One man's tale as a comic/card dealer

This is really interesting! Thanks for posting it

Thanks, the only thing preventing me from opening my latop is that i need it for the next days (I'm too afraid to not be able to close it to risk it now lol), I'll to that in the week-end.

scotch tape, and either tape the screws next to the holes they came out of, or, draw a crude picture of the laptop and tape the screws to the picture next to the drawing of where they came out. It makes it pretty easy to make sure you've got everything in the right spots.

Thanks, Milly, I'll keep that all in mind. It's hard some days, I've been drifting in and out of little depressed spells lately. Finding a job is difficult with the economy, I'm almost 19 and I'm stuck at home while everybody else is making something of themselves.

In the US, some of the census numbers I've got- and they're probably out of date by now- give an unemployment rate of 29.7% for 16-19 year olds, with only 26.2% employed (the rest being students or otherwise not part of the labor pool). For 20-24, it's hardly much better... 59.8% employed, 16.9% unemployed, the remainder not counting as part of the labor pool. For 25-44, things are somewhat better, with 73.7% employed and 10.0% unemployed.

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf - this report is more up to date, but doesn't really split things by age group other than 'teenagers 16-19' and 'everyone else', but it also gives a 25.4% unemployment for that group.

Bottom line, you're not alone there, man. You'll get something eventually- just keep trying. I can't recall if you're in the US or if you're one of our folks from other countries, but... yeah. If all else fails, you might consider the military- the education benefits have certainly done me a great deal of good over the years. Depending on your nature you may prefer the Air Force, as a more technical and less personally combat-heavy branch. Figure it this way- you can take control of things that are within your reach, and *make* a better future. Start a small business selling things that you can make, whether it's furniture, fishing lures, or websites, maybe. Enlist, serve the country for a while, and grow jaded and bitter as we all do

PP: The economy crushing everyone. But hey... Conquer the future!

Not doing anything stupid, it was just one of those one millionth visitor oh for sure you're not clicking on me now ads.

ah, okay. So long as it doesn't bother people, then... 

Testing and fixing these ad chains has taken way longer than I had initially anticipated. Every change made means waiting at least a day to check the performance afterwards...

On that note, am I REALLY the one millionth visitor?!

wait, what? Did one of our ads make noise or do something stupid?

Basically, you go to the website, and there will be a chatbox where folks can type to each other.

Also, there is a video and audio stream. Typically it's set up so that you're watching Jenny's computer desktop or some portion thereof while she works on the comic, and she'll respond verbally to people's comments in the chat.

Jenny can bring people into Skype to talk to, and you'll hear them as well. Usually those folks would be Sammie (the real life person that comic-Sammie was based on), Rose (of Red Moon Rising), and sometimes other comic folks. Also, I'm generally around during some or all of these streams, what with the whole marriage thing, so you'll sometimes hear me in the background as well.

There is a slight delay when you're watching- it can be anywhere from half a second to I think up to 4 seconds- so you won't always hear a response right away when Jenny reads things in the chat.

In general, they're a fun way for us to connect with the community, and they're a fun way for you guys to see how Jenny works.

Typically, the streams run from whenever Jenny decides to start them, until 5PM or until the comic is complete. We haven't really got a set schedule for streams these days.

That would be kinda hilarious, really. Also, your lineart is getting really good

PP: That feeling you get when you look at old code and ask, "How does this work? WHY does this work?"

Double PP: When you're the one who WROTE said code. Hard to believe, but the piece I'm looking at is from 2009...

Okay, in the interests of making sure that our advertisers are family friendly and still, y'know, worth enough money to keep this site running, we're starting to set up another advertiser. For the time being we're going to have an extra ad box on the sidebar and an extra adbox at the bottom of the site.

If anybody has any problems, please let me know.

Also, Dodom, and anybody else who has had the same problems... while I'm working on this, I'll be setting up a testing system that can toggle different sets of advertisers. Once I've done that if I can borrow you to run some tests we'll see if we can isolate the advertising system that was causing the site to drag for your browser setup.

As usual, if you guys see any objectionable ads or offensive behaviours- noisemaking, popups, whatever else.. Please make sure to take a screenshot, if possible, and send me an email so I can beat people with hammers get the offending ad or service taken out.

Whabou ACTA?

O__O

I'm not familiar with that one? I can look it up, or if you have any links on the subject I'd be happy to read them.

Also, speak of the devil... the canadians are getting similar legislation tossed at them. http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/6264/125/

Hey Greg?

Thanks for setting me straight on this. I was making a big deal over literally nothing.

