It’s been one heck of a week, kids.

As you may have noticed, Theater Hopper was down earlier in the week. This was somewhat related to our recent move to a new server. The story is on that’s pretty complicated and one I’ve been wading in up to my eyeballs, so I don’t know how keen I am on retelling it. But we haven’t talked in a while, so I’ll give it a shot.

Basically what happened was that the server move was successful, but we carried over some unwanted guests into our new environment. Dreamhost – Theater Hopper’s new host – caught them and shut us down. What kind of unwanted guests, you might ask? Hackers. They somehow compromised our old server and were using it as a proxy of some sort. Probably for warez sites. We’re not sure. What we *do* know is that some jackass thought it would be fun to leach our bandwidth, slow our server down and cause a whole lot of problems for people who only want to entertain.

At the time Dreamhost shut us down, they fingered us as guilty before even discussing it with us. That left me a little cheesed off. We’re as much a victim as anyone else here. If they had communicated what they had found, we could have partnered with them to resolve the situation faster. But that’s not how things unfolded. Instead, we had to sit on our hands for two days waiting for them to get back to us. It was a bit of a let down for me because I had heard such great things about Dreamhost. This certainly put us off on the wrong foot.

But things are up and running again and we have a new comic for you today.

I should stop to give sincere thanks to Brian for helping to facilitate the switch and talking to Dreamhost in a language they understand. Left to my own devices, I’m pretty sure Dreamhost would have gotten me kicked off the internet altogether. Also thanks to Dave for reconnecting the database that manages the comics and the blogs after the server move. I’d be dead in the water without these guys.

I’ve gotten a few e-mails asking me if I’ve noticed the similarities between my talking DVD player and Penny Arcade’s DIV. My response is "Yes. I’ve noticed them." But I would like to point out the important difference that my character wears shoes and gloves while DIV is essentially walking around naked. Okay. So my talking DVD player isn’t wearing pants, either. But gloves and shoes are better than nothing!

I tried to make my talking appliance look different from the his more well-known counterpart. But there are only so many ways to anthropomorphize small, grey rectangles of technology.

At any rate, keep your eye on this arc as we’ll probably see a cameo from DIV in the upcoming strips. Maybe a couple other pieces of talking technology as well.

As long as we’re on the subject, you should check out the incentive sketch I drew of the talking DVD player. It was the very first drawing I put together of him, plus some notes for personality traits. The whole idea is that he came to life after being disgusted by Tom’s terrible tastes in movies. So it stood to reason that he should be very tweedy and intellectual. That’s why I’m questioning whether or not he should wear spats. Cuz, y’know… spats make you look REALLY smart!

Something else I wanted to draw your attention to are the FREE COMICS you can download through my page at Clickwheel. If you have a video iPod – or heck, even if you don’t! – check out my most recent updates. I’m adding all of my incentive sketches to the site as miniature anthologies separated by month. This is the first time I’ve made these sketches available outside of the site. If you’re interested, they’re out there!

I’m going to try and keep adding sketches until I’m all caught up. After that, I’ll add more comics.

Thanks to everyone for their patience this week. One thing is for sure, I never really knew how cut off I felt until I was forced into that situation. Not having access to the site for this period of time has made me really thankful for what I have. Thanks to you guys for making that possible!