Waffle

Yesterday, I went running again after a month's sick leave due to 'flu and bronchitis. Before that, I'd been training only sporadically, due to a series of injuries, including one case where I spilled boiling water on my foot. Burns on the foot, I can now tell you, are proportionally more painful than similar burns elsewhere, and heal very slowly.

There are currently three subgroups in my running class. I was going to join the light subgroup again, as I had during the period when I was only training sporadically, and queued up with the trainer who handles that group. There were some new faces, but that didn't mean much. People switch groups all the time. Little did I know that it was the trainer who had switched groups and was now training the medium group... but once I realised, I decided to see how well I did.

And I made it through the training all right. I could really give it some welly and keep up with the rest of the group. For a guy with such a bad attendence record, and someone who was still recovering from bronchitis, I was in pretty good shape.

Or so I thought when I came back from the training. A day later, not so much. It turns out that not only can't I hold my liquour anymore, I can't hold my lactic acid either. Ow. Also aargh, moan, groan and woe is me.

Fesworks has reviewed Chronicles of the Witch Queen in his regular mini-webcasts of reviews, and given it a very favourable rating. I can't cut and paste from an MP3 here, but the review itself is only sixty seconds long so there isn't anything stopping you from listening to it.

I'm sort of amused that he avoided trying to pronounce our names though...

I'm also very pleased by the readership Invasion is getting on the COTWQ site. It's a modest number compared to what the Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan main site pulls, but considering that the COTWQ version is merely a mirror, it's doing very well and is likely to hit the Webcomicsnation network's daily top 25 pretty soon. Evidently some people prefer to read it within Webcomicsnation, because it's a system they already know, it has lots of reminders to people telling them the comic has updated, and doesn't have the intimidatingly large archives that ROCR.net has. I may have to rethink my strategy for the COTWQ site in response to that, and mirror more of my work there.

Modern Tales is now offering downloadable comic books in Comic Book Reader format. I've put their press release below the cut.

One of the downloadables is Headsmen (note: 23 Megabytes), a comic-book in progress containing the Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan stories Headsmen and Devil. The book serves as a preview of what the Headsmen comic book will look like when it's done and I've raised the funds to print it. This version stands on its own, though. It's got large, full-colour pages that look great in a Comic Book Reader program (see the ROCR downloadables page for more info on Comic Book Reader software). Download it and tell me what you think.

Joey Manley's full press release:

(more...)

Creator Michael Poe of the webcomic Errant Story has been hit with some unexpected bills totaling $ 10,000, so he's having a fundraiser involving auctions, a donation drive and sponsored wallpapers. Errant Story has a reputation for being a very popular webcomic, and its Advertising page bears that out - 115,000 uniques a month is not to be sneezed at. So it's sobering to think that such a widely-read webcomic still has to do that sort of thing. Clearly, the revolution hasn't quite run its course yet.

In the forum thread, Poe's partner Hillary Hatch gives a breakdown of both the couple's immediate expenses and their more long-term needs. I like that they do that - transparency is important. Webcomics artists have for the most part been unsuccesful at setting up solid businesses, so we've had to become good at emergency fundraising, and telling people what the real situation is and where the money goes is a major part of that.

I'm afraid, though, that this post will be my only contribution. I've been falling far short of my own needs over the past six months, and can't afford to donate or buy stuff. I expect that this blog reaches a handful of people outside the webcomics community, though, and these people are invited to at least give reading Errant Story a try.

If a zygote, created, we allow to divide,
And is animal, a blastula
(Or ball of cells) is soon espied.
Before it moves on to the gastrula.

The gastrula takes the ball
And puts in it a dent
Which deepens to the other wall,
And punctures there a vent

If the dent's the mouth, then mouth is first
(In Greek that's protostomes:
A group of invertebrates dispersed
Throughout all the biomes.)

I'd speak on invertebrates more, but well,
It's really tricky goin's
When detail forces you to spell
Lophotrochozoans.

