Pain and Suffering

Wednesday, July 23, 2003

The sacrifices I make for my comic strip…

You may have noticed the authenticity of the character design for Percy the Biker. This is because I am dedicated to bringing you the best comic possible no matter the cost to my personal mental health.

When I decided to put a biker in the comic, I realized I wasn’t exactly sure how a biker would dress during the summer, so I went to a number of different motorcycle websites, only to find nothing but pictures of the bikes, but no bikers. I then decided to go to Yahoo! Profiles and type in the search field Male age 25-35, and under the interests section I typed "bikers."

I might as well have typed in "Gay Sex Pornography" in the search field. I still have no idea how bikers dress because I was not able to find a picture of a male biker who was in fact wearing clothing of any kind. I quickly gave up my search when I saw what kind of results I was yielding. If you have a problem with Percy’s outfit, well then you may bite me.

I’m not entirely sure what the update situation is for while Emrys is away. I heard a rumor about a guest comic or something, but it’s his job to update the website so I’ll let him worry about that. I know I don’t have anything prepared for over his break, anyway. At The Amish Van, we have a very nice system worked out – I draw and Emrys stays out of it. He … I guess it’s called "HTML’s", and I stay out of that. I pretty much have no idea what I’m doing with websites and if I tried I would no doubt have the entire site destroyed by the time he returned. We both deserve a break anyway.

That’s it for this update. Peace out kids.

-Kevin

Thursday, July 31, 2003

Well people, I'm back from my vacation and boy was it ever worth it. I really had the time of my life. First of all, I've never done anything like that on my own before. Buying plane tickets, flying down and staying anywhere for a whole week. I definitely learned some things though. Mainly that if you're going to take five days off of work, you might as well make them Monday through Friday with a weekend on either end. In retrospect, coming back on a Wednesday really made no sense at all, except that I get a weekend right away to get over the fact that I have to go to work again.

Be careful of food in foreign countries. You might not thing Purto Rico is a foreign country because it's a US territory. But it really is. For instance, I bought a fried thingumy down there that was really good, but very greasy. This fried food, combined with an exciting amount of Olestra, immediately gave me the runs for the next 12 hours.

Be careful of Olestra, it says it gives you "abdominal cramps and loose stools" on the box. It does.

Try not to have diarheaa when you go to the beach. Port-a-Potties are not your friend. If you do have to use a Port-a-Pottie, check it for toilet paper before you use it.

Perhaps these things might seem like common sense to you. Remember, common sense is directly proportional to the popularity of ones online comic strip. Actually its not, but it's a clever way of saying that I don't have any.

In addition to going to the beach, I also hiked up a mountainous rain forest. That was probably the most unique thing I did in Puerto Rico. It was very lush and dense and any other words one might use to describe a rain forest. I enjoyed it immensely, and I'm glad I took the time to do some hiking while I was there instead of just lounging the whole time.

I took a lot of pictures and I'd like to show them to you, but unfortunately, there's no function space for displaying pictures that don't involve comics. So you'll just have to suffer.

- Emrys