Biscuits for Breakfast

Tips and Tricks For the Bus-Riding Gentleman

2006-09-01T01:32:00.000-07:00

Travel is becoming increasingly hard these days. Rising gas prices have effectively ended the era of the affordable road trip, and the combination of bad service, ridiculously high ticket prices and overreaction to "terrorism" have ruined the airline industry (which was ALREADY losing money anyway). And don't even think about taking a train anywhere... you'd be better off buying two plane tickets and flushing one of them down the toilet.

No, the only viable cross-country mode of transportation for the average joe these days is the bus. I know a lot of you don't want to admit this, but unless your family is pretty much well off (or has saved up for a few years), you're probably not going to be able to afford to take any family vacations these days without the bus. It's an unfortunate situation that we have to accept, since the airline industry can only go down from here, and the "alternative fuels" crap with the corn oil is just not going to work any time soon.

So, here is a brief guide to those of you still willing to shell out a couple hundred dollars for a trip across the U.S., as written from the perspective of someone who just got back from a 50 hour bus trip.

1. Pack light.
The more luggage you pack, the more luggage you will lose. The bus will have to stop at least every 6-8 hours (or less), and with every meal stop is a new driver or a new bus. If you think that those greasy mullet-headed bagjockeys give a goddamn about your luggage, just take a peak at the unloading area. Chances are that they'll be pulling your bags out of the bus and throwing them at the ground as hard as they can. They only care about their $5.50 an hour, so don't pack anything valuable, or if you do, put it in a carry-on bag. The carry-on bag is extremely important, but I'll cover that more later.

2. Be a "Seat Republican".
If you're not careful, you will be stuck with the most miserable seat in the bus. It is important to be vigilant about your seat. If you get up, someone will take it, even if you're just getting up to go to the lavatory in the back of the bus (which is NOT advised for completely different reasons as well). This is why you must be a Seat Republican.
In other words, you must not empathize with any of your fellow passengers. You must not let your guard down. You must not show mercy. This is in stark contrast to the Seat Democrat, who lets his conscience get in the way of his own personal comfort. You have to get used to being a complete asshole if you want to keep from going crazy, and so it is necessary to be a Seat Republican.
The first step is to keep an eye on your fellow passengers. Is there one particular passenger than sees him/herself as the leader? If so, this person will most definitely try to tell the other passengers the "rules" of the bus, including how long they should take at each stop, which cafe they should all eat at, etc. The most important thing you must know about the "leader," however, is that he or she will always try to form a line to get on the bus a second after everyone gets off at a stop, since all the passengers are forced off the bus whenever there is a driver change). Of course, a few people will see this person waiting to get on the bus and will immediately form a line behind him or her, meaning that it is basically impossible to go get a cup of coffee or use the restroom without being stuck with the piss seat.
This person is the Alpha Seat Republican. They will always get the best seats, and will always ruin the entire bus trip for everyone else. The only method of combat is to become a Seat Republican yourself. Get in line right behind this person, even if your legs hurt from unnecessarily standing in a line for an hour and a half while your bus driver pinches a loaf. That hour and a half is nothing compared to the eight hours of sitting in an aisle seat next to a baby that is crying while pulling your hair and then throwing up and pooping on you at the same time.

3. Sit strategically.
Part of being a Seat Republican is knowing where and how to sit. First, always sit in the middle of the bus. The front of the bus is always filled with crying babies and old ladies that want to talk to you, while the back of the bus is filled with the same people that rode in the back of the bus in grade school. The middle of the bus is relatively quiet, and if the acoustics are just right, you should be able to block out most of the sound. Second, always ALWAYS get a window seat. Every window on a bus has a strong air conditioner right below it that blows away shit smells from the lavatory and keeps you from boiling in your own B.O. Don't be fooled by the overhead twisty-type air conditioner, it doesn't work.

4. Be ruthless.
Once you've chosen your spot, you must keep it. Sitting in a window seat is alright, but you'll never get to sleep if you have to sit next to someone. If you keep the seat next to you open, chances are that it will be filled by a 400-pound guy that spreads his legs out as far as he can. There are several methods of keeping this seat to yourself.
The first method is the "I brought too much luggage" maneuver. This is where your carry-on luggage pays off. Simply choose your seat and place the luggage in the seat next to you, and then either don't make eye-contact with anyone walking past your seat, or adopt a Johnny Rotten-esque sneer. Most people will be too shy to ask you to move your luggage until the bus is absolutely full except for your seat. This method is even more effective if you sit in the aisle seat and put your bag next to the window while the bus is loading. People definitely won't want to climb over you or ask you to get up while a bunch of people are waiting behind them.
The second (and best) method is the "sleeping baby" maneuver. Once the sun has set, simply take off your coat and place it over your head. Then either sprawl out over both seats or put your luggage next to you. People will definitely not want to mess with a sleeping guy, especially one with B.O. as bad as yours (and trust me, after 24 hours you will smell like the inside of a Subway restaurant).

5. For god's sake, don't watch any of the movies.
When bus drivers pick movies for the passengers to watch, they basically just go to a pawn shop and pick out 20 movies out of the bargain bin at random. Unless you're particularly fond of watching "Action Jackson" and both "Big Momma's House" movies, I suggest you find another way to occupy your time.
Of course, you could always bring a book. This is not advisable if you're hesitant to be a Seat Republican, though, as anyone sitting next to you will invariably start to ask you all sorts of questions about it, as if you were giving a book report. These people are as bored as you, and will resort to any and all topics of conversation just to keep from going crazy themselves. If you absolutely must bring a book, don't bring a sci-fi book, since then it will be very hard for you to explain the plot of it to your neighbor without sounding like a nerd, or a moron, or a nerdy moron. The ultimate bus book is "It," since any conversation about the book ends after only two sentences ("What is that book about?" "A clown that kills children.")
The best option is to listen to music, though. If you can bring enough music to last you the entire trip, do it. Wearing headphones also has the added bonus of keeping any uncomfortable conversation to a minimum, especially if you listen to Marilyn Manson or Slayer or some other band that makes people uncomfortable to be around you.

And finally...

6. Keep an eye on your bank account.
As stated before, every bus company is completely manned and operated by minimum-wage-slaves. This goes for the customer service reps as well, who also have thick Southern accents and use phrases like "six ways from Sunday." These people don't care about you, they only care about keeping their jobs and continuing to feed their twenty stepchildren wet cat food. They WILL mess up your ticket, especially if there's more than one stop on the way to your destination. I recommend buying your ticket online (after making ABSOLUTELY sure you've got your information correct) and then only dealing with a customer service rep once something has screwed up. And again, keep an eye on your bank account after buying your ticket, and don't be surprised if there's a computer error and $900 is charged to your account instead of $50. Remember, bus companies have to refund your money if you don't claim your ticket, even if they say they don't. Just keep fighting them.

Keep these pointers in mind for YOUR next bus trip, considering that I haven't dissuaded you from actually riding the bus. Ask yourself whether 48 hours of your time is really worth an extra $300 before you rule it out.

Never again.

2006-08-12T01:45:00.000-07:00

For my upcoming trip to Texas, I've decided that I'm not going to fly. Nope, it's the Greyhound for me. From now on, I'm only flying under extreme conditions, and by extreme conditions I mean a family member is dying or there's a sudden epidemic of tiny, biting dogs in Washington State and they need to evacuate. That would be terrible.

Why am I willing to spend three or four days on a bus as opposed to half a day on a plane? Well, for one thing, a bus is much less aggrivating. No one ever delayed a bus for nine hours because the driver woke up late. You don't get charged $400 (at the very cheapest) for a bus ticket, nor do you have to reserve your ticket five months in advance in order to get anything even close to a good deal. And you don't need to wait overnight to take a shuttle bus from the bus station to your destination because, get this, you're already on a bus!

As if flying weren't bad enough, apparently it's now illegal to take liquids onto planes, because terrorists might hide a bomb inside a shampoo bottle or something. According to Homeland Security, the terrorists are "always looking for ways to strike us, and will never do the same thing twice." However, if that were true, they'd never try to hide a bomb in a shampoo bottle again, so what the hell. Besides, the next logical step is that some terrorist is going to hide a few pounds of C4 up his ass, and then we'll all have to get full cavity searches every time we get on and off a plane. This is going to happen, too, mark my words, and it will ruin the airline industry. No one wants to have a finger shoved up their ass twice at every connecting flight just so they can go play slots in Vegas. Well, most people don't, anyway.

At what point do we stop letting this kind of thing slide? When do we finally throw up our hands and say "I don't care if I'm fucking safe, I'm just sick of the damn regulations"? It's not as if any of us is REALLY safe, anyway. Even if we opened up all the borders and let in every unshaved, jittery guy with a turban, the chances of you getting killed by one of his bombs would still be less than the chances of a drunk driver plowing through your house and killing you in your sleep, or the chances of you getting mugged on the street by a dude named "Babyfeet," or the chances of you just randomly having a heart attack and dying even though you ran a mile every day while eating Bran Flakes cereal with skim milk and soy milk mixed together.

Terrorism doesn't make it onto my top five list of fears, and I don't even own a gun. You know what scares me more than terrorism? Looking into a mirror in the bathroom and thinking I might see a scary face in the corner of my eye for a split second. And that's not even a plausible fear! Hell, I'm more afraid of using a public restroom than I am of terrorism.

Besides, unless you live in a high profile city like New York, Washington DC, Seattle or Los Angeles (all of which vote Democrat, mind you), you don't really have to fear terrorists at ALL. You think al Qaeda is really going to crash a plane filled with bombs into your local city hall/tavern in Nutsack Falls, Ohio? Think again, Jethro.

Really, if ANY other reason were used to justify all this new bureaucratic bullshit than terrorism, you can bet the Republicans would be up in arms about how the government is trying to "control their lives." But no, they're afraid of terrorists. Fucking terrorists. You might as well be afraid of ghosts or not getting enough presents from Santa Claus, for chrissakes. You fucking cowards.

When I die, I want to be buried in mashed potatoes

2006-08-11T00:26:00.000-07:00

I decided recently to go on a fast. I don't know why, I just felt like it. The only things I'm ingesting are liquids and raw vegetables, which I am eating very sparely. For example, today I just grabbed an uncooked potato and cold ate that thing. I just ate it without even thinking about it, like it was a completely normal thing to do, like I was a Texan.

The fast will last about three weeks (exactly 21 days), and as of right now I'm up to day three. I figure I'm at that age where I can do stupid things like this and people will just go "Oh, that rascal. He's not eating any food." I need to come up with more stupid things to get out of the way before I turn 21 and start drinking and doing stupid things at the same time.

We'll see how this fast goes, and if I actually manage to make it all three weeks, which might be hard since I'll be visiting Texas in a couple weeks and you can't not eat food in Texas. I'll tell you, Texas may be a state of retarded man-children, but damn if they can't make a good meal.

Is anyone still reading this?

2006-08-10T00:32:00.000-07:00

Sorry I've been AWOL for a month , but I recently decided that I'm totally tired of Biscuits for Breakfast now. I'm tired of drawing it, thinking up comics for it, or even looking at it. To me it just looks so bad, I can't stand it.

This happens all the time with webcomics, though. An artist will write himself into a hole, or he'll set his own standards too high and become disappointed with his work, or whatever. That's the way it goes. I've always been notoriously slow with my updates, but especially the last half-year or so, because I really just wasn't into it. Sorry.

So let me just finally announce it all official-like: I'm done drawing Biscuits for Breakfast. No, I won't finish the plot line or end it in any sort of graceful fashion. I'm going to do this like I'm tearing off a band-aid. Besides, I think the only people who would have been disappointed by the comic's ending (or the plot being left wide open) are people that I've already told about it personally.

However, I realize how much this sucks if you actually WERE a fan. The news on THAT front is that I'm starting a new comic, which I've drawn about 11 strips for so far. Once I can get the site going, which should take another week, I'll have that mother going and we can get back to business. It's called "Solid Gold Mummies," it's written by me, and exquisitely drawn by my brother, who assures me that he won't let his hectic schedule of digging for bones and screaming at his dog get in the way of drawing new stuff for me. These comics are so easy for me to make that I'm seriously considering doing a Monday-Wednesday-Friday schedule for them. Seriously.

When I move to the new site, I'll move all my old comics there, as a sort of "look at this crap I used to make isn't it quaint" archive of the past. I'm not just going to throw them in the dumpster... after all, they took up at least two years of my life. Though they may have grown into greasy, back-talking adolescents, they're still my children. I'm not disowning them, I'm just kicking them out of the house. Plus, I still like writing on this here blog, and the updates will be more common from now on, believe me.

As for Biscuits for Breakfast... well, I'll see what happens a year or so from now. If my drawing class this fall (!) actually turns out to be helpful, maybe you'll see their glorious return. Don't worry too much about it for now, though.

A story I forgot to relate about Canada

2006-07-09T02:59:00.000-07:00

It's pretty lame that I'm making another post on a blog about some stuff I did on vacation only a little while after the last post, like I'm some loser that doesn't have anything better to do than write stuff on the internet. I pine for the days of yesteryear, when losers were cool dudes with leather jackets, who drove around in Mustangs, snorting cocaine and pushing over motorcycles starting a domino effect and ruining a bunch of bikes because they were cheated at a poker game or they lost some money at Keno. Now losers are just guys who type shit on the internet and people are like "fuck you, you're such a loser." There's no glory in it, no interesting stories to relate about it, nothing anyone would want to hear. You can't relate your internet stories to friends at a dinner party and be all like "Oh yeah, I saw this really mediocre website with like pictures of cats, so I sent the guy a really mean email and told him his cats were ugly."

But here I have a REAL story. It's not quite a funny story unless you think it's funny that I could have drowned, but I guess that's funny in its own way too.

I had decided to take the canoe out into the lake by myself, since our cabin came with a free canoe and our neighbors weren't using it because they were too busy being loud and stinking. Of course, my first mistake was that I was taking the canoe out by myself. The thing was huge, and not like a rowboat with the oars being held in place with rungs on the sides. If you wanted to go a different direction in the boat, you had to switch sides with your oar and paddle like a son of a bitch, meaning that I always had a choice of either going left or right at any given time.
My second mistake was wearing shoes and socks in the canoe, along with a long sleeve flannel shirt and a pair of Aviator sunglasses. Of course with an outfit like that, it was a given that I would flip my boat over the first two times I tried to get in, completely soaking me. My third mistake was not taking that as a sign to just go inside and change my clothes and enjoy some delicious hot chocolate. I could have done that at home.
My fourth mistake, and probably the worst one, was not noticing that it was a particularly windy day, and that the water was behaving more like a rapidly flowing river than a lake. Once I finally managed to successfully get the canoe into the water with me in it (the canoe, not the water), the boat was immediately pulled downstream (downlake?) at a speed of roughly twenty miles an hour. My dock disappeared from view about three minutes later, and it was about then that I decided I could barely even steer this damn thing, let alone paddle it back home. Luckily, my canoe managed to smash into someone's floating dock, and the rope at the end of the canoe snagged onto a piece of wood before I was pulled further away.
I had to make a decision at that point. I could either scramble onto the unstable dock and call for help, potentially humiliating myself, or I could jump into the water and try to pull the boat to shore, also potentially humiliating myself, but hopefully less. Mistake number five was jumping into the freezing water and basically going into shock for ten seconds. I grabbed the rope and wrapped it around my arm three times before pathetically doggy-paddling towards the nearest shore (I was at a FLOATING dock, mind you). I then proceeded to walk along the shallower waters, latching onto docks and struggling to keep my boat with me as the current threatened to steal it from me. This was, of course, still easier than actually pulling the thing onto dry land and heaving it that way, since I would still have to cut through peoples' properties to get back to my particular piece of shore. This didn't stop people from occasionally launching barbs at me from the safety of their beach chairs, though. "You know, canoes are much better when you're actually inside them, eh?"
Had both my hands been free at the time, I probably would have flipped them off, but instead I just shouted "Yeah, I guess."

What I Think Of Canada

2006-07-09T00:33:00.000-07:00

Canada has been kicked around by Americans for a long time now. I mean, there's just so much about Canada to make fun of, like the fact that they pronounce things differently from us! Also, they have that horribly misguided "socialized medicine" policy, which (get this) allows ANYONE to get health care! Those obviously don't understand that doctors won't do their job correctly unless they're paid ungodly amounts of money to do very little work, and that they get sloppy when they have to operate on poor people. Come on, Canada.

But really, Canada's all right. After spending a week there, the only problems I had were the extremely high price of food (eight bucks for a six pack of soda?!?), the poor exchange rate (which is actually America's fault), and the accents of the French Canadians.

Let me elaborate on that for a moment. I don't mean any actual disrespect to French people (or even French Canadians... Reclamare...). The French language is beautiful, and the French Canadians are a proud people, or so I assume from all the complaining they do about making Quebec its own country, but holy SHIT the French Canadian accent is grating. It's more guttural sounding than proper French, for one thing... like a German guy who learned French and then had his tongue cut in half down the middle. Our downstairs neighbors kept mouthing nonsense words to their baby to make it stop crying, but it came out as an extremely loud "GUIIIIIHHHhhhhhh!" And they would do this for hours! How could they spend so much time basically shouting in their baby's face and then go for so long without changing its diaper that the smell literally travelled out their windows and into ours before embedding itself in the fabric of our furniture, only to make itself known again whenever we sat down?

And another thing: I don't know if it's like this all over Canada, but the drivers in British Columbia are some of the shittiest drivers I've ever seen, and I've been to Texas. EVERYONE'S a tailgater, and nobody even thinks about driving the speed limit. That goes for city driving, too: you can't make a left turn without some dude cutting in front of you, or blasting past you when you're trying to stop for a pedestrian. Incidentally, I don't think I saw one police car for the entirety that I was up there. Canadians seem to just take all their bad driving for granted, though, and don't even seem to get angry at the people that are inconveniencing them by driving the speed limit. I didn't get the finger once, or even garbage thrown at my car. Wish I could say the same about Spokane.

But the positive aspects of Canada. The border guards never even checked my car (even though I was a lone, unshaved American with dirty hair and only one bag of luggage), unlike the American guards, who stopped just short of strip searching me and taking my car apart to find marijuana hidden in some secret compartment of my 1994 Ford Aspire. The Canadians were friendly and never treated us like tourists, even when it was extremely obvious that we WERE tourists. The legal drinking age is 19, so I was able to just walk into a bar and order a drink without even getting carded. Also I saw a house that was actually converted from old-timey river boat. You'd probably get the neighborhood association pounding at your door if you tried that around here.

So anyway, enough about Canada. I'll try to get the new comic finished by tomorrow, and maybe I'll also be able to unveil the first comic of my new college newspaper series, "Generic College Newspaper Comic Strip." It stars two college students that make jokes about drinking and how hard their classes are. Bet you can't find any OTHER webcomics like THAT.

