Nukees

Nukees Newzies

(News about Nukees and this website)



Main Page

MEET THE CAST!

Nukees Newzies
Nukees Reviewzies
Nukees QUAC
Nukees Linkees
Nukee Linky Buttons
Teri Fan Club
F.U.N. Art

Archives:
1997
1998
1999
2000
Calendar Archive


Newly added:
Art of the Nuclides
Nukees: The Short Story
Nukees: The Play!
Nukees message board

Email the Artist
Send mail to Darren


4/25/2008 These guys totally stole my joke from eleven years ago. All I have to say is that it's not a three minute joke.
2/6/2008 Danny's contraction today actually isn't out of character, so you don't have to email me about it.
1/21/2008 Oops one more time. Hey, it's been three months since I screwed up an update. Looks like I scanned the wrong side of the bristol board and repeated Friday's comic today. But now it's fixed.
10/3/2007 _hoops! I forgot a "W" in today's strip this morning (I had whited out a mistake and forgot to correct it once the white-out had dried). How embarrassing. Just fixed it with a creative "cut'n'paste." Try to guess from where to where! No, don't really. Go be productive with your day.
8/17/2007 A new reviewzie! Hrm, I haven't updated my Reviewzies page in a long, long time, though occasionally people do continue to review this cute little strip of mine. I was alerted to this new review recently. It's always nice to know people are interested enough to write about it.
8/5/2007 Ugh for the fourth time .

I had fixed it... I had tested it... And still, my "missing comic notification system" failed me again on Friday. This is getting super irritating.

So in case you're interested, I had fixed the script that text messages my cell phone when the comic isn't updated by routing the email it sends through my Gmail account, which forwards it to my phone (my cell phone has stopped accepting email text messages from Keenspot). It worked in tests and everything.

I forgot to similarly fix the script that text messages me when any of the hard drive partitions are about to run out of space. And the mail directory had filled up, preventing the mail system from working, thus making my script fail. Again.

Okay, sure, it's usually my own fault when the comic doesn't get uploaded (when I draw them far enough in advance, sometimes I just forget to scan/upload them), but it would seem I've become reliant on the notification system telling me when I've been stupid. What can I do? Become responsible for my own actions again? Pfah! Why did we invent computers?

So grrr one more time. I'll update with both comics on Monday, so you're sure not to get them out of order.

8/1/2007 In case you were wondering , I did find a place to stay in San Diego at the very last minute. Aeire and Chris Daily let me crash on their couch (as did Steph, but I have nothing to link her to).

I suppose I should write a Con report or something. Perhaps I will a little later. For now, all I know is that I want a Calle of my very own. Maybe a small one I could keep in my pocket and take out to cheer me up whenever I'm sad.

7/23/2007 Homeless in San Diego. So Comic Con is a mere two days away and I just found out that I don't have a place to stay! (The friend I intended to stay with just said "Sorry, no can do.") And San Diego pretty much sells out completely this weekend of the year months beforehand. Oh well, I'm resourceful, I'll figure out something. The important bit is that I'm going anyway, details be damned, and I hope to see a great lot of you there. If I look mentally exhausted, you'd probably be doing me a favor by not asking me to draw something for you right then and there. Every year, it's just sketch after sketch after sketch after sketch. I love the fans, but I really have only so much "drawing energy" in me each day. And I get really irritated when it becomes obvious that the person who has requested the sketch has no idea who I am and/or what "Nukees" is.

Here's a tip: When I ask you which character you'd like me to sketch, it's really a trick question. If you answer, "Oh, any of them is fine," then I know that you don't read my comic and I will put almost no effort into the sketch. If you really don't care, then you should still answer something like, "Oh Danny, King Luca, Suzy Gee--any of them, it doesn't matter."Anything to let me know that you actually read my comic.

Also, I'm sorry, but I have some kind of mental disorder that gives me subhuman image recognition skills. Even if I've met you at the last six conventions, I won't remember you (though I will fake it). Pepper into your conversation as many reminders of who you are as possisble, including your name, your comic if you draw one, and whether or not we've had sex.

6/27/2007 AUUUGGH! This has been, by far, the worst couple of weeks in Nukees auto-update-crapout history! Now what happened? Nukees didn't update on Wednesday?! I haven't figured out why yet. I was in Washington D.C. last week, and I drew Wednesday's comic on the plane on Saturday and scanned/uploaded it at a friend's house on Sunday.

So where did it go? Pleh.

Somehow, the tech gods know that my cell phone has been broken for the past few weeks, so my text-message-based missing-comic notification system h as not been working.

This is so particularly infuriating because, as you must know by now, I go through some really great lengths to ensure there is a new comic three days a week. I've never not drawn a comic on time in the ten years I've been doing this thing. It's all I have left to be truly proud of.

So if you missed it, please go back to Wednesday

6/7/2007 D'oh D'oh! Well, it looks like I screwed up again, this time in the opposite direction. I'm currently at a physics conference in New Hampshire and I had to draw three comics ahead of schedule in order to come here. But I misnamed the comics, so each of this week's comics updated a day ahead of schedule.

I've corrected it now, so those of you that checked Thursday morning got a sneak peak that the rest of you didn't. If you normally check Monday, Wednesday, and Friday then you may have missed Monday's comic, which updated a day early on Sunday, so you'll probably want to go back and read it.

Well, let's just say that evens out the comic that inadvertantly updated a day late last week.

6/2/2007 What the hell? Sorry for the lack of comic on Friday. I always have one drawn, but every once in a great while, some technical glitch or oversight gets in the way of the site updating (like, I might inadvertantly mis-date the comic or simply forget to upload it or something like that).

So, long ago, I wrote a monitoring program that sends me a text message if the site ever doesn't update for any reason.

So why did it fail this time? According to the logs, the program functioned fine, but my phone never got the text message.

I'm mighty pissed. Anyway, Friday's strip is uploaded now.

1/21/2007 Nukees turns ten!!! Holy crap! I've been drawing this thing for ten freaky years?! It's true! Sunday, I celebrate the tenth anniversary of the very first Nukees strip, which appeared in the UC Berkeley student newspaper (and still does!), The Daily Californian on January 21, 1997.

Since that day, when my schedule was two days a week during the school year and one day a week during the summer (holidays excepted), through the day that I declared I would be drawing three per week regardless of the paper's schedule (December 1, 2000), through to today, Nukees has never missed a strip!

I was sorely tempted to take a week or even a month off on this momentous occasion, but... I just can't do it. It would feel too icky. So here's to another ten years without a break! Woo hoo!

It would behoove you, however, to celebrate by reading each and every freakin' Nukees strip and get yourself caught up on the nuclear-powered madness!

1/21/2007 More FunArt from Maritza in honor of Nukees' tenth anniversary. Check it out on the forum!
1/15/2007 Dude! That seems to be the common sentiment to Eric Burns' proposal to Wednesday, of which I played a bit part. It's almost too bad that I got to join such an all-star cast of talents, as now that I see the final product, I think mine might very well be the worst artwork in the series (and I didn't fully grasp that everyone else was going to be doing it in color). But still, very cool, and she said yes, which is what's important.
1/12/2007 Thanks for the randomness! Twenty four people participated in the Random Bag of Fun this year. Why not discuss your experience with the bag? Get something good? Give something good? Was it random enough? Was it fun enough?
12/19/2006 Drabspotting? It's been pointed out that there's an apparent Gavspotting that looks just like me in Mad About U. (A great strip also about mad science!) However, he's drawn me with naturally-colored hair, which is a bit odd. And I'm getting socked in the chin for no reason I can figure other than just being in the way, which just isn't fair! Otherwise, nifty likeness, though.
11/8/2006 Antspotting? Not that I pioneered the realm of giant robot ants or anything, but I have to wonder about this giant robot ant at "Lio" comics. Homage or coincident concurrent thought process?
10/27/2006 Appreciate today's strip! ...because man it was a difficult time getting it to you! I'm at a nuclear physics conference in Tennessee right now, and had to draw a strip here at the conference. Well, the in-hotel business services scanner was broken, and the closest Kinko's is 8 miles away and I don't have a car. In the end, I could've taken a taxi, I suppose, but it's hard to mentally justify a $30 trip to upload a comic strip. In the end, I had the bright idea to enlarge each of the four panels on a photocopier to a full 8.5x11" sheet of paper each, then fax them to an online fax-to-email service. While fax quality is poor, enlarging the panels took care of that. Then I reconstructed the strip panel by panel once I got them in PDF format from the email. Unfortunately, the first fax attempt didn't end up in my in box, and the business services company charged me $10 just for that. At one point, I got so desperate, I was borrowing a camera phone and taking photos of each panel, but then we couldn't figure out how to email the photos from the phone. It was nuts, let me tell you. But, yay! I got the concierge to fax the panels once more and that time it worked. This strip took two hours to draw and three hours to get onto the web. So, you'd better enjoy it!
10/11/2006 Gavettespotting? Our favorite evil mad scientist was transformed into a chick in an El Goonish Shive guest comic by John Troutman.
9/6/2006 Back from the Burn and I must say it rocked. The best description I can give is that it's a cross between Vegas and Mad Max, only no one is trying to take your money. There was even a Thunderdome. Unfortunately, what I found is that, contrary to what I'd been informed, there is really not a lot of "sitting around time," at least for a first timer like myself. Plus, the wind can be something fierce. It was virtually impossible to get any drawing done while I was there, due to lack of time and the elements. I did manage some pencil work and took some photos of reference material I needed to finish the sketch for the Nuclear Burn Raffle. However, I'll have to finish it, and the other sketches I presold, this weekend or perhaps a little later. Thanks for bearing with me.
8/29/2006 Off to Burning Man! Well, I just got back from a weeklong business trip in Ft. Worth, TX and now I'm off to the Nevada desert for another week in the hot, hot sun. I've been working my butt off this whole month to get four strips ahead, the last of which I just finished an hour before my departure. So, as always, there will be no break in Nukees. So this isn't really newsworthy to you guys. But I'm coming back with sketches! Yay!
8/18/2006 Thanks for entering the Nuclear Burn Raffle. The winner was "CodeGuy." And my mom.
8/3/2006 EXTENDED BURN I've decided to extend the deadline of the Nuclear Burn Raffle one day to August 7, 2006. It suddenly occured to me that having the final ticket-buying day be a day I don't update didn't make a whole lot of sense.
7/31/2006 NUCLEAR BURN! Hey Nuclides! Want to help Darren create art in the desert? I'm selling a yet-to-be-drawn Nukees at Burning Man wallpaper and raffle ticket to help a Burning Man camp that is being kind enough to let me stay with them this year. You can win an original piece of artwork drawn by me featuring your favorite Nukees characters at Burning Man! And all entrants get a high-res wallpaper suitable for printing or displaying on their desktop! You can either get more details or just enter the raffle immediately (and buy the color print/wallpaper) with the button below:

[RAFFLE CLOSED]

Offer will be valid for only one week (closes August 6 2006)! Enter as often as you wish (but you'll only get one wallpaper/hi-res image). Winner will be announced August 7.

7/17/2006 Countdown to Comic Con! Let's see, that would be "3, 2, 1" as of today. Comic Con is in just a few days and I hope to see lots of you there. Drop by the Keenspot booth when you get a chance, or come to our panel on Friday at 6:00pm.

(4/4/2006) UNLEASH... THE UNHOLY FANART! HEE! Maritza Campos, of the marvelously wackazanical College Roomies From Hell!!! posted an awesome pic of Gav inspired by Monday's strip (imagining Robo-church) on the Nukees forum. Go check it out. Oh, and she's probably not "Campos" anymore, but that's how I know her and I'm sticking with it.

