Previous postings:
1/6/09: My job is totally insane. I'm trying to keep up with a weekly comic in hopes that someone will notice and keep reading. We're almost out of the call center comics, people. It'll get better. Okay, so maybe not too much better, but maybe you won't be bored once we're done with the call center comics.
1/12/09: I'm learning to jam hard with these comics on my off days, which right now are Tuesday and Wednesday. A couple bored nights at work have caused some serious mental excursions, which will end up in the comics soon. Not sure if I'll be able to do anything but make these comics from now on. Oh and by the way, Ottercomics still exists, and I guess I should get posting on that flaky server again. I'm going to be doing this very, very slowly. I'll start with the oldest comics and work my way up, 5 a week, while I make new stuff here. More to come.
1/19/09: Plans for the Frankenbob story are reaching an epic scope. Call center comics are almost over. Also, it seems that the Ottercomics website is working again, so I can start posting there again. I'm still wary about the server, so I'm going to upload the archive very slowly, five comics a week.
1/26/09: Ottercomics doesn't seem to mind I'm uploading the archive slowly, so I'll continue to do so in case a virus hits it again. Still trying to keep up with the schedule of five comics a week. I've almost got the coming week done, so I'll have to finish that and work on the one afterwards.
2/3/09: Too many projects, too little time. I'm still focusing on Gardenia, though. Thinking about cheating and doing more fillers so I can have time for other projects. This won't decrease the quality of the comic any. You already knew it was lame.
2/9/09: I might be a little behind for the coming week's comic, since I was slowed up the previous week. Anyways, I'm experimenting on new ways to make filler while doing the painstaking work of making the actual storyline. Good thing nobody's forcing me to keep a deadline.
2/16/09: Still playing catch-up on comics. These five barely got done by Sunday night.
3/9/09: I wasn't able to make the usual five comics the week before last. I had bought a car, and in between the paperwork and getting plates and such, I didn't have much time to work with. You wouldn't believe how much time that eats up. Worse, I then got some kind of virus from the General Manager, so I just felt like sleeping. So I just threw together a quiz comic. Frankenbob and the other characters will come back next week I'm trying to pace myself, so I'm not going to post all those comics at once. Otherwise, I'll have nothing to show for the next week. The quizzes seem popular, so I think I'll keep them going, though a couple weeks I'll have to just do a text version so I can keep up the Frankenbob story. I'm trying the transcript thing because a website says that helps search engines. You're only getting three comics this time so I can keep up with the schedule.
3/16/09: I finally am catching up to speed on this. I think. Probably will throw in more quiz comics this coming week. I sort of got sidetracked because I found a cool tool that allowed me to replace text in multiple files at the same time (and it's only a trial version so I'm trying to milk it). But hey, the pages will load quicker now, and maybe it will finally show up on google.
3/21/09: I've been trying experiments in how to make these comics faster so I can finish the story. So far, there have been delays because I have been doing too much work on them. Hopefully I can develop some ways to cut corners to get the comics produced more quickly so I get five done a week. These quiz comics help a little.
3/29/09: You might think I'm a slob by making all these quiz comics, but I'm trying to do five a week and I only managed to get three done this week. Something had to go in those empty slots.
4/11/09: I don't get much feedback on these comics, so I wonder if it's worth it to fill slots with crap nobody cares about. Not sure if I want to bring the quiz back for another go unless I expand the set and modify stuff. And then, nobody seems to prefer a character. Maybe it's because they all suck? Not sure. Since I caught up a bit, I decided to try to put my Doubledeath game back up on a website. Boy is it complicated. I made the navigation so complicated that I can't even figure out how to make it simpler. Oh well.
4/20/09: These car scenes look terrible. I tried darkening the ceiling, but it didn't quite work. I suppose I could gray it out. Consistency is a problem, as is leaving it alone with all its gaudy ugliness. Not sure what to do, and nobody is going to tell me, unfortunately, so I'll keep on making crap that looks terrible and never get discovered because people will say my comic is another piece of $### web comic when I didn't know any better. I guess that's life.
4/27/09: It's about time I took a comic siesta. A bunch of projects keep nagging at me, and once I get Doubledeath done, I'll have one less thing to concern myself with and can go on to other, less complicated projects. Hopefully this siesta won't take too long!
