Gotta go with your strengths… though Lorraine got around fairly well as a Brunette. The Brunette Lorraine will be returning shortly. A few purchases on Wednesday as the gang goes shopping with their new found wealth.
I’m g0ing to be at the Dallas Webcomic this weekend. I’m working ahead best as I can, but I’m also getting the show organized too, so we’ll see how the updates go for next Monday. After driving 28 hours in 3 days, I’m going to be tired and sore.
“Atomic” by Blondie (from their 1979 release “Eat to the Beat”) is a song essentially about a girl wanting a guy “tonight” and then they end the lyrics simply with “atomic”.  Now, I’m no Shakespeare, but that goes right by me… so I’m sure one of you can explain it to your ol’ uncle Byron. I told you I was going to start stepping into other forms of rock bands from the 70s, and Blondie certain fits the bill. I guess you could call them punk rock in their earlier albums, but they certainly could create some pop songs as well as the disco themed “Call Me” from “American Gigolo”. I also chose Blondie as Lorraine will be blonde for a little bit longer and she’s filling up her “dance card” really fast it seems.
NOTE: I need to know if adding these song links is slowing down the viewing of the comic page for you. It would appear to me that the song should not load until you click play, but I’ve received a couple complaints and want to hear from the rest of you. I enjoy the links, but I’m on a (crappy) AT&T DSL line and not slowing my viewing down. So if it’s messing up the loading of the page, I’d like to know.
PS: Yes, the last frame is the pose in the header. In the past I’ve pulled poses for the Header from already posted comics… THIS one is from the FUTURE and you’ll be seeing those poses show up in comics very soon. A bit of a tease so to speak!
Discussion (44) ¬
No problem with the music link at all. Loads fine for me. I have Uverse. I would assume that if you are on a slow connection that music widget will be the least of your problems. The comic and header would be a much bigger drag on your connection – but hey, it’s a web comic and pretty much based on nice big graphics! It is what it is. We have people complain from time to time on Kevin’s web comic too. But, it’s about a 99% chance they are luddites that prefer old and odd operating systems and browsers that only display the graphics they want to see.
Spoken like a true professional! Thanks. I didn’t think it would be an issue and I think it’s really fun to have on the site now. Makes reading the comic more fun for me… so…
🙂
i am not a luddite (at least i don’t think i am — curmudgeon, yes…luddite, no…spear good! fire bad! ungh!), but it just so happens that the system i pretty much live on these days is an old 17″ g4 powerbook. i’m poor and can’t afford to live on the bleeding edge. plus i like recycling old but still useful hardware. i still use my g4 powerbook, a dual g5, and a p4-1.6gHz mo-sheen for production purposes because they still werk fine for what i do. and with people keying me in as to when to stand under their window so i can catch their old junk as they fling it out, it makes life easier. can’t get new junk, so the old junk werks just fine. and it keeps the mo-sheens out of far-east technology landfills.
if anyone’s got a terabyte hard drive they’re gonna fling out the window, lemme know, ok? 🙂
i am thankful that byron’s site doesn’t have a shitload of stupid flash animations. it seems that adobe doesn’t care about us ppc guys because if they did, they’d do something about the fact that flash pegs any ppc cpu to 100%, takes over all timeslicing and doesn’t let hardly any multitasking happen while the flash animation in question is playing. youtube is a pain in the rump on this platform. i can’t do anything but watch ONE youtube video on the mo-sheen when a youtube video is playing.
the little audio player seems to run great, however. php-based? whatever the case, it werks well, doesn’t bog down the system one iota, and is a great addition. site still loads in zippy fashion.
cheers.
–dee!
spear good! fire bad!
I just pick up the code over at the site… what it is I have no idea as I’m not even an HTML guy, so when it comes to website design and coding, I’m the Luddite.
I miss my electric typewriter and having to type a college term paper WITH NO mistakes or spell checkers or Thesauruses or the bleedin’ Internet as a whole to “steal” ideas from. Damn, if you “kids” today aren’t getting A’s on your term papers, you’re just freakin’ lazy.
I hear you on the poor part. My main PC is from 2003 and is a plain 3.6 P4 Windows XP Pro computer. Can’t even buy good AGP video cards any more, so when this dies, I’m up shit creek as all the software I run works great with XP but I don’t know if it’ll work on Win7 or not. UGH!