Vacation time

2006-07-01T03:23:00.000-07:00

I'm going to Canada for a week for a vacation (or "holiday" for you British types). I'll most likely be back on July 8th, and will have hell of new comics up shortly after. I'll have lots of free time to do nothing while I'm up there, so hopefully I'll be drawing comics while doing nothing.

In other news, where are you, Reclamare? Buy your stupid computer so you can make some more stupid comics, stupid! Stop having a broken computer!

Also, my brother has apparently disappeared somewhere in Texas and nobody can find him or even call his cell phone. He occasionally calls us and leaves us with cryptic messages about where he is or what he's doing, but all I've been able to piece together is that he's living in an abandoned farm house and hiding bones in the desert or something. If you're reading this, Josh, come back home and take care of your damn dog. Wherever you are.

New comic

2006-06-25T20:19:00.000-07:00

That's right. Also, I just noticed that it's been exactly a month since I posted last. Whoops.

Yes, I'm still alive

2006-06-25T03:45:00.000-07:00

Sorry about the lack of updates... I've just been really apathetic about all this for a while. I thought I could revitalize my interest in this with that Burning Barrel business, but no one involved seems to want to update their comics (or buy a new computer... RECLAMARE...), so I'm just a little bit off right now.

Plus, I've been a little depressed lately. In addition to the usual "having to find a part-time job" bullshit associated with summer, I also found out something fairly disturbing about our next door neighbors. For the last two years, their dog (who lives in their back yard and is apparently not allowed inside) has barked incessantly, day and night, just loud enough to force me to find a source of white noise to help me sleep. During the winter it's usually a humidifier, and during the summer an air conditioner or a fan pointed directly at my head. This doesn't make for the most comfortable night's rest, but it does the job. However, I noticed last month that the next door neighbor's dog had inexplicably stopped barking, and was now making muted raspy "coughs" instead (which are just as incessant). After a bit of research into the matter, I found out that the owners of the dog were just as annoyed with it as I was and actually had it's vocal cords removed surgically. I just wonder if our other neighbors (who incidentally work for the Spokane Humane Society) had anything to do with it.

Anyway, I guarantee you that I am currently drawing a new comic, which I hope to turn out in the next day or two. I even have two panels drawn and inked, so that should get me started. It will probably be pretty good, but we just won't know until I'm finished, will we?

100th Post Spectacular-r-r-r-r

2006-06-15T22:56:00.000-07:00

Yes, it's been one-hundred posts since I started this retarded (or rather, retarted) blog. To celebrate, I'm going to do something I almost never do: talk about politics.

The Republican Party seems to be rather full of itself right now, what with Rove having gotten away scott-free and Zarqawi being killed. Almost makes you forget about the last six years of total bullshit we've been having to swallow, huh? That's what the Republicans are hoping you'll do in the next four months, anyway.
Ever seem to notice that the Republican Party seems to be on an upturn right before any of their elections? And they get so fucking optimistic about it, too. Go find the nearest Republican you know, and I guarantee you that he will look pretty much like this:

Just like a dog that just scarfed like three pounds of shit. I even drew some shit dribbling out of his bloated lips for effect. You can just imagine that guy about to open his mouth and scream "HA! Rove DIDN'T get indicted even though he committed treason, you LEFTIES!" all with little bits of human shit spraying all over your face.
Of course, I'm only basing this off the few news stories I've read over the last few weeks, including one I heard on NPR from the editor of the National Review, which was basically just five minutes of him saying "Ha ha, that's what you gee-eeeet!" in a sing-songy voice. To be honest, I didn't even know about the National Review until very recently, but it's apparently just a bunch of idiot Republicans saying stupid things like "Closing Guantanamo would be a psychological victory for al Qaeda" and "Democrats will be in one nationwide bad mood come the morning after election day." It also appears to have AT LEAST two black Republicans as contributing writers, meaning that probably about an eighth of all black Republicans work for the National Review.

Let's look at that picture again after having read some of the stories on the National Review.

In other political news, it seems that my old rabble-rousing friend Mike Ramsey just started up HIS OWN blog, which so far is pretty good. If you haven't heard of him, he's the disappearing act that drew Sidwood until he became the political cartoonist for the State News. Since then he has been accused of "being a liberal," "hating our troops," and "not having a clue" by economics and business majors from all over his college campus. I recommend you go check his shit out, and by shit I mean it's "the shit" like I hear kids saying these days.

Hey it's another Webcomics Roundup!

2006-06-06T00:20:00.000-07:00

Hello again, folks. As you might remember, I occasionally do a feature here called Webcomics Roundup where I find the five comics that are directly ahead of me in the Buzzcomix rankings and "review" them. I'd like to emphasize those quotation marks around "review," since many of my reviews are really just my angry first impressions after reading the comic for five minutes and closing my browser in disgust.
If you're reading this blog post and you're angry that my review of YOUR particular comic was somewhat lax in the research department, well... I don't really care. If I want to list your name wrong because you made it so hard to find on your site (or you had some shitty guest comic on your front page and I was confused), that's YOUR fucking fault, not mine.
But hey! This isn't a time to be angry! This is fun time! Time to review some potentially great comics! Fun!

1 - Artist Adventure by Drago Draconis

So far so good! This comic seems to be... about... um...
Dammit! I've already reviewed this comic! To quote myself:

Lessee... what's this... OH GOD IT'S A BADLY DRAWN FURRY COMIC OH SHIT OH SHIT

To be honest, my last review was a little prejudgmental. I didn't read Mr. Draconis' comic solely because it was a furry comic, and I know that's unprincipled and immature, whatever. I'll give it another try.

Wait, you know what? No I won't. Fuck you, Draco Draconis, or whatever your name is.

Man, that's disappointing. I got started on such a high note, and now I'm just all mad again. Whatever. Let's see what's next.

2 - Angey Aiden's Comic by Aiden Renshaw

Hahahahaha video game comics and random jokes about peeing. Better look out, Penny Arcade.
Oh wait, I just read a few more comics and there's a joke about how a magician is going to turn an apple into something brown and the other guy asks if it's poop and he says it's a candy bar and it appears in the guy's pants and he gets mad and says he will put chiclets in his mouth.

THAT, my friends, is brilliant social commentary.

Okay, I just read his "extras" section, and he has apparently made his first fan video for World of Warcraft. I could let this slide, but the word "first" implies that there will be more of them, and that's just not cool. I'm not even going to watch his video, either, I'm just going to ASSUME that it's a bunch of stupid jokes about how the moderators hate Warlocks or some other stupid shit that I heard a guy talk about at the computer lab while I was trying to type up a paper and he was just so distracting.

3 - Midnight Detectives by Some Fucking Guy Whose Name Wasn't Immediately Obvious (warning: opening up the site causes pop-ups)

Fuck shit. Another furry comic. Whenever I feature one of these, a bunch of idiots who have formed a subculture around drawings of animals who look like people and think that they have animal souls in them find their way onto my board, and I just reviewed TWO furry comics in the same post.

Gotta suck it up, though. Gotta be a man.

Okay, gotta do this fast-like. To start off: furry comic = dumb. Extremely busy and distracting background pictures (which are low-quality screenshots of the comic that have been tiled). Next/previous comic buttons that are hard to find, extremely small, and appear to have been scribbled on with a blue pen. Hell of text bubbles that are just all over the page in an unorganized mess. Characters saying such things as "aroo." Page after page of just character sketches, including Stitch from the Disney movie Lilo and Stitch. And to top it all off, the dude's school made him sign a contract saying he would not draw in school (which is extremely hilarious to me).

Note: I didn't feel like doing enough research on this comic to find out the actual gender of this artist. If you're reading this, Some Fucking Guy, please don't respond with some BS like "lol i'm not a guy" because I don't give even one quarter of a shit.

4 - Blacklight Twilight by "Nekko" (?)

The eternal question: am I allowed to make fun of a comic that has admittedly better art than mine? The answer to this question is variable on the content of the comic. For one thing, the comics are often very busy-looking, making it hard for me to actually read through the comic without occasionally averting my eyes to a tranquil painting of a beach or sunset. I can feel my eyes focus and unfocus of their own accord as I attempt to scan through the archives. Not that the art isn't well drawn, it's just unattractive. It's blurry at times, sketchy at others, and I have to squint at most of the text EVEN THOUGH it is not handwritten. I can't really review further here since understanding the plot requires actually reading the comic, and I don't feel like having the worst headache I've ever had. Plus, I'm pretty sure I saw a half-cat half-human dude there, so this comic gets an automatic F. Which is a shame, really.

Man, I'm getting pretty tired. I don't know if I can do a fifth review. Jeez I'm tired.

Whoof. Okay, I'll try it.

5 - 1980's Cyberpunks with Guitars like in Shadowrun by Italian Dude that just fooled me into looking at an anime comic about "gay love"

Man, what's with all the soap opera comics? Why do people draw this kind of thing? Do they really hope someone will read it? Do they think in their heads "Oh man I hope someone reads my dramatic anime comic"? Why do they spend so much time on the artwork for a comic if the plot is so uninteresting? Will anyone really care if they accidentally misproportion a character if all he's doing is having a boring conversation about coffee? Do they lose sleep at night wondering whether or not their character should get back together with his old flame that dumped him two years ago? Do they REALLY think I want to read word bubbles with emoticons in them?

I've noticed that the people that spend the most time on the art for their comics tend to have the least interesting comics on the internet. Just boring anime shit every time. Conversely, some of the more interesting comics I've seen have extremely simplistic art. Not that there aren't exceptions, but this is what I usually notice after glancing at about 100 webcomics at a time. Artists who can't write, writers who can't draw, and some people who aren't good at either but who still seem to produce thousands of comics.

Maybe I'm just bitter.

Man this shit is too hard

2006-06-05T00:00:00.000-07:00

After reading over my list a few times, I've decided that it's way too much work to do in about a week's time before heading off to Russia, and that I'd rather spread all that work over about a year. Just like everything else I do.
Anyway, I'm getting an apartment with my buddy Kyle Chapman, who was actually really eager to share an apartment with me since I'd be paying a goodly portion of the rent. Also, his backup apartment-sharer (in case I actually did end up going to Russia) was actually Kyle McMahon, the real-life person that the character in my comic is based off of. Just so you all know, he's just as belligerent and annoying in real life as he is in the comic, so Chapman was kind of relieved that I was taking his place.

Onto other possible news, Reclamare has our Burning Barrel site done! It is very pretty (I am a big fan of red-orange myself), and it is sure to get us a lot more traffic once we actually start telling people about it. I'm also planning on using the same site to host Biscuits for Breakfast, so that I can start running Google ads on my site and raking in some of that sweet sell-out cash.

Also, I might start following the leads of some of my idols and start selling some of my junk to my fans. Anyone out there want to buy a mosaic painting of an old Soviet propaganda poster that I made for an art class? Or how about a color wheel? I'll do this all eBay style someday.

List of things I gotta do before I go to Russia

2006-05-31T00:41:00.000-07:00

-Fill out a bunch of damn forms

-Get vaccinated for Hepatitis A

-Get checked for HIV (yes, I'm serious about this... Russia has a strict policy for anyone staying longer than thirty days)

-Get a $90 passport

-Get a $90 visa

-Get a $400 laptop from some bargain bin website that sells shit computers

-See if I can get my Financial Aid to cover the trip, and if they don't...

-Cry myself to sleep

-Learn how to say "Fuck you, dogg, I ain't buying no bread that looks like a dude sat on it" in Russian (this will almost definitely come up at some point)

-Prepare for my trip by watching "Dr. Zhivago," "Hunt for Red October," "The Russia House" (which ALSO stars Sean Connery), "Octopussy," "Enemy At The Gates," and "Rush Hour" starring Chris Tucker.
(EDIT: I have been informed that "Rush Hour" has nothing to do with Russia.)

-Find out the legal drinking age in Russia
(EDIT: It's 18! CHUG! CHUG! CHUG! CHUG! CHUG! CHUG! CHUG! CHUG!)

-Buy a t-shirt that says "America is so much better than Russia" in both English and Russian and wear it every single day while I'm in Russia. The natives will obviously learn how much better America is than Russia after reading my shirt and want to become friends with me.

-Find out how the health care is in St. Petersburg, and whether or not they will cover Americans who have lost three of their teeth after being punched in the face

News for the coming months

2006-05-27T02:25:00.000-07:00

I've been planning on spending the year after next in Russia for a college exchange type program, but after a great deal of soul-searching and personal anguish (actually I just thought about it for like five hours), I've decided to go THIS year instead, as long as some stupid stuff doesn't happen like I lose an arm or the school tells me I need to get a 4.5 GPA or some damn bullshit like that.

The main reason for this decision is actually that my school basically just stopped offering second-year Russian (I'm finishing up my first year right now), and I don't want to be going there a year later having gotten rusty on a language I only sort of know already. That would be totally crappy.

Anyway, this development MIGHT make things slightly harder, making-comics-wise. I doubt I'll be able to lug my giant computer on the plane with me, so I would either need to splurge on a tiny laptop only able to run Photoshop and Microsoft Word, or I would need to use the Russian computers and scanners that the Saint Petersburg Polytechnic University might so generously let me use in their public computer area. I assume that these computers would be exactly the same as American computers, except they would smell like potatoes and will probably be used mainly to look at pictures of expensive cars on the internet.

By the way, if any actual Russians end up reading this (that means you, members of the Russian government that are attempting to pass a law stating that foreigners cannot enter Russia if they are known to make derogatory statements about Russian culture and I am totally not kidding about this), then I didn't actually mean that about the potatoes. I'm sure you guys don't smell like potatoes. I don't even really know why I said that.

...potatoes.

Anyway, another potential change would be that if I go to Russia, the characters in my comic have to, as well. Gorsky (Горскй) has kind of a Slavic-sounding name, though, so I think I could pull it off... somehow. Also, I will definitely have to start inserting more anti-American rhetoric, since I can do that kind of thing there without getting punched in the face by a guy in a cowboy hat. This has happened to me at least three times in America, and believe me, I'm getting pretty tired of it.

Comic's all done

2006-05-26T00:56:00.000-07:00

Hope you're happy.

As an added bonus, here is a random picture from my Photobucket account, which I share with another person. Here is one of HIS pictures, which he has put onto the site for no apparent reason.

Note that probably about 80% of the pictures he loads onto there are pictures of baseball players or their mustaches. I have no idea why he does this. Here's another one.

I don't know about you, but I'm starting to get pretty tired of this shit. There's like fifty pictures of his on there, all exactly like this.

What are you DOING?

WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU THINK YOU'RE DOING

I'M SO SICK OF THIS

2006-05-25T01:44:00.000-07:00

I finally just up and drew that thing, but it won't be photoshopped and up on the site until tomorrow because I am sleepy. Note that just because this is taking me a long time to do does NOT mean that it will be of especially high quality. Remember that whenever I say I'll do something in a certain amount of time, I'm almost guaranteed to take at least three times as long to actually do it. I'll bet my wife wishes she were so lucky.

Note: I only said that for comedic value. I'm not actually married.

Ladies.

EDIT: I just added a link to the site of my old friend Lane Tower from high school. I totally didn't know he had a site until just now, and his videos are hilarious. All two of them.

Gettin' closer!

2006-05-20T01:00:00.000-07:00

New development: I am about half-way through the next comic. I'd love to lie and say I've been real busy, but really, I've just been screwing around and playing old Super Nintendo games. Tomorrow, though, I'm going to finish this mofo. IN FACT, I am going to write the word "mofo" on my hand to remind me to finish a particular mofo.

There you go. Check out that double-jointed thumb, too. It is so double-jointed that it once injured a man without a double-jointed thumb. That man later died of his injuries.

(EDIT: please disregard the beer bottle and the Pavement album pictured in that photo. I don't want a thousand comments from people about how they like or hate beer/Pavement.)

Thanks a lot

2006-05-17T01:29:00.000-07:00

There'll probably be a new comic tomorrow. I'd like to formally thank all those people who keep on checking my site over and over every single day even though I rarely actually make new comics. You ARE Biscuits for Breakfast.

I'd also like to thank all those pissed-off people who wrote shit about me in their Livejournals. Your links to my site have brought in AT LEAST five more people than I would have gotten anyway. If I had ads on my site that didn't belong to Comicgenesis, I would be rolling in pennies because of you.

This post has various appealing qualities

2006-05-10T01:56:00.000-07:00

I just saw the movie Munich with some friends. They laughed the whole way through and complained whenever anyone was assassinated because they think they would have done it much better because they're so good at video games. "Why didn't they use a silencer? Why didn't they shoot him in the head from a mile away with a pistol like I did in Battlefield 2? Why are they using the AK-47 to kill those hostages, it's so inaccurate."

In other news, I'm still e-designing (to quote Reclamare) the plot to my new up-and-coming comics. All I can tell you people at the moment is that they will take place pretty much one year ahead of that last comic you all just read, and there will be something noticably different about McMahon. See if you can guess what it is before I post a comic about it three months from now! No really, guess.

In the meantime, here is a collection of rejected one-liners from my past comics that I didn't end up using after realizing that they were too disgusting and that my comic was relying too heavily on disgusting jokes. That or I couldn't find a way to work them into the plot. Here we GO!

-------------------------------------------------------------------

"What do you mean this isn't cheese? Why didn't anyone tell me I was spreading dog poop on my crackers and eating them for half and hour? Dog poop on crackers? I mean, come on now."

"Boy this lemonade sure does taste like my mailman's urine."

"Hey Gorsky! I can buy Dr. Dre's used adult diaper on eBay for $200,000!"

"If you don't get out of my way, I am going to poop in my pants so hard that my pants will fall down."

"Poop poop pee poop farts."

"Sorry, I didn't hear what you were saying, I was too busy putting these condoms filled with urine and feces under every tire of this expensive sports car."

"Pooooooooop."

"As if this day couldn't get any worse. First I run out of toilet paper, and then my encyclopedia says that the capital of Slovenia is poop."

"Oh wow, I can't believe someone bought my diaper on eBay. I have to go write some raps about this, word up skeet skeet skeet nigga."

"Man, burning hair doesn't smell nearly as good as it tastes."

---------------------------------------------

Ugh, those were terrible. They're out in the open now though, so I won't ever be tempted to put one of them in a comic and gross out my mom.

Oh my god it is 2:26 am I'd better quit writing this post huh.

I made a guest comic

2006-05-05T20:54:00.000-07:00

Esteemed webcomiscist and Biscuits for Breakfast fan Ken Krekeler asked me to make him a guest comic. After stringing him along for about two weeks and saying "I'll get around to it," I finally did. Go check it out if you know what's good for you.

