This isn’t the sort of thing I signed up for. When I first opened up my e-mail and saw requests to “Moderate” comments by other users I was, frankly, shocked. No one ever told me that this sort of thing would require actual work. That’s not the sort of thing I signed up for.

Let me run down for you exactly what I was expecting in this deal.

1. Find an artist - check and double check (and hearty SUCK IT to all those a-holes who responded to my first attempt to find an artist on craigslist, I hope you all contract leprosy and your fingers fall off, but, ya know, in a nice way).

2. Write some strips - currently in progress

3. Make a million dollars - hey, it could happen…

No where in that plan is there room for stuff like, “read,” “click,” or “approve.”

And don’t bother pointing out that I could probably set the blog to allow comments automatically, or that doing so would take less time than it did to write out this complaint. I understand how user friendly wordpress is, OK? But I’m, obviously, lazy and if wordpress doesn’t use pshychic or voodoo like powers to intuitively know what I want then they have some functionality to add.

In an unrelated note, those wallpapers are the f-ing shiznit!

Hello to all!

I was planning on putting together something a bit more festive for today in honor of the winter celebration of the western sun god’s birth tomorrow. Unfortunately, I got hit with some less than stellar news today which made the whole idea of scribbling something festive-y not so attractive anymore. This makes the second piece of weird or bad news that I’ve been handed in the last 2 days. If the old rules still hold true then I’m sure I can expect one more piece of emotional-psychologically-draining-or-physically-debilitating shit to hit me square in the face before everything is said and done, and things start going back to a more enlightened form of multiverse-cosmic balance.

That said and in honor of my current feelings, here is a little something for the season of traitors and wrongdoers…

In special honor of those who seem to have spent the better or at least latter portion of this year trampling on trust, destroying a record of unrequited devotion, sacrifice, honor and basic civility. To those few who seem to have made it a special mission to attack and or endanger my family, my self, my work and my livelihood, as they say, ‘this one’s for you!’. It is my sincere holiday wish that Krampus was real and that he would show up individually to your doors tonight, flatulent you repeatedly, and painfully with his fist full of switches and carry you away sobbing, beaten, broken and bloody. He’s ready, he’s happy to do his job and he has no problem showing you what I think about you miserly, fucktards of despair, spiteful retaliation and selfish ghettoized sense of community responsibility. To you, slobbering, rancid cunts, Happy Krampus, may you receive nasty staph infections, IRS audits and street walker born STDs all!

To everyone else, you’re awesome, please do enjoy this winter holiday and unlike the previously mentioned twats, may you find happiness and comfort in your honorable deeds, the company of your friends and family and in the reflection of another year gone by!

I love you all (or at least those who shouldn’t have Krampus coming after them tonight),

–Aleister

This was completed last Thursday, and seems to have finally gone up today… all in all I was surprised by the cancellation of the series, but the reasons for the cancellation are, well, not evident at this time. However, I was lucky enough to be able to put together one final strip in order to say goodbye to all of the wonderful readers who stuck it out and came back week after week for the 30+ installments. To all that have been reading the series and allowed me, April, Wednesday and even our son, Salem, to be a part of your lives - and to all of those who enjoyed the strips, thank you, very, very much.

So here it is, the final installment of Megalo Life - for Trickster Online Revolution.

And so 2007 closes today, and with it this weekly webcomic serial. Thank you again to everyone who showed their support, if you would like to leave comments for the series itself, please do so in the actual comments section for the Megalo Life series at the bottom of the URL link as I will be reading them there.

See you all next year!

–Aleister

‘Allo Normalinauts! Sorry, I’m not sure what new moniker to give to our loyal, almost double digit readership here, but for now, I’m throwing Normalinaut into play to see how it fairs. Anyone else who has a better one they’d like to throw down, by all means, please do.

Ok, so we’ve been on a fairly serious bent it seems for the last couple of posts, and with good reason, as what’s currently going on with the Presidential race will certainly effect not just the US but peoples in any other country where our nation’s sticky tentacle pull any sort of influence. So thank you for indulging us (and specifically, the more activist minded Kilian).

Now I’m not saying that this trend of seriousness, when serious issues come up will not be coming back to the forefront here on the old Normality, but I did want to take a moment to touch on some of the not-quite-as-serious things that have also been going on. Not to bend this to a completely egotistical outing, but there it is anyway.

