Good news, everyone! Serv-Pro is out of the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office recording studio, and after significant dehumidifying, it turns out the structural damage wound up being minimal, and we have had it alleviated. We are still waiting for replacement storage solutions for the stuff we moved out of the leakage from the water heater, so until that arrives, the studio looks like your back yard shed took a dump in it, but that can wait until a later date.

It turns out we did lose a couple of minor pieces of actual recording studio equipment in the flood, but those have been replaced, tested, and seem to be okay. All in all, we got off very lucky, all things considered.

So the good news is, we will be recording and releasing a live-to-tape episode tomorrow about last week’s conclusions of Twin Peaks: The Return, and of Secret Empire.

We sincerely apologize for being dark as long as we have. Thanks for sticking with us through a mildly trying time!

Okay: we are not dead. We also will likely not have a show for a week or so. Let us explain.

After we came back from San Diego Comic-Con, Rob had a long-standing visit with his parents scheduled. Which is fine, except Rob forgot that his parents weren’t rocking the common decency to leave under cover of darkness on a Saturday night, leaving enough time for us to record a weekend podcast. Rob assumed leaving at off hours was normal, but then again, Rob has not given his Christian name to a hotel since 1994 for a reason. But we digress.

So Rob’s parents left Monday morning. Monday night, Rob and Amanda went into the Home Office Basement Recording Studio to tape a show. Which is normal, if late… except the puddle we walked into was not.

Long story short: our hot water heater blew out at some point between Sunday and Monday night, dumping dozens of gallons of (formerly) hot water onto the recording studio floor.

Luckily, none of the water reached the recording studio area, so our equipment is intact. Unluckily, dozens of gallons of water never goes anywhere you want to (protip: you don’t want that water to go ANYWHERE except the hot water tank).

So our recording studio is working. It is, however, currently filled with no less than nine industrial fans and two Big Iron dehumidifiers of the type that would make Kevin Costner’s Waterworld obsolete in a month. We have a humidity detector in the studio, and it says that it is currently Arrakis in there. Problem is, it needs to be Arrakis for another several days before anyone can be certain that it won’t change from Dune into Tremors in there.

Therefore, we will likely be dark through this week. If things go well and we don’t have to have the recording studio walls sawed apart, put back together and painted, we should be back next week.

We’re sorry for the delay, but we are, after all, regular people with sub-regular water heating equipment. We’ll be back as soon as we can.

There is a phenomenon called Con Crud, which is when tens of thousands of geeks are crammed into a relatively small space for four days, every disease known to mankind that can be passed between them, will be passed between them.

Long story short: Amanda and I picked up a dose of Con Crud at San Diego Comic-Con. And we’ve been getting over it for the past several days. Combine that with the crippling day job work load that comes from taking a week and a half off to rub elbows with The Wicked and The Diseased, and we just haven’t been able to sit down and tape a new episode.

But! We believe we have secured Los Angeles comedian and longtime friend Gariana Abeyta as a guest for this week’s show. She was at SDCC with us, and we’re planning to talk about SDCC, how it went, what could have been better, and when to fake a huge and weighty life choice.

So sorry we’ve been dark, and thank you for your patience. We’ll be back with a new episode Monday.

We wound up being dark this week, as it was a long holiday weekend here in the United States, which is distracting in and of itself. However, we were also distracted with the realization that one of our light switches, which was originally rated to light a two-bulb chandelier, was now running an eight-bulber and growing so hot after ten minutes that I’m surprised it didn’t shriek “Exterminate!” and give Jenna Coleman some self-actualization.

Changing out a light switch is a simple and menial task if you have any handyman skills whatsoever, which means it took me three hours, ten YouTube videos, obsessive wire counting and Amanda standing behind me with rubber-soled shoes and a wooden broom with which she could knock me away from the wires if I even hiccuped funny. Long story short: the chandelier works, but our taping window was shot.

We will be back next week with an episode about Wonder Woman, which is, according to the early reviews, shaping up to be an actually unreservedly good DC Films flick.

Yes, I’m afraid we’re dark again this week. Between Mother’s Day on Sunday, work issues at both our day jobs Monday and another long and crippling 12-hour day today, we just didn’t have time to sit down and tape this week. But here’s some of the stuff we were gonna talk about this week:

  • In the interest of proving that we don’t have anything against Nick Spencer (no matter how painful Secret Empire has been to read), last week’s The Fix #9 was genuinely excellent, with the funniest aftermath of an attempted murder since The Three Stooges. Yes, all those things Moe did were felonies. The only behavior one corrects with a bowling ball to the head is a regular heartbeat.
  • In the interest of demonstrating that we don’t really have anything against Marvel Comics in general, Star Wars: The Screaming Citadel #1 was also well worth reading. Then again, it was a Keiron Gillen Star Wars comic starting Dr. Aphra, and showing her first meeting with Luke Skywalker. The only way you can screw that up is if you somehow shoehorn in the word “goatse.” And that “shoehorn” usage was totally intended.
  • Bryan Fuller’s adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods is spectacular. We’ll leave it at this, since we may come back to the topic in a future episode.

So yes: sorry for no show this week. Now if you’ll excuse us, we need to prepare for an upcoming comics trivia contest between representatives of a bunch of Boston’s best comic stores (which I’m sure we’ll be talking about in our next episode). Plus, the third season of Twin Peaks debuts on Sunday, which means Rob needs to go through about 27 more episodes of the first two seasons in a savage burn before then.

