Waffle

There's a new bonus feature below the comic: The Bare-Pit will be tooncast on Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan for the duration of its current storyline, Enchanted. Enchanted is a sequel to the guest storyline I did for The Bare-Pit, Incognito (also here), in which the faerie Abúi ends up in the nudist resort that is The Bare-Pit's regular setting. In Enchanted, Sven Allestedes is trying to help her go back to her own world, but, as a result of interference by Tash, Sven, Tash and Abúi end up in a country full of naked gnomes, elves, etc. Not that different from Abúi's world, then, but it just isn't home. Noodtoonist has done a great job getting his version of Abúi right, and his storyline, which is about to take a turn for the weird, has been very enjoyable so far, as always.

Some fan art by me has also been posted on the Bare-Pit site.

While on the subject of guest and fan art: Saturday's guest comic by Jeroen and Adam linked back to an earlier guest comic by those two, which didn't exist because I'd forgotten to upload it. I've fixed that now, meaning that a total of 8 ROCR updates were posted last week.

ComicSpace is already turning out to be a neat little earner for its founder Josh Roberts. Indeed, looking at those bids, one can't escape the conclusion that, strange though it may seem, some webcartoonists have entirely too much money.
But I'm pretty sure that once the hype dies down, the ads on there will be worth pretty much what people bid on them. Project Wonderful is a nearly perfect model of capitalism*): accurate information is available to all parties, there's no friction in the form of, say, a labour force needing to be fed and kept safe, and the parties involved are self-interested (read: vain and greedy) enough not to let an undervalued ad go un-bid, while also being rational (read: cheap) enough not to pay more, in the long run, than an ad is worth.

That being said, I think my own ad spots are still being undervalued compared to those on other webcomic sites with thousands of page impressions a day. I still seem to suffer from low visibility, possibly as a result of having been around so long.

The trend is up though; yesterday, my income passed the $2/day mark for the first time, putting it close to my short-term aim of making $3/day. Peanuts compared to what Josh is earning, I know, but that site is very visible right now and serving up tens of thousands of page impressions to people who are nuts about webcomics. I'm beginning to think that my next goal, of making $ 10/day through advertising, might be reachable. That would be the point where I'd be able to free up time to work on Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan. I do that anyway, but whenever I work on the comic, these days, I feel a twinge of guilt for not working on something that pays the bills. $10/day would put the webcomic on the same footing as my single biggest client, so that guilt, that feeling I'm slacking off from something more urgent, would, I think, go away.

$30/day would allow me to work on ROCR as my main project, reducing the others to sidelines. No, really. I could do it. I'm very, er, rational. All right, cheap. So bid on those ads if you want to support me and have a website that needs some more people looking at it.

*) But not quite: apart from the hype factor, participants in the market also come to it from vastly different pre-existing initial situations: some have hightly popular websites, including some where the popularity reflects past merit rather than present and can be said, for the purposes of the model, to be inherited. There is a real risk that PW ends up causing money to flow overwhelmingly from small webcomics sites to large ones, on the basis of these pre-existing conditions. Arguably, ComicSpace is one of them, because it had a huge advantage in the form of the user base of its predecessor, Onlinecomics.net.

... I am now on ComicSpace. An avatar will follow any year now.

ComicSpace bills itself as a MySpace for webcomics, but also promises to provide hosting for webcomics later on. Since its announcement, it's grown very fast indeed. Only time will tell, but ComicSpace might just throw a spanner in the works for Joey Manley's plans to make Webcomicsnation the Flickr of the Webcomics world. ComicSpace, after all, is being built from scratch, concentrating on the social networking aspect first, whereas the networking on WCN works via a range of only loosely connected tools and generally gives the impression of being grafted on after the hosting stuff was developed. On the other hand, WCN got there first, has an established track record at hosting, and the tools it does have (the Share the Love feature, the Talk About Comics Forums and blog), do work rather well.

We'll see how it goes; if there is to be a contest between the two services I'll be rooting for Webcomicsnation. But it does look like the stakes have been raised a bit.

I'm finally creating and posting the 800-pixel, half-page versions of the remastered Guðrún. These image files are taken from the same source as the 700-pixels-wide full-page version over on Chronicles of the Witch Queen, but are still taking quite a bit of time to prepare, because at the greater width, the lettering turns out uncomfortably large. So I'm looking again at each page and shrinking the lettering by up to 10%. This latest version is the first in which most of the lettering fits comfortably in the word balloons (because webcomics, bless them, are just Too Damned Small). It still comes out large-ish, but I'm sure I won't feel that way in another 5 years.
I'm posting the new versions as soon as I get them done, so for the next few days, possibly weeks, there will be a moment in the archive where the scan quality and comic size drop abruptly. Right now, everything up to page 30B, originally posted on August 29, 2000, is posted. That's almost half of the story.

This little improvement to the website was made possible by my current computer-less situation at home. To get online, I have to go to the studio, so I dawdle less in the morning and arrive earlier. Because the morning isn't my most creative period, I spend it working on this. Each installment takes about 15 minutes on additional cleanup, lettering changes and preparation for posting, but having one of my favourite Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan stories not look like crap is worth it.

