It’s official. I am a sellout. A stinking, no-good, money-grubbing, treacherous sellout.

And I have Google Ads.

How did this happen, Sergio, you ask? Who could possibly be behind this? Have you forgotten your principles? your moral upstanding? What about all your ranting and raving about Google’s evilosity? Are you really that shallow? Will you swallow your pride so easily once a little money is tantalizingly waved in your general direction?

There is no simple answer to those questions… No, wait… Ok. There is a simple answer to those questions: yes.

Yesterday I received an email from the Google Adsense folk telling me that they’re expanding now and can acommodate more content, and that they revised my application and had granted it, thus ending my status as one of the last true renegades of the internet — fighting the man with my subversive writing.

Fear not, for I will continue my rebellious crusade as one of the truly free voices of the internet. Only difference is that now I will do it from WiFi hot spots while sipping my latteccino and patting my golf clubs in anticipation to engaging in self-indulgent debauchery.

Fight the power!

— sergio at 10:38 AM  

I just finished reading Spider Man: Blue, by Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale, and I’ve got to say that it’s been a long time since a comic has moved me this much.

The cover was what sold me at first. The friendly neighborhood webslinger, cut over solid pastel blue sporting Gwen Stacy’s eyes sketched on it, topped off by impeccably set Clarendon in duotone… It was all I could do not to lick it then and there, I tell you.

The first time I saw Tim Sale’s art it was in disappointment. I had just bought Deathblow No. 6 from one of those places where comics are kept inside tidy little plastic bags and the preckle-faced store attendant growls scornfully if you so much as look at them sideways, let alone think of exposing one to the air before buying it. This particular number had one of the greatest Jim Lee covers I can remember seeing, ever.

I bought it without giving it a second thought, and all but tore off the plastic bag to find the sweet Jim Lee-ness inside it. Instead, I found work that looked like big splotches of ink had been handed to a weirdo hung up on Humphrey Bogart movies, who had then proceeded to smear them all over the page. I was really disappointed and kind of hated this guy. Then I saw the second, third and fourth pages, and that was it for Jim Lee in my mind.

Sale has gone on to sell out to Marvel, win the fuck out of the Eisners and become one of the most influential artists in comic books, and he deserves every bit of that, as far as I’m concerned.

As for Loeb… well, read this:

It’s about remembering someone who was so important to me I was going to spend the rest of my life with her.

I didn’t know that meant she would only get to spend the rest of her life with me.”

If that’s not solid, concise and inspired writing, I don’t know what is.

Spider Man: Blue tells the story of Spidey’s first love: Gwen Stacy. Webheads all over the world may remember Gwen’s death as one of the strongest Spiderman moments ever. Peter arrives too late to save her —the woman he would spend the rest of his life with— from a fall off the Brooklyn bridge (Green Goblin’s handiwork). He catches her and thinks everything will be ok, but it’s not. She’s dead (“from the fall” is all the explanation we get). He then goes off after the Green Goblin.

To kill him.

Spiderman: Blue does not contain the death scene. It doesn’t even feature much of the Green Goblin as such. Instead, we get a retelling of the Petey/Gwen/MJ story as told by Peter to a tape recorder on Valentine’s Day. Because he needs to tell it. It’s classic Spiderman, with remarkable insights on what makes Spidey tick. There’s nothing new here, but the treatment is, by far, one of the best I’ve seen lately. As he battles his way through the Rhino, two Vultures, the Croc and a host of other enemies, all the way trying to seal the deal with Gwen, you feel for Parker. You just want him to get a break. And we all know how that one ends.

Ultimately, this is a love story. It’s sad and poignant and downbeat. There is some fun, but there’s mostly loss and regret and learning and not much moving on. Just like life.

— sergio at 06:13 PM  

Hola ALA de nuevo! Today, my second ALA article, CSS Drop Shadows II: Fuzzy Shadows (in which our fearless hero braves the hazards of IE’s transparency failings and returns lambasted yet victorious) has just gone live. This, I assure you, fills me with no small amount of glee.

So, for those of you who hadn’t been here before: Welcome. You may want to poke around the abridged section, and of course, the comic (which is fast becoming a relic of times past… times of myth where I actually got off my ass to draw purty things). I hope you enjoy yourselves.

And the site.

To those who are here everyday: You fucking rock! Thanks people!

I’m currently in the middle of a bunch of changes that may alter the way Overcaffeinated interacts with the outside world. These are still the first baby steps, but you may want to hang around to see what eventually comes out of it. Starting with the (currently rather drab) RSS feeds for the News from the ‘Net here: RSS 2.0, RSS 1.0.

— sergio at 10:00 AM  

Doug told me to:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

Never one to shy away from sheep mentality, I give you:

I undertaked to input the things you counseled me to, and I fatigated the thesaurus you presented me, as you counseled me to, when my words appeared too petite, or not befitting.”

That hails from Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer, which, I assure you, I’m enjoying to an unwholesome degree.

The book, that is. Not Jonathan.

What you got?

— sergio at 11:01 AM  

Vive la France! I am really happy to announce that Overcaffeinated, the comic, is now available in French!.

Some time ago, Eric Baulier contacted me and told me he liked the comic a lot, and he also loved translating stuff (some people have the weirdest hobbies), so he set out to translate every comic I’ve published. Even edited them in their image format, too. As you will see, he’s done a fantastic job of it. If you want to thank him or have translation jobs (paying jobs), contact him at eric_baulier@hotmail.com .