It's all right, Stan- it actually is a fairly big thing. While individual users wouldn't see much of an effect, it's very limiting for anyone who wants to create content or work in the information industries within the US. Also, it's a demonstration that a lot of people in the government are *okay* with passing censorship laws, and that's really not a road that a healthy democracy can travel down. We've already managed to pass a bill authorizing the indefinite detention of american citizens (because we already indefinitely detain foreign citizens in job lots)- that, and these the attempts at censorship aren't really good things. While there may not be any sort of shadowy conspiracy involved, and perhaps nobody currently serving would abuse these powers (unlikely), these powers are the sort that can and will be abused by *somebody* somewhere down the line. From ill intent or ignorance, abuse will happen, if we allow the government the power to do so. It's always important for the citizens to serve as a check on our politicians.

I'm glad these bills have been delayed, but similar ones will probably come back again. We'll have to be watchful and make sure that we let our representatives know that we can't accept any sort of censorship like this the next time they try it. Just because they had a dumb way of doing it, this time, doesn't mean that their next attempt won't be effective.

Depending on where you put the end points, I'm either the youngest member of Gen X or the oldest member of Gen Y- I was born in 1980. Just young enough to have missed out on the dot com boom, I wound up going into the Army because of the dot com bust, and then got *out* of the army in time for the real estate bust. Fun times, truly :p

I think we have a negative net worth, thanks to the losses from book one. But, hopefully we'll be turning that around this year.

Starting businesses is a great marker. Hopefully we can keep that going. Having a large number of small-to-medium-size businesses is what keeps an economy growing... That, and having the infrastructure that supports said businesses.

Would yall still be able to access out of US servers to upload the content? It was my understanding that though PIPA, ISPs would be forced to block any and all sites that are on the blacklist, so wouldn't an off-shore server hosting the comic be just as vulnerable to being blocked as the server that yall are already on? I was sort of under the impression that even sites that moved off shore would eventually be blocked as well by your ISP, preventing people even within the US from uploading or downloading anything on the blacklist.

Is that just completely wrong? I'm no where near as tech savvy as you, Sir Greg'ins!

Since SOPA/PIPA are attacking domain name resolution rather than the actual websites, it wouldn't be a big deal to access the site, by either using foreign DNS servers, or by accessing the site by entering the IP address. For example, when I edit the site's code, that gets uploaded by using an FTP connection that simply hits the IP address.

The *idea* is that your ISP wouldn't be allowed to resolve a domain name... hm. Think of it like a phone book.

You point your browser at a name, and then your computer will look up a domain name name in a phone book, and next to that name you have a phone number- in this case, an IP address.
There are LOTS of copies of this phone book out there. Anybody who can register a domain name (when you buy a website address) has a copy. These copies of phone books get shared around, so that everyone has a complete list of what name goes with what number.

SOPA/PIPA are like telling the internet service provider, in the US, to go into their copy of the phone book with a marker and black out entries that someone disagrees with. But, they can't do anything about the copies of the phone book that exist outside of the US.
As a user, you can go to your router and tell it what server to use for DNS resolution. Most people don't *ever* change any settings there, which means that you're just asking your ISP for their phone book. But if you wanted, you could access your router and tell it that you want to use something else. If you don't ask the ISP for their phone book, they don't care. If you *just* ask them for a specific IP address? They'll hand it to you and not be penalized for doing so. So you wouldn't notice a difference. Your browser would go 'hey, Canadian DNS, what's the address for this name?', and then it would ask your ISP, 'show me the information from this address', and that would be that. You'd even still see the domain name up in the address bar of your browser.

It's much more damaging to content creators and service providers here in the US, than it would be to consumers. The businesses within the US would have their ad revenue and bank accounts blocked as well- that's why we would have to move TZH offshore. By using offshore hosting, ad services, and banks, there would be nothing that US authorities could do about it. Since offshore banks don't report to the US, all the US would see would be periodic payments from some foreign entity into a US bank account- assuming we bothered to keep a US bank account at all, at that point.

The likely outcome would be that website hosting in the US would die off. Companies like Google, etc. would move their offices into Canada or other countries, over the next few years. If you're outside the US borders, you don't have to do squat to comply with this law. The advertising provisions and financial provisions would be the most damaging, of course, because we'd wind up having to switch the dominant currency- switch to Euros or Canadian Dollars, most likely.
And then you'd have ISPs outsource their DNS resolution offshore as well- because if they were no longer responsible for doing the lookup, they wouldn't be liable for the results of that lookup.

