Life After Ph.D.

Thirty-Nine: Welcome to the Ivory Tower

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If you prefer women in your sexualized fantasies, use the following word-replacements in panel two: John=Jane; during sportsball practice = at the cheerdance pillow fight; my muscles are getting really stiff = I think I got a tickle burn; give me a rub-down = put this lotion on my back; glottochronology = lexical diffusion.

Panel three is a true story. Hand to teapot, True Story.

And yes, in my academic fantasies I'm a wizard... working at Oxford.

♥ds

Thirty-Eight: Anti-Missile Dismissal Missive

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No, #38 isn't exactly a 'comic' per se. I spent most of Tuesday getting caught up on my Google Reader feed (finally below 1,000!), wherein I found this story on io9 about making your own Tron poster, which linked me to the How To Create A Retro Videogame Poster issue of the Spoongraphics blog. And then I got a little lost in the idea and ran out of time for a proper comic... Oopsy!

The title is a pun that a friend of mine gave me. She took a linguistics class at Harvard wherein her professor pointed out the infinite regress that allows valid words that contain nothing but an unstoppable number of "anti"s before an interminable number of "missiles" (missile. anti-missile. anti-missile missile. anti-anti-missile missile. anti-anti-anti-missile missile... etc.). That kind of crap is the worst kind of pop linguistics. Oy.

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Thirty-Seven: Comedic Wabi-Sabi

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Today's comic has been ripped from the moments of this afternoon! That's right, everyone, I started my bonsai garden today. I took a medium-sized Japanese Boxwood shrub and separated it into five small bonsai-style plants. Hopefully, I didn't kill them all.

Why bonsai? Well, I think that more than any other non-English phrase tossed randomly into conversation, mono no aware [mo-no no ahh-wah-ray] really describes how I view the world. I'm just enlightened like that.

(And, yeah, I reused the second panel from #5, but that was *so* long ago and I've changed *so* many tiny aspects of it that I feel I can justify recycling it.)

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Thirty-Six: Fridays @ the Office make me want to die.

Alt-Codes are the best thing that ever happened to me. The only redeeming aspect of my job is that I get to spend time dicking-off memorizing alt-codes ("€" is alt+0128!) and claim it's for work purposes. sigh....

There's was going to be an optional second zinger for Thirty-Six, ending in "my workplace butt!" I decided single-punchline simplicity was better, though.

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Thirty-Five: Game Over.

Trapped in Mario World, Part 4 of 4.
And so ends our long, strange trip into Mario World. I love making Princess Peach say 'fuck'. I also love love LOVE the "70s Daddy" porntastic styling of Aquaman on the new Batman: The Brave & The Bold cartoon. I had to use that somehow. I think this works. Also, in the first panel, Our Indefatigable Hero is supposed to be wearing Bowser's skinned body as a hat-and-cape (like this), but it didn't work out very well, so he just has a decapitated head hat.

Some other fun Mario Bros-related links:
IRL Mario, from Pixeloo and
Realistic Bowser, from Mario Mayhem.

I hate how the word-action and the image-action can't (or at least don't) always match up in comics. Like here, by the time Mr. Arrow is saying "Oh boy." (Scott Bakula-style), his arm, which he had up during "Baby! Did you...", should have come down. And the thing is, I don't know if I'm supposed to be okay with these kinds of inconsistencies, and maybe try and use them for effect, or if I'm supposed to be working to avoid them. Oh well.

In other news... Two exciting developments. First, I've officially "gone public" with L-A-Ph.D. by entering it in a contest and a webcomic uberlist. I wrote all about it on my blog, which you can find here. Second, I now have a link-banner for L-A-Ph.D. if you'd like to link me on your site! Huzzah! Here's the image:

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Thirty-Four: Tour the Sewers of Mario World!

Trapped in Mario World, Part 3.
I love making TMNT characters say 'fuck'. That is all.

Stay tuned for more Mario World culture-jamming in Part 4's thrilling multi-panel conclusion!

In other news... I'm putting new links on the blog today of other gay webcomics. They're good stuff, you should check them out (in addition to checking out the other webcomics and links I've got!). They are:
Viking Zombie Boyfriend
Finn and Charlie Are Hitched
Capitol Hillbillies
and a blog that isn't a gay webcomic, but a gay weblog about comics, Gay League.

Oh! And in other news! No more re-direct to dsbigham.net needed! I got Google Analytics to work with Blogger/Blogspot. Huzzah!

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Thirty-Three: Casualties of Mario World

Trapped in Mario World, Part 2.
I am not in any way making light of war. I support UNICEF and the message they're trying to get across with their Smurfs video. ...but I couldn't pass up the juxtaposition of these images. Also, this ties-in nicely to Post 29.

Stay tuned for more culture-jamming in Part 3!

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Thirty-Two: Duhduh duhduh duhduh

And so begins a series... this will be 1 of 4 or 5 single-panel issues [SideNote: I've misspelled 'panel' as 'pannel' on the actual filename of every comic so far!]. These tie in thematically with the Endgame post on Boilerplate 3.0.

Stay tuned for more!

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Thirty-One: SYSLJFM?

Ahh... recursive masturbation. I'll admit, I've done it (TMI?); irregardless [yes, that's what I said], I've been wanting to do a series of 'recursion/meta-reality' jokes for a long time, and this week is going to be it, starting with recursive self-love. Coincidentally, this is also what this week's Boilerplate post, "Sci-Fi Saudade", is about: recursion, meta-reality, and la recherche du temps perdu.

In technical news, a couple new things with this one. First, it comes with an NSFW warning, heh. Second, I've reduced the typeface slightly. There are so many things I want to do, but the heavy text kills it, so I thought, why not make the text smaller? Let me know if you hate it. I'm beginning to think I need to go a shade lighter on the text backgrounds, too. I don't think the 'glows' are really doing what I had wanted them to. Oh well.

Oh, and for the record, that is *not* my Adam4Adam profile.
I don't even have an Adam4Adam profile.

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P.S. The headline, "SYSLJFM" is a reference to the alphabet soup of sexual fetishes in the Adam4Adam profile. Hilarious.

Thirty: Casualty of the Format Wars

Okay, so this is only half-true. I didn't invest in HD-DVD, but I supported it. In fact, if I would have had the money to replace my DVDs with either HD-DVD or Blu-ray, I would have gone HD-DVD. So thank goodness for poverty in this case. As for all the others... ALL THE OTHERS... yeah, I went with Sony and lost every time. Anybody need a MiniDisc player? I've got three of them. How about an SACD player?
Anybody?
Anybody?