Blógünder Schlock

Just a reminder: Sketch Edition pre-orders close Friday at 8:00am Mountain (10:00am Eastern, GMT 3:00pm.) It looks like we’ll hit the 1,000 mark pretty close to then, but even if we haven’t you won’t have much time afterwards.

[Link removed because ordering is now closed]
UPDATE: with just 24 hours (and ten minutes) to go we show 804 sketch editions sold and spoken for. Remember — anything we sell beyond 1000 before Friday at 8:00am (my time) is fine. I’ll up the count. But after Friday at 8:00am the count is fixed…

On Friday I delivered the 2:00pm keynote at the Utah Open Source Convention (UTOSC) at Salt Lake Community College. It would have been nice to attend the whole show, but it has been a full, busy week, and this weekend is the family reunion up in Pocatello, Idaho.

So Sandra and I packed all the reunion stuff into the van, loaded the kids, and drove to SLCC. She dropped me off at 1:00pm and took the kids to lunch and to a park. I met some folks, delivered the keynote, and then jumped in the van and headed north at 2:45pm.

It was kind of a drive-by keynote. By 5:45pm I was lounging in the hot-tub at the Best Western watching my kids splash in the pool. I’d tell you that this is the cartoonist’s life, but mostly it’s just THIS cartoonist’s life.

Gotta go. The breakfast buffet has a waffle-maker…

Just last week I was scripting and I used the phrase “revoke metaphor privileges.” It made me giggle, but it sounded familiar. I worried that maybe I was stealing from somebody.

Turns out I’m stealing from me. I decided to run the line anyway. In the linked instance above it’s the punchline. In the upcoming script (three or four weeks out, I forget) it’s the setup for a different punchline.

And the point, long since lost by now, is that I’ve now posted 3,000 installments of Schlock Mercenary to the web in 3,000 days. No, I’ve never missed a day. There have been no guest weeks, no two-for-Tuesdays to cover a missed-it-Monday, and no stretches where I hurriedly threw together a week of Ennesby and Schlock doing plot exposition because I knew I could get seven days of that penciled, inked and colored inside of four hours.

Okay, maybe that last one has happened. At least twice. Still, nobody called me on it.

We’ve all changed a lot in the last 3,000 days. Politics, global economics, and science have all done interesting, disappointing, wonderful, and terrible things in turn. But more importantly most of us have gotten 3,000 days older, and at least 250 days wiser. Some of you have told me that you have practically grown up reading this comic strip of mine.

Three thousand days is longer than any American President has sat in office since 1944. It’s long enough for a bull market to become a bear market, and then back again three or four times. It’s long enough to turn a 9th-grader into a college graduate, or a college graduate into a surgeon.

It’s long enough for Sandra to create two beautiful children from scratch and send them off to school. It’s long enough for me to start a marketing career, excel in it, and then abandon it.

It’s long enough for me to start getting a handle on the basics of writing and illustrating a comic strip. It’s also long enough for me to have figured out how to pay the bills with a comic strip I’m still just exploring basic principles with.

3,000 days is a long time, but it’s not long enough.

I want 10,000 days. That’s almost 28 years years, give or take. I’m not setting that as a maximum, mind you. I’m just holding out for permanence in this particular career. I want us to be able to look back on these times and remember the best of them fondly, while forgetting the worst of them in favor of remembering our favorite punchlines.

Which I will almost certainly re-use.

WorldCon 66 has been amazing thus far, and I don’t expect to be at all disappointed for the remaining three days.

As always, the highlights are the people. Countless (or at least “I lost count”) fans have stopped by to say hi, buy stuff, gush, or otherwise interact. It’s great fun for me, and Sandra has been enjoying it as well.

Then, of course, there are the fellow professionals with whom I’m privileged to rub shoulders. We had dinner with Phil and Kaja Foglio and friends on Wednesday night, and Steve Jackson and Monica Stephens on Thursday. After each of those meals we wandered the room parties and the con suite as a posse, meeting and greeting other notables, fans, and friends along the way.

And for all that there are still a million-zillion-bobillion people here I don’t know, but who I can meet if I want to. I expect I’ll be meeting a bunch more tomorrow, because the comic I created for the newsletter has no dialog — it’s a “caption this” contest. I hold out reasonable hope that in this festival of creative minds SOMEBODY can make me laugh hard enough that I give them free books.

For those of you who have been by to buy stuff — THANK YOU. Sandra and I were worried that the large expense of this trip (flying our children off to California for fun at Grandma’s falls under “babysitting,” for instance) would make it unprofitable, but apparently we’ve more than broken even already.

For those of you who plan to come by to buy stuff — HURRY. We’re already running out of T-shirt sizes, magnet sets, and mouse-mats, and at this rate it looks like we’ll run out of books before Sunday. Yes, you can buy this stuff online, but here at WorldCon there’s no shipping fee, and we’re eating the sales tax.

