I am SO not on the ball this week. I was supposed to shelve this one and try to write a better comic. Instead... well...stuff. I explain what the crap's going on above, so keep reading or skip the next...1,2...6 paragraphs.

Prom was last weekend. I only danced once, and that was because I inconveniently got voted prom king. I'm told this is a good thing. :P

Then, I got sick. GOD this cold sucks.

And this Thursday (Oh, and I seem to write these rants on Thursdays and Fridays; today's Thursday), I did some stuff with my DOS lappy.

Oh, and I named my computers Sunday night. I was quite proud, as I found that it somehow increased my 1337ness levels by some unspecified amount. So, my main computer is called "Steelix" now, and the DOS lappy's name is "Metapod". The former is named for its silver sheen while the latter is named for its lack of powers (it pretty much functions right now exclusively as a clock). Then, I wrote some batch files and stuff so when I turn it on it goes to a folder called "attacks" and displays the contents of that directory, as though they really WERE attacks. I tried some remapping some keys too, but I couldn't get FreeDOS's ansi.sys-equivalent to work.

Also, I finally took off that pesky broken LCD screen. It only got in the way. (Note that I have it hooked permanently to an old CRT screen anyway).

Something else I meant to note: I may have given the impression that I dislike certain people (ie my class president) in my posts. This isn't really true at all. Actually, I like Desere'e. She's usually quite fun and funny to be around. Usually we get along awesomely. In fact, she was my prom queen--did you know that? Unless you know me (probable at this stage of my comic's promotion), probably not. :D Now you do.

Okay, so this comic. I wrote this for Extreme Hammocking Magazine for the very last issue ever. Because of the audience of the magazine (Us and our close friends)I've found inside jokes to be especially effective--in fact, the whole danged MAGAZINE's an inside joke practically. I guess that the first steps here would be to explain suicide soup. Suicide soup works like this: Everybody going on the camping trip brings a random can of soup or block of ramen. It doesn't really matter what it is, as long as it isn't tomato soup or cream-of-. Then, you dump all the soups into the same pot with whatever water is required, mix it together, cook and serve. Each time it comes out different, and it's (usually) surprisingly good.

Okay, so now to explain that can of Alpo. So, one camping trip, Dylan brought his dog, Dozer. He also brought some alpo for the dog, as well as some soup for the suicide soup. Something about the soup just wasn't right, but we couldn't figure it out. My brother, KB, accused Dylan of mixing up the cans of soup with the cans of Alpo--after all, winter camping is kinda dark, and they were CANS after all... "It wasn't friggin' Alpo!!!", Dylan exclaimed over and over. Ah... fond memories.

My mentor, Ed O'Connor, warned against me putting this one up. I was going to run it last week, but he said that maybe I was just convincing myself that it was okay, and that people do this a lot. He used middle schoolers playing chess as an example. They don't really have a real strategy, but kinda make something up that fits their pattern so they feel like they do. Para example, Jens (pronounced "yentz", or something)' strategy was pretty much just to move his chess pieces symmetrically, because "it seemed to work okay" or something. This made sense to me at some level, so I did truly guard against it--but THEN look at what happens. I get sick and I run it anyway, just with less confidence.

So, this week I was gonna put up a hit counter. People all up be askin' me about it around school. I really didn't want to know because I wanted my intentions to be pure I suppose, but if others want to know, I don't see the harm. So, if you see a tiny .jpeg at the bottom or something, that means that I got around to employing the services of a free hit counter or other.

Oh, and before I finish--Mom's gonna get me a hard drive for a graduation present. That means back-up, which in turn means I'll be able to try installing Debian without fear!

--Josh