In other news, Orcish Spam author Jdude (who is my brother in case you haven't been paying attention) is coming to Spokane right this very minute from Texas. There will be a large barbecue, and I'm pretty sure there will be steak involved. If I had any fans in Spokane I would invite them, but I probably don't, so that's too bad.

Too bad for YOU.

Also, I turned anonymous comments back after one of my friends commented that he thought they were funny. I'm doing you a favor by doing this, though, so don't abuse it.

Another angry reviewer

2006-05-03T02:30:00.000-07:00

Webcomics Roundup is really starting to get people riled up. Since I blocked comments from non-Blogger users (anonymous comments are for cowards), they've started trying to post their shit on the reviews section of my Buzzcomix account. You can really tell they're stretching to find things wrong with my comics, though, judging from the overly generic "criticisms." The fact of the matter is that they're mad at me for making fun of them and not letting them complain about it.

Which is extremely hilarious to me.

The most recent review (there are two) comes from Ambot, who I assume owns that website I just linked right there because it has "Ambot Ah!" in the name. Go look at it if you want to see the least impressive website for a self-proclaimed "web designer" ever made. Note to the creator of that particular website: if you aren't the one who wrote this review and the "Ambot" thing is just a coincidence, I'm just kidding. Your website is absolutely amazing.

Ambot wrote:
"Lose the blog, even though It's good to finally hear someone speak the truth about their feelings for good comics. The subject matter of the comic has potential, but the blog (even though it's a joke) removes all interest in following this comic."

I guess my blog is a joke? And it removes interest in following the comic? I'm not sure what this is supposed to mean.

Ambot writes:
"Looking through Bisquit's previous comics, and not finding them very funny, and actually finding the lack of good drawing skills more laughable than the dialogue/plots, it's my conclusion that Bisquit does not take him or herself seriously as an artist, or a decent person."

Okay, first of all, my name isn't "Bisquit." Second of all, yes, I know my early comics don't look fantastic. I hear this is pretty common, though.

Ambot writes:
"From a Professional Illustrator's standpoint, who also publishes an Online Comic, This comic is not much of an undertaking."

You're a Professional Illustrator? Like with capital letters and everything? Ooohhh, sorry to have offended you, your majesty. If you think I'm going to concede and take down my site because you have a graphic design major, you've got another think coming (that is the correct usage of that phrase by the way, did you know that).
Also, where is this alleged comic? I'm really having a hard time finding anything specific about the word Ambot except for this annoying Myspace page that talks to you about abortion when you load it up.

Ambot says:
"People post comics on this site to share a talent, not to ask for putdowns. Why spend time critiquing comics that aren't even in the top 100?"

I might ask you the same question, genius. The reason I do it, though, is because it's funny to watch people writhe in agony after reading the opinions of some dude on the internet. They'll get all pissed off and rant and rave and call the person a douchebag, and then always follow it off with a statement like this:

Ambot says:
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, Bisquit obviously has his/her own, and that's fine."

I thought I told you to not call me Bisquit, asshole. People on the internet seem to think that they need to constantly grant others permission to have their own opinion. Every time someone says something the least bit offensive. Every fucking time. Please oh please, Almighty Professional Ilustrator, might I possibly inconvenience you by having my own opinion, if it's not too much trouble?

But oh wait, this guy seems to have an opinion of his own! Maybe it's somehow related to my comic "not being very good?" Read and find out!

Ambot says:
"My opinion is that this comic is not worth the artist's time, or skill. I would advise finding a unique style and developing it, maybe look elsewhere for subject matter. take a drawing class, read funny poetry for better delivery, and out of respect- stop making fun of other people's work."

Did you catch that? That part about the poetry? I couldn't believe that when I read it. If this guy was a professional reviewer, he would be fired (unless he worked for IGN). Imagine reading a review of "Thank You For Smoking" in the paper and seeing the words "Jason Reitman might improve his directing skills if he were to consider reading funny poetry." He would find himself face down on the sidewalk in front of the newspaper office the next day with an imprint of a giant boot embedded into his ass.
And really, his last words say it all. He probably wouldn't even reviewed me if it weren't for my making fun of other people's work, which really just signifies to me that I should keep doing it. Publicity is publicity, and hits from Faulknerian man-children are just as good as any other hits.

What a douchebag. He's entitled to his own opinion, though.

Look for a new comic, a new Webcomics Roundup, and a new guest comic on My Nemesis throughout the rest of the week (not necessarily in that particular order, though).

Wolf Creek sucked

2006-04-27T02:02:00.000-07:00

I just saw Wolf Creek on DVD. It stank. Plot devices were introduced and just thrown away, characters died pointless deaths, and the ending was unsatisfying.

For those of you that haven't seen this movie but want to spend two hours being mad at a movie, don't scroll down, because there are like some spoilers that I will mark with the word spoilers.

Here it comes.

spoilers

Who here likes movies where the main character just dies for no reason at the end? If you just read that and your arm shot up like you were in donut class and the teacher just asked "who here wants donuts," then this is the movie for you and also please tell me whether donut class would get me credits for my International Affairs major and why you raised your hand even though you are on the internet.
The first forty minutes of the movie are basically build-up to the "scary" part, introducing characters and helping you get attached to them. You get an insight to the characters' individual personalities and eventually start wondering whether you just rented a horror movie or not because the only thing scary about the first forty minutes is the stupid brooding music (note: muting a horror movie makes it 75% less scary, try it some time). Of course, once the "scary" part starts, their personalities just fly out the door and they become cookie-cutter victims just like in every other horror movie where they never stop screaming and do stupid things that could get them killed. And then they DO get killed except for some guy that you don't really care about. Then the movie is pretty much over.

A good way to determine whether a movie was good or not? Try to summarize the plot in a few sentences. "Some people in Australia go on vacation, and a killer picks them up and tries to torture and kill them. They escape, but later, they get killed anyway except for one guy that was barely focused on, and they explain him away with some captions at the end of the movie."

Try to do that shit with the Godfather. You can't.

Oh god I'm sleepy why am I even bothering right now

2006-04-25T02:48:00.000-07:00

The last comic was kind of an epilogue. Kind of an ending of that particular story and the beginning of a new particular story that is particular about something that is about battle tanks.

Or maybe not. Anyway, the next comic, which I will begin working on tomorrow (today?) will make you be all like "whoa, I wasn't expecting that." Because you won't be expecting that, and "that" will be ridiculously ridiculous.

In unrelated news, my grandfather just died today (yesterday?) so I am not that happy right now. You don't need to be all like "oh man sorry dude that is harsh" though because it's not like I'm fishing for pity or anything, because that would be a jackass thing to do.

Just like your mom.

Webcomics Roundup Pt. 3

2006-04-21T16:31:00.000-07:00

I've been getting requests to do another Webcomics Roundup that are exactly like hotcakes (I'm not sure exactly how that phrase is supposed to go though so please to be not criticism). Turns out that other people hate webcomics almost as much as I do, so I'm not just some lone asshole making fun of people for no reason anymore. HERE WE GO

1 - A Strange Fruit by Raegan Millhollin

When I saw the front page of this comic, I thought "hey, that's a pretty cool graphic right there. Maybe this comic won't be that ba..." WRONG. "A Strange Fruit" seems to be another badly drawn anime comic by some guy that is obviously not Japanese, except it has the twist that it's totally gay. At least, I assume it's gay because all the characters look like women but not all of them have breasts. Anyway, go read this comic if you like to look at androgynous men kiss each other and then get stabbed and they're all bloody and oh wait they're kissing again and now they're in bed.

Man, fuck this comic.

2 - Resident Dysentary by "flux"

Now, this is the kind of comic that makes it hard to do these Roundups. On the one hand, the plot is just stupid as hell (based off of the Resident Evil videogames), it's drawn in anime style (again), and it's hard to get attached to any of the characters because they all look the same and don't have any distinctive personalities...

On the other hand, it's actually occasionally funny, which is actually a high honor when it comes to webcomics. Even if you only make one really funny comic for every ten boring, stupid comics, you're still way ahead of about 80% of the other shitheels out there. Resident Dysentary deserves an "okay" ranking, but my comic is still better. Sorry, Resident Dysentary, that's just what I think.

3 - Cy-Boar by Lou Graziani

I don't feel so good about criticizing this particular comic because it's on Eyeskream, which is actually a legitimate webcomics group that my homie Ken belongs to (go look at Ken's comic right now if you know what's good for you, by the way), but come on. Cy-Boar? What the fuck IS this?

Apparently, some scientists abduct a pig and transform him into a cybernetic pig-man that ends up escaping with his other cybernetic animal friends to kill farmers and such. I might actually welcome this absolutely ridiculous plot were it not for the fact that this comic takes itself really fucking seriously. I'm not a real big fan of anthropomorphic animals, either (except for the Spelling Bunny, of course), and I'm not a real big fan of gross violence in cartoons either, so I'll have to pass on Cy-Boar.

I mean, come on. Fucking Cy-Boar. What the fuck?

4 - Plugged Nickel by Ronald MacKinnon

Man, ANOTHER furry comic? I am FUCKING SICK OF FURRY COMICS. ENOUGH WITH THE FURRY COMICS ALREADY, INTERNET, THEY'RE NEVER ANY GOOD AND THEY AREN'T FUNNY AND IT'S A STUPID IDEA ANYWAYS.

You know what? I'm not even going to read this goddamn comic. Fuck Plugged Nickel. This comic can go fuck itself, I don't even care.

5 - NetherOak by David R. Dryburgh

This comic actually isn't so bad. It seems to be about post-apocalyptic ravers that get in fights a lot and also there's some giant Transformers that punch each other in the face. I have to give this comic props because it seems to have gradually morphed from a kind of generic not-all-that-outstanding webcomic with unfunny jokes to an interestingly drawn comic book-style action comic with an outlandish plot and a bunch of people shooting at each other. Go ahead and look at both of those links... believe it or not, they were indeed written and drawn by the same person.

So, again, this comic ain't that bad. For the sake of being an asshole, though, I'm going to say that my comic is way better and that I should be ahead of this guy in the ranking. You can definitly suck it, David R. Dryburgh.

Things that inexplicably make me really, really mad

2006-04-21T04:13:00.000-07:00

-When Americans say anything in Japanese, ever

-The overamplified sound of coffee dripping in Folgers commercials

-The G4 Channel

-The movie Moulin Rouge

-Rock music with female singers (excluding the Pixies)

-Rock music with singers that sound like Kurt Cobain (excluding Kurt Cobain)

-The game "The Adventures of Fatman"

-Everything on the Fox network

-When some on TV starts laughing maniacally and then goes into coughing fits

-That canned children's laughter that they've been using for 40 years

-Anything that the President says

-People that think their t-shirts are just hilarious when they obviously aren't actually hilarious

-Katamari Damacy

-The fact that people watch anime on a regular basis

-People who chew on raw potatoes and just act like it's a completely normal thing to do

-Bands that sound good but have really stupid-sounding names (Cat Power?!?)

-Leslie Neilson

-People with high-pitched British accents

-People with dumb-cracker Southern accents

-People who say "speak English!" when they hear a technical term they don't understand

-E-mail

-When my friends on AIM are obviously on drugs, but continue to talk to me and are really annoying

-Anything related to skateboarding

-When skateboarders complain about rollerbladers

-Rollerbladers

-People who bounce up and down on the back wheels of their BMX bikes

-People that complain about smokers all the time

-Smokers that complain about being persecuted all the time

-Everything about Carlos Mencia

and finally...

-The fact that I was recently peer-pressured into registering with Myspace

Firefox is for nutmeats

2006-04-19T15:25:00.000-07:00

I decided to wait up a bit on the Webcomics Roundup, since I just realized that I don't have the stamina right now to read through five of those damn things. Meanwhile, how about I talk about something else like this:

What the fuck is up with Firefox? What's so freaking great about it? Why is everyone always bitching every time a page doesn't work for their stupid-ass Firefox browser? I personally use Slimbrowser because it lets me open multitabs (Firefox can't do that shit). It also lets me zoom in and out, it blocks all pop-ups, it has a Google toolbar in the corner that DOESN'T put spyware on your computer... it's great.

What does Firefox do? It makes whatever webpage you go to that isn't specially designed for Firefox look like shit. I mean, look at my site! The voting button isn't centered! The link for my blog is supposed to be headline sized, with one of those <> thingies to make the text big, and Firefox makes it look all small

You know what else? I went to a website the other day to download something, and the fucking site presented this little message saying "We noticed that you're not using Firefox! You should really use Firefox, it blocks pop-ups!" Just like those douchebags at the gas station that yell "YOU SHOULDN'T SMOKE IT'S BAD FOR YOU" when you try to buy cigarettes from them.

Really, what's so great about Firefox? Tell me, you hippies! And nobody try to pull that "well that's your opinion but..." shit before you try to criticize me. I know it's my damn opinion. I want to hear YOUR opinion.

Girl you betta gimme dat money!

2006-04-18T01:58:00.000-07:00

Some good music for you to listen to is The Kleptones. It is an internet "band" (that is probably just one person) that takes samples from such as different songs and mashes them together into interesting new songs. Plus it is all free (since it would be illegal for this guy to try to sell his music to you), and there is like five really long albums on his site. Some good songs for you to start with are this Queen/Ol' Dirty Bastard song and this Clash/David Bowie song unless you are some sort of jackass that doesn't like good music (or Ol' Dirty Bastard). Be sure to save those to your desktop, since opening them in your browser can be problematic.

I will likely have a new cartoon some time on Tuesday probably, but you know how it is when I try to tell you when my next update will be. Also, I will most definitely do another Webcomics Roundup tomorrow, meaning lotsa laffs and gaffs and perhaps also some chaffs, which I believe are like countermeasures that planes release to keep heat-seeking missiles from hitting them. Be sure that you are ready for some of those.

What the hell...

2006-04-17T13:57:00.000-07:00

I was deleting my spam mail today, and I noticed something very interesting in some of the subject lines. Here's some examples:

"It is a shame. Waterhouse knew Bobby Shaftoe, and would have liked to attend his funeral standing up--not skulking around like this. But Enoch Root and Rudy would both recognize him. Waterhouse is their enemy.qtW9"

"He rips the life preserver off over his head and lets it go. It shoots straight up and bursts out of the surface, burning like a comet. His oil-soaked clothing is tugging him relentlessly upwards, so he rips his shirt off and lets it tumble up towards the surface. His boots pull down, his oily pants push up, and he reaches some sort of equilibrium.OfU9d"

"Shoot," Shaftoe says.7x411

"Randy grinds his teeth for about a mile, and then says, "If there is any generalization at all that you can draw about how men think versus how women think, I believe it is that men can narrow themselves down to this incredibly narrow laser-beam focus on one tiny little subject and think about nothing else."jxqR4"

These subject lines, to the uneducated, might just seem like another series of random words strung together to get idiots to click their emails. However, these subject lines are actually excerpts from my favorite book, "Cryptonomicon."

Anyone want to explain this one to me?

Webcomics Roundup Part 2

2006-04-12T13:50:00.000-07:00

Well, looks like I've moved up the list since last time, which means there's another five webcomics for me to berate. I decided to do it now because I'm listening to punk rock and it's making me all mad by default.

1 - Liberty's Jewell's (sic) by Mizark Dizark (?)

I really want to make fun of this comic, but after reading through the archives, I'm starting to think that English isn't this guy's first language. So, in order to maintain good international relations with Whatevercountrythisguyisfromistan, I'm going to ignore this comic and just ASSUME that my comic is better based on the fact that "Liberty's Jewell's" is about college students being "hilarious."

2 - Artist Adventure by Drago Draconis

Lessee... what's this... OH GOD IT'S A BADLY DRAWN FURRY COMIC OH SHIT OH SHIT

Okay, I'm fine. I automatically assume that my comic is better than every furry comic in existence, because... well, they're furry comics. If this generalization offends any of you, maybe you should go outside more often.

3 - Many Tidings Grim by Corgan Dane

Anyone out there read Goats? I used to read it all the time back in high school. However, at some point the comic started doing these excessively long storylines where Diablo the Chicken would be reminiscing about someone named Shazam Twix. I remember checking the comic every day and just seeing another damn Shazam Twix strip, and it was always boring and pointless and had nothing to do with the regular storyline, so I just stopped reading. I started reading again later, but they had just started another Shazam Twix storyline and I was off the comic for good.

I mention this because that's what it's like reading Many Tidings Grim, except all the time. You just get the general feeling of "who cares" whenever you start up on it. If it mixed it up with some outstanding humor, I might have given it a better rating, but... bleh. Who cares.

4 - Lost Trace Mission by Rengin Tumer

You all know my opinion on anime in general. It's all basically just cookie-cutter fantasy nonsense with cutesy characters with big eyes (the Boondocks excepted). Anyway, this comic is just kind of more of the same. I'd like to critique it with some more depth, but I can't bring myself to go through more than ten comics without being bored out of my skull (and the site is just a sea of broken links, anyway). Pass.

5 - omie by Omar El Alami

The basis for this comic seems to be that a dumpy white guy gets constantly berated by an offensive Asian stereotype named "Ping." Ping is short, has buck-teeth, squinty eyes, a bowl-cut, and says things like "Rook at you, day is raffing at you white man!" Other than that, the humor is about on par with your typical syndicated comic strip. Think "The Born Loser," except with racism. Don't anyone pull that Carlos Mencia "you're too PC" mess with me either, because that shit is tired.

Seems that Omar also has another comic called "Shizzy," which seems to be a lot of unfunny one-shot comics that one would find in a college newspaper somewhere. I would make the obvious joke about the comic's name ("this comic certainly IS Shizzy!"), but I'm beyond that. That shit isn't funny at all.

Webcomics roundup Pt. 1

2006-04-10T01:01:00.000-07:00

We've got a new feature here at Biscuits for Breakfast called the "Webcomics Roundup." Basically, I will feature the five webcomics ahead of mine in the Buzzcomix ranking at any given time, and determine whether or not they're worthy of being ahead of my comic in said ranking. If you people keep voting for me, I'll be able to keep making these things, so if this doesn't turn out to be funny, you'd better not vote for me or else I'll keep making them and you'll be sad.

1 - Rogue Robot by Amory Abbot and Ben Roe.

The art on this comic is okay... I'm having trouble seeing the hook, though. I mean, it's funny, but it's not "I would ever actually laugh at this" funny. Kind of a mediocre caricature of all college-student webcomics in general. My comic is funnier.

2 - Bowser's Plan B by Commander Chaos

A sprite comic about Bowser. One of the good things about Comicgenesis is that sprite comics with pictures of video game characters are not allowed (I guess so they can make more room for the furry comics). A good example of the humor from this comic can be seen here. This particular strip is funny because Luigi is using Pikmins as soldiers instead of Toads because Toads are cowardly. Get it? THAT'S SO FUCKING FUNNY OH MY GOD.
I think I can say with no amount of hubris that my comic deserves to be higher ranked than this... thing.

