Waffle

Two weeks ago, Adam told me he thought the recent work on Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan was "gorgeous -- just for once nothing is rushed". I thanked him for that but had to admit that I didn't think the next few weeks would be quite as good. And two weeks on, I do think the pressure of keeping up is showing in all aspects of the work.

Normally, this would be my cue to say, "hold on, I can do better if I give myself more time", but as I'm in the thick of a crossover, I can't do that. The work has to stay on schedule even if I'm exhausted and also have taxes, Gang of Four and several other urgent matters to deal with (several of which involve a mad scramble to get paperwork done so that money from my client starts flowing into my bank account. I'm not doing well on that score). And while these pages won't go down as the best in the archives, the heroic work done by DFG, Calvin Bexfield and Mravac Kid saves them from being the worst. Though I did draw the line at letting the computer interface lettering on the version of today's comic that originally went up this morning stay unfixed.

Blogging will be light until I have some more time and energy again.

First, a cover drawing for a forthcoming ebook:

The e-book version of Guðrún will be launched real soon now. Headsmen (link goes directly to downloadable file) was downloaded more than 900 times, so there are clearly plenty of people who want Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan ebooks. As with Headsmen, the e-book will be a stepping-stone towards a print book, but some raising of funds will also be involved in its publication.

I spent yesterday evening at the monthly sketching party at Erik Wielaart's. Most of the sketches came out fairly raw and low-contrast, so I've had to adjust them to the hilt and keep most of them small. Pictures below may or may not enlarge if you click on them.

(more...)

Spot the significant drunk in today's (and the previous - oops!) Dangerous and Fluffy: The Sheep of Doom

In the weeks before I got my last bout of 'flu, I didn't do much running. I told people that it was because I disliked running in dark, wet conditions, which was partly true; one evening, I got rather badly spooked running up a slope into pitch darkness. But a bigger part of the reason was that the joy had gone out of running for me.
Well, the joy is back. But conditions did have something to do with the lack of joy: it turns out that I enjoy running in Zernike Science Park a lot more than running in the Noorderplantsoen. This may seem strange, because the Noorderplantsoen is quite a nice park whereas the ZSP is a collection of parking lots encircled by streets that lead through a rather ghastly post-industrial business waste land. But for me as a runner, those mostly-flat, paved streets allow me to get a decent tempo going, and the trainer isn't tempted to make me do Fartlek-style interval training*) (up a slope, down another, 10 meters of running at top speed over gravel, and up another slope). While running uphill can be fun, I don't think Fartlek is on the whole my thing. Let me get some mileage under my feet and I'm happy as a pig in shit. So the next few trainings, I'm going to pick my group based on where they're going.
Of course, this only applies to running in the evening, with my club. It's different when I'm running alone, in the day - then, a quick dash into the Noorderplantsoen is convenient and fun.

*) What we do on those occasions isn't technically Fartlek, which as I read in the Wikipedia article actually does contain quite a bit of steady running. Maybe I should refer to those in-park interval exercises as Mini-Fartleks?

In the blog under his comic, Matthew Skala has been thinking about the same concerns I have with Project Wonderful, and thought them to their logical conclusion:

In Project Wonderful news, I started scaling back my bids because my account with them was running low, and I've already sunk what feels like more than enough money into it. I decided to shoot for breaking even - spending no more money buying ads on other people's sites than my own ad boxes bring in. So I've been looking at my bids, figuring out which are most expensive per click, and lowering those until they're no longer winners - the idea being to reduce my total expenses while keeping the bids that produce the best performance of clicks per unit money. Thing is, though, pretty often when I lower a bid to the point where it starts losing the auction, it only loses the auction for a short time. Other people are lowering their bids too. I wonder if I've started some kind of a thing. Unfortunately, it's happening on my own boxes, too. The vertical box went from 0.10 and 0.20 bids, to 0.02, in the last couple of days. Of course that reduces my budget and means (if I'm going to be serious about the break-even thing) that I have to lower my own bids even more.

I wonder if this is going to stabilize in some kind of steady state, or if it's a basic problem with the market. Money leaves the system for Ryan's 25% cut, and presumably some of the big-time ad venues (the ones that get bids of dollars per slot per day) are taking out profits as well. I'm not taking out profits. If too many of the small-timers like me decide they want to break even, there's going to be very little actual money entering the system, and the stable state is going to be basically a free banner-swap network. For it to work as designed, there need to be more buyers bidding more real money, and I don't know where they're going to come from.