Couple of interpretations of “atomic” spring to mind. They’re going have their own personal fusion and it’ll be as hot as the sun’s core. The Earth will move like an atomic bomb’s just gone off. Debbie Harry’s got a geek fetish (she did date Chris Stein for years, after all) so her character decided to pick up a physicist… with good hair… okay, maybe not that one.
LOL! Yeah, I caught the “good hair” line as well. “And his hair was perfect…”
Ah, “atomic” as it’s going to be hot… I like that interpretation, so I think I’ll settle with that one! I think that fits in with their style too… Thanks!
🙂
I love Blondie — they were so incredibly versatile, starting off as a punk band but moving into New Wave and exploring Caribbean styles and rap… plus Debbie Harry’s got a fantastic voice and incredible presence. In some ways she’s a female version of Roger Daltrey.
I love her voice as well and not many women get to front a band of any sort so I support those bands best I can.
No problems on this end; I have a cable modem connection over here, which means if I’m not bombing out then the page is at least behaving within normal parameters…
Thanks! I was hoping it was not going to bother most folks…
Dial up…bless you for your patience.
No problems with loading here.
Yep, my sentiments as well. For anyone using dial-up, they must have the patience of a saint as it’s agonizingly slow.
Dial up? whats that? 😉
Great comic as usual dude!
Thanks, Andy!
Well, I do have a share of readers still on dial-up (hey, I still own a crank pencil sharpener… ) and I want to make sure the site is viewable by the widest range of folks. But, admittedly the width of the site and the size of the comics would make it hard to load on a dial-up. I had to use a dial-up for about a week while we moved from Comcast to AT&T DSL (a move I regret BIG TIME) and MAN was it a lesson in patience.
In today’s Flash heavy sites and all, I know using dial-up must be frustrating at best.
Blonde seriously doesnt fit her.
I absolutely agree! It’s amazing, even for a cartoon character, how a change like that alters her “personality” and reactions. She’s much hotter as a Brunette… it’s coming back… very soon!
🙂
Sorry, but for me someone hot is probably Jeff.
“See you next Tuesday!” Am I the only one who can’t NOT see that now?
Man, I was wondering who was going to pick that out. Believe it or not, it was a Spongebob Squarepants episode that made that popular amongst the current college stoner crowd. For those still confused… here’s a hint: C U Next…
I am a stinker sometimes…
Grand Funk Railroad had a song on their live album title T.N.U.C with the letters backwards so when you held it up to a mirror you got the message. I believe the song was a drum solo too, but that WAS AGES ago, so I’m only guessing now..
🙂
Thinking back I realized that I’ve never dated a SINGLE blonde in my entire life (29 years) I’ve just never, EVER had a good impression of a blonde. 2 red heads, 6 brunettes and 1 black haired woman(who’s now my fiance) guess that’s one reason I like Lorraine you just don’t see black hair and blue eyes. It’s one of the reasons I asked mine to marry me 🙂 I’m glad you’ll bring her back. I still get that look on my face of ‘did someone just fart in here’ every time I see Lorraine as a blonde.
I had a crush on this one blonde girl and dated her a couple times. Got to see her totally buff one time completely by accident as I carried her roommate on my back into their dorm room. I knocked and thought I heard “Come In” but actually she had said “Don’t Come In” and she was standing there totally naked. Now, who does that without locking the door? And yes, that is when I discovered the carpet matches the curtains. Who knew? It was a good year…
🙂
well, it seems to be loading better for me now, was having problems that seem to coincide with the music widget, but I guess maybe it was just water in the old stranded copper wire that my dialup runs on … living out almost off the grid does have some drawbacks, but being away from the city and people WAY outweighs them … keep up the good work!!!
Cool. I didn’t want to have to take the buttons off as I really dig them. And I’m doing my best to keep the site as clean as possible of ads, there are just a couple at the bottom now and they don’t seem to slow it down (yet).
Rock on my dial-up readers!
🙂
Blonde or brunette makes no difference to me, it’s still a funny strip!
Thanks! Makes me laugh too… which is a good thing. I love the fourth frame which is why I put her up in the header in that pose. That is soooo Lorraine…
😉
Well, not fer nuthin but if you were truly bothered and wanted to keep the “luddite” audience as well as the G3/iPhone fad-queens in your readership you could get someone to cut you a style sheet or two that would allow the site to be seen without all the cruft on kit that found the job onerous.
