Announcements

That DNS Thingy Yesterday

Yesterday there was a connectivity outage around one of our DNS name servers at bkwm.com. This wouldn’t have been noticeable to the general public, except unbeknownst to us, the hosting provider for the backup name servers had been blocking DNS traffic “for security purposes.”

The result? Lots of people couldn’t find schlockmercenary.com.

Sandra’s out of town, and this is something she usually handles. In her absence I panicked and decided to make matters inestimably worse by using her Dotster login (Dotster is where the schlockmercenary.com domain is registered) to point to different name servers.

This is something with which I had zero experience. Contrary to our wildest hopes, but to nobody’s actual surprise, I made an amazing mess of things, and motivated millions¹ of panicked readers to tweet at me, email me, or otherwise attempt a back-channel ping. The DNS servers I pointed at weren’t configured correctly, and simply pointed the domain at the parking page.

As of this morning I am an expert². Also, I did not get much sleep, and the work day I wanted to have yesterday was spent on urgency rather than importance.

The excitement accelerated a “skunkworks” project I’ve had Gary Henson of Plus 14 Ltd working on: x.schlockapp.com, a new engine upon which to build Schlock Mercenary on the web. He threw bandaids at things, nailed two windows shut, and then we pointed people at the under-construction site so they could get their Schlock fix independently of me getting DNS fixed. This means that site is no longer “skunkworks.” It’s out in the open, and it’s not really good for much besides delivering the comic³.

The salient point: DNS is working now. If you can’t find comics at schlockmercenary.com, caches need to be refreshed (some of which may be on your ISP.)

 

¹ dozens
² on the Dunning-Krueger scale
³ it is, however, an amazing piece of work, destined to be the greatest thing since ALT-code superscripts.

Announcements

Skunkworks Schlock Site

We’re mid-project here at Chez Schlock, but http://x.schlockapp.com is in a state where it’ll function nicely as a mirror if things go wrong with the official Schlock Mercenary server.

The biggest piece of the project is an infrastructure rip-and-replace. The site is being built on a commercial content management engine, and for now we’re building it to look pretty much like the old site. Except for the places where we’re not.

Why the change? Lots of reasons, most of them having to do with the stuff I need to do, rather than anything y’all see. I needed a clean admin interface with some specific functions, and the old one was not clean, and the functions I wanted were buried or missing.

Comments are not enabled. It’s not that we don’t want feedback. It’s that we don’t… okay, you know what? Right now we don’t want feedback.

Hey, look up there! A comic strip! For FREE!

UPDATED: 
When I jokingly said “we don’t want feedback,” I meant it. Keep it to yourself until we’re further along. Do not tweet it at me, or that tweet will be the last thing I ever read from you.

Journal, Reviews

The Last Witch Hunter

As direct-to-DVD movies go, The Last Witch Hunter is surprisingly oh wait I saw this in the theater.

TheLastWitchHunterI had fun, but here I am a day later trying to write a review, and the movie has already faded into the meld-haze of urban fantasy “hidden world” films in which a badass protagonist fights ultimate evil. Why did this even get made?

Maybe because Vin Diesel is a giant nerd, and wanted to make a sci-fi/fantasy/horror genre movie that he got to be in?

Look, I had fun during the film. It cleared my Threshold of Disappointment (unlike the OTHER Vin Diesel film I saw this year) and was interesting enough that I did not finish my popcorn or my soda.

But it was predictable, and sloppy, and took shortcuts, and could have been a truly memorable, outstanding addition to a crowded field full of similar things. Here’s a bulleted list of sins which, had they not been committed, could have allowed this film over my Threshold of Awesome.

  • Shaky-cam during cool action
  • Shaky-cam as a “oh no we’re getting slaughtered” device
  • Shaky-cam
  • Cliché dialog as a shortcut for selling us an emotional state.
  • Immortality as a boon/curse, which (gasp) can be taken away.
  • Betrayal we all saw coming.
  • Why didn’t you just lead with that?
  • If you have little vials of “detect magic,” you should be using them all the time, or you should be explaining that they are expensive/rare.
  • Man of few words who seldom shows emotion
  • Because he’s tortured by memories
  • Which we are going to have to sit through
  • But it’s okay because they’re central to the plot.

It’s a long list, I know. A great many genre movies commit these same sins, and are mediocre-to-bad as a result. It’s a good thing I like Vin Diesel, and an even better thing that Rose Leslie (who I’d never seen in a film before) shone the way she did in a cast full of bigger names.

(Note: If there is a sequel that has ZERO Vin Diesel, and is all about Rose Leslie’s character Chloe taking up the Witch Hunter mantle despite being herself a witch, I would pay opening night fancy-seat money. No, wait… just give her a franchise of her own, without the baggage of this film.)

That reminds me:

  • A non-immortal character who is interesting, and who we care about, who can be threatened with death to make us feel tension

The Last Witch Hunter enters my list at #20 out of #30. Do I recommend it? When it hits Netflix it might make for a great excuse to have the TV on while you knit something. If you’ve got movie money to spend, though, there are many much better options.

Writer, Illustrator, Consumer