I'd add that that projected steady state would be a free banner-swap network that is much smaller than PW's current network because people would start taking down their PW ads and returning to the warm, heaving bosom of Google Adsense and other large advertising networks. If I was Ryan North, I'd worry about this a bit.

I'm definitely experiencing the same phenomenon that Matt is talking about, partly because I'm one of the people he's inflicting it on, the cheap, cheap bastard. It's extra painful for me because I spent rather a lot of money on Project Wonderful in the final months of 2006, and once I take that into account, it's very unlikely I'll break even over the full period I've been buying and selling ads through it. I'm running in budget-neutral mode now and I'll be able to claim the late-2006 advertising binge on my taxes, but with hindsight, I'd have done better to keep it in my pocket.

Note that this is the third time I've linked to Matt since he started putting his ads on my site. I'm normally against doing that. It's a conflict of interest even though the amounts of money involved are infinitesimal. But every time I click on Matt's ad I find, if not necessarily a great episode of The Bonobo Conspiracy, then at least a well-written and/or thought-provoking article about one of his many geeky interests. Besides, there's actually a perverse incentive for him to take down his ad, because the permalinks to this blog are free and are arguably a lot more effective than the tiny button ads he's currently paying a penny for (the cheap, cheap bastard).

Another effect that may be coming into play with Project Wonderful if not enough new buyers enter the network is bid monopolies. I think one of my ads may be in a bid monopoly situation: One bidder is willing to lock in a bid over and above the likely real value of the ad for a long period, so that people willing to bid the real value and not a lot more end up giving up, leaving the overbidder to snap up the ad spot for pennies.

I hope Matt is wrong about the direction PW is heading in, and I hope someone will prove me wrong about that other thing as well. But right now, I'm a bit bearish about it, as they say.

Oddly, the one place where my PW ads still do well is this blog, which you wouldn't think of as an ideal place to put (mostly) webcomics-related ads.

Noteworthy things I've read today:
Digby on religious literacy in the US.
Amanda Marcotte on guns, bad faith arguments and pleasure as a positive good.

One of the benefits of living in a green neighbourhood: plenty of signs that spring is upon us...

This YouTube video was posted on the ComicGenesis boards:

It's a humane way of keeping squirrels out of your bird feeder, but...
While one of the commenters on YouTube refers to squirrels as "stupid tree rats", the American Grey Squirrel is better thought of as a clever, crafty little tree rat. There will inevitably be a sequel to this video entitled "Twirl-a-squirrel defeated, hordes of squirrels plunder trapped bird feeders."

Years ago, the BBC broadcast two documentaries in which Grey Squirrels were presented with obstacle courses that they had to defeat in order to get to food that was laid out at the end of the course. It never took them long to get there, and once one had made it through the course, others would soon follow because they'd all observe how the first one did it. I looked for footage from those documentaries on YouTube but couldn't find any yet. I recall it being very impressive.

The Grey Squirrel is an introduced species in Britain, and is considered a pest there. It drives out the native red squirrels, partly as a result of being more intelligent and agressive. Red squirrels are cuter to look at but, while in a human-dominated environment, there's a survival advantage to being cute, it hasn't helped them enough.

On the continent, though, Red Squirrels are still going strong, and I'm happy to say there's a nice little population near the studio where I work. From time to time, one of us spots one - Calvin saw a bunch of them fighting a few weeks ago, and days later, I could observe one climbing a tree for about a minute before I lost sight of it. That always makes me feel good.

Being in a Crossover means you get to draw things you wouldn't normally. Like computer interfaces if you're doing a medieval-based fantasy comic:

To be precise, this is the SMOG2MAC interface - SMOG for "Semi-Mystical Otherworldly Gates", MAC for "BSD on a high-quality PC with an Intel Chip, formerly BSD on a PowerPC, formerly a once innovative but aging GUI on a PowerPC.". This SMOG2MAC program is a hacked/pirated version running in a virtual machine in a more conventional laptop PC, though, which is why the Apple logo has a worm in it.
The comic universes SMOG2MAC is streaming video from can just about be recognised at this stage of the drawing.

Reminder to self and others to read Susie Bright on NSFW warnings. Also, read comments. But first, bed.
(Via Pharyngula)

Update: What you really need to read is this earlier post in which Bright brings up the classism involved in deciding what does and does not get branded NSFW. Again, the comments are good.