As the new truck driver, Sam had to make a delivery to Death Valley in California. When he returned from the trip he informed his boss that if he ever got assigned to go out there again, he would quit.
The boss was not very sympathetic, and mentioned that his Death Valley account was one of his most profitable.
“Now see here,” said Sam in protest. “When I arrived it was 128 degrees Fahrenheit. After just a few minutes I was so miserable I was afraid I was going to die.”
“Well, it doesn’t look as though you succumbed to the heat,” chided the boss.
“That was the other problem,” complained Sam. “After the two hours it took them to unload the truck, the heat made me so miserable I was afraid I wasn’t going to die.”
So last week I got a call from work. They wanted me back on first shift, and they had already let the last remaining 3rd shift temp go. To be honest, I was relieved. I had had enough, and was eager to return to days.
Don’t get me wrong. I actually enjoy working 3rd shift, but this time it was different. It wasn’t like it used to be. I couldn’t just go in, do my job, and go home. I had to deal with a whole bunch of random chaos every night.
So what’s it like now that I’m back on 1st? Well, it’s basically still chaos, but at least there are other people I know and trust to help me through it.
Kudos
Some of the daily jokes were provided by George, but a couple were left in the queue by an anonymous donor. Thanks goes out to George and whoever the mystery contributor is. It means a lot. If anyone else would like to add jokes to the site, you can do so on our submission page, or send an email to flush2x@gmail.com.
During a terrible storm, most of the highway signs became covered with snow. After conducting an extensive study, the state decided to raise all the affected signs an additional 36 inches at a cost of six million dollars.
A TV news channel decided to interview some of their local residents to gage the public sentiment.
“That’s an outrageous price!” said a local farmer, “but I guess we’re lucky the state handled it instead of the federal government.”
“Why is that?” asked the reporter.
“Because knowing the federal government, they woulda decided to lower the highways!”
In Mrs. Winslow’s third grade class, the teacher was going around the room asking the children about what they might want to become when they get older.
There were the usual choices, doctor, fireman, nurse, and so on. But then she got to Jason.
“When I grow up, I want to draw comics!” said little Jason.
The teacher furrowed her brow and said, “That sounds like fun, but you can’t have it both ways.”
Buddy was talking to his friend, “I went to my doctor to see if he could help me give up smoking. He suggested that every time I felt like a smoke I should reach for a bar of chocolate.”
His friend nodded in bemusement and asked, “So how’s that working out for you?”
“Terrible!” exclaimed Buddy. “I can’t get the chocolate to light.”
When I make a comic, I start by building the character(s). In the old “stick-figure” days, the characters were made from scratch every time, but these days I have extremely large image files with all the pieces that make up any given character. I select and move these pieces around to form the completed pose and expression. Sometimes there’s a bit of airbrushing. Occasionally I’ll revise and update the character’s components if I discover a new way to make it look even better.
After that, I will select or build the scene(s). Again, in the old days I made the sets in the bitmap editor, but these days all the backgrounds come from a modified 3D game engine. Using my own textures, I’ve built several buildings. Brandon’s house is actually based on my own home, but the office building is an original design. So I load one of my maps, move to the point where I want to set up the scene, and take a screen shot. I then load the scene into the bitmap editor and tweak it as necessary. To be honest, I re-use a lot of those screenshots because “they work”.
The next step is to resize the character(s) into the scene(s). This is just a trial and error thing to find that spot and size that looks right. If the set would overlap onto the character, such as Brandon’s legs under the desk, I will carefully select the part that overlays and make a copy of it. After the character is placed in the scene, the copied section is pasted back on top of the character. I might even include a custom prop or two and paste them into the scene for good measure.
Using the square select tool, I would then crop the scene(s). There’s a lot to consider here too, like don’t cut off the feet, or putting a little extra space above their heads. It then gets resized to fit a template that will hold either one, two, or three panels. Carefully I paste the panel(s) onto the template.
