GPF News Archive

Another Quick Update: Just a quick FYI, gang. As most of you know, I've had problems the past few months with a condition called map-dot-fingerprint dystrophy, which is caused by my ocular hypertension. This causes very painful erosions of my cornea that can put me out of commission for a while. (See this forum thread for some of the discussion about that.) Well, even though I had surgery a few months ago to help alleviate the condition, I had a very painful erosion early Sunday morning (yep, Easter Sunday morning) that has apparently gotten a bit infected. I've already seen one doctor on Monday and I'll be seeing my regular eye doctor today (Tuesday), so hopefully I'll get over this soon. But I just wanted to let you know that it may be a few days before I'll be able to answer e-mails and forum posts, so please be patient if you're waiting for a reply from me. Since I've got a full two months in my buffer, the comic should not be affected.

Quick Update: Heh... Just a quick note to sort of apologize for yesterday's April Fools' prank. Most of you caught that it was a joke, but a few of you (including our dear Dr. Bleuel) got duped and sent me a note about my "error." If you were sleeping under a rock or otherwise didn't get to see it (since I know some of you only visit once per week), the April 1st strip was uploaded in "reverse," or mirrored. A lot of you came up with inventive ways to read it, ranging from mirrors to handy AOL CDs pulled from the trash to just reading it as is. But for those of you who had problems reading it, take heart... I've uploaded the "corrected" strip today so you can read it as it was supposed to be. (Note that there's a chance it may not appear to have updated, because your browser may pull the old image from the cache or your ISP or company gateway may use a proxy server. Make sure to force your browser to perform a refresh to get the updated image.)

Hey, gang. Yet again, several weeks since my last news update. Sorry about that, but I have a darn good excuse this time....

Turns out that besides the fun memories, kewl ideas, nifty sketches, and awesome goodies I managed to acquire from our trip to UberCon, I also brought one thing more: a nasty head cold. Normally, a cold wouldn't do much other than slow me down for a few days, but unfortunately I'm rather susceptible to lung ailments. In the course of a couple weeks, that head cold progressed into bronchitis, then degenerated into full blown pneumonia. This put me out of commission for well over a week. I'm still taking antibiotics and I'm doing a lot better now, but I still have this nasty lingering cough. By now, Halls and Robitussin ought to be sending me medicine by the case.

Luckily, I've managed to keep the comic going without missing a week. Unfortunately, that's been at the sacrifice of keeping up with e-mail. As a result, I'm horribly behind at the moment, so if you've sent me e-mail in the past several weeks, you have my apologies. I'm trying to catch up, but it's going to take a while. I'll do what I usually do and let some messages slide if all they contain are generic kudos ("Great strip, man!") and such. Don't worry... even if I don't respond, I always read my mail, both good and bad. If you sent me a more detailed question, I'll try to answer it as soon as I can, so please be patient.

As a good number of you have noticed, I "misspelled" Sony VAIO in several recent strips. While I thank you for pointing this at, the "misspelling" was intentional, kind of silly twist on a brand name without actually using it. Of course, this kind of confusion has happened before, so I guess I deserve the scolding.

There's not much else to tell you about this week (another reason there haven't been many updates lately). I do have some really big news that's coming up very soon, but I don't want to spoil any surprises. However, I will note that thanks to the diligence of showler from the forums, I've gone back and added some old news posts back into the News Archive. In the drop down, you'll find them under the heading "News from the Wayback Machine," since showler resurrected them from the Wayback Machine Web archive. There are also a few others news posts I managed to find on my own and added back in. I tweaked most of the links so they should work, but don't be surprised if they don't. Note that the archive is very incomplete; a lot of these old posts are taken out of their context and don't have the posts immediately surrounding them. However, then do present you with some interesting snapshots of what was going on with the comic at interesting points in time, like my first "I'm a Thief!" campaign and my patriotic September 11, 2001 rant.

Don't forget that the Fred plush dolls are still available, and that you can help me decide what to do with my Microsoft anti-trust settlement in this poll thread on the forum. Check out the Shows & Cons site for updates on where we're planning to be in the near future.