So firstly, for anyone interested, and I assume that we’re seeing some new faces around here from ye olde MyTrix community as well as from Trickster Online Revolution in general, let me take this opportunity to say thank you very, very, very much for all of the truly heart-string-strumming comments on the final Megalo Life that went up this last Monday on the official Trickster Online Revolution website. I meant every last word that typed out in the episode’s commentary and a lot more that would really not be appropriate or in anyway professional for me add as well. I really did love (and hate using the past-tense) working on the strip week after week, and it is my belief thatthe silly little comic outing worked great to promote not only the game, the company, the community and to shed some light on the fact that the game is brought to its loyal players by real people who are weird, wonderful, falable and overwhelmingly human. This was, to my thinking, something that really set us apart from other games and communities that are out there. Obviously, there are games with better graphics, mechanics, support or any other individual component that you could name, than TOR, but I always held the belief that the strength of the title despite the uphill climb against newer, flashier titles and the seemingly endless stream of even-newer-debuting titles, was the community and the way it could interact with the company behind the game.

For me, Megalo Life was one of our several pronged efforts to create and sustain that sort of unusual community/company involvement, and in the passing of the comic, I am bitterly happy to see that I wasn’t too far off the marks in my thoughts. As it turns out, the community does seem to have enjoyed the comic. I never made the thing to have people start clammering that it was the greatest thing to hit the internet since porn, or even the best webcomic out there. It really was, at its inception and at its core, a means for those of us behind TOR to pull back the OZ-like curtain and say, ‘No, it’s ok, there is a man back here, it’s cool,’ and then /wave in a friendly manner. For whatever reason, it was pulled, canceled or decidedly ended… however you want to put it, it doesn’t matter the ultimate outcome was/is the same: the series is no more.

But as I said, the one really positive thing to come out of all of this, especially as the title to this post might suggest, is that when the air started to clear and emotions could be stowed for a bit to re-asses the aftermath, there was nothing more evident than the fact that the fallout of the series has shown what I might humbly term as overwhelming community support for the strip and my efforts.

Again, for anyone interested, especially those from the TOR community, I am deeply thankful that you enjoyed the series, and I am very, truly moved by the outcries of support and even unhappiness to see it/me go. So thank you. I don’t know a better way to express it, than to just keep saying thank you over and over again.

I suppose that it was something of a pipe-dream to think that overwhelming outcries from the community would possibly spring some sort of rethinking to the cancellation decision as the evidence mounted to the fact that strip (like some of the other efforts, such as the now still missing GM Blog) actually did work. It did encourage interaction and involvement in the community and for the game itself. It was a useful effective tool to help set us and our collective efforts apart from the other, and oft-times behemoth-y-juggernaut-like competitors in the online gaming world who always have more money and resources to throw at things than we could dream of. Because of the players, the Tricksters, the community members and the readers of the Megalo Life series that returned week after week, and especially have been showing their support in the final installment, I think it is now assured that the points have been proven. There should no longer be a question as to whether or not it was effective, useful, and basically a good thing.

Doubt can no longer be attributed to the quantifying of the effort - and no question can reasonably be raised as to whether or not the series itself was a much needed bridge between players and corporation.

Thank you once more, sincerely and whole heartedly to every single one of you Tricksters who have come forward in the comment section on the final Megalo Life and in the My Trix thread to show your support and even your surprise at the sudden ending of the webcomic. My heart’ still heavy from the ending of it all, but I can watch now with a smile on my face because I know that I did make a difference, and I made that difference because you let me. Thank you.

The decision always has been and is still now, out of my hands. If I could change it, I would, and perhaps I thought naively that you could effect change as well. Maybe that will still happen, at this point my crystal ball can’t see quite that far into the future ^__^ but I’m glad to have your efforts behind it just the same.

As Megalo Life has ended, in a somewhat traumatic sort of way, suddenly, and without any real warning (announcements, or even being posted on the normal day of the week) I will be taking this week off to finish recuperating from what can only be described as a tumultuous, emotional, rollercoaster of crazy bat shit, and will not be posting a new strip for NR today. I should be able to return to form once more next week, and in the meantime I offer some other stimulus for visual trauma:

If you’ve noticed on the top right side of the NR site here, there is a new section added, along with the Comic Archive, and the Vote Campaign for TopWebComics, and other information, there is a new section (still being polished so be nice, please) titled Gilgrim’s Artwork. So if visual stimuli is what you crave, as they say, buy the ticket, take the ride.

Cheers,

–Aleister

KMFDM - Last Things

Well, I didn’t want to take down gilgrim’s post (since it is well written and heartfelt) for one quick thing…so anyway, read this and let your imagination pique at the possibility…

And I, for one, vote for Normalinauts!

–Kilian

Firstly, big thank you to Matty for passing this on, and to APrilhead herself for then passing it on to me, so that I may bask in the gleeful joy of this news.

