Noob e-mail

I received several emails while I was on holiday in Scotland, so I'll answer them here.

Simon writes about a free mmo that he plays, Eternal Lands, where high level miners can move on from diamond digging and start harvesting precious substances from public toilets. Apparently there's rare gunpowder to be found in human faeces (which possibly requires a dinner of curry vindaloo the night before). Maybe the designers of Eternal Lands were fed up with miners asking for craft improvements when they made this update. I was about to say that WoW designers can only dream to have players with their arms up to the elbows in dung piles then I remembered that there are quests in Nagrand where you have to do just that. Are they trying to send us a message? ARE THEY FED UP WITH PLAYERS? How's that possible!?! After all, listening to endless whining, moaning and complaining from people with an overinflated sense of entitlement has never killed anyone.

Earte writes a long suggestion for the plot based on Apocalypse Now/Heart of Darkness. Thanks, it's very interesting and detailed. I won't use it but I really appreciated it and had fun reading it. Anyway I have ideas that I haven't scripted yet, that are based on Apocalypse Now. The last time that I quoted it someone said that I was quoting Surf Ninjas, so I'm really curious to see if anyone thinks that "oh the horror... the horror" is a quote from Scary Movie IV.

I have received emails from several Swedish readers, horrified at the thought that Basshunter is embarassing their country outside national borders. I don't know what you're talking about, all I sing in the shower these days is "on enemies ve creep-ah lalalah ve sleep-ah". Mattias points out that the correct spelling is "vi sitter hÄr i venten". Double-dot omissions are seriously frowned upon in Sweden, I'm told. They may even creep-ah on you and bitchslap you, if you do it too often.

Borys from Poland likes the bored dwarfette/chavette in the last panel of 262. WTF, chavs are known outside Britain, now? Now that's embarassing - much more than Basshunter. I drew the dwarfette looking at a still image of the girl in the white gym suit in the video - a.k.a. the swedish version of Vicky Pollard.

J would like to see some eccentric newbies in bronze armour in the comic. Well, ok, but they'll have a hard time looking eccentric in Beacon of Hope, though, what with the flower guys and the squids and so on.

Then there's the usual bunch of people who want a piece of me, like some guy who signs his emails as Dynamo Ace. He offers to format in PDF and sell my comic with chapter bookmarks (chapter bookmarks, no less! welcome to the world of tomorrow! Don't you need some special expensive machinery to enter bookmarks in a PDF file?). He would generously give me 50% of the profit. How very kind! He'd be selling my work and keeping only half of the money! What a great deal.

And while the distribution of the comic is in safe hands with Dynamo Ace, I can rely on Janet from Nigeria to take care of the online store:

"Hello sale,
when i come across your website, i observe that you have different product in your store and available items, well before i procced i want to know if you can ship your product to one of my store in Nigeria.

Thanks,
Janet."

I really like the "hello sale". Nothing like the informal, human touch to start a business partnership.

This is all for this bunch of emails, thanks for writing and take care.