First, my new comedy music CD, "For Amusement Only" is now complete and available for sale! I am hoping it will get some airplay on the Doctor Demento Show and other radio soon.

Second, in addition to the sound samples available in the PartiallyClips store, I have made one complete song available for download on its own page, under the Creative Commons attribution license. This is "NetHack," a parody of "Pepper" by the Butthole Surfers, about the ASCII-graphics game of that name.

The following is a post I made on a friend's LiveJournal (the great filker legend, Tom Smith, in fact). He created a topic to list our favorite mainstream syndicated comic strips, with a separate thread to follow about webcomics. This raised my eyebrow and potentially my hackles, but led to my articulating why I hate the Major Comics Syndicates with a white-hot passion. Seemed worth cross-posting here...

The other shoe just dropped at last. Over at Whispered Apologies, Alexander Danner has written the canon version of the comic featuring the Deadmouse art I chose when I was writing a contribution there.

There was an odd mix-up. Normally, a pool of writers choose a piece of art from the submissions archive, and create a comic from it. Unbeknownst to me, Alexander had already made a comic with that art when I sent mine to Ryan, and Alexander's strip was queued to load next.

Buried in my PenguiCon 4.0 report is about an eight-paragraph description of some of the things I intended to say on that webcomics panel. It doesn't have a tremendous amount of numbers in it, just a high-level summary of some of the things I think are going on with webcomics traffic today. Scroll down or ctrl-f for "WEBCOMICS GEEKOUT."

The More I Learn, the Less I Broadcast

This is an official rant. It's very long.

An incident today really threw a spotlight on a major attitude change of mine, which has happened within the last six months to a year. I no longer look to any public webcomics blog or forum to productively share and receive information about webcomics. I barely participate. I'm genuinely disgusted with the state of webcomics discussion, and it's not worth my time either to wade in and try to raise the level of debate, or to keep sifting for signal in all the noise.

Over at Sluggy Freelance, Pete Abrams has just announced the long-anticipated general release of Get Nifty, a standalone card game themed around Sluggy and designed by Rob Balder of PartiallyClips.

Originally conceptualized in late 2002, Get Nifty has been through multiple changes and stages of development. At one point in 2004, Steve Jackson Games announced that they would be carrying the game, but that deal was later dissolved by mutual consent. In 2005, Pete and Rob signed a development deal with Blood & Cardstock Games, and Sluggites who pre-ordered the game found it arriving just in time for Christmas.