Rob here. If you’ve listened to even a single episode of our show, you know that I enjoy the occasional fine adult beverage. Sometimes, however, said beverages make me infantile, in the sense that I deny that I should go to bed, even as I am nodding off while watching Guardians of The Galaxy at midnight. However, since I am not actually an infant, I have the ability to try to stave off bedtime by brewing up a pot of coffee. And since I enjoy adult beverages, I also have the ability to fortify said coffee with a heavy pour of Tennessee whiskey.

If you’ve ever enjoyed a fine adult beverage, you know that after enough of them, particularly when switching from beer to whiskey, they can have an adverse effect on your fine motor control. Sometimes this leads to dropping things. Things like coffee cups. And sometimes, those cups will spill in unfortunate ways. Ways like, I don’t know… directly into the power supply fan port of the computer you use to edit your podcast. You know, the machine that contains all the regular sound elements and the configured audio editor you need to actually complete an episode.

The machine died painlessly, but instantly, meaning I’ve had to replace it. This means ordering parts – friends don’t let friends buy computers at big box stores – and waiting for them to arrive. The main machine is here, but a couple of key components aren’t coming until this afternoon.

Even worse, it means reconstructing your data. Luckily, a certain amount was backed up to the cloud. Unluckily, all of that data was encrypted, meaning recovering the keys from an old cell phone. Which worked, and worked far more reliably than trying to get a seven-year-old internal hard drive (the drives, luckily, were on the other side of the machine, and mounted toward the top of the case) to connect to a shiny new machine via a USB connection. Oh, it can be done, but it requires command line tools and time. Like, six to eight hours per drive. Times three drives.

Long story short: as much data as possible is busily being recovered and copied to the new machine, and the remaining parts will be attached and running in the next couple of days. So there WILL be a new episode next week. Probably not about Ghost in the Shell, as that movie died to fast I think it’s on SyFy in the next few days, but barring unforeseen catastrophe, there WILL BE AN EPISODE.

So thanks to you listeners who reached out via email and Facebook to make sure we’re alive. We’re fine. I’m horribly embarrassed and several hundred bucks poorer, but fine nonetheless.

So, funny story: we fully intended to do this week’s episode on the new Scarlett Johansson live-action remake of Ghost in The Shell. We took early notes on this week’s comics to make sure we had time to absorb other Ghost in The Shell material. We got a copy of the original 1995 anime. We borrowed a copy of the manga to at least look at. We watched and read these items, all by Saturday, giving us plenty of time to catch the remake on the 2:10 p.m.Sunday matinee, tape Sunday night, and post the episode on Monday. Flawless plan, right?

Sure it is. Assuming the fancy movie scheduling app on your phone is pointed to the theater you’re actually going to. Which mine wasn’t. Meaning we were only 55 minutes late.

We then planned to catch the 7:10 p.m. Monday showing, throw some notes together, and tape the show tonight, but the people who give me money with which I use to live had other plans.

So, here we are. But here’s the good news: we have tickets in hand for tomorrow night after we pick up this week’s comics. So we will have an episode on Ghost in The Shell next week. And the good news is that it also will give you time to go see it! Because apparently, none of you did!

We apologize, but there won’t be a new episode this week. We had good intentions, but Rob met up with some old college buddies this weekend, and traveled to his old college town for an informal mini-reunion. Which is fine, and our original intention was to record a show after Rob got home… but for some reason, while surrounded by college friends in his college town, Rob decided to act like he was still in college. You know, those days almost a quarter century ago, when Rob could spend ten hours drinking, several hours in a car, and then do things like record a podcast, or anything more strenuous than sleeping and sometimes whimpering.

We will be back next week, probably with an episode about Marvel’s Iron Fist on Netflix. After all, it’s getting such good press!

I know we are wicked late with any word about the show this week, but it is because we – Rob in particular – have been as sick as morons at a Mountain Dew geyser since Friday night. Like, wake up, take pills that can be turned into methamphetamines, fall asleep, wake up, swill Robitussin with a Kaopectate chaser, repeat until Wednesday kinda sick.

But we are quickly recovering, have this week’s comics safely in hand, and will have a new episode recorded and online early next week.

Thanks for your patience and for hanging with us.

Wow, did you see that Super Bowl the other night? Didn’t you think it was amazing when the New England Patriots came from behind to defeat the Atlanta Falcons, after being behind for the entire game? Didn’t you think it was amazing?

Yeah, neither did we. Or at least, Neither did Rob. Because, like a technical genius, he decided to upgrade this Web site literally nine minutes before kickoff. And, being Rob, he fucked it all up.

So he spent a large part of Super Bowl Sunday just getting the site to work again. And a large part of Super Bowl Hangover Monday making it so podcasts would have their feed again. And a small part of Let’s Pretend To Be Sick At Work So We Can Attend The Patriots Rally In Boston Tuesday making sure that new podcasts would be added to the feed when they were put “on the air.”

And all of that seems to be working… but it meant that we had no time to actually prepare for an actual podcast this week, let alone have a place in which we could broadcast it.

However: we will be back on Monday with a new show, mostly complaining about the new DC / Warner Bros. show Powerless,