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It's my mother's 75th birthday!

Hey there, The Beat will officially be appearing on Saturday at WonderCon on this panel:

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Yes, The Beat is two years old today as its own standalone website. Woot. And we're celebrating just as we always do --slaving away into the wee hours of the day so you have something to read with your coffee. Oh yeah, we also changed the background just for the day—yes, it's awful, but it's our blog and we'll be tacky if we want to.

A few suggestions on how publishers can improve their websites. Feel free to add your own in the comments! (And, yeah, I guess we could take some ourselves, "what's sauce for the goose" and all that...)

Well, we got our Christmas wish! Our internet came back on -- magically! But only after we had made a service appointment and had to give up all our last minute Christmas shopping to race -- and we do mean race -- home. Time Warner Cable, you know how to push my buttons. Things are back on line just in time for our annual pilgrimage to Ultima Thule. Everything is slowing down to holiday mode anyhoo. We'll post some holiday reading just to keep everyone sharp. And remember to shop locally! Like we wanted to...but were prevented from by TIME WARNER CABLE.

Hell demons from Time Warner are trying to stop The Beat!

We'll take this occasion of reprinting this year's Center for Cartoon Studies holiday card by Alexis Frederick-Frost to note that thanks to a 12 hour cable outage on my block I've had to repair to the local Not Starbucks for internet. Dear god, this place is a madhouse of men in business suits yapping about plans along with three plucky students from nearby Baruch who looked to have pitched a tent amid empty yogurt containers and one Unabomber type in the back corner typing on a seedy black netbook.

Hope you all had a great holiday weekend and plenty of turkey and stuffins. We spent the whole holiday mucking out our shelf porn -- organizing shelves, tossing pamphlets, setting aside some books for storage some for donation, a few for eBay. And some for Beat giveaways! Check back every day this week at 5 pm EST for some really swell classic GNs which we're giving away to lucky readers! A few other notes of business:

This weekend I suffered the technocrat's greatest nightmare and dunked my iPhone. It's currently sitting in a bag of rice and soon I will find out if my life is over or not. In the meantime, for someone who is attached at the metacarpal to her iPhone, this past weekend was very interesting. For instance, I had to find my way to someplace I'd never been. Instead of relying on GPS when I got out of the subway, before leaving the house I had to look it up on a map and print it out. And then pull out a paper and look at the map when I arrived. It was like a Geico caveman commercial.

I am going away from the computer for approximately 48 hours. Of course, this means that Marvel will announce a reboot, or Jim Lee will quit DC, or Alan Moore will announce he's writing HELLBOY, or Google will buy Archie Comics sometime during the next 48 hours. My Special Operatives will be keeping an eye on things, and I've left a few art posts to keep you all amused. But for now I'm going somewhere where giant Indians beat drums so loud that train tracks disintegrate. Because that's how I roll. So behave.