It's weird how much flak I've gotten for Wil Wheaton's mention of me. Everything from stand-offish sarcasm from a few emails, to others angrily using Twitter to contact both Wheaton and myself. What's the big deal? I'm a fan of his, so I drew him into my comic and twittered about it. Yes, I twittered about how I wanted him to see it. I didn't start a spam campaign or pass out his email address or anything. I twittered that I wanted the guy to see my work. Now before you start painting "Thunt was getting his readers to spam Wheaton" on a sign and waving it above your head, let's take a moment to look at some important numbers.

-Wheaton has close to two million followers on Twitter.
-He Tweets dozens of times a day, often with inane/entertaining questions to his followers.
-I currently have a meager 1,450ish followers and when I ask them a question such as "can condensed milk go in tea" I get maybe 30-50 responses in the space of a couple hours.

So if (1,450 Twitter followers + inane question = 30 to 50 tweets) then (1,638,000 Twitter followers + inane question = somewhere around 49,000 tweets) I actually can't imagine him getting 49,000 responses every time he asks a question on Twitter, but lets just say, considering how many times he tweets with fun questions or "look at a picture of the waffles I ate for breakfast", that it's a lot. Wil Wheaton is clearly not a man who minds getting Twitter traffic.

Does my mentioning on Twitter about how much I'd like Wheaton to look at my comic, get people to send him tweets? Yes. Does it flood him with spam? Of course not. The tweets he got about my comic from Goblins readers is nothing when compared to his usual daily traffic, which as I've mentioned, he encourages. Let's also not forget that we're talking about Twitter here. Twitter. It's not his email or his website, it's Twitter. The same social networking site that people use to show pics of their cat sleeping or their lucky D-twenty. This is the site that is primarily used to tell the world that your shoelace broke or that the guy in front of you at the bank has body odour. Twitter is simplistic, pseudo-intellectual tripe and I freaking love it. It's the perfect place to say "hey geeky celebrity, check out my backwater, Canadian comic in which you appear cause you rock".

One email that I received talked about how Wheaton only linked to me on Twitter to "shut me up". However, Wil also copied a snip of my comic and posted it on his Tumblr account along with a comment about how funny he found it and how he liked the shirt I'd drawn him in. This doesn't seem like the actions of a guy who just wants to shut me up or who feels like I'm flooding him with a tidal wave of spam.

Now that that's said, let me take this moment to recommend his books. They're pretty much mandatory reading for any geek and you can find them along with a huge amount of other brilliant and hilarious material over at his site. Along with my recommendation to buy his books, I'm aggressively asking all my readers to go over to his Twitter account and tell him how awesome he is. Tell him he's intelligent, tell him he's funny. Make him smile. In fact, I also want everyone to go over to Neil Patrick Harris' Twitter account and compliment him for rocking our worlds. Then when you're all done there, head to Girl Genius' Twitter and thank the Foglios for making such great comics. Then onto Lar deSouza and Ryan Sohmer for their inspiring work. Wait a second... my call to spam is starting to look an awful lot like social networking. Hmmm...

You see, as much as I'd like to think that I have the kind of tspamnami powers that some angry folks claim I have, I'm just one more person having some fun on Twitter, and what some people call "encouragement to spam", I call respecting someone I look up to by telling folks about him in my own way.

As always, thanks for reading and following me on Twitter.

~Thunt

Audio ads, as you probably know, are those ads that spew out annoying sound while you're trying to browse a site. It's been brought to my attention by a few annoyed readers that Goblins sometimes shows an audio ad.

I hate audio ads. I hate them more than I hate brussel sprouts, and I hate brussel sprouts. Keenspot manages the ad rotation on my site and they hate audio ads too, that's why they've blocked them from Goblins and their other sites. However, some audio ads are still getting through and somehow making their way onto my comic. I hate this more than I hate brussel sprouts with an earwax center, and I hate brussel sprouts with an earwax center. I've contacted the Keenspotian Gods about this and I'm going to do everything I can to stop this from ever happening again, because I hate this. I hate it more than I hate brussel sprouts with an earwax center dusted in powdered glass, and I hate brussel sprouts with an earwax center dusted in powdered glass. In the meantime, please bear with me.

As always, thanks for reading.

~Thunt

PS - Brussel sprouts are yucky.

For the last day and a half, I've been without electricity. A wind storm knocked down a whole bunch of trees in my area, taking out power lines all over the place. Although this looked pretty cool, it stopped me dead as far as finishing the update that should have gone up on Monday.

Power lines and cable lines were all repaired and now I'm back in the realm of heated food and light!

In other news, one of the maple trees in our front yard fell over during the wind storm and did some minor damage to the front of our house. I'm going to miss that tree. :(

I'll try and have the update up sometime on Tuesday night.

As always, thanks for reading.

