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Housing Struggles
May 2nd, 2008 by Phil
And now I shall present to you the story of my week. A story of anger, pain, bitterness, hopelessness, and joy. It will shock you, it will surprise you. You’ll pay for the whole seat, but you’ll only need the edge.
On Sunday, April 27th, Becky and I went out to another game of run-through-other-people’s-houses. We had already been burned twice by trying to buy someone else’s home and were none too excited about looking at more houses; especially ones at the upper plateau of our price range. To our amazement, the first house we looked at was perfect. Big, beautiful, with a fenced in backyard. It came with all of the appliances, and after some consideration (most of which was done in the car on the way to other houses that didn’t stand a chance) we decided we could afford to buy the house provided we didn’t need to buy anything for it. We submitted our offer that night.
On Monday, just before 10:00, we learned that our offer was accepted. We were halfway to becoming homeowners. At this point I should give you all some back-story. Becky and I were told, almost two months ago, that we would qualify for a very generous loan. We both had great credit scores and steady, well paying jobs. I was on contract at Xerox then (as I am now), with a very good chance of being hired permanently, or at minimum extending my contract until the paperwork for being hired went through. We have the paperwork for the original pre-approval still, dated March 7th. We figured the easiest portion of house hunting was getting the money.
When the financial arm of Nothnagle told us we couldn’t qualify because I was classified as a contract employee, and my contract ended in a month, and thus they couldn’t count my wages as part of our earnings for the FHA loan, our hopes were quickly snatched away. I don’t really remember much of Tuesday or Wednesday, except that I was very bitter and depressed, and spent at least 3 hours each day on the phone. We talked to several different loan companies about the possibility of getting a loan, and were told the same thing: A contractor must have 2 years of contract employment under his belt before the money he makes even counts toward a loan. We had nowhere left to go. We told our Realtor that we would come in Thursday and sign a cancellation form.
Wednesday, just after I got home, I got a call from my boss at Next Generation Solutions. She gave me a glimmer of hope: I’m not a contractor. I work for Next Generation Solutions directly, as a consultant at Xerox. My paychecks come through them, and they have never had difficulties getting their employees loans; they even have their own connections with local banks. I forwarded this information to our friends at Nothnagle.
Thursday morning they got the information, and after a few emailed release forms, I got the call back that we were good to go. Today, Friday, Becky and I go to sign our life away.
As a result, I haven’t been able to draw any comic strip for this week, and I totally forgot to upload “something” last night. I typically draw the comic during lunch, and this week I spent lunch either on the phone or frantically scarfing down as much food as possible because I was cutting my lunch hour in half in an attempt to save up time to take off on Friday so that we could go do the home inspection (which is now no longer a home inspection but mortgage paper signing)
The odd thing is I typically have nothing to talk about in the blog, but this week I had so many things I could discuss. I’ll try to save them for next week, but I tend to forget things.
Things like loading a filler image on time.
By the way, If you’re an aspiring webcomedian or webcomic-artist or whatnot and you want to contribute a “filler comic” for PDC, or even if you just think you’ve got what it takes, send a gif or jpeg of your filler comic to DoctrZombie@playingdeadcomic.com and next time I’m drowning in mortgage commitments your entry will get featured! =D
This isn’t an elaborate ploy to decrease my workload. Honest!
| 0 CommentsApril 1st, 2008 by Phil
Hey, I know it isn’t friday or anything, but I want to update because it is officially Playing Dead’s 2 year aniversary mark today, April Fools day! 100 episodes two years in the making.
For those of you obsessed with numbers and statistics, technically there have been more than 100 comics, and even more images posted.
For those of you not obsessed with silly things like consistancy: thank you, it makes my job easier.
| 0 CommentsMULTIBLOG!
March 21st, 2008 by Phil
Before I get on with the daily blogging, I have big news.
Every single work day (M-F) next week I WILL POST A NEW FULL SIZED COMIC PICTURE. Don’t. Miss. One. Single. Episode.
On Friday, the final panel will be shown, and the following week we will return to your normally scheduled plot-less hilarity.
Now for the boring blog portion…
I’ve always been a huge fan of pinball. I don’t know why, but when I go to an arcade the games I typically enjoy the most are pinball games. I’m not talking about your father’s pinball games—my dad would regale me with tales of how every bumper was worth a single point, rather than racking up the literal millions we do these days with our fancy animated combos and loud noises—but the pinball games that have wild and crazy challenges, and themes, they’re definitely the best bang for your buck in the entire arcade.
