I have a new comic up over at Friendly Atheist, check it out! I actually created this one prior to the North Carolina uspet (warning: HuffPo link with MSNBC video) and Barack Obama speaking out on the issue (warning: extremely skeptical Gawker article on Obama's interview), but it got queued up until after, which I guess is a good thing since it "grew" into a slightly more timely comic over those couple days.

Gay marriage seems to be one of those topics where you are either violently opposed to it, or (like me) can't even understand why it's even an issue. A lot of the arguments against same-sex marriage (ignoring the God-said-so non-arguments) seem to be centered around perceived damage that it would cause to heterosexual marriage and families. For example, allowing the gays to marry would lead to polygamy, a decrease in heterosexual marriage, an increase in heterosexual divorces, more kids being raised in broken families, people marrying their toasters, dogs and cats living together...

Even if these arguments against same-sex marriage were built upon a rational basis (which, let's be honest, they are not (warning: extremely awesome Jeff Dee video clip series)), my response is

So What?

If the "institution" of heterosexual marriage is hanging by such a tenuously thin thread that the mere aknowledgement and recognition of alternate relationship types will cause it to completely break down and errupt into a new wave of divorces, orgies, and toaster sex, then maybe that's for the better. I say let's liberate all of the toaster lovers out there! Everyone who is currently living in denial, forced against their will into relationships with human members of the opposite sex by societal pressures should be free to love the kitchen appliances that they desire without fear of reprisal or condemnation!

Toaster Lovers Unite!

Thank the FSM for Hacker News.

To learn more of Saren's plight

So disappointed

This is an old post I wrote ages ago for a long-abandoned blog.

It all started out innocently enough. You experimented with it once or twice in your first year of college, but Nano and Pico were easier--closer to what you had already been using during high school on the Windows machines and Macs. But as time went on and you got more experience under your belt in the college-level computer science courses, you started to notice something: All of the really great programmers--the kind who churned out 4 line solutions for an assignment that took you 10 pages of code to complete; the kind who produced ridiculously over-featured class projects in a day while you struggled with just the basics for weeks--none of them used Nano or Pico.

Staying late one night to finish an assignment that was due at midnight, you happened to catch a glimpse over one of the quiet uber-programmer's shoulders. Your eyes twinkled from the glow of rows upon rows of monitors in the darkened computer lab as you witnessed in awe the impossible patterns of code and text manipulation that flashed across the screen.

"How did you do that?" you asked, incredulous.

The pithy, monosyllabic answer uttered in response changed your life forever: "Vim."

At first you were frustrated a lot, and far less productive. Your browser history was essentially a full index to the online Vim documentation; your Nano and Pico-using friends thought you were insane; your Emacs using friends begged you to change your mind; you paid actual money for a laminated copy of a Vim cheat sheet for easy reference. Even after weeks of training, you still kept reaching for your mouse out of habit, then stopped with the realization that you'll have to hit the web yet again to learn the proper way to perform some mundane task that you never even had to think about before.

But as time went on, you struggled less and less. You aren't sure when it happened, but Vim stopped being a hindrance. Instead, it become something greater than you had anticipated. It wasn't a mere text editor with keyboard shortcuts anymore--it had become an extension of your body. Nay, an extension of your very essence as a programmer.

Editing source code alone now seemed an insufficient usage of Vim. You installed it on all of your machines at home and used it to write everything from emails to English papers. You installed a portable version along with a fine-tuned personalized .vimrc file onto a flash drive so that you could have Vim with you everywhere you went, keeping you company, comforting you, making you feel like you had a little piece of home in your pocket no matter where you were.

Vim entered every part of your online life. Unhappy with the meager offerings of ViewSourceWith, you quickly graduated to Vimperator, and then again to Pentadactyl. You used to just surf the web. Now you are the web. When you decided to write an iPhone application, the first thing you did was change XCode's default editor to MacVim. When you got a job working with .NET code, you immediately purchased a copy of ViEmu for Visual Studio (not satisfied with the offerings of its free cousin, VsVim).

Late one night, as you slaved away over your keyboard at your cubicle, working diligently to complete a project that was due the next morning, you laughed to yourself because you knew no ordinary programmer could complete the task at hand before the deadline. You recorded macros, you moved entire blocks of code with the flick of a finger, you filled dozens of registers, and you rewrote and refactored entire components without even glancing at your mouse. That's when you noticed the reflection in your monitor. A wide-eyed coworker looking over your shoulder. You paused briefly, to let him know that you were aware of his presence.

"How did you do that?" he asked, his voice filled with awe.

You smile, and prepare to utter the single word that changed your life. The word that, should your colleague choose to pursue it, will lead him down the same rabbit hole to a universe filled with infinite combinations of infinite possibilities to produce a form of hyper-efficiency previously attainable only in his wildest of dreams. He reminds you of yourself, standing in that darkened computer lab all those years ago, and you feel a tinge of excitement for him as you form the word.

"Vim."

:wq

Many nights when I dream, I'm still living in the house I grew up in. I'm visiting it for real now, and tonight's the last night I will ever physically spend here. I've been living thousands of miles away, in another country for almost nine years now, but I've never really missed it like I do now. Even though my parents have made changes over the years, the changes mostly felt superficial, or unimportant somehow. It still felt like home. It still felt like things could go back to the way they were, if we wanted.

