Category Archives: Sunday’s Rant

Don’t Google “Sunday Rant”

Go on and check the archives. I started doing my “Sunday Rant” back in January of 2016. At the time, I had no idea if the phrase “Sunday Rant” was even a thing. I didn’t actually care. I just like to vent my arbitrary compositions about whatever. Even though I have another website with the word “Soapbox” literally in the title, I chose this little sidebar to be my place to let my inner id hang out.

So about a week ago I decided to Google “Sunday Rant” to see if per chance any of these little jeremiad joyrides made their way into the indices of the ultimate index. To my horror, anything with the word “rant” is frequently linked to President Trump. Not exactly what I was expecting. “Sunday Rant” also links to other blogs, but still, Flush Twice isn’t even in the top 100, and even if it were, it would be among terrible company.

That being said, I’m not changing the title. It’s Sunday, I’m ranting, and that’s how it is. OK, so maybe I don’t always rant, but this time I’m really doing it. I’m going on a tirade because of the extreme injustice I’ve perceived that “Sunday Rant” gives toxic search results on Google. There, I said it, and that’s all I’ve got to say.

/rant

Pax,

-f2x

Why the “Flush Twice” comic became “Pathos in the Plumbing”.

Back on on Monday, September 26, 2016 I officially re-titled my comic to “Pathos in the Plumbing”. While no one has ever asked me why I did what I did, I felt like I needed to explain.

Of course it’s the same comic that I started back in January of 2004. It’s the same characters, the same stories, the same everything… So why change the name? Because it signified a completely different way in which I was presenting the comic.

In the beginning, the comic was inextricably linked with the daily joke. Even though they weren’t related, I didn’t post a comic without a joke. Of course if I didn’t have time or feel like making a comic, there wasn’t going to be a joke, and vice versa.

As the comic’s art evolved, panels took longer to produce, and a daily schedule was no longer practical. Suddenly updates got very irregular. My joke suppliers started to taper off at this time, and my morale suffered too. Long hiatuses ensued, and eventually in late 2013 I decided: Let’s post jokes separate from comics!

That was all well and good, but then I realized something: The comic had only a day or two in the spotlight, then just rolled down the blog as the next joke pushed it out of the way. You may not think so, but I worked hard on that comic! Of course I tried giving the comic it’s own category, but then it was hidden from the main page entirely, and that’s no good either! I needed some way to keep the comic in a prominent position until it was superseded by a new comic.

It was my sidebar rants that gave me the solution I’d been looking for! I modified a WordPress plugin that allows posts from specified categories to appear in the sidebar. I could finally post a comic along side a JOTD without the comic scrolling out of the limelight! While I still feel the weekly schedule to be a bit challenging, it’s doable, and I’ve been hiatus free for nearly a year now!

Of course there are certain limitations. The comic cannot exceed a width of 330 pixels or it messes up on some mobile devices. If I want to do a two or three panel strip, I have to make the strip vertical, and internet critics aren’t fond of scrolling. I’ve found some workarounds, but the comic still has to render with legible text at 330 by whatever resolution. (Yes, I tried widening the sidebar. It goes deeper than that.)

And now with a new way of doing things, a new name should grace this boldly positioned panel! “Pathos in the Plumbing” was born! It’s the same comic I started back in 2004, and with over 13 years in the making, I’m more proud of my comic than ever.

Thanks for watching!

Pax,

-f2x

Steppin’ up my Game

So you might have noticed a minor design change this week. It also coincided with an updated and improved character page. I’ve already deleted the revision history, but I feel much more confident in the various backstories after the rewrite. The characters seem way better thought out now, and their lives make more sense. I just need to get better at this thing called comedy.

I’m trying to do my best to make this site the best JOTD and comic site on the net. Oh wait… I’ve been trying my best to do that for 14 years, and I’m still not ranked on Alexa. Seriously, mBlip is ranking higher than Flush Twice, and it’s not even a year old!

The updated character design templates are coming along slowly. I’m running into some old personal limitations I’ve yet to overcome when it comes to the artwork. The biggest one has to be the fact that I’m still using a bitmap editor from 1997 for the bulk of my work. Sorry, but Gimp and Photoshop aren’t very intuitive for me, so I work with what I know best… and what I know likes to crash and wipe out hours worth of work when I least expect it.

Pax,

-f2x

How Would You Like Your Crow?

So I’m a little embarrassed to admit this, but I’ve occasionally torrented TV shows, and less often movies. Many times I’ve used Kodi to watch stuff I can’t get on Netflix or Amazon Prime video, but let’s face it: There’s no way in hell I will ever subscribe to cable or dish. While I am kind of leaning towards Sling TV (owned by Dish BTW), until they support Linux, they can suck a bag of dicks.

