Drunk Elephant Comics

Monday January 16, 2012

Whoops! Technical Difficulties!

Sorry about the latest comic not being up this Monday morning! I had a technical issue with the database and my site caching, but it’s all fixed now.

I’m back at the Center for Cartoon Studies after a month long break. Vermont. It’s cold as hell up in this place. Spring semester starts tomorrow; wish me luck!

Wednesday January 4, 2012

We're Back!

Last week’s panic to fix two laptops ended well. We had to get new laptops, but we had no data loss between both the failing hard drives (my logic board went out also). I’m still setting up my new MacBook Pro, but that’s a trivial problem compared to losing years of data. And while I was ultimately fine with one of my many backups, it just drives home the fact that my backups need to happen a bit more frequently (I lost a couple of days worth of work).

I’ll miss my old MacBook Pro. It was my first laptop, and I used the heck out of it on a daily basis as a professor, designer, cartoonist and this last semester as a student again. But 5 years is a long life for a laptop anymore, and it performed admirably.

So, without further ado, Drunk Elephant Comics is back!

Thursday December 29, 2011

No Strips For Now. My Computer Is Dying!

Ugh – so I’m back in Omaha for the holidays, and one of the things I always do is run some maintenance on my grandfather’s computer. He has an older MacBook, and he had been complaining that while working on his World War II memoires that his computer had been acting slowly. I ran some basic maintenance tasks and hit some errors that required me to repair his hard drive. I took his laptop home with me to work on, and once I started to work, the disk locked up completely and switched into read-only mode. Which, as I now know from the Genius Bar at the Apple Store means that the hard drive is irrevocably damaged. To make matters worse, my grandfather’s backups were not working at all. He was going to lose everything.

And then somehow it got worse. MY MacBook suddenly stopped working two days ago. I’ve been in a mad panic to try to fix it and somehow pull anything off of my grandfather’s laptop.

I’ve run out of options on my MacBook, having tested the hard drive, checked the logs, cleared caches, reset the SMC, cleared the PRAM, and booted into Safe Mode to check for any rampant background process running amok.

The good news? I was able to rip out my grandfather’s hard drive, attach it to a USB sled/enclosure, mount it and pull all of his data.

The bad news? No new strip this week, but hopefully in the foreseeable future.

Wish me luck!

Thursday December 15, 2011

The Greatest Cocktail?

Troy Patterson, writing for Slate, has written a lengthy article about the Old Fashioned, it’s history and it’s many, many variations. The Old Fashioned is my favorite cocktail, and I’ve seen several variations, but I have come to make them at home in the manner of the cranky New Yorker who wrote a letter to the Times, paraphrased at the beginning of the article: sugar cube, soaked in bitters and muddled gently with ice and a heaping amount of bourbon. Rye is good also, but rye comes at me funny if I have too many, like a pack of cannibalistic squirrels. Sometimes, I’m in the mood to see that pack of squirrels, so I keep rye in the back of my mind.

Thursday December 8, 2011

Thanks for the break, everyone!

Thanks to everyone for being patient this week as I caught my breath. I was surprisingly tired the last few days after the marathon of work that was my first semester at the Center for Cartoon Studies. So, I thought I would celebrate for the lax week with a large-and-in-charge strip. Let me know if you like this size! Or if you just like this strip more in general; it’s a little easier to hit the story beats I like with this size, so I’m interested in what you think!

Also, I had an exciting opportunity to listen to Jules Feiffer give a presentation on his work this week. I can only hope to still be doing great work in my 80s like he is. The man is very funny, and very sharp. CCSers were in full attendance, taking over most of the venue for his talk.

Tomorrow, we are all going to celebrate Alec Longstreth’s absolute domination of his latest graphic novel, Basewood, by shaving his beard and hair, which have been growing for the last three and a half years. He committed to not shaving until he finished the book. What an accomplishment.

Big week for comics and celebrating!