Nope.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

And this is only the tip of an ever-expanding iceberg of insanity. I’ve had my son describe Minecraft contraptions that artifically induce lag by stuffing enough chickens in the space of a single block that they collapse into an entity singularity that warps time and distance calculations. I’ve witnessed him troubleshooting a machine that pushes sand around at teraherz frequencies to mess with the server tick and make plants on the other side of the river grow faster. Then of course, there are the relatively mundane devices that simply spawn animals, grind them up, cook them, and deposit them in convenient storage bins for later consumption, all entirely unassisted while fuel stores last. Hoppers are the straight shiz, I guess.

The simplest of these infernal machines is a small dark hole designed to allow monsters to spawn, but is only open on one side by their ankles. Skeletons and zombies can’t crouch, you see–must be the rigor mortis–so the player is then free to hack at their ankles entirely risk-free. These easy experience points can then be used to enchant weapons and armor to, I can only estimate, melt puppies into sheets of glass that actually cry when the sun shines through them?

I don’t know. I stopped fucking asking.

Ja.

So yeah, the preceding is a true story. Only the names, circumstances, and actions taken were changed to protect the innocent.

Ja.