So in order to watch whatever, whenever… Well… Now don’t get me wrong! I’m not condoning any of this! but sometimes I’d dip my toe into legally murky waters. And well… I got caught… Sort of. You may have gotten one yourself. It’s an e-mail from your ISP letting you know that: “It has been brought to our attention that your Internet service was recently used to improperly copy or share copyrighted content such as music, movies, video or software using Peer-to-Peer or Torrenting software.”

They also were kind enough to inform me that: “We have not shared any information about you with the content owner, nor will we unless we receive a subpoena or are otherwise required to do so by law or if you choose to file a counter-notification.” So that right there has set me off. First of all, they didn’t even mention what “content” or when it happened, and if I counter it, they’re going to snitch on me! Thanks assholes!

OK, so maybe calling them assholes is a bit harsh. At least they’re not turning me over to the Feds. It’s not about the movies or TV shows. Most nights I’m watching videos on mBlip. It’s about my privacy. So now I’m joining the ranks of internet users who feel uncomfortable that their internet history is being cataloged by the bureaucrats.

I signed up for a VPN.

And now for that tasty morsel of crow I was talking about: All those server farms I’ve been zealously blocking on Flush Twice? Well… it looks like I’m going to have to unblock them… Yeah… {sigh} I’m going to have to edit the ol’ htaccess file and let the scum of the earth scrape my site like a priest in an unsupervised daycare.

Who knows… Maybe we’ll start to see the visitor numbers go up because people who wanted to protect their online privacy couldn’t get through my “deny from” list.

If you were previously unable to check out this site because you have to use a VPN, well, I understand now. Welcome to Flush Twice.

Pax,

-f2x

Insufferable Heat

So for the past week, the midwest here in the good ol’ US of A has been a bit on the warmish side. As the old saying goes, it’s not the heat so much as the humidity. With a dew point that never leaves the mid 60’s (F), the overall comfort level has been bleah!

I just got done mowing the grass this morning, and believe it or not, it’s actually very green, and there’s been a lot of growth in the past week. Usually when it gets unpleasantly hot, the grass turns brown and basically stops growing. Not this year though. Somehow (and without watering) it’s managed to stay pretty lush. Perhaps it’s because the humidity is keeping everything moist. I dunno, but in some ways I wish I didn’t have to go out there and mow it so much.

So this afternoon I’m kicking back with some Netflix, General Tso’s, and I’m cranking the AC down to the low 70’s. Some days, you just don’t want to face the harsh reality that is currently hotter than hell.

Pax,

-f2x

A Brighter Tomato

Well, the tomatoes were delicious this year, but the best of them have passed. The current leftovers on the vine all taste vaguely better than store bought, but they aren’t anything to crow about.

The hanging tomato experiment is now over. Every pot produced some tomatoes. The Sugary and Sweet Millions (both grape) produced the most, the La Roma II and San Marzano’s all had a problem with end rot, the Rutgers and Goliath were slow to produce anything, and didn’t produce much, and the Sonic came on strong in the beginning, but basically fizzled out after that.

Ultimately I decided the real winners in the experiment were the tomatoes planted in the ground. They all did very well with large bushes and many healthy fruits. Next year I’m going to focus on Sonic, Sweet Millions, and the rest will be peppers. Mainly I’ll have bell, jalapenos, and a lot of banana peppers. The hanging baskets will be used for flowers.

Pax

-f2x

Bot Rant

It’s been a little while since I mentioned this, but just in case you ever have trouble reaching Flush Twice from various locations, I figured you ought to know why.

The Flush Twice server gets requests every day. Virtually every request gets added to the log file. Sometimes it receives requests from actual humans, but other times it gets these requests that no human visitor would ever make. Now the best thing to do is to just ignore the weird inhuman requests, but sometimes the logs fill up with nothing but these weird requests. Next thing you know, your site is being Ddos’ed or hacked. For the longest time I was able to collect huge lists of username/passwords that bots would use in a vain attempt to gain access to this site. Good thing they never tried, “hunter2”. Oh wait… They tried that one as well.

So after a while I started to block IP addresses that were almost certainly bad bots. This list grew to huge proportions, and I was left with pathetically low visitor numbers. Seeing such low numbers made me sad, and I thought that perhaps I was blocking legitimate traffic from accessing the site. I deleted the block lists. The visitor numbers when back up, but the spammy site scraping behaviour returned. Off an on I’ve vacillated between blocking bots and not. At one point I even tried to create a website devoted to the problem.

Ultimately I gave up worrying about how many people actually visit this site. If there’s only five of you, the by golly, the five of you should have the best jokes and comics I can come up with! Even if no one is watching, this site is going to be here in case someone ever does. At the end of the day, I still like to point at this site and say, “I made this for you!”

