Early this morning in a fit of insomnia I added transcriptions to all the comics that were missing them. We should be all caught up on those now.

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.

Yes, I know. It shocked me too.

You can thank a certain person I know from work who has been pestering me incessantly for an update. Though he'll be disappointed it wasn't a new Kernel Panic...

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.

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Now that I have a real computer to work on (my new laptop, refer to previous post) I've been spending the last two days copying and restoring files, downloading software, etc -- everything I need to do to get the machine fully loaded and ready to go. Unfortunately that has been taking up all my time, so I've missed two publication dates as a result. If I am very productive this evening I hope to have comics queued for Friday, Saturday and Sunday. If I am closer to my normal level of productivity then the comic will resume publication on Monday.

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.

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