Waffle

I have updated the cast page with short bios of two minor characters from the Rite of Serfdom storyline: Brakeburn and Brushhead (whose page comes up looking wonky in Safari for a reason I cannot understand). I have also linked the page for Hywel Bastardsson which I created last Summer but forgot to link from the main cast page. Faerie body parts galore so don't read them at work.

I am trying out some Photoshop alternatives for both OS X and Windows, so there will probably be a lot more small updates featuring little graphics made from art created earlier, using Pixelmator, Pixel Studio Pro, Seashore, Paint.net and whatever else I can find. So far, I really like Pixelmator for jobs that are too small to load a full-featured graphics program for. It opens promptly and handles smaller graphics well, and the interface makes common tasks a breeze. For larger, multi-layered jobs, its performance is still severely impaired on my MacBook. Pixel Studio Pro has the advantage of being multi-platform and is also easy to use, but it is also crash-prone on Windows and it comically misinterprets my larger images as animations. Both are hard to bail out of once the spinning beach ball appears. I will want to try both of them intensively, though.

Another piece of technology I'm very interested in is Opera Unite, the small, simple web/file server built into new versions of the Opera web browser. I am already using it to develop and host some new web pages right from my computers at home, and it does make development and sharing a lot easier and more fun. It is very limited, and I wouldn't run a dynamic, database driven website on it even if I could, but as with those small graphics apps, the features it does offer are very handy and will speed up new development on the website. Living in the boonies for months has given me a much stronger appreciation of the need for simplicity in websites, and I do have some ideas for simplifying the ROCR site.

Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan is now on Facebook. Has been for a while actually, but because it's easier to post quick announcements about the comic there than here, I recommend adding the page if you want to keep up with things. Longer, less-frequent announcements and commentary will still also be posted here, though.

I've not been updating much since December, but Aggie has been kicking ass and taking names over at American Gothic Daily lately, and now has several pages backed up so that she can increase the frequency again for a while.

There's some more new ROCR material written, but I need to buy new paper - I got the wrong size last week. Turns out there's another size between A4 and A3 that I hadn't seen in the shops before, so I picked it up thinking it was the A4+ I have been using for the Feral storyline. I expect to have a little bit of drawing time during the week and in the weekend though, so there will be new pages soonish, hopefully maybe.

Quietly and without fanfare, Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan's hiatus has been interrupted twice by updates in the past two weeks. I'm still officially on hiatus but the productivity machine has been grinding and stuttering into motion lately. I expect that there'll be more regular updates in December, knock on wood.

Life in BF, middle Tennessee has been very good indeed and in fact I've had so little to whine about that I haven't blogged for a whole month. I'm sure that will change too, eventually.

I'm going to stop counting the numbers for the Webcomicsnation and Modern Tales sections of my content empire for now. Together, they make up a very small percentage of my pageviews and counting them is just too much work as my only source for them is the Project Wonderful listing for the ads that appear on those sites. Project Wonderful only counts the past 30 days so if I'm late tallying up the statistics, they're gone. Bugger that.

Now that Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan is on indefinite hiatus (and honestly, it may take a LONG time for it to come back. Preparing for emigration while holding down my job has absolute priority and I simply can't afford to commit to any kind of schedule or deadline), pageviews are predictably going down, except on the . Here are the numbers (compare with last month):
ROCR.net: 78022 pageviews, 7939 uniques month-on-month. Down from 82343/8184 last month. Not so bad, all things considered.
ROCR@Drunk Duck: 16640, down slightly from 16810. I guess July's result was a bit of a fluke, and indeed there is a lot of day to day variation on Drunk Duck. Number of uniques unknown.

Shout-out: Thank you to George of Amazoness! for linking me in your blog. It's bringing in half a dozen readers a day and is probably part of the reason why the drop in readership hasn't been larger.

Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan is going on indefinite hiatus starting today. All the stuff I need to do in preparation for my wedding has a lot to do with it but the main reason for calling it quits for now is that my motivation has gotten very low.