The most recent scourge I’ve encountered is the site scrapers. They are kind of like spiders, only they disguise themselves as actual visitors. They don’t do a very good job of it, because they “scrape” through the site, trying to download every last page in under 15 minutes. This grinds my gears for a variety of reasons, but suffice to say, they aren’t doing it to the benefit of this site or its actual visitors.

And how many IP addresses do I block? That’s actually hard to say. These days, I block by seeing bot-like behavior, check who owns the IP address of the culprit, if they are a server farm I look up a list of all of the CIDR’s they own, then run that list through a script I cobbled together, document it and add it to the “deny from” section of my htaccess file. Currently there are nearly 16000 CIDR’s in this list. With each CIDR typically covering between 256 and 65536 IP addresses each, that adds up to a lot of places on the internet that are permanently blocked from accessing this site!

And while blocking that many IP addresses makes me a little sad, I didn’t block you. No, not you. You’re special. You’re the person I made this site for. You’re the reason I’m doing all this. It’s always been about you. Nobody but you.

Pleasant dreams.

Pax,

-f2x

How Much Time Do You Waste on Here?

So a commonly asked question that no one has ever asked me is, “How much time do you spend working on Flush Twice?”

And honestly, it varies. If I have enough jokes in my e-mail, then it’s pretty much a snap. I copy/paste the jokes into the queue, along with some editing to correct spelling, grammar, and fix any other errors that one typically finds in the copypasta. It’s just a mere five jokes a week, so I like to get it all done in an evening. Takes about an hour or two if things are going well.

These rants are just like any other “twittube” or “facespace” post that people make. I just type whatever nonsense comes off the top of my head. Other than ensuring that spelling, grammar, and paragraphing is adhered to, I make no claims that you’re reading the Journals’ of Ernest Hemingway. In fact, if you’re reading this, you’re probably more bored than I am and need to find a better hobby. All in all, it’s about an hour’s worth of my time, because I really don’t rush it, and there are frequent breaks and digressions.

The amount of time I spend on the comic is the real wildcard. Some weeks I spend a lot of time trying new stuff, while others I just quickly toss it together because I’m really not feeling it. Interestingly, the comic you see, and the stuff I’m working on, are not necessarily connected. The panels I publish are based on tried and true techniques that I feel comfortable using. Occasionally I might create something that looks really cool, but if creating it is very tedious or I’m just not able to consistently create that kind of work, then I’m not going to post it. A lot of really interesting (and sometimes disturbing) stuff ends up on the cutting room floor.

So there you have it. Jokes and rants take two to three hours a week, but the comic itself could be anywhere from 15 minutes to ten hours of time spent each week.

Pax,

-f2x

PS: I also just wanted to add that the tomatoes have finally ripened, and I’ve been enjoying the most delicious tomato sandwiches. Here’s the recipe:

• Pick ripe tomato off of your tomato plant.
• Put 2 slices of bread in toaster.
• Slice tomato.
• When bread pops up, spread on Miracle Whip (or mayo).
• Add tomato slices and smash together.
• Enjoy.

I suppose you could add bacon to this sandwich if you wanted to, but honestly they are so juicy and delicious by themselves, it’s almost a shame to mess with it.

Also, I wanted to touch on what makes a home grown tomato so much better than any store bought:

1. They have a more concentrated tomato flavor.
2. They are tender without being mushy.
3. Juicy without being drippy
4. …and they have that fresh tomato plant smell on them!

Migraine Weekend

Saturday, about noon, I started getting a migraine again. I was in the middle of developing some new stuff for the comic when it hit. Needless to say, I never got done with my comic development that evening. I did finish it tonight though, and while I can still feel a residual dull ache, the migraine has subsided enough that I can at least function around the house.

So basically the whole weekend was shot. Didn’t go anywhere or do anything. For all I know (or care) the tomatoes all dried up and died. But sometimes you need that downtime. It helps to have that break in your day to day life. a couple of days where nothing gets done or matters.

Actually I do have some happy news. I got a promotion at work, and I start tomorrow in mold set up. Having a couple days of downtime to calibrate my focus might just be a good thing too.

Pax,

-f2x

Busy, Busy, Busy

So… the tomatoes are doing fine. The cherry/grape tomatoes are producing a few ripe tomatoes every day, but everything else is still looking very green. I’m not really sure if there is a way to force green tomatoes to turn red on the vine. I’m thinking about cutting up pieces of very ripe banana and putting them under each bush.

OK, that’s about all I have time for. Tune in next week when I whine about not having enough time again.

Pax,

-f2x