Now comes the dialog. I have a speech bubble template that I created. I type in what the character is saying and copy/paste the bubbles onto the comic, taking great care to position them so they read left to right, top to bottom, and don’t cover anything important. After that I apply the tails and aim them at the character’s mouth. Finally, I clean up any stray pixels and add in the title of the strip.
Once the panel or strip is complete, I’ll save that version, and then make a copy that gets resampled to a smaller size for uploading to the web. My original stays with me as a kind of “Master” file in case there’s ever a problem. Since the originals are of a higher resolution, they might also be useful if I ever need to print a comic or make a T-Shirt.
Of course this is a rather time consuming process. Believe it or not, a single character on a single panel can take 30 minutes or more. A three panel strip with multiple characters in each panel can take several hours. Of course I also look for any time saving tricks along the way, such as reusing part of a character’s pose and the set, but making the comic is still embarrassingly time consuming.
Well, I really hope you found that interesting. If you did, be sure to click on that thumbs up button, and be sure to subscribe to our channel so that you’ll never miss another episode. As always, thank you for watching.
Man, I watch too much mBlip.
Settling Into the New Place
I wanted to mention if you are still having security certificate issues with this site, you might try clearing your browser’s cache. It could still be using the old certs from the previous host, and of course that’s not going to fly on the new server. The https://flushtwice.com address should always immediately forward you to https://flushtwice.com without any errors.
Kudos
The daily jokes for this week were provided by George. Thanks, George. It means a lot. If anyone else would like to add jokes to the site, you can do so on our submission page, or send an email to flush2x@gmail.com.
I suppose I should start by telling you how it happened. It was an otherwise nondescript day back in February. I went to get out of my rocker-recliner and when I scooched forward to get up, the front armrests bottomed out on the floor as they always do. Unbeknownst to me, Alex just happened to be laying down there that fateful day, and his left arm managed to get pinched.
Of course he yowled the loudest I'd ever heard him yell in his entire life and shot off into the basement. I felt terrible about it, but then I had no way of knowing he was down there when I went to get up. After a short while, Alex came back upstairs, and I was able to check for injury.
Shockingly, there were no broken bones, no blood, and Alex was able to walk just fine. It almost seemed cartoonish at the time, but down the left side of his left arm was a ribbon of flattened fur. He seemed somewhat indifferent to this, and acted like he just wanted to put the whole thing behind him. Seeing as Alex didn't appear to be in immediate danger, I took a "wait and see" position.
Over the next month, the "ribbon" began to shrink inward towards his elbow. I took this as a good sign that his injury was healing naturally and everything would be fine... But things were not fine. After a month and a half, his elbow began to swell. By mid-April I had to take him in to the vet for an exam.
The vet did a fair bit of Hmmm'ing and scrunched her face a lot. She didn't want to poke it with anything for fear it might introduce something. She took some measurements and expressed a "wait and see" attitude. I then scheduled a follow up appointment two months out.
Only a month later in mid-May, the swelling on his elbow had increased to the point that it started to ulcer. I called the vet and got him in immediately. This time they tried to drain it, but it went horribly. After the first stick, Alex started squirting blood all over the place, and the vet and technician freaked out and were running around looking for towels while I had to hold my cat down in a growing pool of his own blood.
After they got things back under control, she tried again with a larger needle, and went in from a different direction. After plunging to the center of the mass, she remarked that it was solid and that the fluid had probably dispersed into the surrounding tissue. She then went on to suggest that it might even be "malignant" and recommended a biopsy. They gave me an estimate for the procedure that ran from $500 to $800. I immediately left and made an appointment with another vet that I had gone to in the past.
The next day, my alternate vet didn't have any good news. By now, Alex's arm was very infected. At first he suggested that the arm would have to come off, but after noting Alex's age, he pulled back and recommended palliative care. I pushed for a quote on the cost of an amputation, and he informed me it would be around $3500 at the lowest, and that at his age, Alex would only live another 6 months after the surgery, and to just stick with palliative care.