The link for seeing the comics in French is http://overcaffeinated.net/comic/fr/. Dates follow the same directory structure we specified before. Links have been added at each comic to its translation, back and forth (a couple are missing near the beginning, but I hope that will be resolved soon — Update: Missing comics uploaded. Everything’s dandy now.)

Thanks Eric!

— sergio at 10:22 PM  

We made up holidays, Diana and I. Had a whole system set up to this effect, too. It worked something like this: If we thought it would be cool to make up a holiday, we would.

Next step was deciding where we’d go for the duration. It was a question that was largely determined by how far we could get in the alotted time (this didn’t always account for time spent on getting back). This philosophy led us to go through roughly one third of the country. It also meant that we fought, bickered and argued in one third of the country.

We had a lot of these holidays. There was “They say Puebla is nice this time of the year” week, “I know I screwed up, let’s go to Valle de Bravo and make up, my treat” weekend and “got us fake student ID’s, we have travel discount!” month, amongst others.

This particular story happened in the middle of “Yay! Michoacán!!” week, right before it turned into the “We don’t have enough money for the ticket back” pledge drive. We were having coffee in a really small town south of Michoacán. Our waiter —Omar— was very nice, and we kept inviting him to join us at the table. When his shift was over, he did.

— So, have you lived here all of your life? How is it?
— Oh, it’s nice, I guess. We don’t do much. We have a football¹ team, though. Play every month against the guys from the town you passed on the way here.
— Cool! Are you good?
— Well, sort of. We used to be better. Had a great goalkeeper. The guy would take a swift look at the ball, lunge for it and grab it real firm. Never missed a ball, he was that good. But this one time, he jumped for the ball and hit his hand against the post. Really hurt it, it was left dangling like this —At this, he made a limp pendulum-like motion with his hand— So, anyway, we took him to the hospital, but it was real bad… They had to cut it off.

We had been smiling up to that point, but then we hit a brick wall in the conversation. We were wide eyed, staring at Omar and each other in turn, unable to think of what to say next. Omar saved us the trouble:

— Now he plays center midfield.

To this day, I still laugh my ass off every time I remember.

_______
¹ Soccer

— sergio at 11:47 PM  

It is April. Month of the fools, and the… um… Aprils, I guess (sucks to be you). Outside, dogs are barking, kids are playing and people are going on with their lives, oblivious to the goings on of the latest —and, by this time, obligatory— Overcaffeinated’s useless and utterly invisible redesign.

The poor, poor fools.

As usual, this redesign (or major tweaking) dramatically improves several key aspects of the site’s usability. Aspects that no one had ever remarked upon or —most likely— even cared about. But, also as usual, it gives me a warm, fuzzy feeling inside, and that’s ultimately the reason why I do most of the stuff I do. So there.

If you head over to the different sections of the site, you may notice that the URI’s have changed and no longer point to a specific HTML file. Instead of http://overcaffeinated.net/about.html, we now have http://overcaffeinated.net/about/. The reasoning behind this change is that now I can change the about.html file to be generated by a different CMS (which may use another file extension), to be coded in PHP (about.php) or to be hacked together out of pocket lint, for all the URI cares. Its location will stay the same, since I only need to change a rule in my .htaccess file for it to point to the new file.

The underlying structure of this site may change tremendously, and all bookmarks would still work (well, the ones made after this change anyway). This also has the added advantage of simplifying URI’s, and allowing people to remember parts of the site easily. The methodology is explained in two ALA articles: Slash Forward and How to succeed with URL’s, so I won’t go into the nitty gritty of how .htaccess and mod_rewrite work. Suffice it to say that a .htaccess file can be placed in any directory of your site and Apache will use it to determine access permissions to the files in that directory. Mod_rewrite is an Apache module that allows you to create dynamic URL rewrites with regular expressions, so the url you convert from/to can be mind bogglingly complex or really simple, depending on which end of it you’re standing.

The rules I created for this site are very simple. For the static pages (about, abridged…) I use this rule:

RewriteRule ^about(/)?$ /about.html

Mod_rewrite parses that as follows: The RewriteRule part indicates we’re specifying a Rewrite Rule (told you this was easy!). The next part is what the user will see in the address bar of his browser. ^ means the start of the URL (the root of the site), then we have the word (about) and then the (/)?$ bit, which decomposes to this: (/) is a piece of delimited text (the text is “/”), the ? tells mod_rewrite that we’re to expect zero or one of the delimited text (hence, you can go to http://overcaffeinated.net/about/ and http://overcaffeinated.net/about and they both point to the same place). The $ marks the ending of our regular expression. The next part is the actual location of the file we’re pointing at (/about.html).

The next example is more complex, and you can see it in action if you head over to the comic section. The rule is this:

RewriteRule ^comic/date/(.+) /cgi-bin/comic.cgi?date=$1

What this does is change the usual comic url from the aesthetically challenged http://overcaffeinated.net/cgi-bin/comic.cgi?date=yyyymmdd format to the strikingly beautiful http://overcaffeinated.net/comic/date/yyyymmdd form (makes you want to shed a tear, doesn’t it?). Notice the (.+) bit at the end of the first section of the rule. That’s where we take the part of the URL that changes (the yyyymmdd part) and reference it later with the $1 thingie.

These changes have been implemented all over the site, along with a change to simplify internally referencing links, which I had foolishly set up with a fully qualified path. For instance, I was using <a href="http://overcaffeinated.net">... as a link to home, instead of <a href="/">..., which ultimately amounts to the same and looks much prettier. I was doing this because sometimes I’m just plain dumb. But now it’s been corrected, and the code is looking cleaner everyday.

Doesn’t that give you a warm, fuzzy feeling?

— sergio at 11:19 AM