So… I guess the comic is going to be late.
Posted March 31st, 2008 by Howard TaylerEDIT: in case you missed it, the original “filler strip” for April 1st, 2008 is thumbnailed here…
I went seven years, nine months, and twenty-one days without missing a strip. That’s not such a bad run. But I guess with all the convention travel, I neglected to finish the work on today’s installment. I’ve forgotten to upload before, but until now I’ve not forgotten to color.
I would have caught that if I hadn’t been so very, very tired all day.
Anyway, I’m still half-asleep, but I figure you fine folks will forgive an indulgence. I threw together a placeholder image and put it up (there’s a first time for everything) and I’m headed for bed. Please be patient, you’ll get the April 1st installment soon enough.
In fact, it’s probably already there. I mean, by the time you’ve finished reading this blog post, the animation should have cycled through to your precious Schlock Fix.
Happy All Fools’ Day.
Explore posts in the same categories: Site News, Humor
March 31st, 2008 at 8:12 pm
Very nice April Fools’! I am liking it. I wish I had something to counter with, but alas…I bow in respect.
March 31st, 2008 at 8:15 pm
Go ahead, Howard. Take that day off. You deserve it.
I will just stare at the filler until it eats its way into my brain…
*goes off to stare*
March 31st, 2008 at 8:26 pm
My first thought was “Wait, Howard keeps a buffer.” And then I read the blog and remembered it was April Fools day.
March 31st, 2008 at 8:42 pm
I was with Brenatevi, I know you keep a buffer, then got to the end.
ewwwww …. that was just baaad!
And then I still had to wait for it to come up. It was worth it though!
Thanks!
March 31st, 2008 at 8:59 pm
Oh, I get it. Heheh.
March 31st, 2008 at 8:59 pm
It’s not April Fool’s day yet for another two minutes!
Nice one, Howard. You actually got me with that one.
I trust that the april fool’s joke isen’t goign into the archives?
March 31st, 2008 at 9:09 pm
Got me for a moment, but I was going there is a buffer so I had to read the blog. By which time the strip was up. Well timed! Of course I had to reload to watch the ‘filler’
March 31st, 2008 at 9:19 pm
I just finished reading your entire strip’s archive. Been a reader for about two weeks. And tonight, you absolutely got me. Was eating a breadstick and cruised here for my nightly fix and was floored. “Hey, he’s never done a AFD strip before. Huh.”
NICE job. Now I have to clean the breadstick sauce off of my laptop screen.
Cheers, Howard!
March 31st, 2008 at 9:42 pm
Sigh.
My internal clock was still set to March 31st. My April Fools Day filters were still offline.
Yeah, for a minute, I believed it. Good one :)
March 31st, 2008 at 9:45 pm
Bravo sir, bravo.
March 31st, 2008 at 10:02 pm
Well played, Mr. Tayler … well played. ^_^
March 31st, 2008 at 10:30 pm
Just wanted to say you totally got me. For five full seconds i just stared, seriously the look on my face would have given passers-by the impression that I’d just heard a family member died
March 31st, 2008 at 10:31 pm
I have one in Locus Online today, but I like yours better.
However…watch other news:)
March 31st, 2008 at 10:57 pm
‘Course, those of us who open our comics in a bunch of tabs fail to see the joke.
I started reading the newspost and was like, “What? Filler? That didn’t last long.” Then I got it and refreshed.
March 31st, 2008 at 11:28 pm
@theamberkey: If I were trying to write jokes that everyone got all the time I’d be in real trouble. :-)
March 31st, 2008 at 11:28 pm
Hah! You half got me… I knew it was the first, and I was quite certain you hadn’t underrun your buffer… But boy I sure burnt out a few brain cells looking for the secret link before I realized it was just an anigif. :)
March 31st, 2008 at 11:31 pm
“I mean, by the time you’ve finished reading this blog post, the animation should have cycled through to your precious Schlock Fix.”
I think you underestimated a lot of people’s reading speed. By an insultingly wide margin. Or were you counting on people being stunned?
