Category Archives: Sunday’s Rant

We Gotta Lotta Tomata’s

So far, this year’s experimental crop looks very promising. Of course I’d really like to get a hold of a real horticulturalist who specializes in S. lycopersicum for some feedback on what I’m doing, but it looks like I’m on my own with this one. Of the people I’ve shown these plants, all have been rather impressed. I find this curious, because while I think the plants are doing well, I still think they could be doing a lot better.

Meanwhile, yesterday’s comic is kind of… um… lurid? Alexis likes to play a little rough.

OK, so that about wraps that up. Tune in next week for another episode of “Ripen, You Bastards!”

Pax,

-f2x

Living for the Long Weekend

The 4th of July (US national holiday) falls on a Tuesday this year, and non-service industry workers, government offices, and banks get to take the day off. A lot of times, factory workers (like me) will schedule a vacation day adjacent to the holiday to extend the weekend. Basically I’m taking a 4 day weekend.

Now if I were smart, I would have scheduled the 5th of July as well. After all, People celebrate the night of the 4th. Who wants to get up at 4:30am to go to work after a night of partying? On the other hand, I’m not actually into that whole 4th of July party stuff, so it should be a fairly quiet day at work for me on the 5th, because EVERYONE ELSE WAS SMART ENOUGH TO SCHEDULE THAT DAY OFF.

But still, I’ve written this in advance of the weekend, because the moment this entry posts, I’ll be well into my mini stay-cation, and I don’t want to be bothered with any “work”. I’ll be thinking about you as I drink my Margarita’s under the sun.

Pax,

-f2x

The Garden is Doing Well

Did I mention I was growing some tomatoes this year? I thought I mentioned that… Yeah. Also I think I mentioned my experiment that I’d been running with seven (7) different varieties: Supersonic, Sugary, La Roma II, Rutgers, Bush Goliath, Sweet Millions, and San Marzano. I’ve got one of each turned upside down and growing out of the bottom of hanging planters.

Since I bought two of each, I gave the two sauce tomatoes to my neighbor and put the other five in the ground on the side of the house. The results have been remarkable.

Now you may be wondering if I’d ever grown tomatoes before. Well, yes. But this year, I’m using some premium name-brand potting soil. Even the ones in the ground got planted in the stuff, because I dug out a large hole, filled it with the potting soil, then planted the tomato seedling in it, then covered it in a thin layer of my native dirt. It’s like the plant gets to start out in a well drained pot, and when it outgrows the pot, it’s already in the dirt with a tomato cage around it.

So while the hanging plants have done much better than previous attempts, the tomatoes I put in the ground are truly astonishing.

Pax,

-f2x

The Heat is On

Don’t take this politically, but the weather has been rather warm so far this season, and this Wednesday is only the first day of summer. I work in a factory that is hot in the winter and even hotter in the summer, and to be honest, I really hate the heat. On the bright side, my tomato plants are looking amazing this year.

I’m experimenting with hanging tomato pots. Don’t be dense and confuse them with the “Topsy Turvy™” As Seen on TV stuff. This is where you take a hanging flower pot, cut out the grill on the drainage hole, fish a small tomato plant through, then backfill will a high-end potting soil. I’m testing seven different varieties this year. So far the Supersonic is the largest, but the Sugary has the most fruit. The rest are doing OK, but they’ve fallen way behind the other two.

And I’m falling behind as well… The heat makes me lazy. It’s after 8pm this Sunday, and I’m just getting around to writing this so called “rant”. It’s not really a rant. I’m too hot and tired to rant. Here in a moment I’m going to take a cool shower and get ready for bed. You know, I worked yesterday, so sleeping in today was an obligation. It just started raining outside, so I ought to sleep good tonight. Sometimes you need that extra rest.

The kk Star Rating plugin was updated this past week. That’s a good sign. It means that this plugin might just be around for a little while. I also had time to check it out a little. It doesn’t create its own database. Instead, it stores the ratings inside the posts’ metadata. After looking at the metadata it generates, I can safely say that it stores visitor votes with an encrypted hash. This means it does not store the actual IP address, and there would be no way for me to ever tell who voted for what. That’s kind of a bummer for me, but at least you know your privacy is protected if you decide to rate a joke… or comic… or rant…

OK, so the jokes are queued up, and I pretty much don’t care what happens. I gotta be at work in the morning, and it will likely be another 6 days of mostly 10 hour shifts. Hopefully I’ll get around to actually working on those profile pages some time this week, but don’t hold your breath

Pax,

-f2x

update Wed, Jun, 21:

Happy longest day of the year and all… It seems like some hosting companies were abusing the privilege, so I’ve started blocking feeds. If this negatively affects you, just drop me a line and I’ll restore it.