3/21/2006 Gavspotting on the Ides of March. This is a long one, so I'll put off adding it to the Gavspotting page until after it's done. But there's our famous gang, starting with our favorite robot in If Then Else.
2/3/2006 Transcription update: You guys rock. Thus far, over half of Nukees has been transcribed and I had a chance to catch up on reading, correcting, and approving them last week. So if you're looking for that particular Nukees strip, there's a good chance you can find it at the Nukees search page at OhNoRobot. That's also a good place to see comics that still need transcribing. Go Nuclides!
1/29/2006 Someone sent a gift from UBID.COM to the Random Bag, but unfortunately didn't indicate who they were or theri address. If it was you, please write to me at randombag [at] agnostica.com and tell me what the object was, and then give me your address. Otherwise, I can't send you your selection from the Bag!

Hopefully, everyone else got their gifts. If you haven't received yours by now, something must have gone very wrong at the post office, and I'd be very interested in knowing about it.

1/16/2006 The Final Random Bag Gifts were wrapped and boxed today! Thus endeth the Agnostica season for me. They will be mailed on Tuesday. I had mistakenly thought fewer people were participating this year, but actually, there were just more mailed-in gifts and fewer cash entrants. A total of 19 people participated this year, and more than half of those people sent in a gift, so the odds are that you'll get something from another participant than something I picked out. Happy Agnostica to you all!
1/4/2006 More OhNoRobot transcription instructions:
  1. First off, please proofread your transcriptions before submitting. I'm overjoyed that there are over 300 comics for me to "approve of," but it's taking me quite a while to edit them all because of the number of typos.
  2. Second, it was asked, "What about original text typos? Do them as-is or correct?" Please transcribe mispellings and typos exactly as they appear in the comic! This will be a great way for me to spell-check my own strip. However, so that I know it's my typo and not yours, you can go ahead and put [sic] after the typo to draw attention to it.
  3. Third, for consistancy's sake, let's always list Luca as King Luca and Suzy as Suzy Gee.
  4. Finally, I'd rather not EVERY bolded word be capitalized in the transcriptions. This can be a tough judgement call, I know. Sometimes in comics, a word is bolded because of "vocal emphasis," and other times its bolded because of "contextual importance." I only want to bold in the transcriptions those words that need "vocal emphasis." That means those words in which the sentence seems to mean a different thing when the word is capitalized.

    As an example, in the third panel of today's comic, "bards" is a word I wanted to draw attention to, but King Luca wouldn't really be EMPHASIZING it in his speech, so it would remain lower case. The word "THY," however, WOULD be emphasized in his speech, so it WOULD be capitalized. Make sense? If not, don't worry about it.

Thanks, you guys have been swell. Don't fret if your transcription doesn't appear in the search engine right away. As I mentioned, it's taking me quite a while to proofread, correct, and approve each one. I've done about two hundred so far, I think, and have 250 to go (of course, as you toil, this number grows--there are still about 800 untranscribed strips as well).

Also, the OhNoRobot boys took a suggestion of mine that now provides a way to allow you to transcribe today's comic and not just the ones in the archives. Thanks, boys!

12/21/2005 A clarification on transcriptions: Even though my comic "font" is all uppercase, please don't transcribe the comics entirely in uppercase. If you want, you can use uppercase for bolded or emphasized words, but it's fine either way. If you see "Improve this transcription," then it's probably something that needs to be converted to regular case. Thanks.

Otherwise, thanks so much to everyone who has done transcribing thus far. It's really appreciated. And you can go to Oh No Robot to search through the current-transcribed comics (about 40 as of this writing).

12/19/2005 Want to give me an Agnostica gift this year? As you may have noticed, I never ask for money, but I would always appreciate anything that reduces my workload so I can spend my time working on the comic.

I've signed up for OhNoRobot, which is a service that lets you guys, the infamous Nuclides, transcribe my comics for me into text so that they can be searchable in their database. I've also tweaked Autokeen to allow me to put this text on the archive pages themselves, so that they will show up in Google searches, which is the more important thing to me.

But I need your help to do the actual transcribing. I could do it myself, but it would take weeks and weeks of typing. But if each of you just did a few each, it would be a minimal effort for any of us. So if you have a free moment, any time you see an orange button reading Transcribe this comic, why not go ahead and type a few scripts? Thanks, and a Happy Agnostica to you, too.

11/16/2005 Oops, missed it! I did a guest strip for General Protection Fault on Monday, only I didn't notice that it'd gone up until today (been quite busy, you see...). Go give it a looksee and let me know what you think. Some may be disappointed to see none of my characteristic "sketchy art style" in there, but I had more fun trying to imitate Jeff's style than trying to adapt it. I've always felt that if I have only one artistic talent in this world, it's "human photocopy machine."

Oh, and also, there appears to be a Gavspotting in today's GPF 'Interpretation'. I haven't added it to the Gavspotting page yet, because I'm not sure which strip to attribute it to...

10/4/2005 Happy Birthday to me . I am probably unusually depressed for a Tuesday.
9/12/2005 Exposed , I am, apparently, as a closet evangelist in the Bizarro universe that is Nukees. The clash between science and religion as depicted here was discussed at the Modern Humor Authority. I appreciate any discussion of Nukees that uses the metaphor "...mandibular gnashing of two American stag beetles..."
8/15/2005 Foiled by my own safety measures! Unbelievable! So, over the weekend, I moved Nukees to a new server with a working sendmail, so that the server could warn me if the site wasn't updated for any reason. And because of that move, Nukees didn't update today! Boy, do I feel stupid. Apparently, I forgot to check that my FTP program was uploading to the new server (it wasn't) and I forgot to actually activate the program that warns me if Nukees isn't uploaded! How stupid am I? Dreadfully sorry about that. The payoff is that now everything is in place so it won't happen again.
8/12/2005 Sorry for the late update this morning. I can only blame my own stupidity. I used to have an automated system that would page my cell phone if ever a Nukees strip didn't update on time. Unfortunately, we moved Nukees some time ago to a server that doesn't have sendmail installed. This is the last straw, though. I'm abandoning ship and transferring Nukees to another server with sendmail. Theoretically, this should never happen again. Theoretically.
7/25/2005 Missed a review of sorts. A blog called The Living Comic made some nifty comments about Nukees about a month ago, inventing terminology called a "Lightning Bolt Moment" to describe the moment a comic (in this case, Nukees) really grabs your attention. I find this funny, because at Nukees, a "Lightning Bolt Moment" is decidedly different, of course. It's when anti-karma catches up on you just after things start going your way.
7/20/2005 I'm in El Goonish Shive again! This time, it was a strip which I got to preview, in blue pencil, at Comic Con. I'm always tickled to see myself in EGS, but I have to admit, I'm a little annoyed by this one. That's because he slipped Gavcharacter into a picture hanging on the wall. Even though I've appeared three times in EGS now, the race for Gavspottings is now effectively cancelled out on the EGS site. :)
7/13/2005 And now I'm off to Comic Con! There will, of course, be no interruption of Nukees. But you knew that. Hope to see lots of you there!
7/9/2005 Did I mention Comic Con is in just a few days? Look for me at the Keenspot booth, or hosting the two-hour Keenspot panel. For those few of you that don't already know, I'll be the guy with the blue hair. I like the fact that that's not necessarily enough information for you to uniquely identify me at Comic Con.
7/1/2005 Another Tangent , and I'm not talking about the storyline, but rather another review thingy over at Tangents. In his last review (was it really eight weeks ago?), he was obviously exacerbated by the slow build-up to the final meeting of Ma'at, but for this review, he's obviously relieved that we're finally here. I love reading these kinds of comments about Nukees to see that the details I've been working on for so long are actually being noticed by the readers.
6/22/2005 For the first time ever I think my buffer is larger than Howard Tayler's. In other news, I'm back from Japan. I bought an abacus at a street antique fair in Tokyo. This crazy old guy, who reminded me of the guy that sold the mogwump thingys in Gremlins, at the next spot pulled me aside and in mostly-impossible-to-understand english said something along the lines of "Very good deal! No cross bar! End of period!" I don't know what he was trying to say, but I'm not feeding it after midnight.
6/15/2005 Domo Origato, Giant Ant Roboto I'm off on a business trip to Tokyo! It turns out my thesis research paid off after all, as a Belgian accelerator company has hired me as a consultant to help them design a cancer therapy facility for a Japanese company. I'll be in Tokyo until Sunday. At one point, there is an official ceremony (the Japanese are big on official ceremonies) which will be attended by, among others, the Prince of Belgium. Maybe I'll meet him. Anyway, I've worked very hard and have drawn Nukees through Monday, so even if something delays my flight, Nukees will update normally.
5/10/2005 There is a tradition here at Nukees that a news item may not be posted without screwing up the link within. Yesterday, I posted about a review of Nukees at Tangents in which I neglected an equals sign in the "href" part of the link tag. Thus, even though, for once, I got the link URL right, the link ledback here, anyway. Also, I didn't read the other review on the page, and only very briefly glanced at the strip itself when I mentioned it was Suburban Jungle. Apparently, it only looks like SJ out of the corner of one's eye. The first review on the page was for "Fur Will Fly." Not that that matters to finding the Nukees commentary.
5/9/2005 Reviewzies over at Tangents (scroll past the Suburban Jungle review), echoing what perhaps many of you might be feeling now, which is essentially, "Goddammit! I want to see Ma'at again!" Ma'at appreciates your support. It's still good commentary, though.
4/20/2005 A Quark-Gluon liquid? Wow! The scientists at Brookhaven, who for years have been accelerating and smashing together gold atoms with a combined kinetic energy of 40 TeV (about 40,000 times the rest mass energy of a proton), have finally come to a consensus about their results. This energy is high enough to recreate the conditions of the very early universe microseconds after the big bang, when the basic components of matter (quarks and gluons) had not yet solidified into ordinary matter (protons). They expected to find a "quark-gluon plasma." What they found, instead, was a "quark-gluon liquid."

Apparently, free quarks and gluons act as a kind of strongly-interacting nuclear liquid (this is a liquid 100 times more dense than a nucleus). Apparently, it acts almost exactly like a classical liquid with very low viscosity, though not like a superfluid (which has zero viscosity and whose flow properties are dictated by quantum mechanics, not hydrodynamics).

This means the early universe was a kind of hyperdense liquid. I always find it interesting when our cosmological discoveries seem to match the oldest mythologies. Virtually all the earliest religions (from Finnish to Egyptian) say that in the beginning, there was a vast undifferentiated sea. Then the gods would pull order from the sea to create the land and the heavens (Ma'at's job, actually).

This is exciting stuff, for reasons I'm not even sure I can explain. This has been a decade of ginormous cosmological discoveries, from the discovery that the universe is accelerating, to the mass of the neutrino, and now this. Meanwhile, our president wants to spend trillions of dollars sending two or three of us to Mars to do less than our robots have done already.

