Comic Transcript
ALEX: Today we break from our regular storyline to describe a literary phenomenon known commonly as “writer’s block.”
MARK: Ah yes. That thing.
ALEX: To help you, the reader, fully understand writer’s block, I’ve asked Mark to use his skills as a technical writer to translate the concept into something our technically-minded readership can understand.
MARK: Try to think of writer’s block as any firewall software you can buy off-the-shelf.
ALEX: As what?
MARK: That’s right — it CLAIMS it’s going to protect you from malicious intruders. It seems simple enough to install. But once you reboot, you can’t log into your game servers, your instant messaging doesn’t work, and some 1337 d00d has still manage to turn your machine into yet another pingflooding zombie.
ALEX: Mark…
MARK: So you wind up spending a good chunk of change on something that offers you no protection whatsoever, as well as keeping all the applications you WANT to work from doing anything useful at all, and you’re essentially worse off than when you started this mess!
(Silence.)
ALEX: Well, we’ll try to explain it again tomorrow.
MARK: What? I think I nailed that sucker.
