So, I'm gonna skip over the part about me having a kidney stone.

I've been the the hospital more in the past year than the 10 preceeding it, and it's getting pretty tiresome.

And yes, they suck about as much as you've heard. I'm feeling much better now, thank you, let's just get past the bit about me straining my urine.

And now, for some things that are marginally different.

I'm a huge fan of Venture Bros, though I wasn't initially. I'm now convinced its the best thing Adult Swim has pumped out since the original wave, and that includes Robot Chicken. God save "Jackson Publick", though I'm sure that's a meaningless call given whatever he had to do to get J.G. Thirlwell to do the music.

Today I finally watched what I guess was last week's episode, "Careers in Science," and I'd like to comment on the utter hillarity, if you'll allow.

See, Dr. Venture's father, Dr. Venture, built this giant orbiting space station, Gargantua 1. And the crew on the station calls current Dr. Venture, because there is something wrong with it.

He gets there, and they show him to the control room, wherein they show him this giant steel panel, featureless except for this:

Which is hillarious enough, but as this is happening, this dialogue occurs: (click for MP3)

VENTURE: So, what's the problem?
(SCIENTIST shows him the lit-up light labeled "Problem")
SCIENTIST: The light went on.
VENTURE: Oh! That's...helpful.
SCIENTIST: And...that's never happened before.

I think I may very well make a large steel panel with a similarly labeled LED, and not even hook it up to anything. Seems it would make a highly reassuring conversation piece / wall hanging.

HYPOTHETICAL CONCERNED PERSONAGE: Hey, is everything okay?
HYPOTHETICAL ME: I dunno, check the problem light.
(HYPOTHETICAL CONCERNED PERSONAGE checks light, and finds it dark.)
HYPOTHETICAL MOLLIFIED PERSONAGE: Let's get some tacos!
HYPOTHETICAL ME: Yay!

Plus it would go a long way toward having something tangible to point to to shut my head up from time to time, even if I secretly knew it wasn't hooked up.

Anyway, I thought I'd share that. It cracked me up, and I went so far as to make an animated gif of the light blinking for LJ users, but to make it in under the 40k cap you have to reduce the color depth into unrecognizable bitmap slurry.

That is thing one.

Thing two is that while I've been..er..incapacitated and kept in a pretty constant state of "too tired to focus on anything meaningful" I've managed to do a couple interesting things, number one of which is teach myself how to do comic book word balloons in photoshop that actually look good.

I was talking to a guy I know on IRC named basic, who runs basicstories, and we were talking about webcomics. If you go to his site, it appears unupdated, but the comics are fresh and plentiful. His comics are more touching and personal than any of the unreleased ones I've fiddled with in my time, but they have the same kind of sort of amateur looking framing and lettering that has been part of why I didn't release any or mine.

So, I found out he had a package of sweet comic lettering fonts, and in my abdomenal-pain-killer-high I fiddled a lot.

First, I made this, which I was pretty happy with the type work and bubbling on, and then revised it to this. Then, I decided a challenge was in order, and did what I always considered really damned hard - an interrupting dialog set.

I still think my art kinda blows, so I don't know if you should expect a new comics section of the Z axis any time soon, but I'd already made the gifs to show off, and what's a blog if not a giant cyber scrapbook.

Speaking of which, I think it's time I tied the ribbon or whatever the hell it is you do on a chapter of a scrapbook. Now that I'm feeling considerably better, normal posting schedule will probably resume.

[mmm hypothetical tacos]