-f2x

My current comic agenda..

Here lately I’ve been making panels specifically to use on new character pages that I’ll create sometime in the future. The current character pages feel a little out of date, and I want to scrap and rebuild that whole mess. Here now is a draft of the new “History” on the comic. I went back and did a forensic examination to find the actual dates that certain things occurred because the site before October 22, 2008 was deleted, and I have never found any backups.

A Brief History of the Comics and the Characters

So if you go back to Flush Twice’s “Old Testament” days, there were two nameless, faceless stick figures that showed up on Jan 11, 2004. A week later on Jan 18, I re-posted them, and started publishing daily panels thereafter. Thus began what was internally referred to as the “Stick Series”. I gave them faces on Feb 13th (stick0027), and their recognizable features solidified on the Jan 15, 2004 (stick0029), An old man named Ben showed up on Feb 21, 2004 (stick0035), and Brandon and Dewey got their names the next day (stick0036). I felt sorry for Dewey and on Apr 23 2004 (stick0097) I created Birdie to be his girlfriend. Newt and Clif showed up on May 12, 2004 (stick0116), with the introduction of Alexis the next day on May 13, 2004 (stick0117).

My home computer crashed after I had uploaded the 120th comic to the site. All of my original PNG files were lost, and I always resize my comics to smaller, lower quality JPG files when they get posted on the site. I was devastated by the loss of 4 months of work on the comic. Nevertheless, I persevered and rebuilt everything from the ashes, making sure to do it better this time around.

My first “hiatus” happened on August 24, 2004 after publishing 220 consecutive panels. Believe it or not I didn’t introduced Tyler until October 3, 2004 (stick0272). I started toying around with “fleshing out” the stick figures on Nov 5, 2004 (stick0274), and the new look became permanent on December 21, 2004 (stick0316). Toni rounded out the cast on December 30, 2004 (stick0325), and that about wrapped up the first year of my not so brief foray into comics.

Those were the original 9 characters. Brandon, Dewey, Ben, Birdie, Clif, Newt, Alexis, Tyler, and Toni.

In 2005 some of the updates became a bit sporadic. Of course Tyler’s character joined the Army in October of 2005, which is the same time that I did in real life. The comics and jokes became even more sporadically updated at that point with the “Stick Series” ending July 20, 2008.

On October 22, 2008 I deleted the original site and installed a content management system. This began the “f2x Series” of comics. During this time, I would add Sergeant Bromite on October 10, 2009. Updates on the site continued to be sporadic until late November 2013 when I began pumping out a couple weeks worth of comics before settling into publishing jokes every Monday through Friday. On March 8, 2014 I debuted 2 new characters dressed in Army fatigues. It would be another 7 months before I showed them along with two more soldiers on Oct 4, 2014. They would be further refined and named over several months to be known as Sergeant Bryan, Sergeant Scrapper, Specialist Brady, and Private Grouper.

Only one other named character has been added since then, and that’s Chef Jimmy DeMarde on October 31, 2015. That sporadic story arc lasted until March 5, 2016. While I never officially closed the “f2x Series”, I’ve never went back to it, and in spite of what I might have said at the time, there currently aren’t any plans to either.

And that brings us to the “Pathos Series” that began on May 13, 2016. At first I tried to make them daily like I used to in 2004, but the schedule was too demanding for me. The comics continued to be sporadic until Saturday Nov 5, 2016, and have appeared every Saturday since then (although not necessarily at midnight EST).

So there you have it. A brief synopsis of the past 13 years and 5 months that I have been making comics. I’ll also note that every panel and strip is still available on this site, no matter how embarrassingly bad some of them may be. Oh yeah… Some of them make me cringe hard. Some of them I like… But there are some on here that I just shake my head in shame over. WTF was I thinking?

I really hope you liked this history lessen. If you want, compare an contrast it with the current historical account that I wrote previously.

Pax,

-f2x

Meta Analysis

By now you’re probably beginning to notice a pattern. This is the paragraph where I start some diatribe about something that gets under my skin. No one should ever read this stuff, but for some reason you do.

The second paragraph is where I go into a little more detail, then start to backpedal by saying something like, “maybe I’m overreacting”. You’ve probably also realized you’ve seen this meta analysis someplace else on the internet, because nothing on the internet is original anymore. If you’re still reading this garbage I have no pity on you.

By this point all intelligent cohesion is lost, and I’m just rambling aimlessly. If you think there is any sense to this crap, that’s all you. That’s just you projecting your own nonsensical beliefs on meaningless filler that I typed.