3 - Town Called Dobson by Storm Bear (?)

Some kind of a political comic that uses templates. The main problem with this comic is not necessarily the art (far be it from me to criticize someone for using templates), but the directionless political jokes. I mean, I know it's supposed to be liberal, and I backtracked quite a bit to see if I was missing some kind of continuity or something, but really, I don't know what this comic is supposed to mean. He could afford healing water because he drives a hybrid? EH? I mean, I'm not a professional on political humor or anything, but the least you could do is put some edge in there. Maybe you could spell out America with KKK instead of C? Maybe photoshop Bush's head onto Hitler's body? Find your niche.

4 - Podunk U by Bob Quaintence

This comic is like a trifecta of mediocrity. It's about college students, it recycles Dave Chappelle jokes, AND it's on an Angelfire site, meaning that you get pop-ups for going to this site. This comic is a BM.

5 - D.D.S.R. by RazorD9

Another sprite comic (although this one thankfully doesn't have videogame sprites). This comic advertises itself as being better than all those other comics where there are two college students talking to each other about inane bullshit because this one has a necromancer in it. There's only one comic up at this point, and I don't normally like to stomp all over a dude when he only has one comic up, but honestly, this comic really doesn't look like it's going to spring some cold Seinfeld shit on us any time soon. The first strip reminds me of the first Garfield comic ever drawn where Jon is sitting next to his deformed cat saying "Hi, there... I'm Jon Arbuckle. I'm a cartoonist, and this is my cat, Garfield" and then the cat proceeds to say (think?) "Hi, I'm Garfield. I'm a cat, and this is my cartoonist, Jon." My first comic was so much better than this first comic, and MY first comic didn't make a lick of sense.

New vote button

2006-04-09T18:16:00.000-07:00

I just swtiched away from that Webcomics List Voting Button Thingy System because it hadn't been working for like a month, and I'm tired of having a broken link displayed so prominently on my front page. I've got this new Buzzcomix thing going now, so you guys go vote your brains out now.

What's interesting, though, is that even though I just signed up not twenty minutes ago (as of this writing), I'm still not at the bottom of the list! Seems that either some people are signing up and not putting vote buttons on their sites, or their comics are so bad that they won't even vote for themselves. Either way, it's good for me... although I miss being able to see what ranking I'm at just by looking at my site. Meh.

By the way, let me remind everyone once again that if you're going to send me emails, PLEASE write something specific in the subject line (preferably with my name, or perhaps my website name in it). I've been getting something like 40 emails a day now and they're all this stupid tricky spam. I hate to think about how many well-written hate emails I've been accidentally deleting because of this.

If I don't put this comic out before I go to sleep the terrorists win

2006-04-09T05:57:00.000-07:00

There, I have a new comic up, despite the fact that someone sent me a hate mail that totally hurt my self-esteem and made me feel bad about myself. You wouldn't believe how harmful it can be when some random person on the internet sends a whiny email at you for non-specific reasons.

Anyway, enjoy it. I stayed up until 6:00 am making it, dammit.

My first REAL hate mail

2006-04-05T21:28:00.000-07:00

Sorry I'm being so lazy with the new comics. I guess I should really draw one soon... I've gotten some of my first hate mails recently because of that Hamburger guest comic I have up right now, and since I have nothing better to tell you people, I'll show you one of them, along with my response.

Now, be sure to... ahem, NOT to send this person tons of pissy emails. Not that I could stop you, anyway.
--------------------------------------
From: Helen - helpla@yahoo.com

Congratulations, your site has a collection of the worst comics I have ever seen.

The fact that I saw the hamburgers-cut-from-advertisements strip and let it slide, figured maybe it could only get beter, went to look at another one and then thought 'hmm, maybe he had a bad day' and looked at ANOTHER one only makes it so much more painful that I bothered to waste that many minutes of my life looking at your pathetic drivel.

The drawing is shocking, the plot goes nowhere, and the hamburger comic had the only slight representation of humor - which really isn't saying much.

Which leaves me very puzzled: if your comics are so terrible why do you bother to keep posting them? Why do you even bother drawing them? They should go back to being doodles on the margin of a really boring book, or the notepad by the phone.

Why torture yourself?

And me?

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Yahoo! Photos – NEW, now offering a quality print service from just 8p a photo.

And my response:

Now this is a hate mail. This guy sent me one a few days ago, but it was really shitty. It was like three sentences, it didn't really critique anything past the first comic, and it was generally very badly written. I mean, this guy was an IDIOT. Your email, however, has all the elements. It's long, for one thing... it looks like you put a lot of effort into this one. You didn't want me to just KNOW that my comic is bad, you wanted me to FEEL it.
It's hysterically written, too. I can just hear the shrillness in your high-pitched, whiny voice. And you use all the qualifying terms that one would expect. "Pathetic drivel?" "Shocking?" The implication that my website is "torturing" you? All fantastic.

A few suggestions for future emails, though. The subject line should contain something more specific than "ahem." This is a common mistake that many people make. I get probably 25 emails a day from people with names like "Helen" and "John" and such with subject lines like "hey" or "what" and I assume they're all spam. You're really lucky I read yours. Not that I'm challenging your creative sensibilities, of course... that congratulations at the beginning of your email was really well placed. I just read it and was like "Oh man, did I win a prize?" before you brought the hammer down. Really, nice work there.

Also, sorry, but I'm not interested in Yahoo photos. I understand that it's a quality print service, but that seemed fairly unrelated to the rest of the email. Try to stay to the point next time.

-Danny Alexander

Habby Birvday!

2006-04-02T00:16:00.000-08:00

Happy April Fools day! The fool is that I didn't post a new comic today. Surprise!

But yes, it was my birthday on the 31st, so now I am exactly 20 years old. My birthday presents were $107.00 in cash, and a $100 gift certificate at CompUSA, which is a good present because if I had just gotten another cold $100, I probably would have just put it in my bank account to appreciate in value, and then my stupid crappy bank would put it all into stocks involving miniature pianos and I would have lost it all.

Anyway, most of the people I've talked to recently have been saying "one more year" to me, since that's when they can take me out to bars and get me drunk and make me tell them embarrassing stories. Still, I think 20 is an important milestone, and I believe that I've progressed as a human being in the last 10 or so years. What was I doing ten years ago? Let's see:

-I was drawing a comic called "Jet Engine Jim," which was about a man who worked at Southwest Airlines and decided to steal and modify a jet engine so he could fly around and fight crime. His sidekick was "Copter Boy," a man who was four years older than Jim who had a helicopter rotor jammed through the top of his head and down through his torso. You will never get to read these comics, I'm sorry.

-My teacher, Mrs. Bishop, tore up a five page essay that I had written (that's a long essay for a ten-year-old) because it was a day late. My mom convinced me to start calling her "Mrs. Bitch-op." I did.

-I moved to Spokane from Port Orchard just as it was getting overrun by Californians. Californians turn every place they move to into a run-down slum filled with Doubletree Hotels. Thanks a lot, California.

-I wasn't turning in homework for any of my classes, ever. Now that I'm in college, though, I don't get as much homework, so I make up for it by not studying for tests and writing all my papers a day before they're due.

Anyway, hope you're all having a good spring break (or if you're on a semesterly schedule or aren't in college, I hope you're having a good trudge through the dull monotony of work). Tomorrow I'm finishing my most recent comic for all y'all, so check back in the later hours of the day.

No!

2006-03-28T17:30:00.000-08:00

You know, every once in a while I hear suggestions from my fans, telling me that they think it would be a good idea to set up a forum. And every once in a while, I contemplate the benefits of doing so. Maybe it would help to consolidate a community, and keep my fans coming back to my comic again and again. Maybe they could help improve my site by giving constructive critism, and I could hold contests and such, and good times could be had by all.

But then I see something like this. Look closely near the top of that page. See the word "locked?"

Apparently the people on Jeff Rowland's boards were such assholes that he has locked his entire forum. It's hard to imagine someone doing something THAT BAD to make someone angry enough to pull a stunt like that, considering that most people on forums are assholes already.

However, things had gotten so bad that people started creating threads with the INTENT of getting them locked. They'd purposely post pictures bigger than the required size, knowing that Jeff had to pay for bandwidth space out of his own pocket. On the last thread created, they had apparently decided to post pictures of enormous screenshots of threads that had been banned over and over and over. not only that, but they did so with a "we're your fans, so you owe us" kind of attitude, as if Jeff was in the wrong for locking a thread with pictures of people drinking piss. As one person put it:

"I don't think that this is your living room. It's an open message board. As long as the "owners" continue paying the bills around here they are welcome. As soon as you miss the payments, you're out, you chumps... we come here not for you and your cheesy strips but for the community. Your system of Owners and Users does not do much to build community. So just SHUT UP"

So no, I won't start a forum. I don't trust you. Not to say that most of you wouldn't be perfectly nice on there, but it only took about three or four people to completely ruin Jeff's forums.

Oh, by the way, I'm still in Texas. I'm flying back to Washington on Wednesday, and then I'm driving my brother to Seattle to some anthropology conference. It'll be gr-r-reat.

Hey guys guess what I've been doing in Texas

2006-03-26T13:21:00.000-08:00

Day 1: I spent all this time on the plane today. Every time I tried to listen to music the guy next to me (not Nate) started groaning and sighing like I was inconveniencing him so much. Like he was trying to sleep or something. We ate at Whataburger and I got a Whataburger. I have not slept in about 48 hours I want to go to sleep.

Day 2: I got some sleep. Boy howdy we is having some fun here in Texas. It's basically the closest thing in the country to just pure anarchy. There are barely any laws here in Texas, meaning that you could just drive straight through a red light while shooting a yield sign with a rifle with one hand and drinking two separate bottles of vodka with the other one right in front of a cop, and he'll just pretend he didn't see anything. It's kind of refreshing after spending my entire life in the confining authoritarian atmosphere of Washington, where they ticket you for driving half a mile over the speed limit without a garbage bag in your car.
We watched V for Vendetta today, which was pretty good. That guy likes to say words with the letter "v" in them. I think it's because he has V in his name! Then we saw a movie called "Surf Nazis Must Die," which I do not recommend to people that only watch good movies. Also, we ate at Fatburger today, and I got a fatburger. With cheese.

Day 3: We went to the Kettle, and I got a chicken fried steak sandwich. Then we went to Sonic Drive-in and I got a bacon burger on texas toast. Hopefully I won't die of diabetes or something before this trip is over, because that would not be a cool thing to die from. Incidentally, I want to be shot by a cowboy and fall off a balcony in an old west-style town when I die. My face will fall into a big pile of horse poop, and an old man without teeth with laugh at me before having an ironic heart attack.

Day 4: We were planning on driving to Corpus Christi and checking out the place where Cheney shot that dude in the face, but my brother decided he didn't want to drive for ten hours today. He is so lazy.
We went to Church's Chicken and I got a chicken sandwich. I don't think my brother's oven works or something.

More to come.

My very first hate mail (kind of)

2006-03-19T16:43:00.000-08:00

I got this email the other day regarding a fan art I made for White Ninja back around the Super Bowl.

From: "Pete Roth"
To: valuedan@comcast.net
Subject: Your comic on white ninja
Date: Friday, March 17, 2006 8:02:16 PM [View Source]

Blew. Seriously, The Steel City kicks (and kicked) your ass.

Love,

- A 'Stiller' fan for life.

I replied with this:

More like the referees kicked our asses. Don't worry, though... I'm sure you'll get your asses kicked pretty good once Ford sends its factories to Mexico.

Boo-yeah.

Also an interesting thing to note is a postscript on the confirmation email that Kent Earle from White Ninja sent to me about that comic:

Thanks for your fan art. It will be up in a couple weeks.

Kent

PS. the Seahawks were robbed.

You're older than you've ever been and now you're even older

2006-03-17T01:30:00.000-08:00

I found this site while catching some waves on the intersurf today. Apparently this guy's been taking a picture of himself every day since 2000. I just had to make an animated gif out of it.

You can check it out by going here.

Watch as he ages six years in twenty seconds. You can almost see him transform from a high school kid to a college student to a world-weary alcoholic.

Posting on a blog can be hard work

2006-03-15T03:17:00.000-08:00

Sorry about the slow updating. Finals are a bee-eye-itch, as usual. I'll see if I can shoot out a comic some time before I go to Tejas for Spring Break a week from today, and then I'll see if I can make some lame-o diary comics that take place in Tejas. You know how it is with that shit.

Reclamare just got his shit together with Paypal, so it looks like we can pay for the hosting of our site soon. We think we know who we're going to go with, but there's like a million hosters out there and they all offer these dumb plans. I got a PHONE CALL today by a hosting company that found out that I had registered a domain with GoDaddy a few months ago and it made me feel like an official businessman for some reason. I'm sure the novelty will wear off after the first ten sales calls about that kind of thing and I'll just be pissy again about being called during dinner like the rest of you.

Which reminds me: if you have suggestions for good hosting providers that aren't assholes or who you think is a better choice than whoever you think we would be going with, go ahead and email me about it, please. Send your emails to valuedan@eagles.ewu.edu (the old Comcast address gets like 40 spams a day now so if you send an email there I might accidentally delete it and that would be sad). Also, if you have a comic that you think is good, you might be able to get in on the ground floor with Burning Barrel comics and become part of the next big wave. The only rules are:
-No porno comics
-No furry comics
-No sprite comics (unless they're non-video game based)
-Comics must have some appeal that other comics do not have
-No shitty comics
-Author has to be a team player

Also, you will have to pay a really small monthly fee (less than $5 a month)... but that's still a better deal than you'll get on Comicgenesis, which we hope to someday leave.

Last thing: anyone out there any good at designing websites? None of us are. If you would like to help us out on this, please contact me about it. PLEASE. I'll give you money!

Is Burning Barrel Comics a good name for a comics group

2006-03-09T01:14:00.000-08:00

Check out my new avatar. That's not actually what I look like, but for all you know it is.

Also, I'm starting a webcomics group with my brother and Reclamare called Burning Barrel Productions. We're going to get some webhosting company to host some sites for us so we can set up a big ol' page for it and put some stuff on there. It's all going to be hobo-themed, which you'll notice if you look at all our avatar pictures. We'll have a forum, do some schmoozing, maybe try and engulf a few more comics... it'll be glorious. Plus, maybe we can get out of this bullshit Comicgenesis rut and make a real name for ourselves.

On an unrelated note, one side of my jaw hurts for no reason. Maybe one of my wisdom teeth are coming in? I hope so, because that will give me another excuse as to why my comics are constantly late that doesn't involve my being lazy.

EDIT: here's some animated gifs I made. They're my first ones, though, so don't make fun of me.

Here are several topics for your perusal

2006-03-08T01:41:00.000-08:00

First order of business: oh my god Reclamare I'm sorry that I didn't mention your website sooner I'll do that right now. To all you cats out there looking for a political-type comic by a Canadian dude that knows way more about American politics than he should, look no further. This comic in particular had me shooting milk and cocaine out my nose (and then blood a few seconds later). Plus, he seems to be updating his site fairly frequently, which is a weird thing to do. Must be some kind of publicity stunt.

Second order of business: I've had complaints from a few people (including my mother) that my comics are constantly either disgusting or misogynistic. Looks like the Liberal PC Thought Control Police are out to get me and put fluoride in my water so I'll forget that I'm being oppressed by the New York Times. Well, I'm not going to let Hilary Clinton and her extreme left-wing ACLU robots turn me into a non-female feminazi with their donkey rays. I say "BRING IT ON" just like President Bush because you can't stop me with your socialist vegetarian manifestoes and such because this is a free country where you can say whatever you want and complain about people saying whatever they want as long as they disagree with you unless you're someone that isn't me in which case you should just shut up because I don't swing that way, guy.

Ahem.

Third order of business: I talked to the people at the International Studies office at my college about studying in Russia my senior year, and they told me that no one at my school has opted to study in Russia for about ten years. Also, the woman I talked to was all like "you can't take classes over there because they don't have enough professors that speak English to make up an entire year's worth of classes," to which I responded "If I wanted to take classes where the professor spoke English, I wouldn't be going to Russia." She seemed surprised, which doesn't make a bit of sense considering that she worked in the International Studies office. I guess people at this podunk college that I'm going to don't like having to learn the language of whatever country they're planning on living in for a year.

Gah

2006-03-07T03:10:00.000-08:00

New comic coming up some time on Tuesday. It's all drawn and everything, but I still need to color it and I'm not going to do it now because it's like 3:00 am and I want to go to sleep so there you go. Don't nobody be giving me the business about my comic being so late, neither, or I'll kick you in your business, old school.

Reasons for my comic being late:
-I dug our old record collection out of the garage and have been listening to it because it's pretty good.
-I've been working hell of hard on school work and also some video games.
-This dude stomped on my hand and it still kinda stings when I try to move my thumb around but that ain't no thing.
-I was driving the other day and I saw a car get smashed by this garbage truck because the driver was looking at me instead of the car in front of him because I guess my car was just that cool, so anyway I got like some post-traumatic stress syndrome, but not enough to make me stop and help the guy that got hit.
-Been reading this book about Vlad the Impaler and it made me start thinking about what it would be like to be impaled upon a spike and when I was done thinking about that it was like 5:00 am and I found out that I'm supposed to be asleep.

Anyway, comic later. Soon. Barfgleu.

I win

2006-02-26T23:45:00.000-08:00

Well, apparently the post I made on Comicgenesis made a difference, because out of my own (and other peoples') complaining, they've put the porno ads only on the NC-17 sites, and not the MA sites. Apparently one of the higher ups didn't realize that the two ratings meant different things, so they just applied the ad to MA and NC-17 rated people across the board. It's better now, though, so there you go. Who says that protestors never achieve anything?

Also, Comicgenesis apparently has a rule saying that you have to put the ad at the top of the site, which pretty much ruins my design scheme. I didn't really want people to have to scroll way down just to get past an ad AND the banner for my site, but they have their rules and I have to follow them, so that's that. I'll try to find a way to spruce it up so it's not so glaringly obvious, though.

This is the last straw

2006-02-26T14:05:00.000-08:00

Okay, here's the deal. Comicgenesis has decided, without my permission, to put ads to J-List on my site. You'll notice this if you scan down to the bottom of the page. J-List, of course, is a Japanese company that sells pornography. I don't know if they just thought that it was a harmless ad or what, but it seems unlikely, because not only did the ad change, but it mysteriously moved from the bottom of the page (where it used to be) to the top (I have since changed the code so it's back at the bottom of the site again, with a friendly note). This leads me to believe that they did it as an act of revenge, maybe because I had the ad at the bottom of the site instead of the top, maybe because I've been openly telling people that clicking the ads will give them pop-ups and spyware, maybe because I've been openly criticizing ComicGenesis for two years. None of that should make a difference, though, because that's an extremely oppressive (and juvenile) thing for them to do, and I hope to god that this is just a mistake.