5/4/09: I'm still recovering from my comic siesta. I almost got the comics done for this week, but I still haven't finished the fifth one. Normally, I don't celebrate Cinco De Mayo, but since I couldn't catch up in time, I made a Cinco De Mayo comic as an excuse. It's awesome that it just happened to be Cinco De Mayo tomorrow, when I just randomly pulled the siesta comic out of a bag of thumbnail sketches.
5/11/09: This week's comic was so elaborate that I ran out of time trying to finish it all, so I had to postpone posting the week before. Maybe I overdid it trying to one-up the original artist or something. Anyways, this week's comics were some random funnies I jotted down while on my break at work. I have a bunch of these thumbnails and I randomly pulled these out, figuring they'd be a good break between the vanishing Frankenbob and the next scene. I hope I don't randomly pull out something this complicated as filler again. Well, I guess it was sorta fun, though. The only trouble I see is that the original artist who made up the characters might get real annoyed, and that they also don't look like the characters he drew.
5/17/09: I just got an e-mail from Cancelman saying that I had a broken link on Gardenia150.html, so I fixed it. Thanks, Cancelman!
Also, someone said that Abbott Babbit had taken a vow of celibacy. This gives me fodder for the next time that story comes up. I've also recently been analyzing my motives for making this comic. At times, it stops being fun because it becomes too much like work. I think I'm driving myself too hard. In the future, I'm going to just do whatever I can and not force myself to do five a week if I can't. My schedule changed (that's a good thing) so I get Saturday and Sunday off. It's likely that since I get to have more fun and hang out with my friends, there might be less comics. Anyways, who cares. I've been trying too hard to get famous.
5/25/09: I was too busy fixing the Doubledeath site to get the comics done this week. I'll have some done next week. To compensate, people can look at the Doubledeath website for the first time: http://www.doubledeath.i8.com/
5/31/09: Now that the http://www.doubledeath.i8.com/ is done (it still has some bugs to work out), I have more time to make comics. Didn't quite get five done in time like I wanted, but it was close, and it's five counting last week's comic. Not happy with how my filters worked on this call center comic, but it's interesting, and I've got to keep moving if I want to get these comics done.
6/8/09: I've decided that I cuss too much when working on these comics, so I've decided to play Christian radio while I work on them. It worked. I didn't get angry at the computer or Photoshop, and I didn't cuss, but I did get really, really mad at liberals. I guess it's a trade-off. I only made four comics this week, but at least I'm pacing myself and sleeping. I also just realized that it's likely that once I get to the crucial moment in the story that requires audience participation in order for it to continue, it probably won't continue. Oh well.
6/15/09: It took me a lot longer than necessary to make this week's comics. That's because my eyelids have become swollen for some reason. I thought it was my allergies, but now I don't know. It's hard to do much of anything when your eyes are puffy. So I ended up turning in early several days this week and not drawing enough. This may become noticable next week when I don't post much.
6/22/09: I really don't think anyone but me cares one bit if I don't post comics every week. For what it's worth, I was in a bad state this week, so I could only manage three. I found out I had somehow contracted Bell's Palsy. My eye kept drooping, and getting really dry, so I couldn't see enough to draw anything half the time. Then I had the worst time trying to draw that scene where they're carrying the box. I had to cover up areas to make it work. It was terrible. I'm really not a good artist. I can't even draw people carrying a box. It didn't help that I didn't have a digital camera the day I wanted to draw people carrying a box. I can't see my own back that well. Also, on Tuesday, I got really depressed and saw no point in drawing more comics, so I played King's Quest and watched TV. Lazy, perhaps. But I had given up hope, so I figured I'd do something that I could get an immediate benefit out of.
6/30/09: I've realized that it's not me being lazy or busy that's slowing me down. These forest scenes are hard to draw. It's very time consuming. I knocked out the Korean Matrix a lot faster, but it's nothing to brag about. Also, I decided to organize my comics according to the quality levels of the various doctors in Doctor Who. I don't think I'll ever get to David Tennant Quality Level. Actually, I think I'll be at John Pertwee Quality Level indefinitely because even though my art isn't crap (like the first Doctor Who episodes with the vasoline smeared gorilla glove), it's not Tom Baker quality yet. Also, I got locked out of ottercomics, so I didn't post for an entire week. Since I don't get that many comments on my comics, I guess it doesn't matter. Except to the moderator who doesn't like inactivity for some reason.
