Blógünder Schlock

Today’s strip features Fan Art from Cannon Hamaker of Animal Ward. His piece deserves to be seen in full, so here it is:

Thank you, Cannon! I love it!

If you follow my Twitter feed you may have seen my tweet about renaming Swine Flu to Hogthrax. My buddy Dave said that Hamthrax is a much better name, and I agree. Later my brother Randy pointed out that H1N1 sounds like something out of Star Wars.

Do you want to defuse some of the hysteria surrounding this particular strain of Type A Influenza? Let’s make fun of it with pig-related names. Here are a few I’ve collected, and a few I’ve contributed …

• Hamthrax
• Hogthrax
• Spamthrax
• Tuporkulosis
• Porklio
• Cowpox oh wait that’s real
• Hogmumps
• The Other Yellow Fever
• Pigfluenza
• Mad Sow Disease
• Sowbola
• Sowmonella
• Spammonella
• Bacon AIDS
• Bacon Fever
• Baconator oh wait that’s at Wendy’s
• Whooping Oink
• Oinking Pneumonia
• Buboinking Pork

For you Star Wars fans:

• Gamorreanorhea

And the end-of-the-world scenarios for the epidemic?

• The Aporkalypse
• Hognarok

Yes,  I know that influenza kills tens of thousands of people annually. This is very sad. These people were not, however, killed by the name of this viral strain, which is what I’m actually mocking (unless I suggest that “Buboinking Pork” sounds more like how you caught the disease, which I would never do.)

Join me. Let’s hear your best names for an inappropriately pig-themed disease, and maybe our peals of laughter will make the world a happier and less hysteria-prone place.

The difference between Blogunder Schlock and my Twitter feed is that on Blogunder I can luxuriate in the absence of a 140-character limit…

I think that “hiccough” is the original, non-intuitive spelling of the word we all pronounce as “hiccup.” And my server had one last night.

Maybe it’s wrong to call it a hiccough, or even a hiccup. After all, when humans have involuntary diaphragm spasms they usually don’t forget to do important things that are on their schedules, like post the next day’s comic. They just gripe about how this always happens when they eat too fast, then get on with whatever else they were supposed to be doing.

Anyway, the day’s comic is up, and people who know more about the server than I do are looking closely at the diaphragm, and checking to see if perhaps it has been eating too quickly. I suspect cyberalzheimer’s, or perhaps CRONic Fatigue Syndrome, but I’m no expert. I’d just kick the darn thing in the hex-nuts and then tell it to turn its head and hiccough.

A while back I invented “smutto.” As it happens High Culinary Inquisitor “Old Wolf” is a regular reader. His feasts of odd foods are something of a legend among those few who have attended his Banquet From Hell, and recently he decided to try actually making smutto.

He recorded the process. Here is the smutto video. The camera never shows us his face, thus allowing The Old Wolf to keep his true identity secret (he has eaten thousands of helpless foods, I’m sure.) This also allows us to not have to actually see the point in the video where he puts smutto in the one and only mouth he will ever have.

When I told John Scalzi about the smutto comic last year (it still hadn’t aired when John and I chatted at InConJunction) he said something like this was bound to happen. I think we’re both amazed it has taken this long.

We’re all quite pleased things turned out as well as they did. Which is to say “no injuries.”

The gamers among you will get this immediately. Some of the rest of you may also get it immediately, though I won’t be surprised if a few of you need a nudge.

Here’s the full statement, which I found occasion to use during three different panels at Life, the Universe, and Everything XXVII: “If you want to work in this business, charisma is not a dump stat.”

My meaning should be obvious. If you want to be a professional writer, illustrator, or other creator, you may be enticed into believing that your dress, demeanor, and interpersonal skills are less important than they are in other fields. This is patently false. The only situation in which people will overlook what a jerk you are, or how smelly you are, or how shabbily dressed you are is when you are so incredibly impressive in other ways that they figure your eccentricities don’t matter, or may even be part of the mystique.

This is not a message that I send to my fellow creators who are successful in this business. Why not? Because whatever their current charisma score, they’re successful in this business and it probably doesn’t matter much. Whatever they’re doing is working.

But if you’re trying to break in, if you’re hoping to get hired by a comic book company, a video game company, or get an editor to read that 200,000 word manuscript, you cannot afford to be anything other than easy to get along with and inoffensive to the other senses. Write nice emails. Say kind things. I’m not suggesting that you become a simpering, obsequious, shallowly-flattering aspirant. Just be nice. Look nice, smell nice, act nice.

Why? Because you’re going to have to work with others, and they have to want to work with you.

And now, an observation…

Every full-time, creative professional at this most recent event looked really good. The authors, illustrators, game designers, animators, and editors all dressed sharply, carried themselves uprightly, spoke clearly, and if I stood close enough to them to smell them the only smells were clean clothing, and perhaps a hint of appropriate fragrance.

They did not all look sharp in the same way. Tracy and Laura Hickman wore muted colors, while Lee Modessit wore black and white. David Farland and Brandon Sanderson looked like college professors, casually yet very sharply academic.

