I’m seeing a lot of the same questions in the comments of DM of the Rings. Rather than answering the same question in the comments of a dozen threads, I’m going to gather it all up here and deal with it in one post so that I can link back to it as the need arises.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “DM of the Rings FAQ”
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It would have been pleasing if this extra-large (double, actually) comic had ended up being number “XL”. Missed it by one. (What kind of a dork obsesses over details like that? Sheesh.)
I’m sure this is an unexpected turn of events. Don’t worry, I know where this is going. You don’t. Ha ha.
Steven has a post up on the whole deal with Rabbi Elazar Bogomilsky, who has filed suit to be permitted to put up a menorah next to a Christmas display, and…
Oh what’s the use? It’s like part of the holiday now. Every year we turn on the TV and it’s either playing It’s a Wonderful Life or a story about another Christmas-tree lawsuit. The whole thing is so cliché that even the jokes about how cliché it is have themselves become cliché.
But Steven suggests:
That is something with which I am down. Er. Anime Day. Not the lawsuit.
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You know what I mean.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Session 10, Part 3”
Some Sysadmins evidently have spam filters in place that let you know if your email was eaten by their spam filter. It does this by replying to the suspected spam. I can see the reasoning here. If the filter eats an email I’ve sent to their system, the filter lets me know so that I can pick up the phone or otherwise make another attempt to reach the intended party. This seems like a helpful thing thing to do, until you come out of your stupor and realize spammers usually don’t use a valid return address. If a message is suspected of being spam, then the odds of the return address being vaild are astronomical.
The result of this idiocy is that if a spammer uses a real adress of some unrelated third-party (say, for example, mine) then the target’s filter will, in turn, send a whole bunch of “Your email could not be delivered” crap to this third party. Some are even stupid enough to include the text of the original spam, thus helping the spammer by propigating their spam even further. To me.
What would happen if I installed a similar filter on my end? When I got hit with one of these “warnings”, would my filter would turn around and send the warning right back at the original target? Would the two mail servers then begin an eternal game of ping-pong with the message?
I bring this up because the number of warnings outnumber the actual spams in my inbox this morning. One or more spammers is using [random]@shamusyoung.com as their originating address, and so my inbox has over a thousand of these “Your email was intercepted by our junk mail filter” warnings. These filters should at the very least have some sort of breaking point where they realize, “Hey, I’ve eaten a dozen messages from this guy. Maybe he is, in fact, a spammer, and maybe I should stop notifying him that his stuff isn’t getting through.” These filters should never, ever, blindly reply to hundreds of random emails comming from the same address.
I am reminded of a passage from Cryptonomicon:
Yes. That is exactly why this bugs me. It is not the volume of mail that irritates me, but the pointlessness and stupidity of the chain reaction.
UPDATE: I was just emailed a link to this post. Looks like I’m not the only one with this problem.
I actually made today’s comic twice. The one I posted is the second version. Below are a few observations about making comics and using different layouts, as well as the original cut of today’s comic.
People have been emailing me links to various other webcomics and putting the occasional link in the comments, and so I’ve been reading through a bunch of webcomics I’ve never seen before.
The obvious uh, observation, is that the ones with a non-grid layout are a lot more interesting to look at. They are more exciting, more dramatic, more whatever-the-artist-is-trying-to-do. The less grid-like the layout, the better. EXCEPT: If the layout is too formless then it becomes difficult to read. I’ll jump to the wrong panel, read the punchline in the middle of the joke, or get confused about who is talking. If this happens then the layout is far, far worse than a plain-Jane grid. I have this problem with mainsteam comics all the time. There will be several partly-overlapping panels in a crazy top-left to lower-right diagonal and I’ll get confused or lost.
I doubt either style makes a strip more or less funny. Provided the information still makes it across, the joke is the same.
Still, just to amuse myself I’ve been trying to break out of the grids, but Comic Book Creator is my enemy here. The layouts are stored in XML pages. So, when I start a strip I have to know ahead of time that I want the 6-panel, or the 5 panel one with a huge closing frame, or whatever the situation calls for. There are a lot of arrangements to choose from, but you can’t edit them on the fly. If I decide I want to steal some space from Faramir’s panel and give it to the next frame, the only way to accomplish this is to edit the XML document to put the frames where I want, and then start the comic over from the beginning.
Because of this, I end up abandoning my fancy-pants layout and going with Yet Another Grid Comic. This was fine at first, but the longer I do this the more it bugs me. Now I’m wondering if there is any other comic software out there? I’m using a PC, so Comic Life isn’t an option.
For comparison, below the fold I have the original “grid-style” layout of today’s strip.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Alternate DMotR #40”
How did this niche racing game make a gameworld so massive, and why is that a big deal?
A breakdown of how this game faltered when the franchise was given to a different studio.
Do you like electronic music? Do you like free stuff? Are you okay with amateur music from someone who's learning? Yes? Because that's what this is.
This is why shopping for graphics cards is so stupid and miserable.
Denuvo videogame DRM didn't actually kill piracy, but it did stop it for several months. Here's what we learned from that.
Why Google sucks, and what made me switch to crowdfunding for this site.
Why is internet news so bad, why do people prefer celebrity fluff, and how could it be made better?
This series began as a cheap little 2D overhead game and grew into the most profitable entertainment product ever made. I have a love / hate relationship with the series.
Computers keep getting more powerful. So why do the population caps for massively multiplayer games stay about the same?
This version of Silver Sable is poorly designed, horribly written, and placed in the game for all the wrong reasons.
T w e n t y S i d e d