Anyway, this is a deciding moment for Biscuits for Breakfast, the moment where the wrong decision on anyone's part could lead to the end of my site. I posted a complaint about the ad on the Comicgenesis help forum (which can be read here), and I'm going to see what their reaction is. If I get ANY implication that they did this out of revenge, or that this is somehow MY fault, I'm shutting down Biscuits for Breakfast. That's it.

Stay posted.

Don't read forums. Ever.

2006-02-24T02:48:00.000-08:00

There is never a good reason to read a forum. What might start out as a friendly chat with a long-distance friend will quickly spiral into an endless miasma of confusing emoticons and irritating emotional descriptions. For every sane, intelligent person that types complete sentences with capitalization and punctuation, there are about fifty people that find it necessary to pretend that they're hugging you over the internet or some such nonsense. There are several patterns that will inevitably emerge from any forum-type situation you're ever in.

1. People will say ^___^ at least once in every thread. I think it's supposed to represent someone smirking at you, but if I ever saw anyone make a face like that at me in real life, I would instantly spit at them. It wouldn't even be a conscious thing, but more of a gut reaction, as if the lizard part of my brain thinks that this person is about to attack me, and the only thing I can do is blast a loogie right in his face.

2. The subject of any conversation you start will be lost within six to eight posts of the original. Want to talk about Jean Paul Sarte and the concept of existentialism? Within six posts, someone will proclaim that a dance party has started, and twenty people in a row will say that they're dancing with asterisks around whatever text they type. Within twelve posts, someone will probably compare someone else to Hitler or the Nazis.

3. Someone with an anime picture as their avatar will say something about anime, thereby marking the end of whatever thread was being posted on. Making a post like this is equal to farting so loudly at a dinner party that everyone leaves the room at the same time. Any attempts to revitalize whatever thread this happened on will be ignored.

4. Someone with an extremely conservative ideology will show up and say something completely ridiculous, and will then be attacked by about six angry liberals at the same time. All the same arguments will be used again and again by both sides, and the battle will continue indefinitely until someone says something about anime.

Here is a quick transcript of a possible forum exchange over a period of several days.

DAY 1 (note: thread is called "Flaws in Taxi Driver")
"SaucyCat23 - Taxi Driver was a fine film, but it lacked critical elements that could have humanized the main character."

"*.*.+\Kujimo ^_^/+.*.* - You are absolutely right. *Kujimo kisses SaucyCat*"

"chibiLOLdrugs - hey what do you guys think about spoons :("

DAY 2
"SaucyCat23 - butter knives can be used to butter bread but you should use a spoon to butter toast"

"chibiLOLdrugs - *Chibi hugs saucycat* lol yea *Chibi kisses saucycat on the neck* i use spoons for drugs lol "

DAY 3
"SaucyCat23 - lol *SaucyCat does a dance* DANCE PARTY"

"chibiLOLdrugs - lol dance party everybody dance *chibi does disco dance*

"*.*.+\Kujimo ^_^/+.*.* - *kujimo dances as well* hey do u guys hate the jews as much as i do lol"

"chibiLOLdrugs - omg thats RACIST and let me tell you why: didn't you ever learn about hte holocaust"

"*.*.+\Kujimo ^_^/+.*.* - you lie-beral all im saying is that the jews should be exterminated lol there's so many holes in your argument"

(chibiLOLdrugs proceeds to counterattack Kujimo by repeating every word he said and then explaining a fatal flaw in the reasoning of each individual word, which Kujimo blows off as being "rediculous.")

---------------------------------

DAY 13
"AnimeCatzSmileLOL204 - do u guys watch inuyasha ^_____^ lol anime fujibar crystals"

DAY 14
Nothing is posted.

DAY 15
Nothing is posted.

Forums can ruin a person. They can make a person hate the world, even if that person isn't in junior high. Back in 2003 when my brother ran his original Orcish Spam site, Tim Buckley from Ctrl-Alt-Del made an offhand comment about it (because the guy that designed his website also designed/starred in Orcish Spam). Needless to say, Josh's forums got mobbed by idiots that basically did everything I stated above tenfold, and it got so bad that it ended up being one of the contributing factors to the downfall of Orcish Spam itself. Let that be a warning.

An interesting news story

2006-02-22T02:12:00.000-08:00

I was checking my email today when a story from Comcast News caught my eye. Frankly, I was shocked.

Angry Bond Fans Threaten to Boycott Film

According to the story, a small website has declared war on the new James Bond film, "Casino Royale," since they have replaced pretty-boy fancy-man Pierce Brosnan with a more haggard, Connery-esque looking Daniel Craig.

SHOCKING.

No, it's not shocking that they've replaced the actor that plays James Bond, that's happened at least three (four?) times. No, it's not shocking that they've picked someone slightly less attractive (Sean Connery wasn't a pretty-boy by any means, and he was still the best Bond by far). And no, it's not shocking that he has light colored hair. Who the fuck cares about that shit.

No, what's shocking is that the Associated Press thinks it's newsworthy to report on these stupid angry websites now. My website looks better than this bullshit. I barely know html, let alone any of that php or flash crap, and I didn't get a call from any reporters when I told everyone that I play a game where I search for cats on Google Image Search. Hey Associated Press, I heard that Maddox updated his website for the first time in several months! Why don't you write a news story about it? Sure people are dying around the world and we can't find a cure for AIDS or cancer or heart disease, the deficit is skyrocketing, and Dick Cheney shot someone in the face, but who cares? SOME PODUNK WEBSITE JUST CALLED FOR A BOYCOTT ON A JAMES BOND MOVIE!

You know what? I don't care how Casino Royale turns out to be. I don't care if Daniel Craig speaks with a lisp or gets a mohawk or rubs bacon grease on his face... I'm going to watch that goddamn movie, and I encourage all of you to do the same. Watch it five times in a row. Spread the word that this is going to be the best movie ever made, even if it's (probably) not. Spite can be a powerful weapon.

Comic graveyard!

2006-02-21T02:39:00.000-08:00

Well, I managed to set up my new sister site, which I did decide to name Comic Graveyard. You can find it over at http://comicgraveyard.comicgenesis.com, which I understand would be quite a mouthful if you had to speak out loud to your computer in order to make it go to websites. I guess if you were blind you might have some kind of system that would work like this, but blind people don't read comics on the internet.

Anyway, I'm going to post one of my classic side comics every day until they're all used up. Afterwards, I'm going to start putting new comics up there, which I can update just about every day, since those damn things are just so easy to make.

OH MY GOD ORCISH SPAM IS BACK

2006-02-16T01:50:00.000-08:00

My brother has resurrected his old comic, Orcish Spam! Dedicated readers already know this as the site where I got my start as a professional shitty-comic creator, but he let it die about two years ago because of some kind of problems.

Well, now it's back, and the new strip is just kicking ass all over the place. All the archives will apparently be up in a day or so, and the site design still needs to be worked on, but who cares? FUCKING ORCISH SPAM IS BACK.

HOLY SHIT.

Eye Are See

2006-02-14T01:56:00.000-08:00

I created an IRC channel just for you, my terrible fans. If you want to get in on the action, go to irc.sorcery.net #biscuitsforbreakfast. If you need a good IRC client, I suggest you go get mIRC.

This is a test to start out... if people post on it without being assholes, I might leave it permanent. However, remember that nothing is sacred in IRC, so you might want to leave any semblance of dignity behind before entering (I had to leave the Bigger Than Cheese channel after people started posting pictures of their scanned penises... but I won't let things get THAT bad).

I'm adding a permanent link to the bar on your right, so... you know. Yup.

EDIT: The best time to show up is from 2:00 pm to 2:00 am on any given day.

Would you believe that phase two has a third phase

2006-02-12T02:52:00.000-08:00

gNew order of business: I have included transcription links to all my comics, courtesy of Ohnorobot.com. So, if you see a link under one of my comics that says "Transcribe this comic!" then by all means click that link and follow the instructions. This will allow certain keywords to show up for people looking for comics with that particular keyword. So if someone was searching for, I don't know, the word TAMPON, Biscuits for Breakfast would probably come up first.

I've also put a little search bar on my site, so if there's a particular comic you want to find (once all my comics have been transcribed), just type in a keyword and a list will come up. It's that easy and/or cheesy.

Also, some news. I still have a bunch of old comics leftover from the old days that most of you haven't seen yet. However, I've been reluctant to post them on my site, since they're completely unrelated to Biscuits for Breakfast. So, I've decided to start up a yet unnamed sister site (working title: Comic Graveyard) to put these on. Once I've posted them all, I'll try to think of something to do with the site (maybe post unrelated comics there in the future! hooray!)

Phase two of phase two

2006-02-11T16:26:00.000-08:00

Things are already going swimmingly. Rabid fan Reclamare (who I suspect was the person who sent me this comic) has created a Comixpedia entry about my comic, which is now permanently listed on the links section to the right. It's actually really good so far, and it has some stuff on there that I never would have thought to mention, meaning that my fans already know more about my comic than I do.
I'd actually prefer it if you guys did all the modifying of that page, though, since you would probably do a better job of it than I would. Plus, it seems kind of pretentious to basically make a Wikipedia article about myself, so there you go.

Regarding the new comic schedule (two comics a week), I haven't decided which day the second comic will typically post, but the first one will most likely be on Sundays. The schedule will probably change from time to time as my own schedule changes, but I'll still be sure to post at least two comics a week. This blog will also continue to post regularly, as it has in the past, so keep on reading it.

Reclamare also mentioned that I should try making fan art for other comics to spread the word around. I've already done one for Sidwood (scroll down) and three for White Ninja (although the third one hasn't been posted yet, and the two that have been posted BOTH have incorrect urls). I still do fan art whenever the opportunity arises, but now that I know it's a business strategy... we'll see what happens.

It's time to step up, fools

2006-02-11T02:36:00.000-08:00

My internet comic has existed for about two years now. I've got a considerable amount of strips at this point, I've made some big changes, and I think that I've finally got my comic where I want it to be artwise. I've got a solid comic that is quite a bit funnier than most of the other comics on Comic Genesis.

It's time to enter phase two of our operations.

Anyone who reads this comic regularly: listen up. I'm updating TWICE A WEEK from now on. I've decided to spend a lot more time drawing comics and a lot less time doing other shit, like nothing, and watching television. I need you guys to try and advertise my site a little bit, though... tell your friends about it, make occasional posts on whatever websites you have, do what you got to do.

The only place I've ever advertised my comic is on Comic Genesis, at the Comic Pitching section. Let me tell you, though, that it's a bit of a dead end. The only people that tend to read that thing are other webcomic artists, and these are people that make comics with names like "Life, Such as it is" and "Not Your Standard College Webcomic." Ooh, what's so deviant about your college webcomic, huh? Does it have a ZANY professor that smokes pot? Maybe a talking dog that's majoring in engineering? You make me sick.

Anyway, that's the deal. Tell people about my comic (I'm looking at YOU, Reclamare), and I'll post two comics a week, guar-ron-teed.

McMahon emails me

2006-02-06T21:30:00.000-08:00

As you might already know, the character McMahon from my comic is partly based off of a real person I know from college named Kyle McMahon. I named the character after him about a year after I started the comic because I realized that this person was like a living embodiment of this character in his mannerisms and body type (although he had real legs, as far as I can tell). Well, he sent me an email the other day, because he apparently has a problem with me.

--------

dear dan:
i'm writing this email to you because i don't like the way you have been portraying my in your comic. i was fine with it at first becuase is was actually a lot like that, but now you're starting to cross the line. i would NOT put a bumper sticker on my car that said "git r' done", and i am offended that you would assume as such. also i do not carry giant bags of trash in my car either, so you were wrong about that as well. i do drive a monster truck though so at least you got that right.
i am not angry at you, i would just like for you to do your research in the future if you want mcmahon to be accurate. i woudl rather swallow an entire glass bottle without chewing it than put a git r done sticker on my car. really, i would swallow the bottle whole/
please apologize.
-kyle mcmahon

-----------

Okay, Kyle, I'm sorry that I assumed you were a fan of Larry the Cable Guy. I do realize that this may have been over the line, so I formally apologize. I'm not altering the comic, though, so if you thought I was going to do something like that, you are wrong to the point that I am going to laugh at you.

Why would someone do this

2006-01-24T16:47:00.000-08:00

For the record, I would like to let all my readers know that I don't have an especially filthy mind. I don't try to find symbolism and sexual connotations in everything or laugh at people when part of a word they're saying sounds kind of like a dirty word. I don't do that.
But take a look at this.

Obviously I have removed anything that would directly signify what kind of cereal this is, but you know what it is. Apparently, this brand of cereal is introducing a new "Cherry Cherry" cereal piece that is shaped like an 8. That's not so odd, but they also seem to have included a little scratch and sniff dealie near the bottom.

Let's take a closer look. See anything wrong with this picture?

Look at it.

LOOK AT IT.

Stop blocking me, stupid

2006-01-23T01:10:00.000-08:00

Apparently I have offended my friend Daggabouche with my comments about his comic, because he has blocked me on the instant messenger program I use. There has been nothing but misery and despair surrounding this comic since its creation... a big, brown miasma of sadness that just spins around and gets gross clumps of sadness in your hair and you can't get it out, not even with a comb.
Anyway, I don't know what his deal is. It's not like I actually insulted the comic or anything (even though plenty of you have). If anything, I was defending the comic. It was funny, and by god, it was plenty better than this shit or this shit (which still seems to be on the top ten list for some goddamn reason). I think you chumps are just spoiled now that I'm drawing the comic, and not doing the crappy pixel-art thing. Daggabouche's comic compared to my comic a little better back in those days, but you folks don't seem to be into that anymore.
Anyway, if you're reading this, Daggabouche, you should stop blocking me. I might even consider publishing your guest comics with your original, more offensive name instead of "Daggabouche."

EDIT: Look at this cool picture I made.

Google Cat

2006-01-17T02:47:00.000-08:00

As an undergraduate, my brother Josh invented a game with his roommate called "Cat." The basis of the game was that each played would think of a term to be inputted into Google Image Search, and whoever managed to produce the most results without eventually getting a photo of a cat was deemed the winner. Since idiots always like to post pictures of their cats on the internet, it is almost impossible to come up with a term that will not get you a cat. Here are a few additional rules for those of you that want to play this game because you have no life:
-Pornographic results are an automatic disqualification ( it is recommended that you play this game with a filter on)
-Drawings of cats do not count, but do not necessarily lead to disqualification
-Any results that are drawn in "furry" style (half animal, half person) automatically disqualify the term, since it counts as pornography for being weird and disturbing
-The loser has to wear a paper hat with the words "I lost at cat" for an entire day, and may not explain the hat to anyone

This can also be played as a drinking game, in which the players must drink one beer for every five pages of photos that come up without a cat. This is probably the least fun drinking game to play, but you'll play it anyway because you're such a loser.

This is a four-part post

2006-01-16T02:47:00.000-08:00

There's an old rule (I think it was started in the mid-nineties) that applies directly to my current situation: when you're busy with work or school, you want to do nothing but draw comics, but when you've got unlimited free time, you just want to sit around. I'm not exactly sure why this is, but the fact remains that I've basically been drawing one comic for about three weeks now, and I don't even like it very much (it will be posted tomorrow). There have also been more obvious problems such as my computer meltdown and the fact that I haven't reinstalled Photoshop yet, but those are pretty much out of the way by now. I've also found a way to streamline my comic production in the future, so look out for comics to possibly come out on time for once (I want to say that I'll be able to make more that one a week, but I'm not guaranteeing anything... I'm sure that all four of you are wetting your pants with excitement about this).

And of course, Comic Genesis (formerly Keenspace) has welcomed my return by redesigning its site yet again, making it load even slower than before. They've also added a new login button that doesn't do anything, because it doesn't let you login in the same way that it used to. One of the higher-ups in the Comic Genesis heirarchy explains it as this in the forums:

"Okay, there's been some confusion on the two siteadmins. So, I'm going to color-classify them.

The old bluish Siteadmin is at http://siteadmin.comicgenesis.com:8080 and looks bluish/cyan with bits of green. This you log in with your comic account -- and for some folks it's a bit quiry to get into.

The new red Siteadmin is at http://siteadmin.comicgenesis.com and looks all red. This you do not use your comic account on. You use your forum account to get in, and then attach your comic to it. You also need to use this red Siteadmin to see all your PREMIUM area files by the webserver, but that's something for later."

In other words, the old login button that was useful is nowhere to be found on the main site, and has been replaced with a new login button that doesn't do anything yet, and the only way to login is to read this forum post. Of course, rather than being understanding to their artists' concerns, they say this:

"Please, if you can't get into one and want to post about it, please tell us which one you're having problems with, and try the other one!"

In other words, it's your fault for being confused, not their fault for being confusing.

Also, in order to sate their own hubris (I've been taking writing classes), they went ahead and "threw the switch" and forced all their artists to include the lame "comicgenesis" tag on their sites instead of the cozy old "keenspace" one, meaning a lot a artists (including myself) had to clean up a lot of broken pages to make up for this. Comic Genesis defended their actions here by stating that "you all had your warning it was comming, and now it's happened." It's important to them that people who read my comic KNOW that my host site is now called Comic Genesis. Important! HEY! ARE YOU PAYING ATTENTION? YOU BETTER PAY SOME GODDAMN ATTENTION BECAUSE IT'S NOT KEENSPACE ANYMORE! YOU HEAR THAT? IT'S COMIC GENESIS, YOU DUMB ASSHOLES!

Finally, I've been getting a lot of complaints about the current comic being extraordinarily bad. One fan by the name of "Scurvy" remarked that the comic "sucks," and that I am an "idiot" for letting it stay up for any amount of time, let alone several weeks. Let me just go on the record as saying that this kind of talk should be discouraged as a result of it being not very nice. You should be grateful that I put up anything at all, let alone this quality comic about a kid that fails ESP class for not being good at ESP. Shame on you.

