One of my brilliant-er ideas

Here’s what I want. Say I have a few boxes of old documents I want shredded. (Easy to say. I do, in fact have four full boxes of documents of which I want rid.) Now, I can use my personal shredder, which will take many hours and destroy the shredder, forcing me to buy a new one, which I will then destroy. I can use a service, which costs a dollar a pound. For four boxes that’s over one hundred dollars, and all the shredding is done by strangers, out of my field of vision.

I don’t like either of these options.

Here’s what I suggest. If you happen to be an executive at any chain office supply store, feel free to use this idea. All I ask is free shredding for life. I should be able to take my boxes of documents into an office store. Upon hearing that I want documents shredded the cashier would hit a big red button. Yes, it can be marked “easy” if it must. Sirens would go off. A recording of Annie Potts yelling “We got one!” would reverberate around the store. On one side of the sales floor a curtain would part, revealing this machine.

Okay, not THAT machine. A smaller machine. And while I have an aside going here, why try to be funny at the beginning of a video of a piano being shredded? It’s just gilding the lily.

Anyhoo, I would then be given safety goggles, walked up some stairs and directed to slide my boxes down a chute into the machine. A mirror would let the spectators see the action, and I would personally see the tiny bits of paper coming out of the machine. Thus, I would know the documents are destroyed.

I would GLADLY pay thirty-five dollars a box for this service. Heck, give me a ten dollar store credit and I’ll probably buy another thirty bucks worth of paper on my way out, which, seven years from now, I will need to shred.

Infini-Tees were back.

I have finished taking Infini-Tee orders for the 2010 Holiday season. Thanks everyone for your consideration.

If you'll excuse me now, I have some drawing to do.

Good news ... I hope.

Good news ... I hope.

Starting September 19^th, I will be changing the posting schedule for Basic Instructions.  Instead of posting on Monday and Thursday (Really the night before, if you wanna get technical) I will be posting on Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

Yes, as the math implies, I am upping production of the strip to three a week. Between ad revenue (thanks for putting up with the ads, btw) book sales (thanks for buying books as well) and now my deal with Cracked.com, I’ve been able to cut back on my hours at ye olde day job, and I’m putting the time to use getting back to my original three-strip-a-week schedule.

The kind of problem you want to have.

First of all, I'm sorry that I haven't posted here in so long.

There are two reasons for the lack of posting. One is that I've learned that
if I really want to get the word out about something, posting it here
doesn't work nearly as well as posting it as a postscript at the
bottom of a comic. The other reason is that I’ve been making more of an effort to
turn any funny ideas I have into comics, where in the past there were
some ideas where I just went "eh" and posted them here or to Twitter.

Now that my customary "apology from nowhere" is out of the way, I can
get on the real reason for this post. As you may be aware, some of
my comics are now running on Cracked.com. This has caused some
confusion as to which of my comics are new and which are reruns.  I
figured I'd just publicly state my posting schedule so everyone will
know what's going on.

I create two comics a week.

One goes to print papers. It can’t legally be posted online for thirty
days, so it gets scheduled for posting on a Sunday five weeks after I sent it to the papers.

Every Sunday and Wednesday I post to my site, but Cracked.com now gets
first shot at all the comics. They are not going to run all of them.
(In theory they could, but I really don't see that happening). Anyway,
I send Cracked.com a comic every Sunday and Wednesday. (on Sundays, it's
the comic that ran in the papers a month ago)

A week after I've sent a comic to Cracked.com, it becomes available for me
to post on my site, which I do.

Hopefully my posting schedule makes sense to you now. If it does,
please explain it to me, 'cause it confuses the he'll out of me every
time I post a comic.

About the most recent strip

About the most recent strip.

Over the course of the last three hundred comics, pretty much everyone has been the butt of the joke except the reader. I figured it was time to do something about that.

Actually, I labored quite a bit over this comic. I tried to maintain the joke while making the tone as gentle and self-effacing as possible. Overall I seem to have succeeded in that, but a few of the readers do seem to have gotten their feelings hurt. I’d like to clarify my position.

I HATE the fact that I make these stupid spelling and grammar errors. I’ve written before about the steps I take to try to prevent them, and I swear it seems like the harder I try to make a comic error-free, the more likely there is to be an error.

I am grateful to those who catch my mistakes and politely point them out to me. The problem, and I’m not the only person who has noticed this, is that finding my blunders has turned into a game, similar to “Where’s Waldo” or trying to find the bunny logo hidden on the cover of Playboy (hint: It’s seldom if ever on the “boobs,” so you can stop looking there). Also, some of the corrections have taken an increasingly derisive tone. Perhaps I’m just playing the over-sensitive artiste, but when you post a strip you’re proud of, then check to see people’s reaction and get fifteen variations of “prophesy is spelled with an S in this case, moron” it starts to detract from the fun. Judging from the comments, it’s beginning to bother many of the readers as well.

Again, a lot of the dogpile-like nature of the comments does stem from the fact that I moderate comments, and cannot do it in real time, so most of the correctors don’t know that they aren’t the first to give me a heads-up. This is not the corrector’s fault, but even they would probably admit that the cumulative effect is not pleasant.

So here’s the problem I have. I want to encourage the majority of you who correct me in a polite manner, while preventing the finding of my flaws from turning into some kind of drinking game. Here’s what I’ve come up with.

From now on, if you spot an error in Basic Instructions, you are encouraged to leave a comment telling me. You are doing me a favor in doing this, I just ask that you remember that I’m a real person over here, not a drawing. I will correct it as soon as possible, but I will not post your comment to the site. This way the comic gets fixed (which is all most of us want anyway) but nobody gets the credit for catching the error first, or for making the wittiest comment about the error.

Thanks for your time.