Previous News11.19.2012 - Terrence Marks:So to answer the questions you've all been asking:1) Sorry about the radio silence lately. They changed my schedule at work. What does that mean for you? I've had comics written ahead so I was able to keep up. But for the first week or two, I've been mostly useless after about 8 PM, and that's when I write these updates (and come up with clever things to say on twitter - if I remember to post them the next day when people are on, I figure it's probably worthwhile.) I think I've adjusted, so I should be back to normal, such as it is.
2) I don't care for the new Paper Mario game. You fight using stickers. Each attack consumes one sticker. You can carry up to 24, at the start of the game. This turns it into an inventory management game, and inventory management games aren't fun. Ever.
More importantly, it's missing all the cool stuff that the previous games had. The main strength of the series was its humor and characters. Thousand Year Door had an amazing array of companions - the clever Goombella, the conflicted Vivian, the manly Admiral Bobbery - that provided personality to Mario's mute relentlessness. Super Paper Mario had a great cast of villains. Mario & Luigi had Fawful. Bowser's Inside Story made Bowser cool again.
This game has none of that. Bowser has no dialogue. The only NPCs I've encountered are a few dozen generic Toads. I understand that this game is not meant to be exactly the same as the previous games, but they've removed the core elements and replaced them with either generic things or unique but unpleasant things. I haven't played through all of it, but I don't care for it. If you liked the Paper Mario or Mario & Luigi series, I would not recommend this game to you.
3) Veronica is running in a non-partisan race. Besides that, You Say it First is not set in the United States. It contains its own political parties which do not correspond to American political parties (or elsewhere). It would have been more clever of me if that particular storyline had ended before November, but that is not how the scripts played out.
10.08.2012 - Terrence Marks:So, what have we been up to?
Recently found out that we get Antenna TV, one of the channels higher on our cable dial. And I found out that they play an hour each of Burns & Allen and The Jack Benny Program. If you have the chance, I'd recommend trying it, at least for one night.
George Burns and Gracie Allen had one joke. George Burns would say something, and Gracie would misunderstand it. They got twenty-five years of material out of that. Sometimes George didn't even need to say anything. They had, by the time of the TV show, got enough practice at it to get it just about perfect. I'd recommend everybody watch two episodes; they're generally similar enough to each other that any two will be sufficient.
I was listening to the old radio shows, and I realized that they were making jokes about how old George Burns was. That was all I knew about him, growing up. The jokes about his age went back to before my parents were born. And they kept joking about it for another fifty years, which isn't a bad career.
Jack Benny's radio program is one of my favorites. Unlike Minerva, especially the early ones, reflects this. It spent time on both sides of the fourth wall, usually at the same time. It parodied other shows while remaining fully itself, which I quickly learned was a tougher trick than they made it look. My secondary cast - Peter, Caleb, Sofia, and Goliath - bears a passing resemblance to Dennis Day, Phil Harris, Mary Livingstone, and Don Wilson. Or at least it would've if Goliath ever got lines.
Some comedians are very sensitive about who gets the punchlines, and want to be sure that nobody else on their show is funnier than they are. Jack Benny is famous for not being one of them. He had a very talented cast and wasn't afraid to use them.
Unfortunately, he lost about half of them on the way to TV. By the time the TV show came on, he had been doing this for about thirty years. Longer if you count vaudeville. It feels a bit tired, compared to the energy he had back in the forties. Still, you could do worse.
There aren't many faces that most of you would recognize, but there are a few voices. Gracie's friend is played by Bea Benaderet; if you think that someone on that show talks (and laughs) like Betty Rubble, you'd be right. Mel Blanc played a variety of small parts on Jack Benny's show and voiced Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and a collection of other cartoon characters too long to list here.09.10.2012 - Terrence Marks:We mentioned computer issues, recently. My computer broke the other day.
My computer had been randomly and intermittantly turning off. Happened twice in the last few days, and I wanted to figure out why. The processor is the part of the computer that does the actual computing. It turns ones and zeroes into different ones and zeroes and the rest of the computer is, ultimately, just there to facilitate that process. This is, generally, the most expensive bit of the computer. That is not the part that broke.
The main side-effect of computing is heat. In order to keep the processor in its normal temperature range (which is somewhere above "hot enough to burn you" but below "on fire"), there's a heat sink. That's the big flanged aluminum thing inside your computer, probably with a fan on it. The idea is that it draws heat from the processor, where it is dissipated into the environment. That is also not the part that broke.
The heat sink needs to have solid contact with the processor to function; that lets it conduct heat efficiently so that the processor does not catch fire. There's a plastic bit that the heat sink latches on to, so that it can maintain that contact. That's the part that broke.
As you can see, it's a difficult piece to explain to people and it took a fair amount of doing to find a place that sold it separately.
Update:
Looks like there's a place that sells them, only 20 miles away, and for the same price that Amazon wants to ship one. So I don't have to scrap a mostly-working computer because a little plastic thing snapped off. Unfortunately, the bit about my heat sink not being the part that broke? Apparently I was being optimistic. The heat sink fan also broke, and my computer can't stay on for more than ninety seconds at a time.
So I get a new heat sink too. So far, everything appears to be mostly working.09.03.2012 - Terrence Marks:We're back. After the stress of jury duty, power outages, heavy construction, and everything else we were feeling burnt out. Isabel needed to take a week off, and she's feeling a lot better now.As I might've mentioned, we had a scheduled full-day power outage on Monday. Then we went and bought new groceries only to have an unscheduled full-day power outage on Tuesday. The good news is that they seem to have fixed it. I'm not entirely sure what they did, except that it involved jackhammers and was directly outside our bedroom window at 7 AM (which, when you work the night shift, is very early indeed for jackhammering). While this was going on, Isabel was selected for jury duty. Thing about jury duty is that you're making decisions that will have lasting repercussions on a complete stranger's life and that's not easy. In short, we had a very bad week and it took its toll on us.
Isabel is feeling better. Not fully recharged, but enough power to boot up. Comics should continue as scheduled, and we sincerely hope that the next few weeks go better for us. Sketches are up to date over at NamirDeiter.net and all of the donors' accounts have been extended an extra three weeks to make up for the two-week outage.
08.24.2012 - Terrence Marks:As you've seen, Isabel has jury duty. The power is back on, at least. She's working on comics, but they're not completed yet.08.19.2012 - Terrence Marks:Comics are delayed a bit. Expect comics on Wednesday.Also, Tipper and Joan are in today's Precocious, so please check it out if you haven't already.
06.22.2012 - Terrence Marks:We're back! We expect regular updates to continue as long as life remains normal.
Firstly, all NamirDeiter.net accounts have been given an extra two weeks because of our delays.
Secondly, we've got a new car. The old one had served us well. There were 225,000 miles on it and most of those were ours. It was a good car, but it was time for us to move on. As a moderately tall person who drives long distances, my options were limited. That worked for me. I'd rather choose the best option out of six than out of six hundred. So we've got us a Ford Fusion, and it seems to be working very well for us.
Thirdly, a while back we were wondering about site utilization. If you were wondering too...
How do you usually get to this site?
Bookmark Type the address RSS feed It's my homepage Webcomic hub site Other
I know there are more than 5 people on our RSS feed. Unfortunately, the polls don't show there, so they're under-represented.