(More Information Here)

4/19/2005 Gavspotting again! Very cool. Today, I appear as a character in El Goonish Shive, which is an excellent and fun strip, the wackiness of which I'm proud to be a part. It's hard to describe that strip without resorting to words like "wacky," "zany," or "befuddledingerzornkish." But I think fun describes it best, which is amusing, because I look ready to kill anyone so much as holding a balloon. That's me, the single raincloud on an otherwise sunny day! But really, the joke in this strip is hilarious and very apropos.
4/14/2005 Operaheimer? Oh, I have got to see THIS debuting at the San Francisco Opera right around my birthday.
4/8/2005 Snarking WebSnark. We need more people honestly and publicly critiquing webcomics. It's not just that we're attention whores (we are), but it improves the entire field to get real feedback. That's why I really liked WebSnark when it first debutted as a daily blog offering an honest daily review about specific strips, the wrongs and the rights. Plus, Eric started the thing off with about seven snarks in the first month about Nukees, and all of them were embarrassingly, glowingly positive, so it's no wonder I loved it. True, we must always keep in mind that it's only one opinion, and that we could use more, but his opinion was that Nukees kicks ass, and I'm inclined to support that.

But lately, I'm inclined to believe that the attention has gone to his head, like how new movie starlets get the first time E! News chases them and their agents haven't had a chance to tell them what they should and shouldn't say when 20 million people are watching. I just couldn't help but notice that on the front page today, there isn't a single snark about a webcomic. Does anyone else think that's just not right? I'm also not entirely certain what Wednesday's role is there, but she seems to be taking over (and says so in her subject lines). That's not necessarily a bad thing--she entertaining in that kooky but cute Sarah-Jessica-Parker-from-L.A.-Story kind of way--but she seems to talk about pretty much anything that hasn't quite been filed into long term memory yet, and only very rarely is a webcomic actually involved. Furthermore, they launch into these sidebars like I'm already deep in the issue's fan club and receive a regular newsletter, when in fact, I'm not even 100% sure what the topic is.

And finally, Something. Has. Happened. To the WRITING STYLE. I mean, I know it's the Internet, but one of the great points of WebSnark is that Eric wrote well and was articulate. But maybe he writes too much. Because. NOW. It's. All. About. EMPHASIS. And no complete. Sentences.

To top it all off, I feel the site's been cheapened recently by both the launching and plugging of Eric's own webcomic, thus removing him from the realm of objectivity, and the recent overpowering begging relating to his new Paypal donation button. Apparently, we're supposed to buy them speakers and electric kettles now that they have our attention. When did panhandling revert back to the barter system? I'm not sure how I feel when someone says, "You don't have to get me anything" and then provides a long list of the things I shouldn't get them.

Okay, that's a lot of snarking but it's been building and I had to get it off my chest. I still like the site, even though it had seven good things to say about Nukees the first month, then never again. Maybe I haven't done anything good since then, but I'm chalking it up to the fact that Eric himself hasn't snarked a single webcomic in all of April so far (I'm not counting the Queen of Wands snark, which wasn't really about the comic, but Aeire's commentary). Anyway, to reiterate, I still think he's providing a valuable service to us all and I thank him for it, but I feel like it could be sliding ever-so-quickly into "First and Ten" Syndrome in only a few short months (and by not explaining "First and Ten" syndrome, I'm giving you an example of how I feel when they launch into issues without providing sufficient background). And if that ever happened with Nukees, I'd want to know.

It's got me, but it may lose me.

(tell me I'm just a bitter old curmudgeon in my forum).

3/30/2005 CRAP CRAP CRAP! It happened again! Somehow, the comic didn't get uploaded for today. By saying that in the passive voice, I somehow absolve myself of responsibility, but it was really just my stupidity. Sorry for the delay.
3/10/2005 NukeeWiki Boom shakalaka! I've been thinking that, while I appreciate that someone took the time to enter a Nukees Wikipedia Entry, that the content of said entry is rather lacking. It could really stand to be expanded with a character list, storylines, mention of Agnostica (And there's no Agnostica Wikipedia entry!), etc. By the rule of the Wikipedia, I'm not allow to enter data on my own creation, so the burden is on all of you Nuclides to keep them updated. Someone might help them out, maybe?
3/7/2005 Error fixed. There was a typo in the URL link below to the interview with me and Engineering News. It's been fixed, so if you tried to click on it before and failed, try again.
3/5/2005 I was interviewed recently by Engineering News, a weekly newsletter of the U.C. Berkeley engineering school. Go take a read.
3/4/2005 Feeling much better Just thought I'd let you all know that my Übermune system is doing its job, and aforementioned flu was mostly booted out of my system before its 24-hour deadline.
3/2/2005 Ugh! So I caught the flu this afternoon. Fever. Tired. Sore all over. It's times like this that make me really regret not working without a buffer. As you all should know, I'm still holding on to my perfect eight-year record despite, by and large, not working ahead, and tonight was a clear indication of the huge disadvantages of working that way. Maritza Campos recently brought up my update record on the Keenspot Forum and it made me feel pretty decent.

For the most part, my patented Übermune system has been pretty good at keeping this kind of misery away, and I'm certain I'll be better by morning (no flu is allowed to spend more than 24 hours in my body, I HAVE SPOKEN!). And when it happens (and I suppose over eight years, this wasn't the only flu I had to work through), despite the hours of pain, when I'm done, I somehow feel just a bit more proud of myself. I can actually rejoice in the aching comfort of the viral battlefield of my body. But it does make me fear the day I get hit by a bus or something. I'll keep drawing so long as I can hold a pen in some kind of appendage, but I suppose there's always the possibility of coma. And if it happens the evening before an update, there may be trouble. Guess I should really get at least one strip ahead. That'll be my goal next week. Along with cleaning the house, fixing the forums, transferring half of Keenspot to a new server, rehauling the advertising system, calculating a D-D ion beam neutron spectrum... ;)

But maybe not right this second.

2/17/2005 Hee! Today's Schlock Mercenary is funny. In case you haven't been following it lately, the multiplicity of me has made many appearances lately.
2/11/2005 All the random bag gifts except for one were sent out over a week ago, but I forgot to mention it. That one lone gift will get a special sketch in addition to a gift to make up for the lateness. Anyway, it turns out that I wasn't able to accept a number of payments for random bag presents because I guess personal Paypal accounts can't accept credit card payments. I still sent out random presents to all those people, though. Yeah, that means I'm out about $100. I would like to ask anyone who had a payment returned to them to please re-donate using actual money instead of paying by credit card. If you can't get real money into a Paypal account, you can send it by check or something to P.O. Box 4735, Berkeley, CA 94704. But if you don't get around to it or don't notice, it's no biggie.
1/27/2005 Snarked again, a week ago. While I was in Hawaii, Eric Burns snarked on Nukees again in this month's Comixpedia. I love this guy. He makes me feel all warm and gooey inside. Also, he gave Nukees an award this year. I got A Shortbread Award for "Bringing the Funny:Character Driven" The funny thing about this award was that, as thankful as I am to be recognized, my first thought was what I should do to improve in the other catagories in which Nukees didn't win. Such is the mind of a webtoonist.
1/15/2005 Crap! I swear, for some reason I cannot take a vacation without something going wrong with the site! I worked my ass off, once again, drawing extra strips so that I could take a little trip to Maui, only to find that I somehow screwed up uploading Friday's strip. I guess I can just never leave the house again.

Fortunately, I was able to rescan and reupload the missing strips at this island's only Kinko's on Saturday. Please, if you are tuning in on Monday, be sure to go back to the previous strip and get properly caught up.

This special news item is actually being 'typed' painstakingly from my PDA/cell phone as I am without internet access completely. I only hope I didn't screw this up, too.

1/13/2005 Sorry, but I wasn't quite able to finish wrapping andmailing all the Random Bag presents and now I am going out of town for thenext week and a half. So for a few of you, your Agnostica holiday seasonwill stretch all the way out to the last week of January. Most of you,however, should be receiving your Random Bag selection within a week.

1/6/2005 A bit late, but the Random Bag presents are going out this weekend. I underestimated the response and also neglected to buy packing tape, so they're being sent out a tad later than I'd intended. At least 25 people participated in the Random Bag, with about an equal split of mailed-in versus cashed-in participation. Next year, I'll shorten the window of opportunity and have plenty of packing material on hand to quicken the process.
12/21/2004 Happy Solstice! Today is the primary day to celebrate Agnostica, a great day to throw an Agnostica party. At least I think it's today. Could be tomorrow. My Lab-issued calendar says today is the first day of winter, at least. Anywho, the days just keep getting longer from now on, and that's reason enough to celebrate.
12/14/2004 It's QM Day once again, the official start of Agnostica! This year, I'd like to try something that I hope will become an online Agnostica tradition, to be repeated and hopefully be better organized in future years. You've heard about it in Nukees strips of the past but what exact IS the "Random Bag of Fun?

It's a bag, it's random, and it's fun. And you can participate in an Agnostica global gift exchage designed to remove holiday guilt and bring fun back into gift-giving and gift-getting.

Go to AGNOSTICA.COM to find out how you can get a random gift this year!

