Thank you! Thank you, Mr. President!

I didn't learn about George Bush Senior's 1987 remark about atheists not being worthy of citizenship until long after he was out of office - I was only a year old when he said it, after all - but I've always felt subtly excluded when politicians reach out to "everyone."

Not anymore.

I must have lost all of my (five? six?) readers by now.

Anyway, I now have a domain name of my own and some non-free hosting thanks to HostGator.  It's a pretty good deal, and I say that entirely don't just say that because I'll earn money if you follow this link and buy one of their excellent hosting packages.  Seriously, it's a good deal, especially if you use one of those coupons that gets you a month of hosting for one cent (Google "Hostgator coupons" - they're all over the place).

I've replaced the old javascript-generated pages and their javascript data arrays with nice new php-generated pages and an SQL database.  I'm also using .png transparency all over the place, so if things look ugly, upgrade your browser.

I've added a whole bunch of new links to the sidebar, but I can't remember which ones.  Hopefully, I'll have a new catch(Exception) comic (and maybe a filler comic or two about what I've been doing over the past two years) up in a few weeks.  If I'm lucky.

Again, HostGator is a good deal.

For those of you who haven't read about it elsewhere, something very bad just happened at my school.

On Monday morning, I didn't heard a single thing about any of the murders until I was walking out of Robeson Hall after my first class.  That was when I saw police car after police car, with sirens blaring, driving around the drill field to Norris Hall (though I didn't really pay attention to where they were going and only learned their destination later).  I overheard a few people saying there'd been "some kind of shooting in West AJ," but I still figured it was something relatively small.

When I was about halfway back to my dorm, a university employee of some kind told me as I passed that everyone had been advised to stay inside.  I figured that meant that whatever had happened must have been a few minutes ago - if there'd been a gunman on the loose earlier, surely I would have been told to stay inside Robeson, and if it had been earlier than my first class, surely there would have been some warning not to leave my dorm in the first place.  Only later did I find out that the first shooting had been over two and a half hours earlier, when I was still asleep.  Yeah, the authorities sure were prompt about letting everyone know there was a killer at large ... -_-;

When I got back to my dorm, I still didn't know how big everything was.  When I checked my email a few hours later and found two emails from my mom asking if I was alright, I finally made the connection "mom worried = something was on the news = those police cars weren't just for a small shooting = omgwtfbbq."

So I checked the headlines on Yahoo news, found out that the worst school shooting in U.S. history had just happened, and tried to call my mom.  My cell phone couldn't connect - the Verizon towers must have been overwhelmed already, heck, even the VT webmail server had been giving me connection errors due to what I then realized must have been heavy traffic - so I sent a reply email to my mom and eventually called her using my roommate's cell phone (thanks again, Lauren!) to let her know I was okay.

Since classes were cancelled for the rest of the day, I just surfed the internet and read reports as they were coming in.  By the time the campus lockdown had lifted, the reported death toll had gone from twenty-two to thirty-two, the magnitude had gone up from "worst school shooting in U.S. history" to "worst shooting in U.S. history," and classes had been cancelled for Tuesday as well.

I used Tuesday morning (and a chunk of Tuesday afternoon as well) to recover from a few episodes of severe sleep deprivation that had occurred the week before.  When I finally woke up, I learned from my roommate (who was packing to leave) that classes had been cancelled for the rest of the week as well and that lots of people were going home.

I live in the Hillcrest dorm, not the West Ambler-Johnston dorm. I'd only taken one class in Norris Hall, ever, and that was a Numerical Methods class last spring that I didn't really care about.  I didn't know any of the dead or injured.  I never heard any of the gunshots. Despite their physical proximity, the events had no more emotional impact on me than any other tragedy I might read about on the internet.  The only thing that had any effect on me personally was the cancellation of classes for the rest of the week.  I knew full well that whether I stayed at Tech or went home, I'd spend the rest of my week exactly the same way - surfing the web, sleeping, and working on homework.  The only differences would be that my dorm had a scanner I was familiar with in case I finally found time to draw while home meant I could eat out with my family on Saturday.

I didn't feel strongly one way or another about going home, so I called my parents, who, after much prodding to stop saying it was entirely up to me, said they'd be happier if I came home for a bit than if I stayed up at Tech, so I'll be going home tomorrow.  Well, today, technically, since midnight passed while I was writing this.

Here's hoping that all of you are safe and sound as well.

First off, a great forum I've been going to recently - Bokura no Taiyou Online.  If you like Boktai (and you should), you'll like Boktai Online, so go join!

