This week will be uneven as far as updates are concerned. It's the week of Thanksgiving over here in the US so on Wednesday we'll be traveling to visit with family and I'll probably not have regular Internet access from there on out.

And on Monday -- cross your fingers -- I might be in New Orleans on a three week tech writing contract. So next week may be spotty as well.

Of course, there's always a chance I'll get my act together and build up a queue of new comics to bridge the gap...

Thanks the kind donation of server space by one of my readers, Ubersoft.net has moved to a new server location for a while so I can save on server costs until my financial situation rights itself. Well have to see whether or not the new site can survive the strain. For the moment, only Ubersoft.net is active - EvisceratiNet and Eviscerati.org have gone dark until such a time as they can be let back into the wild. That's OK, for the moment, since I didn't really have any content to put there yet.

Meanwhile... I'm still trying to get my email account working. It isn't yet.

Update: Email now working!

"A toast! A toast! A toast to Mama Dollar and to Papa Dollar, and if you want to keep this old Building and Loan in business, you better have a family real quick."
- George Bailey, It's a Wonderful Life

Every Christmas my wife and I watch a number of old Christmas movies. It's a tradition: on Christmas day we get up, put on a pot of coffee and put in movie after movie after movie: The Bishop's Wife for one, Miracle on 34th Street for another, and, of course, It's a Wonderful Life. At the very end of It's a Wonderful Life, the whole town of Bedford Falls descends on George Bailey's house and donates enough money to keep him from going to jail.

I was never in danger of going to jail (that I know of) and I wasn't as desperate as George was in that movie, but you, my readers, remind me of that town.

This post is probably much longer than it needs to be, filled with anecdotes and reminiscences. For those of you who don't want to bother with the buildup, the summary is that I'm running out of money, and as a result I may have to take down EvisceratiNet (eviscerati.net, ubersoft.net, evsicerati.org) for a while until I can afford to resume publishing. There are ways out of this predicament--a sudden influx of money from enthusiastic supporters, a sudden offer of a decent job, a sudden winning lottery ticket--but given the current economic climate I'm thinking the lottery ticket is my best shot.

I go into more detail after the break.

On his blog Rick Marshal asks "Which candidates would your webcomic characters vote for?" He only asks the question of a few specific webcomic creators, none of which are me, but I have no qualms about crashing the party. Below the cut I talk about which characters in which comic would support which candidate (and why).

All day yesterday I was in a great mood. I'd decided to spin off the "PCtown" storyline into its own mini-run comic in order to resume the M-F publication schedule of Help Desk and it felt like things were going to return to normal.

Late afternoon I received a notice that Drupal, the CMS I use to publish Help Desk, had released an update that fixed a critical security flaw. So I downloaded the update, applied the update, and updated the database...

... and the site broke. My relatively good day turned into a pretty horrible evening... and a pretty lousy today, too.

The "PCtown" storyline in Help Desk has become something of a problem.

Help Desk is supposed to be a Monday through Friday comic. In theory. This deadline is iffy on the best of days; add more complicated art and it becomes nearly impossible unless I spend all day drawing. The birth of my daughter combined with the need to get a paying job has made that kind of time pretty much impossible.

These days my free time comes in short bursts -- an hour here, a half hour there, scattered throughout the day. This time can still be put to good use, but it requires a little shuffling of resources.

Template-driven clipart to the rescue: I can create a standard Help Desk comic in half an hour on the outside, once I think of a punchline, and I don't need to be sitting in front of a computer to do that. So it's in the best interest of the site to return to that format. But I don't want to stop PCtown... I'm rather fond of the story, and I haven't got to any of the good stuff yet. But the only way I'm going to be able to keep telling the story is if I work on the art in bits in pieces over time, which will slow down the publication of each piece a fair amount.

Solution: fork PCtown from Help Desk and run it as a separate comic until it's finished. This will allow the site to return to its regular update schedule while also allowing me to keep plugging away at the Jake Nero storyline, all the while keeping the website free of cobwebs.

Of course, some of you might take this opportunity to remind me that Kernel Panic is sadly neglected and is also in need of updates. To which I say: well played, gentle reader. Well played.

Some of you may have noticed a new "feature" on the far-right column of the site called "UberTWIT" -- that is the RSS feed for my Twitter page. The only reason I set it up is because KDE4 has a plasmoid that allows you to update your twitter feed by typing directly into it.

The main purpose of this feed is to let you, the reader, know what I'm currently working on -- i.e., am I creating a new comic, writing an article, or am I distracted by real life events. As family members also have access to this feed there's a fair chance other stuff will be in it as well... but mostly I'm using it to let my readers Know What Is Going On.

Why am I doing this? Well, long-time readers may have noticed that I'm not one to expound a great deal on my personal life, trials and tribulations unless they immediately affect the site itself. So I figured the tweets (yes, Twitter calls individual posts "tweets" rather than "twits," which I think is a missed opportunity) would be a good way of keeping my readers in the loop insofar as there is a loop that one can be in. At the moment it's more like a Moebius strip being randomly attacked by pinking shears.

Yes, this November is yet another edition of National Novel Writing Month, and I am yet again going to try to jump into the fray and try to make it through in one piece.

For those of you who don't know, National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo for short) is an exercise in pain and insanity. More specifically, you try to write a novel in a month. Most specifically, you try to write 50,000 words in a month, which isn't quite novel length but for crying out loud it's a lot of words!

It averages 1667 words a day through the entire month of November.

Here's the breakdown of my attempts so far:

2003: Success, with 90,000 + words.

2004: Failure.

2005: Failure.

2006: Success, with a little over 50,000 words.

2007: Miserable and pathetic failure.

So what are my chances for 2008? Well, I'm currently looking for work, I have a new baby daughter, I'm in the middle of a noir detective allegory that is incredibly time consuming to draw... so I'm thinking the odds are pretty low.

But I'm going to try to do it anyway. Because if being a new father has taught me anything, it's that flat surfaces look sparkley at four o'clock in the morning.

For about a year my wife and I have been in the process of entering an adoption program. In January we went live, in the spring we were matched, and today we took our daughter home from the hospital. We'd been traveling back and forth from Shreveport (where she was born) since Saturday and it's pretty much consumed all of our time, which has made it difficult for me to find the time to draw the things I need to draw for the next comic.

While we're no longer driving 8 hours a day (two hours up and two hours back twice a day -- to make sure the dogs get fed) we now have a beautiful little girl who has made it clear that while she permitted the nurses in the hospital nursery to believe she had settled into a regular feeding and sleeping schedule, now that she is home she will tolerate nothing of the kind.

So... I'm getting around to new updates, but I fear they will be even less consistent than usual.

There's a picture of her after the link.