There have been a few pinball games that have really struck me as being worthy in the hall of fame; games that, should I ever win the lottery, will be put in my enormous gameroom. The first is Attack from Mars (I checked, and it would cost me a cool 5 grand). There’s also a decent South Park machine. The one I played today was based on my personal favorite movie trilogy: Lord of the Rings.
I sunk around 3 dollars into the machine in return for 45 minutes of heart pounding gameplay, and I walked away to return to work with 2 credits still in the machine for the next lucky kid.
Believe it or not there’s an entire pinball machine database, for those of you who DON’T spend enough time wasting away on the internet…
| 0 CommentsOh, Zombies…
March 15th, 2008 by Phil
There’s something totally awesome about having your true love reading over the comics you’ve drawn even though you know she’s already seen them all.
And something totally awful about Dead Rising.
The game is meant to be played as a series of quests, like a role-playing game, with optional side quests… Except that the game is FUCKING impossible, so you wind up running out of time doing the main quests, and guess what I just found out!
If you miss ONE the game is OVER.
That’s right, while your busy trying to save someone’s life from the hordes of flesh eaters (and worse, the god damn convicts which happened to get a hold of a hummer and a 50 cal fucking machine gun) the clock is ticking away and if you are 20 seconds late in getting to the target point, the game is over and you need to start all over.
A game shouldn’t piss you off, it should entertain and reward you. Dwarf Fortress is entertaining and rewarding even if you lose. Bioshock is rewarding and entertaining even when upping the difficulty level. Halo is rewarding even if you play the same damn map over and over again (pwnzoring n00bs never gets old). I can name a hundred other games in which I actually enjoy the experience; games that don’t feel like work. Even World of Warcraft FELT like a game (a job cleverly disguised as a game, yes) but I have twice sworn off of Dead Rising, and I will probably go back to it and get hurt again…
Like the pretty blond girl who keeps getting hit by her drunk husband.
Yeah, Dead Rising is like a drunk husband. Eat shit, fuckers!
| 0 CommentsStrike the Earth!
February 7th, 2008 by Phil
Today’s guest(sort of) strip is half brought to you by my evil IT demon! How could I say no when I’m so over-worked?! =D
Becky has a tendency to loathe any game that I play that doesn’t have at least a modest graphics engine. I don’t hold that against her: most gamers look for something that sparkles before they look at amazing gameplay, but for her sake and for those of you who think that all that glitters is gold, turn back now. The rest of this post will be about a game that shines beautifully in ascii glory:Dwarf Fortress.
A shining star, Dwarf Fortress has one of the most fanatically devout fan bases I’ve ever seen. They’ve forged a magnificent Wiki, forum threads in many popular websites… Two amazing ways to play, and best of all, the game is FREE. It’s still in alpha, and improving every day. The game is easily modable (add your own creatures, plants, weapons, civilizations, body parts.. O.o) and still a pretty damn good simulation straight out of the proverbial box.
Personally, I haven’t played the adventure mode yet: I’ve been playing DF for around a year on and off, but I’ve only been playing “Fortress mode”. In Fortress mode you start off with 7 stout dwarves, and you select a good place to strike out for fortune and prosperity. You’ll have to secure food, water, shelter, and protect your colonists from the harsh wilds. Every year you will have to deal with trade caravans, immigrants, and the occasional INVASION by goblin or kobold hordes.
It’s worth a good hard look, and since you all have super fast Internet connections and lots of free time, worth a download as well. The “learning curve” is steep, but there’s TONS of help out there, and the forum and wiki have all the information you could ask for, even fan made stories formed from their exploits in the wild.
If you’re unconvinced, read this story about encounters with Giant Cave Spiders (One of the world’s most deadly and common monsters you find in adventure mode). Dwarf fortress is the most beautifully complex game I’ve ever seen, and it’s getting better. The next stage of development will involve armies. (Did I forget to mention that the entire world is generated randomly before you begin your game, and that every civilization is simulated over an eon or so, causing permanent changes in the world?)
But don’t take my word for it!
| 0 CommentsGuilty Games
February 4th, 2008 by Phil
It’s getting harder and harder to find time to do the webcomic in, and being in Pennsylvania for two days to attend my grandfather’s funeral didn’t help this week. On Wednesday Dan came to visit, so rather than work on the next adventure of Ted and Ian, I played some Xbox 360. I don’t regret it, but if this comic is crap it might have something to do with it. As much as the Photoshop versions of the webcomic look great, I might have to go back to the old Pencil drawings just so that I can get some work done during my lunch break. I know I’ve been complaining about this a lot lately, and using it as an excuse to deliver crappy strips, but I’m going to have to ask you once more: Please forgive the lack of a good comic strip, life is hard and all that. Next week I’m going back to the classic Pencil format.
