April 4th, 2006: The news stories about the question blocks in Ravenna have been really popular online: yesterday I got as many hits to the Mario Question Block Site as I got here, to the comics (about 65,000 unique IPs)! I've had inquiries from journalists as far away as Japan and Israel, even though I'm just the dude hosting the site. The email has been overwhelmingly supportive of the girls who may be facing charges in Ravenna, which is nice!

The dissenting opinion is that the girls maybe should have known better than to do something like putting up Mario blocks unannounced "in today’s day and age". I don't know. I hate what that phrase represents, and people had been making the boxes all over the US for over a year without incident before this happened, but the person in Ohio who called the blocks into the police obviously felt threatened by them. It's really sad when someone sees something they don't expect in their environment, something creative, and their first instinct is that it might be trying to kill them. (paraphrased from my friend Jason!) Nobody involved in creating the blocks ever expected them to be mistaken for bombs. Posterchild (who is responsible for the original blocks) wrote a response to this here.

In other news, here's a whole lot of Batman onomatopoeias!

One year ago today: three years before the great war

– Ryan