This is the curator’s corner; a place where I express my own thoughts about whatever crosses my mind. The jokes are much more fun to read. This section of the site can safely be ignored.
It started back in February… No wait… It started in 2011… But really it started before that…
First of all, I just got a clean bill of health, but things aren’t so plucky for this ducky right now. Apparently my body has been aging without my explicit permission again. Some parts of me are wearing out. As a result my resilience to the ravages of time seems to be fading, and it’s rather infuriating. After all, I was hoping to live forever. I guess that shit ain’t happening now, is it?
I know that most people are mouth breathing morons who probably can’t figure out how to find the system settings for their i-phones, but it really chaps my ass that HP doesn’t at least politely tip their hat to a Linux user who just bought their fucking ink guzzling money sucker.
Just so you know, I’ve had a Canon printer for about 5 years or so. It had been ailing for a while, but it became extremely dysfunctional earlier today when I needed to finish up my taxes. Fed up, I packed up the dog in the ol’ Plymouth and headed to Wally World. After starring at the 15 or so printers for way too long, I finally picked up the $50 HP Officejet 4652 and headed to Burger King for a stress relieving artery clogger. Grace had a couple of cheeseburgers too.
Now just so you know, you can get just about every HP printer out there to work with Linux. (I’m a Linux user by the way. It’s no big deal really; I just prefer it to Windows.) The thing is that during the setup process they have you go to their website where they immediately SHIT ON YOU for buying their printer rather than saying, “Thanks for choosing HP! We see you’re using Linux. Head on over to our Officially Unsupported HPLIP page to get you started on a path to paying us hundreds of dollars for milliliters of ink!”
Let’s be clear about this. Linux: It’s just another fucking operating system. It’s modern and fairly standardised these days. There’s really no good reason not to be civil and provide a modicum of support. After all, I just gave you $50 for a some plastic. If you want to see anymore money out of me, the damn thing had better “just work”TM.
You know, over the years I’ve owned several printers. Tandy, Epson, Canon, HP… Generally speaking HP’s have been the best… Although that Tandy was a beast. Epson print heads clog and make the device useless, and Canon… Well Canon’s pretty good too, but three out of the five HP printers I’ve owned were amazing. (I had one dud.) Let’s hope this new one doesn’t make me rant any further.
Oh, final note on HP with Linux: Installing the latest version of HPLIP from their website is painfully slow. HP software is just as shitty on Linux as it is on Windows. It’s sits in the background stealing your CPU Cycles and “phoning home” way too often, but the printer works well, and the print quality is excellent.
I really thought I was going to outsmart this cold that I’ve got right now. I had my strategy all planned out in the event that I should ever get sick again. And of course it all went sideways.
I suppose it could be worse. I’ve definitely been a lot sicker than this in the past, but after all the effort I put into irrigating my sinuses I was hoping that this season’s rhinovirus would take it a lot easier on me.
Of course it decided to settle into parts previously unknown to me, and the pain… Oh the pain! Well, you get the idea. And of course the irrigation merely delayed the inevitable. Right now my sinuses are so plugged up, my teeth feel like they’re going to pop out!
With any luck this should all be over in time for the next weekend. Until then!
Easter just so happens to coincide with today’s regularly scheduled rant, so I thought I’d go ahead and make this rant Easter themed. Of course there’s a trade off. Since Easter is only for one day, and this post sticks around for a full week, it’s going to look pretty dated rather quickly. Holidays are like that. Once they’ve passed, people generally want to remove all traces of their existence for the next 10 months.
You know, no one on the political left would ever accept the notion that I could fit in with the democrats. And while I tend to lean a little to the right, people on the political right have views that are far too authoritarian for me to abide. When I step back and look at both sides, I realize the sad truth that they suffer from a kind of political brain damage. For them it’s impossible to impartially look at virtually any issue and come to a rational conclusion. Their prejudice prevents them from any deviation to the stare decisis, even in the face of obvious evidence that contradicts the judgement of those past precedences. Basically it’s like talking to a brick wall.
We live in a age where anything can be a hot-button issue. Make no mistake, both sides are super touchy when it comes to being politically correct. If you don’t recite their dogma within the approved party lines, there will be an uproar. It’s been my personal experience that it doesn’t take much to send a right-wing snowflake on an endless rant just by bringing up any subject that touches on LGBT issues, abortion, gun control, or the weather, and you can get similar results from a liberal when bringing up the subject of LGBT, abortion, gun control, the weather, or basically the time of day.
In the end, I think we’re screwed. Too many of us have been psychologically damaged by the political echo chambers. You can’t even tell someone why you like Kirk’s castile soap over Irish Spring without them trying to twist it into a conspiratorial political agenda. The next step is a complete system collapse wherein everybody with extreme views squares off and has a fight to the death.