By the way: Any feedback on the photoshop comic strips? Srsly? Need Infoz?
Speaking of lunch breaks, I am eating leftover Chinese food out of a paper cup. Why, you might ask? Because I forgot to bring a fork with my lunch. Surprisingly, the paper cup is working well enough to get the rice from my plate to my mouth without spilling much. It’s half pathetic and half genius.
Is it possible to feel guilty about morality in video games? I finished Bioshock as a “good guy” saving all the little sisters that I could, but in order to rack up a few more achievements and gamer points I decided I would play through the game again on hard mode and “harvest” the little sisters instead of saving them. As I received my reprimand from the woman scientist who created them, I felt a pang of real guilt for murdering an innocent, although imaginary, girl, even if it did net me twice the amount of Adam… Can video games make you feel genuine guilt? Bioshock is a wonderfully built story, and I have already mentioned that I let out a single tear at the “good” ending. Given a little more depth, can a normal, rational, compassionate human being feel so guilty about the imaginary choices he or she makes in a game that they will cause that person to regret their actions? In Grand Theft Auto I regularly mowed down innocent people just for a few extra bucks… Is the guilt coming from Bioshock being more realistic in every sense of the word, or is it because I’m not murdering cookie-cutter characters for cash, I’m harvesting a finite amount of little girls for essential nutrients… Life for me is easier when I pull the symbiotic slug from their brains and absorb its precious genetic material, but is it worth it? Is it worth becoming a monster?
Either I need to distance myself from video games, or someone out there is just too damn good at writing a story that sucks you in.
| 0 CommentsMore Bioshock, damnit!
February 4th, 2008 by Phil
Bioshock was, from beginning to end, a beautiful story told in a morbid first person shooter. It is everything I have come to expect from a game that modeled itself after System Shock. I played the path of good, and I have no doubt in my mind that I will turn around and seek the path of evil next time–if only to get the rest of the achievements.
Once you’ve played through Bioshock, you can understand why it was built to be a single player game. Several of the powers and the game’s setting don’t lend itself to deathmatch style games. I could see Co-op, but it would seriously take away from the game. As much as I would love to capture some flags, blasting away with the shotgun, I can do that in other games…other games that have a feel that screams kill your neighbors…
Next on my plate is one of those games: Halo 3. I’ve decided to put Dead Rising on the back burner.. It takes too long to play and I have, typically, 30 minute time spans in which to play the 360, except for when my amazing fiance offers to let me play while she watches, playing soduku. Halo 3 is nice, but so far it feels like an old game with new levels… Bioshock was a new experience altogether.
I should mention that another of the best experiences Becky and I have had on the 360 was a game we downloaded: Band of Bugs. It’s a game that plays like the “Tactics” style of games (Tactics Ogre and Final Fantasy Tactics to name the big ones). Becky actually loved it. She loved a game where you tactically position your units..where each unit has different hit points, spells, movement speed…special abilities… it gives me hope that she can be turned…
Turned towards Dungeons and Dragons.
| 0 CommentsLove is…
December 27th, 2007 by Phil
Imagine my moist, delicious surprise when Becky bought me an Xbox 360 for Christmas! And not the cheap one, the expensive one with all the whistles and bells, in sweet, evil Black! =D Combined with the extra controller (Pink, for Becky), 2 rechargeable batteries, the Battery Charger Station, and 5 games (Dead Rising, Bioshock, Forza Motorsport 2, Marvel Ultimate Alliance, Halo 3, and N3: Ninety Nine Nights), I will have weeks, if not months, of exciting game related posts!
To my regular viewers who do not read other webcomics religiously, the above comic may seem a little…out of place. I am taking part in a “Webcomic Meme”, a rather new concept in which one Webcomedian draws a comic strip with a specific theme, and this theme is continued by other webcomic authors and artists to create a sort of online community. The “Love is…” webcomic originated at OctopusPie then moved to Diesel Sweeties, found its way to Questionable Content, which of course means the entire Internet has probably heard of it by now. I know Bunny got a hold of it, and now the zombies (and one survivor, and one immeasurable mass of pure evil) weigh in on what love is to them.
One day I will take a screen shot of the red underlines that OpenOffice places on every mis-spelled word, hyper link, or use of the phrase “webcomic” in any form. It makes it very hard to read what I’ve written.
