March 11, 2002

It's been a while since I've updated this thing, and frankly I'm tired of reading about chinese food. I blame the entry for my failure to eat right this week. Thus, even though I have next to nothing to actually say, I'm going to attempt to write something ANYWAY.

Speaking of eats, I drove past a steakhouse the other day where a bit of letter displacement on their sign out front promised "All you can eat sirlion." Mmmm. Noble big cat. Tasty. I didn't stop in for dinner. If you're too sloppy to spell sirloin correctly in foot-high letters in front of your restaurant, how sloppy are you in the kitchen where you think nobody is looking?

Oh, sure, it's a bit judgemental for me to think that folks who can't spell might have other more deeply-seated problems, but we pass that kind of judgement online all the time. "1337-speak," for instance... there are only two kinds of people who use it now: those who think it's cool, and those who think the joke is still funny. Both kinds of people are likely flatlining the cluemeter enough to still chuckle at "all your base" jokes.

Along those lines, it occured to some of the Schlockers on the forums that "all your base" could actually be amusing again (briefly) if mixed with other cultural quips that have gone stale, along the lines of "All your base are whasssUP." "Someone set us up the beef" actually made me laugh. Ahh, sweet synthesis... the mixture of incongruous and independently unamusing items to create something new and funny. I have respect for that.

*sigh*... reading what I've written thus far has me convinced that it's a very, VERY good thing that I'm not trying to crank out Schlock Mercenary the night before. Quality takes time. Granted, I'm careful not to dole out too much quality at any given time, but at least working in advance affords me the option of sleeping on these scripts before actually committing artwork to them. Even so, this weekend for the first time EVER I discovered I needed to discard a strip I'd drawn because it did not fit. Fortunately the first three panels were just distant shots of a buuthandi. It's easier to throw away artwork when you've only invested five minutes in it.