01.25.2013 - Terrence Marks:

The final You Say it First is now up.

When we started, Brisbane and Kimberly were single. They were unemployed. And one of them was kinda homeless. Now, they're married. They run a medium-sized company. And Kimberly moved from a one-bedroom apartment to a two-bedroom apartment. I think they've earned every bit of that over the last nine years.

It's been a lot of work getting them from here to there, but it's been a lot of fun too. Isabel and I are glad we could do it, and we're glad you came along. We want to thank everybody who reads the comic and everybody who supported the comic. We're sad that it's over, but more than that, we're proud that we were able to see the story through to the end.

12.31.2012 - Terrence Marks:

Happy Last-Day-of-2012, everybody. As you know, the New Year brings changes. For the last two years, You Say it First has been working its way towards an ending. The time is nearly upon us. It will get there some time in January. We've had a good run on it, and we appreciate you being a part of it.

We don't have any further plans for Brisbane and Kimberly. We didn't have any plans for Brisbane and Kimberly when Unlike Minerva ended - and then we did You Say it First for nearly ten years, so I'm not going to rule anything out.

100% Cat is going on indefinite hiatus. We've got more information on that page, but the long and short of it is that it's not the right series for Isabel right now.

Namir Deiter will be continuing.

What's next? We don't know. We're not ready to make any announcements. We will let you know when there's news.

So from both of us, thank you. These comics have been a great part of our lives, and we're glad they could be a part of yours.

Happy New Years! Keep reading Namir Deiter, and keep reading You Say it First while it's still going!

12.12.2012 - Terrence Marks:

Our weekend was going pretty well until Saturday morning. At that point, my computer stopped working. More specifically, one of my hard drives - the one that contains the operating system - stopped working. Now, a reasonable person might, at that point, decide to go and replace the hard drive. Fortunately, I know how to fix computers. Also, I'm not a reasonable person.

There were two possibilities: Either the drive was totally dead or it was just mostly dead. The difference is that if it was mostly dead and I could repair the file system, I just might be able to get my data back. I've got three hard drives in there - when I upgrade to a new computer, I keep the old computer's drives. I keep my data distributed across all three drives. That way, if something happens to any one of them I'm bound to lose *something* important. It was, of course, the largest and newest of the drives that failed.

This reminded me of things, like the portable backup drive that I got two weeks ago. I decided - against my wife's suggestion - not to open it, so it'd be a "Christmas present". In retrospect, this was not a wise decision.

So the BIOS saw that the drive existed, just that it had 0 MB. I tried a set of known good cables - same thing. Cable failure is vanishingly rare, but it's a good idea to try the easiest solution first. I commandeered Isabel's computer, hooked the drive to it. After several hours - including time in the freezer - I was able to get it working and copy some of the files off. That lasted about 30 minutes before it stopped responding again.

I spent most of Sunday trying to get it working again. By the end of it, the computer wasn't even acknowledging that the drive exists. Every couple minutes, it'd start clicking. I'd spent about twenty hours working on it. THAT was when I decided to go and replace the hard drive.

But it's not that simple. The computer came with Windows Vista. Instead of a CD, it kept the recovery information on a partition on the hard drive. The now-defunct hard drive. I had tried to burn it to DVD a few times, but it wouldn't cooperate. I had a retail copy of Windows XP, but the disc was scuffed and unreadable.

Windows 8 is heavily discounted right now. It makes your computer behave like a smartphone. I don't even like it when my smartphone behaves like a smartphone, so that's not the OS for me.

So I had to get a hard drive. I had to get an OS. I'd have to reinstall all of my software. I could either do that on a computer that was four years old and at the end of its upgrade path, or I could replace it. Isabel suggested I replace it. She's been suggesting that for a while, actually. I just hadn't wanted to have to reinstall all my stuff, earlier.

I got the thing rebuilt at around 1 AM Sunday/Monday. I've reloaded most of the software that I remember using. If I had other programs that I never remember to use again, I'm probably better off without them.

What does this mean to you, the reader? No comic-related data was lost. That's backed up in many, many places. We lost a lot of comic-related time, however. I'm still trying to get this thing working the way it ought to work.

What does it mean for me? Firstly, that I need to back things up better. Secondly, that I should always listen to Isabel. At least when she's right.

11.19.2012 - 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.