Dirty River

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Original Art - Flash Gordon Sunday Comic Strip (July16th1950)

Art by Mac Raboy

King Features Syndicate

From Heritage Auctions...

Dracula Lives Vol 2 No 1 [5], 6, 7

Marvel, 1974

Covers by Luis Dominguez.

Includes work by Vicente Alcázar, John Buscema, Ernie Chan, Gene Colan, Gerry Conway, George Evans, Mike Friedrich, Steve Gerber, Dick Giordano, Sid Greene, Tony Isabella, Pablo Marcos, Val Mayerik, Doug Moench, Thompson O'Rourke, Mac L. Pacula, Frank Springer, Bram Stoker, Roy Thomas, and Marv Wolfman.

"Dearest Veronica!"

and her return in The Question.

Views from the East

Part One of our couple’s getaway to Dildo.

My wife and I booked one excursion away leaving our daughter with her grandparents. We decided why not spend a night in Dildo, yes I’m 12 and I giggled.

We stayed in a heritage B&B built in the late 1800s. It was a cozy little place overlooking the water. Our room didn’t but the front porch and sunroom did.

After checking in we decided to check out Nan and Pop’s Dildo souvenir shop followed by a late lunch/appetizer at the Dildo Coffee shop. The sandwiches, soup and iced lattes were amazing.

So Donald decides he wants to be a writer. He has so many great ideas… if only he could concentrate long enough to get them down on paper!

He decides that just dreaming up story ideas is work enough, and there must be an easier way to get the actual “writing” part done.

When that plan doesn’t work, he goes to Gyro, who has a solution:

What I wouldn’t give for one of those!

But of course isn’t as easy as that. Various hijinks ensue, as Donald discovers that a) even with a magic machine to do the writing for you, it still takes more than a good idea to make a good book and b) none of his own ideas are particularly good or original anyway. Instead he and Gyro start mass-producing the Think-o-Matics and selling them, resulting in everyone in Duckburg producing their own terrible books that no one wants to read.

Gyro eventually upgrades the device to create ebooks instead of physical books, but –

Finally Donald devises the perfect solution:

Anthropic illegally downloaded some 500,000 titles, and 92% of those eligible for an award—both authors and publishers are entitled to payment—had opted into the class action. Martínez-Olguín denied all but two requests to opt out of the agreement. “We applaud the court’s final approval of this settlement, which represents an important victory in the larger battle to hold big tech accountable for its unscrupulous appropriation of intellectual and creative properties that clearly belong to authors and publishers,” said Maria Pallante, president and CEO of the Association of American Publishers, in a statement. Pallante praised the court for recognizing that downloading from pirate sites “is not a choice we should simply accept as an efficiency for the infringer; on the contrary, it’s abhorrent conduct that should never be normalized.” She also argued that fair use should not be extended to allow tech companies to copy copyrighted materials, and that tech giants should look to licensing agreements to train their AI models.

Now we'll see how long the payouts take to come through. I had between a half and two-thirds of my lifetime output stolen by these schmucks, but payouts from many of those thefts will be split 50/50 with the publishers. (Which strikes me as fair enough.)

Views from the East

Dildo part 2.

Of course the town of Dildo has a Dildo Discovery Centre and if that doesn’t make you chuckle even a tiny bit you’re dead inside.

The real reason we chose Dildo was for the brewery. Both the wife and myself like to try different beers. What we didn’t know was that about 60 Misses Roper from Threes Company were going to parade through the brewpub. A few stayed behind for a drink or two but most moved on.

I sampled seven of their beers, my wife had four and two cocktails. Weakest of the beers was their IPA, then again I’m not a fan of those to begin with. Drinks were delicious, food we had was mediocre. However some of the other dishes that came out looked far superior.