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”
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Live free or die, man. Live free or die.
Hat Tip: James Hudnall
Eomer talks to the captain in charge of this mining camp. Eomer bluffs his way though this, making the captain think that the players were sent from Fol Thron to deal with the rioting and work stoppage. This is made easier by the fact that they do have papers proclaiming them to be in service on the Queen, and the fact that the captain would really rather let someone else handle this. They get a lot of license for how they want to handle the problem.
The players have already decided they want the slaves free. Now they need to figure out how to pull it off.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Session 10, Part 2”
Due to the repeated requests, I sat down this weekend and finished the D&D campaign I left hanging waaaay back in May. I apologize to everyone who read through that half-finished story. I didn’t want to start the story again only to stop it again, so now I’ve completed the whole thing. It’s done. I’ll post the next installment later today, and I’ll post the rest Tues-Thu-Sat until the end.
Thanks to the gentle prodding from everyone, and the interest you all expressed in the story.
LATER: I should add that this effort ate into the time I usually spend making the DM of the Rings for the week. Let’s see if I can ALSO get out three comics before the weekend is over. We’ll see.
Still, I feel a great sense of accomplishment right now. This thing has been a little splinter of guilt that would bother me from time to time. The D&D campaign was the original reason for this entire blog, and the fact that I’d left it hanging had been eating at me. So nice to have that done.
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T w e n t y S i d e d