For those that have not already heard, the internet hacking group known simply as Anonymous, has hacked into the FOX brodacasting signal to declare open and unrelenting war on the money-grubbing, brainwashing intent, and media-bullying cult of Scientology.

Here is the main clip which has been circulating - Anonymous = We do not forgive. We do not forget.

Now, I am not particularly a fan in anyway of the mass media and it does not matter to me in anyway if the source is con or lib, to me it is pretty obvious that all broadcast - mass-market news media is simply is about (like all business) bottom dollars. And for this form of ‘entertainment’ it is simply most profitable to push sensationalized versions and spins of what would otherwise be interesting but innocuous fluff, such as the FOX report some time ago on Anonymous itself, which is not the clearest or most accurate depiction of the group or its antics and does not clearly prove that the group they are reporting on is in fact even the same group in question. With this is mind it is important to note that it is FOX who was specifically hacked and their signal was broken into and used to push the most recent message from the group itself. That message, is an open declaration of war against Scientology. If you want to know why this group, legion, of hackers and other revolutionaries is now formalizing their efforts on the infamous cult, watch their video, they will explain in their own words.

For me, this is a startling and exciting phenomenon as it heralds a shift that I think all of us who ever took some small consolidation in fantastic or speculative fictional stories about a coming change to world. The change is coming and it looks like Gibson, Palaniuk, Dick and others were spot on. I don’t think that this is really any sort of overwhelming conspiracy as I tend to not believe in conspiracy theories simply for the fact that that sort of organizational hutzpah is nearly impossible. Instead I see this recent action as an embodiment of the cultural zeitgeist of our society. We all know that things are not as they should be, and that things are simply messed up especially when it comes to large scale media control and brainwashing. It’s easy to dismiss stories about the builderbergs and illuminati, skull and bones, and even scientology as merely overhyped paranoia. Yet, while I personally do not put unbiased stock in everything that comes forth from the mouths of Alex Jones and others like him simply on the face of their own presentations, I think it is impossible to ignore the fact that more and more stories keep popping up in this same vein.

So what does this similarity mean? To me, it is symptomatic not of an overwhelming and shadow-organized conspiracy for world enslavement - no, instead I think it is much simpler, but no less draconian, I believe that these actions by organized and powerful groups are taken as a shortsighted means to a profitable end. But the fact that these efforts, uses of disgusting amounts of spin, misdirection and misinformation and control are not orchestrated on some grand -evil-overlord-sort-of-scale does not dispute the fact that the results are not acceptable.

To this end, I believe that we have slowly been moving towards a revolution of sorts. I think, after watching many developments and trends come in and out of play with new media and information dissemination techniques now available that did not even exist before, that people are beginning to think. They are beginning to truly question, and they are not happy with the answers that they’re receiving as a result. There is no James Bond styled master-villain behind the curtain pulling the puppet strings, no singular shadow-group or figure head that can be villainized, thwarted, and attacked in the ways that movies have taught us for decades. Instead, it is the extremely unpleasant reality facing us that we must confront and stand against the worst results of all of our most utopian efforts and avarice, our shortsighted plans and efforts and our willingness to forfeit our freedoms for security that is staring stupidly back at us through the mirror. I see groups like Anonymous, and am happy to know that thinking is starting a new. I’m happy to see people no longer happy with their flaming little shit. I’m energized, excited and overwhelmed to see the beginnings of what should be a thorough (and likely difficult) change to come in how we handle information, news, media and ideas. The time has come to quit taking the obvious and easier roads offered, the pavement that we’ve laid ourselves in our own laziness that gives control to others instead of relying on the hardship of our own accountability. It could easily have lead to our own literal destruction, but it should be obvious now that there is still time to fight back. There is chance and opportunity to learn from our mistakes and to try and make things right.

Utopian dreams are wonderful, and sadly the efforts generally used to achieve them result ultimately in the reality of dystopia rather than utopia. They work well on paper but not in reality. Perhaps, it is best to strive for utopia and to be content in continuing an ongoing and never ending struggle to keep totalitarian efforts in check. It’s somewhat Jeffersonian, it means that the efforts are never ending and that the struggle is never really with a true and tangible end. but such may be the very worthwhile cost of true freedom. The cost of freedom is not security and the cost of security is not freedom. The cost of freedom is accountability and ceaseless effort, and willingness to fight. By any and all means. I think the fight is finally starting to happen and it’s about bloody time.

The following is the follow up video from Anonymous regarding their first organized effort against the Scientology cult:

Call to Arms - FEB 10th 2008 - We Are Legion. We Do Not Forgive. We Do Not Forget. We Will Be Heard. Expect US.

Happy Revolution NR.

–Aleister

Acumen Nation