Actually, it worked for me. I read the first frame and the headline of the top blog post, decided to re-read yesterday’s comic (in another tab) before coming back to read your excuses. Just after I came back to the first tab, the animation switched to the second slide, which made me pause for a bit. (”Wait right here?” Oh, so it’s only gonna be a little bit late. Okay then. I’ll read the blog, and then I’ll reload.) Then I started reading the blog post, interrupted briefly by reading the third slide. (Why are you wasting time making all these slides when you could be colouring? Still half-asleep. Okay, why are you wasting time making slides when you could be having a nap to prepare yourself for colouring?) My annoyance with the animation made me pause long enough for the comic to come up. (Oh, okay, it’s ready. Did you have a Javascript image-refresher prepared just in case this sort of thing happened? That’s pretty cool.) So I read the comic, then finished reading the post. (Planned all along. After my last theory, that’s actually a let-down. Wait… how did you know I wouldn’t finish reading the blog post before the comic appeared?)
ShadowDragon8685: As I write this, the AFJ is in the archives, but since there’s a broken image above it, I don’t think that’s quite how it’s meant to be.
Oh, and by the way Howard, I think the way you’ve been colouring lately, those out-of-focus backgrounds want more than 256 colours.
theamberkey: I wish I had the bandwidth to be confident that I could do that without anything timing out. It’d suck to have the TCP connection drop out between the end of the first slide and the start of the last.
March 31st, 2008 at 11:50 pm
Wowzers.
I hast been gotten. That hasn’t happened in a long time.
Kudos, my laughter was mighty upon realization.
March 31st, 2008 at 11:54 pm
Okay, that’s interesting. Animated GIFs seem to pause when I’m on another tab. Which is odd, because Flash animations keep going, and although YouTube videos only start when they’re in the front tab, they keep going if I switch away. But GIFs pause.
Okay, that makes the timing a little less mysterious, but it still relies on the reader to pause in shock. And I didn’t switch to the tab with yesterday’s comic in it until the thing had stopped spinning, so the GIF was going while yesterday’s was loading.
Nentuaby: Were you using those brain cells for anything?
‘Cos if so, BAD HOWARD! No tasty, tasty biscuit for you!
April 1st, 2008 at 12:28 am
Sam:
Actually, I think I may have lost a couple of anime quotations and the lyrics to a Pink song. So he did the world a favor, really.
April 1st, 2008 at 1:00 am
[sigh] Leave it to Yr. Obd. Srvt. & Hmb. Narr. to manage to find the
way to completely miss the joke….
I use Firefox, with NoScript. Clicking on the NS icon reveals roughly
a dozen different sites — the main one, Project Wonderful, various
ads, and so on. I have schlockmercenary.com on “always allow”,
but that’s it — everything else is Forbidden.
Problem: The Animation doesn’t work unless the blanklabelcomic.com
site is Allowed. The first “slide” will show, but none of the rest will.
(Not to mention: I also remember all the times The Boss has
mentioned The Buffer, so the Bogometer pegged on that one. :) )
Oh well. Never much cared for AFD anyway — too many mean-
spirited imbeciles with access to photocopiers and books on salt-
water sealife killed any interest. :|
OK, happier comments: Since Ventura’s job is to help keep the
robots on the ship functional, isn’t Tagon technically correct when
he calls her a “robot assist”? (Which doesn’t necessarily preclude
him being ignorant, of course….) :)
April 1st, 2008 at 1:14 am
Definitely need to up the speed on that animation. Stream of thought ‘Well, finally broke the stre…buffer, what happened to his buffer? Oh, that annual nonsense. Lets wait for the slow gif to process.’
April 1st, 2008 at 1:23 am
csadn:
Oh well. Never much cared for AFD anyway — too many mean-
spirited imbeciles with access to photocopiers and books on salt-
water sealife killed any interest. :|
Explain. Please. <popcorn>
April 1st, 2008 at 1:52 am
Well, I can say you had me going for a moment. and BTW, today is the 42nd anniversary of my arrival in this world.
April 1st, 2008 at 3:09 am
Nentuaby: Oh, well in that case I guess Howard can have a biscuit. When he fixes the archive, anyway.
csadn: That’s weird. The animation is a GIF, hosted on schlockmercenary.com, so I think you’ve found a bug in NoScript.
April 1st, 2008 at 3:52 am
But I can’t connect to the internet.
How am I going to read all these wonderful posts or see the joke leading up to the strip if I can’t get on the internet?
Woe is me.
Woe is me.
April 1st, 2008 at 6:21 am
I load pages in tabs, and got to Schlock when the animation had already cycled. Yet, I read the blog post and my pre-caffeine and food brain goes “huh, I guess he must’ve updated it already. Darn, I didn’t get to see the filler. Schlock filler, once in a lifetime sort of thing. Wait. Animation. Cycled. All Fool’s Day. Right.”