Yet Another Fantasy Gamer Comic is much more fun than the title promises, and rather well-drawn. I wish it wasn't done in un-inked pencils, and I wish I'd find more fantasy comics that took their influence from fantasy literature (or better yet, the legends that form the source material for other forms of fantasy, or better yet, entirely from the artists' own fevered imaginations, though in the case of a parody comic like this, that wouldn't have worked anyway) rather than roleplaying games, but given these niggling objections, I found this one funny, easy on the eyes and a good way to procrastinate for an hour or so. If you like the manic energy of early Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan or the low-brow sillyness of Pawn, then spend some time in the world of Yet Another Fantasy Gamer Comic.

Last Saturday, a few hours after posting this, I made a deal with my supplier in which the issue of the memory sticks was resolved, and I got my PC back with a new motherboard and hard drive. I partitioned and formatted the new drive, installed SuSE linux 10.0 on it and started copying my administration and working files to the new drive, from the old 40 Gig drive which was still installed. I also moved my music collection to a data partition on the new drive and started downloading some old Doctor Who seasons just because I had that much space to fill for the first time in years.
Because of the download, I left the PC on overnight for a few nights. When I got out of bed on Tuesday morning, the PC was unresponsive. I rebooted it and was greeted with a large number of file system errors. Because I needed to plan my travel for a workshop in Emmen, I panicked a bit, but eventually I managed to boot the PC from a Kubuntu LiveCD and after a few attempts managed to mount the partitions on the new drive, causing the reiserfs journal entries to get replayed so the drive could be shut down properly. Yes, this is going to be that kind of post. Long and technical.
I ran fsck a few times with different options as well, but I do think it was mainly mounting the disks that caused the problem to go away for the time being. I shut the PC down, rebooted it after my workshops and it worked normally. So I resumed the download and continued to leave the PC on overnight. One might argue that that was irresponsible, but hey, I knew how to solve the problem if it reoccurred, right? And if it did, I might be able to investigate it in my own time, without running in panic mode, and solve it properly.
Well, that didn't turn out that way. I got the same problem again on Thursday, so I rebooted into Kubuntu LiveCD, did what I did last time, and rebooted my normal system again. Only now I got a new set of hard-drive-related I/O errors during SuSE bootup, and when I rebooted again, I got hard drive errors during the BIOS bootup stage. Eep.
Booting into Kubuntu LiveCD again for another look at my disks turned out to be harder than it had been before. The Hard Drive error occurred before the system decides to boot from the CD... luckily, it doesn't occur every time, and upon repeated tries I got the LiveCD to boot. Unfortunately, LiveCD technology isn't all that reliable, and this one had about five different places in the bootup process where it could and would get stuck, including at the end, when it sometimes displays a 1280*1024 pixel desktop on a screen set to 640*380. Now, there are plenty of linux geeks around who can fly blindly and fix problems like that without being able to see what's on their screen. I'm not one of them. If I can't see nearly all the contents of the screen, I can't fix the screen configuration, so in those situations, all that's left for me to do is reboot and try again.
When I did get Kubuntu to run properly, I found I could no longer see the new drive in the Disk/File system configuration screen, so I figured that at the very least, the file system was a goner, and possibly the hardware as well. So I fetched my portable hard drive from the studio, so I could back up the data that was still on the old hard drive. That way, if the new drive was broken, I'd be able to do a fresh OS install on the old drive. But while I was copying over my working files, the old hard drive also began to fail, and it didn't last long enough to copy over my Opera config files (which contain my email and my password). Upon a remount, the system returned similar I/O errors to the ones I remember seeing on Thursday morning. It's very likely now that that drive is also dead. It's like my computer is rotting!
I've called the shop about the problem. They invited me to bring my PC back to them, but mentioned that they were still drowning in repair work. I've mentioned their workload before - it's a big part of what caused the three-week wait before I got the machine back the first time. It may also have been the cause of some less than stirling workmanship; the intermittent nature of the Hard Drive Errors may be a sign that it's actually functional but not connected properly.
So I've decided to take some cooling-off time in which I weigh my options. I could take it back to the shop; I could take it to another shop; I could get a more hardware-savvy friend to look at it. If I get really desperate, I could open it myself and see if someone didn't connect the yellow wire right.
Or I could give this machine up as a bad job, reevaluate my computing needs and start with a fresh system. If the hard drives are broken and the data on them lost, I have no real reason to keep tinkering with this system; I might as well get something new that's more adequate to my needs right now.
When I bought my current system, I had a need to edit high-res comics in mind, and got a decent processor as well as as much memory as I could fit in. As it turned out, I've only ever used that power a handful of times since. All my productive work is done in the studio - on the desktop PC if possible, on the iBook if necessary. The home machine is used for getting online and playing media, and doesn't do the latter all that well.
And while I'm at it consider that:
1) I consider not having to spend time rummaging in the innards of a computer a good indicator of my quality of life;
2) I find tinkering with Operating Systems and getting software to run somewhat interesting, but it's not something I should spend great amounts of time on, which linux tends to make me do too often;
3) I don't trust Windows - I think XP is ancient and unsafe, and don't think Vista was developed with my interests in mind;
4) I don't have a lot of space in my apartment;
5) Me and my iBook, we get along very well...
...what's to stop me from just plonking a Mac Mini in the space where the PC is now, and join the army of computer dimwit graphical artists for a while? Well, apart from the price of the damned things. But maybe if I work a bit harder while there's no PC at home to distract me, I might earn the money soon enough.
Oh, and there's the issue of getting Macs online through @home.nl. But then I'm a bit fed up with them anyway.