Pickle Zombie » Blog

Enshittification of everything

Lennon — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 03:21:28 +0000

I long for the analog days, simpler times. When an oven or washing machine is asking to join the wifi, I have to ask, why? It’s so infuriatingly stupid. I can’t stand when features are added for the sake of adding things. When something works fine, just let it be.

It dices! And… Uh… Dices. And That’s It.

The Samuwriter — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 03:21:21 +0000

For the record, rolling any number of zeroes on a D20 would be pretty impressive. You’d still get stepped on by the Tarrasque, but people would remember the event. For like a minute. Because of the Tarrasque.

While server-side physical dice is a late stage capitalism wet dream still relegated to science fiction, I have seen a bunch of different products attempting to sell me a digital D20. One of them would light up when rolled and flash red on a low roll and play a jingle when landing on a twenty. Another would connect to an app that would… display the result of the roll on your phone. Not quite as exciting, but technically impressive.

My question is always how do you make sure the die is fair with all those electronic bits in it? Teeny lithium batteries, wireless charging coils, and a PCB with ICs powering LEDs all have wildly varying densities. Have you seen the crazy bananas things they do to keep a bowling ball balanced? And I’m to believe that these guys on Kickstarter with the fancy graphic designers have figured it out at a miniature scale where the error margins are so low it would make NASA engineers double-check the math?

Semi-related tangent, I once chipped the edge a D4 I liked a lot so I set out to see if it was still fair or not. Did a hundred trials and had trouble telling, so I looked it up and statistically it takes tens of thousands of rolls to prove a D4 is fair. And it takes exponentially more to do the same for a die with five times as many faces at roughly the same radius. I don’t have the dozens of hours to setup the image recognition rig and robot arm to compensate for the fact that I don’t have the hundreds to roll dice over and over again.

Well at least until it’s the Tarrasque’s turn. Then your minute’s up.

Ja.

Meet Freya

Lennon — Fri, 08 May 2026 17:21:10 +0000

She likes coffee beans, springs and gets the zoomies.

Dodged a bullet…

The Samuwriter — Thu, 05 Jun 2025 01:04:25 +0000

For the record, you’re not going to get uncensored bare feet on my website. Not to yuck your yum, just not that corner of the web, this here.

Nope.

Comics Writing Themselves

The Samuwriter — Sun, 18 May 2025 19:28:27 +0000

For the record, May doesn’t often show up in the comic except to deliver direct quotes from my wife. This is a case study.

Now, the threat here might seem akin to a minefield, where the field is the portion of the mattress where I sleep and the mines are tiny shards of ABS plastic with sharp corners. But the reality was a brick-built statuette of a praying mantis standing just beside the pillow where my shoulders would go. An insect famous, among other things, for eating her mate after copulation.

Her ways are subtle and unsettling.

Behold My Umlauts, Ye Mighty, And Despair!

The Samuwriter — Wed, 09 Apr 2025 02:31:30 +0000

For the record, I wasn’t sure the umlaut in the title of this comic would work. I never tested this decade old PHP template against unicode. You’re not likely to see my success, as the actual comic title only shows in the archive menu. But hey. Unicode compliance. Dope.

I kind of feel for Lennon in this one. I can’t count the number of times my wife has been doing her delicious sorcery in the kitchen and dispatched me to fetch some simple thing she was missing. Like flour. And I manage to return with too much of the wrong kind of flour that I paid way too much for. She guesses she can use the entirely wrong butter I got with it.

But the muffins. Mmm.

The Title Didn’t Help, Either

The Samuwriter — Sat, 28 Dec 2024 04:42:55 +0000

For the record, we aren‘t barbequing in December. Well, Forrest might be; he’s that kind of Canadian. But the reality is that I wrote this punchline six months ago. Forrest had to go back and find it because by the time he had inked the panels we had both forgotten what the comic was about.

I was recently promoted to software architect. That guy says we need better tracking and logging in our half-year comic production workflow. Rub some JIRA on it and see if the problem goes away. We might be able to get another trial license to test with if we use a different email address. I don’t want to take this expense to the PM until we’ve got proof-of-concept. I know she’s just going to ask why this takes us so long.

Maybe she’s got a fucking point there.

Ja.

PS: It’s been so long since I’ve done this I forgot how to automatically inject the bloody paragraph tags into the post.

It’s Funny Because I Don’t Have To Deal Anymore

The Samuwriter — Fri, 14 Jul 2023 00:29:43 +0000

For the record, I’ve been here. It takes years to get out. But now my two spawn are either old enough to stay up until one in the morning playing Noita and then sleep it off until noon, or still want to get up before me and watch tee-vee but have figured out how to hook up headphones. So while I sympathize with Forrest, who’s family is time displaced about five years behind mine, my initial reaction to this comic was overwhelming relief. And a primal need to chase down my youngest and tickle him.

Can’t even threaten to tickle his older brother anymore. He just starts punching and kicking at full force. While I might have a few dozen pounds on him is all the soft, kick-and-punchable kind. We have a saying in our family for when rough housing goes wrong: “Not mad just hurt.” So while I know I’m not allowed to be upset when I intimate that I might be considering poking him and subsequently lose a tooth, I would argue that it’s a disproportionate response.

Kid don’t suffer tickles no more.

Ja.

A Lot Has Happened in the Last Four Years

Lennon — Tue, 02 May 2023 20:14:42 +0000

I have two wonderful kids now, we lost some pets, we’re down to a single cat, Mr. Wednesday AKA Odin. We miss the others dearly.

I haven’t been doing a whole lot of drawing, I finally feel compelled to get back to it. I’ve been making a silly monster truck game with one of the kids, he’s a very blunt creative director. I cook a lot more now, bake sour dough, we try to grow veg. And of course, I still play Ultimate Frisbee, despite being 40 now. Speaking of which, I threw out my back and cancelled the 40th birthday party, hilarious.

So yeah, still here. Just feel a lot older.

Back to Back

The Samuwriter — Tue, 02 May 2023 20:14:16 +0000

For the record, we’re back! What do you mean are we back, back? The comic is right there. Oh, you mean are we back on the regular. Is this a thing you can expect to see again, soon. Look, don’t overthink this. I’m just going to bask here in the fresh rendering of my two favorite comic characters for a minute longer. Just let that nepotism sink in, you know.

Also kind of appropriate that DT looks like shit given the strep throat I caught from my son last week. Art imitating life, that right there. Now I’m just trying to survive finishing some military-grade antibiotics waging a proxy war on my microbiome on behalf of my doctor against the Strep Remnant, with all the metaphorically consistent knock-on effects of trampling fields and destabilizing political relationships. Might have taken that one too far. Forgive me. I’m rusty at this.

One thing’s for sure. This website is embarrassingly old. That’s something I can look into while Forrest’s art abilities cool down.

Ja.