So, about twenty days ago, my next door neighbor gave me and my wife a starter package of Amish Friendship Bread. The basic concept is that you mush the bag for ten days, adding sugar, flour, and milk half way through, and in the end you have a half fermented bag of dough that you can use to make a couple muffins in loaf form, and also make four starter packages to give to people you want to force to do work for a week and a half. It's the Amish equivalent of a pyramid scheme, with an Amish person at the peak, and forcing others to share friendship and sweets at an exponential rate. These guys are devious.

My first iteration went fine, and I ended up with a poorly backed loaf of bread and four starter packages. The bread itself was thoroughly mediocre, and I kind of messed it up because I was like, "Well, ALL the dough can fit in one pan," because I'm an idiot who doesn't understand the concept of bread rising.

In the intervening time, I managed to get rid of two of the starter packages. Today is day ten. Typically, that would mean I'd have four loaves of bread, and an overwhelming load of starter packs. However, I'm not about to make myself the victim of my own Amish pyramid, so I just made two starter packs, and divided the rest of the dough into four ready to go batches of batter, which almost kind of worked. They're a little larger than they're supposed to be, but it's easier than making a whole lot of friends on short time. For those playing at home, that means I'm baking eight loafs of bread today.

Rather than pound down the same bread day after day for the next six years (I'm going to be making full use of my chest freezer), I decided to mix it up a bit. Batch 1 is your standard Amish bread, only with extra cinnamon, because that is the Amish bread that Gotham deserves. Batch 2 is Amish Banana Nut Bread, where I substituted "1 Cup Oil" with "A bunch of bananas," , not to mention "1 large box of vanilla pudding" with "more bananas", and "An ounce of sanity," with "a whole ton of nuts." Plus, you know, more cinnamon. Batch 3 involved using Chocolate pudding rather than vanilla, and smashing up a couple large bars of dark chocolate and tossing them in as well. Batch 4 was where things went wrong.

Thoroughly the ten day waiting period, you have to remove air from the bag, since otherwise the yeast farts tend to build up. I'm guessing the combined power of all that fermented beer smelling gas finally got to me, because when I started working on the last one, I passed out.

I awoke several hours later with a large bump on my head and a completed bag of batter. I had no memory of putting in the ingredients, or what those ingredients might have been. The batter was a swirling green pastel, and offered me a murky reflection of my own confused face.

I attempted to Google what might have happened in the intervening time, and the internets informed me that if I really wanted to find out, I'd have to assemble the following team.

1 Chemist
1 Theoretical Physicist/Psychic
1 Metallurgist
2 Alchemists
1 Witch Doctor from the heart of the African jungle, whom has never seen a white man.
1 German Prostitute

I was able to get everyone except the prostitute, because apparently, a Dutch one isn't technically "Close enough." I tried to ask Google what would happen if he wasn't German, and the response was, "I don't know, and you don't want to find out."

The recipe calls for leaving the bread in the oven for one hour, but because I wanted to make sure any bacteria would be thoroughly dead, I decided to leave it in there for three. When I pulled it out, it was horribly wrong. Rather than growing larger, it had shrunk down. And had molded itself into a small humanoid form. I screamed and dropped the pan when it opened its eyes.

It stood upright, looking up at me from the linoleum floor. It spoke, it's voice soft and high pitched, and at first I had trouble understanding it. I asked this strange, pudgy abomination to repeat itself. It cleared it's throat (it has a throat? It has LUNGS?) and said, "Greetings master. Whom shall we slay this eve?"

And that, dear reader, is how I came to realize the Pillsbury Doughboy is REAL.

So hey, it's been like a year since I've updated my blog. Funny how that works.

So, you know how some people only update their blog occasionally to make a post about how they wish they could think of a post? This isn't one of those posts.

So, last year my wife got my a brand spanking new computer for Christmas, the only downside of which is that it has my old video card in it preventing me from playing new games significantly better than my old computer; this is still an improvement however given that my old computer had been dead for a while and my attempts to build a new one ended in tragedy.

So now I've got 8 gigs of RAM and a terabyte of hard drive space and I'm running Crysis on medium everything, and Assassins Creed on low. Crysis still manages to look good, Creed looks like an eight year olds water painting.

So then I saw a commercial on TV that changed my opinion, and I've posted it here for your convenience:



After admiring the rugged handsomeness of the host, I decided to make a list of all the games that I'd always meant to play through, perhaps spending an alarmingly large amount of time dedicated towards, but never finished, or worse yet, never even got around to playing.

Never Finished:
Thief 1,2
Alice
Undying
Pain Killer
Omnikron
Black & White
Fable

Never Played:
Messiah
Wolfenstein
KISS: Psycho Circus
Serious Sam
Doom 3
Matrix Path of Neo

The games in Italics are ones that are particularly embarrassing because I've spent QUITE a bit of time on them without finishing. Like, more than 40 hours, probably. This varies; sometimes it's because the game just gets too hard, other times something happens to my computer and I lose the save files and have to start over.

