Nukees Newzies

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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!

[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.

(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.

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. 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.

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!

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).

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.

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...

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)

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).

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.

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.

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!

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...

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.

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...)

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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?

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

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.

1. There's the chick in a black turtleneck sweater,
2. the miniature glasses-mounted camera
3. and giant robot ants!

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

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. :)

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.