Saturday Blues and Other Things

If you're reading this because you enjoy the comic strips I do, then hey, strips 9-16 of season 28 are probably the wildest strips I've written in a while. The ending is shocking even by OUR standards here and we're going to hopefully explore what this strip is about and what TechTV means and has meant to people in 29 and onwards.

No matter what you may read or what you may hear, THE STRIP IS NOT ENDING. I'm writing 29 now. While I may take some time away, long time readers know I always take time away and the strip always comes back. I've done nearly 450 strips in 3 years (as of next month) and have every intent to continue cranking these things out as long as folks actually read them.

I *am* wondering what the future has in store for the site though. Let's face it, TechTV's merger with G4 is going to be extremely different. My thoughts are with those who are probably going to be laid off and it's NOT a good situation for anyone involved. Let's face it, things are grim and there's been zero news coming out of anywhere on this matter. I don't think we're going to hear anything else to the future of the shows until they get the okay to do the merger. Then what? Well, god, the doom and gloom predictions are going around that it's going to make the purge of 2001 look like the mini-purges since then. That's saying something.

For everyone associated with TechTV and for all of those I've featured in the strips, I want to say a big THANK YOU for all that you've done over the years to keep me entertained. I don't care about anyone else, I still tune in for a reason (even if half the shows annoy the hell out of me), it's campy fun and a nice little channel to have. I hope that Comcast finds a way to keep most of you around and you'll continue to have the opportunity to entertain millions hundreds of thousands thousands the 43 geeks that are watching at one time in the future.

k9
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The Return

So Leo's back at TechTV.

By now you've (hopefully) read how I wrote him out of the series. Figured it would be a fitting end after all the times that we've written him off in the past. Then he goes and settles with the channel.

So, well, you already knew that this season WAS going to center on how the channel goes about life without him -- for real this time but since he screwed all that up I had to find a new focus for the rest of the season.

I've written 12 new strips in 2 days. I'm exhausted. We hit strip #450 somewhere in all of this. Not sure where but I'm pressing hard to make 500 and HOPEFULLY someone will notice the site one day.

For those regular readers, thank you for being here. You're going to want to read every strip coming up because EVERY strip in the next 12 is important. I can't wait for people to see #16. Honestly, I can't say much about it but it gives a fitting end to what is going on.

After that? Well, can't say really. 29 is going to be a strange season. 30? 30 really depends on what happens in the next 30 days or so. If the merger happens, what shows survive, who will be out of work. It's all changing and I'll do my best to keep up. But for now, relax, have some fun and get to reading strips. I promise they're my best work yet.

IMDO anyway. :)

k9
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Lots of Writing ...

I don't know what's come over me, I've been writing my brains out lately. I finished season 27 and got a good start on season 28 today. In fact, I know how season 28 ends and I know what season 29 is going to be about. For those of you who can't wait, don't go looking in our directories just yet. I haven't uploaded much and I've only written a few strips for 28 yet. The real surprise is going to be what I do with 29.

Since it's JUST after midnight, wishing STEF a happy birthday and dedicating season 29 to her. It's all about something we talked about once and I'm betting she doesn't remember it. So you can bug her but it's not going to do you any good. :)

Happy birthday, Steffiblimblamhasenstuffacanada. :)

k9
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Happy Easter or Whatever

I couldn't sleep last night. Was up until 1:30 AM before sleep finally came. Immediately had a dream that I was living in a midlevel community that was living underground in New York City literally. No one had seen the sky in their lifetimes after a great war had wiped out civilization. As with all cliche dreams there were bands of marauding robots in human form, hell bent on killing everyone.

I was part of an expedition to the outside world. We were running out of candles to keep the robots away (I'm thinking I swiped that from the anti-vampire candles in 'Vampire Hunter D,' which I watched the other day) so me and two others walked through the wastelands with shadow shields and into the "real" world.

We weren't prepared for it. No zombies or anything. Just people covered up because the ozone hole was now over Manhattan. It was a utopia (as with all cliches like this), people shared everything, there was no fighting, heck when we stole a car, no one complained. This, of course, freaked the hell out of us and we thought a giant machine was going to come and kill us for stealing the car so we drove it around some then crossed a giant bridge that ended with toll booths. We were trying to figure out how to pay the toll when I woke up.

Oh well. Another typical dream.

One BAD dream I had last night wasn't a dream at all. I went to update to the latest drivers for my video card on my TV Computer. Well I forgot to uninstall the control panel before uninstalling the driver. Major chaos. The driver tried to reinstall itself and that crashed and then every other reboot would fail to recognize the driver so ... I ended up reformatting that thing AGAIN. Spent all night doing it, didn't lose any data but damn, it wasn't something I wanted to do with my only day off.