It would be a huge business die-off here in the US. It would also cost a LOT of money for everyone involved. Just for us, as in TZH, to switch over to business on the canadian side, we'd probably wind up losing about 30%, ish? of our income. After all, we'd have to pay taxes to Canada for the privilege, and there would be a lot more fees involved. Heck, I don't know if there IS a Canadian equivalent of PayPal, yet. If PayPal.ca actually is a separate corporate entity, there would be no change, but if not... it would get ugly.

And then we'd have to do it all over again in five or ten years as Harper squealed like a little girl, "Let's do that TOO, eh?" (seriously, cartoon villains, WTF? He's so OBVIOUSLY a shill for Murdoch, and somehow nobody calls him on it...)

Unfortunately, these attempts at legislation here in the US will likely continue for the next ten to twenty years, as the baby boomers continue to grow old and feel threatened by the technologies that they don't understand. Because of our population dynamics here in the US, the young people are outnumbered by the old[1], and so have a great deal of difficulty motivating politicians to support our ideals. The fact that we have a large segment of our population that *can* be motivated by fear to support legislation that goes against their interests doesn't help, either. It has allowed the continued concentration of wealth into the hands of the elderly[2], further reducing the abilities of young people to affect real change. Without money or numbers on our side, these attacks against technology, and indeed attacks against the 'young', will continue until the boomers have died off in sufficient numbers that they are no longer a meaningful voting block.

Fortunately, while the politicians are obligated by their voting base to continue their *attacks*, they are under no such obligation to actually *succeed*. So long as they can go home to their voters and say that they tried, the politicians generally don't actually care if they win or lose. As cynical as it sounds, most politicians' motivation comes down to continuing to get re-elected. Without winning their election, after all, they can't push for issues that they *do* care about. Whatever those issues may be. By continuing to push a vocal opposition to each of these attacks, those of us not members of the boomer generation can continue to limit the damage done. It'll be a long haul, but if nothing else, we can always hold onto the truth that time is on our side, not theirs. What they can try, we can try to stop. And what they can do, we can eventually undo. It's a sad fact that we *have* to look at it that way, but, it is what it is. I'm looking forward to the days when we can once again reinvest in our infrastructure and rebuild our country. And if we all work together, and continue to harangue the politicians when they do these things, then we can bring those days somewhat faster, I hope

...and that's probably the most use I'll get from my Poli Sci degree any time soon

Edited to clarify:
1) While 'elderly' generally means 65+, I'm including the baby boomers because of the general attitudes and behaviours as a population group. The boomers make up about 34% of our voting-age population, and as of 2012 will be between 48 and 66 years old. Those older than the boomers made up an additional 21% as of 2006... about 20% now, if my math is correct, though I don't have a solid source on that. Together that equates to 54% of our voting-age population.

2) If this (cribbed from here) is accurate, the median -not average- wealth of a boomer is  about 190K, while their elders have a mean net worth about 200K. The median net worth of someone my particular age is 8.5K.

If it were to pass- or if they passed PIPA- then TZH would have to shift our hosting overseas. It wouldn't be worth the eventual, and inevitable, takedown attempts that would result. When you make a consequence-free way of shutting down sites, it's not an if it happens. it becomes a when.

That said. Our hosting would migrate, probably to Canada. Hell, our current host might even set up a branch there, but that would have to be up to them. We'd have to switch ad providers. We'd have to open new bank accounts, or reactivate them in Canada.

As far as users are concerned, there wouldn't be a change. TZH would still be there. If something really went wrong, you'd just take about three minutes to point your router at a non-US domain name server.

Basically, this legislation would kill all the hosts and internet companies here in the US, but it wouldn't actually affect the content of the web. Nor, even though this is what both bills are DESIGNED to do, would it actually prevent a user's computer from resolving a hostname with an IP address.

It's incredibly stupid legislation. And I'm aghast that one of my congresspeople actually co-sponsored the PIPA version of it. Censorship is never the right answer... much less this economy-wrecking attempt at it.

It's one of those things. This is cartoon-villain level evil, and it's hard to know which to be more upset about- the attempt itself, or the fact that our government is run by such staggeringly stupid people, who didn't even bother learning enough about How Shit Works, and so got it all so very wrong.

Right, we didn't want to remove them, because a lot of those RPGs represent a huge amount of time and energy from our members. But at the same time we wanted to showcase the newer RPGs and let people really enjoy them- it felt like the activity there had been tapering off a bit.

I can't say I'm a fan so far. I preferred having the general stuff right at the top.

The reorganization into categories means that you can minimize the other sections and that should push the General Discussion section higher. Or at least, it *should* work that way
The idea is that this can let you keep your area of interest expanded and move other less-interesting-to-you sections out of sight.