Career Change - Robot General Custard - Pt 5
Fresh new comics! Yay. Woo. Yay. Hum. Buh…meh.
Today we’re peeking in on Kirby as he reenacts the epic battles of robot General Custard and a Dinosaur with a rocket launcher strapped to his arm. If Hemingway were alive (and not fighting bulls or sky elephants) I’m sure he’d be doing the same.
Many thanks to Felonious Tub for all the hillarious and kind comments over the past few weeks. You’re now officially immortalized in a low resolution jpeg. Take that society’s taboos! Remember kids, if you’d like to get your real or funny web/matrix name emblazoned on a strip just make a comment. You too can live the life of luxury a C-level comic name drop can provide.
Did you find last week’s hidden message? It was in plain site but pretty hard to decode without a key. It was created using a transpose code called Railroad which sorts the text into vertical columns and then compresses these columns. This week’s is much, much easier though. Anyone have a guess?
The weekend trip to Devil’s Lake was the most terrifying experience I’ve ever had. No joking. I should clarify that the whole trip was a blast, but the first night in particular almost had me pack up and leave. Let me set the mood… (Dims lights, turns on music, dresses up like a monster)
So it is a little before midnight in our secluded area of a heavily wooded camping ground. I was pretty tired from the drive, learing how to make a fire, and putting together the place we were to sleep, so hitting the hay felt wonderful. I awoke to the noise of the snapping leaves and moving gravel outside our tent. And by outside I mean five feet or so. I woke up and immediately thought it was another camper, possibly intoxicated, looking for their way home.
But then they started trashing our camping gear. The metal skewers we used to cook over the fire went first…then the cooler was flung open, then everything else on the picnic table. You know that terror that you get in the movies but hardly see in real life? I had that.
Being 145 pounds of iron my first instinct is to kick some meandering camper ass. But my wife, now awake, intelligently persuades me otherwise by a firm look. I scoot to the front of the tent, look outside, and see nothing but pitch black. I move to the tent windows…the same. I’m trapped within a few feat of someone/something that is pissed and I can’t even see them.
We sit quietly in the tent waiting. A new noise wafts through the screen and it is less then helpful. This isn’t a person. We can hear it breathing, and licking and chewing. And now there are MORE its. I can hear them around the tent shuffling, all waiting in line to watch us squirm. I wanted to turn on the lights, but who knew what they were and how they might react?
There is an axe just outside the tent door. Maybe 4 feet at the most. If I could unzip the front quietly I might have a chance to grab it and do something. My confidence in the 1 milimeter thick tent is decreasing by the second. I start to slowly unzip the tent and that is when I see the creature. It is bigger then I hoped, atleast half the size of the cooler, but this is just the part I can see contrasted against the white. Who knows how much fades into the inky black forest. My desire to grab the axe subsides and we shuffle to the middle of the tent.
The shadow monsters stay for about thirty minutes.
When they leave I think most people’s instincts would be to turn on the lights and try and see what damage was done. I wanted to stay in the tent forever. I laid there staring at the mesh ceiling for a few hours. If this were just me I would have ran in there guns blazing, but I couldn’t do that without bringing attention to the tent.
An actual conversation that went through my mind while staring at the ceiling:
“I want to get up.”
“Why?”
“Because if I die, I want to die vertically.”
The shadow monsters eventually came back. This time I had the axe. We turned on the light to see the backside of one of the creatures - it looked like a giant raccoon. In the morning we found their prints tracked over the whole site. I slept with the axe next to me for the remaining days. 
And in continued Google search hillarity: Welcome to Pixelton is on the front page of 110 million search results for “thing that I put on my web page”. Seriously. Give it a go and I’ll wait here and ponder about this humorous mystery that we call search engine optimization.
Enjoy!
-Josh
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Am I the only one who doesn’t get the hidden messages? Will there be, like, a Dummies Guide To The Hidden Messages In Pixelton Comics: A Reference For The Rest Of Us soon?
