Wednesday, August 31, 2005

For your information

Ryan Estrada’s 175 hour comic is a work of genius. Mad genius, more than likely, considering the circumstances, but you can’t be picky when it comes to genius these days.

Monday, August 29, 2005

Zombies!

Maybe they don't want to chase us screaming through the night, to tear us limb from limb.

Maybe they just want to feel loved.

Maybe they want a hug.

Sunday, August 28, 2005

Comic Concerns, Update

So, it turns out that blogger doesn't have back/forward links. So, if I use it for my comic, I will have to add those links by hand to every post. Just as if I was updating by hand. Bleh.

I'm still looking for alternatives, in other words.

Comic Concerns

So, I’m drawing this comic, you see, and I’m slowly getting to the point where I’m finally ready to put it online. I’ve more or less decided to get a webcomicsnation.com account, but right now I can’t really afford it. Or rather; I could afford to get an account for one month, and after a month, I would most likely be able to pay for a whole year, and then I’m sure a miracle would happen before I have to pay again. But if I pay for a month now, the sum of money remaining on my bank account will, for a couple of weeks, be so small that I won’t be able to make any withdrawals, because they don’t make money that small anymore. So I’m looking for a temporary solution.

I’ve got a web page on a universtity server, and it’s free, and has no hard limits for storage and bandwidth, but the only way to update it that I’ve been able to figure out is to upload html files by hand. I’ve done that, once, and it took so much time and energy that I never got around to the content. It was only today that I realized I could set up a new blog with only a couple of clicks, and put it on my own webpage. I’ve only had a blogger account for three months or so, you see, and I've only seen that little “get your own blog” link up in the corner about four thousand times, so it took a while for me to figure it out.

I must have done something wrong, however, because it didn’t work. I tried fixing it for a while (it’s obviously caused by my own incompetence, but I haven’t yet been able to figure out if I failed to understand the embarrassingly simple setup process, or if I failed to understand the rather more complicated university sftp server, but I prefer to believe that it’s the latter, because that makes me look slightly less ignorant), but every time I changed something and failed, the strategically placed link for swithing from using an sftp account to using a .blogspot.com address started to look more tempting. It’s only temporary, after all, and ***.blogspot.com is actually a whole lot better than www.abo.fi/~jsandas/***, as addresses go. So I clicked on the link.

And noticed that the name I had chosen was already taken. For a while now, I’ve been calling my comic Unreal City, because it’s a good name, and a reference to The Waste Land, and not completely unfitting for the story. It also tends to be occupied. I already knew that unrealcity.com, .net and .org were in use, but I wasn’t planning to name the whole webpage after the comic anyway, so it didn’t matter. In a way, of course, the fact that unrealcity.blogspot.com (probably not safe for work, if anyone who reads this happens to be working. Definitely not safe for Clockmaker, anyway...) is taken matters even less, because I’m only planning to use whichever .blogspot.com address I happen to choose for a short time.

Only, names tend to stick. I’m not very good at names (you could say that it's my greatest limitation as a writer, but then you’d be neglecting that small “sometimes takes a year to get started” thing. And “regularly fails to complete anything”. But I'm not very good at names either), so the ones I do choose, after excruciating agony (or at least mild discomfort. Excruciating mild discomfort), stay with me.

Most often, it’s names for characters or places (the main character of this very comic, for example, uses a name that I’ve been keeping around for several years. Sometimes, I’ve stopped writing a story because it wasn't good enough for the name. I don’t recommend this), and not so much the titles of stories. If you write a short story or a novel you don’t have to choose title until after you’ve finished it, and if you never finish it, you never have to choose (I don’t recommend this, either).

In this case, however, I’m going to start publishing the story, piece by piece, long before the whole thing is finished (there are problems with this approach, of course, but compared to publishing it after it’s completed, and never completing it, it doesn’t look so bad), so I won't be able to change the name. And I like the name Unreal City. It has stuck.

A common solution when somebody else has taken your domain name of choice is to compromise. People use domain names like ***comic.whatever (to distinguish it from the other websites which are not comics), or ***online.something (to distinguish it from the other websites which, presumably, are not online). Or you can choose a completely different name, especially if you plan to do more than one comic, or to do other things than comics. As I already mentioned, this is what I’ve been planning do, sooner or later, but I haven’t thought of a good enough name yet...

At the moment, though, all I really need is a name that I can use for my temporary blogspot address, preferably one that I won’t be completely embarrassed by ten yers from now when I realize it's ended up as the name of my official website, production company, line of customized elephant memorabilia, and first-born child.

Any suggestions?

Friday, August 26, 2005

Nobody expects the badger!

I was going to write something, really, but I didn't have anything to say, so I ended up tweaking the template instead. And by “tweaking”, I of course mean that I removed something and found that I quite liked how the page looked without it. If you find that you can’t live without the dark brown background image, you can see it in its full glory here. Tomorrow, I'm going to try to replace the rather bland text heading with a picture of a bdager. A badger drinking tea.

Tuesday, August 16, 2005

Facts about America

Americans do not speak like other people. Instead they communicate by means of an intricate system of clicks and whistles, which can be heard over distances up to several miles. Because of this, they do not recognize the concept of privacy, and consider anything that has been said as public information, available to everyone. They are deeply suspicious of the written word, and foreign visitors (who often find it difficult to make themselves heard in American society) should take care never to be seen reading silently in public, as this will provoke most Americans into uncontrollable fits of rage.

The American diet consists mainly of insects and small animals, which the Americans skillfully catch with their long sticky tongues. They do not consider fruit and vegetables edible, but their children sometimes collect nuts and berries (which they believe are small rocks) and use them for decorative purposes.

American society is divided into three groups, which have very little contact with each other. Members of all three groups look very similar and do not differ in behaviour or habits. It is believed that they are able to recognize members of their own group by smell, or by minimal variations in language. Children always belong to the same group as their parents, but after they reach adolescence, they often join one of the other groups with little or no advance warning. Members of the three groups only get together once or twice every year, at great open-air meetings where new births and marriages are acknowledged, and where individuals who have broken one of their intricate and unwritten laws are sentenced to government duty or to work in public schools.

Saturday, August 13, 2005

Zombies!

She hid in the basement, with tin cans and shotguns and a lot of batteries for her flashlight, and they passed her by. Afterwards she couldn't help thinking that maybe, if she had let them catch her, she wouldn't feel so lonely anymore.

Tuesday, August 09, 2005

Things You Need To Know

Interesting things even

The Penguin of Death is a powerful symbol of man's...uh...struggle with...penguins. Yeah. Powerful.
Also I find it hilarious. Perceive it, or founder in black regret.

Wednesday, August 03, 2005

Link of the Day

365 Days