12/20/2004 This marks the third Nukees cameo in General Protection Fault, but it's the first of "me." (The first two were of "Gav," not to be confused with me). I'm named "Fleuel," though, and have short hair. But the important this is that I'm mean. Part of the "bully sysadmin" set! ;)
12/18/2004 I was ego-surfing today and this made me laugh very hard. Maybe he should get a free pick from the Random Bag?
11/25/2004 I won! Well, sort of. A number of Keenspotters and other webcartoonists were let in on a free "sneak peak" of a Nokia N-Gage game known as Pocket Kingdom, put out by the folks at thew0rld.com. If you check out the list of competitors, you'll see that I won the "Comic" catagory. Woo! That officially makes me a more obsessed gamer than Scott Kurtz, Greg Dean, Ian J., Graveyard Greg, Gabe and Tycho, and all those other "so-called gamer" cartoonists out there. Although it would seem that half of those so-called gamers didn't even bother to register their accounts so they could be ranked, if they even played the game at all. I'll be reviewing the game, which is released today, on my Forum later this week.
11/16/2004 Check it out, I had meant to post this tribute strip here earlier this week, but I was just too busy to do it. Dan Shive, who draws El Goonish Shive is just peachy for drawing it and for also regularly sending me traffic from his far more popular strip. His strip is quite mad and wacky and cool and you should read it, though I have to admit I've fallen behind on it due to the aforementioned lack of time so well characterized in that tribute, so I'm not sure who's tranformed into who, what or which these days. Definitely a "read from the beginning" sort of strip. Anywho, every so often, it's nice to be appreciated.
11/3/2004 1000! Today's was STRIP #1000 and I almost missed it. Somehow, it seems appropriate. Been doing this for almost 8 years now and have never taken a hiatus or missed an update (except for technical problems). Not always sure why.
11/2/2004 I'm a star! Actually, I'm a whole star system. There's an incredibly prolific writer slash critic who started up a critical webcomic review website a month or two ago called WebSnark. Every day, he writes quite a lot in analysis of what webcomics are doing right or wrong. I might add, he's commented many times (at least 5-6) about Nukees and has always had great things to say about it, which cheers me up regularly. I really appreciate the effort he puts into it, good or bad. In fact, I find the bad comments he makes highlight the fact that he isn't just cowtowing to the webcartoonist population--that all his comments are honest. Anyway, I haven't linked to it before (other than on my Forums where such secret stuff is public domain), maybe because it felt like tooting my own horn, maybe because I needed news-updating time for precious things like sleep. But now, he's gone too far. He's taking a "50,000 words in 30 days" book-writing challenge and is writing a Sci-Fi, which requires the creation and naming of multiple star systems. And he's taken to naming them after webcartoonists. And one of them is named after yours truely. The odd thing is that my last name already hurts the tongue enough to try to enunciate, but he's extended the pain to Bleuelsuld. If anything in the list sounds like a completely alien world, it's that. I can only wonder thus far the hair color of the inhabitants. It would seem I'm a cheeky little star system way out on the fringe, the only blockade between Aeire and the universe.
7/28/2004 I got an email from the South Pole while I was at Comic Con, asking for permission to use the IceCube strip a few weeks ago. Unfortunately, I seem to have lost that email, so I can't respond to it. If you were the one who sent me that email, would you please email me again? Thanks.
7/14/2004 Comic Con Approacheth As you may deduce, I'm back from Finland and am now busily preparing for Comic Con in San Diego. I hope to see a great many of you there. If there's anything in particular you'd like me to talk about at the Keenspot panel, let me know in my Forum. Otherwise, I'm going to try to have fun this time without caring what my bitter rivals think of me.
6/22/2004 Back to the midnight sun Well, starting tomorrow morning (very very early), I'll be off on a plane to Finland, my fourth visit to the land of the midnight sun (my third visit during the midnight sun). As you should well know by now, I take no breaks, and thus there will be no interruption in Nukees during that time, although it means drawing while on "vacation." I hope it's fun, though right now, I'm just worn out from all the work I've had to do for the past two weeks so that I could go. I suppose this changes your life not at all, but nonetheless, I'll be back about a week into July.
6/14/2004 Love me. Love my emissions. Attention is all I really want in life, and I'm getting my share over at Goats today. Another one for the Gavspotting page. I expect to be heavily abused, which is essentially normal.
4/22/2004 Okay, I don't know french. Apparently, according to a number of emails I got this morning, it's not "c'est vous plait," (which means "it is you please") but rather "s'il vous plait" ("if you please."). There's also a grave in there somewhere I should add. Huh. Learn something new every day. I'll get it corrected tonight. But I don't claim the beauty from Boise knows French any better than I...
4/7/2004 KiokO! There was a typo in today's Nukees this morning. The new character's name is Kioko, not Kioki. It was a long night last night, somehow the wrong letter came out. I fixed it at work today with the fine help of Photoshop. I'll have to fix the original when I get home.
4/5/2004 YAOI: No, not that, silly buns! What I mean is, there is Yet Another Online Interview with me at "Comixpedia." Go find out what people want to know about Keenspot. Also, check out "The History of WebComics (Part 6)." There are many quotes by me in this somewhat-scathing analysis of our past. Unfortunately, it's a bit of a bitch to find parts 1-5. I haven't found them yet, but I suspect I may be quoted or mentioned in some of those as well.
2/23/2004 Kinda lost my email from this weekend. I've been shuttling email around a lot lately, passing it through various spam filters from various services, and I guess I got careless at one point, and pretty much misplaced all my email for this weekend (since Friday evening). So if you sent me something during that time and I haven't answered, you might want to send it again.
2/6/2004 Sorry about this morning, when it seemed that the comic uploaded, but with the wrong permissions. My ancient computer on which I've been scanning for the past seven years finally died last night. I bought a new computer many years ago, but have never really used it, because it turned out the scanner I bought for it (an HP) has horrible scanning software. The weird thing is that the software that does the scanning cannot be replaced. It's as integral to the scanner as the lightbulb. So I've been limping along with the old 90 Mhz computer (top of the line in its day), which has had a failing hard drive for over a year now.

WHy am I telling you all this? Because last night, after I frantically hunted down all the appropriate cables and such to set up the "new" computer, I scanned the comic in and uploaded it via SFTP instead of FTP, thinking I might as well upgrade my uploading as well. Well, SFTP, paranoid as it is, decided to set the permissions on the file such that it does not have "world readable" access, which is quite important if, you know, you want other to be able to read it. Anyway, Jeff Darlington (GPF), my east coast eyes, pointed out the problem and I fixed it this morning. Sorry to those early risers (or the Finnish) who saw a broken image this morn.

On the plus side, I discovered that the image four days ago was not corrupted--that my browser had simply decided to stop loading in the middle for some reason.
2/2/2004 Huh. Looks like something went wrong in the scanning/shrinking/uploading process of today's comic and the bottom part of today's comic is a bit munged up in the resolution department. I'll have to fix it after work tonight. Sorry about that.
12/31/2003 Okay, that's Wednesday's strip down and just one more to go. I'm now using a university library computer to scan, which has Photoshop, so the image quality is now immensely improved. I encourage you to go look at the last four strips again. In particular, you might check out yesterday's, since the previous image quality was particularly poor (you couldn't even tell the delivery guy had a shaded uniform). Of course, nothing will make up for any poor image quality due to the artist's shortcomings. Incidentally, it turns out there may be a similar 1-2 hour delay with Friday's strip, so don't worry too much if you're checking at midnight. Toodles until then.
12/29/2003 As you can see so far I've done a pretty good job keeping the comic strip updated while on vacation. Only two left to draw while here in Finland (and one to draw on the plane back). However, I'm going to Helsinki today and may not have as easy access to a scanner. It looks to me like I'll be able to get scanning done Wednesday before noon. That means Wednesday's comic may update at about 2-3 am PST instead of the normal 12-1 am PST. I know you'll survive. Friday's should update normally, as should Monday's. However, if something happens to delay my flight back from Finland, I may not be able to update that day. Hopefully all will go well, but I thought I'd warn you.

For those interested in the weather report, it's been hovering above and below freezing all week now. At the moment, it's snowing. What that means essentially is that every flat surface (road, sidewalk, dog...) is now basically coated in three inches of ice, which in turn is hidden by a thin layer of snow. Quite dangerous, I must say! I don't understand how to get around. And now, off to Helsinki...

12/25/2003 Scan improving! Well, it's not as good looking as usual, but I find the image quality now acceptable (at least until I get back to America and redo this series). I installed The GIMP on the computer here, so I'm able to do some normal image manipulation. Unfortunately, The GIMP is a somewhat difficult program to use, which would not normally be a problem since I'm used to it, but it also installed in Finnish, the combination of which makes it quite difficult, indeed. So, I'll take what I can get.

I still have four comic strips to draw and scan while on "vacation." Not much of a vacation, is it? But that's how much I like you guys.

The temperature went above zero Celcius today, so the snow is becoming rather wet and slushy. It's still quite beautiful and peaceful here, though. I have to get used to things like fish eggs for breakfast and walking on lakes.

12/24/2003 Apologies for the poor quality of the scan today. It is now about 3am PST and I just want to get the strip up ASAP and then try to improve the scan quality later. I'm having many problems getting this strip scanned at my current location in Finland. There is a scanner here, but no graphics software and all the software that I can use is in Finnish, anyway. Also, I am having some uploading problems which I can't figure out, but I managed to upload to a tertiary computer first to bypass. Hopefully, later on today, I'll be able to get up a better quality image than the one above. Thanks for your understanding.

In more personal news, it really is quite kaunis (beautiful) here in Eastern Finland (near Savonlinna), for at least the few hours of daylight that are available. Since it seems to be getting darker (it's about 2pm here) and they say it may go above freezing tomorrow (which would ruin the omnipresent white landscape if it precipitates), I think I'll go outside and enjoy a little of it now (it is currently -10 Celcius, warmer than the -20 C of last night when I got in) and get back to the comic in a few hours. Happy Agnostica and Hyvää Joulua kaikille ja kaikille hyvää yota!

(Note to Finnish speakers: Apologies if the above phrase insults your collective mothers or something instead of the intended seasons greetings. It's a montrously tough language, you know...)

11/18/2003 One thing I forgot to mention is that I'm currently travelling for the holidays. At the moment, I'm in Florida, about to catch a flight to France. Just before Christmas, I'll be jetting off to Finland, where I'll be until January 5. As such, I may not be able to answer emails or the forum for some time, so don't feel insulted. I'm still looking for Agnostica Party photos, of course. Unfortunately, because of my Italy trip, I wasn't able to get very far ahead on the strip, so I'm having to draw it on my vacation. But rest asured, Nukees will not miss a day, unless (as so many times before), because of technical difficulties.
10/27/2003 Back from Italy! Didn't know I was gone, did you? Well, I was spending every free second getting ahead on the strip so that I could go to this conference last week and didn't spend thirteen seconds posting anything about it. In retrospect, I probably should have, because every time I leave town, something goes wrong with the automatic site updating. This time, I did two things wrong. First, I accidentally saved 11/28/2003 as a tif file instead of a gif file. Fortunately, Teri caught it and Nate fixed it while I was gone, but not until the next day (11/29/2003). Secondly, I entered the comic from 12/1/2003 as 11/31/2003, which doesn't exist, of course. However, the automatic updater doesn't care and updated on the correct day, though with an incorrect date. I apologize for the missing comic on the 28th. I should just never leave the country, I guess.
10/27/2003 Halloween in Vegas is a grand, freaky time, and I'm going to be there for Las Vegas Comic Con. I hope to see some of you there. It should be pretty cool. There's a Keenspot panel and also a Webcomics panel. I'm not certain if I'm supposed to be on the latter panel or not, but I'm definitely on the former. Anyway, if you can make it, come on by. Las Vegas is an awesome place to be for Halloween. Las Vegas is just an awesome place to be, period. It really shows what you can do with a city if you had an infinite supply of money and power and no sense of social or environmental responsibility whatsoever.
9/29/2003 -- 12:00pm Nukees Nuked! OH HAPPY DAY! Nate is now officially my hero for the week! He figured out how to recover data from the fubared hard drive! I can't tell you all how happy this has made me! If you don't know what I'm talking about, read the note below this one first.

I wrote the note below very late last night and was both not lucid and not happy. I just wanted to clear up a few things that may have been unclear:

  1. The "bad tech" was not Nate. Nate has been a saint -- the only one able to deal with all of this as I was out of town all weekend. The "bad tech" was the guy he was dealing with at our webhost.
  2. I had no real intention of leaving Keenspot or Nukees. A number of existing Keenspotters seem to react immediately to every bad situation with "I'm going to leave Keenspot over this" and it always disturbs me to no end. This is not how I want any of you to feel. I meant to say that I had "thoughts" of leaving Keenspot/Nukees because of all this. It's like when you have "thoughts" of killing yourself because your girlfriend dumped you, even though you would never actually do such a thing (and then you feel silly for it later). They aren't serious thoughts, but they are there. I only mentioned them to express the hopelessness I was feeling. I hope I didn't scare anyone. None of you deserve to stress about that sort of thing.
  3. Please don't offer any tech advice at this time. I know that when you do, you have the best intentions and are only trying to help, but we do know what we are doing, and it's not what I need at this point. It's a bit like when your girlfriend dumps you (a popular theme in this news item), and everyone starts telling you that she was horrible anyway, or worse, what you should have done to keep her.


9/29/2003 -- 2:00am Nukees Nuked! Due to a truely astounding conflux of bad luck, the Nukees site and two backups have been wiped out (naturally, while I was out of town and could do nothing about the effects). In addition, a great portion of my work at Keenspot has similarly been wiped out. In short, my life, which was already 99.97% full, has just been made infinitely more difficult. I won't go into the technical details, because I'm too depressed about it and the only way I have been able to survive this week is to repress most of the thought itself. When I have been unable to fend off the reality of what has happened, my mind fills with thoughts of quitting Nukees, quitting Keenspot, and just crawling in a hole. I will not likely do any of these things, but it's what I want to do. Why I don't do what I want anymore is anyone's guess.

Using a Google cache, I have reconstructed this front page and uploaded today's comic and the last week's. No other pages on this site are currently operational. I will be toiling today (after I wake up--it's far too late at nig ht/early in the morning now) and all this week to bring the site back to a reasonable operation (I do have some very old backups). Please bear with me.

