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.
Don’t worry, I’m not going on hiatus again, but suddenly everyone around me thinks I’m some kind of magic djinn as they dump their mess in my lap and run for cover.
Of course they sure as hell wouldn’t give my ideas a moment’s consideration back when the situation was realistically manageable. Oh, no… That would might have implied the ungrateful SOB’s had a shred of respect for me.
So now that everything is out of control, I’m their fallback plan. It was nice of them to tell me ahead of time… Oh wait. They didn’t do that either. They just waited until all the shit was fucked, then flippantly dumped it on me as if I’m supposed to not mind a single fucking bit.
Well, I’ll just get right on it and make everything all right again, and once that happens they’ll want their reins back. Nothing ever changes, and once I’ve fixed their problem, they’ll sneer at me with contempt for being better than they are.
If you’ve been watching the sidebar this past week, you might have noticed that the speech bubble font has changed. I thought I’d write a brief article about it and share it with you here today.
One of the things I pride myself on is the fact that I created my own font for the comic. Back in 2004 I tossed a serif font into the comic, and it was impossible to read. I really didn’t pay any attention to the idea of fonts at all, but quickly realized something just didn’t look right.
It didn’t take long for me to stumble into Comic Sans. Shortly after, I starting to notice how much the internet seemed to hate this font, which is a shame, because it really is a good font. Not in the mood to champion a lost cause, I set out to forge my own font with FontForge.
Of course the first version was absolutely abhorrent. I didn’t know what I was doing. It was monospaced. The characters where supposed to appear handwritten, but these looked downright arthritic. It was just very, very bad. That font was revamped and overwritten several times while I used it for the daily panel. Eventually I felt it was “tolerable”. Overtaxed on my creative output, I called this font aaa.ttf. That way it would be easy to locate at the top of the font list.
That font lasted until about 2009 when I revamped it again. This time I named it the aab.ttf. Even though the only real difference was a heavier and more consistent line weight, it was a lot easier to read. There were still some aspects of it that bothered me back then. Why were other comic fonts able to me more legible in smaller spaces? This is kind of an important thing since the comic has to surrender an unfortunate amount of space to the speech bubble.
And that brings us to the present. I finally took the time to sit down and give the Flush Twice font a complete overhaul. Many of the typefaces were redrawn from scratch, and I finally figured out how to standardize the spacing. The size of the characters has not changed, but I can fit more text in a smaller area. If I’m to be totally honest though, I still don’t know what I’m actually doing. I don’t know how to properly design a font, so it’s glitchy. On a positive note, I feel the look of the font has significantly improved.
The image above is a before and after of the font. As you can see, the bottom one is bolder and takes up slightly less space. IMHO it’s easier to read because more of the word stays inside your foveal vision. I really like my font. It’s no Comic Sans, but that’s probably a good thing. While I probably spent way too much time making this font, I’d do it again in a heartbeat. There’s just no way I’d feel as good about my work if I used a font that someone else designed.
I had a pretty good htaccess file there for a while, but when I re-installed WordPress, I accidentally deleted it. Almost immediately I saw four times the visitors I normally would, and for some reason they were interested in finding the login page, checking random non-existent plugin directories, and letting me know that they were referred here from spammymcspammer.com.
Fortunately they still haven’t figured out webvitalii’s “Anti-spam” plugin, so I haven’t seen any comment spam at all.
Meanwhile, my ranking with Google seems to be slipping a bit. Maybe it’s because I went on hiatus during the summer, or maybe Flush Twice is becoming less relevant. In any event, I’m not seeing as many legitimate referrals as I used to get, and that means a lot fewer people are actually visiting.
I guess it’s a good thing I do it for the love of the jokes, instead of basing my self-worth on how many visitors I get.
OK everybody, I’m finally ready to come back now. The sight has received a fresh install of WordPress, all the plugins are up to date, the database has been cleaned and polished to a high gloss finish, and I finally tracked down one of my primary contributors… who probably doesn’t know that they are a contributor.
I’m just saying that things are finally getting back to normal around here., While the summer heat may not be entirely gone, it has started to wane as we enter into fall. I’m feeling much better, and we should be able to resume normal daily jokes starting tomorrow!
Huzzah!
With the good comes the bad.
See the black lab in the picture up there? That’s my dog. Her name is Grace. She’s had a rough summer. Grace had to have surgery to remove a mast cell tumor from her tummy. Sadly, the histopathology report on the tumor wasn’t the best. It seems that while they went deep enough, they didn’t go wide enough. On the bright side, it’s a low grade MCT, so her prognosis isn’t necessarily terrible.
For my fellow viewers with four legged family, please give them a hug for me, and say a prayer for Grace.
But on the bright side, I re-installed WordPress (again) and fixed some of those irritating glitches I’ve been experiencing. The “Random!” tab is back on the menu, and now when I post something into the queue, it doesn’t give me a blank screen while only saving part of it to “Drafts”.
So in my last “News” post, I mentioned that we’d be back in mid to late September with new jokes. You may be asking, “Does that time frame still stand?” Basically we will be posting new jokes on Monday, September 26… Unless I decide to start posting them sooner.
“So ‘maybe sooner’? Why you gotta play with us like that?”
