“What’s that?” you say. Schlock Mercenary is only starting year eight!

True. But today Sandra and I celebrate the fourteenth anniversary of our wedding, and kick off year fifteen.

Sandra dealt out enough mushy stuff for both of us, so I’m just going to link to her post. She said it better than I can.

When I started this comic project in March of 2000 (three full months before posting anything online) we had been married for about seven years and seven months.

With Schlock now two months into year eight, I think that sometime soon we will have spent half of our married life as the proud parents of a comic-strip universe. Oh, how the time flies.

(Note: we are also the proud parents of four actual CHILDREN. I spent a good chunk of this afternoon snuggling them on the couch while watching an Animaniacs DVD.)

Here’s to another fifteen years. Or fifteen million.

All,

I’m interested in getting some good Taiko drum music for my iPod. I could Google, yes, but I figure you folks might have some recommendations off the tops of your heads.

Thanks!

Some of the “upgrades” to the coloring of Schlock Mercenary have sent me out for lunch while my PC grinds (and grinds, and grinds.)

Earlier this week I decided that the problem had to be solved, and since CPU utilization was never more than 30% during the grinding, I figured more RAM would help.

I figured correctly. WOW.

I went from 1GB to 4GB (of which my 32-bit Windows XP is only recognizing 3.25GB) and the only operations I have to wait for now are opening files and saving lots of changes (like the addition of several colored layers).

As soon as my Serial ATA interface cable arrives, I’ll be adding a second drive to this machine, and telling Photoshop that if it ever DOES need to page to disk, it should use the second drive instead of the one Windows is using. That way when I do grind, I can grind in parallel.

In related news, who wants to buy four 256Mb DDR2-400 DIMMs? If these chips could talk, they’d tell you about all kinds of Schlock I’ve forced them to remember at one time or another.

I took Turbo Schlock in to Jiffy Lube yesterday, and saw a guy who looked kind of familiar sitting in the lobby. I turned back to the check-in desk, and the fancy screen that faces customers told me it was Sam Cardon.

Background: when I was a music student at BYU back in 1990 there were a couple of famous and successful local alumni we variously admired, respected, and envied. Sam was one of these guys. Here’s the official CV, if you want it.

Anyway, I turned back to Sam and said “Sam Cardon! I thought you looked familiar — the screen here helped me out.” He told me that I looked familiar too, but he wasn’t placing me. So I introduced myself — “Howard Tayler – I studied music at BYU.” He recognized me then, and immediately asked if I was still “doing music.”

I told him I wasn’t — I was now a full-time, independent cartoonist. He was genuinely thrilled.

And there began a very enjoyable and enlightening 15 or 20 minute discussion. We dicussed the “cult of the amateur” in our various fields, and how the free content model was or wasn’t working well there. He seemed happy to know that it wasn’t just the music industry falling apart, though we agreed that they’re being pressured less by a rising tide of free-content amateurs than by file sharing among their customers.

We also talked about how technology has provided such cool tools for our jobs. Sam wistfully spoke of the $100,000 in recording equipment that he and Kurt Bestor put together years ago, whose functionality now exists in a single laptop Sam carries around.

I wish we could have talked longer. I hope we’ll have the opportunity to talk again. I gave Sam a Schlock Mercenary URL card, along with my email address and phone number. Not that I hope to illustrate his music, or have him score my comic, mind you.