But this site is just the most minor of my troubles. So much work lies ahead of me because of this double hard-drive failure (combined with a bug that wiped out my backup) that it's actually too much for me to bear. It makes me naseous just to think about it, so I'll probably not be in very good communication for some time. As always, some inexplicable masochistic force should continue to draw the comic. I apologize if it's not drawn so well today. I apologize if it's not drawn so well, ever. I have to get used to apologizing, because a stupid tech at our bandwidth provider has made it so that's all I'll be doing for a few months now.

7/16/2003 And I'm off to Comic Con! I hope to see many of you there. If you haven't had the pleasure of seeing my scary visage, I'm the blue-haired guy. Now, at Comic Con, that describes a lot of people, but I think I still stand out. Check the name tag. Be sure to come to our panel. I think it's on Saturday. It'll be real fun. The Keenspot booth will be smaller this year, so I may do more wandering around than hanging around, since there will be little room except for those scheduled. Drop by our booth and find out when I'm scheduled to sit.
7/10/2003 Nukees: d/dx, the first Nukees book, seems to have disappeared completely from the Plan 9 website many months ago. I've gotten a number of emails asking how to buy it, and all I can say is that it apparently sold out and I don't know if Plan 9 is interested in a reprint before I give them materials for the next two books (which have been delayed by my now-completed thesis). The fact that no mention is even made of me, or the unavailability of the first print of Nukees: d/dx, anywhere at Plan 9.
6/25/2003 Pretty late update "tonight," but at least it happened. It's been difficult finding computers with both scanners and image processing software this week. I had to promise to read a science paper and correct the english in order to borrow use of the scanner here at the Finnish Reactor where my girlfriend is working and even then, I was only able to do it just now, about four hours after my normal update time. And it still didn't have very good software--thus I was only able to save as a PNG file. Most of you should have updated browsers that can display PNG but if not, you may have to wait until I return from Finland and convert to GIF.
6/22/2003 What happened Friday? Damn! Sorry, guys, it looks like I mislabled Friday's strip so that it didn't update until Saturday. Normally, when I'm stupid like this, the Keenspot server sends a text message to my cell phone at one in the morning (usually waking me up) to alert me. Unfortunately, I'm in Finland at the moment, where American cell phones don't do their jobs. Incidentally, I have to draw and update the next three strips here in Finland (I was only able to get three strips ahead before leaving), and I'm having a seriously difficult time, stemming from being in the middle of the forests of East Finland where I've forgotten my drawing paper, this small town's only paper store is open only on Wednesdays, computers are in Finnish, and I can't find any kind of image editing software. I'm doing everything I can to draw and scan in my absence to keep you in fresh quality Nukees, but it's terribly difficult. I don't intend to break my perfect schedule at this time, but my morale is low. It's safe to say I'm not in the best mood when it comes to all things Nukees. Anyway, I apologize if the image quality over the next three days is low. I'll fix it when I get back in July. Thanks to those who raised a stink about Nukees not appearing on Friday.
6/14/2003 The infamous thesis is now available for download in postscript format only. Go to our LBNL BNCT Papers page to download it. I'm currently out of town for the entire month of June (in Colorado now and going to Finland in a few days), so I won't be able to address the errors I encountered convertin g to PDF format until I return in July (of course, there will be no interruption in Nukees' schedule, as always). But you can download Ghostscript and GSView for Windows (scroll down on that page) to view it. Note that in postscript format, the thesis is 13.4 MB.
5/23/2003 PhinisheD! As the special item (and newsbox) says above, today I am officially Dr. Gav. I'm getting my final signatures today at 10am, making a few last minute corrections, printing out on special 11 cents/sheet "thesis paper" and turning my 350 page dissertation into the graduate division office before 4pm. And that's it. I'm over a billion seconds old, and I'm finally done with school. I am SO TIRED! But also so happy! It's like all the dark matter in the universe has been lifted off my brain. I'm torn between sleeping all weekend and getting very, very drunk. Fortunately, these are complementary goals.

Why not say nice things about me on my Forum? Or come by Blake's tonight and buy me a Guinness? Thanks, you're swell.

(UPDATE - 5:20pm) It's done! I made all the final alterations and printed out the final copies on official paper and got it to the graduate office at 3pm. I waited in line, filled out all the forms, paid all the money, went through all the requirements and was out of there by 3:30pm. So I made the 5pm deadline by an hour and a half. Now I'm dyeing my hair (it's been two months), and will crack open a four-year-old bottle of champagne that my parents gave me for this day (that I hope hasn't gone bad) and will head out to Blake and proceed to get very, very drunk. Thanks to all the well-wishes!
5/13/2003 Yesterday, I turned One Billion seconds old, and I didn't even properly celebrate. I programmed Keenspot to send messages to my cell phone all day long, but when the final message came, I was still unprepared from being so sob-out-loud overworked. Everywhere I turn is someone with yet more work for me. I wanted to celebrate with a Guinness at Blake's, but I had to settle for one at home. Me so sad. Me want to cry.
4/30/2003 A wider range of interests... Hee. I crack myself up sometimes. That's the beauty of having no long term memory. When you say something funny, it still seems funny when you read it again later. Check out this new article in Hogan's Alley #11 on webcomics, featuring quotes from yours truely.
4/16/2003 College Roomies From Hell!!! is the kind of place where Nukees and Boobies are basically the same thing.
4/14/2003 It ain't been electrically zombified, but it's a squid all right. I've been informed that a monster of a squid was discovered/captured in the seas of Antarctica. In a typical case of art imitating life and of, in general, me being right all the time, it was discovered by New Zealand scientists, similar to the Giant Electric Zombie Squid featured in my Gavarctica storyline. The scientist in charge was not named Maritza, but did have the rather curious name of "O'Shea."
4/2/2003 And the moral of today's strip is never try to make fun of the weather in real time. It was bright and sunny again this morning, though a little chillier. It's not actually possible to predict the weather in the San Francisco Bay Area, but weathermen try anyway. It was supposed to rain yesterday. It was supposed to rain today. It's supposed to rain tomorrow and the next day, too. We'll see. Actually, it seems to be sprinkling a bit now that it's the afternoon, but the sun is still annoyingly shining. This strip is slated to run in the Daily Cal on Friday. For once, I'm crossing my fingers, hoping for the rain that never comes.
3/14/2003 Happy Pi Day! This year's Pi Day has reminded me that I forgot to celebrate my 10pi birthday! Oi, I feel ashamed to be a geek.
2/10/2003 Did you send out your Agnostica cards? I feel a tad guilty because I didn't get a chance to send out any Agnostica cards this year (I even have some really nifty Edward Gorey cards). But "they" certainly didn't forget at General Protection Fault. I'm about two or three weeks behind in all my webcomic reading, due to various of life's insanities, so I'm not sure what's going on, but I'm not sure we're supposed to know who "they" are anyway, yet.
2/10/2003 The server spirits conspire against me Early risers may have noticed Nukees was again non-existant this morning. How could this be? Months ago, when I went on a tirade because various tech problems caused Nukees not to update and no one even told me, I decided it was unfair to place the burden on any of you for my problems, so I wrote a little shell script that would check my site for me every night and send me a text message to my cell phone if the comic wasn't updated. Genius. However, Nukees was moved onto a different server recently and the script wasn't. I actually got that text page (woke me up at 1am), but I ignored it, since I knew the script was on the wrong server. Little did I know that the site went unupdated on the new server, anyway! Seems that, in the transfer, my site was installed correctly, but the permissions were wrong. That means my account did not have access to change anything at my own site. So the comic didn't update. That's what happened. You may now go about your everyday life.
1/8/2003 Where was today's Nukees? Sorry guys, it seems that Nate has been experimenting with the Nukees site to see about distributing our sites across multiple servers. I guess it wasn't working correctly, so his experimental server didn't synch up with the original. Thus, this morning, the new comic didn't show up. I also can't seem to get into that server to try to fix it myself, so I've now just redirected the domain name back to the original server. Some of you won't see this message for several hours until your DNS updates with the new information, unfortunately. I apologize for the problems.
12/16/2002 Regarding today's strip I suggest you read the following. The same people who think it won't ever be used for evil are the same people who invented the Internet, presumably under the same pretenses.

UPDATE: (12/18) For those that think the above link was inadvertantly tak en from The Onion, see the TIA Systems page at DARPA for more information.
12/15/2002 And on the second day of Agnostica, we were chided along with every other major holiday at Sinfest That's when you know your holiday has made it--when others start to get sick of them. I have no idea how to list this on the Gavspotting page.
10/4/2002 Happy Birthday to me. I'm really old today. Like, as old as a girl I used to date who refused to tell me under any circumstances how old she was. But I'm a prime number again, which always feels slightly more comfortable.
10/1/2002 I guess I was distracted by caution tape or something, and I missed the Sluggy Freelance Comic Con 2002 Report. A whole half page is dedicated to my clumsiness, so you should check it out. Click on the Blue box to skip straight to me. The embarrassing moment he describes really was one of the funniest moments of timing ever, one of those "had to be there moments." Hanging out with Pete is definitely a high point of these conferences, if only for our continuing mutual admonishment of all things Steve Troop, and I always know he's up for a beer (theoretically--I haven't experienced a Con in which his wife is in attendence yet). As you'll read, I invited Pete and T-Shirt Guy Tom to experience the wonderment that is Blake's Bar. I don't think Blake's was in such prime form that night (translate: none of the hot bartendresses were working). But I had fun, and that's what matters.
9/23/2002 Which Nukee is most popular? Have you ever asked that question? Well we don't aim to answer it today. Instead, "Maddog" has made a very cool Nukees Appearance Count page. While it won't tell you who's most popular, it will tell you who's most prominent. Of course, Gav leads the pack, but I was surprised to learn that Suzy Gee takes second by a fairly good margin (she'll definitely be losing ground to Danny in the latest storyline, however). Bruce took several of my suggestions and turned it into an extremely useful resource. Take a look and then discuss how cool it is (or what it needs) in the forum!
9/5/2002 I'm off to Germany! I don't know how I did it, but somehow I managed to draw five extra comic strips in only two weeks to cover my time away, so as always, there will be no interruption in your thrice weekly nuclear funtime. It was at the expense of the presentation I'm supposed to give at this scientifical conference, though, so now I'm busily trying to finish that up as well, as well as 13 million other things I need to do before I leave. Let me tell you, I am worn out! I'll also be meeting my girlfriend there (who has been home in Finland for two weeks, which is probably the only reason I was able to get five extra strips done), and we're going to spend a few days in Spain, visiting a friend of mine (no, I don't make friends locally, what's it to you?).

I'll also be stopping off for a few hours in Washington D.C. along the way to see some other friends of mine and my second favorite bar in the world, The Brickskeller. Special thanks go out to my Nukee friend, Peloso, who will be picking me up and taking me back to the airport instead of working. He wants me to plug his book, published by the enigmatic Invisible College Press. I told him I wouldn't, but then he's giving me a ride, so what the hey. He also let me and Shea sleep on his couch for three weeks many years ago, so I suppose I owe him.

8/29/2002 I never really link to any outside sites that I just happen to like, do I? I mean here in the news, that is. Well, I was checking out my referrers last month in my logs, and I found that a lot of traffic came my way from a links page at skizzers.org. I decided to check it out, only to find that the whole site had been taken down due to bandwidth overage. Seems some random page about Legomen at his site had become ultra popular. Well, some kind folks have mirrored that site now, and I think it's pretty funny, though not quite as impressive as Legoland Sluggy. But I gotta give it up for his appreciation of Nukees. He said he put his comics list in the order that he reads them and I felt a little insulted that I was last, and then my day was made when he said "I save the best for last." Anyway, go see how he put together his new computer.

