The Blog of Discord

Sometimes, when making a webcomic, I'll do a joke or draw a panel that, when I'm done, I'll decide might not have been the best idea. It's still perfectly good and probably could go up without any further fussing, but I know you can do better, so it's back to the drawing board, both figuratively and literally in many cases.

I've decideded that when the original is good enough (but maybe not great) and turned out significantly differently from the final product, I'm going to post the proto-comics here as extra special bonuses to you loyal blog readers. This is the original form of the comic from Monday...

As you might notice, the text in the fourth box is decidedly different than it wound up being. While this text actually makes a lot more sense in the terms of the comic itself and what you're seeing, I'm not a big fan of self-ref humor. It's something you either have to go with from the very beginning, or not at all... I've slipped a few mentions in here or there, but nothing this big or blatant... so for the final version, I decided to play it straight instead. Enjoy.

I am now the proud owner of three flying rat-monkeys... I'm being told the official name for them is "Sugar Gliders". A friend of a friend of Mrs. Kallisti's mother used to breed them, and these were the last ones she had when she decided to quit. We have Peek (the daddy), Boo (the mommy), and Untitled_Baby_Project (their daughter), whom we have code-named 'Deathscream'.

Don't get me wrong, I love the little things... however I promise that owning them will not turn me into the blathering moron that Sugar Glider ownership seems to bring out in most people. I will not call them "suggies" or "shuggies", will not berate people for not taking proper care of their bat-possums, and will do my best not to sound like a 80-year-old house-bound catlady.

I reserve the right to post pictures, however, especially cute ones... possibly lolcatified.

Just for you guys, decided to do up a Gayzilla wallpaper, available in a variety of popular flavors. If someone would like it in a different size, just drop me a line and I'll make it happen.

1024 x 786
1200 x 800
1280 x 800
1280 x 1024

Today's comic is the final culmination of all the free speech stuff this week... a big huge comic full of cameos leading into cheap shot against mimes.

I wanted to thank (and credit) all the characters making cameo appearances. If you can't tell who someone is, here's a handy guide:

Panel 2 :

• Evil Couch of The World's Worst Webcomic fame

Panel 3:

• Martoff the Destroyer of Roomies on Bass
• Jamie of 67th Avenue on Drums
• Trent of t-n-t on Guitar

Panel 4:

• Max of Indifferently Evil
• Chooken of Chooken

Panel 5:

• Jenny Everywhere of... er... um... everywhere.
• Sir Vivor of Redshirtia from The Apple of Discord

Also, since I used Jenny, I have to disclaim her, as she belongs to teh interwebs:

The character of Jenny Everywhere is available for use by anyone, with only one condition.This paragraph must be included in any publication involving Jenny Everywhere,in order that others may use this property as they wish. All rights reversed.

Ok, so those now using IE 6 should be fine. IE 5 and 5.5 are still having some problems, but the comic is at least viewable, so I'm going to hang a big banner up and say "Problem Solved" at this point. Later, when I have time, I'm going to make up a 'low-fi' version of the page which those using antiquated or otherwise malfunctioning browsers can still use to read AoD.

It's come to my attention that there are some problems displaying the new site design correctly in IE 5.5 and 6, with the comic appearing far down the page, somewhere after the last elements but before the footer. So far, the problem appears to be limited to IE 5.5-6.... IE 7, Firefox, Mozilla, Opera, Safari, and a bajillion linux programs all say the code is fine. This appears to be another occurance of a fairly well documented (but ultimately unresolved) bug with how IE handles the "float" command. IE's troubleshooting recommendation, I believe, is to upgrade to IE 7 if at all possible.

I'm working up a workaround right now, however the whole "float" command is rather important to the dynamic layout... So if you are still using IE 5.5/6, I'm sorry, and I feel your pain. The super-nice fast nifty computers I have here at work only have IE 6.0.29xxxxx, and since they're company owned, we're not allowed to upgrade the version of IE we're using.

If you are able, at all, to upgrade (or go to a different platform, such as Firefox, which I won't even bother linking to) now would probably be as good a time as any, since it's only going to get worse from here out.