Ugly American

by on January 6, 2010 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Uncategorized

I never actually took Russian in college, but my friend did and he asked me to come to class one day to see this girl.  Ugh.  She was saccharin sweet and chipper.  I have NO idea what her agenda was in the class, other than to perhaps meet a future spy with whom she could have undercover adventures.  On the day I went, they were learning how to say, “I am an American.” which is (yah ameri-cahn-cuh).  The issue with this girl is that she didn’t understand tone and chanted it like she was on the pep squad and had this all too cheerful up-note at the end.  My understanding of Russians is “What the Hell are you so god-damned cheerful about!”  Oblivious, she just kept at it.

The teacher was a nice woman from…Norway?  She didn’t look like a babushka, but it was fun to draw her that way.

Crack Cocaine Good

by on January 4, 2010 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Uncategorized

Every so often, my friend and I would make to 70 mile drive to Pullman, Washington, which was 7 miles away.  Something happened that bent time-space and made it the LONGEST drive of your life.  But, Pullman had something that Moscow did not…Daylight Donuts.  They were so good!  We had a three donut rule.  If you exceeded said rule, you paid for it with intestinal cramping and pancreatic shock.

You Bitch

by on January 1, 2010 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Uncategorized

One of my favortie movie quotes of all time never actually occurred.  We were watching a movie in…1993?  Some woman killed a guy in a home office and another woman shouted, “You killed him!”  We ad libbed, “…you bitch!”  It fit so perfectly in the scene.  I cannot for the life of me remember the movie it came from, any of the actors, or any other useful information to help me find the movie.  I suppose I could watch every movie from say, 1992-1995.  Can’t be that many.

On a meta-note, I was really pleased by the art in this comic.  I think it turned out really well.  Also, I found it fitting for a start of the year comic.  Who shot JR?

Data Bitch

by on December 30, 2009 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Uncategorized

My friend bought a computer from Micron.  It was the baddest mofo on the planet.  I think it had a whopping 32 megabytes of RAM!  Yeah, baby!  Maybe a 512 megabyte hard drive.  It was blazing!  There was no way we would ever fill it, or use a program that taxed it.  First thing we did when we turned it on was find out it had gnomes.  We had no idea what the Hell that meant.  We assumed it was bad to have them and sought to eradicate them.  It eventually started working, but we forever referred to it as “Data Bitch.”  She was a capricious device.  He had a few games for it, some sort of D&D Mummy game, the coolest helicopter game ever (Apache Commando?), and Virtual Vixens…a game about…umm…stuff.  My favorite was the helicopter game.  You could pan back to the copilot who always just looked really pissed off.  We imagined him shooting the pilot in the back of the head a lot.  But really, despite it being cool and all-powerful, we rarely played on it.  It really was just an expensive word processor.

My first PC came years later.

Intarwebs

by on December 28, 2009 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Uncategorized

One day (1993?!), the basement of the dorms was an empty room, the next day it was filled to the brim with people on computers.  I’d had computers in high school, but this was for something all together different.  It was the birth of the Internet.  Email was huge!  As someone who wrote letters, it was hard for me to give up that level of personal touch, but the instant and free nature of it was hard to resist.  In addition, we had these things called Archie, and Gopher, and Veronica.  They were the great grandaddy of Google, a way to share files.  So, Al Gore invented the Internet (Sorry Tim Berners-Lee) and minutes later, nerds filled it with Dungeons and Dragons and porn.  I didn’t own a computer until 1998.