Return (Again) of the No Name Comic

Seriously. I am going to return to the blog-o-sphere (is that now passe in 2012?)!!!!!!!!! I am also going to make some new comics. Believe it or not, there is an actual plot arc to these comics and I have sketched over 30 of them.

This is still my favorite.

This Guy is My Hero

Public Service Announcement

It is recommended that all households have smoke detectors but I believe that for homes with small children there needs be an additional kind of an alarm.

The Quiet Detector.

Tonight Anna had a board meeting and needed to work late. After dinner, I surveyed our living room which looked like a Toys R Us had vomited all over; and, being the super-human husband that I am, I decided that it would great if I cleaned the living room and kitchen. Things went pretty well with the living room, since Sophie only pulled out about 75% percent of everything that I just put away. I like to think of cleaning the house as a war of attrition and I only have to outlast Sophie for another 15 years.

So I started on the kitchen. It was at this point that Sophie informed me that she was going to make a bed for Tiger Lily in the Parlor. I thought "Great! Anything to keep her out of my hair while I clean."

This is where a Quiet Detector would have come in very handy. You see, I managed to clean the kitchen, make my self a drink and then turn on the BBC Nightly News, and I still hadn't heard a peep from my daughter.

Obviously, I was suspicious and went to investigate. Sophie had in fact made a bed for Tiger Lily on the coffee table but at some point decided that the cat wasn't feeling well. So being the caring 3 year old that she is, she went and got the Desitin butt cream and applied a very liberal amount deep into the cat's fur. To "Make her feel better," as Sophie put it. Apparently, Wendy-dog wasn't feeling well either, because she also got a dose of butt cream rubbed into her fur.

I have since cleaned the butt cream from the carpet, couch, pillow, blankets and everywhere else that I could think of (not to mention the poor animals' fur).

The moral of the story is, while peace and quiet is what many of us dream of, the consequences of such quiet usually spells trouble.

Hence why our household needs a Quiet Detector.

Smile

I was having crappy day at work and while waiting for Anna I found the following video on my iPhone. It brought a smile to my face and became the 11,239 reason why I love the internet.

Turning Plowshares Into Swords.

Everything is Crystal Clear.

Coming out of the Dungeon.

Over the last ten years a trend has emerged that really gets under my skin.

I am a member (or at least was) of an oppressed minority that over the course of many years co-opted the derogatory term that was used against us as a badge of honor. Life was never easy for us. Unless you were willing to be ridiculed mercilessly, you couldn’t openly ask others if they shared the same interests. The only way to meet others was by collecting phone numbers off the back wall in dimly lit establishments. You then called these strangers and made arrangements to meet at their house. You never knew what you were walking into and more likely than not, they were a little crazy. But you didn’t care. You would do this again and again, because damn it, you needed your fix.

D&D (or more accurately AD&D 1st edition and then 2nd Edition), GURPS, MechWarrior, Call of Cthulhu, Rifts, Vampire, Marvel Superheroes, it didn’t matter. There was something special about sitting around a table with a bunch of guys (because it was always males), collectively telling a story.

We had a our bags of dice, elaborately painted miniatures, shelves upon shelves of books, cases of Mountain Dew, Doritos, pencils, paper and imaginations that could not be contained by the borders of Kentucky.

We were gamers and proud of it. But starting sometime around 2000, people that played video games started calling themselves gamers. I have nothing against video games and enjoy them occasionally but what they were doing and what we were doing weren’t anywhere close the same thing. When you play a role playing game (don’t even get me started on the video games that are classified as an RPG), you are participating in an organic story limited only by the collective imaginations of the people sitting at the table. When you play a video game, you are interacting with a story limited by what the programmer felt important to include.

Both may contain very similar themes, but at their core, the two hobbies could not be further apart. In fact, I could argue that they are the very opposite of each other.

But here we are in the year 2009 and almost exclusively the term “gamer” is used to identify people whose hobby is playing video games. What’s worse is that the role playing industry is moving towards making their games more video game like.

Arrrrgghhhhh!!!!

I know that I don’t have the time, but I really need to make the trek to the Rusty Scabbard, walk to the back wall and tear off the slip of paper with a phone number.

I still have my dice.