Well, the truth is, I’m ready today! The summer heat has started to back off a little, and I’m not feeling quite so worn out… But my contributors are not giving me any new material. Right now it looks like I’ll have to copy paste more shit from /r/jokes if my current sources don’t pick it up, or I can’t find some new sources.
So there it is… We’ll definitely be posting jokes by 9/26 or sooner if I can find another mother lode of jokes.
Hoo boy… I really hate to do this to you guys. We were having a really good run too. Unfortunately with my job and the summer heat, I really don’t want to be staring at the computer screen unless it’s to look at pictures of glaciers and snow capped mountains. This past week has left me feeling quite nauseous from the heat, and since I’m out of payed vacation time at my day job, that means I need to take a vacation from this place to try to recoup. As of today, I’ve switched the system over to generate a random page until fall, or whenever the heat breaks.
So basically, we’re showing re-runs for the next two months.
Remember, this is a hiatus, not a funeral. Every time you reload the page there will be five (5) jokes randomly selected from the archives. Enjoy the random jokes. We’ve got a lot of ’em.
Oh, BTW: The site has a bunch of glitches in it right now… They aren’t immediately apparent, but they are there. One of the glitches makes it impractical to allow voting on the random jokes, so it was disabled. I may or may not invoke some maintenance mode at some point to try and repair some glitches that the site has developed.
Again, I just was to stress that I’m only taking a break for the summer and we will resume adding new entries in mid to late September.
It’s like watching the world on fast forward. Where the heck am I going to find the time to get all the things done that I need to do? Thank goodness I have the support of friends and family to get through the rough spots.
Of course no one is helping me with putting together new comics at the moment (not that anyone ever has), so that’s why there hasn’t been any new ones lately. I’d like to make some new ones, I really would, but who has the time?
It looks like July is just bananas, so if I get a moment to catch my breath, I’ll try and get back to the story.
Now with Less Sex Appeal!
After last week’s dearth of sexy jokes, I gave it some thought and realized something. Some weeks all we have are sex related jokes. Now I like all jokes no matter their genre just so long as they’re funny. That being said, I’m going to actively try including more jokes that aren’t sexual in nature. So how do you feel about this? Let me know in the comments.
This past week was brutal, and next week doesn’t look much better. I’ll admit, I’m a bit of a wuss when it comes to putting up with heat, but nevertheless, it’s been hot outside lately.
How hot was it?
It’s been so hot, the birds are using potholders to take the worms out of the dirt.
It’s been so hot, I bought a loaf of bread, and when I got home I had a loaf of toast!
It’s been so hot, the catfish are already fried when you catch them!
That’s how hot it’s been, and it’s only going to get worse!
Cleaner Jokes?
I take ’em as I get ’em, but here lately I’ve noticed that more of the jokes have been less sexual in nature. It’s been a nice change of pace, and I’d like to have more clean jokes. Alas it reminds me of that famous limerick:
Break out the bunting; it’s that time of year again. This is a special holiday season for me since I’m getting a three day weekend! Woo-hoo!
While I do love this country, I’m not particularly partial to American exceptionalism. Jingoism just reeks of being dreadfully dull and tacky. On the other hand, I can’t think of any other country I’d rather be living in at the moment. The food here is simply the best, and despite what you may have heard, the water is actually safe to drink. While the United States may not be perfect, it is a really terrific place to live and work.
If there’s one thing I hate about the US, it’s all the polarizing politics. This is a presidential election year, so it’s a little worse than usual. To be fair, it’s nothing compared with the previous four elections but still enough to make me gnash my teeth. I’m just going to put all that stuff to the side and enjoy this Independence day.
Still going strong after 240 years! Happy 4th of July!
Usually on Sunday, weather permitting, I cut my grass. As a courtesy I also cut the front lawns of my neighbor’s homes as well. It’s something I started doing a few years ago. These are small yards, and it’s really no trouble… Until it gets hot out… and naturally it’s usually hot out when the grass gets growing.
Of course the neighbor to the south is a renter. She never cuts her lawn herself, and it’s not a service offered in her lease either. About once every month and a half she’d hire a bunch of guys to cut her grass… poorly. This year I started doing her front and back yard as well. Partly because I’m a nice guy, but since she lives on a corner it stands out as an eyesore if I don’t.
In a way, it’s become a bit of a spectacle to see me stretching my extension cord across the neighborhood cutting all these lawns. I think it may have inspired others to get out there and make their lawns look neat and trim. I have to admit that in the 15 years I’ve lived in my house, I’ve never seen the yards on my street look quite so tidy.
New Logo
Just wanted to include a quick mention that I put up a new “logo” with the site’s new tagline, “Comics and Joke of the Day”. The “Once for the bulk…” text is actually built into the header image, so give me a week or two to come up with a new header.
Last of the Weekend Jokes
Just a reminder that next Saturday and Sunday there will be no new jokes posted. We’re going back to the Monday-Friday arrangement. The number of visits to the site actually went down since I started posting weekend jokes. Coincidence? Most likely. I don’t think people started avoiding this place because I posted more jokes, but they sure as hell didn’t flock to the site either.
5 jokes a week. If you don’t like it, start your own JOTD!
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.