Otherwise chordates, echinoderms
Or hemichordates seek asylum.
Second the mouth - in proper terms
Deuterostomia (a superphylum)

But, in the developmental timing,
One stage in each phylum is singular
(But causes abuse of rhyming)
The phylotypic stage, pharyngula

Though creationists it will rile 'em,
It's the same in every thing-you'll-a
llow into the phylum,
The phylotypic stage, pharyngula

Animals all have a blastula
You can divide them up by gastrula
Pharyngula the phylum ensnares
All according to von Baer's
Principle of developmental creation
By means of increasing specialisation.

Aye, 'tis doggerel, but happy 50'th birthday, PZ Myers!

If job interviews worked like Wikipedia.

OK. One comment: Bwa ha ha!

Edit: Link fixed. Matt's so smart, yet he creates front page URLs that look like archive links. Boo!

I've got some ad spots up on my websites that have been going cheap. They're served by Project Wonderful, so they go to the highest bidder, and recently, the price on them has gone down to a few pennies.

Small ad buttons, about 10,000 pageviews a day, going for $ 0.05.
Square ad on the front page only, about 900 pageviews a day, going for $ 0.08.
Archive-only leaderboard ad, currently going for $1.10 but likely to drop deeply as the second-highest bid is expiring in a few days. About 10,000 pageviews a day, give or take the odd dip.
Square ad on this very blog! A couple of hundred pageviews a day, which surprised me when I saw it. Currently going at a whopping $ 0.30 a day.
Skyscraper ad on Chronicles of the Witch Queen. Currently going for free! Not exactly a pageview magnet, but as you can see from the graph, it goes up and down, so if you're the gambling kind, you might want to consider it.

Other sites with the same reach, such as Websnark, have much higher bids on them. One difference is that Websnark does have more unique visitors; another is that the Project Wonderful ads on Websnark are brand spanking new. Somehow, Project Wonderful ads perform best in their first few weeks and then begin to sag. Jin Wicked of Crap I Drew On My Lunch Break, a site whose reach is much greater than mine, noticed the same thing. Project Wonderful encourages novelty-chasing. There's an automated notifier that you can set up to send you email when there are new ads meeting your criteria, but I don't think there's one that tells you when an ad that's been around for a few months has become a bargain. And because many of Project Wonderful's ad publishers are, like myself, penniless web comic artists and enthusiasts who are thrilled at the opportunity to make some money from what are, on the whole, tasteful, discrete, even hip ads that can actually make a webcomics site somewhat more appealing, they tend to make a big noise about having shiny new Project Wonderful ads on their sites. Very few people make a big noise about the ads they've had on there for three months.

There is, then, a strong argument for occasionally replacing ones ad blocks with new ones. Unfortunately, the system works best if bidders lock in bids for months or even years, so while replacing ad blocks might deliver some short-term benefits for the individual doing it, it degrades the system as a whole in the long term if everyone does it. Especially with the vast majority of bids everywhere being very low; canceling ads doesn't save anyone any real money, but does waste the work people have done in setting them up.

But when I see start seeing "Your ad here" on any of my ad blocks, it goes down. If no one's bidding anyway, there's no harm done.

First, a question I've been meaning to ask: does anyone reading this know of a web bbs that
1) runs on PHPBB; and
2) has some version of Bad Behavior, such as this mod as its only defense against spam? In other words, no CAPCHAs, no other mods or plugins aimed at preventing the board from being overrun with spam?

If so, I very much want to hear from it. Bad Behaviour has done really well at stopping the endless flood of spam on Talk About Comics that I've been wondering if the time has come to stop making new members jump through hoops to get activated, or even open the forum to guest posters again. You know, make it a more inviting place. I'm not the guy who gets to decide this, by the way, but if there's evidence that Bad Behavior can do the job on its own, I can put in a word. Let me know in email or comments under this post.

I was prompted to bring this up by reading Matt Skala's recent post Why Web BBSes Suck. It's a great post that really opened my eyes to the extent to which I was taking bad functionality for granted for no other reason than that they've always been designed that way. I could quibble about some things, but I think the general thrust of his argument, that Web BBSes have terrible usability and don't serve the needs of their users well, is correct.