There were a few fans, on the other hand, who looked, acted, and even smelled pretty bad. Yes, the smelly fan is kind of a cliché, and we laugh at it. But in some cases it’s sad because there are fans who desperately want to be professionals, and whether or not their work is up to that level they won’t be recognized as such… not unless their work is so incredible, so outstanding, so ground-breakingly, astoundingly awe-inspiring that those reviewing it are suddenly forced to pay attention to nothing but that work. And that’s a hard thing to pull off if you look like you haven’t showered in two days, and then, upon closer examination, it turns out that you smell that way too.

I’m not pointing fingers.  If you were there, please don’t go thinking I was looking at you and saying to myself “what a slob.” I wasn’t. But if you think that maybe you did look that way, congratulations. You probably know enough to solve the problem.

Many of the panels and lectures at this event focused on developing the skills necessary to be a creative professional. We covered putting good science in your science fiction, writing believable romance, maintaining suspense, rewriting for clarity and concision, and a host of other things — and that’s just on the writing side. To my knowledge, however, there wasn’t a panel centered around crafting personal appearance in order to increase the chances of getting published.

Maybe there should have been. And maybe the title of that presentation should be “Charisma Is Not A Dump Stat.”

Yes, it is true: the Daystar boiled my frog.

Bear with me. I’m mixing and matching memes here.

First up: let’s start with an inconvenient fact: I do my best at-the-computer work (scripting and coloring) before 10am. If I haven’t started by 10am sometimes I can’t start at all. My head goes all stupid, and I get headaches. Getting up earlier does seem to help, so that’s been my solution. Get up early, work hard until 10am, take a nap, and then get out of the house for penciling and inking.

Next Up: Boiling frogs. I don’t know if this is true or not, but as the myth goes if you drop a live frog in boiling water it will leap out. It might even live. If, however, you drop the frog in tepid water and then slowly heat it you will be able to boil the frog. The moral? Slow changes, even deadly ones, may not be noticed by the victim.

Third, the Geek meme: We all know geeks hate direct sunlight. The Daystar, it burns us. This Penny-Arcade sums up many people’s feelings on the matter.

Now… let’s tie these together.

As it turns out, by 10am it has gotten quite bright behind my house, especially on a sunny day when there is lots of snow on the ground. There is a window in my office almost directly behind my monitors.

This morning at 11:00am I was lamenting the late start, the lack of productivity, and while nursing a headache at my desk I chanced to shield my eyes. Almost instantly the headache was gone, and awareness dawned on me like… well, like dawn, but I don’t want to cast the Daystar in a pleasant light. It makes enough darn light, thankyouverymuch.

Apparently I’m not self-aware enough to notice the gradual increase in Daystar-induced pain while I’m working.

Tomorrow’s productivity tool: drawn drapes! As it happens, the migraine-inducing radiation of the Daystar can be blocked with a single layer of tightly-woven, heavy, and above all opaque fabric.

A very thoughtful Schlocker sent a gift to me, delivered through wine.woot.com: cheese!

There was a strong, soft, crumbly bleu, a deliciously nutty Gouda, and a chevre (goat cheese) called “purple haze” that I just loved.

Better still, there was a recipe for making horse-durfees* out of the chevre. Mix it with chopped pistachios, olive oil, and ground black pepper, then spread it on prosciutto and wrap it around steamed asparagus. I followed the instructions (had to substitute a deli salami for the prosciutto, sadly) and it was delicious! Sandra liked it too, and we’ve shared some of those yummy appetizers** with our greek-food-loving neighbors.

So… you know who you are. Thank you!

* I hate looking up the spelling of that stupid French word every time I use it. If you’re well-read enough to correct my spelling, then you know what I meant. If you don’t know what I meant by “horse-durfees” then just assume horrible things about what French people will eat before a meal, and you’ll be on the right page.

** I suppose I could keep using the English word, but that drops these delicious rolls of asparagus, goat-cheese, and pistachios in the same category as TGIF’s mozzerella stix.

Occasionally I get sad emails from people who have made the mistake of reading Schlock Mercenary with a mouthful of their favorite morning beverage. I call these emails “confirmed keyboard kills,” and I’d venture to say that if every one of those keyboards actually needs to be replaced, I’ve cost the world tens of thousands of dollars.

But you only have my word for it.

I just learned that a new site has launched allowing you to tell others whether or not a particular strip is funny. Is It Funny Today, found at isitfunnytoday.com lets you see what others think is funny, and rate strips yourself on a simple funny/not-funny scale.

There is no CKK option yet, but there should be.

I’ve linked you to the “story comics” page, because that’s where Schlock Mercenary appears. If you feel inclined to tell others that I made you laugh, heed that inclination and go!

Also, stop reading this comic with your mouth full. The world economy is suffering enough without your senseless wasting of computer hardware and carefully-brewed beverages.

Last Tuesday I pointed Schlockers worldwide at Bob Defendi’s new audiobook podcast Death by Cliché. Bob’s server groaned under the load and then expired.

Bob now assures me that the technicians in charge have correctly configured things, and are standing by for your traffic on Saturday night and Sunday morning. Bob was so confident, in fact, that he dares you to try to take his server down.

No DDoSing, though. Just go listen to Death by Cliché, Episode 2. And if you haven’t hit DbC Episode 1 yet, you ought to start there.

Episode 2 has one of the greatest moments of the whole audiobook in it: the expository “DOOOM!” sequence.