OH MY GOD!!!! HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!

[Michael]

Glad to see you're still alive, Lee. Here's to a great 2009!

[Lee Herold]

Thank you, Michael! You're either incredibly patient or morbidly pathetic to still be checking in here, but thank you for being the only person left in the free world who still comes here. I intend to right my ship this year. Let's hope, anyway.

[Guairdean]

He's not the only one!!!! I keep a file of webcomics that are on hiatus for one reason or another and check them weekly. Much to my delight I found a new entry today. I'll keep checking in for more gems of humor. Welcome back.

[Grenlen]

Yeah there's a few of us lurking around here. It's good to see ya around bro.. and thank you for the entertainment. Keep it up.
Gren

[SinisterMarmalade]

Me, I'm just a pathetic reader who didn't have anything better to do. Btw, would you ever hold a contest where the winner gets murdered by butch in the comic?

[Lee Herold]

Btw, would you ever hold a contest where the winner gets murdered by butch in the comic?

No, I would not ever, ever, ever do that. No. N-O!
http://choppingblock.org/d/20031031.html

[haaid]

I still have Choppingblock in my daily feed to check... never took it out

[haaid]

Good to see you around still... I always kept Chopping Block in my daily comics list; now I know why

Welcome back, good to see you!

[mrwhipple]

I've been checking in on a random basis since last Feb....well more regular than random....but I was begining to loose the worst of mankind's evils........

[thehatter]

I blame The Power Of The Internet - I read via the RSS to livejournal. As do 65 other people, it seems. So I was happily surprised to see the new postings, good to see you back

[mouse]

it's alive! ALIVE!!!!

[Michael]

See? More people read you in hiatus than read me in hiatus. I've even managed to scare off mouse and Emsworth (my last two fans). But soon! Soon! Uh ... well, maybe not. Hey, Lee! You want to take the Toon-o-Matic for a spin? It's spam-beset lately, but online and ravenous for input. God knows I've neglected it horribly.

[slarabee]

I beg forgiveness for my lack of faith. During the winter, the dark irony of the now-seared-into-our-brains 'Hope is the worst' comic started a crack in the conviction of a return. I began to skip Chopping Block some evenings. I was weak.

Now I am happy. And tomorrow I will be making coworkers nervous as I wear my Butch t-shirt and stare quietly at them while wearing a silly grin.

Thank you Lee.

[Lee Herold]

See? More people read you in hiatus than read me in hiatus. I've even managed to scare off mouse and Emsworth (my last two fans). But soon! Soon! Uh ... well, maybe not. Hey, Lee! You want to take the Toon-o-Matic for a spin? It's spam-beset lately, but online and ravenous for input. God knows I've neglected it horribly.

Toon-o-matic lives yet? I've lost the URL, I'm afraid.

[Lee Herold]

You are all wonderful. Thank you!

[Michael]

Oh, look -- slarabee signed up just to express what we've all been thinking.

As to the Toon-o-Matic -- Toonbots is where it always was, at http://www.vivtek.com/toonbots/, and the Toon-o-Matic in a measurable fraction of all its glory is open to the public and the spambots at http://www.vivtek.com/toon-o-matic/ -- meaning that the spambots are posting about thirty trash episodes a day that don't actually resolve to comic strips. I've got a script called the modbot (a descendant of the Grim Thread Reaper on my old forum) which I'm rewriting this week, partly to put paid to that damn Toon-o-Matic spam. If it made comics, it would be fun.

Actually, maybe I should rewrite the Toon-o-Matic to make comics from the spam. I'm not sure how that would work, but at least I'd never want for raw material. This deserves some thought. Hmm. I could even still use the modbot to detect the spam, maybe engage different rules for interpretation. This does deserve some thought. I'm glad we've had this time to discuss it.

[novocaine]

hell yeah. he's back.

[mouse]

michael - you should definitely rig the toon-o-matic to make toons from spam. (you can maybe smash some together, so you get both the toon and the commentary bit at the bottom (what did we use to call that?) all from spam.) this might distract the spam from the forums, so the real people can use the forum to comment on the toons made by the spam. spam has no feelings, so we can be devastatingly honest in our critiques. which is liberating, even if it will not have any impact on spam-generated toons.

the main problem is that spam does not know the basic cast of characters, but you can either a) make aliases or 2) design a whole new cast. although, admittedly, it might be difficult distinguishing viagara from cialllis, or whatever the kids are calling them now.

[Lee Herold]

spam has no feelings

What a reckless, unsubstantiated statement. If spam has no feelings, why does it scream when you boil it?

[Michael]

Well, it's just a question of utilizing our natural resources. The Internet has abundant supplies of spam. Surely there must be some way to harness that energy and put it to good use.

Lee, everything screams when you're the one cooking. That's why we seldom come over lately.

[Michael]

Well, I got my WWW::Modbot module working in primo CPAN style, and deleted about 5500 spams off the Toon-o-Matic list, but ... I can't for the life of me see how I can use spam to generate cartoons. The only thing I can imagine is to use the keywords in the spam to retrieve some Google results and maybe Markov-chain the text into some semblance of coherence, then take the resulting prosoidal gulyás and ... what? How do I get from a text to a script? I freaking don't know! I just don't know. I should just give up and go back to plotting how to adapt the Toon-o-Matic to generate animation, and start scripting Narbonic. I have a really good plan.

[Lord Emsworth]

>I've even managed to scare off mouse and Emsworth (my last two fans).

You didn't scare me off. The barrage of spam in the Toon-o-Matic, coupled with your own absence/silence, did. Still spammy, but now it's down to two dozen. Hooray!

I may try to do something with it at some point soonish. Maybe I can work whiskey slogans into it.

[MissRaa]

So happy Butch is back. I nearly choked on my tea when the feed popped up in my journal

[Michael]

I'm getting about a spam per ten minutes on the Toon-o-Matic. I haven't yet automated their removal, so over the course of a day or so, it really piles up before I remember to run the cleanup script again.

As to my silence -- well, I made a lot of money last year. It was a nice change. What little time I had that wasn't work, the Muse decided to spend mostly on spam analysis. In July, I got into an obsessive mode about the Storm botnet. In December we got lost in the forest and I discovered that poison ivy comes in species that I don't recognize. Damn biology.

So life's gone on apace. As it does. Eventually I'm hoping the Muse will turn back to cartooning. Or maybe the recession will finally hit me and I can get some sleep. One or the other. Although I have to say, economic downturns are fantastic when you don't lose your source of income. We're strongly considering a move back to Indiana, now that the housing market has collapsed. There's a three-bedroom brick house, hardwood floors, walking distance from my mother's house and a public library, that the realtor is pretty sure we could get for $8,000. Yes. The asking price is $14,900. The listing realtor says the owner would certainly take $10,000 to $12,000, but if we were paying cash we could offer less and probably be greeted as liberators.

Holy schemoley. Our rent here in Ponce is $1000 a month. So if we moved back, within eight months that house would have paid for itself. And we could pay cash. Or, you know, put it on a Visa card. I've always wanted to put a house on a Visa card. !!!

[mouse]

$8,000? for an entire house???

damn. that's enough to make _me_ consider moving to indiana.