Another Quick Update

Ideaphile Jamie sent me fan art inspired by the last news post to get us through the weekend. A huge thank you to Jamie!

Dread Pirate Roberts (my iBook laptop) is in many pieces on the diningroom table right now (call it drydock if you wish) but I’m out the screwdriver necessary to remove 3 screws, so until I find one, well, we’re stuck. It’s not easy being sans computer either, let me tell you. I just paid off my house again in Animal Crossing: Wild World and I’m up to two rooms on the 1st floor and one on the second floor.

Hoping either Lowe’s or Radio Shack has the screwdriver I need or we’re dead in the water. We’ll see….

Comic Girl Wants Barbecue

whattaya mean I don't get my comic?


Another fan art from ideaphile Plantnerd. I’ve owed her my recipe for barbecue rub for ages and ages now, so we’re trading fan art for recipes.

Anne’s Barbecue Rub Recipe:

1 cup brown sugar
1/3 cup kosher salt (a heavy 1/3 cup)
2 tbsp chili powder
1 tsp ground cumin
1 tsp cayenne pepper
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp ginger
1 tsp thyme
1 tsp garlic powder
1/2 tsp ground black pepper
1/2 tsp old bay

How to make: Mix all the stuff together and then mix until blended. I use a whisk.

When to use: You have a slab of meat? Put meat in dish, cover with rub, cook. Or, put meat on aluminum foil, cover with rub, wrap foil around meat, cook. How to cook? Bake, broil, grill, doesn’t matter. What to cook? Beef, pork, fish, chicken, any critter will do. A spoonful in the Kraft Macaroni & Cheese you added that can of tuna to will make a decent lunch.

Store extra in a relatively large airtight container. The brown sugar, if moist, tends to make it kind of clumpy. I tend to shake the whole container before reopening.

Plantnerd’s really got our goat.

a painted goat


And a last-minute bailout by ideaphile Plantnerd saves us from overall comic lateness, huzzah! I received this awesome goat painting (I think for a shirt?) a few moments after posting today’s Help, my hard drive is full! missive, which is good because the comic I was working on is still less than 1/3 complete.

We will get back to the Get Outta My Head plot in progress as soon as I can. Thanks!

Drive-ing me crazy

Well, I knew it was going to happen eventually, but I was really trying to put it off a little longer than this.

I’ve maxed my hard drive.

See, this comic is brought to you by the power of a 2 year old iBook G4 with a 40 gig drive. When it was purchased, I thought this was the lap of luxury — it was an upgrade from a 2000-model Pismo (Powerbook G3) with a 20 gig drive. Forty gigabytes! That’s huge! My first Mac had a 512 megabyte drive! I could hold THE WORLD with 40 gigs!

Except that the world has suddenly become 7.5 GB of applications, 10 GB of music, and, shockingly, almost 10 GB of files in the Pictures directory. And of those 10 GB in the Pictures directly almost 7 GB is, well, the comic. There’s another 6+ gig of every other thing I need to survive (everything from finances to old poetry to, oh yeah, the backups of this website) and that leaves me at about 33 to 34 GB filled.

Since the drive only formats at 37 and a smidge, well, things have been tight.

So tight that every single time I try to draw a comic at this point, I’m maxing the hard drive. How maxed? Well, let’s just say I’m very very familiar with the error that says that the comic can’t be saved because we’re out of disk space.

So here’s where we sit. (The livingroom.) (Sorry. I couldn’t help it.) Nighthawk just spec’d out and ordered me a new 120GB laptop drive and an external enclosure for the old drive. But once it arrives (next week?) I’ll have to back up everthing to the server, then install the new drive, and then rebuild the laptop with the new drive.

But until then, well, the buffer is empty because it’s been so damn hard to draw comics with no hard drive space, and we’re really scroungy. Consider this an active solicitation for fan art. You send fanart, I post it. (Obviously within reason, I get to choose, blahblahblah.) Where to send it? How ’bout we go with fanart at kirabug dot com

As for tonight’s comic, I’m trying to throw something small together to get us through the night, but it’s after 11 now and we’ll see what happens. Whatever does show up will probably be late. I do have some standards.

Thanks for your patience and your support.

Further Introduction to Peggy Shippen

peggy shippen


Don’t forget to check out The Adventures of Brigadier General John Stark if you like history and such, especially as delivered by statues. Peggy’s great-great-great-great-etc.-yeah-whatever-grandmother’s mentioned quite a bit. Nathaniel Hawthorne, not so much.

typo fixed. thanks, nighthawk.