They gave Alex a shot of antibiotics, a shot for long term pain management, prednisolone tablets and a liquid antibiotic, along with an appointment to come back about a month later.
Over the memorial day weekend, I cleaned Alex's wound and administered his meds. Alex was still Alex though. He obviously wanted to live, so I began making phone calls. Eventually I got in touch with the Humane Society. It took week and a half to finally get in, but after looking at Alex's arm, their surgeon said that the arm was "not compatible with long term survival" and agreed to amputate it... in two weeks.
That was the longest two weeks of my life.
Every day that thing on his elbow grew bigger and bigger. In the final week, it started to split open. It looked like something out of a horror movie. The outer layer of skin died off and eventually I had to cut the hard chunk of dried flesh off with scissors. Fortunately the antibiotics prescribed by the second vet kept the wound site free from infection.
And through all of this, Alex was still Alex. He just kept on living his life like nothing was wrong. Even with that thing on his arm, he still walked normal, climbed up and down the stairs, jumped on the bed, table, dresser, et cetera. Part of me knew this cat was gonna make it, but part of me was scared that his arm was going to go septic and Alex would die.
I felt relieved on the day of the surgery. We made it through to this day! Alex would be a tripod, but he was going to live! I dropped Alex off at the Human Society and went to work expecting to pick him up between 4:00 pm and 5:00 pm.
My phone rang a little before noon. The voice on the other end informed me that the surgery had gone fine, and they didn't notice anything wrong during the procedure, but in the recovery room, Alex's heart rate began to drop, he went non-responsive, and his pupils dilated. The surgeon explained that sometimes a blood clot will break free during the surgery and make its way into the brain. Alex had had a stroke. There was nothing more they could do.
Moments later, Alex died.
Usually I show off pictures of Gail here, (she's doing find by the way). Gail is a fun dog who loves to constantly run and play, but Alex was the one that I could really count on for affection. He would hop up on my chest when I was resting in my recliner and purr. He would be there at the door to greet me when I came home. He would keep me company when I pooped. He would wake me in the morning, and insist I gave him a thorough petting before I went to sleep at night. He talked to me with his incessant meows, and made sure I never left the house without filling the food and water bowls. Alex loved to get his "full kitty massage" complete with belly rubs, and he was the kind of cat that would walk up and headbutt me to let me know I was his as much as he was mine.
Flush Twice has been around since May of 2003. It started out as a JOTD (Joke of the Day) website. New jokes were published every weekday. Over the years, good jokes were increasingly hard to come by, and eventually they got so rare that I just stopped trying to publish them.
Since 2004 there has also been an eponymous comic. I still occasionally publish a new one on Saturdays. It’s also rare anymore, but sometimes it happens.
Here lately I’ve been posting a “Link of the Day”. For the time being, I will be featuring a new website from my enormous collection of bookmarked websites every weekday. None of it is solicited promotions, and no one is paying me to feature their site. These are just websites that at one time I thought were interesting enough to add to my bookmarks folder.
I highly encourage using some kind of ad blocking extension before clicking on any of these links. You’ll also hear me say this phrase a lot about these posts: “They can’t all be winners.” But it’s better than just leaving the site abandoned.
The jokes were generously provided by friends and visitors such as yourself. I want to express my eternal thanks to everyone over the years who helped contribute to the collection.
So what is it that makes a joke funny?
It all boils down to a sudden shift in perception. The story starts you thinking one way, then the punchline turns that thinking on its ear. The art of the joke is to craft a short story that isn’t overly contrived, then deliver a punchline that suddenly shifts your perception about the story you were being told.
Many of the jokes on this site are offensive, and I make no apologies for it. Offensive jokes work by making the reader uncomfortable through the use of a taboo subject thus enhancing the underlying humor. Without the offensive element, the joke would simply not be as funny.