There is good news on some issues. Project Wonderful Talk, whose CAPTCHA I've finally been able to defeat, allows the use of Livejournal accounts for identification, which I hope many more boards will adopt (as well as other, similar, multi-site identification methods); PHPBB isn't as ubiquitous as it was a year ago even if it's still very dominant, and BBcode is more standardised than Matt claims it is. I also think the dominance of PHPBB could end very quickly if something truly better came along. Five years ago, when Ultimate Bulletin Board was as ubiquitous as PHPBB is now, it was quickly superceded by PHPBB because PHPBB was less crash-prone and easier to set up. The spambots have since made PHPBB at least as big a nightmare to work with as UBB was then.

So what I'd like to see is a project in which skilled designers and coders who have read Matt's rant build a new Web BBS from the ground up so it has the features the users actually need instead of the ones that Ultimate Bulletin Board happened to have in 1998 and which all other Web BBS systems have copied. And integrated spambot protection that actually works. Those two ingredients together would, I think, make most forum owners drop PHPBB like a hot potato.

Adam pointed me to Jonathan Kane's comics on DeviantArt. They're rather poorly drawn, but funny as hell. His superhero, Captain Occam, fights creationists wielding PRATT lists (meaning Points Refuted A Thousand Times) with his mighty razor. It's got lovely quotable lines like Bill was training the Tyrannosaurus to eat plants, but he didn't do a good enough job and generally mocks fraudsters like Kent Hovind, as well as their deluded fellow travelers. I especially liked his Deinonychos telling a Deinonychan myth about bird flight to help out the Captain, who had commandeered a vehicle that ran on bullshit.
DeviantARt isn't an ideal interface for serialising comics, so I'll list the episodes so far here.
Captain Occam versus the Prattmasters
The Prattmaster, ep. 2
The Prattmaster, ep.3
Dinosaur Adventure Land
Reverend Zedekiah EDIT: Replaced it with a better link, as the old one didn't work. -Adam
The Origin of Flight.
You'll need to click on the images to enlarge them, and in one or two cases that won't work and you'll have to click on "Download" instead. And there are people who say Livejournal is a poor comic hosting choice...

Of course, Captain Occam can't really compete with Dresden Codak, but honestly, what can?

Yesterday afternoon, I met with my friends Kim, Danny and Steve in the pub to quickly celebrate Kim's birthday before she had to go back to Plauen in eastern Germany. That was at five o'clock. Three hours, three Belgian beers and a quick meal later, I had a life drawing session with the VOIC.
So, how unsteady was my hand? I won't claim that the life drawings below are my best ever, but they're not nearly my worst either. I sat down at a table for the first time since I started taking part in those sessions (I normally prefer to either sit with the sketchbook in my hands, or stand at an easel). That helped, and what also helped was that the model was very good at sitting still. So was her identical twin. The pink elephant, on the other hand, was a constant nuisance.

For the first few drawings, the model kept her wraparound towel on, so I tried to work on draperies and feet. There's a girl in the class I teach who can draw feet amazingly well, so I need to improve to keep up with my student.

Nice hands. Terrible legs.

Cartoonish face, proportions all wrong. Must have been that pink elephant trumpeting in my ears.

I had to cheat a bit with this one. When I was drawing this one, I liked how the abstract, minimalist painting in the background framed her skin and hair against a square red area. However, I didn't have any colour tools on me so I tried, and failed, to replicated the effect with my grey pencils. That wasn't the same because the red square was the same brightness as the hair, causing the hair to disappear. Photoshop to the rescue... this is actually a good approximation of what it would have looked like if I'd had my colour pencils with me.

This one turned out all right in the end, though as I was working on it, I had no idea how to make the way the model's body was turned unambiguously clear. Older, fatter models usually have some folds that can be used to indicate how the twist works, but this model lacked them. In the end, I don't think it was necessary to emphasize the mechanics. She's turned. This was how it looked.