Maybe when it’s all over and the dust settles, we can get on with creating that super-amazing future society that science fiction has been taunting us with for nearly a century.
I just wanted to sort of illustrate what I’m using to connect to the internet these days. Since “Sputum” was so kind as to make me despise everything about them, I’ve had to find an alternative form of home internet.
Make no mistake: This shit sucks. The typical internet user goes through about 60 GB per month. I have to seriously budget every bit that I download. Still, it’s better than the bad taste left in my mouth from the “Sputum”.
Oh, in case you’re wondering how I get 20GB for $50/month, I use two separate sim cards from “Mint sim”. Each is 10GB for $25/month. I just swap them out as I use up the data. I also have one for my cell phone, so technically I get 30GB for $75/month. If anyone knows of a cheaper/better plan, please let me know. Their throttled speeds are basically crap, and I really miss binging on Netflix.
It started with a couple of stick figures who became known as Brandon and Dewey. A couple of characters held together more by circumstance than by friendship.
Fourteen years ago, I probably would have killed to have my art look like it does now. Thankfully it’s changed a lot since then. Those stick figures were used as filler so that the page full of text didn’t look dry and bland. Originally I was using funny pictures that people sent in their e-mails, but when I was cornered on copyright concerns, I thought it best to remove the pictures and just toss in my own doodles and stylizations.
Long gone are those stick figures from 14 years ago. Surprisingly, with nothing other than years of practice, I managed to make comic characters that look like they were done by someone who knew what they were doing. With no formal training or even compatriots to help me learn and grow, I kept at it and picked up tricks and techniques along the way. Is what I’m doing now something that has real artistic merit? I’m not sure, but when I step back and look at one of the comics I make today, I’m seeing something that makes me go, “Wow. That’s pretty good.”
It has to keep evolving though. It’s still nowhere near what I want it to be.
So I’m still in the process of cleaning it up, but I just wanted to mention one of my other sites, “Golden Soapbox”. It originally began before Flush Twice, but I let it go after a few years. Then back in 2011, I re-registered it and tried to create a social networking site with it. Well, that wasn’t working out either, so I just started blogging about a grab bag of topics.
As time went on, there was one subject that seemed to be the most dominant. My recipes. So I deleted everything else. Gone are the rants about Linux, hypothyroidism, product reviews, growing tomatoes, and general bitching. Now I’m up on my Golden Soapbox to show pictures of food that I made, and how I made it.
The recipes were originally haphazardly tossed onto the site, so some of the formatting is kind of ugly. Like I said, I’m cleaning it up, but I just thought I’d mention the site anyways. Now when I bring a dish and people ask about it, I’ll just tell them I got it from Golden Soapbox (dot com).
Don’t worry though, I’m not going to promote it like I do mBlip. Man, I really love that site. Let me know if you’d like an mBlip T-shirt.
“Life is about the journey, not the destination.” – Someone who never had a daily commute.
I’m trying to get somewhere, folks, and I have to watch you insane muthaforkers weaving aimlessly like drunken mosquitos. It’s a turn lane, not a merge lane for pity’s sake!
That self-driving technology can’t get here fast enough. Just turn on the autopilot, pull the shades, and wake me when we get there.
Today I wanted to talk more about the font I mentioned in the blurb of yesterday’s comic. The original first font has kind of been overwritten and lost, but there are examples of it in the archives.
Since I wanted a kind of handwritten font, I intentionally aimed for sloppiness. It was to look like the penmanship of a mildly gifted third grader.
The points on each font face were numerous and haphazard. That actually made it difficult to edit into a reasonable threshold of legibility. Nevertheless, I was proud of my creation. It was totally original.
Each letter had unique points because I hand “clicked” each point on each letter. That meant that the b, d, g, p, and q were not very uniform. Every letter was made a little “different” to give it that handwritten feel.
But that individuality came at a cost. There was a legibility limit to how small the font could get. While one should always practice brevity in comics, my speech bubbles could easily dominate the panel due in part because my font had to be big to be readable.
So the other day I sat down and redesigned the font. It was a major revision. Gone are the numerous unique points on every letter. Simplicity is the goal. The b, d, and p are now the same points only flipped, and letters like the n and u or t and f are basically the same. Every character borrows from another to create uniformity, and the font looks almost entirely different as a result.
I really like this updated font, and I hope you do too. I’m still a little apprehensive about updating the site’s logo, so I guess it’s going to take some getting used to.
Pax,
-f2x
Special thanks to all the joke contributors this week. I really couldn’t have pulled it off without you. If you’d like to contribute your jokes to this site, just forward your forwards to flush2x@gmail.com. We never use your e-mail to solicit or spam you, and you’ll be helping to keep Flush Twice a fun and active “Joke of the Day” site.”
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.
