As you may or may not know, spamming is a crime in my fictional universe. This hardly qualifies as predictive or prophetic when juxtaposed with the recent brutal murder of a spammer in Russia. I mean, it was bound to happen sooner or later, right.

I’m fascinated at how people are reacting to this. It reads like one of those “offbeat news” items, or maybe a “Darwin Award,” and those articles are things we’re supposed to be able to laugh at. Lots of us are upset enough at spammers, though, that we’re openly praising the thugs who committed an inarguably horrible crime upon someone whose only crime was that he found legal ways to make money by annoying millions of people.

So rather than just feeling what I’m gonna feel and then moving on, I’ve been THINKING about how I feel about this murder. I’ve been analyzing my reaction to the crime. And the more I think about it, the more I hope that it wasn’t the spamming that got this guy on the wrong side of his killers.

I hope it was something more mundane, like stiffing a pimp, or not paying off a gambling debt on time, or otherwise inappropriately interacting with the seedy, violent side of his society.

See, it does my heart good to think that his spamming gave him a sense of invulnerability that crept into other aspects of his life, and that he then went and did something more routinely fatal.

I’m not sure why I feel this way. Maybe it makes me less likely to identify with the victim, enabling me to more easily de-humanize him so that I can enjoy the news of his death without feeling guilty about it.

–Howard

It’s been a while since my last update. My new PC showed up, and I’ve been migrating everything from one machine to another. Here are the high points:

1) My shoulder has a full range of motion again, but late in the day and early in the morning (around 7:00am and 7:00pm… something about the sevens) it starts to hurt a LOT. Maybe this is because that’s when the drugs I took at midnight or at noon wear off.

2) I’m taking four or five Lortab a day now. They don’t make me quite as loopy as they used to, and they DO seem to kill the pain, as evidenced by the fact that several hours after taking the drugs, my shoulder suddenly hurts like a run on the pain bank.

3) I finally have backup software configured on my PC. The way it’ll work is that every Sunday in the wee hours my machine will be backed up to an external USB drive. Yes, I’ll test the restoration process and make sure it works. Also, I can now burn CDs. The OTHER part of my backup process is the “archive” process, in which I take my most critical source files (PSD files, comic strip scripts, and accounting stuff) and burn them to CD. Given the bloat of Photoshop documents (especially with the rich shading and starfield renders I’m doing more and more of) I’ll be forced to NOT keep those on my PC forever and ever. I think our “Gold” bank account qualifies us for a free safe deposit box — archive CDs will go there. Upshot — in the event of fire, my most critical data is safe off-site. In the event of a PC crash-and-burn, I can be up and running again in short order.

4) The old PC had a combo DVD/CDRW drive, but the machine “destabilized” just over a year ago and I couldn’t watch DVDs, burn CDs, or figure out what was the matter. Now it doesn’t matter. We’ll be reformatting it, reinstalling everything, and then turning it over to Sandra. Then her computer becomes the kidputer, and the kidputer becomes I don’t know what. Maybe I’ll raid it for a disk drive, and add a drive to my PC so that Photoshop has its own scratch disk. Dunno.

5) We rearranged my office, so that the drawing table and the computer desk are now horizontally aligned, instead of being at opposing corners of the room. This should mean more spontaneous sketches while sitting at the computer, and easier sketching-from-reference. There’s still a lot of tidying to do. I ought to post pictures.

6) Gleek took a long, late nap, and will likely be up until 2am. *sigh*

–Howard

King Features just announced their new system for publishing their comics to the web.

For free, you can read one week a month of your favorite King Features strips, but only during the month FOLLOWING the month in question. That’s right, you get a week of comics to last you a month. Then, next month, you get a NEW week… but it’s not sequential to the one you just read.

For $15 per year, you can subscribe to their Daily Ink site, and get to read sequentially, with no delay, and even read several months back in the archives.

What a bargain!

Compare that to what you get with Schlock Mercenary, or any other non-King-Features-syndicated webcomic: For free, you can read in real time, and you can read the archives from the beginning. You don’t have to spend any money, ever.

I hope Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand gives King Features a solid poke in the eye. I’d hate to see good money get spent by consumers who don’t know that a better deal can be found pretty much anywhere else on the web.

–Howard

Well, I really ought to stay on the painkillers, and I really need to sleep on my side.

Between two bad decisions I pretty much shot the entire day.

1) Last night I was too drugged and too tired to bother to prop a throw pillow at the edge of bed, such that I could lie down at sort of a 45-degree angle, halfway between my left side and my back. I just laid flat on my back and called it good. Sandra said I snored all night, and by midday the next day we’d attributed my complete lack of energy to sleep apnea.

2) I tried to not take any drugs today. My shoulder knotted up after the first strip, and I fell asleep under a hot pad. I woke an hour later still tired, and napped for ANOTHER hour. About that time, still tired, Sandra and I made the “sleep apnea” diagnosis. I tried to stay clear-headed with some Diet Dr. Thunder (the generic Wal-Mart crap) and it did nothing for me. All afternoon I struggled to get another strip inked, or some other decent work done, but the shoulder stayed knotted, the pain stayed distracting, and my head remained stuffed with cotton.

I feel better now, but I’ve got two Lortab and three naps in me. I managed to get a third strip inked, but I look back at the day and my lack of accomplishing anything makes me grumpy. I suppose part of that is the Lortab — it does something to my filtering system, such that background noise (supplied most frequently by my offspring) intrudes very disruptively, and I’m less patient with the children than I should be.

“Less patient than I should be” is a euphemism for “grouchy monster who cannot stand the sounds of fun.”

Of course, the pain has the same effect, so it’s a wash as far as the kids are concerned. Injured Daddy = Maybe We’d Better Play At A Friend’s House.

–Howard

ps: Oh, and I was expecting a package that didn’t come today.