Sorry for being away for so long. There was One Last Big Push at work, then I got strep throat.

Getting rid of the latest pile of blogspam appears to have removed a number of legitimate posts (mostly posts commenting on the blogspam). Apologies for this. I suspect it removed those posts because they were treated as responses to the spam posts, and it deleted the entire "thread." Never mind my comments aren't threaded...

I think there's a fix for this and I'll try to set it up so it doesn't happen again...

Every once in a while I feel proud of being around for 14 years. It's no mean feat, but there are other webcomics, and creators of webcomics, who flat-out put me to shame.

Let's take, for example, Howard Tayler. Howard Tayler, creator of Schlock Mercenary, a brilliant webcomic set in the far-flung future starring a carbosilicate amorph and the mercenaries he runs around with.

Schlock Mercenary started on June 12, 2000, with Schlock signing up with Tagon's Toughs for the first time. It is ten years later, and Howard has updated every single day since he started. No breaks. No holidays. No long-winded explanations on his front page about how he's too busy to update... and he actually draws everything. His comic tells long-form coherent, side-splittingly funny stories that involve violence, death, explosions, and ominous hummmmms.

He has published 3,653 comics. In other words, he has done more in 10 years than I will probably do in 20.

When he started he was employed full-time at a day job. Now he supports himself completely on his comic. He has an entire store full of swag, including a soon-to-be-released new book, "Resident Mad Scientist," that republishes one of my favorite storylines in the Schlock Mercenary universe.

Happy Birthday, Schlock Mercenary. And congratulations, Howard, for reaching the 10 year mark. And for those of you reading this, if you haven't discovered Schlock Mercenary now is an excellent time to start.

Just a quick update. My day job is still shoving the rest of my free time aside, so those of you waiting for me to update again are going to have to wait a little longer. By "little" I mean "an unspecified amount of time." I find it incredibly frustrating, because I was just starting to get into a publication rhythm when my day job grabbed me by the neck and started shoving me repeatedly against the wall.

I am managing to get a few things done, they're just not comics.

Oh Moore's Law. You might be running out of steam, but you still deliver.

As you know, because I have been whining about it constantly on this site, my old trusty laptop has been killing power cords in a particularly brutal fashion. I've been looking for a replacement, and have been forced to use an HP Mini 1000 Netbook in its place. This experience inspired the latest run of comics.

When I bought the old laptop I dropped about $1600 on it. It's a few years old but it still runs everything quite well. I assumed that I'd have to spend something similar in order to replace it.

I was, as it turns out, wrong. This weekend I found a more than serviceable replacement for $700.

Behold my new laptop.