Actually, come to think of it, those two factors work in concert. Imagine waking up on a Saturday knowing that this, the weekend, is the time you have to work on your hobby. But it's a nice, sunny day, maybe the last of the year, there are friends you haven't seen in months and may soon never be able to see again. There are unread books on the shelves, unwatched videos on your hard drive. There are vague ideas for new comics buzzing around in your head, that you haven't developed but they seem fresher than your project of the past 18 years, and may have wider appeal. There is maintenance to do on your existing, 1400-comic archive. There is grocery shopping, chores around the house, and all the time you were planning to work on the comic, your attention goes to those things. Oh, and it won't be long before that short time window opens when both you and you fiancee in a different time zone are both up and available to talk.

Doesn't seem like a whole weekend is all that long anymore? Those four or five hours for a comic suddenly look like a big chunk of your free time. Now imagine all that, plus being aware that you need to get off your ass to prepare for a big, permanent change to your life.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not complaining or making excuses. I know perfectly well that if I really wanted to, if I was really driven, I'd sacrifice all the other stuff I want to do, the stuff that normal people do on a weekend, to get my art out for you to read. But right now, unlike say four or five years ago, I'm not that driven. I want to do it, but at my own leisure. And as a result, making myself sit at home working on comics over a weekend makes me feel like a rat in a cage. So I'm calling the schedule off until my head is clearer and the drive returns.

Again, don't get me wrong. It is a very good time to be me. I'm not fed up with my comic just yet, and I'm happier than I've been in a long time. I'm just adjusting to some new realities in my life and one of them is that if you're going to maintain a webcomic on a regular schedule at my age, you can only do that if it's the number one thing you're obsessed about. I'm not, so I won't.

The one thing that will continue on schedule is the Drunk Duck re-runs. As much of a pain in the ass as working on that can be, this situation is a big part of what the re-run project is for: to keep the comic in the back of my mind when for one reason or another, I have to take a break from it. It doesn't take nearly as much time as it used to, and I can do it in small time increments without harming the art quality because all the art work is already drawn. So go there for your daily fix - there have been changes from the comics as originally run.

This is sort of a cross between a memo to self and a public announcement of my priorities for the next few months. If all you're interested in is the schedule of the Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan comic, scroll to the bottom.

Like I mentioned the other day, I'm getting married in May. Since my fiancée and I currently live on different continents, that means one of us is going to have to pack up and leave, and that's going to be me. Aggie has the public-facing job, the house and land that she owns and the two teenagers; I've got no dependents, no mortgage and a job that I can do over the internet.
The planned emigration is a much bigger change than the marriage itself, and a much scarier one for me. There's a number of ways I need to get my house in order before May 29. These are some of them.

The emigration itself. We have talked about it between us in the past year and at some point I was downloading and saving documents from the US INS to study the matter. But it's been a maze of documents to read, I lost track, then the hard drive the docs were on went kablooie. All that I took away from it is that it's a very long process, that as a spouse or prospective spouse I should have it relatively easy but will still have to fill in a bunch of applications and probably have to prove that I actually know this woman and have spent time with her, and that it's a good thing that Aggie's income is well over the poverty line. I will need to start making phone calls and writing to the embassy for more information and incorporate those things into my schedule, soon. In the next few weeks.

Work: I have already experimented with working long-distance from Tennessee at my current job and have the go-ahead from my boss to go back and do it again. There are still some teething problems to sort out and some unanswered questions about the value of it all to the company; all we know is that it doesn't hurt my job performance. I consider this issue 80% covered, but just in case, the next issue will be:

Money: Over the past year, I have slowly built an emergency fund in high-interest savings account. That will have to be turned into a Flexibility fund that should be enough to keep me going for a year in case I do somehow lose my job and am not yet able to look for a new one in the US (or in case I lose my job, am eligible to look for one in the US, but can't find one. It's Middle Tennessee; the demand for white-collar work isn't high there). By my estimate I will need € 20,000 in savings and have no idea how to get there from here (I have € 5000 as my Simplified Net Worth, i.e. whatever is in that account - anything in my other bank accounts may be needed to cover taxes and stuff like that).