Today's Easter Sunday and I'm going into work in an hour. I'm going to work as much of the day as possible and avoid the Easter dinner, which is always the same here. I mean literally. Ham with sides. Eww. I swear next year I'll do ham pizza instead.

Have a happy whatever,

k9
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Dumbass of the Year?

Christopher Breen is back in the news. He's completely changed his MAC911 Blog entry about TechTV. The revision no longer mentions TechTV, hosting, or insults to TechTV fandom. Well good for Chris. Too bad Google News is still linking to his article with the following description:

"On Trial on TechTV
MacWorld - 17 hours ago
This week I had the pleasure to host TechTV's Call for Help program on Wednesday and Thursday. "Mixed" might be the most polite ..."


I wonder what sort of drugs he was on when he wrote the original piece. I mean seriously, it's one thing to write a blog for a major web site like MACWorld, it's another to start your blog on that site with an attack on the very fan base he was just catering too. Makes you wonder, "Will this guy get another shot on the air?"

He insults the fans.

People hate him.

He'll be back.

This is TechTV after all.

Controversy = Ratings!

What's sad is one of the reasons I was doing captures of 'Call for Help' yesterday is the fact that Mr. Breen was hosting the day before. I don't know WHO the guy was, but I did know he looks an awful lot like Leo and they could have pulled him off as a new host an no one would have known or cared that Leo was gone. I mean, sort of like Steve on 'Blues Clues' or that guy on 'Mystery Science Theatre.' You could put ANYONE in that role and as long as they look or sound like Leo, no one is going to notice that the original was gone. I had an idea for an extended storyline exploring the new guy and life after Leo. Oh well. If he's back, he's back, and now his rabid anti-TechTV remarks (hey I can spin them too), would be part of his character. :)

Oh, for those of you who figured out how to read strips in advance ... heads up, I changed the lineups. Some strips (like today's) have been completely revamped and some have been thrown out. So you're going to have to go back and catch up again. Hey, them's the breaks for reading strips that weren't live. :)

k9
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Call for Help Follies

For two days this week 'Call for Help' was hosted by the LEO CLONE aka Christopher Breen of MAC world. You can read the insults he directed at all TechTV fandom in his MAC911 blog. Great to have you on board, Chris, don't let the door slam you on the ass as you aren't invited back. :)

Meanwhile some folks have started a petition for Comcast to hire Leo Laporte. They've collected 2060 signatures now, including one from Joe Mama in Hershey, PA, and we wish them the best of luck. They're going to need it.

Speaking of this merger. GUESS WHAT? THE VIDEO GAME GEEKS STILL DON'T CARE! Sure, one or two are picking it up, like this rehashed article from Xbox Solution, but otherwise, it isn't exactly setting the world on fire. In fact, I'm pretty sure that no one actually cares about it as long as Morgan Webb and Laura Swisher will remain on TV (somehow, somewhere), no one will care what you call the station.

Doing captures now and it's Cat Schwartz and Roger Chang hosting today on 'Call for Help.' I'm not sure if this was from today or not. The indicator at the start of the show didn't say it was previously recorded. Cat started the show by saying that Leo "had the day off." Does Cat Schwartz repeating a lie every day suddenly make it true? Cat and Roger hosting is the absolute worst thing since well, our good buddy Breen tried to be Leo for 2 days this week. I can't believe they stumble this badly through a broadcast and they've been on the air FOR OVER TWO YEARS.

Dear god.

I'm sort of glad it will be canceled soon.

Hmm. The Screen Savers is on. The first "story" of the night comes directly from Leo's blog. Go figure.

k9
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Monday Afternoon Jim-Joe-Bob Blues

Anyone remember my rant about how sucky the Star Trek universe was these days? Well, it looks like there will be no more movies based on 'Star Trek: The Next Generation' featuring the full cast.

I'm pretty sure I ranted about the "new" 'Battlestar Galactica' last year. Well, that's been picked up by sci-fi channel and Richard Hatch (no not the 'Survivor' guy) is joining the cast. Oh well, it's a blow for all of those who thought the show as a bastardization of the old franchise, but you know what? Most of those people have found lives and moved on anyway. Sadly, there were more of them then 'Unscrewed' viewers ...

In our TechTV News of the Whatever, TVWeek is making a big deal about interactive TV and TechTV's efforts in it. Well the one night last week I tried watching 'Unscrewed' and 'Xplay' was one of the first nights they tried the "Hyperactive" interactive gaming thing and I didn't see what the point was. The scores flashing on the screen reminded me of the late-90's when MTV was embracing AOL chat rooms and they'd actually have feeds from the chat on the screen during videos. Yes, at that point they were still playing videos from time to time. It was pretty lame. I think "Hyperactive" is pretty pointless. But hey, TechTV's executives know so much about technology and running things like this that they've successfully run the station into the ground! Whoo hoo!

