Today's comic is about the SNES classic, Earthbound. The game has a huge following and for good reason; it really set itself apart from the pack by introducing a lot of humor and lightheartedness in a modern story of good vs. aliens. Even though the game is goofy, there were also bits of deeper meaning that it explored and had one of the most memorable final boss battles I've played. Add on top of it a lot of very memorable NPCs and neat gameplay elements, and you have one of the classics that defined the generation.

On the fields you will occasionally run into a butterfly that, as the game states, is magical and helps you relax. It is really just code-speak for getting back a few psychic points (PP, the game's mana). It isn't unnatural in some of the harder areas to move back and forth in the area where the butterfly is to force it to respawn, thus allowing you to grab as many as possible to max out on PP for the hard battles that lay ahead. I think we can all assume that this is the natural assumption of what's happening as our heroes relax.

For those who checked the site Friday expecting comic goodies, I apologize. If you read my Bunny vs. Ogre post, you should know that my computer has been in a disabled state for the last couple days and I've been working feverishly to repair the damage caused by my own self-inflicted wounds. The good news is that I've found out that I can restore almost all of the data, no problem. It's a long process but at least I'm not at too much of a loss and hopefully I learned a good lesson.

I have a lot more to say about this great game but sadly it will have to wait; my computer just woke up in a dazed confusion as to why he is bandaged up and in the hospital. It's not going to be easy breaking the news to him that he got assaulted by some impossibly mad stranger.

P.S. - Thank you Recuva for having amazingly awesome- and FREE- data recovery software.
P.P.S. - Kickstarter packages will be shipped as early as possible this coming week!

I wanted to let you all know that the comic will be up sometime tomorrow afternoon. In the mean time, enjoy my tale of derring-do.

You know, I've been pretty excited lately! We've had our shirts and hoodies come in earlier this week and Pie and I have preparing to get them shipped. It has been a bit exhausting trying to undertake everything all at once on our own, but we have a lot of fun with it. I've been working on making sure we had everything we needed to ship packages and Pie has been working diligently on getting the comics done while also making progress on commissions.

I had originally planned to start the shipping process Saturday. I've been feeling a bit of pressure from it because we were hoping to get the packages out in March and it's already approaching the end of the first week of April. Regardless, we just kept plugging away as fast as we can while still trying to get some good comics out.

So I got this nice software package that will allow me to calculate and pay postage from home so we don't have to go to the post office. It's a great time saver since I can print and ship pretty quickly with the right tools. Strangely, I ran into a problem where the software kept crashing when I tried to open it. I had deduced that it must have something to do with the Microsoft .NET framework that has been buggy on my system for ages.

Pretend for a moment that you are navigating a forest and as you look up from your map, you find two paths in the road. One has a bunch of fluffy celebratory bunnies, juicy fruits and piles of video games and the other has a nasty ogre with a blood-stained club. You're here to kill the ogre, avenge your parents and become the hero of the forest. After you are done, you get to party on the other side of the forests with all those cool things.

Now let's pretend the bunny path is your data drive and the ogre is you messed up Windows drive. Well wouldn't you know it?! I accidentally took the machete through the bunny path and went to go party with the ogre. Who needed all that wonderful data with important e-mails, wonderfully formatted Kickstarter backer info, games and documents I've spent countless months on? NOT ME APPARENTLY.

So yeah. Probably not the best idea to make such a critical decision lightly. I'm not even sure what I was thinking. I think I was tired and under pressure to get this comic done on time as well as packages shipped ASAP since I feel we're behind when I mistook the data drive as my system drive for the reformat. Who knows. Needless to say, I was freaking out last night because I didn't have any backups - my data drive was my "backup".

So for the last 12 hours or more, I've run the full gamut of running around screaming at my own incompetence and sitting in my chair, rocking back and forth, waiting for the nightmare to end. Eventually, I sort-of came to and was able to approach the situation a bit more level-headed.

Luckily, the format of my data drive was what is known as a quick format. Essentially it means the computer is told to ignore the data and write over it if it needs the space. Thankfully, I found a program that could restore my data. I quickly downloaded the trial to see if it would work, and for 3 agonizing hours, I waited while it determined what, if anything it could find.

From what I can tell, it found almost all of my data (and I believe ALL of the really, really important stuff) and it only set us back $70 to buy the full version of the recovery software >_< I need to be spending money on stupid things like this about as much as I need a hole in the head, but I couldn't go without having my data restored. It's been working on restoring for about 5 hours now and its only 40% complete. I'm hoping that all the files come back in one piece without being partial files or corrupted, but I won't know until later. Here's hoping for the best.

Learn from my mistakes boys and girls. Don't choose the wrong path; you may end up with bunny blood on your hands.