Stuff: In the next few weeks, I will start selling or giving away a large part of my books, CDs, DVDs, etcetera. I will also start looking for a transport company that will ship whatever I won't get rid of to th US without costing an arm and a leg. But I'm aiming to keep that part to a minimum: the Stokke chairs, the A3 scanner, my unsold original art and some irreplaceble books should cover it.

Driving: Amazingly, it's a year ago that I started my driving lessons. I had to drop out of them due to being too tired after work to learn anything or indeed be safe. In Tennessee, an adult has to be able to drive, so I'm going to have to go back to driving class and hope I don't run into the same problem again.

Health/exercise: I put on weight while staying in Tennessee. That by itself isn't so bad; it's not like I am being immobilized by carrying a ton of flesh around. But I do feel flabby and spent much of this weekend and the previous one not having much energy at all (see "Driving" above for an example of how that hurts me). Time to pick up running again. Running every other day should reverse the weight gain and help me fit in my pants again so I won't have to buy new ones, and it should help me feel better and get my energy and drive back.

Comics: To be honest, my biggest problem relating to my own comics is that I'm not as motivated as I used to be. If I really wanted to, I could keep the comic going on a weekly schedule between now and May 29 or the day the storyline is over, whichever is earliest. But I'm kind of burned out for now.
Having said that, I have no idea what effects the work related to moving out will have on the comic. I do know that I will want to take it easy over the next few months and not bust myself out to make deadline. It's entirely possible that I might find a way to squeeze some extra money for my goals out of the comic, in which case the readers benefit from my plans. Or I might take a long break so I have time to read emigration documentation. It's all up in the air right now.

Wow, it's been a whole month already since I did the stats thing. Last month's statistics. July's results are as follows:

ROCR.net: 82343 pageviews, 8184 month-on-month unique visitors. down from 98002/8434.
ROCR@Drunk Duck: 16810 pageviews, uniques unknown, up from 9951.
QOTWQ/ROCR@Moderntales jointly: 5427 pageviews (estimated), monthly uniques unknown, down from 9341.

Apart from the Drunk Duck numbers, these stats are pretty dismal. As I'm not interested right now in increasing my advertising budget, there isn't much that I can do about it other than try to increase the update frequency, which is unlikely to be succesful. I have other priorities at this time, it's as simple as that.
One exception: I can start adding more comics to the COTWQ mirror again. I had quietly started mirroring the Corby Tribe storyline, currently being rerun on Drunk Duck in remastered form, there, but had stopped due to time constrained. I do want as many people as possible to see the new version of the storyline, so this week I'll start catching up. But even that is simply republishing and re-mirroring old material. The flow of new material will not speed up for now. Sorry.

I took some time off the clock during a slump at my day job to fix up some more remastered comics for the Drunk Duck mirror, and in the process I fixed a serious problem with the comic for May 1, 2002, bringing back three panels that had been missing for years. I also fixed a spelling error in the comic for May 2, 2002.

The May 1, 2002 installment, coloured by Drooling Fan Girl, is still one of my favourite installments, largely thanks to her colour choices. I'm glad to have it back on the website.

Between me working full time again (long distance from Aggie's place), Aggie breaking her foot, two baby goats being born here at the minifarm, me throwing repeated fits at the local internet service and router, and the need to sleep at least occasionaly, I haven't been able to get any new updates done. What little art time I've had these past week and a half has gone into the remasters on Drunk Duck and what with the internet connectivity problems, it's been a torment just to get those uploaded in time - I spent a profanity-filled hour uploading just three episodes the other day. I'm afraid we're going to have to go back to the every-other-week-if-we're-lucky schedule we had in April and May.

Actually producing the Drunk Duck updates doesn't take that much time anymore, and it's important enough to me to keep doing it. It's the one subsection of my publishing empire that does update regularly (720 updates in as many days) and it's slowly closing the popularity gap with the other sites and mirrors. At half an hour per update, it's worth it to me to keep it going and doesn't detract from producing the new updates at all.
Nevertheless, I'm sorry there's no update! I'll try to get something up as soon as possible! And to get back on some of the comments and responses I got to that recent post about the reader number. I haven't forgotten that either.