Heck, maybe they'll end up hiring this guy to be Leo's replacement on 'Call For Help." After all, the most wonderful thing about tigger ... hey, watch that tail, buster!

k9
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Boring Afternoon

There's little news at all coming out on the TechTV/Comcast/Leo Laporte front though the Happy Slander Fun Corner has anonymous folks claiming that Leo is threatening to sue Vulcan Ventures and hold up the buyout over the shares owed to him. As with anything posted over there a) take it with a grain of salt and b) wonder if people have too much time on their hands to make this stuff up. Warning: that page is NOT FOR KIDS and I'm not claiming anything posted there is true nor is anything there family friendly. So click at your own risk.

I redid some of my "Favorite" links to reflect sites that I actually use. So if you're bored and blue, you can always find something in my links to make you happy. From beautiful girls (Laura's moblog) to stupid people put on reality shows (Reality TV News) to converting temperatures to Canadian, I gotcha covered.

No back to our regularly scheduled brain dead afternoon.

k9
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Daylight Savings

If I could have my way I'd go back in time and beat the living hell out of the person who invented daylight savings time. I don't care that without it it would be light until 10 or 11 PM in the summertime. Just give me back this @#$#ing lost hour of sleep.

I'm grumpy.

No updates on anything other than I managed to clean off my desk for the first time since ... oh, well the reciepts I was finding back behind my computer monitor were from 1997. I'm really scared now.

I keep it dirty because the cats tend to walk all over it and I don't like them walking in front of my monitor. Worse yet, one of them was trying to sleep behind the monitor at night. So I'd just leave piles of junk on this big desk and then they couldn't walk on it without collapsing something. It worked for years.

Damn spring cleaning bug. Seriously. Spring cleaning hits and I'm like "well, gotta clean off the desk next ..."

So here I sit, with a @#%$ing clean desk. I hope the daylight savings guy is happy.

@#$#.

k9
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Later that Day ...

I'm heading to bed in a few minutes after a long day of strip writing. I had planned on napping all day and taking in easy. Instead, well, instead I pretty much spent the day writing strips. I did 9 strips over the course of the day. I don't think that's near the record (at this point I can't remember the record), but it's damn good enough to get us a nice little head start as I figure out what to do next with these people.

Things of note (not really spoilers):

I addressed the Comcast situation.

I finally wrote out Michaela.

I killed someone off and I introduced a minor major new character.

I didn't write off Leo. I don't think I'm going to write off Leo. Leo's made it clear that his current contract situation is a dispute with Vulcan Ventures and NOT Comcast. As much as people are bitching and moaning about this, as far as I can tell this whole Comcast merger thing happens at the end of the month and I'm sure one way or another there will be something more to be said about Leo and G4TV or whatever the heck the new network is going to be called.

Call For Help is going to suck with just Cat, but you know what? They probably should just put it into reruns for the rest of the month anyway unless they decide to pick it up for the new channel. They have enough footage from the Leo era to fill the timeslot with reruns and no one will notice. It's not like they had a hardcore number of regular viewers who can either save the show or raise enough of a stink to get Leo back. They could take it off the air tomorrow and no one would blink.

What would really suck is if they go ahead and give it a new host (Roger Chang? Becky Worley? Chris "I'm Not Serious" Leary?) and that host puts his or her heart into it for the next month or so ... only to have the show canceled or have them bring back Leo on the new network. It's a tricky situation, that's for sure.

Oh well, my poor tired brain is ready for bed. Good night everyone.

k9
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Saturday Morning

I'm bored. Looking at the latest spoiler pictures from Movie-Vault.com's coverage of Star Wars: Episode 3 doesn't have me quite as depressed as the last two movies made me. Though Natalie Portman looks horrible in the one shot, I hope it gets better as we see more of it. If you really want to be a geek, hop over to the Jedi Council Spoiler Forums for Episode 3. Geeks. Nothing but geeks talking Star Wars. Can it get any better than that?

An interesting article from the New York Times on digitally erasing your ex that quotes someone named Gina Lynn who apparently works for TechTV.com. You know, whenever I've had a breakup I've just nuked their names from my buddy list and left it at that. I never nuke old e-mails since I can never figure out which folder I've stuck them in. I'm sure there's stuff on my hard drive backing up to my first digital relationship in the early '90's just waiting to go. But you know what? It can stay there. I'm not going looking for it.