Yes, I am still alive

2005-12-22T02:20:00.000-08:00

You know, theoretically, I should be drawing more comics while I'm on my holiday break (I prefer to say "holiday" so as not to offend all you grouchy old atheists and Hindus). I mean, I have all this free time, so it's like there should be more comics, but there are obviously less. The reason for this is that I have become the laziest man on the planet in the last week or two. I have sunk into a quicksand-like pit of laziness, and the only way for me to claw my way out is to cut off my legs, or maybe float a balloon with a rock tied to it toward a nearby vine of productivity and shoot it with a blowgun that I constructed from a bamboo shoot so that the rock dislodges the vine. The bamboo shoot represents something, but I'm too lazy to think of what that might be at this point.
Possible solutions to this problem might include getting screamed at by a really shrill person, jumping into a bathtub filled with ice water, or getting punched in the stomach every time I don't draw a comic, which is like every second. Now that I think about it, I believe that my laziness can be directly attributed to how warm I am at any given moment. It's been like five degrees for the last month here in Spokane, and now that the temperature has finally gone up, I suddenly want to draw comics again (because we don't have our furnace on at full blast all the time).

I wonder if you're allowed to patent speculations. If Jesus had done that, we wouldn't have all these cultists trying to commit suicide all the time.

Why are they trying to update King Kong with modern music

2005-12-09T23:18:00.000-08:00

Well, in addition to having finals earlier this week (I had planned for there to be a new comic today), my hard drive finally up and died, meaning I had to go buy another one. Fortunately, it's an upgrade from an 80 gig to a 200 gig hard drive, so whatever. I'll have a new comic up as soon as possible, maybe tomorrow. Go ahead and look at my front page and keep on pressing the update button every five seconds until your heart stops, because it's not like I can stop you or anything.

Also, they're playing Matchbox 20 music in the previews for King Kong. Why don't I just shoot myself.

You like tricks, Chris? It's a quarter in your ear, bitch

2005-11-29T23:38:00.000-08:00

I have some hot topics for you people today. They are more like news topics, though, not stores where goths buy beads, so you might want to keep reading.

No, really. Go ahead and keep reading.

First of all, my brother Josh (also known as Jdude on the comments section) has decided to restart his old webcomic, Orcish Spam. It was a Dungeons and Dragons-related comic, but it was really funny, and you didn't necessarily have to play Dungeons and Dragons to think so, either. How many Dungeons and Dragons comics can you seriously say that about? None, that's how many. I'll tell you more about it later when Keenspace decides to get off its ass and answer his request for a site, so keep on truckin'. Whatever that means.

Also, Josh and I are working together on an epic unnamed comic about robots. Josh is drawing it, and I'm writing it. We've got about 5-6 comics drawn up, but we still haven't decided on a name. The working title is "The Dravo Project," but that's probably not what we're going to call it. I don't know. We might. Whatever. Here's a sneak preview of the first comic, so you don't all think I'm just making shit up. This is copyrighted by Josh and me, so don't steal it and try to sell it to Dark Horse or anything, or we will TOTALLY sue you.

Click the picture for a larger version

Let's see, what else... oh yeah. I registered the domain name for http://www.biscuitsforbreakfast.com the other day, so just type that in and it will take you to my comic site. Take THAT, established painter G. Harvey.

THIS IS FUCKING BULLSHIT

2005-11-27T00:50:00.000-08:00

Okay, I don't like to talk about politics much (especially on the internet), and I ESPECIALLY don't like to have any politics associated with my comic, but this is the goddamn line. As you know, I'm good friends with Mike Ramsey, who draws/drew the comic Sidwood. Though he hasn't been updating his site at all for quite a while now, he has been actively drawing political cartoons for his college paper, the State News. He has actually generated an impressive amount of cartoons over the last few months, and he tells me he will someday put all those comics on his old website once he gets the go-ahead from his editor. That's not the issue.

On November 11, Ramsey published this comic in the State News. As you might imagine, this caused a furor amongst the College Republicans, who proceeded to flood the paper with angry letters calling for Ramsey's resignation. They even held a protest outside his office. I just had to send in a letter (under my, uh, pseudonym) spouting all kinds of angry liberal nonsense defending him.

Eventually, Ramsey had to write a column defending himself because these people had obviously misinterpreted his cartoon. At that point, the argument seemed to shift from "Ramsey is unpatriotic and he doesn't support our troops and he should be fired" to "Ramsey's cartoon, while putting forth a valid point, is immature and he should still be fired" to "The newspaper defending Ramsey's cartoon is hiding behind the First Amendment and we pay for your newspaper so you'd better not challenge our opinions at all or we'll FUCKING SHUT YOU DOWN."

Let me tell you something right here and now: political cartoonists exist to provoke thought. That's why they're there. They can say more with a picture of an animal with some word like "Congress" tattooed across it than a columnist could say in 5,000 words. You don't like something a political cartoonist is saying? Cry me a fucking river. This is America.

And how do you "hide behind the First Amendment," anyway? This isn't like some privilege or something that you can sometimes have and sometimes not have, it's a fundamental right. That's why it's at the very top of the Constitution. Yes, the State News is being paid for by the students, but this is a paper for a college in Michigan. Colleges tend to be breeding grounds for liberals anyway (it must have something to do with all the education going around), but a Michigan college? Beam me up.

Of course, these people have their own right to free speech, and they can say whatever dumbass thing they want. However, when you're exercising your own free speech to explain why someone else shouldn't be able to, you're pretty much just full of shit right there.

Fun Present Ideas from Radio Commercials

2005-11-21T11:33:00.000-08:00

It's almost Thanksgiving, and you know what that means: time to start thinking about Christmas gifts for your loved ones! That's right, it's around this part of the year that people start taking time out of their busy schedule of working themselves into an early grave to fret about how they'll be able to afford presents for their greedy, unloving children. Well, I was listening to the radio on my drive home today, and the commercials gave me some great ideas for presents that you can get that I'm sure your kids or your ugly spouses will just "love." Get some pens and a pad of paper and write all of these down, but remember, these all came from real radio advertisements, so I can't take any of the credit!

-Tesoro Gift Cards
You'll be filled with pride upon hearing the joyous cries of your children after they've received their Tesoro Gift Cards. "OH BOY MOMMY YOU GOT ME A $15 GAS STATION CARD! Now I can afford half a tank of gas, and maybe an old gas station sandwich!" Remember, these cards are renewable, so they can put more money into it themselves instead of just paying cash at the pump, because everyone knows that cards are more fun.

-Scratch Tickets
Oh boy, scratch tickets! The gift that might keep on giving if you're really really lucky! "THANKS FOR THE SCRATCH TICKETS, GRANDPA! You really must have dipped into your retirement fund for these! I mean, two dollars?!? I'm sure the ten minutes of work you had to do for these must have been really grueling!"
This present is one of the few gifts that has the potential to either be a really shitty gift or a really really really REALLY great gift... but it's more likely to be the shittiest gift anyone will ever receive. Don't give up hope, though!

-Tickets to go see the Trans-Siberian Orchestra
The only thing better than classical music is classical music played on synthesizers by a band that sounds like 80's butt rock.

-A coupon for one free drink
That's right, you can get a free drink at the Big Easy! This present is the funniest if you put it in a really big box filled with packing peanuts so the kids have to search for it for like fifteen minutes. When they find it and look up at you with their intent little faces, be sure to grin at them and slowly nod your head.

-$10 gift certificate to Toys R Us
The kids will be genuinely excited by this at first because they think that it means that they will get to pick out some of their own presents. Unfortunately for them, they still don't have any sense of how much things cost, and will only get to buy like one pack of Pokemon cards or whatever shit those little idiots are wasting your money on these days. Be sure to promptly follow up on this gift with the next:

-A lecture on the value of a dollar, and the "real reason for the season"
I heard this idea on a Christian Rock station as I was scanning for something that wasn't commercials. If your kids are disappointed by any of their presents (especially that last one), be sure to remind them that presents are very expensive, and that the meager amounts of money that they think is "a lot" could never be used to buy anything of value anyway. Besides, Christmas is really about loving Jesus anyway so why don't you kids shut up or we'll all become Jehovah's Witnesses and you won't get any presents at all next year.

So think first the next time you criticize radio stations for playing sub-par music. They're only trying to HELP you, and the least you can do is help their advertisers by buying stupid shit for your kids instead of real presents.

Fuckin' computer shit goddammit

2005-11-14T12:43:00.000-08:00

Well, due to some embarrassing computer problems, I lost everything on my hard drive. All my stolen mp3s, all my jpegs, my entire comic archive... everything. Five years of collecting, all gone.

My computer had been freezing up occasionally for about a month now, and it was happening more and more often. Finally, it got to the point where I couldn't even boot up Windows anymore, and I had to just reformat the entire thing. Of course, in retrospect I could have taken the hard drive out and put my files on another computer before doing this, but I'm not real good at the whole "thinking" thing, so it's all gone.
Anyway, I reformatted the computer and reinstalled Windows, and it worked for about six hours last night (I had just finished installing all the important programs from discs and such) before it crashed again and refused to even boot up the computer. There was apparently a "disk read error," and I couldn't even reformat the computer. I decided to open up the side of my computer to see if some wire had come loose or something. Frankly, I was surprised by what I found.

A huge cloud of dust literally billowed out of the side of the computer. I coughed and cleared the air to get a closer look at the guts inside, realizing that dirt and hair had clumped all over every single surface. The fans were clogged, the motherboard was caked with dirt, and the underside of my main hard drive looked like a cracker smeared with cream cheese. I made the immediate mistake of blowing as hard as I could into the machine, realizing afterwards that I probably should have been wearing some goggles and a face mask first. I mean, the insides of computer are supposed to get dusty (one of my previous computers appeared to have a mouse living in it), but this was just too much.
My computer works just fine now, after clearing all that crap out of there, but I'll never get my files back. I really didn't need this, especially after having had the flu for like a week... but at least I didn't have to have the computer replaced.

Fun Facts!

2005-11-13T02:10:00.000-08:00

Did you know...

- ...that Vanity Fair is not actually a ladies magazine? It is actually a legitimate publication with actual articles that people write.

- ...that it is not okay to make cheesy remakes of good songs for commercials?

- ...that it is okay to be racist against people from other countries if they are telemarketers? It's true. While it's not okay to call a Chinese person "Dr. Dong" (this is very not okay), it is perfectly fine to ask an Indian person why he got a job talking to Americans for a living when he clearly can't speak English.

- ...that bilingual dictionaries don't have swear words? People from other countries don't want you dirty Americans coming to THEIR country and saying "ha ha damn it you suck Frenchie where da beers at." No one likes this.

- ...that Fox cancelled Arrested Development? Fox executives apparently think that changing a show's schedule over and over and not telling anyone should get a show BETTER ratings, and when Arrested Development failed to do this, it got "the axe."

- ...that Axe Body Spray actually smells a lot like dog farts? A guy walked past me the other day and I asked him if a dog had blasted liquid dog poop all over his clothes the previous night. He told me no, he was just wearing an entire can of Axe body spray. The commercials for that product make it out to be like this super intense aphrodesiac or something that makes ladies just cling to you, and yet last I checked, there were absolutely no ladies walking around in the yard behind my house rubbing crusty turds against their naked bodies.

- ...that Boston Market smells a lot like Axe Body Spray?

- ...that Rudy isn't really that great of a movie? It's a cancer movie. You want to watch that movie like fifty times, go turn on the Lifetime Channel, you sissies. Go play some more football, you fancy-men.

- ...that Green Day isn't allowed to name "The Clash" as one of their main influences? That is just ludicrous.

- ...that Robitussin keeps you awake? It's like 2:30 in the morning, and my head feels like it's going to explode, but I'm still not asleep. This is such bullshit.

- ...that the Simpsons was actually cancelled back in 1999? Yeah, the writers and producers all agreed, "Yeah, we've made enough episodes. Let's just stop making the show now while it's still at least marginally good so it will be remembered for its ten years of hilarious comedy, and not it's additional 6-10 years of awkward, poorly-thought-out skuldrudgery once we've fired all our good writers and run out of ideas." This was obviously a very good idea.

Naked Ladies Part Deux

2005-11-10T10:58:00.000-08:00

The following is an actual email I got from a fellow webcomic artist whose name has been removed partly to protect his privacy, and partly because I don't want him to get any extra publicity (for reasons you will see below).

----------------------------------

Dear Alex Keene, (if that is your real name)(ed: no, it isn't)

I am writing this open letter to you in response to criticisms that you have made about webcomics on the periphery as it were. I refer in particular to your criticism of the use of female breasts as marketing tools for webcomics. As I the author and artist of one such webcomic that is guilty of applying such a strategy, I feel that I must defend my actions, as well as those of my fellows

I have two key reasons for featuring gratuitous amounts of overexposed female flesh in my comic, XXXXXXXXXXXX. Firstly, I can only assume that my comic is of second-rate quality, due to the extremely low level of readership. Because of this, I feel it is necessary to resort to the abovementioned cheap marketing strategy, in the hopes that this will attract a much-needed audience, even if this hypothetical audience will consist largely of prepubescent boys.

Secondly, if feel that as an artist, it is a fundamental property of my work that it reflects my inner being. The overabundant presence of breasts in my comic is symptomatic of my profound deep-rooted desire to procreate.

I hope this will strengthen your sympathy and understanding for the authors of webcomics that rely on sex to attract readership.

Thank you for your time,

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

---------------------------------------

So, Mr. X wants me to back down from my belief that boobies in comics = a cop out because:
1. He doesn't have enough readers
2. He ain't one o' them homos

First of all, if you don't have enough readers, there is a multitude of ways for you to remedy that problem that don't involve obligatory nudity. I mean, Napoleon Dynamite was rated fucking PG, and that shit got those dudes a mess of fuckin' cash moneys.
Secondly, I ain't one o' them homos neither, but that doesn't mean that I don't have any self-restraint. While an artist's work does tend to mirror the artist in a way, throwing boobs into your comic for the hell of it just makes you look like one of those prepubescent boys you spoke of. Don't you have any self-respect? What if your grandma decided to read your comic? I can just see her now: "Oh deary me I'm going to go look at my grandson's comic OH LORDY THERE ARE BOOBIES HERE I WILL HAVE A HEART ATTACK 23 SKIDDOO!" Have a little respect for your grandma.
You see this kind of shit all the time in movies too. Directors are notorious for adding completely unnecessary sex scenes just to give their shitty movies an R rating. R ratings = more stupid douchebags coming to see your shitty movie. You see what I'm getting at?

I want my comic to live or die by my talent alone. If that means I get less readers because I didn't sell out to the "man," then so be it.

I stole this idea from a popular website

2005-11-09T17:43:00.000-08:00

I'm switching to a three-panel format for a while, since it lets me make twice as many comics each week. Look for another comic this Friday. Or you could just be a dick and not look for it. Don't be such a dick.

Now, since I'm sick and I don't feel like doing anything creative, here's another brilliant transcript between professional somethingorother Mike Ramsey and myself.

[19:42] Ramsey: i wish i was any good at plots
[19:42] Ramsey: i want to get my characters away from college
[19:42] Ramsey: something random
[19:43] Valuedan: so do it
[19:43] Ramsey: alright
[19:43] Ramsey: okay, how's this
[19:43] Valuedan: have your characters all drop out
[19:43] Valuedan: and become crackheads in the streets of detroit
[19:43] Ramsey: wait
[19:43] Ramsey: they take a weekend trip to canada so they can get hammered legally
[19:44] Valuedan: and they accidentally kill a prostitute
[19:44] Ramsey: but they get so copiously drunk they lose all their money and their car
[19:44] Ramsey: somehow
[19:44] Valuedan: and they have to get jobs as hired killers
[19:44] Ramsey: no
[19:44] Ramsey: stop turning it in that direction!
[19:45] Valuedan: then they kill the president and make twenty million dollars

VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE DO IT DO IT VOTE

2005-11-02T22:55:00.000-08:00

This is an emergency: go vote for me RIGHT NOW if you haven't already. If you have friends that know what the internet is, tell them to go vote for me too. This is one of those rare moments where the Web Comics List vote count resets, and votes are worth a lot more than usual, so vote early and vote often. Party bosses will arrive soon to look over your shoulder and make sure you do it.

On a semi-related note, Beaver and Steve only has one Sonic the Hedgehog comic ahead of it in the rankings. Go vote for that, too (Beaver and Steve, not the Sonic comic).

Radio radio

2005-10-31T12:34:00.000-08:00

Today's comic pretty much explains how I feel about the radio. I argued with an acquaintance of mine recently about whether or not it was my right to say that "just about everything on the radio is a huge load of horseshit." His argument was basically that "this music wouldn't exist if people didn't want to listen to it, so you're basically being an elitist by saying that they have bad taste in music."
Am I out of line here by saying that "Hollaback Girl" is a really annoying song? Am I being politically incorrect somehow by saying that this music is terrible? Do I need some kind of a fucking badge in order to voice my opinion about something?

Okay, I'm going to lay down the law right here and now. "Hollaback Girl" is a shitty song, and if you have ever listened to it and enjoyed it, you are a shitty person. Country music is vile jingoistic trash now... or at least it is when its artists aren't singing about how they like to drive trucks. Nobody cares about your goddamn trucks, okay?
Rap has been wussified. What happened to the songs about shooting people on the street? Even Fifty Cent, who is supposed to be like this hardcore gangster or something, is writing shit like this:
"You can find me in the club, bottle full of bub, look mami i got the extacey in to taken drugs, im in there having sex i aint into maken love, so come give me a hug, if u in there gettin rubbed"
That's right, the lyrics sheet has the letter "u" instead of the word "you." Fifty Cent has the lyrical abilities of some 13-year-old kid from Nebraska that posts his amateur rap lyrics on some Insane Clown Posse messageboard. You just need to add the word "juggalo" or "faygo" in there and you're all set.
And what rock do I have to listen to? All they play on the radio is either this Pennywise or Green Day complaint rock shit, unless you want to go the classic rock direction, meaning 80's butt rock with an occasional Led Zeppelin song thrown in, but never one of the good ones. I mean, why are they playing butt rock? It's called butt rock for a good reason: because it sounds like music that was produced from a butt.

Disagree with that, punks.

Some kind of mail from people

2005-10-24T11:10:00.000-07:00

TobyFire16 writes:
"hey danny alex keene or whatever you name is, how come you talk like you do on your website? are you trying to be a hipster by talking like that"

Jeez, I hope not. I don't even really know what a hipster is. Let's check out our old friend "Dictionary.com" to find out.

"hip·ster (hpstr)
n. Slang
One who is exceptionally aware of or interested in the latest trends and tastes, especially a devotee of modern jazz."

MODERN JAZZ? Fuck you, TobyFire! I'll be singing scat at your funeral, douche! Doodily bop do doo bopp she bop she YOU SUCK.

--------

Ashley writes:
"Hey, I like the new comic. Did you get someone else to start drawing for you?"

I couldn't tell if this person was trying to be witty or if she actually thought someone else was drawing for me. Either way, that's not a very polite thing for you to say to someone. Where's YOUR comic, Ashley? How well drawn is it? Wait, what's that? It DOESN'T EXIST?
FACED.