April 1st, 2008 at 6:28 am
I just got toatlly pwned…
I hope I at least avoid getting rick roll’d today. I just can’t trust you swine…
April 1st, 2008 at 7:23 am
Hee! Nicely done. :)
April 1st, 2008 at 7:55 am
Dammit! You’re supposed to warn your BROTHER when you prank the world!
As a side note, I only now understand why xkcd, dinosaur comics, and questionable content did their switcheroo. Boy. Sure hope I’m only an April fool.
April 1st, 2008 at 8:24 am
What annoyed the crap out of me is that I don’t have dino comics on my list (don’t care for it personally), so it screwed with my comic-viewing…
April 1st, 2008 at 8:26 am
It doesn’t animate for me. I’ve left it for 10 minutes, and I’ve still got the filler.
I had to save the image separately and open it with a graphic editor to see the comic.
April 1st, 2008 at 8:30 am
@DStaal: What browser are you using? GIF animation is pretty standard stuff. Old-school, even.
April 1st, 2008 at 8:42 am
The animation is WAAAAAAY too slow. Almost missed the joke completely, because it hadn’t switched off the first page. I almost never read the blog anyway, and certainly don’t keep track of the “track record” of a webcomic, so it didn’t trip any triggers in my head.
April 1st, 2008 at 8:54 am
It was REALLY slow on my IE7, for the record… Took a long time to move…
April 1st, 2008 at 9:14 am
I didn’t even get it for a while. I load all my morning comics by middle-clicking on a “comics” folder which loads them all in tabs. Schlock is near the end since I like to keep the best for last. When I got to that page I read the comic and closed the tab.
Then about 20 minutes later on the RSS reader I read the blog entry that said the comic was delayed. I figured it must be an entry from late last night.
Finally I came here again and actually saw the pseudo-filler.
I winder if DStaal has a plug-in installed or a Firefox option set to disable GIF animation? There are several such.
PNG animation is the new thing, with Firefox 3.0
April 1st, 2008 at 9:18 am
It did eventually cycle for me. Took seven minutes to get to the strip though!
Nice one, best since Channel 4 over here did an April fool that got broadcast on the wrong day about the elite flying to Mars! That really got the hackles raised.
April 1st, 2008 at 10:11 am
I couldn’t figure out the joke… At first… I pull up 14 different comics in tabs all at one time… By the time I got down the list to Schlock, the graphics had already cycled… I had to go back and reload the tab to see what was going on! Nice job Howard!!
April 1st, 2008 at 10:30 am
Oh you crafty devil you. You got me right good. I had no idea how you would have run through your buffer, but I believed it.
April 1st, 2008 at 11:17 am
hmmmm.
home desktop (Firefox with NoScript) - never got past frame 1.
work laptop (Firefox w/o NoScript) - never saw the animation, it went straight to the comic. Tried reloading, still no animation.
Oh well.
April 1st, 2008 at 12:04 pm
If I were reading the work of any other webcomic artist, I would’ve simply shrugged and continued down my daily list. But this is Howard we’re talking about. If he’s blogging, he’s alive. And if he’s alive, he’s updating. Ergo…
–GS
April 1st, 2008 at 12:15 pm
This April Fools joke is a good one, but once I saw the first screen I knew it had to be a joke. I just started thinking, “Okay, he’s hid it somewhere as an April Fool on his readers.” So while I thought about where to look the animation cycled through and I got a double laugh.
Ona
April 1st, 2008 at 1:08 pm
i’m sure no one else here at the public library was pleased when i audibly gasped, and began loudly complaining about someone being as lazy as everyone i work with. Then for some reason the strip wasn’t the same filler strip it was.
Refresh. Oh. i get it. Well, at least the cartoonist can pull off a better prank then my coworkers. They’re lazy when it comes to pranks too.
April 1st, 2008 at 1:55 pm
Yeah, that was pretty good. I also thought “Wait, he actually exhausted his buffer???” And then something moved above the blog. “Huh? It’s different…” Very cool.
April 1st, 2008 at 2:03 pm
You actually got me for a moment. Then I remembered that somewhere you said you had enough buffer that you could fall down dead and Schlock could continue without missing a strip.
Can I trust you’ll stick a PNG version in the archive, maybe keeping the April Fools one as a secondary strip or something? There are visual errors (especially noticeable in the second panel) with equivalents just fine in previous strips.
