Ever heard of a cascading failure? If you’re a fan of TNG then you probably saw that episode with Data where he’s trying to save his daughter. Well I had one of those. The past two weeks I have been restoring the post archives along with their comments. I managed to get all the posts but in the middle of restoring the comments my laptop decided to fart on me. But that wasn’t enough. Since it had already farted 6 months ago this time it was a nice and juicy one that cascaded down to my USB backup drive and broke it. Yeah that’s right, all the DS archives were located on the laptop and backed-up on the hard drive. So wish me luck as I try to have it recovered.

On to some better news. One of the things I do to collect news is Goggle alerts. Often these alerts send me old news or passing references to ‘webcomic’ in some random manner. It occurred to me there’s no reason I can’t collect these and tell you about them though.

First we have a mention of a strip called Pokey the Penguin. Never read it before but apparently a popular blog about San Fransisco likes it. Jon Shurkin of sfist used it to explain the term Chicago-Style. I like the term but from a brief glance at the strip it wasn’t able to grab my attention.

About 6 months ago there was short period where there seem to be popping up all these tools for creating new web comics. I’m not talking about Webcomics Nation or ComicGenesis but these sites that gave avatars to play with or a collection of pictures. Perhaps one that exploded and died quickly were the “Mr. T” comics. The site appears down now but basically the idea is they provide you with a huge collection of pictures containing Mr. T in them and some editing ability and you can string a bunch together into a comic. So have a look and maybe you will get a laugh.

Silent Devil continues to expand into the web comic arena. They are best known for sponsoring Devil’s Panties and the recent addition of the webcomic Jim Reaper. On their site itself the host web comics as well and they’ve added a sixth in Hocal. A comic about the hotel business. You know it’s usually the targeted comics that do the best. They also happen to be the ones that do the worst.

Reminding me of the good old days when DS was suppose to be the hub of a web comic revolution is a post on the blog WebProBlog. David Utter tells it like it is on why the funnies section just isn’t funny. Basically all that’s left is Dilbert, Foxtrot, and Boondocks. Well he has a list of what many would say are perhaps 8 of the top 25 comics on the web: User Friendly, PvP, Order of the Stick, Little Gamers, Girl Genius, MegaTokyo, Schlock Mercenary, and Questionable Content. I wonder if anyone has a system of ranking web comics based off Alexa ratings?

To tell you just how much of a clue I don’t have about gaming I will tell you first that I just bought a PS2 for the first time a week ago. I couldn’t resist the $25 price tag but it was guitar hero and Kingdom Hearts which finally pushed me over the edge. So don’t tell me about the $600 PS3 or the $400 Xbox360 as I refuse to buy a console until it goes under $200. Anyways I got an alert about something Sony did in an attempt to start a viral ad campaign. I don’t care enough to figure out how youtube fits in but the part that caught my attention is Penny-Arcade getting the props for taking them out. It’s a good thing they’re on our side.

BlogTo is proposing monthly interviews with web comic artists. Their first one is with Scott Ramsoomair of VG Cats. Apparently he’s got two projects for the next year and he’s put his animation on indefinite hold. You know there really are too many comics out there to keep track of. Maybe Scott should get in touch with the Blind Ferret guys. Their building seems to be painted with gold.