In other news, I'm a frantic headless chicken these days as I prepare for a scientifical conference in Essen, Germany. I'll be gone two weeks (also going to visit a friend of mine in Spain), and I was lazy and didn't start trying to get ahead on the strip until just now (no worries, though, I refuse to miss a day no matter what I have to do). Plus, I also have to prepare my presentation for said conference, not to mention the thousands of Keenspot responsibilities foisted upon me daily. So I'm a wreck, but haven't snapped a cog yet. Man, I wish I had an army of Legomen to help me out!

8/7/2002 From Comic Con! (URLs updated 8/10/2002) Well, I'm back from Comic Con and it was fun. I wanted to do a whole nifty Comic Con report, detailing my exploits and such, but who has time for that? I'll just link to Jeff's photos at GPF and the Sluggy report, when they put them up. If anything happened that they didn't see, I don't remember it.
7/31/2002 To Comic Con! And today, I'm off to Comic Con in San Diego.
7/30/2002 Who can it be now? Yet another Gavspotting of me at, of all places, a Comic Convention in Funny Farm. That makes 16 cameos of myself so far!
7/26/2002 I've been informed that today is System Administrator Appreciation Day. Whatever. Appreciate me.
7/23/2002 Comic Con! It's coming! Now that I've basically blamed you all for my stupidity (I didn't mean it that way, honest), come share the love with me at Comic Con! I'll be there in all my blue-haired Hawaiian-shirted glory. And I promised Aeire that I would definitely get her contest prize drawn while there (yes, it's been over a year since the coloring contest... oi!), along with Malicious Ferret's. Sorry guys! Anyway, Comic Con starts on July 31, and I hope to see some of you there!
7/17/2002 IRC Junkie? I can't say I'm much into the whole IRC thing as many, but for those that are, Vorn the Unspeakable has set up a Nukees IRC channel on Nightstar. It's channel #nukees on irc.nightstar.net. Go check it out, it needs Nuclides. I may even drop by every so often. If there's enough interest (tell me on the forum), then I may make scheduled appearances so you can ask me anything you want, live, about Nukees or anything else except how I get my hair this color. If there's no interest, well, I won't be too sad.
6/24/2002 The Giant Robot Ant lives! Leave it to my favorite foreign friends, the funky Finns, to invent a real Giant Robot Ant! Go there now and check out their videos of it walking! Spectacumundous!
6/11/2002 Cameos for Everyone! Looks like few Nukees characters were left out of the Clan of the Cats storyline while I was on vacation! Of course, Jamie would have to show me up by drawing a better robot ant than me. But most importantly, Linus appears to make his first cameo! Count the Nukees characters and win no prize!
5/29/2002 Everything happens when I'm away. There was a double Gavspotting at Clan of the Cats where, in possibly the only strip with enough paranormal activity to handle such a dimensional paradox, I am seen as my own servant. Or more accurately, Gav(me) is seen as Gav(character)'s servant. Now that's a first.
5/27/002 Gavspotting from the Grave! I may be on vacation, but it doesn't mean my ubercyberpresence can't make announcements in my absence (spooky, ain't it?). Look who's survived the centuries over at Schlock Mercenary! Keep checking back for the next few weeks, and go read the whole thing anyway. Schlock is definitely one of my favorite strips and deserves a spot on my "not updated this millenium" Snooty short list of links. One of these days, it'll go there. Maybe something to do on vacation... I can't stop working!
5/2/2002 Well color me rendered! Check out the awesome newest Cameo of me at DeViations! (Warning, there appears to be MIDI sound there--at least my browser is whining for a plugin). I've been painstakingly rendered in 3D! Unlike my mention in a Sluggy Freelib, when I was compared to Christina Aguilera, this time I'm being compared (in a way) to Britney Spears. Is it just me or are the blonde Mouseketeer female pop star associations getting a little disturbing?

You may remember I appeared in a completely different form in DeViations exactly one year ago. I'm not sure how to tally this on the Gavspotting page. Suggestions welcome.
1/24/2002 Wanna see me talk about myself? Are you a comic creator that lives in the Bay Area and wants to see me? Well, geez, get therapy, ya freak! But after your session, why not drop by the Cartoon Art Museum this Thursday at 7pm for the weekly "Creator's Meeting?" I'll be speaking at it, as evidenced by this short offically-sanctioned blurb:

The Cartoon Art Museum will hold its next Creators' Meeting on Thursday, Jan. 31st @ 7pm. Hobnob with professional and aspiring cartoonists, illustrators, and caricaturists. This month's meeting will focus on the upcoming Alternative Press Expo (A.P.E.), the nation's premiere independent and underground cartoonist convention happeningat Fort Mason Center on Feb. 9th & 10th. Also, the state of online comics in the post dot.com era will be discussed with online creators Derek Kirk ("small stories") and Darren "Gav" Bleuel ("Nukees"). Curated by Keith Knight. $3 donation suggested. the C.A.M. is located at 655 Mission St. (near 3rd st.) in San Francisco.

10/09/2001 What happened to our regularly scheduled Nukees? Sorry, I meant to put up a notice yesterday, but didn't have time to log in before I left for New York last week. For the next two weeks, we'll have a bit of an intermission in the storyline to bring a recap of sorts. I'm experimenting with a cut-n-paste style here. Don't worry, this isn't permanent. These are strips that ran in the Daily Californian a few weeks back to get readers caught up on things and I thought they were kinda cute, so I'm sharing them with all of you.
9/24/2001 A Coloring Contest! Yeah, just like when we were kids! I'm holding a coloring contest! Pick a Nukees strip and colorize it and you could win an original sketch of two of your favorite characters. Claim a strip and get full details here!
9/19/2001 In Honnor of my 500th strip, Nucline LCARS decided to colorize strip #500. Cool, thanks LCARS!
9/18/2001 Have we helped enough yet? First of all, I am not going to tell you to donate money or blood or buy a product to help support the cause. Why not? Because you know. You've seen the information on every webpage, TV station, and radio program in the nation. Help in whatever way you want, but there's no sense in me repeating the phone numbers that the entire country has now memorized and Sluggy Freelance does a better job of providing info than I ever could.

Since this began, we've all felt the need to combat this great evil with at least a little bit of goodness. But there are 300 million of us. We've given enough blood. They're actually getting enough money. Have we done enough yet? Has the nightmare gone away yet? We gave the blood and the money and the people are still dead?

If for some reason you're actually looking to me to tell you how you can ease the pain, let me tell you what you need to do. You need to do what I've tried to tell people to do since I started this strip. You need to combat all the stupidity and evil in the world with education and intelligence. Two nights ago, a group of drunken frat boys here in Berkeley shouted racial slurs and "Terrorist! Towelhead!" to another student, whose skin was dark and whose head was wrappen in a turban. Not only did this student have nothing to do with the attack, he wasn't even Arab or Muslim. He was an Indian Sikh. I've been avoiding the news lately, but I know at least one Arab was killed somewhere in this country because of this, and I'm sure there are more atrocities from morons of which I'm not aware.

The Afghani people are not responsible. They are far more oppressed and damaged because of the Taliban than we ever will be. Arabs are not the problem any more than those people in the WTC were responsible for those things that have so angered these terrorists. Muslims are not the problem unless you believe all Christians should be blamed for the Crusades. Those terrorists were bad, but those that would attack anything in a turban are worse because they attack their own people for the actions of others.

You all know this, though. I'm almost certain you do. I've never preached to anything but the choir on issues of ignorance. But if you are looking to me to tell me how to "help," I have a grander task for you. You must stand up to the hate in this country. You have to let it be known to the idiots that stupidity is not tolerated anymore. When your bartender opens the conversation with, "Kill any Afghans today?" you are not to shrug him off as an ignoramous anymore. You are hearby instructed to tell him that prejudice is no longer acceptable. When a fellow citizen is attacked for his race, you are to protect him. When Muslims are discriminated against in your community, you are to give them the support you might normally have given your own church. You are to make up for the stupid people, and not just ignore them anymore. It's easy to give money, to give blood. It is hard to stand up to stupidity, but it is a great stupidity and a great evil we must fight and it can only be fought with a greater intelligence and a greater goodness.

We are not fighting a collapsed building. It's already collapsed. We are fighting hate. We are fighting ignorance. And this is war.

9/12/2001 Leave thy neighbor the hell alone! Two things anger me more than anything after this awful day. The first is that it seems 99.9% of the world's atrocities are the fault of religion. No matter how pure and good natured the core philosophies of religion are, they are inevitably used to justify the most horrific, illogical actions. Islamic beliefs seem to impell some of the greatest hate in the world today, but which religion hasn't been used for purest evil? I poke fun a lot at Christianity, but even I have to admit that Jesus had a good point: "For My sake, just be nice to each other, m'kay?" And yet it led to the Crusades, the Dark Ages, abortion clinic bombings... It seems no philosophy can't be twisted.

If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. I've decided to start my own religion, with one founding philosophy: Leave everyone the hell alone! There are too many different people in the world for you to be tolerant of all of them, apparently, or try to love them all, or try to look out for their best interests, so stop trying. Just leave them the hell alone.

I'm not saying don't go ahead and bomb those responsible back to the Stone Age, if you think that will help. But maybe if everyone slowly replaces their existing belief that their neighbor needs to be changed to be like them (or eliminated if they won't change) into an ideology in which we just leave each other the hell alone... maybe slowly, the world will become a better place.

Maybe in a hundred years, all the hate will die. And in two hundred, we'll find some way of twisting "Gavism" into a new excuse to kill.

The second thing that angers me is that the first thing in my mind this morning was a hundred different ways this could have been avoided. We are the most technologically advanced nation on earth and as such, we are uniquely poised to take advantage of unique, technological deterrents to this kind of action, such as LOCKING THE FREAKIN' COCKPIT DOOR! Maybe we've just never really thought of the airplane as a weapon far more powerful than most missiles and certainly far more powerful than a Ryder truck full of C4, but this all could have been avoided if we treated the airplane with the respect it deserves. Little Billy doesn't need to tour the cockpit anymore, so put up a bullet proof shield, for Gav's sake! You can't fight this with ground security. I could get a knife on board a plane just by stuffing it in my steel-toed boot. It has to be mitigated in the air.

Anyway, shouldn't planes be flying themselves by now?

7/23/2001 Back from ComicCon! and it was mega-stylin'! Toon in to the message board some time later today (after I wake up--boy that's a long drive!) for a report and maybe some photos.
6/7/2001 I'm off to Finland! ...to see a hot blonde and to attend a physics conference. Nukees should be unaffected.
6/1/2001 Are you a cartoonist? sheartened by a complete lack of mention of Nukees in the discussion of the Cartoonist Choice Awards at Elf Life, I've decided that I won't be satisfied until I get nominated for Best Romance Comic. Yup, that's all I really want. Best Romance Comic. Go nominate me, or I'll take out Keenspace! ;)
5/29/2001 See, TODAY is the day that I am officially counting the General Protection Fault Cameo! If you haven't guessed, I knew this was coming, but I wanted to wait for the actual competition between Gav and Trudy to start before counting it. Everyone go see Gav attempt to trounce Trudy and find out who is more evil! That means InkGav and FleshGav are now tied in number of cameos in Gavspotting! FleshGav is worried.
5/23/2001 Just to show... that there must be no hard feelings, I just now noticed that Kevin Pease used a quote from my scant Links page in one of his promo banners:

I have to say, I'm overly thrilled to see Warren actually shouting it at the TV. I can picture him watching Fraiser right now.