--------

Joe writes:
"your website looks kind of different but there are a few pictures different, if that is the website mike ramsey made for you you should get your momey back :)"

Joe, first of all, dudes should not send smileys to other dudes. Second of all, this is definitely not the website that Mike Ramsey made for me... I just changed a few pictures. Ramsey's site will probably have all these frames and things that make it look like a website from 1995, so you'll know it when you see it. Third of all, I'm not paying Ramsey jack (which may account for the fact that he's taking a really long time). Even if I were paying him, I wouldn't pay him in "momey."

--------

Brenda Phillips writes:

"sщpиr sоzи yтыr mаnhффd "

This is all I'm posting from this person because it's obviously junk mail and I'm not opening it. Russians everywhere should be proud to know that their alphabet is being used to bypass junk mail filters.
Besides, Brenda Phillips, junk mail making references to one's "manhood" is so old hat. You think anyone falls for that? What happened to those emails that just said "hey" or "Your shipment of A-Team vanity plates has arrived?" Those were tricky.

Big news

2005-10-19T17:06:00.000-07:00

Have you heard the news, man? Sure, you might have heard that a warrant has just been issued for Tom Delay's arrest, or that Harriet Miers would support a constitutional ban on abortion... but I've got the real news right here. You won't hear this on any of the official news sources, either. Hot off the presses.

Comcast has officially classified "Hackers" as a comedy.

Is this a mistake? Is this just another random blunder that Comcast so often makes due to gross ineptitude? Or could it be that Comcast finally knows what it's doing?

FREE MUMIA!

2005-10-15T22:14:00.000-07:00

I don't tend to rant a lot on this thing (I mean, I do sometimes). I don't like to think of myself as one of those internet assholes whose opinion is somehow better than everyone elses because I have my very own official website. I like to leave that kind of thing to people who do it professionally. There's something that really pisses me off though, and hell, what better place to whine about it than on a blog?
As you probably know, there's a vote button on my site that gives me a higher rank on www.webcomicslist.com. I finally made it onto the top 100 list for some reason (I jumped from something like 112 to 86 in one day) when I posted my most recent comic. In other words, according to the statistics at the time of this posting, I am officially better than this comic, but I'm not as good as this comic. I'm not bitter about being a lower rank than a Sonic the Hedgehog ripoff comic, because even though it's been a year, I'm still pretty new at this. What really rankles my shingles (I just made that up because I'm a spectacular writer) is that a Sonic the Hedgehog comic is ahead of Beaver and Steve. As you might know by now, Beaver and Steve is actually funny. Very funny. I've actually laughed out loud at that comic, and I don't laugh out loud at comics, especially ones that are on the fucking internet.
And you know what? There are THREE Sonic the Hedgehog comics ahead of it! SONIC THE GODDAMN HEDGEHOG. You know what I think about I think about people that draw comics that utilize a popular video game character? This is what I fucking think of them.

I mean, I can deal with anime comics, I can deal with stick figures, and god help me, I can even deal with furry comics, but when a comic that stars Sonic the Hedgehog gets into the top ten of ANY list, that's when you know that something has gone terribly wrong with society.
You know what I want you all to go do? Go to www.beaverandsteve.com and vote for it. Right now. Vote for it every day in fact. Make sure it stays on the top ten, because Christ Almighty, it deserves to be ahead of anything called "InSONICnia."

This is not a guest comic at all

2005-10-14T14:12:00.000-07:00

My brother's first reaction upon looking at my new comic was "Ooh, guest comic! I thought you said YOU drew this one." My brother is totally a sucker, though, because I DREW IT. I decided to draw the panels a lot bigger before scanning the thing, and I also made darker outlines around the characters. My brother and all the rest of you jerks who thought it was a guest comic can go suck it. That includes YOU, Muqtada al-Sadr , you stupid idiot. You don't know anything.

Rush

2005-10-05T15:43:00.000-07:00

If you ever have to listen to any music by the band Rush, be sure to look at this picture while you do it:

Try it. You may be pleasantly surprised.

Unhappiness is webcomics

2005-10-04T20:22:00.000-07:00

I'm pretty sure this has been said, like, a million times by now, but most webcomics out there are very bad, especially near the beginning. Go check out any Keenspace comic... there's probably about a 90% chance that it will suck balls. However, there are plenty of good comics out there that are confused as being bad comics for various reasons, and I'm going to tell you about them right now, speaking as a person who pretty much just uses the internet to read webcomics.

First of all, every comic has an awkward starting period. Either the artwork starts out not looking so good, or the comic isn't especially funny, whatever. These things happen. It takes some time for the artist to get into his groove and ultimately do what he actually wants to do. Some webcomics have longer awkward periods than others (I, for example, am still in my awkward artwork phase, but I like to think that I've grown out of my awkward writing phase). Hell, one of my favorite webcartoonists, Jeffery Rowland, didn't really get out of his awkward stage until he stopped doing his original comic. I usually like to give comics some leeway, timewise, before I judge them one way or another for this reason.

Another potential problem is that people will scan comics, see the one on the front page, and not understand what is going on in the storyline. I'm not suggesting that people limit their comics to one-shot jokes that anyone could get on face value, but it does pose a problem. In order for anyone to get the joke on the front page (which is potentially hilarious in context), the reader has to scan through all the other comics, and if your first comic looks something like this, chances are that they'll be instantly turned off.

How do you tell which comic you should give a chance? Here are the guidelines you can follow if you want to find the comics that may have some potential:

-They are interestingly drawn. Too many comics tend to look like the author just picked up some book on how to draw anime. Even if the comic isn't necessarily spectacular-looking, if the style is different than what you're normally used to seeing, you ought to give it a chance. The author will probably improve with time, anyway. A good example you should go check out is Stolle Bengtsson, unless you're easily disturbed, or you're prejudiced against foreigners.

-They don't look like Penny-Arcade. Penny-Arcade is funny and all, but everyone that knows how to draw is copying their drawing style; when you see that kind of art, you can pretty much assume that the humor is going to be similar to Penny-Arcade's, but more half-baked and unoriginal. And speaking of Penny-Arcade, that brings us to the next guideline...

-They aren't about videogames. Again, Penny-Arcade has cornered the market on this one, and to be honest, they're pretty much the only ones that do it right.

-They aren't boring Mary Worth-style relationship comics. You can pretty much recognize these right away without much trouble. If you have any doubts, try finding the comic's archive section, go about halfway down the list, and then read through four or five strips. If it's just some dude talking to some chick about buying a coffee pot without any jokes or action thrown in to spice it up, you can probably ignore this comic altogether. You may have noticed by now that I haven't mentioned that "the comic should be well drawn" yet, and for good reason: the most well-drawn comics tend to be boring Mary Worth-style relationship comics. Being a good artist doesn't necessarily make you a good writer (and vice versa).

-They aren't anime (or anime-style). I know I already mentioned anime earlier, but if you're reading an anime comic and it doesn't have any naked ladies on it, it probably doesn't have any redeeming value at all. If you think I'm being shallow by saying this, go read a few of them and then get back to me. If you find one that is worth my time, I'd be very willing to check out your notable exception.

Anyway, there are other guidelines, but they probably vary from person to person. These are the important ones, and I think I have the authority to say so because I'm like some kind of big time comic artist who makes tons of money by posting comics without spending any of my own money on bandwidth.

Comic Genesis? More like Comic GeneSHITS.

2005-10-03T18:23:00.000-07:00

My comic server, Keenspace (also known as "Comic Genesis" for total losers), seriously gets slower every time I update my comic. It used to take a half-hour, tops. Now it literally takes hours to update, and sometimes it won't update for at least a day. It's almost enough of an inconvenience to make me just go and set up my own server with old Apple II computers so that when people load up my comic, they get an error message that says something like "what is a html" or "I just don't understand all these jpegs." Also maybe it will show up as one of those ASCII pictures that moves.

What are my actual news? I'm taking a Russian class, so if anybody out there knows the language and wants to help teach a dude Russian, that's word because you know you can't touch this.

Go look at that picture of the tiger

2005-09-28T10:00:00.000-07:00

The most recent thing that I put up on the site will soon be replaced by an actual comic, and will no longer exist at that point, so you better go look at it long and hard before it's gone. Just stare at that picture for as long as you can and occasionally hit the refresh button until the picture changes. Print it out if you want. It's a pretty good picture.

On an unrelated note, I'm back in school now, which (along with the fact that I spilled coffee on four different incarnations of the same goddamn comic) is mostly to account for my late-itude. I'm going to find a nice, well-lit place to draw today (that has no coffee nearby) and just power-draw the hell out of that comic. Then I will put it on the floor and point at it and shout "You drawn!"

Regarding the new website design, unless I start getting emails from Liberty Cabbage real soon, I'm going to have to go with a different website. Mike Ramsey has offered to make me a website himself just to spite Liberty Cabbage, since he apparently doesn't like him too much. Whatever. Someone had just better make me a damn website pretty damn soon, dammit.

Damn man I'm getting all these votes

2005-09-13T00:44:00.000-07:00

Okay, I don't understand something. For some reason, my vote count is the highest that it's been since May (which was my site's peak). At last check, it was up to about 189, and I haven't been able to break 200 for quite a while. The reason this is weird is that it happened while I was on my about-two-weeks-long break. Not that I'm complaining, of course... it's just weird. Do people prefer it when I'm not updating or something? Because that would be insulting.

I'll have a new site design in the near future, thanks to the author of Freedom Fries, who won my Make-Me-A-Website Contest by actually sending me an email. He gets a free t-shirt out of the deal, and will probably be in one of my comics in the near future, so good on him. If you tried to send me an email, but your computer broke, and you just wrote "email" on an envelope and put it in the mailbox, I probably didn't get it, so sorry, you don't win. I'll probably hold more contests in the future which will get you free t-shirts, but only if I'm really lazy and I want other people to do things for me.

This is an experiment

2005-09-12T01:03:00.000-07:00

I just turned the comments function back on. This is mostly just to see if I get a bunch more spam from people selling diet pills like last time. If things go well, I'll leave it this way.

By the way, please, no joke posts pretending to be spam. It's funny and all, but a few of those were a bit to realistic for my tastes.

A word with Mike Ramsey

2005-09-11T01:46:00.000-07:00

I don't feel especially inspired at the moment, so today's news update will just be a transcript of an AIM conversation between me and Mike Ramsey, who still won't update his website.

[18:55] Valuedan: The Sci-Fi Channel is having an all-Bruce Campbell day
[18:56] MikeRamsey: nice
[18:58] Valuedan: Including that really shitty "Alien Apocalypse" movie
[18:59] MikeRamsey: if by shitty you mean awesome
[18:59] Valuedan: That's not what I mean at all
[18:59] Valuedan: Ooh, they're showing "The Man With The Screaming Brain" soon
[19:00] Valuedan: I don't know what their schedule is over on the East Coast, but you should try to watch it
[19:00] MikeRamsey: my TV's fucked anyway
[19:00] Valuedan: That's what you get for trying to have sex with your TV
[19:00] MikeRamsey: don't judge me
[19:00] MikeRamsey: you'll never understand our love
[19:00] Valuedan: Ha ha did you get that joke back there it was pretty funny
[19:01] Valuedan: Oh god, Alien Apocalypse is SO BAD
[19:08] MikeRamsey: says you
[19:08] Valuedan: Are you watching it?
[19:08] Valuedan: No?
[19:08] MikeRamsey: no
[19:08] Valuedan: Then be QUIET!
[19:09] MikeRamsey: touché
[19:10] Valuedan: Replace the t with a d
[19:10] Valuedan: Huhuhuhuhuhuh

The conversation continued to degenerate after that. I would include more, but you can probably guess how it turned out.

Go fuck yourself, Internet.

2005-08-30T23:31:00.000-07:00

Some of you might have noticed by now, but I thought it was important to mention that I had to change the comments policy on this blog because a ton of spammers started making anonymous comments, and I ain't having none of that shit. So, if any of you want to contact me or say some crap about whatever kinda crap I don't know, you'll have to go get a blogger account to do so. Or if you want to go the old-fashioned way, don't hesitate to email me at valuedan@comcast.net. I'm still in the phase where I'm just famous enough to be able to respond to all the emails that are sent to me, so you will almost definitely get a response. Be sure to send emails with my name in it, or something that would let me know you're not some scammer trying to sell me scallops or Viagra or something.

Ahem... on an unrelated note, I'm going to Maryland this Labor Day weekend to visit my internet-only friend Daggabouche for the first time. It is very surreal to suddenly realize that a person you've only talked to on the internet is actually a real live person that has blood and probably feces inside him. It really says something about one's perception of existence itself, and the secret inner belief that nothing really exists until you're actually looking right at it. Hooray for quasi-nihilism!

Why does I take so long

2005-08-29T17:26:00.000-07:00

Every once in a while, some douchebag will come up to me and say "HAY DAN HOW COME YOU TAKE SO LONG TO MAKE COMICS" and not end his sentence with a question mark. I can tell that he doesn't end his sentence with a question mark at this point because his voice doesn't go up at the end. Also, the whole sentence is spoken in a monotone fashion, and when he finishes the sentence, he stands there with his mouth hanging wide open. This happens maybe once a month.

Anyway, I'd like to answer this question for all of you right now, so there will be no more of this nonsense. I will demonstrate exactly what happens when I am given less than a week to make new comics. Ready? It's coming.

I hope you enjoyed reading that as much as I did making it. Oh wait, I think I still have another one left in me...

There. All the hilarity of Toothpaste For Dinner, and none of the artistic talent. The next time any one of you gets the urge to complain about my lack of updates, just look at this post, and I'm sure all your concerns will be alleviated.

You've got an arm off!

2005-08-27T04:46:00.000-07:00

I'm finally back from Texas. I spent about six hours on the plane on the way to Spokane today, which is apparently a long time by stewardess standards, since by the end of the flight they were like "Why are you still here? This is like the 4th can of Coke I've served you! WHY DIDN'T YOU GET OFF IN OAKLAND?!?" But I kid the stewardesses.
When you're sitting on a plane for a long time without any mental stimulus, you tend to get deeply philosophical about things that are just totally stupid. Like, I was thinking about the social implications of losing an arm at a young age as opposed to only losing part of your arm and having a nub sticking off your body. When you lose your entire arm, or sustain a similar injury, it's almost as if you've earned some sort of street cred as a human. People treat you like you've somehow experienced more in your life, and that you're a better person because of it, even though if you'd actually lost your arm you'd probably get pretty annoyed if people treated you like that.
On the other hand, if you only lost part of your arm and you just had a nub, that would be a completely different situation. A nub indicates a sad story, rather than a cool disfigurement. Any coolness is immediately lost by the grossness of the nub, and besides, it only reminds other people of the fragility of life, and that the exact same thing could easily happen to them. You are an outcast when you have a nub.
When you have a robot hand or a claw, though, you're the life of the fucking party. Everybody wants to be friends with that guy. Some people would rip off their own arms just to get robot hands, because then people are all like "you're a cyborg... whoa!" All a person has to do at that point is learn to play an electric guitar, and they're like the world's biggest rockstar. But hey, I kid the people without arms.
Anyway, while I was away, some guy named Kaleb sent me a guest comic, so I put it up. He doesn't have a website yet, but I support the webcomic community to the point that I don't have to support them financially, so he's cool.

Texas smells like farts

2005-08-23T20:27:00.000-07:00

Well, after four days of driving, I finally made it to Texas. I'm staying at my brother's new apartment at Texas A&M, which is pretty nice. Now, I don't want to offend any of you Texans out there, because I appreciate that you look at my site and all, but Texas smells really bad. I mean it, too. I can't get away from the pungent aroma of mildew and old barbecue. It's really hot and muggy, too, and a lot of people don't wear shirts, and the roads are really crappy, and we saw some cops harrass some black guys and search their van for drugs and not find any. I guess that's the kind of thing that happens to a state when they don't pay their fair share of taxes.
Along the way, we also spent a while in Dallas at Dealey Plaza where Kennedy was shot by the CIA. A very nice conspiracy theorist saw us taking pictures of the book depository and decided to sell us a copy of the "JFK News" for five dollars. It's an interesting eight-page newspaper with a bunch of pictures of bullets going through guys at weird angles and some other ones of Oswald making that funny "oh no I'm being shot" face. We stood on the Grassy Knoll, stood in the same place where a member of the Mafia shot Kennedy in the head, and I recreated the Zapruder Film using my video camera.
Some short comments about the states we drove through on the way to Texas:
1. Idaho sells sunglasses and doesn't let people use their bathrooms unless you buy sunglasses. Go fuck yourself, Idaho.
2. Just about every building in Montana has a sign on it that says "Welcome Fishermen."
3. Wyoming is pretty much exactly the same as Montana. It even has part of the same national park in it (Yellowstone). Unfortunately, it mostly has the part of the park that burned down because some lazy park rangers thought it would be a good idea to not put forest fires out if they were naturally caused. Thanks for ruining most of Yellowstone, Wyoming. You jackasses.
4. All the drivers in Colorado are dumb assholes that don't use their turn signals. Also, Denver is pretty much just a smoking hive of industry with a Six Flags Theme Park in it. Real classy, Colorado.
5. Kansas is really flat, and it has lots of ironic religious signs. There was this one that said "Abortion stops a beating heart," but instead of the word "heart," it was just a little picture of a heart, so it looked like it said "Abortion stops a beating."
6. Oklahoma has red dirt. I can't really say anything else about Oklahoma because I wasn't paying that much attention at this point, but I'm sure I'd have something disparaging to say about it if I was (note: this was the first state since we'd left Washington that had coffee that actually tasted good. I guess Washington has just spoiled me in this way).
7. The first thing we saw when we were entering Texas was the world's biggest adult book store. I guess that's just Texas' way of saying to the world "Hey, I ain't queer!" Also, all the vehicles on the road are either semis or those big fat-ass Ford trucks that aren't actually used to pull or carry anything. We would see up to six ribbons on any given truck, because Texas apparently supports their troops so much that they would make their macho trucks really gay looking like that. Way to take one for the team, Texas.
I'll post a comic sometime when I get back to Spokane, because I don't have a scanner right now. This is such a great excuse.