Finally, I show the poor reader a little compassion and wrap things up. It doesn’t really resolve anything, even if it claims it does, and your life is somehow 15 minutes shorter after reading a blog post that only took a minute to read. As always, I’ll finish this with my customary closing.

Pax,

-f2x

ps: Thanks for hanging in there with me. We’ve got more jokes coming every Monday through Friday, and I’m doing my best to make sure that PitP is published every Saturday. I love you guys! See you again soon!

Thoughts on the Side

Ever hear the sound of your own voice? It’s rather annoying, isn’t it? That’s how I feel whenever I go back and read some of my rants and comics. While I’m actually quite proud of much of the work I’ve done on my comic and various ramblings, there are certain desultory prose that I regard as cringe-worthy. I imagine today’s scribbling on my digital palimpsest will evoke that same sense of mortified embarrassment in a week or so.

Just so you know, the jokes on the left are taken from various friends, coworkers, emails, and occasionally other websites. While I do rewrite many of them to correct grammar, or ensure that the actual punchline lands at the end of the joke, or that the joke is consistently told in the past tense, or that silly ethic pronunciations are re-written in plain English because I refuse to do the voices… OK, you get the idea… The point is, the jokes aren’t mine. I do my best to edit them as appropriate, but I also try to keep out of it as much as possible.

As for the stuff that shows up on the right, well that is mine, and that’s where the cringe factor comes in. Many times I go back and read things I’ve written only to realize I’m reading the accidental diary of a morose clown. Oh my god! Do I really sound like that? It’s like realizing your fly was down during a semi-formal event.

Thankfully, no one I know IRL is reading any of this. Even though it’s not a secret to my coworkers, friends, and family that I run this JOTD and comic, none of them would ever bother to visit this site. Except for the times I’ve used my phone to show off a comic I made, none of them have actually seen it, and they usually dismiss it as something I made using an app or copied from something else. Seriously?! At first glance, do you actually think my comic was created on an iPad using an app developed by someone else? What’s worse, I don’t know whether to take that as a compliment or not!

I suppose that’s the underlying reason why I write stuff like this. It’s the reason I renamed the comic to “Pathos in the Plumbing”. Among all my family, friends, and coworkers, none of them actually care about my hobbies and interests, and when you look at it like that. it’s kind of comically sad. I live inside a monkey sphere that insulates me from people I might actually have things in common with. Writing about it is basically a kind of therapy to deal with that fact.

Pax,

-f2x

New Stars!

Introducing “kk Star Ratings”.

OK, so I’m not entirely sold on this one yet, but it’s not the bloated abandonware we were using before. I haven’t fully examined the code to see if it messes with the privacy policy, but so far it looks very kosher.

Things I like about it:

1. It just works! (No short codes or modifying themes to make it work.)

2. I can upload different images if I want! (Instead of stars, how about sandwiches? OK, maybe not…)

3. It supports ten stars! (Or any reasonable number.)

4. It’s got hover tips! (Hover over a stars to see what they say!)

5. Much, much smaller than GD Star Rating.

6. It’s free as in beer. (Not a crippleware advertisement for their “pro” version.)

Things I’m not too thrilled about:

1. I have no idea how it works yet. (For all I know it could melt my database.)

2. There is no way to see who is voting. (Yes Michigan and Minnesota, I could see your IP addresses and how you were voting under the old system.)

3. No way to import GD Star Rating data. (Oh well.)

4. The author hasn’t updated it in a while. (So it might be abandonware after all.)

There’s a silver lining to the last one. Since this plugin is so much smaller, I might be able to wrap my head around what it’s doing and how it functions. Then if I’m lucky I might just be able to rewrite it to suit my needs. I actually did that with the plugin that allows these side posts. I rewrote someone else’s code, and now it’s mine.

Anti-Scraping Plugin

I also wanted to mention there’s a plugin that I’m trying out in order to combat the content scraping bots. If you ask for pages too fast it will request that you solve a captcha to prove that you’re human. I really doubt that this plugin is going to be around much longer, but if you see the captcha, I’m sorry about that. Don’t freak. Just type it in, and it should leave you alone after that. Um, yeah… That didn’t last long.

OK, so there you go. Feel free to rate the jokes again, and let me know if you have any other problems or concerns.

Pax,

-f2x

Mother’s Day

If your mom is still with you, don’t forget to give her a card and a hug.

What I wouldn’t do for that hug right now…

I miss you, Mom.

Pax,

-f2x

What? Oh, you were expecting me to have something to say this week?

Honestly, I’ve been busy with yard work, and things are growing like crazy with all the rain we’ve been having. I’ll come back and bitch about something if I can find the time.

Pax,

-f2x