We will recycle images until the server morale improves.

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Either the servers here are having a personal moment, or someone flipped the "disable Aaron's password" switch at Gamespy because I can't upload anything to this version of the site at the moment. I've altered the links to the comics above to go to the new website, so if you were looking for Thursday's FFN and were disappointed, it's right over here. If after reading it you're still disappointed, just consider it a lesson on the general unfairness of life (grin). I'm taking this as a sign to finish up a lot of the transition before anything else goes off-line unexpectedly, so if this site goes kaput, just freshen up the Nodwick.com URL and you'll go to where the action is.

I'm also posting all kinds of other weird and amusing stuff over there that hasn't always been seen here, so go and see what you think. I'm also working on more Interrupt Request, so a new episode should be up soon. I've also written a theme song for another video idea I had that I'll try out in the future. I will be singing this theme song, by the way. Without autotune. Of course it'll sound awful. I'm actually trying to make it sound that way, because it's comedy... I hope.

I've also discovered that sometimes more expensive equipment doesn't always yield better results. I've been using a DRK brand microphone with pop shield hooked into a Behringer preamp to record the audio for IRQ. It needs a lot of filtration, tweaking, and noise reduction before I start to sound halfway decent. After listening to a similar game-mocking production and reading what audio gizmos they were favoring, I found that sometimes the cheap stuff works better (at least in this case). I dug up an old Griffin lapel mic that had been sitting in a box in my "technology debris closet," plugged it in (sans preamp), and tried it out. It beat the other, larger mic (which needs a 9-volt battery, by the way) for voice quality and low background noise hands-down. I'm sure someone can tell me where I might be losing sound quality by going with the small plastic mic, but the trade-off seems to be more than worth it.

Can I now call my java habit a workout? A study suggests that drinking a lot of coffee can burn fat just like exercise. The only problem is the caffeine required is nearly lethal. On the positive side, if you do slip away in a fit of the jitters, any excess weight you might have won't be a problem anymore.

A quick Minecraft note about something I encountered, but doubt I can reproduce again without a lot of luck and effort. I don't play it too much because I stink at it because of time constraints, but I did try out the new release. During my usual mucking about, I built a short mine-track with powered rails. Now, either Java or Minecraft or both suffered some kind of memory leak, ate all my RAM, and slowed to a crawl while I was mid-transit from one end of my rail line to the other. I had to kill the process to restore computational functionality, and I restarted the game to see if it was salvageable. I arrived standing in the track bed up to my waist. Jumping restored me to having my feet on the ground, and I figured that since I was no longer in a cart, it had somehow been glitched out of existence. When I turned to go back the way I'd came, I saw that I had somehow warped the space-time continuum and actualized a number of mine carts (about eight of them) during the RAMpocalypse, which were spaced along the track behind me. If anyone can get that to happen again with a chest-cart full of diamonds, let the rest of us know how. :)

Back to drawin' and pixel-pushin' for me. Before I leave you to the links, here's something I had drilled into me way back when I got to write a Spider-Man story for "Spider-Man Unlimited" before my curse killed the comic before Marvel canceled the title. They were adamant that I spell the hero's name as "Spider-Man," not "Spiderman." This is a hard rule for the comic character, and a cartoon has been drawn to help people remember. When I asked if his web shooters were still mechanical or if they'd gone organic, that was left up to me. Weird.

And now, these:

- Just a reminder that in real life, treasure hunters aren't fire-eyed spellcasters or brooding champions of forgotten gods. Instead, they usually min-max whatever stats involve luck and electronics (proficiency: metal detector) and can get similar results without all the initiative rolls.
- Makeup, plastic surgery, and now the latest all-gender product seems to be Mantyhose, or male pantyhose. I think the problem with this is that it'll encourage people to become supervillains, or at least the sidekicks of the ones who laugh a lot.
- But if more dudes do turn to crime, DC Nation's Baby Superman will stop them.
- The president of Syria had his e-mail hacked, and has reportedly complained to his friend, President Skroob for suggesting a code Skroob uses on his luggage.
- Hanger 2, Endless Level Pack has you controlling the Spider-Man like hanger-guy as he tries to swing through new levels without losing all of his body parts.
- If ever they get t-shirts whose fronts are digital displays that can take feeds from websites, I'm totally wearing an ever-cycling insult from Martin Luther.
- Bioshock Infinite is going to have "heavy hitter" bosses to fight, including robot George Washington.
- And speaking of Bioshock, the devs are saying that player choices will affect how the game ends. I hope it's better than the first game which gave you "good ending," "bad ending," and "bad ending but read in a sympathetic tone of voice."
- From the "sounds like a neat place for a horror movie" files comes the Venetian Island of the Dead.
- Even though the concepts they discuss do show a lot of imagination, I'm kind of glad the Fallout franchise didn't involve time travel, magic, and derailing human evolution.
- Stop-motion genius PES serves up some "Fresh Guacamole" made from unexpected ingredients. And kudos to Showtime for encouraging animated shorts.
- The theft of Nic Cage's copy of "Action Comics #1" is going to serve as the basis for a comedy film. I'm glad they didn't add it to the National Treasure franchise...
- Never leave your cubicle unguarded, for your coworkers are a vicious and cowardly lot.
- "Losties" and orchestral music fans might like to hear 12 minutes of music and readings from Lost played live.
- Mindless destruction from an alien doom-machine is what you get in Alien Invader. Guide your walker-tank around various side-scrolling levels, showing the puny humans that they and their works are no match for your superior pew-pew technology.