~Thunt

I don't want you to think that Goblins has become stuck in a 'one page a week' schedule, because it hasn't. Not permanently, anyways. If you haven't already caught my complaining on Twitter, I had some yucky dental surgery done, which lead to some gross complications, which lead to me going back to the dentist today. It's been a painful, whiny week. If you add Tempts Fate and the recently passed holidays in there, you get one page per week. Very soon though, I'll be able to do more as well as finish cleaning up the site.

Also, Book Two is a hobbit's hat-rack away from to shipping out! Hang in there, peoples!

As always, thanks for reading.

~Thunt

On Tuesday morning, I have a dentist appointment to remove a wisdom tooth that is apparently right on a nerve. What is the difference between removing this tooth and removing a normal wisdom tooth? This will cost more, hurt more and take longer. I'm not sure exactly how this is going to go down, as soon as my dentist said "Okay, we're going to separate your jaw from..." was when I started watching old cartoons in my head so i don't know everything about the process. I do know that my dentist is against knocking his patients out, so I'll be awake for this.

I'm not sure how much drawing I'll be able to do tomorrow, but I know I won't be broadcasting any of it. In the meantime...

Dear Dentist who is about to torture me:

Dantooine. They're on Dantooine.
Shire! Baggins!

As always, thanks for reading.

~Thunt

Under the vote button there is now a new sneak peek. Check it out.

As always, thanks for reading.

~Thunt

I had hoped for there to be a Tempts Fate update today, but holidays with the family has been hectic and (I'm not going to lie) loads of fun. Since my two boys will be away with family for Christmas Day (sniff), we've celebrated Christmas with them today. Presents, turkey, trying to put together the new toys, crumpled wrapping paper covering the entire livingroom... we did it all!

On Christmas eve, Danielle and I will go stay with her family for three days, making drawing impossible during that time, so the next Goblins update will be Monday, January 4th and Tempts Fate will update on Wednesday, December 30th.

Have a great holiday season and I'll see you next year and as always, thanks for reading!

~Thunt

There's a new sneak peek under the vote button. I've added text to the sneak peek that is not the actual text that will appear in the comic.

Also, I want to thank everyone who's been donating to Tempts Fate. THANK YOU! The last couple months have been... well, you know when your bills and income decide to have a foot race and the bills start to win? Yeah, that. I've gotten a couple emails lately asking what the minimum donation is and the answer is $1 (just because Paypal charges a bit for each donation so less than that starts to equal zero). If every Goblins reader donated a dollar, I could buy a house! Well, a small house, but you get the idea.

For the desktop picture that Tempts will win for everyone, should he survive, send me an email letting me know what you'd like it to be. :)

As always, thanks for reading.

~Thunt

I um... well... I forgot to put the donation button up. It's there now though, at the top-left corner of the Tempts Fate comic.

I seem to have critically failed my intelligence check. Feel free to mock me.

As always, thanks for reading.

~Thunt

Tempts Fate started as a fun way to create a donation meter. I drew a few pictures of a goblin either surviving or dying in various traps depending on how donations went. As the concept grew and Tempts became almost a comic of his own, I tried to find new ways for the whole thing to be original and fun. I started coming up with ways for readers to help Tempts along without ever donating a penny.

This all came to a screeching halt however, with my idea for a visual, play-by-post Tempts Fate game. I wrote a dungeon crawl, filled it with rooms, traps and monsters and set up a system in which readers could adventure through the crawl, gather magical gear and help Tempts fight an entire army. I drew goblin body types, hair styles, jewelry and hundreds of various weapons and armour bits each sized in a way so they could all be put together by myself in a sort of virtual paper-doll manner. My plan was to have readers email me their actions, so I could email them the game's reactions and update the picture of their character on the site. When the game, which was to be Tempts Fate's ninth adventure, launched last year, I was amazed to find that in under 48 hours, I had over a thousand character submissions with no sign of the emails slowing down. Accepting defeat, I realised that I could never handle that many characters and so I reluctantly took the Tempts Fate 9 down.

Since then, I have tried to find a cheap way to turn the game into an online automated version to allow everyone to play without me needing to manually handle each move. Those of you who have been waiting know that it hasn't been happening. One person in particular has been great with working on programming the game but as both of us have full time jobs that must take priority, it's been a very uphill battle.

I miss Tempts Fate and judging by the emails I've been getting asking when he's coming back, so do some of you. So for now, I must reluctantly shelf the game idea and let poor Tempts get back to doing what he does best, tempting fate. Maybe one day the game will happen in some form. I've still got a mountain of artwork for this project just sitting here.

When Tempts Fate 9 launched and crashed all those months ago, I had gotten some donations from readers. Since it would be unfair for those donations to go uncounted, I've transferred that money onto this Tempts adventure, giving us a bit of a head start.

Also, in the interest in doing new, interactive things with Tempts, I've added The Door to this adventure. It's a way for people to take part in helping Tempts without donating any money. I hope you guys like it.

Note: The site is still under construction, so some pages are pretty messed up. That's being worked on.

As always, thanks for reading.

~Thunt