I've decided to start with Messiah, because it's one that I've begun multiple times. It's on the Never Played list because I never managed to get past the first level, for reasons that will become clear.

I acquired the full version of the game, installed it, and immediately ran into trouble. The main issue was that the game crashes often during setup, occasionally during game play, and always whenever I die. I've gone in on Safe Mode multiple times, and have now got it to play more or less consistently without crashing, if I can get the game to start. I've probably spent an equal amount of time playing the game and trying to get it to work.

"Well Gordon," you're saying, leaning back with a sigh. "That's the price you pay for playing an old game on Vista 64."

"Well," I'd reply, "You would be right about that, except that this game had all of those bugs back in 2000 when it first game out." It's true; all these bugs and more have been a consistent struggle on the last fifteen computers I've owned, and judging by the comments I've seen online, I'm not alone. The game itself is a wonderful concept, but its execution is so mangled it's a struggle just to play the thing. Outside of all the bugs, the games controls are reminiscent of a console port, except that it only came out for PC. Apparently, there was a version for the Dream Cast that was supposed to happen, but was cancelled, so it inherited all the lousy controls without the benefit of bug-free version to run on.

I may have to switch to Wolfenstein a little ahead of schedule...

Have you ever seen Uwe Boll and Jack Thompson at the same place at the same time? No you haven't, and now you know why.

Sorry, for the late post (roughly one week late, cough), however things are, as usual, hectic. I've got this and some other creative projects cooking, so stick around and hopefully one will turn out well.

I should really get back to making 3-D backgrounds for some of the art. This could have looked a lot more interesting with a rendered skyline, which I have made previously. Maybe next weeks comic will be bryce-tastic?

Trying something a little different with the art, making the eyes much larger and more noticeable. Hopefully this is not horrible.

hiatus is officially over! True I got back from my honeymoon more than a week ago, but you're forgetting a crucial detail...I don't care.

This comic is all too true. I dumped years into Diablo II, and my characters all sucked. I'd probably still be playing, except I had to force myself to stop because even after playing consistently for a fairly long time, none of my characters reached max level, and their equipment was barely functional.
The best equipment I had was stuff that was given to me, for free, by players who were trying to make room in their stash for REAL loot.

This is my first attempt at a redesign for my avatar in the comic; I'm not sure how I feel about it. Profile works alright, portrait needs a bit of work. I used a pic from Black and White as a model to work from, which made sense because that is what the character is based off of. I may have to reinstall the game and get some better screenies to use for the comic. Also, I'd like to, you know, finish the game at some point.

A sign of my incompetence using photoshop is the fact that I spent over an hour trying to get the texture on Diablo's hand working. I could have just filled it in with red, but nooo, I had to get all fancy pants with it. At any rate, I had to learn to work with it better, if I ever expect to bring Madam Logic back into the comic; under no circumstances am I drawing plaid manually.

Also, hello to anyone stopping by from the forums where I posted the guest comic.

New Comic Posted Below; Scroll Down to See

So after posting the comic I ran down to McDonalds, because on Thursday they have this deal where you can get their new chicken sandwich for free by buying a drink. I hadn't had McDonalds in a while so I thought it might be worth checking out. I can now tell you as an informed individual that what you get for $1.69 is certainly worth that amount of money, but there's little chance I'll be getting the sandwich outside of this special.

The sandwich itself is actually quite good, don't get me wrong. The chicken is crispy and golden brown on the outside, and tender and juicy in the all white meat inside. The bun was soft and tasty. That's about all I can describe, however, because that's all there was. The sandwich came with only one single slice of pickle for a condiment; I guess they felt that a translucent aged vegetable was all the sandwich needed.

I'm not even sure the pickle was supposed to be there; it may have been dropped into my sandwich completely by accident. Or maybe it's meant to have more than one slice, but they were irritated by my sheer cheapness that they decided to cheap me right back. Hard to say over all.

So the breakdown is: Southern Chicken Sandwich is very good, but to insubstantial for $3.20

I only saw a few minutes of the movie Juno, and really, that's all I needed to see. If I really wanted to watch a girl complain and talk down to everybody else for over an hour, I'd watch the View. Or this movie, I guess. Everything about this comic is based off the one scene of Juno that I did happen to see, and more specifically the way I felt it should have gone.

Art wise I'm pretty sure this is my weakest comic; I am out of practice and have been short on time lately, so all the figures were traced from a shot directly from the movie:

That and all three panels are EXACTLY the same, except for the text. And that one drawing isn't even shaded. I'd have tried to make them a bit different in each one, but my schedule has been packed lately. Three people who used to work at my gas station are no longer working there, which severely bumped up my hours, not to mention that I still have a lot of things I need to do around the apartment and for the wedding.

Because of all this, the comic is officially going off weekly updates until I get back from my honey moon. If I have time to draw something, I will, but I'm waiting until after the wedding to relaunch the regular comic. Makes me glad I actually hadn't announced the comic yet.