April 1st, 2008 at 3:36 pm
As someone who just attended Ad Astra, you managed to give me a huge guilt complex. ;) “Yay, I got to see Howard– but it cost the world! What a Phyrric victory that was– oh, wait. Ha ha.”
Sidenote: In Firefox, to deal with animated gifs, open about:config. Search for image.animation_mode. Set it to “true” to see animate gifs, and “none” to not animate gifs.
By default, I keep it on “none”, because flashing things on my periphery annoy the “was that something that’s going to eat me” part of my primordial programming. =)
April 1st, 2008 at 4:03 pm
I was wondering what happened to the buffer. It took my handheld PC about 5 minutes before it showed me the new strip. Good one, Howard.
April 1st, 2008 at 6:07 pm
Ok, not that anyone’ll care after 46 comments, but I’ve been a reader for a couple years and Schlock’s become a staple comic, you always know there’ll be a new one every day, it’s someting I’ve come to rely on in this world. So when I logged one and saw the non-filler, I wasn’t devastated or anything, but just a little disappointed, a little sad. A little less impressed with the world.
Like nothing is for certain in this world.. you can’t completely rely on anything.. I read the blog at exactly the right speed to realise what was going on and ecxtatically witness the animation change.. AND I was impressed enough to finally get my butt up to register so I can comment on the blog.. btw happy birthday a while back..
Well played, sir, well played. Maybe some things are for sure..
April 1st, 2008 at 6:53 pm
ummmm…dang. Got me…. its been four years.
CURSE YOU HOWARD TAYLOR!!!!!
April 1st, 2008 at 8:23 pm
The timing was a bit off. Some of us read the strip as soon as it updates, and the associated blog post didn’t go up until later.
April 1st, 2008 at 9:09 pm
Eeeeeehahahahahahahha! Trap sprung!
April 2nd, 2008 at 12:58 am
Nentuaby: _Schlock Mercenary_, 10/31/2005.
Now, take That Image, put it in the hands of a bunch of grade-school
intellects (all the way up through HS in some cases), and add one
student who goes into PTSD-esque panic attacks at the sight of
such things.
And if you’re observing from nearby, pray your insurance is paid up….
Sam: Not a bug, I think — more likely a peculiarity in how the actual
comic gets to the website. (How does that work, anyway, Boss?)
April 2nd, 2008 at 7:35 am
I’m using Safari. And the add above your strip had animated, just the strip itself didn’t seem to.
April 2nd, 2008 at 11:07 am
A little humor there, Howard.
Very little.
April 2nd, 2008 at 11:12 pm
A lot of people expressed disbelief on the basis that Howard keeps a buffer. I interpreted “forgotten to color” as meaning that he’d accidentally put an uncoloured strip into his buffer, and realised it in time to yank the embarrassingly-unfinished strip, but not in time to colour it.
Howard: There sure are a lot of complaints about how slow the animation was, aren’t there?
Oh, and csadn referred to this strip, the annotation to which suggests that you may be unaware that outside the US, “bonk” means “boink”. Perhaps the word “conk” would be more appropriate?
csadn: But the GIF was served to the browser from schlockmercenary.com, not Blank Label, so if you saw it at all, it should have animated.
swj719: I got rickrolled by YouTube! Their AFJ was to tamper with the featured videos links to rickroll people.
I don’t actually mind rickrolling that much. I mean, it’s only “Never Gonna Give You Up”, it’s not like it’s 2tubgirls1goatse or whatever… Oh God, now some sicko’s gonna combine them, and people who see the result are gonna get PTSD when they get rickrolled…
April 3rd, 2008 at 1:07 am
Sam: Yeah — *that* one…. :P
And on the topic of Imagery Which Will Cause Nightmares From Now
Until The Time_ts Wrap Around: Thanks for suggesting videos for
people to use for pranks. Thank you so *BLOODY* much…. :)
(Now to get to work on the rules for _Kancho: The Boardgame_….
>:) )
April 4th, 2008 at 1:48 am
Warning to innocent bystanders:
DO NOT LOOK UP WHAT KANCHO IS!!! Unless you’re going to Japan, anyway. Then you might actually need to know. Best reason I’ve heard of not to go to Japan.
Now I need to fill my head with something else to get rid of that. I know…
Never gonna give you up…
Never gonna let you down…
Never gonna run around and desert you…
April 5th, 2008 at 1:14 am
. o O ( There’s a thought — getting Kanchoed by Rick Astley…. >;) )