I'm Not Cute, and I Resent the Implication

Damn I wish I had more gummi bears. I bought some earlier and, as I said on the Twitter, they were really good. I could have more in a few minutes, as the 7-11 I bought them at is open all night and is right next to my house, but I must resist the temptation to walk back over there and buy more! For one thing, if the same people are working, that's embarrassing, in an admittedly abstract way. Like, I really don't think they'll think twice when they see me in there for the second time tonight buying gummi bears. But suppose they did, suppose they recognized me and recalled that I was just buying some gummi bears a few hours ago, and then it stuck in their mind "Why does he need so many gummi bears? Is he feeding them to a captured alien?" because everyone knows that's what aliens eat: gummi bears.

Gummi appears not to be one of those words that if you type it over and over is loses all meaning, because I just used it six times and it still means gummi. And even though Firefox's spellchecker doesn't recognize that alternate spelling of gummy and it keeps underlining it it still looks perfectly fine to me. I am wholly confident that I am spelling it correctly.

Drunk Duck keeps breaking. I want to take that as a sign that I should finally get around to setting up my own website, but I have no idea how to go about that. I'm always seeing comics people complaining about their web hosts due to having their sites go down for no apparent reason or having shitty customer service or whatever, which I would prefer not to happen. I've never had a proper website before, I used to have various home pages on various free hosts but they always sucked and I gather they suck even more these days. The other day I wondered about an old internet acquaintance and moseyed on over to his site to see if he had perhaps come back from the land of Nod, but no, he hadn't. What I did see while I was over there was his amusingly outdated sidebar links to various comics, including one to the Rambling Crazy Man which points to my Angelfire site from years and years ago. (Also spotted was a broken link to a cool comic called Sidewalk Cred which, after it ended, disappeared from the Internet completely.)

I get very little feedback on my comic (or anything, really) so it's hard to tell if people are enjoying it or even reading it or whatever. I want to say this is part of my currently developing neurotic sense that people are increasingly ignoring me. I don't know if there's a name for it but it is really annoying, like all my mental problems. I came to a realization the other day that the thing that really bugs me about the current trend of characters in media with Asperger's is that there seems to be some notion that they (we, rather) are somehow cute. I can't fucking stand that. Sheldon on the Big Bang Theory is at least written as fairly abrasive, but with a saccharine undertone I find off-putting. If that is the hole those with AS are being pigeoned into, I'd prefer to be left out. Call me something else, I'd prefer not to be labeled at all, but anything but cute. If ever I appear to be cute, just remember that I'm thinking really nasty things about you even if you're trying to sympathize with me. I can't fucking stand it when people sympathize with me. Because regular people have proven to be at least as bad at comprehending my emotional makeup as I am at comprehending theirs, if that sentence can be followed.

Just while writing this I've suddenly developed a headache. Fuck it, I'm going to get some more gummi bears. Put that on my tombstone, while we're at it.

I'm Not in the Mood to Make Up A Clever Title For You Assholes (This Doesn't Count)

A grocery receipt staring at me from just beyond my keyboard declares I "HAVE SAVED A TOTAL OF 1,900.64 WITH [my] CUSTOMER REWARD CARD." That seems bizarrely high, as the period it is measuring starts some seven months ago when I moved into this place and applied for my customer reward card because the only grocery store within walking distance is aggravatingly also the only local grocery chain that still uses customer reward cards.

It is of course a secret conspiracy to track our buying habits, but all they're getting out of me is that I'm eating myself into an early grave. And I've recently switched from drinking generic Diet Coke to generic Fresca. But I still drink a ridiculous amount of it.

Another reason that number seems oddly high is that the giant "You Saved" message on each receipt is usually less than a dollar. On this one it proclaims "You Saved $0.50." Also strange is the message telling me the name of my cashier, which is left blank, as though I jumped over the counter and rang myself up while the checkout girl was in the powder room.

Tomorrow (technically later today) I'm posting the first page of Joe Bivins: Man Genius issue #3. I'm still not sure if anyone's even reading the damn thing. I'm trying to decide when a good time to post pages is. I think if I use DrunkDuck's automatic system they go live at midnight PST (or maybe EST? I'm pretty sure the admins operate on PST but they might have it set up to post at midnight whatever-your-time-zone-is). I get a good amount of traffic from the thumbnail popping up on the main page, so I don't think midnight is the best time for that to happen. But then how do I decide when the peak time for that would be? I can't remember if I've had this problem with another comic before, I was posting LUB regularly for a little while but that's the ONLY comic of mine that's ever had a regular update schedule. I have to obsess over little problems like this so I won't be overwhelmed by the awful mess my life is as a whole.

Finally listened to the new Weezer album. I'm not going to do an in-depth lambasting like last time because that would require me to actually listen to it a second time and I don't think I'd survive that. Anyway no one's interested in reading that. (Although my Red Album review got a lot of traffic, but I did it right when the album came out.) I'm still struggling to figure out what the hell happened to those guys to get them to suck this hard.

I read an article sometime last week I think where they asked a bunch of famous authors what their 10 rules for writing were. I got too annoyed with it to get past the first page, because like always the advice they were giving was entirely about style and mechanics, most of which was bullshit anyway but even if it had been good advice that is the only thing about writing novels I don't have a problem with. I've always been good at stringing words together, I just can't come up with story ideas and when I do I always seem to get stuck ten pages in and I never manage to disentangle myself. Perhaps it's because I read so few books but watch so much TV and so many shitty movies, and now those are the only ideas I'm capable of coming up with. That's why I'm doing a comedy Sci-Fi comic instead of writing the great American novel (I seriously have no idea what the living fuck that expression refers to.) And when I get the urge to string a bunch of words together, I just come here and expel verbal diarrhea all over the place. I'm going out on a fecal reference. BLOOG OVER.