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.
Oh, Sorry, there’s no comic this week. I just wanted to mention that yesterday we received more visits than I’ve seen in over a year. Of course half of them were probably bots, but statistically, it looks like actual people were coming to the site to read the jokes.
(hint: this makes me happy!)
Just a reminder, your tax forms are due Monday, so… If you don’t get around to it, the IRS is probably going to get around to you. Since I only have income that’s clearly enumerated on a singular W-2 form, my taxes were done months ago and the refund money is spent.
Also- Since I’m nearly broke, I’m working at my day job today in an effort to get some overtime. That means I’m probably not going to have much time to work on comics or jokes for next week. It’s like that old saying: The best way to get out of responsibilities is to say, “I have responsibilities.” Well, I have them, and you’ll just have to accept that.
OK, so pretty much nobody is going to see this because there is no new joke or comic today, and Sunday’s news will be up here tomorrow. As always, thanks for stopping by.
So I’m shopping at my local grocery when I got a sudden hankering for fresh made chocolate chip cookies. Keep in mind the store is pumping delicious aromas into my nostrils. My left brain kicks in and says: “Cookies in the bakery are too expensive.” OK, so that’s out… How about the cookie isle? “They taste terrible compared to the real deal!” says the right brain. So what about making them from scratch? The right and left brain thought about it for a moment before unanimously shouting “No!” with the right brain objecting to a lack of immediate gratification, and the left pointing out that I’ll probably just eat all the chips before I ever get around to making the cookie dough.
Pre-made cookie dough! What about a tube of cookie dough?
The left brain was trying to say something about the cost when the right brain threw a heavy blanket over the left hemisphere while jumping up and down shouting “Get it! Get it! Get it! It’s on sale! Get it!”
Don’t remind me that I’m already waaaay too fat as it is… I bought the cookie dough and took it home. “preheat oven to 350…” I got the cookie sheet out of the oven and began to prepare for this evening’s gluttony. Along the way I noticed that a serving size is one (1) cookie. One fucking cookie?! Aw come on! I could eat a dozen before reaching for a glass of milk… OK, so how many servings in this “tube”? I could scarcely believe the pitifully low number: 16. That’s it… Sixteen cookies in a tube. Oh well… My cookie sheet only holds 14 cookies anyway. The last two blobs of uncooked dough are for my troubles.
And then I read it… “Please do not consume raw cookie dough.”
My shit day has already been shitty enough, and now I’m faced with this plea to not consume the product in what is arguably it’s tastiest form.
When did they start putting that shit on there? As if eating a pile of chocolate chip cookies is a healthy food choice to begin with. Who are these people to tell me how to live my life after providing me with a foodstuff that (baked on not) is essentially a tube of diabetes?
My job sucks. My day sucked. My life sucks. Fuck you. I’m eating the raw cookie dough.
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Hey folks, thanks for stopping by. We’ve got new jokes Monday through Friday, and an archive filled with hundreds of jokes. If it isn’t too much trouble, please rate the jokes you read! You’ve got stars one through ten. Click on star number one if you hated the joke, star number 10 if you loved the joke, or pick one of the stars in between that you feel is most appropriate. Heck, you can even click on the date above to go to the page where you can rate my rant! You can even leave comments to tell me what a fantastic site this is, or to tell me how you really feel! It’s free as in speech and beer, and you’ve got nothing to lose by playing along!
Perhaps you’ve seen something in the news about these “Panama Papers”. It seems the rabble within concerned online communities are frothing at the mouth over the thought that their ruling elites will somehow be held accountable, and justice will rain down from heaven upon those evil doers.
Whatever.
So the PM of Iceland stepped aside for a bit, a few world leaders acted like they were squirming a little, and a few calls for action were made, but the bottom line is this: Those in power will sacrifice a few of their members who’ve been getting a little sloppy lately, while the rest of them vindicate themselves and introduce new legislation that will promise to crack down on these “shell companies”.
Will this stop the practice? The reality of the situation implies something else… The rich and powerful will move on to their next secret tax haven. What is it? No one knows yet because it’s a secret, but rest assured they have plenty of backup plans. Meanwhile the rest of us will be burdened with some kind of bureaucratic red tape to remind us that our government is doing something about it. (Which is mainly forcing us to hop through more red tape so we don’t have the time and energy to deal with the fact that nothing’s really changed.)
So there… I’ve called it. Only time will tell if I’m right, but check back in about a year and tell me if I’m wrong.
Just so you know, I actually write these sidebars before they get published, so sometimes I have to rely on what I think I would say if it actually were Sunday. Right now it’s the Friday night before Sunday, so it’s not that far out. Even though there aren’t any jokes in the queue yet, I’m going to assume that by Sunday there will be, so let’s just pretend the queue is ready to go and there’s five jokes ready for the coming week.
