flail

Monday, July 31, 2000

Here we go - as promised, low quality work. I'm working on something else, right now, and it's taking up a good portion of my brain. It's just got me a bit frazzled, and I'm having a devil of a time concentrating. Hopefully, the walk to and from work tomorrow will help me focus, and I'll have some brilliant ideas for tomorrow's strip

kodi 14:30

Friday, July 28, 2000

It turns out he didn't turn on the light. Sorry if the first two panels remain unintelligible for some of you - it's really hard to know how low-contrast dark stuff will turn out on different monitors. Somewhere, one of my 13 readers is saying, "Damn, why is the strip green all of a sudden"?

That aside, I'm really proud of yesterday's strip, and today's. Just very satisfied. Probably misplaced, but it still feels good.

kodi 14:28

Thursday, July 27, 2000

Today's comic may be entirely unreadable on some screens. I suggest trying the large version if you have a problem. Or getting angry and never visiting flail again. I was originally going to continue this scene in the dark, but I'm thinking maybe Tant should turn on the light real soon, now.

I thought of a new, sadder way of looking at my low readership. I've spent more time writing this comic than everyone else in the world, put together, has spent reading it. I take solace, however, in the fact that the set of things everyone in the world put together has spent more time doing than reading my comic is finite, while the set of such things on which less time has been spent is infinite. I'll let you know when the world has spent as much time reading flail as it has trying to assassinate then-President Reagan.

kodi 12:30

Wednesday, July 26, 2000

I keep thinking I'll make time to start archiving these, but I never do. I guess I'll wait until someone actually visits this page before I start feeling guilty. I must admit, I'm proud of today's cartoon - it's almost as if actual thought went into it. It made me laugh when I re-read it, anyway. I think I really like not doing Saturday and Sunday strips - I'll have to get much better at this before I start doing them again. Other than that, though - if I make it through the week, I'll have gone three weeks in a row without missing a day. Wish I could say the same about deadlines - I won't feel really good about myself until I get a month up dead on time.

Tomorrow will also be my 20th strip. Sluggy's at, what, 1030 or so? What a difference ability, practice and determination can make. But enough about me...

kodi 12:30

Tuesday, July 25, 2000

Whee. 10 minutes under the wire. Fortunately, tomorrow's comic is prettymuch written - I may finish it before I go to bed, and actually have one in the can. I don't know about everyone else, but I'll be a bunch happier when I don't have to strap myself in every single night to do this.

In other news, if you've not seen Starship Troopers, yet, it's worth it if you've got a good group of friends to make fun of it with. Oh, and yesterday I cracked the 600 mark, in terms of visits to the main page that didn't come from me, personal friends, or inktomi. I'd really like to think that one day, I'll have a readership. It's a funny feeling, knowing that I've had as many visitors in my first month as some comics do the last day of their first month. I'm not actually this self-pitying, really, just a little melancholy. I really need to figure out how I want to promote this thing.

kodi 12:30

Monday, July 24, 2000

Again, a little late. I had a comic all ready to go for Friday, see, but then I scrapped it because it seemed too early for it, and wrote a new one in the time I had set aside to write one for today, because I would be out of town all weekend. So that left me getting in at midnight and not having a comic ready. That's also why the art is crappier than usual - I drew this comic in about 30 minutes, lettering and all.

kodi 12:29

Friday, July 21, 2000

Wow. This may be the worst comic I've done, yet. I think that's because it's not really plot driven, just filler. I want to point out how much I idolize When I Grow Up - plot driven, and consistently funny. I am so jealous. All 20 of my readers are just going to have to learn to put up with boring filler that stalls for time while I try to advance the plot. Or go become When I Grow Up readers, instead, which I highly recommend.

kodi 12:29

Thursday, July 20, 2000

As if the quality hadn't slipped far enough already... I'm going to be even busier than normal over the next 5 weeks. Consider this fair warning that you may not see a freshly drawn panel until sometime in August. (I doubt it will be that bad, but if that's what happens, you'll know why.)

The good news is, I'm actually starting to derive great joy from writing the comic every day. Something about finishing the 10th strip, I guess, but I'm actually excited about the direction I'm heading. Well, that, and cherries are in season.

Oh, yeah - I didn't get to bed last night, on account of the desk. But now the desk is together, and it's lovely. Yay.

kodi 12:29

Wednesday, July 19, 2000

Comic is crappy and late today because of big desk emergency. If you have a choice between O'Sullivan and Bush brands of office furniture, choose Bush every time.

Oh, another important lesson - although Ctrl-Z is "undo" in both Painter Classic and Delphi, Ctrl-Y is "redo" in only one of these packages.

kodi 12:28

Tuesday, July 18, 2000

I realised one of the really cool things about my phenomenally low readership. I can actually go through and look at the IP address of each and every person who visits my site. Not that I would, of course - I collect that data for aggregate use only, and it's really just depressing seeing each and every one of the 150 visits from *.inktomi.com that seem to make up about half the traffic to my site. I guess it might be neat to try stalking people who visit, though - track their visits, try to figure out their e-mail address, and send them e-mails asking them why they don't visit more often.

I just found out about the junior hockey beating death that occurred last week. That's really just so surreal, but like many articles have pointed out, the really shocking thing is how surprising we find this. The USA certainly has a violent society, and I cannot imagine this is the first fist-fight that has broken out over youth sport, here. I think it's just a testament to how difficult it really is to beat someone to death that this is the first such incidence. This isn't a comment on this case, so much, but I really wonder how you beat someone to death in self-defence. It seems like we have two quantities we're looking at - the number of punches necessary for "stop hitting me" and the number of punches necessary for "fall unconscious and later die, despite prompt medical treatment." In order to beat someone to death in self-defence, it seems like the difference between those numbers has to be close to 0. I guess there's flukes... Well, anyway, I'm glad my dad never died at any of my little league baseball practices.

It's clear now that although virtually everything I do on a computer happens better when I'm listening to rap, lettering gets much, much worse. Panel 3 today was lettered in silence, 1 and 2 were lettered while listening to some of the selections from the Monsters of Rap collection which are actually rap. (Straight Outta Compton was at work.)

kodi 12:27

Monday, July 17, 2000

Not that I expect anyone to actually stumble upon it, but I've finally started a log section. I find that, for the comics I really enjoy, I especially enjoy when the artist presents brief ramblings with each days comics. It'll be a while before I figure out how I want to organize this page.
Unfortunately, although I'm getting better at actually producing art for the comics, I'm not getting better at coming up with dedication. I promised myself I'd get at least one full strip done over the weekend, so I could be a strip ahead this week. Naturally, I failed. If I can ever get a full week in the can, I may start putting up Saturday and Sunday strips.
I can't wait to finish off this storyline. I got off to such a slow start, now I've been working on one storyline for fully a month, and I'm really quite tired of it. Then again, even if I'd been going full-speed, I'd be midway through my third week right now. I think I see why Sluggy does massive Sunday strips.
It's kind of frustrating, the way focusing on long storylines is making it difficult to do any throwaway comics about current events. I'm sure I'm the only one who's bugged.
I'm still trying to decide if I want to solicit other online comic authors for linkage. Bleah.

kodi 14:18