Category Archives: diatribes

how to lose my business in just six words

I don't know how hor­ri­bly rel­e­vant this is or how many of you read comic books any­more (yes, they still pub­lish them and yes, some of us still read them) but I just wanted to make good on the old adage about telling 100 peo­ple when some­thing goes wrong as opposed to telling 10 when it

Scalped!

At first I was all excited about Live Nation… some­one was com­pet­ing with Tick­et­mas­ter! This had to be a good thing! There was no way it could go hor­ri­bly wrong! Then I tried to buy some tick­ets to see Los Campesinos in Feb­ru­ary. $7.00 sur­charge on $14.00 tick­ets. 50% markup. 50% markup! Unbe­liev­able. UPDATE I worked the math, and

Maybe It's a Regional Thing?

Why are the only Beastie Boys songs I ever hear on the radio here in east­ern Mass­a­chu­setts "Sab­o­tage", "She's Crafty", "Fight for Your Right to Party", "No Sleep Till Brook­lyn" or "Inter­galac­tic"? 20 god damned years putting out records, some­thing like 15 radio sin­gles, and these are the ones I hear over and over again on local

Web hosting 101, or how to lose my business in five words

Behold, a star­tling tale of awful tech sup­port staff, too lit­tle too late man­age­ment strate­gies, and ver­bose tirades of dar­ing do that was sup­pos­edly done did! Since Jan­u­ary, my vir­tual pri­vate server account with Tek­tonic has gone down more than a fresh­man soror­ity pledge. Every time, I have had to play this two-step swing­ing game with them to

fuck you, austin sarner

Matt Ball has posted a siz­able write-up which neatly sums up the ris­ing tide of back­lash against the so-called "Deli­cious Gen­er­a­tion" of soft­ware devel­op­ers cur­rently bilk­ing milk­ing aban­don­ing their installed base every 6-to-8 months. I had been work­ing on some­thing sim­i­lar, though admit­tedly much, much less details when this dropped. My inter­est in this was strictly

Class Warfare

I no longer define my class stand­ing in terms of the money I've made or the things I own. It's not even some­thing as pedes­trian as the neigh­bor­hood I live in or the car I drive. I now define it in terms of how much time I have to spend in laundromats.

Free Rick Marshall

Rick Mar­shall has a story to tell. After "part­ing ways" with Wiz­ard Mag­a­zine ear­lier this month, Rick has been blog­ging about it very pub­licly for the last few days. The online comic book indus­try sites seem to be sup­port­ing this, and it doesn't seem like it's sim­ply because they've all hated Wiz­ard for years. For the