A while back I deleted all the IP block-lists from the .htaccess file because I thought perhaps there might be people trying to visit through VPN’s or even TOR. I figured the site’s defenses were robust enough to hold its own against the hackers and spammers. It turns out I’ve been introduced to another internet scourge called scrapers. They basically rifle through the site and steal content. Even though this is mildly annoying, I’ll allow it for now. While I don’t agree with their methods, I don’t claim to actually own the jokes I publish, so they’re free to take them. In fact I maintain that all jokes are old jokes and predate most of the living.
Of course it goes from bad to worse… I can’t tell if there were any VPN or TOR users trying to get at the jokes, so my internal analytics are once again useless. The statistic plugin that I use can’t really tell a bot from a human, so I have no idea how many people actually visit the site. It would seem the humans are a mere drop in the bucket compared to all the bots out there.
Of course with me, nothing is ever truly happy… It’s not like the old days when I could just show up to the family Easter gathering, yap, and eat. Now I have to actually lend a hand in making the party happen, and you can believe with over twenty people coming, it’s a lot of work.
So there’s a new feature. I haven’t thoroughly tested it yet, but the random post tab will take you to a random post. How cool is that? Of course since it’s “random” it could take you to a comic, a joke, or even one of these sidebar rants of mine. It’s random!
I’m going to try to keep up with the schedule for this week, but there’s a possibility that I might not get the jokes up in time. As of this writing, the joke queue is bone dry, and since I’m going to be busy all day on Easter, you might have to entertain yourself on Monday with that fancy new random post tab.
And so spring has sprung! Nature’s time of re-birth arrives with fresh greens that fill the air with sweet and earthy aromas. It is a time of pleasantly brisk air along with occasional warm breezes. The birds begin to return in force as the buds on the trees spout into leaves. Life is anew!
That’s great and all, but I really can’t give two shits when my sciatica is acting up. I’m not kidding either. A couple weeks ago my back went out, and while I’m able to get around a bit better now, there’s still that nagging soreness in my lower spine and buttocks.
It’s hard to chuckle with a shooting pain in your backside, so I’ll just grin and bear it for another week or so, and I hope you never have to go through this sort of shit.
So things are moving along pretty good here. I took down the “deny from” list of IP addresses, opened up the comment function, re-instated the feeds, and added a sitemap page. So what happened with the bots and spammers? Not quite sure, but a new plugin has been keeping the spam out of the comments section. It seems that China, Russia, and Ukraine seem to have backed off as well. We still get probed by bots, but not like it was a while back. I’m pretty sure that if it was something I did, it was completely by accident.
You may be wondering, “Has opening things up lead to an increase in the number of real visitors?” Not really. I’m seeing a few more visits, but nothing like it was back in the day. I suppose that will have to do. There’s an over abundance of choices out there, so unless I come up with something truly novel, I doubt Flush Twice will see a huge influx of visitors.
I guess in the end it really doesn’t matter. I still enjoy maintaining the site, and there’s enough regular viewers to make it all worth it.
Pax,
-f2x
Update 3/15: Apparently I spoke to soon… The Ukrainians are back at it again. What gives with that country?
Big News! I’ve decided to turn the comment system back on. Whether or not they stay on is dependent on whether or not the spam situation is under control. If I start to see spam, then I’ll turn it off again. To leave a comment, you have to go to the article’s actual page. I really hope this works.
Just so you know, new comics will not appear in the main blogroll. You have to actually click on the “The Comic” tab. I only mention this because I put a new comic in there yesterday.
I’m also opening the site up to feed readers again… So you may be asking yourself, “What’s up? Why the sudden change of heart?” Simply put: Viewership is way down. For quite some time now I’ve been obsessed with blocking spammers and hackers, and it’s basically made Flush Twice all but invisible on the internet.
This site used to see over 5000 visits a day, and these days it’s lucky to see a hundred, and I think the site has a lot more to offer and looks a lot better than it ever has. I’ve got some new tools to make sure that hackers and spammers don’t take advantage of the site’s engine. Starting this week, I’m opening it up to all the bots and crawlers, and perhaps they’ll do me a solid and make Flush Twice more visible to people who like a daily dose of funny jokes.
Pax,
f2x
Update March 8, 2016 9:41pm: I thought I had opened the feeds, but apparently it was still borked. I was just about to commit seppuku when I found the problem… And it was actually a very simple fix. Feeds are working great, so let’s start increasing those visitor numbers. I want to see no less that 700 visitors a day by the end of the week!
I was going to have a new strip for yesterday, but I was pretty drunk when I made it. After sobering up I realized it wasn’t funny. In fact it was disturbingly creepy, sad, and pathetic. I deleted it before it ever saw the light of day.
We made it through last week, and this week’s jokes are queued up. I’m going to try my best to have a February comic, but don’t hold your breath… My muse seems to be taking another sabbatical.
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.
Please Do Not Consume Raw Cookie Dough