Next, two comics I should have put up earlier: Schlock Mercenary, an awesome strip about the antics of a company of thirty-first century mercenaries, and Narbonic, a hilarious mad science comic nearing its end.  Read them both, they're hilarious!

Finally, I'm linking to Ngamer01's Comic Site, since Ngamer01 was nice enough to link to me.  Plantman also appears to have linked to me on Abnormal Gravity for a while now - I just never noticed because I never scrolled past the wonderful comic.  Thank you Ngamer01 and Planty!

At last!  I'm off the school server!

Thanks to the wonderful Psyren, catch(Exception) is now hosted on midnightwaters.net, so be sure to update your bookmarks!  There's a real forum now, so please click the Forum link in the navigation bar and sign up.  It'll make me feel good.

I'm really sorry for taking so long to finish comic 15.  Between schoolwork and fiddling with the code for my nice new forum, I kind of got sidetracked.

One of the many joys (and by "joys" I mean inconveniences, by which I really mean %$&#ing pains in the @$$) of being a double major in two challenging (and by "challenging" I mean difficult, by which I really mean asking-for-pain-if-you-major-in-more-than-one) fields is that sometimes, certain required classes from the two different majors are scheduled for the exact same time.  Since I am not Hermione Granger, despite the uncanny similarities in work ethic, I cannot be in two places at the same time and must therefor take some classes during the summer.  Because summer sessions are, well, short, this means I get about two and a half days' worth of homework each night due to the accelerated pace.

This is fine for me, but not for the comic.

I started the lineart for comic 11 in mid-May, between the end of spring semester and the beginning of summer semester I.  I was promptly swamped with work, especially from CS 2605 (Data Structures I, or whatever it's called), and didn't get to work on the comic again until my exams ended on Saturday.  My apologies for the massive delay, to those few of you who actually visit this site.

It's so frustrating - I have everything planned out several storyarcs into the future, but I work at such a glacial pace. :P

Anyaway, new link: Girl Genius, an awsome "gaslamp fantasy" (their words, not mine) series that I have recently learned to love.

I am now severely sleep deprived and I have only myself to blame.

The final exam in my Intermediate Mechanics class was a take-home exam.  If the exam had been a standard, in-class exam, it would have taken place at 10:05am on Tuesday, which wasn't a bad time, but take-home exams are even better because I can take longer to get a problem right.  I had a good plan for that exam: Sunday night, after finishing comic #010, I would read over the entire exam carefully, then go to bed and get a good night's sleep.  When I got up Monday morning (today), well-rested and clear-headed, I would spend the entire day working on my exam and then turn it in Tuesday morning.

But when I started looking over my exam sheet last night, I discovered a severe oversight: I had forgotten that the exam was due Monday at 10:00am, not Tuesday!  Suddenly, I had only thirteen sleep-deprived hours to complete a very difficult Physics exam, not the thirty-seven I had been counting on.

I spent the night in a haze of panic and fatigue, unable to complete the last question, and turned in what I had finished right on the deadline this morning, having gone without sleep for nearly twenty-four hours.

Thankfully, Professor Mizutani was very very kind and gave me an extra credit problem to turn in tomorrow.

The moral of this story: always check things well in advance.

I hate being slow.

Anyway, I added some new pages to the side bar, A Miracle of Science, Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, JHuger.com, Sparkling Generation Valkyrie Yuuki, and Tales of the Questor.  I also made a link to my thread on the Bob and George fancomic forum.  A big thank you to everyone who commented - your feedback was very helpful!

Many thanks to Sephi Kitsune, Mr. OMA, and Andrew Dickman for previewing this comic a few months ago and offering advice.  Now that I've finally got ten comics in the archive (the minimum recommended by, I think, all three), I can start looking for some real hosting!

Until then ... I guess I'll open everything up to the public anyway.  I don't know whether to hope for heavy traffic (popularity) or light traffic (won't get the site blocked for taking up too much bandwidth).

Holy moly, I can hardly believe it's been more than a year since I made my first strip ... *is a lazy author*

Granted, the comic is only on the school server, so it can't handle a massive amount of traffic, but I figured there were just enough comics now to upload everything.  For now, I'll only be showing this stuff to a few people just to see if I really do have enough content to make it online.  If it really is ready, then I'll find some proper hosting (until then, PLEASE DON'T LINK TO THIS PAGE).

On another note, the cast page has been updated with probably the best picture I've ever drawn!