Ever had one of those weeks where come the end you’re thinking of giving the boss an ultimatum so that you never have to deal with that kind of ultra physical confrontational situation? Then on the way home you think to yourself “Hey! I know what would be great right now. Fishing!”

Yeah, that’s right. You get to thinking that after that kind of totally crapful week a nice old fishing trip somewhere nice, quiet and peaceful will do your mind wonders.

Of course you haven’t been fishing in a while and you have no idea where your gear is but no worries you can pick up some cheap but just as effective gear at your local department store and then you’re all set. Right?

Except that it’s not as easy to catch bait in a bait trap as you remember it being and instead of there being ample supply of yabbies there’s nothing but guppies out there that get ripped right off your line the moment you cast into the plentiful water weeds.

So I guess the lesson here is that no matter how prepared you think you are just dig up some bloody earthworms from your garden and have some bait that will last long enough to catch something.

Then go somewhere well away from anything so that some picknickers don’t ruin the peaceful contemplation that you were actually trying to catch some of. (and remember to set the alarm =P )

Nuff said.

Without whining to too much, Australian broadband is a bloody joke. With the federal election tomorrow, both of the major parties are promising things which should see an increase in the speed of broadband to the average consumer. Problem is that isn’t exactly the problem with our broadband. The real issue with Australian broadband is one of capacity. Australians are burdened by highly restrictive limits to their downloads, thanks to only having two undersea connections to the outside world. The simple fact of the matter is that no matter how fast broadband infrastructure inside the country becomes, it’s all for naught if we don’t remove the bottleneck between us and the rest of the world. Sadly neither our politicians nor the average consumer seems to realise this.

On a related issue, Rudd has recently been going around promising that every high-school students will have access to a computer at school. It is astounding that it he can make this promise and have no one call him up on the fact that the vast majority of Australian high school students already have access to a computer in their school libraries, etc. It’s got to be the emptiest policy promise I’ve seen, since the promise to ratify Kyoto, when we’ve already reached and surpassed Kyoto targets without having even being on board with that treaty. The average Australian not having any understanding about broadband, that I can understand. But I would have thought that they would have at least had enough knowledge about the schools that their children go to, to know that this promise is simply grandstanding.

Quick rant on the spam issue. I realize this is like beating a dead horse with a baseball bat, but there’s something odd about…

You see, I remember a time when spam emails were about some poor orphan that needed money for a life saving operation. Now all I get are emails asking me if I’d like a pill to help me better please my lover, or whether I’d like some extra length for my wang. No self-respecting guy ever entertains the thought of actually responding to these, but it does make me wonder why there isn’t any female oriented ones asking them if they’d like bigger curves and tighter assets. I think I’d enjoy reading those for a change.

Oh and by-the-way, for those of you whom have been living under a rock and don’t recognize the Monty Python reference, you probably should be checking out this YouTube video.

Now that I’ve emerged from the void of my games, it’s time to share one of my latest internet stumblings. Actually this isn’t so much my stumbling, but it ties in with my last rant rather nicely. You see I’ve already bought and finished the Half-Life 2: Orange Box, and finished it. Of course I have a few obvious comments, but instead I’m going to let Zero Punctuation’s Yahtzee Croshaw tie-up the whole Orange Box issue for me.

There is of course the issue of ’smug’. You can bet for sure that some people reading this are grinning, having already known about Zero Punctuation for a while, and are wondering why I feel the need to shamelessly link to the escapist. To those people I say, ‘may your game consoles burn and horrid curses beset your game save files’.

I Hate Howard But He’s Right

Go here and have a read. You may be forgiven for thinking that this article is very one sided.

Quotes from a university history professor and an education minister are used here to slam soon to be ex-primeminister little John Howard for his proposal on a national Australian history high-school subject.

You’ve already heard the offensively uninformed arguments of a few persons that clearly have no knowledge of the scientifically conducted research that leads the trends in educational practice amongst professionals (aka teachers in public and some private schools that embrace improvement). So what about the truth then?

Truth is that in any subject it is impossible to cover all the basics in any meaningful way. Rather, all that can really be done is to give students the knowledge and skills they will need to research this information themselves.

Yes that’s right. John Howard is the only person in this article that actually knows what he’s doing.

And why do I ‘know’ this? Because I was trained as a teacher by Qld’s own world respected QUT. A place where they teach us that they can’t teach us all the basics but they can teach us how to teach ourselves all the basics (there are a lot of basics). (No way a few hours a week of university classes can do that. There is a lot of information out there to sort through.)

So Halo 3 is finally out. No spoilers here I promise, but in a word – simply ‘wow’. Of course there was the whole weekend flashing before my eyes thing, and the lack of any actual drawing – or scanning – or photoshopping to speak of, but you can almost expect that when something like this comes out. Now all I need is Half-Life 2: Episode Two to come out and everything will be just dandy.

On the comic front weekly comics start this week, that is if I can manage to stick to a non-slacker schedule. Here’s hoping I can focus on drawing comics, resist the urge to mercilessly empty lead into my digital prey, and not get myself distracted by the games that sit so handy near-by. Comic soon. =)

Ok this is too cool. I must admit that it’s been a while since I’ve checked outIrregular Webcomic but even so this is so cool.

No not the regular, Irregular Webcomic but the new Darths & Droids side-comic.

In just a few words with a few pictures as illustrating aides he manages to sum up the total of my years of RPG experiences. (Excepting of course the 1 PC that just doesn’t feel like participating every session and manages to ruin it all for the rest of us.)

Seldom do I see an example as fine as this one of why pictures can say much more than mere words ever can. In fact the written word is derived from mere childish pictures. How far backwards have we gone that children are punished for doodling in their schoolbooks?

If I could draw on a computer I would do so right now but alas my skills are lacking to mediocre at best.

I look forward to more from Irregular Webcomic and Darths & Droids. As well as Shinyverse of course =P

We have a new site. Yay. Ok – it’s not like you’ll hear any trumpets blaring, drums beating, tectonics faulting or such. In fact you might not even notice the difference, cuz I’ve kind of been too much of a slacker to come up with a new color schema that works. Oh well. I’m sure you don’t mind.

One thing you’re definatly going to like is the archive pages, cus this means you can now meaningfully browse some kind of an archive with pictures, as opposed to the complete lack-there-of in the previous website.

Another thing you might like is the new subscription function. You can now get our comics and news posts in your Vista Gadget or Apple Widget. For you techno-savvy people, the RSS feeds are now automatic, instead of waiting for me to remember that I haven’t updated the RSS file yet.

Oh, and you can now post comments on the comics and the news posts here. Please be kind to your friendly neighbourhood comic-man, cuz otherwise I might have to edit your little post =) – Ah well, new comic soon!