In many of my memories, both good and bad--games with my brother in the basement, rough housing with our puppy Sacha at the top of the stairs, Christmases, dinner parties, sleepovers, pizza and movies with best friends, watching Friday night sitcoms as a family every week, first love, learning of the loss of my grandfather, friends moving away, me moving away, hugging Sacha on my bed the night before we took her to the vet for the last time--this house plays an integral role, almost like another family member. It's the one unchanging constant; the backdrop to them all. Ever present. Ever comforting.

While a part of me is sad that my parents have sold my old home, I also recognize that this is a very special thing. Not everyone has such a wealth of fond childhood memories tied to a single place. My own sons are one and three years old now, and when they grow up I want for them to have this too. I want them to have a lifetime of fantastic memories in a home that they love and where they are loved. I know that some day they'll move out on their own, start their own families, live their own lives... I just hope that when they do, even if they end up chasing a girl that they met on the Internet half way around the world and only get to visit us once or twice a year, that at least when they sleep, they can come home, and dream of a house that they loved as much as I loved mine.

Good bye, old friend, and thank you. I hope you provide your next family with the same warmth, safety, and happiness that you did mine.

Earlier this year, I wrote and released a password management app for the iPhone called PassDrop. I created it because I was highly unsatisfied with the state of password management apps on the app store at the time—most were either lacking a painless method of synchronization, or lacking a desktop counterpart altogether. PassDrop took a considerable amount of my free time for a few months to complete.

At the time, I had decided not to add iPad support since I didn’t have an iPad, and didn’t want to invest additional resources into the app when my time to work on it was already so limited.

Much has changed since then—I do have an iPad now, I have even less free time than I did before, and many of the competing password managers have evolved to a point where I find them rather usable (mSecure in particular, now that they’ve added (admittedly glitchy) DropBox support).

What all of this means for me is that I’m no longer motivated enough to continue working on and supporting PassDrop for the time being. What all of this means for you is that PassDrop should be considered more or less feature complete as it is now (with the exception of bug fixes).

As for the future of PassDrop, you are unlikely to see any major updates or improvements coming from me. However, seeing as how I’m using a GPL'ed library (libkpass), PassDrop itself falls under the GPL (albeit a slightly modified version since it makes use of OpenSSL for crypto). As such I can, have, and will provide the complete source code to anybody who wants it, so there is a possibility that other apps forked off of the PassDrop source code may one day appear on the App Store.

If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to leave a comment below, or email me at the address I provide on the PassDrop support page.

I wrote and illustrated a little Christmas poem for everyone. It's up now on the Friendly Atheist.

This one was drawn and inked on paper, then scanned and colored in the Gimp. It took about a week of writing and drawing off and on to create. I chose a girl as the main character as a sort of spiritual successor to Lacey Cuskin from my External Delivery series on Cectic.

I hope it's enjoyed!

My first comic for FA can be seen here. I'm not super pleased with the art--I whipped it up really quickly shortly after the ad came out and didn't spend too much time on it. I am quite pleased with the comic as a whole though.

I actually used Toon Boom Studio to draw it. I purchased the animation suite a few months back with the intention of some day adding rudimentary animated cartoons to my arsenal of weapons against the absurd. I suppose you'll probably hear more about my progress on that front in coming days on this blog.

I found Toon Boom to be a huge time saver, since you can draw a few elements, then re-use them in different panels by simply rearranging them slightly and changing the camera angle and zoom level. It's a technique that I strictly avoided back in my Cectic days (prefering instead to draw each frame by hand even when they were essentially identical), but like I said I wanted to finish this one quickly so that it could go up while the ad was still timely. The fact that it's the first real project I've done in Toon Boom also contributes to the roughness of the art.

My favorite response to this comic was (I believe) a comment on Reddit, expressing great dismay that the comic was merely a re-wording of Rick Perry's actual ad--I hadn't changed the core message at all. So true, and so sad.

On the topic of Reddit, this comic got some love over there when it got posted. I really enjoy seeing my stuff pop up there spontaneously. I enjoy it so much, in fact, that I never post my own comics there myself--it's much more gratifying to see it pop up on its own, and I don't mind spreading the karma around to others with my work. The thing that doesn't particularly give me warm fuzzies inside, however, is when people link just the image, or even worse re-host the image on imgur and post that. Back in my Cectic days I didn't care too much because I wasn't making any money from the website, but Friendly Atheist is another story, and by directly linking the posts instead of the images you're helping to ensure that the blog and all of its contributors can continue putting out the fresh, original content that you've all grown to trust and love.

Hey there, welcome to my new space on the web. I used to draw a skepticism and atheism themed webcomic called Cectic. I was able to put out several comics a week at first, because I had just moved to the United States from Canada, and was legally unable to work until my immigration status was updated. Once I got a job, it became harder to keep updating the site and I eventualy slowed down and stopped.

I still enjoy writing and drawing, however, and recently Hemant Mehta asked me if I would consider drawing comics for the Friendly Atheist blog. I am really excited about that because it allows me to work at my own pace, and lets me share my comics with a much wider audience than I could have ever hoped to achieve and maintain on my own.

I plan on updating this space with links to each of my new comics as they appear on the Friendly Atheist blog, and perhaps provide a kind of "director's commentary" around them. I'll also post any work I do that appears elsewhere on the web, and maybe even some original content that appears nowhere else.

I've never really had a personal blog before, but I'm looking forward to seeing how this one shapes up. Anyway, due to my inexperience, I haven't really figured out the best way to end posts yet.

The End.