Laugh your ants off!

Entry posted by atari2600land January 5, 2012

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I seem to have a fascination with ants. Must have been the 10 or so years I've lived in an ant-infested house. Well, now that that's been over, I've made an Odyssey^2 version of the Ants! game (which was one of my first Atari 2600 games I ever made). Doing my daily comic (which can be found here: http://chrisread.comicgenesis.com) I've seemed to notice that like Gary Larson's unintended infatuation with cows, I too have had an unintended infatuation with ants. So I turned it into an intended one and have been off and on making pages of comic strips about ants. This is page 7. That would equal 14 weeks' worth since I do 12 strips (2 weeks) per page. Well, for page 8, I devised a way to make straight lines: let the computer do it. So I made a blank strip in Paint, went into Word, copied it 11 times, and, with a little bit of tweaking of the margins, fit 12 on one page. Word told me that some of the lines would be out of the margin of printing, but I clicked OK anyway and it looks just fine with no missing lines at the edges or anything. Page 7, which you can view here: http://www.atari2600land.com/page7.jpg is the last time I will use a ruler unless my printer breaks like the last one that did. I decided at first to name the comic "Over the Ant Hill," but I decided that could be used as a joke for a strip, so I changed it to Antology. I could have named it the proper "myrmecology" (study of ants), but didn't want to confuse people, plus my book then could be called "Antology Anthology." This book I'm working on is a half-inch binder (I'm up to using the third half-inch binder for my daily comic I've been doing since late 2009. I save all of them in paper form.) I only have one strip for page 8 so far. The caption is "Words of encouragement for ants" and it has two ants backstage and one says to the other "break three legs." Yeah, if you like bad jokes and puns you'd love this (hopefully.) I was going to plan an annual ant festival every year like the swallows returning to Capistrano, but then my grandparents died and we inherited their place and decided to move out of the crappy trailer park we'd been living in and into our grandparents' condo. This was in 2008. So this July marks four years of living here, although it doesn't seem that long! I convinced my mom although we could no longer have it hanging in the hall, that I could keep the giant picture of a chicken (Grandma was always a bit of an eccentric). It's now sitting in my room, along with the multitudes of video games and other crap I collect. And please send good thoughts out to me because I have to go to the dentist at 3pm!