Dead Rising is everything I hoped it would be, plus insanely difficult bosses who are not zombified. Particularly, the Humvee with three convicts and a machine gun that patrols the courtyard infuriates me to no end. The walkthroughs on the Internet suggest that you might as well kiss your ass goodbye if this is your first time playing through the game: you cannot kill the hummer and shouldn’t bother trying, you should just sigh dramatically and restart from your last save point 50% of the time you enter the courtyard while trying to save someone’s pathetic life.
ARGH. JUST LET ME CUT THE LIMBS OFF THE UNDEAD WITH HEDGECLIPPERS!
| 0 CommentsHappy Halloween!
November 1st, 2007 by Phil
Happy Holla-Pweeeeeeeeen!
Ah yes, the festival of candy! In my day, it was a chance for all the young boys and girls to dress up as what they wanted to be. A superhero, a ballerina… now it’s a chance for all the high school girls to dress as slutty nurses, slutty referees, and (yes, I saw it) a slutty ladybug.
My parents, Becky, and myself all noticed a disturbing trend this year. Although the weather was fair, and a lot of people clearly have their homes decorated for Halloween, there weren’t many trick-or-treaters. My parents, who normally have a few dozen at least, had 8. My mom thinks that kids might be going to the neighborhoods that have more houses per block in hopes of getting bigger hauls, but I think it probably has more to do with a more obvious factor: fear.
Children these days have no more and no less dangers than they did when I was a lad, but the parents are blowing some things out of proportion. When I brought home a sack full of candy, my parents would go through it and make sure that anything that was not properly wrapped (such as cookies, or a torn candy bar) would be thrown out, much to my dismay. This was in response to the hundred thousand children who were poisoned every year at “OCTOBER-SLAUGHTER-CHILDREN-WEEN!”. In reality, there were only 2 confirmed cases of “bad-candy” and both were done intentionally, by the parents. I don’t blame my mom and dad for being concerned with my well being, in fact I’m glad they threw out anything that looked suspicious. Even if not poisoned, who knows what could have gotten into or on the candy/cookies while they moved from a random stranger’s hand to mine. The disease alone made it smart to just throw it out, even if I was in no real danger.
Speaking of danger, I am here to warn you about the very real danger of zombies! That’s right, the living dead have five possible things working on their side to soon rise from the grave, hungry for the flesh of the living! Do you have your Defense Kit ready?
The news article is linked from Cracked.com, a humor site, but the links they get their supporting information from are, to the best of my knowledge, legit. Think about it. Someone with an agenda has five potential sources to develop their own biological weapon. A weapon made from human corpses!
PS. The Mayor of Rochester agreed to officiate our wedding.
PPS. I have almost 16 hours logged into Team Fortress 2. Someone call social services!
| 0 CommentsI wanna be an internet celebrity
October 25th, 2007 by Phil
Becky insisted I make this post entirely about her. I will do my best to at least discuss in moderate length the love of my life, but I know most of you came for other, cake related reasons.
Becky has a tendency to be…. in pain. Constantly. Every day she has a new problem, and tonight it is “My flu shot hurts.” This means if I accidentally bump, smush, rub against, or generally come within 10 inches of her arm bump, she cries out in pain. In the last week, she has complained of headache, migraine, a myriad of tummy problems, her knee, her feet, her back, her shoulders, her finger which she cut open using a pair of scissors whilst decorating for Holla-Pween, and finally her arm where she received a flu shot.
So, back to cake. It turns out that the link I posted last week to the real-life version of the portal cake was made by a friend of mine from RIT. Needless to say, he was made an Internet celebrity overnight (Well, technically 7 days, but that’s overnight when you’ve been drawing a crappy pencil webcomic for a year and a half).
It isn’t that I’m jealous, far from it. I’m just shocked at how people I bump into randomly turn out to be famous on teh webtubes. First Yuko, now Eric. I’d like to be huge, but lets be honest, we all know that in order to be big I need to do something amazing, and half-assed zombies don’t cut it.
When I get a real job, and real money, I will go out and grab a copy of Photoshop, and hopefully have the inspiration and willpower to use it to create a more quality comic strip for everyone. This will, officially, be the first thing I have done for you the audience. Until now, and for the next few weeks at least, I have drawn the comic for me and me alone, but when I get a real copy of a real image editor, I will make something that I am proud to put out there… Something you will be proud to share with your friends.
Something moist and delicious.
| 0 Comments « Previous EntriesGames
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