April 04, 2002
Welcome, Real Lifers!For those of you who missed the excitement (which would be pretty much everyone except those few able to read my webalizer logs), Greg Dean of Real Life Comics plugged Schlock Mercenary on April 2nd, sending countless droves of unsuspecting readers into the path of the Post-Dated Check Loan. I'm happy to have some new readers, naturally. I just hope they make it past the early 'artwork' here at schlockmercenary.com.
Greg's strip, by the way, is excellent. Not only that, but Greg is an excellent guy. I had a chance to hang with him for a bit last summer at Comic Con International 2001 in San Diego, and even got a sketch from him. I'm looking forward to a repeat performance this summer, as both Greg and I will be at Comic Con 2002. If you'd like to meet Greg, just check out Real Life - the strip has a heavy gaming appeal, but even non-gamers (like myself) will find some fun there, and Greg very literally puts quite a bit of himself into his work.
In other comic-related news, my brother Randy has fired up the Randym Thoughts engine again, and so my nepotistically favorite single-panel gag strip is back. This makes me happy. Randym Thoughts brings me daily joy, but only when it's being updated, which it now is. Hurrah!
Moving on... the last week or so has been pretty rough. Work at Novell has been more demanding than usual, and I just got a condolence-worthy non-promotion to "Product Management Team Lead." Mostly this means more responsibility for the same pay, but I'm told that shining in a position like this one is a great career move. I think that's corporatese for "someday you'll get even MORE responsibility, and an accompanying promotion." It would seem that the reward for a job well done is, indeed, a more difficult job. Fortunately, I don't think I've yet fulfilled Peter's Law and been promoted to my level of incompetence. Only time will tell.
More responsibility at Novell means more mental drain, though, and it comes as I'm trying to generate some momentum in this next Schlock Mercenary storyline. Thus, I get home from work, and drawing Schlock fails to relax me as it should. As a result, the buffer has fallen to about 18 days, and I've got to get it WAY up by the end of this month to make up for the fact that I'm traveling a lot in May. Ugh. I'm not whining, mind you. I'm a basically happy guy. I'm just tired right now. If you'd like to take a moment and concentrate, and send me some throbbingly uplifting waves of positive mental energy, that might help.
That's all for now. Again, welcome to the new readers, and a big shout out to my buddy Greg (oh, and to Randy, too.) Schlock on!