It's like my mom's refrigerator. She has a tendency to push things to the back and then forget about them. I've learned that when you're hungry and looking for food in her fridge, stop at what you can see. Don't dig. You don't want to get to that egg that fell off the shelf in the very back and shattered and grew new life forms on it or that slice of ham that now looks like fungus version of pimento loaf. You don't want to know. Just get recent stuff and get out. You'll be safer that way.

This just in (for those who don't read Leo's Blog), he's quit TechTV. No April Fool's gag here folks. He apparently had a dispute about old shares and is gone from the current TechTV network. He *has* told the Comcast people he'd be interested in working for them, though, so I'm sure the saga will continue ...

Oh well, off to haul wood on a Saturday. It's going to snow tonight. Yikes. Snow in April. Dear god.

k9
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Later On

Watching a movie called Innocent Blood on DVD. It's a vampire movie starring Anne Parillaud as a modern day vampire who feeds on a mob boss but doesn't finish him off so he becomes a vampire and starts "making" his mob family by turning them into vampires.

Okay vampire mythos changes in this movie: She can see herself in mirrors and vampires only paralyze their victims when they drain them of blood. In order to stop them becoming vampires they need to kill them. She does it with a shotgun to the one victim at the start of the movie. She also seems to have no trouble entering a church. Vampires also seem to need sex, where in most other movies they just need blood. They can also be killed in normal ways like having their necks snapped or having a gunshot to the head.

John Landis directed this movie and it's a good spin on vampires. I saw it back in the early 90's and I remember thinking that Anne Parillaud was the sexiest vampire I've ever seen. Probably held true until I saw the late Sharon Tate in the Fearless Vampire Killers.

Kate Beckinsale in Underworld comes a close third behind these two.

If you haven't figured it out, I'm a sucker for a good vampire movie. I hate gross things. I hate horror movies. Why? Just never got into them. When I was a kid it was the heyday of the Friday the 13ths and those sort of gore fests. I remember a friend was obsessed with Fangoria he thought it was the neatest magazine on earth. Personally? I have a weak stomach, I'll always have a weak stomach and stuff like that seriously tests it.

So why the fascination with vampires? I don't know. I've waxed romantically on this a few times in the past. I like the myth but I think people who believe themselves to be vampires are serious freaks. Don't want to be one. Don't care for the lifestyle or the delusion, just like the movies.

On that note, I'm off to bed ...

k9
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April Fools & Other Rants

Gamers.Com News Article on Merger

Top gaming site gamers.com finally got around to reporting on the G4/TechTV merger. As you can see, they reported nothing new and essentially rehashed what everyone else has been reporting for the last week or so.

It's kind of sad when the top gaming sites, you know the geeks who run the gaming world, barely blink when there's "important" news like this.

For everything that's happening -- possibly hundreds out of work, shutting down an entire channel, moving the studios to Santa Monica -- the game geeks don't care. Not a good sign.

In other news, two major earth shattering events:

The other night I made it through 8 minutes of 'Unscrewed' before changing the channel.

I didn't put up an April Fool's gag.

I'll Tackle the April Fool's gag first, if you don't mind. I don't care for April Fool's gags. I hate April Fool's day. News sites go gaga over bogus stories that seem great then turn out to be a gag. Great. It was cool the first time I saw it -- 11 years ago -- but quickly lost its luster once everyone started doing it. The practice is so widespread that yesterday that I thought it was a gag when I read that Gateway was shutting down all the Gateway Stores and putting thousands of people out of work. Sadly, it wasn't. I'm not going to mourn the loss of the Gateway stores (everyone I've ever known who has bought a computer there has quickly regretted it), but you know what? It is sad when I had to do a double take and check it out on my own because of the date. April Fools indeed.

Now the screwy news. I tried. I honestly tried sitting through 'Unscrewed.' They seem to have made changes since the show opens on Laura Swisher's twin ripe thingies, err, they open with Laura Swisher now and they even included her in the opening credits. I still don't see the purpose of the show. I'm also wondering if the studio audience is either paid or just on crack. They laugh at anything. Even if it's not supposed to be funny. I'm starting to wonder if the audience isn't made up of soon to be out of work TechTV employees who are told to laugh "or else." My theory only though. Take it however you want it.

I mean it's not like I don't like stupid humor, I worship 'Beavis & Butt-head' after all. 'Unscrewed' should appeal to me. I mean I run a comedy site that's all about stupid humor ... but it doesn't. It tries so hard to be funny and keeps on falling on its ass. I actually liked the opening dynamic between Martin and Laura. They had her off to the side and him at his desk and went back and forth with some nice energy between them but then they brought a guest on and Laura vanished and all that energy and all the fun went out the door.

I know it's too late. I know it's as good as canceled but it showed promise for a whole minute before going back to what it's famous for ... making me change the channel.

Oh well.

Back to Beavis ...

k9
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