My only complaint with WorldCon 66 here in Denver is that it’s very spread out compared to WorldCon 64 in Los Angeles. We’re in six or eight different hotels, the Convention Center is being shared with two other events, and the result is that fandom doesn’t seem to be developing the critical mass it did two years ago. We’re just a little too far apart, and when we leave the Convention Center for hotels, we scatter, rather than clumping up and raising the ambient temperature of the networking.

Still, it’s a good event. No, a GREAT event. I’m having a fantastic time.

By Sandra Tayler

That whole post about potential problems with the schlock site is now moot. We made sure that Mr. Murphy and his rules couldn’t take the Schlock comic out of commission, so he instead opted for making me look like Chicken Little. The domain registration renewal went through mere hours after I ran around making posts anywhere and everywhere I could think that fans might go looking for information. Now I get to run around and spam every place again to say “Never mind.”

Can I tell you how happy I am to be Chicken Little? It is so much better than having site downtime.

Cheep! Cheep!

Note from Sandra Tayler
If you have any difficulties reaching www.schlockmercenary.com over the next few days, please click over to www.schlocktroops.com. It has been set up as an alternate location for fans to get their daily Schlock fix. Please spread the word in the event of a problem. That is the important information. Like any good reporter, I’ve put it first in case people don’t care to read the rest of the story.

The rest of the story: We are in the process of renewing the Schlock Mercenary domain name. Due to a comedy of errors (some of which are our fault, why did we not take care of this months ago? I keep asking myself this and then remembering exactly how busy we’ve been for the last three months. That’s my excuse. I’m sticking to it.) the renewal may not be complete before the domain expires. We’ve set up the www.schlocktroops.com site so that no one need to go Schlockless while we sort things out.

Some of you may remember the domain name snafu of last summer when Howard and I only became aware of the domain expiration after the site went down. We vowed to not let that happen again because that was really embarrassing. So we’ve improved. Perhaps next time we need to renew the domain, we’ll figure out how to do it without a public brouhaha. That would be nice.

I don’t understand how John Scalzi manages to post so many interesting things in a single week. You’d think the guy just lives to write, but I happen to know that he has a wonderful family to spend time with as well.

Anyway, I’m back from InConjunction, and I owe you a convention report. I also STILL owe you a report from LepreCon. Perhaps both of those will get done before ComicCon in two weeks.

By the way, I’ll be at ComicCon in two weeks. I’ll also be at the World Science Fiction Convention in Denver in four weeks. Mark your calendars!

In unrelated news, the first batch of magnets arrived (enough to fill maybe a quarter of the orders), so we’ll start shipping those out today and tomorrow.

Just prior to the big EV1 outage this weekend I heard from Cybermaus, a Schlocker from the Netherlands who is currently in China…

I am in China (Shanghai) for the last few days, having problem getting my daily digest of Schlock Mercenary, and suddenly I realize: Schlock is being censored!

I can get most internet OK, but for some I get a ‘cannot find’. And now I pay attention, it is always Schlock and Sinfest. But Sluggy, Nukees, Freefall have no problems. Only if I start a VPN via my home router (Netherlands) and route through there, it works.
…
So Howard, not sure if it is something to be proud of or not, but it seems you are among China’s state enemies. I hope my repeated attempts to open your page doesn’t have the PLA knocking on my door…

I, too, hope the PLA doesn’t knock on your door. And now I’m wondering if a Chinese hacker couldn’t have managed to find a way to remotely take control of a certain datacenter’s electrical room and activate the self-destruct on one of the transformers…

UPDATE: from a look at the comments below (and my email) it appears that if there are Schlock Mercenary filters in place in China, they’re either not very effective, or they’re not being universally applied. If you’re reading this in China somewhere, weigh in! The PLA can’t track you ALL down…

As you may or may not have heard, on Saturday a transformer in the electrical room powering schlockmercenary.com (and 9,000 other web servers) exploded. It took out three walls, but (ironically) left the fourth wall intact. Obviously the transformer in question was a Decepticon. I’m blaming that annoying little “Soundwave” guy. He’s a sneaky one.
Okay, seriously… we’ve been running on shoestrings and hacking coughs for three days.

I’d like to thank Troy Belding of Bookworm Computing for his tireless efforts over the weekend, pointing DNS at new places, and finding new places for it to point.

I’d also like to thank David Brady, who, with no small amount of help from Troy, cobbled the original site back together once the electricity was back on.

Finally, I’d like to thank all of you. Thanks for sticking with us through the mess. Yes, the comic did update on time (ahead of time, even) at alternate locations. My unbroken eight-year record of updates remains intact. As I said to one hopeful onlooker, “if you want to see that kind of history in the making, you’ll have to do more than just blow up my datacenter.”

And as somebody else said, “an explosion and a fire are good reasons for Schlock Mercenary to go offline for a bit.” Sage words, those. Sage words indeed.

There has been a minor production delay on the Ringer-style Rule 37 shirts. The 5XL regular-style Rule 37 shirts are delayed as well. If your order contains one of these type of shirts, it will be delayed. Hopefully we’ll be able to ship these in about a week. All the other orders have either shipped already, or are going out in tomorrow’s mail.