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< Piro >

"ah, but come back thursday"

Wednesday - February 28, 2001

Ah, it's amazing. I finally am back online. Yes, as of 10:00 pm this evening, my cable modem is working like a charm. In typical 'my life is my best source of material for the comic' fashion, the hurdles that had to be cleared to GET me here is a story in and of itself.

Good to be back.

First off, let me cover a little business. I know that there have been a lot of guest strips, 'shirt guy dom' strips and 'piro bad art day - adventures of RL Piro and RL Seraphim' this month - if you've read my rants recently you will know that it is because I have been quite literally buried under work deadlines and the upheaval common with moving from one apartment to a (much smaller) new apartment. The movers moved the bulk of my possessions on Wednesday last week, when the sun was shining. The rest of my junk (the stuff i just wished would go away) i moved in the sleet and rain on Saturday, and the 50 mph windstorm on Sunday. It was so bad I started to feel as if it was some sort of cosmic joke. Yes, Seraphim did drop a dresser on me. Yes, i did recover, but I think that Seraphim's ribs still hurt from laughing so hard. In truth, I should be at the office tonight helping my crew finish up a set of construction documents. I'm a lousy boss. :(

As you have no doubt noticed, we have yet another 'Shirt Guy Dom' strip today. This was not my original plan - in fact, I am about halfway done with Wednesday's strip... I just can't finish it. I wasn't able to start drawing until 10:00 pm, and now that it is almost 1:00 am, i just don't have the energy to stay up till 3 am to finish it. Another thing, it's an important strip, and I want to do it right. Luckily, Dom, bless his trackball-biased soul, had given me another SGD strip to fill in next time I needed it. Well, tonight I need it.

I'm eager to get on with the story - in fact, i'm working to string in a few more threads and tug on a few others to slide them along more quickly - so the plethora of non-piro-drawn MT strips is as frustrating to me as it is to you (er, well, that's what i hear every time i use a guest strip). So, here's the deal: I'm going to spoil you folks - in addition to the SGD strip posted today, I will add post a new strip on Thursday, and yet another new strip on Friday. It will be like MT will have gone daily for three days in a row. Don't get used to it. ^_^

I won't prattle on much longer here - i'm very disappointed in myself for not getting the comic done for today, and I am tired and need to go to bed - but the effort required to get my cable installed in the apartment is worth telling...

As i mentioned last week, I was faced with the problem of having an apartment that was supposed to be wired for cable, but for some reason the cable in the wall itself was missing. Today's efforts involved one guy from Comcast/MediaOne and two of the maintenance guys from my new apartment complex.

To make a long story short, It took a good five hours before i was finally able to see things stream in thru my cable modem. Our first thought was that someone had just simply cut the cable and removed it from the wall. In the furnace closet, it was plain to see where the original cable had come down thru a hole in the ceiling, down to the floor, thru a hole, into the wall and down to the faceplate on the first floor. Even after cutting away a good part of the ceiling in the mechanical closet, they couldn't find a loose end of the cable to re-attach to.

You can imagine my surprise when the maintenance guys started cutting a 2 ft by 3 ft hole in the ceiling (you have no idea what a mess that can be ^_^) into which the cable guy clambered up to find where the end of the cable coming to my apartment was. It turns out that at some point in the past someone had yanked pretty hard on that cable that came down from the attic and quite literally yanked it out of it's crimp and termination. Once that was threaded thru and connected, my TV suddenly had more than 2 channels. After a quick replacement of the cable modem itself (i now have this real funky looking 3Com modem) and a run to Comp USA to pick up a 50 ft length of Cat 5 cable - i was online. It's was 10:00 pm. I hadn't even started to draw yet.

I'd just like to say 'thanks' to the Media One / Comcast guy, and to the two guys from the apartment complex here. You guys busted your asses to get me online, and I appreciate it. Thanks guys.

In March things should get back to normal... which doesn't really mean my life gets any easier, but hey - it all makes for good story material. :)

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< Largo >

"I'm not dead yet"

Saturday - March 3, 2001

[Largo] - 13:52:00 - [link here]

Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.

The fine people over at Bioware sent me some goodies such as a sweet Baldur's Gate mouse pad which now takes up permanent space on my desk.

Bioware recently annouced the final chaper in the Child of Bhaal saga with, Baldur's Gate II: Throne of Bhaal. Now I'm looking forward to yet another Bioware masterpiece. Now where's thats NDA at....

I love those Bioware guys, my every dealing with them only reaffirms the good things I always thought about them. Now if I can just challenge Trent Oster and his '84 Mazda RX7 to a race.

Alright, enough nice-ness, time to go back to doing what I'm paid to do, which is be Largo. Speaking of which, I get a lot of email asking how close the persona of Largo is to me in real life.

While there isn't an easy answer to that, the best way to explain it is Largo is my id. Understand that everything that I say in these rants, I do sincerely believe. Instead of portraying a character, I just try to turn off my better judgment when I write rants and scripts for MegaTokyo. I prefer to embrace the more spirited side of myself when it comes to my writings, and so - I tend to attract a great deal of flame mail when I throw my ego to the wind. Believe it or not, for all my ravings and misanthropy, I'm an idealist.

First off, for those of you who wrote in asking about my Phantasy Star Online character, I currently have a level 41 Hunter Newearl. Though I keep telling myself I need to stop playing PSO, like any good MMORPG, it's addicting, the leveling, and all that junk. However there always a feeling of 'damn' when I sit down to play the same game over and over again just to get an additional level which doesn't really translate into all that much, besides the wasting of a day of my time. It was this reason I had to stop playing Evercrack so much.

Verant, the makers of Everquest and the largest drug dealer in America, recently pissed me off. On my credit card bill this month I noticed eight charges from Verant to my card, each charge was for $9.89, totaling up to a $79.12 bill. Naturally I called them about this and their explanation was they are doing a audit for the previous year and it turns out they forgot to bill me 8 months of the last 12. So now they are simply just billing me all at once so I can pay them all that back money. Granted, I did check my credit card statements for the last year, and yes they were correct that they were not always billing me. I never gave it much thought in the past, I always figured they were giving me free months to compensate for their crappy game. Oh well, I suppose it would have been nice for them to at least 'tell' me they were going to stick a big charge on my card for this, but knowing Verant's idea of customer service, I'm not surprised.

I was notified that there is a new Erika skin over on the winamp site, found here.

On the comic front, there is a new webcomic up called TrueNuff. The guys over at Comic Ex Machina did a cool strip awhile back that was brought to my attention recently and can be found here. Funny stuff, though by linking it I'm sure I'll be barraged by flame mail.

Over at the shroom there is a interview with us posted here.

I miss broadband, there used to be a time when I could spend hours over at AdCritic being entertained by commercials that didn't suck all that much. Now however, I'm in broadband limbo thanks to the merchants of evil at @home. When I moved to my new place back in November I was saddened to learn I was too far from my phone company's central office to get DSL service.However @home assured me that my area was going to be setup for cable modem service soon, and all I had to do was wait. Waiting is what I've done, patiently waiting each day for the service to be turned on, day after day, and hour after excruciating hour. The kicker to this is the equipment is all already in place. @home assigns a node to each residence before they can provide service. Currently everything is setup for me to get @home service, except they are not allowing me to have it until they 'release my node'. I swear it's this sort of fsck'ing bureaucratic red tape that causes people to go postal.