This might be a good opportunity to express my final words on the matter of begging until 2002.

5/22/2001 Is that? Hmm... I dunno. I'm rather reluctant to add yet another cameo to the Gavspotting page, since that would mean Gav and I would be tied for the title of "Most Cameoed." Maybe I should wait for more solid evidence... But check out General Protection Fault today, anyway, fellow Gavspotters.
5/8/2001 Sorry Kevin, Hey, lookit me, I'm causing problems. Kevin Pease of Absurd Notions is a bit miffed by a line in what I guess is my first official "rant." It's no wonder he's mad. I effectively said, "Don't give Kevin Pease money." Is that fair? I'll admit that, in the interests of delivering my point effectively through conciseness, I may have glossed over the statement, "It's not a sustainable model." In response, a new rant, (which I may or may not make a regular thing now that I've tasted ire) entitled, Don't Give Kevin Pease Money. Read it, then discuss.

In less controversy-spawning news, I have just surged ahead in the Gavspotting race with this amusing (and disturbingly accurate) reference to myself in Blue Canary.

4/27/2001 Who's your favorite heartthrob? Go now! Check out the Sluggy Freelib for today. In particular, check out #3. In the company of Mel Gibson and Christina Aguilera? Natch. Girls, girls, please. The constant swooning is distracting me from wold domination.
4/19/2001 Who's more cameod? Me or Gav? And by Gav, I mean the blonde in the strip, of course. I think I have a shot at the title of "Most parodied webcartoonist." So far, six different people have either drawn me, or depicted me in their strip. Gavcharacter has inched out my performance by a single cameo (so far, I have not totaled fun art, however--I will surely lose after that). Track all of our non-Nukees appearances on the new Gavspotting page!
4/9/2001 Well, I think crazed stalker chicks are sexy. Well, at least they are when they're stalking me and they look like bubbly pink-pig-tailed anime cat chicks. The divine MissM has found my bluedomed zebraprint-hugging visage and irresistable despotic charms so enticing, that she has devoted a Shrine to yours truely. Yes, that's right, a Gav Shrine! I'm going to say it again, because it's just all too cool and disturbing in cute, fuzzy ways: A Shrine to Moi. Looks like all those years of coy lessons are paying off.
4/2/2001 Recognize that hair? Guess whose lovely blue visiage graces the Entertainment section of the SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE! I'm so totally stoked. Finally, a local article! Sometimes I forget just how colorful I actually am! But ugh, they had to take my picture when my roots were showing! The print article is in black and white, though, so I guess it doesn't matter.
4/1/2001 April Fool's! Maybe I went over the line this year? Who knows? I've been working so very hard for so very long and I really just wanted to pull as big a prank as I could think of. I apologize if you didn't get the joke. Incidentally, if you are a victim, you can easily remove my joke from your site by requesting an update from your "Site Maintenance" page.
3/9/2001 Perfect timing? Heh heh. After reading today's Nukees, go check out the Bobbins strip for the same day. Ain't that a cheeky coincidence?
2/27/2001 Notice anything different? I wouldn't say that one of my primary goals with Nukees is to educate anyone on anything, but it is a major goal of mine not to de-educate anyone with my creation, the way Hollywood does with awful, awful movies like "Stargate" (Eye of 'Ra?') or, even worse, Star Trek (hey! Everyone see that neutrino beam?). As such, I've been talking to Aric Campling, a cardiac nurse who draws Hosers regarding the fact that the EKG readout I drew yesterday never happens. Shocking is used in case of fribrillation, not a stopped heart. It actually stops a fribrillating heart in order to shock the sinoatrial node into restarting at a regular beat (sort of the equivalent of rebooting your computer and hoping there's nothing wrong with the boot sector). I also changed the heartbeats themselves to more accurately reflect the patterns of a human heart. I'm keeping the dramatic pause after the first beat, however, as artistic license. Thank you Aric, for keeping Nukees accurate. Go read Hosers if you want to thank him, too.
2/19/2001 The Quotable Mr. Bleuel Have you read the Chicago Tribune article on webcomics yet? Your esteemed Nukees and Keenspot creator was quoted for a full five paragraphs! I'm ever so thrilled. And they spelled my name correctly. What has become of the universe?
2/9/2001 Danny will hate me for it. Ever wonder what led me to create such a confusing character? Then prepare for real life Danny quotes. Yes, dudes and gentlewomen, these are things actually spoken by the person upon which Danny is based.
2/7/2001 I KNEW IT! Now the question is, was this a response to my suspicions, or was it carefully planned, and I called it early? A paranoid mind is never sure. Danny shows up with a big fluffy tail as the mind behind the bug in The Class Menagerie today.
2/5/2001 Well, DeMontFort is supposed to be... I don't know what Vince is pulling over at The Class Menagerie, but it seems familiar, doesn't it?
  1. There's the chick in a black turtleneck sweater,
  2. the miniature glasses-mounted camera
  3. and giant robot ants!
Coincidence? I dunno. I'm waiting to see how this turns out. What do you think?
1/24/2001 A week of Fours Hey, go me! Not only was last weekend Nukees' 4th anniversary, but today is my 400th strip. And isn't this the fourth week in January? What a thrill. An arbitrary landmark relative to the number of opposable digits on our limbs. I'm underwhelmed.
1/24/2001 King Luca's first cameo! Yay! I was so hoping I'd be next on Mark Stanley's list! Our favorite nuclear couple can be found over at one of my favorite strips, Freefall! Mark is a fellow Nukee, don't 'cha know? I worked with him on the Fright Night project a while back, if you remember. I would expect King Luca to order nothing less than the big tub of popcorn! BTW, if you like the science geekiness of Nukees, you'll love Freefall. I know I do.
1/21/2001 FOUR MORE YEARS! Looks like I've come to the end of my term limit, but I think I'll be sticking around a while longer. Happy fourth anniversary to me! Like my self-congratulatory newsbox promo? Poor Gav has been through so much. Maybe in the next four years, things will go his way? He can dream...
1/6/2001 Introducing GIGA! Okay, maybe "introducing" is the wrong word. I thought I would transfer Gav's Imaginary Gallary of Art over to my Nukees site finally. It's just a haphazzard collection of some of my pre-Nukees artwork, mostly just a few scattered portraits of depressed women I drew back in 1993-1995. But check it out. At least it shows I could do something with a #2 pencil before Nukees... Plus, you get to see a photo of me with really awful hair!
12/28/2000 Your friendly neighborhood Angry Hippie Geek may or may not necessarily want you to see this. Any bets as to whether I am more parodied than my main character now?
12/14/2000 HAPPY AGNOSTICA! As you all know now, December 14 (when Planck first suggested that energy exists in discrete quanta) is QM DAY, the first day of the Agnostica season. In commemoration, King Luca is launching Agnostica.com! Right now, it's pretty sparse, but in the coming weeks, you can go to this site to view the latest info on the Agnostica holiday, and direct your skeptic, holiday-hating friends to adopt this holiday for themselves.
12/12/2000 Gav the Drunken Hedgehog. It's the second in a series of Hedgehog Gav by "Naraxa," author of Elsinore. Naraxa (I never know which name to use for some people) actually visited me in my natural environment (Flake's, of course) while in the Bay Area and I guess watching me and my favorite beverage (Guinness, of course) inspired her to sketch this second "Hedgehog Gav" fan art. She surprised me by being both charming and cute, which I don't always associate with computer geeks from Yale. I think she's a regular Faire-goer, too, which often scares me, but I don't know what I'm basing that on. Have I drifted? I think I have. (New information: she isn't. A "regular Faire-goer," I mean).
12/7/2000 Be Fascist Pigs! This is the funniest freakin' thing I've seen in weeks. You must all go now. I command it!
11/17/2000 Gavspotting, the return! Sometimes cameos are legitimate hommages (which I giddily appreciate), and sometimes they are just a sad ploy to try to gain links from more popular comics' homepages. So I've been toying around with the idea of not linking to cameos from my news unless the comic in question has been around for more than a year, and not if the comic seems to do seventeen cameos of the most popular webcomics per week. That said, I'm mentioning Gav's appearance in Sporkman that John Troutman directed me to recently, even though his strip is a couple months short of a year old. What can I say? I like to break rules. Plus, I like this one and the motivation was not the latter explanation. Did that make sense? It's Friday. I need beer.
11/15/2000 Antspotting! Ah, Halloween! Always good for an assortment of webcartoon costumes. I was at an all-day technical class on Tuesday, so I almost missed this Funny Farm costume of everyone's favorite Atomic Robotic Ant! Now that's a challenging costume to make! But where are the extra legs?
11/1/2000 GPF Cameo Alert! Woo! A little kid dressed up as Gav for Halloween at Jeff Darlington's General Protection Fault! I almost dressed up as Gav for Halloween this year, but I thought it would be a little odd to go as what many consider already my alter ego. Plus, no one would know who I was, sorta like last year when I went as Bob the Angry Flower.
10/14/2000 Off again! I'm off to Spain and Portugal for the next two weeks. Nukees will continue to update as normal in my absence, although there may be a delay on Friday, October 27. Sorry about that.
10/12/2000 Cameopeia! Suzy Gee made a rather amusing appearance in Blotto Street last week (well, amusing only if you read Nukees, which I'm hoping you do). Nukees is also supposed to be the target of Lazy's Walkabout today, but then he said that about Tuesday, so who really knows? (I think it's all just a conspiracy).
10/4/2000 Morose Birthday to me. Just one more year before I leave behind my 20s and officially become a disturbing old out-of-place loser at the bar, rather than a young, vibrant social butterfly among his peers. Ah well. Here I am turning 29, and I'm thousands of miles from anyone I might have celebrated with. *sigh* If you'd like to read my thoughts on Japan so far (which is where I currently am), check out the extremely lengthy report on my Message Board.
8/17/2000 Recycled? I seem to have won some kind of award. No theme. No point. They just said I had a good comic, which is cool. I like people who tell me I have a good comic. But the "recycled" part has me suspicious. Sure, I'm sure it's the award that's recycled, but that grammar can go either way, you know?
8/2/2000 The Keenonball Run has begun! Go check out Curtis Berry's Keenspot Miniseries event, The Keenonball Run in which teams from all the Keenspot comics (including Gav and Suzy driving the Robot Ant) compete in a cross-country road race! The ant made an appearance today in a most noble role.
7/30/2000 Vote for SUZY! There is now a vote going on at the Bikeeni Summer 2000 page! Suzy Gee and Gav are doing pretty well already! Why not drop by and vote for the hottest babe and/or hunk? It's exploitive so it must be fun!
7/27/2000 Two Arms! Two Arms! A familiar-looking superhero named Nuclear Arms has shown up in the Keenspot Miniseries, The Black Plague as part of the Keen Team! Check it out!
7/18/2000 Sex! I finally finished my Pin-up page for the Bikeeni Summer special. Check it out and be sure to click on the image and look at the close-ups.
7/12/2000 SUCCESS!!! Apologies to all for some of the late updates recently. I got angry at Windows over a week ago and kinda trashed my computer in response. It's taken me a full week to finally reanimate the rotting, smoking corpse I left behind in my wrath. Since then I've had to drive to Kinko's for scanning, and use the school's computers for processing and uploading. But my computer is alive once more and the site will be updated as normal from now on.
7/10/2000 Gavspotting: Just noticed a Gav cameo as a "College Roomies survivor" in Funny Farm, munching on a doughnut.
7/3/2000 BACK from Dragon*Con See the message board Trip Report for details.
6/28/2000 Off to Dragon*Con! My flight leaves today for Dragon*Con, and wouldn't you know I lost my airline tickets? Hopefully, I'll get there somehow and I hope to see some of you there. I'll probably have to latch onto the Sluggy crowd for any kind of recognition, though. Anyway, if you want to find me, just look for the mop of blue hair and the look of paranoia hanging around the Plan 9 booth. Be back on Sunday! (And yes, the comic will update regularly while I'm gone).
6/20/2000

The Book is shipping on June 30! Order your copy today!