I personally don’t care about the sound widget, didn’t even realise what it was until you said last week during the 1977 Monkees revival, but I could sure live without all those bloody sidebar animated graphics that many sites have ([cough]WillowsGrove[/cough]) that do nothing for the comic but slow down its load time (over a cable modem before you kibbutzers get uppity). Please do not add them to the 1977 experience. Nothing causes me to consider dropping a comic from my bookmarks than persistent slow loads while some stupid dating service or MUD promotion loads, then plays (usually jerkily). Your current layout of simple links is minimalistically beautiful and elegant.
Your site loads fine for me, probably because you have zero animation and minimise off-site asset loading (a shame to pay for the bandwidth to load your comic to your audience in real time, then balls it up with assets delivered by a snail with gout from websites run on the cheap).
Once again the usual comic brilliance in the strip. I found the fact that they have a special bonking suite histerical. Typical stoner logic – the fifth room is in use so no nookie tonight. Just a good night’s rest in your own bed. Wait, what?
Did you see that episode of House where the stoner came in complaining that it hurt when he pressed his arm or his legs? House watched him demonstrate, poking each place and saying in a stoned voice “ow”. Then he said “how about when I do this?” and grabbed the finger the kid was using to poke his limbs with, eliciting a yowl of pain. Yep, the stoner had a broken finger and couldn’t figure it out for himself. I thought when I saw it that it was very “1977”.
I have to hand it to you, my friend, but you can make me laugh more than my own comics sometimes! “Bonking suite” has just been officially stolen! Call the Idea Cops, Dee!
🙂
Thanks man!
Speaking of The Monkees, the day we were discussing them I turned on the radio on my drive home, and accidentally selected a retro channel I almost never listen to, only to discover the opening bars of “Daydream Believer”. Of course, I stayed tuned to that station all the way home and joined in the chorus.
I seem to have a sixth sense when it comes to music and influencing my reader’s listen experiences outside the comic! I have had many comments where folks will turn on their iTunes or whatever and that day’s comic song comes on as they pop my page up.
OooooOOOoooOOo! Now to conquer the Lotto numbers…
😀
have to mention that the addition of embedding the song into your post is brilliant. geez, duh, why didn’t we think of such things before? It’s a true soundtrack for your comic now!
Thanks, Dawn! Thanks goes to my readers for turning me onto the ability to even do it. Duh, is right…
Now to make money with it… hmmmm…
Hahaha! Girls just wanna have fun, alright. 🙂
Damn straight! And I even liked some of Cindy Lauper’s songs too… and what WAS her real hair color? Never saw it I believe…
😛
Plaid. She got teased about it a lot in school, which is why she developed that flamboyant public persona. The tears of a clown, don’t you know…
Love the comic and today’s soundtrack to go with it. Gotta love the blondes – and Blondie (even the comic character aint too shabby…)
Things go better with blondes…
🙂
Re today’s strip: the fun continues, and much amusement is being had in our household.
Re the ‘music’: can’t say what I really feel for fear of starting a flamewar here, so I’ll just say that I’m very, very, very, very, VERY glad that I don’t use sound on my ‘puter except when watching downloads… ‘Yours truly, Plan 9’s producer’s advocate’ 😛
Well, I’ll say it once more, the song does NOT play unless you click play. The little tool pops in and that’s it, so it should not eat any bandwidth or slow the page down UNLESS you click play. I simply think it’s fun to have there.
Dead horse is now beatin’…
Also, I know some of my song picks will rub you the wrong way too… 🙂 But that’s what makes you a great friend… we can toss barbs back and forth on stuff like this and still come up smiling.
🙂
Argh, sorry about that – I do know that, and tried to post a comment in reply to you (about the click-to-play tab) several days ago, but your site was being cranky at the time and ate my comment, and then I wandered off and forgot to try again!
I do approve of most of your music choices. *Most* 😛
Er um BTW when I snarkily (and unapologetically) referred to ‘music’, I was referring specifically to the song and band you chose for today’s strip. Certainly not complaining about the choice of music for 1977 in general!!! (note multiple exclamation marks)
excellent strip as usual byron. the music loads just fine. i love that new feature.cant wait to see how this pans out.
umm dont know if this is important but when i scrolled down to comment all the text on the screen disappeared when i scrolled back up it came back. ill check if its me and let you know
Well if blonds have more fun why is conservative columnist Ann Colter in a foul mood she writes mean spirited books and columns. I have a theory she really a drag queen rejected by a Lebanese shipping magnet and all she needs is a little love. I’ll even stop with the dumb blond jokes from a snide brunett.