Short letters that I will send to people

2005-08-19T01:42:00.000-07:00

Dear Comcast:
How come I cannot check my email. What is the deal
Love,
Danny Alexander

Dear They Might Be Giants:
Quit making childrens albums. I am tired of them.
Truly Yours Forever,
Danny Alexander

Dear Chinese Restaurant That Is Down The Street From My House:
Next time I eat at your restaurant please let me use a fork if I want to. Your rice doesn't have enough cohesion for me to pick it up with chopsticks in a practical manner.
Sincerely,
Danny Alexander

Dear Rubiks Cube Incorporated:
Why are Rubiks Cubes so hard.
Love,
Danny Alexander

Dear guy who broke a hole in my snare drum when he was drumming on it a year ago when I went to that stupid drum circle thing:
Why did you do that.
Regards,
Danny Alexander

Dear Keenspace/ComicGenesis:
Thanks for putting my site up for free. If you could please not put ads on my site that are basically porno, that would be fantastic. Also, I'm not changing my site name to "valuedan.comicgenesis.com" because that name is pretty much bullshit all the way through.
Sincelery,
Danny Alexander

Dear Mike Ramsey:
Thanks for making the gust (sic) comic, guy. I should have had you make it this next week instead of the previous week because I'm going to Texas but I'm not going to tell you to make another one because that would be a lot of work on your part and I would feel bad about putting you in that position so I'm just going to not post anything for a week. I hope you feel guilty about this.
All the best,
Danny Alexander

Dear World Of Warcraft:
Maybe you should release a patch that makes the game fun.
Signed,
Danny Alexander

Dear Comedy Central:
Stop showing Mad TV. Stop showing Mind of Mencia. Stop showing the new episodes of South Park. Stop showing anything with Adam Corolla. Stop showing that D.L. Hugley show. Stop showing those generic teen comedies that seem to have just come out of nowhere because I sure as hell didn't see them at the theater. Be sure to never show old episodes of Drawn Together again. Thanks for cancelling that Norm McDonald show after the first episode.

Dear My New Car:
You are the best car.
Love,
Danny Alexander

My drawings make Buddha weep in agony

2005-08-13T03:06:00.000-07:00

Hello everyone. The next comic will be posted on Tuesday. It's another guest comic by Mike Ramsey (http://sidwood.net), who continues to amaze me not only with his artistic talent, but with his amazing ability to perfectly recreate the curse-ridden dialogue of my comics. Just thought I'd give you guys a heads-up, so you don't think I've suddenly improved in artistic style or something.

I'd also like to remind all you inattentive people that I am now selling t-shirts for my site. They're Cafepress, meaning there's a chance that they'll be of poor quality, but if you're a big enough fan of my comics to buy a shirt, I'm sure you're used to that kind of thing by now. Check me out, I'm all self-depricating, therefore making me immune to criticism. You can't even handle that.

HEY YOU GODDAMN IDIOTS

2005-08-10T12:32:00.000-07:00

Hey, I got a great idea: how about instead of doing something to make your comic actually better, why not just stick a bunch of nudie pictures on there? I say this because I'm sick - literally SICK - of comics that are actually capable of standing on their own by being funny and/or well written. I mean, when I'm surfing the net, do you think I'm looking for something even the slightest bit intellectually stimulating, or even (god forbid) amusing? No, I want naked ladies, and that's it, and if you give me ANYTHING ELSE I will definitely send you an email with a bunch of misspelled words calling you all sorts of nasty names because I am a stupid fucking idiot.
Take for example, the top ten comics on Top Web Comics. Here, we got 10 comics, and can you believe it, only SIX of them have sexually enticing ladies on their banners? And the number one comic right now is some crap called "the n00b" and the banner has a guy with a big nose!

Hey, and here's an even better idea! Why not take the even lazier route and have someone draw nudie pictures of your characters FOR YOU and put them on your forum signature? That way you don't have to go to all the trouble of even drawing the ladies yourself, probably because all your hands are too cramped up to do so. I don't understand all these "artists" who apparently "take their work seriously" and "draw things themselves" to get people "to" look at their "web" sit"e". I mean, come on! That guy is drawing THONG BIKINIS and, I quote, "a blonde girl with fairly short hair inside a washing machine, drinking vodka."

Make-me-a-website contest

2005-08-04T15:52:00.000-07:00

Okay, here's the deal: my website is ugly. I want a better looking website. Since I'm moving to a new site (http://biscuitsforbreakfast.keenspace.com) and I don't know very much about HTML and I refuse to learn, I'm making the offer of a lifetime to any readers out there that know how to do that sort of thing.
If you want to help me make a new site design (and I'm sure that you do), show me an example of a site you've made, and we'll talk. Whoever I decide can make my website for me will get these awesome prizes:

1. I will buy a t-shirt for you and have it mailed to your house. It must be a Biscuits for Breakfast t-shirt (I'm conveniently setting up a crappy t-shirt service with Cafepress so people can buy their own shirts from now on).
2. You get to guest star in a real honest-to-god comic (or more than one comic, if you're really interesting or easy to draw).
3. I'll link to whatever site you have and talk about it every once in a while... but not too much.

I'm not sure about what kind of style I want the site to have, so if you have suggestions, I'd be willing to hear them.

If you want to contact me, either post something on this board, or email it to valuedan@comcast.net. Be sure to link me to YOUR site, and not some porno site. I'm not an idiot.

UPDATE (Sept. 12th): The contest is over. Some guy is making me a website, so if you were all set on making me one, you're all slow and stuff.

Coke is on my last nerve

2005-08-03T16:39:00.000-07:00

Man, if I see that commercial where those kids are playing music on the roof of a building and drinking Coke and that one guy holds his guitar up in the air in a dramatic pose like he's some kind of hotshot rockstar ONE MORE TIME, I'm totally going to just puke in the nearest coffee pot.
See, as you might remember from an earlier post, Pepsi has been on my official list of products I absolutely will not buy for quite a while now. This was not based on the taste when compared to Coke - frankly, I cannot tell the difference (same goes with butter and margarine, mayo and salad dressing, whatever). I based this decision solely off of the commercials. At the time, Pepsi made the most god-awful, annoying commercials ever, with that little girl that changed her voice to sound like cowboys and old black men. Don't get me started on the ones with Britney Spears neither, because I just don't want to even try to remember those.
However, the most recent Coke commercials have been surpassing the Pepsi ones in sheer irritance. There's the one mentioned above, there's the ones where some guy is holding a can of Coke and all these giant bubbles are flying around and everyone just has this shit-eating grin on their faces... or the ones where they take classic songs that you used to enjoy listening to, and then just hack them to pieces and make you associate them with the horrible commercials (I'm looking at you too, McDonalds). Coke ruined a perfectly good Rolling Stones song that way with their goddamned Coca-Cola Minus 5 or whatever the hell diet shit they're putting out now.
I'm giving Coke another month before I switch sides and become a Pepsi man. Brand loyalty has never really been my thing, but if they're going to keep bombarding me with this shit, they're going to suffer the consequences.

Okay so how about those new comics

2005-07-29T16:47:00.000-07:00

You may have noticed (I hope) that I started drawing the regular comic. This may come as a shock to some of you, since my comic was just a pixellated ugly nightmare up until now. However, I think my art skills have improved enough that I can hold my own with a paper and pen now. I have other reasons for changing the style, too, but I don't feel like typing them all right now... however, you might be enlightened by this forum post I made over on the Keenspace forums (the dudes who host my site) while trying to get more people to look at my site. If you don't feel like reading too much stuff, the gist of it is that drawing stuff is good, and not drawing stuff is bad. Also there's some stuff there about the colors on my site being ugly, and my comic being too offensive, but you don't have to read those other peoples' posts.

I was actually surprised to find that a few people were disappointed by my change in art style. I really don't see how this can be possible. My friend from high school, Steve Johnson, put it this way:
"Most webcomic readers just like the status quo, and if you ask them, they will say that they want more of the same [...] because it is what is the same, and what is comfortable."
This is the only explanation that makes the least bit of sense. What do the rest of you think of the change? Go ahead and post comments below this post like I know you like to do, because you know you were just gonna do that anyway.

I wuz camping doods

2005-07-25T08:16:00.000-07:00

I just got back from camping! We went to Dry Falls, which is this big dry canyon about 2 hours west of Spokane. Our campground was basically a gravel driveway, and we were surrounded by about 200 people that wouldn't shut the hell up until like 3 am (or until we yelled something obscene at them). As if that wasn't bad enough, the place was just windy as hell every single night. The sound of the tent trying to collapse on itself did however cover up the sound of stupid teenagers laughing, so I guess things equaled themselves out.

By the way, let me inform my fans and any potential internet hacker-type people that I don't respond to emails titled "1" with the word "1" in the body, and I especially don't open the attached text files. And I ESPECIALLY don't open emails sent by someone named "valuedan1185@hatmail.com," so if you're trying to send me an email, Mr. Dan, you might want to switch to Hotmail.

this courtyard is for like the whoreyard, or boreyard, or pooryard!

2005-07-18T20:59:00.000-07:00

My brother is going to Texas A&M in the next four weeks, so he is looking for an apartment in College Station. He accidentally found a review for one particular apartment online (oddly titled "Chimmy Chungas." It was written by some dude from Korea, so it doesn't make any goddamn sense, but it is one of the funniest things I've ever read.

My "get-up-and-go" has just hit the last bus to Party Town USA but the roads are pretty icy I hope he doesn't get hurt

2005-07-16T01:21:00.000-07:00

I made about half of that new comic the other day, then I decided that I was lazy and stopped. I'll finish it tomorrow probably. If you want a sneak preview of the first four panels, you should just imagine what you think they might be and then surprise yourself by looking at me site in a few days to see if you were right. What if you are? Wouldn't that be cool? Oh YEAH.
My friend Paul, who has an extremely crappy LiveJournal site, decided to learn Flash animation and then teach me to use it. Expect to see Flash animations composed of obnoxious rotating pictures of large bald men on my site, undoubtedly accompanied by a repeating four-second clip of "Birdman Kicked My Ass" by Wesley Willis.

The world is ending, and I feel just totally great

2005-07-10T23:56:00.000-07:00

The title of this post has a double meaning. First of all, I would like to let everyone know that I am phasing out "valuedan.keenspace.com." I'm not doing this because I'm ending the comic. Quite on the contrary, in fact... I'm actually going to move the comic to a new site! It will be called "biscuitsforbreakfast.keenspace.com." See, it's more descriptive that way, and people aren't all like "what's valuedan mean" and I won't have to shrug at them even though they can't see me shrugging because they can't actually see me. Now when people think of Biscuits for Breakfast, they will think of the site "biscuitsforbreakfast.keenspace.com," not some crappy "duhyouwontrememberthissitename.keenspace.com" piece of crap.
I'll also be sure to change the front page to something completely different to notify all my past viewers when the site changes, and then I'll go about the business of pimping my comic out to random people on the "Inter."
Also, I saw "War of the Worlds." It's a pretty good movie, but my only complaints are that it ended too abruptly, and that the aliens were just stupid as hell for waiting for a million years for humans to get advanced technology before attacking, and not even taking diseases into account. I mean, c'mon aliens. A million years.
And before you idiots start complaining to me that the story was originally written by H.G. Wells like 100 years ago, you should just shut your mouths (or... break your... hands) and not do that.
I would also like to mention that I somehow got a copy of Flash the other day, and once I learn how to use it, Biscuits for Breakfast is totally going to go animated-style. That means I'll have to break out the sound-recording equipment and finally decide whether Gorsky should sound like Edward Norton or not. I really hope he doesn't, because it would be really hard to get Edward Norton to come over to my house.

Guest comics go here now

2005-07-06T23:22:00.000-07:00

The guy that the Spelling Bunny is based off of sent me this picture he made a few days ago. He is also the author of one of my guest comics, so if you look hard enough you might find out what his actual name is. You have to look really, really hard, though.
On an unrelated note, my electric guitar seems to be shocking me whenever I use it. It's not like a sudden shock, it's more like a constant electrical current running through the strings. It's rather unpleasant to use. Anyone out there know why this is happening?

Damn it damn it damn it

2005-06-27T12:48:00.000-07:00

So, where's my comic? Any of my long-time fans (I won't say anything self-deprecating like "all two of them" because that would suck) must have realized by now that I will often go for long periods of time without actually updating. I seem to follow a specific pattern, which I hadn't realized until just recently.
First, I make two or three comics. At this point, I either have trouble thinking of what to do next, or I get too lazy to actually make a comic (even if I have a bunch of comics written ahead of time). This often lasts 1-3 weeks, at which point my guilt overcomes me and causes me to struggle to put out a new comic. Then I "get back into the groove," as people who don't brush their teeth often say, and put out another two or three comics. Continue this pattern forever.
A lot of this stems from the fact that I'm easily distracted, and that I don't like to stack up comics (I think about them too much before they automatically post and want to change them) or put out guest comics (I did that way too much earlier, and I should really save that kind of thing for when I break both my hands, or when I die and have my son try and recreate my comics to the best of his ability). Also, I don't like to spend all that much time at my computer these days (these days being the summer) because I have to spend 9 hours at a computer during work.
I'll try my best to finish the comic I've been working on the last 3 days tonight. It's a pretty good one, so you had all better read it and make it your desktop wallpapers, or I'll crawl through your monitors and scare you so bad that you die and make this horrible face that will only be visible for a split second, and everyone will be like "ewwwww."
Obviously I am making a reference to the movie "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow."

Oh man what the hell is wrong with me

2005-06-21T12:51:00.000-07:00

I really need to make a new comic, but I keep getting distracted by San Andreas for the X-Box. Also, my computer is in my messy, messy room which I would have to clean if I were to spend any time in there (I moved back home for the summer, and still haven't unpacked). I could decide to announce another "guest comic" week, but I'm not going to. I'm just going to hunker down and... well, not clean my room, but I'll make the comic. I will make that damn comic.

By the way, the most recent White Stripes album is really good. Other bands should take a note from the White Stripes and start making good music.

I'm at work

2005-06-17T12:41:00.000-07:00

I got a job last Monday at the engineering firm where my dad works. I'm like an intern now, so that's all good and stuff. Also, $11 an hour. I like the job and everything, so I'm not going to make a bunch of annoying office-related comics now where some guy talks to his boss and his boss says something really stupid, and then the guy is all like "Oh man, that doesn't make ANY sense" and then he quits and gets a job digging ditches. It would be beneath me to do something like that.
I'll try to make a new comic later today, which is possible because it's Friday and everything. Not until some time after about 6:00 pm, though, because if I make comics at work, people will laugh at me and stuff. Then they'll fire me, probably.

UPDATE (later in the day): AutoCAD is just totally freaking out. I use this program called AutoCAD that you might know about where you make these drawings for engineering and such. I did this one subroutine where I try to make a rectangular pipe (which really exists, look it up) and it just starts bugging out on me. It's all like "a buffer overrun has been detected, dude," and then it ruins my shit without letting me save. I reinstalled it and everything, and it still doesn't work. AutoCAD is like a homeless man in this way.
Also, I'm sad because tonight I'm going to go home and there won't be anything good on television, because network executives don't seem to realize that there are plenty of losers like me that just want to relax on Friday nights and watch TV and not go out and do things like drink beer and get in a car crash. I mean, they don't even show Adult Swim (which, despite its name, isn't a porno) on Friday nights, which would probably be the best time for me to watch it. What is their problem? Is that their day off? Don't they know that I need to WATCH TV SHOWS? This is like inventing a game console that only turns on when it is 8:00 am on Monday through Friday and turns itself off at around 3 pm, or starting up a chain of banks that close at 5 pm.

I'm still lazy

2005-06-10T02:19:00.000-07:00

The link post thing can wait. What is important at the moment is this website where you peel a potato. I do this for your benefit. Oh, also, there's a new comic.

Also, I just found out that there is a remake of the original Evil Dead movie in the works. I don't want to sound like a huge greasy nerd that probably wets his bed, but I am concerned by this development. For one thing, Bruce Campbell said in an interview that Evil Dead 4 (not the remake) was probably in the works, but that Sam Raimi is still too occupied by the Spiderman series to make it yet. Also, the remake will have an entirely new cast, director, etc., and is basically being made "for a new generation." Not only that, but there will not even be an "Ash" character. I don't want to say anything else since the movie isn't even being made yet, but there's a pretty good chance this is going to suck.
If that last paragraph means absolutely nothing to you, I apologize. Go peel some virtual potatoes.

I'm lazy

2005-06-06T23:42:00.000-07:00

I'll do the link post thing next time, because I'm writing this during my 15 minute break from finals-week studying. However, I will mention that today's comic was not made out of laziness. In fact, this was one of those rare comics that was actually made a few days ahead of the time that I posted it. McMahon just isn't very good at drawing, so hooray for me!

The next comic will be showing up probably on Thursday or Friday, since that is when my finals are all done. We'll see how lazy I am on Thursday.

EDIT: There is one thing that I have to mention, because it really makes me mad, and these issues are important to everyone. I really can't stand it when people pretend to do real things on forums. You know, when someone says they're doing something, and they put it in little asterisks, but you know that they're really not doing them because that would be ludicrous. An example (for those of you lucky enough to not know what I'm talking about) would be if someone decided that they were going to pretend to punch another person on the forum, so they say: *punches ass_slapper69^_^ in the face*. The REALLY bad thing, though, is that this behavior leads to more of the same from other forum posters trying to "get back" at their enemies by writing more annoying stuff. Here is a totally real excerpt from a totally real forum:

-------------------------------------------

M² - *punches Ryuko*
Levi-chan - *punches Ryuko*
Ryuko - (punches you both)
M² - :hides from ryuko: :(
Levi-chan - OMG...we're toast.
Ryuko - >_<
M² - :offers brownies for forgiveness:
Levi-chan - Okay, okay. Sorry, Ryuko. Dough I can't promise that I will be able to restrain myself all the time. ^_^ *ducks* I kid! C'mere, gimme a hug. :)
Ryuko - :D All is forgiven. (assumes the aspect of a loving mother goddess) (eats brownies)
Levi-chan - Yay! *hugs Ryuko* I admit, I kinda liked annoying Ryuko for a while. I didn't want to see her wearing an expression that is sour, dough. *hugs her more to make up for the above trespassing* Sorry! *hugs again*
noxmeansxno - OH EM GEE. Attack of the puns.

-----------------------

It goes on like this for 20 pages. This is totally unacceptable. Also, what the hell is with that one guy apologizing and explaining himself? Like he actually punched Ryuko? That's bullshit.

Wow, pretty colors

2005-06-04T01:50:00.000-07:00

Yes, the comic is colored now, and I'm saying that in the least racist way possible. Plus, there are t-shirt references and stuff that you can't even believe.

You can't believe them, can you? No.

By the way, you may have noticed by now that I like to include links to stupid pictures in a lot of these posts. Well, my next post is going to make your head explode, because every word is going to be a link to a different site. Be sure to stay tuned, because this will be sure to occupy way too much of your time, as I'm sure it will mine.

Also, I should mention real quick that there's something wrong with Keenspace, my hosting site, so that sometimes the comic archives don't show up. If this happens to you, send me an email at valuedan@comcast.net so I can fix it up real good.