5/28/2000 The Book is on its way! That's right, my first book "Nukees: d/dx" is right now being churned out by Plan 9 Publishing and will be available for purchase in June. This compilation will feature the first three years of Nukees and will contain a special BONUS STORY not available anywhere else! This is a five page, 50 panel, FULL COLOR extra feature! It will also be unveiled just in time for Dragon*Con in Atlanta, which I will be attending at the end of June. I hope to see some of you there!
5/16/2000 New F.U.N. Art! Yay! My efforts at Keenspot have finally paid dividends in the form of new F.U.N. Art by Jamie Robertson of Clan of the Cats, which I've decided is probably the polar opposite to Nukees. It has talking cats and witches and all sorts of things without a basis in logical, scientific proven fact. As with all new F.U.N. Art, this necessitated a complete restructuring of the Art of the Nuclides, which is pretty loosely defined to say the least.
5/13/2000 New S.U.S.B.E.C. The nefarious "Slick" from Sinfest has been added as a case study to the SUSBEC pages! Look out for this nefarious character. He's nefarious, you know! Actually I just like saying "nefarious." Nefarious, nefarious, nefarious!
4/20/2000 NEW F.U.N. ART Just a week after adding the Art of the Nuclides I get a new submission from Aric Campling, who draws the comic strip, H.O.S.E.R.S. Check it out. Since it's going in the spot where "Tritium" would normally be, which is unstable, I've made a new "blue" catagory for color submissions. Yes, I'm just making it up as I go along, what's it to you?
4/12/2000 LOTS of STUFF Too much! Too fast! Not enough hours in the day! Well, I've made some additions to the Nukees site lately, and thought you'd like to see them. For one, I'm starting up a new format for Nuclide-submitted artwork and prose, called (wait for it) the Art of the Nuclides! I will eventually get rid of the "F.U.N. Art" page. To commemorate this move, I've added a wonderfully depressing Short Story that was written by Nuclide John Braue. If you're feeling cheery, say because you've just come over from CRFH!!! singing that nifty "Sunshine, Lollipops and Rainbows" song (which I can't get out of my head anymore thanks to Maritza), then this will bring you right back down again. I love it!

I've also added a storyline dropdown to make it easier to show your friends all your favorite strips and stuff. You can also sign up to receive Nukees by email now (see the bottom of this page). Plus, you may have noticed that Gav has made several appearances as Sluggy Freelance the past few weeks. I've been helping out Pete along with some other webtoonists so he can have time to spend with his new baby daughter. Naturally, I don't mind the cross-traffic. :)

4/1/2000 April Fool! Well, not really. It's the same thing we did last year, after all. But you expected something different, so I guess we did fool you, didn't we? Whatever. Anyway, in addition to the special "drawn by someone else" strip today, I have new F.U.N. Art in commemoration of the fact that I always seem to get hooked up with furries. Check it out!
3/18/2000 The calendar archives: Well, I programmed it, so I might as well use it. For those that don't know, I've been doing a hell of a lot of programming lately to create the infrastructure of Keenspot Comics. I've also been badmouthed unfairly by a certain unmentioned someone who wasn't happy that Superosity's Chris Crosby and I were able to provide a better service than he. Frankly, it's not worth getting into. BUT, I've been rapidly producing feature after feature every day for Keenspot Comics. However, I haven't been using any of them! Why? I've just been too busy lately to change my own webpage! But for the past two weeks, I've had a working calendar archive page (which really just started off as a "test" page), so since my regular archives aren't working yet, I might as well share it with the rest of you. Soon, I will provide more convenient navigation tools for those of you who might not check the site every other day. And maybe if I have time left over, I'll actually use them myself. :)
3/14/2000 Nukees: A one-act play is here! For a high school playwriting class, one of my new-found Nuclides, Steve Spoon decided to base a play on my little 'ol comic strip! Why not read it?
3/12/2000 Come yak it up at the new Keenspot-sponsored Nukees message board! It's great for wasting time and gives all my sweet little Nuclides a place to ask questions and demand King Luca spinoffs.
3/10/2000 HA! What do you know?!? While the plot thickens here at Nukees with a strange tentacle-obsessed character named Maritza, over at College Roomies From Hell!!! appears a strange college student at a conference in opaque glasses, with a blonde ponytail, and a strangely familiar lab coat! What fun!
1/19/2000 And a new semester is upon us. Thus endeth the King Luca Agnostic Holiday Special, and thus beginneth a new semester here at U.C. Berkeley. And good news to you lovely Nuclides. (A name suggested for Nukees fans by Mark Stanley of Freefall). My editor at The Daily Cal has figured out a layout that will allow me to publish three days a week. So I will be able to continue the Monday, Wednesday, Friday schedule you've been so spoiled with! This has proven to be quite difficult to incorporate into my already busy life, but I'm dedicated to the task. Would you like to thank me? No no, I really don't need more cowtowing email, and I think begging for votes on some comic list is a pointless endevour. What I would like more than anything would be for each of you to tell a friend about Nukees. That would make me happier than a warm pie on a summer day. Thanks and Happy Agnostica, everyone.
1/4/2000 Thank you, Mr. Schulz. I apologize for the continuity error in today's special strip. I'm sure you have the brain power to take this out of the current context. Anyway, I've been fretting over doing a Peanuts tribute for a long time, because quite frankly, how do you thank someone for 50 years of brilliance and psychological help in 700x224 pixels? I abandoned many ideas that were only moderately funny and simply stuck with the truth. I can only hope it's appropriate. We will continue with the King Luca Agnostic Christmas Special tomorrow.

Addendum: To tell the truth, I was really very unsatisfied with my Schulz tribute and have removed it from the web. Let's just remember him as the great humorist he was and let his work, not mine, speak for itself.

12/18/1999 New Page: I've now added a new page, Nukees Linkees (not to be confused with the Nukees Linky Buttons page. This lists my favorite webcomics. I've been fighting making a page like this for some time (see the page to see why), but I thought that if I ever got a really large cult following, it would be rude of me not to tell my readers about some other really great non-syndicated comics. And if I'm going to buckle on that issue, it doesn't make sense to not do it without a huge audience. Mmmmm.... Crow...
12/13/1999 The King Luca Agnostic Holiday Special is here! All Hail King Luca! Well, I figured it would be pretty piggy of me to say, "If you're nice to me, I'll run three times a week," and then later say, "You weren't nice enough. Bad Nukaphiles! No Mondays!" Fortunately, a few of you were nice to me, so I didn't have to be a total wank. Anyway, for the duration of winter break, we present The King Luca Agnostic Holiday Special, launching things off with my first color comic! This series (which will end on Jan. 17) is for web viewers only because the Daily Cal doesn't run over the break. Aren't you all just the luckiest sons of whores around? My comic might be PG, but my news isn't.
12/12/1999 Introducing SUSBEC! That's the Society for Unravelling the Eyeless Blonde Conspiracy! Have you ever wondered why everyone with opaque glasses is blonde? Well, you should have! Now it is revealed, and the society of SUSBEC is dedicated to determining what is behind this Eyeless Blonde Conspiracy! If you ignore it, it won't just go away!
12/1/1999 Missing Nukees last Friday? Sorry, I should've said something. Nukees didn't run over Thanksgiving break, because The Daily Californian doesn't publish during holidays. To make up for it, however, you're all in for a treat. First, there will be a BONUS NUKEES this Monday! Second, Nukees will continue to run during the winter break, published exclusively on the web. That means you web readers will get strips that will not appear in The Daily Californian, which will be on holiday break. This is in response to some nice people who say the main problem with Nukees is that there isn't enough of it. If you're all very very nice to me, I might be convinced to run Nukees three times a week during this time.

11/24/1999 Welcome to my new Big Panda site! That's right, I'm ditching my .edu address for www.nukees.com. Hopefully, I'll be throwing in a few improvements to go with the move, like maybe an actual graphical title. I plan to keep the horrendous orange color scheme, though, so tough noogies to you aesthetically-sensitive folks.

11/19/1999 New F.U.N. Art! Just 3 days after I added the F.U.N. Art section, Martiza Campos, who I believe hails from the southern tip of Antartica, sent me another addition for my all too new F.U.N. Art section. It's purty dern keen.

11/18/1999 Hooray! I've won an award from everyone favorite mysterious secret society known as Spleen! It's the well-known coveted SPLEEN AWARD FOR THE BEST COMIC NAMED NUKEES! I'm so proud. I always knew one day such a prestigious, yet oddly friendly organization would acknowledge my many many achievements and glaring humility. All hail Nukees!
11/16/1999 Spleen! Introducing a really convenient tool for finding other web-based comics that are exactly like Nukees in every conceivable way! It's Spleen! Use it wisely.
11/15/1999 Nukanimation is here! (I suppose not EVERY news item needs to have an exclamation mark, but it's fun). I now have a "F.U.N. Art" section, thanks to an old friend of mine who whipped up a nifty little Flash animation for Nukees. It's pretty nifty. Take a look.
11/5/1999 Vote! Think Suzy Gee deserves a fan club more than Teri? Why not VOTE for your favorite Nukees character, then? (That's right, I'm adding all sorts of useless crap to this webpage now!)

11/4/1999 The Teri Fan Club!! Well, sorta. If you like Teri the Terapet, or you just hate Pokemon, then the Teri Fan Club is for you.

10/31/1999 Happy Halloween! This year, over 30 webcomics participated (myself included) in a humungously awesome comic crossover event. Click the banner above to read some scary stories, or go directly to the one in which I participated, called Because Those Who Fail To Learn From The Future Are Doomed to Repeat It! It's a fun little romp in which Gav stars, sort of... Check it out.

10/13/1999 New size! I've decided to go to 700 pixels wide instead of 600 pixels. I originally downsized from 900 to 600 to get the strip to fit horizontally when printed out, and to cut down on drive space. I picked 600 because that's what they use at Peanuts, but I noticed that 700 pixels also fits on paper, and it looks SO much better this way, don't you think? I hope to redo the entire archive at this size soon.

4/29/1999 I bought my own scanner! That's right, a friend of mine sold me his old scanner since he wasn't using it, so I should be able to update the page on a far more frequent basis now, hopefully in real-time. The problem is getting the scanner to work. Ironically, this new scanner is responsible for the few weeks my site has not been updated recently. It's not working yet (driver problems), so I decided to use the school's scanner one last time. Hopefully, the next comic scanned will be from my own computer.

4/1/1999 April Fool's! A little confused about the April 1, 1999 strip? Well, you should've been. You're not paying attention, are you?

3/24/1999 I was interviewed for the April issue of a magazine called PRISM, put out by the American Society of Engineering Education. I'm in the second article on that "On Campus" page.

3/1/1999 I thought up a good compromise to solve my problem with 'The Most Recent" strip vs. my tendancy to update the site sporadically. I'm going to continue scanning in bulk, but I am only going to add new strips to the site one at a time, two per week, delayed from newspaper publication by about two weeks. Those of you who come here regularly will see something new more often, but not all at once.
gav@nukees.com