetorically, "Why does this strip remind me of your sense of humor?" I don't understand where he's coming from, because as I told him, I am simply an author of an educational, family-themed webcomic.

At any rate, Julia and I are on a relaxing vacation on the idyllic Puerto Rican island of Vieques. Other than the disturbingly banshee-like wails of cockfight roosters in the morning, we are thoroughly enjoying the postcard-perfect beach, the warm and unrelenting tropical sun, and the endless rum cocktails in the beach house we are sharing with our friends here. Since we won't be back in Colorado this weekend, I regret to announce that the comic this week will be at least a day late.

Gainesville Represent!

Whoa - it looks like achewood, one of my favorite comics, has started a story arc based in Gainesville, FL (thanks Todd for the heads up!). This is pretty exciting stuff to me because before moving to Denver, Julia and I hailed from the home of the Gators. And really, no one does a comic about that podunk town (unless you count The Remonstrance, where Mike and Lola very subtly live in Gainesville). Just when you thought Chris Onstad couldn't get any cooler - Bam! He even mentions Archer road on 75 ;).

Living Social: Books

I previously wrote about LibraryThing, an online community for book lovers, where you can create a virtual library and share reviews, etc. While I really liked the idea of the site, I never fully integrated it into my online routine - perhaps because it stops being free after you add your 200th book.

That has changed with my discovery of Living Social: Books. Maybe it's because this site is free with no detectable strings attached, or maybe it's because of Living Social's seemingly more robust online community and modern user interface. However, I think the main reason I've been using it - religiously - to host my virtual bookshelf is its plug-in integration with Facebook. I really think the sites that will catch on in this era will be the ones, like Living Social, that allow you to use them as seamless parts of the "indispensable" sites into which you are already logged - or at the very least, ones that allow for the convenience of single sign on, such as Blogger's integration with Gmail.

Cheetah Men?

The Cheetah Men referenced in this comic are perhaps not as popular as Probo thinks. They are mutant cheetah characters - obviously ripped off from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles - from what is widely considered the worst video game ever, Action 52 for the NES. This was a bizarre collection of 52 buggy, unplayable, and unfinished games. Interestingly, while the Cheetah Men and its completely unnecessary sequel, Cheetah Men II, are considered awful, awful games, they are noted for having pretty spectacular music.