7/8/09: I'm really having trouble keeping up with these. I think part of the problem is that I have no stock backgrounds for the recent ones. The call center ones were simpler. But I still think I somehow got them done faster. I did a double shot this time because the Korean Matrix comics were really simple to do, and really shouldn't have taken the time they did. Of course, I didn't want to completely disconnect from the Castrovolvo story, either, so I had to drop those in as well. My shift schedule changed, so I've been a lot more tired, and have been sleeping more, and there's been a lot more work to do these last few days. Sitting in the DMV waiting for my brother to get his permit renewed, for instance, took a long, long time. So I couldn't get it all done on Monday.
7/12/09: We're finally at Castrovolvo! I don't think anybody cares, but it was an ordeal to get this far. Those nature scenes are hard to draw. It's also hard to draw people lifting a coffin, unless you can get a group of people to pose for you (I didn't). My stubborn insistance on using the last drop in old markers probably also caused a delay. At any rate, it should move much more quickly from here. No, this isn't an advertisement for Volvo, this is a Doctor Who parody. And there's going to be a lot of non-Volvo stuff to come.
7/21/09: After watching episodes of the Mysterious Cities of Gold, I've become addicted, and so I made Castrovolvo kind of like the stuff in that show, basically a pastiche of mesoamerican stuff that doesn't go together. Monday I felt really depressed and didn't feel like drawing. I felt like nobody was going to see this stuff, so really didn't feel the motivation to do anything but play video games. I still got stuff done, though. Again, it seems the real issue is the elaborate artwork taking extra time. Then my mom is beginning to think I am a print shop. After I fixed the pictures of the dog we lost, she handed me grandma's photo album, so I'm messing with that now. But it's interesting stuff to look at. I can't believe nurses used to be allowed to take snapshots of the operating table during a surgery. Anyways, the comic is going slower than my ideas are.
8/2/09: I think I forgot to do one of these last week. Not like it matters. Anyway, doing these monsters provides a unique challenge. It's difficult to make them look scary while also trying to prevent them from looking too dark and unreadable. It was sort of hard to keep the lighting consistent in the panels. I think they turned out all right, though. I don't get any feedback, so I really don't know what is successful or effective. Oh well. At least I maintained a good pace this week. I got the comics done by Monday and thus will have more time to get comics done for the coming week so I don't get stuck on a Tuesday rut. Ironically, I'm finding more success just displaying the artwork from the comics I make here on Deviantart and Furaffinity. I guess that's my equivalent to the producer of Sim City making his game from the tools he created while working on Bungling Bay.
8/6/09: I keep finding mistakes on my website and missing images, and nobody says $### about it. For months. I don't think anyone gives a $### what I'm doing. I think I must be making these comics just for my health, which really doesn't make my health better. I could just as well just hang my comics on a refrigerator and save time and effort. I keep wondering why I should bother. I posted these comics because I had them half done. I really don't know what good making more would be. No one reads them. The only benefit is being able to post new art at Deviantart and Furaffinity. But I could do that without a comic. And then I got a sneaky suspicion that Furnation deleted my Quaceb comic book because my bandwidth was too large or something. I might have accidentally done it myself in my zeal to get rid of the old QAX comics, but I don't know if that's completely right. My files were named differently. I don't think I would have done that on purpose. I wonder how long it was like that. I guess it doesn't matter. I always think someone will visit my website when and only when something is wrong with it, and not before or after. So it's sort of a superstition I guess. They visit when everything looks like garbage, then never come back and never tell anyone about the website. That's what I imagine. Anyways, I don't know why I bother.
8/16/09: Decided to make more just to have something to post to DA and Furaffinity. However, the church was really complicated to draw, so I only got one comic done for the week. Not like anyone cares.
8/24/09: I finally got around to doing a preview submission for a VBS program. It was really difficult since I don't have a real PDF making program and all those illustrator objects are difficult to manage. Didn't quite turn out like I visualized it. Not sure I want to post it until I'm sure someone wants to publish it. I kind of blasted through the abbott babbit cartoons, which surprised me. Of course, I had sleeping problems a couple nights, so I suffered for it. But it's more of an issue of not being able to sleep, rather than having a drive to become famous with this stuff or anything. Anyways, probably one day all my files will be gone, as well as the websites they're hosted on, and when I die someone will find nothing but these pieces of paper filled with randomly assembled images and nobody will understand what the point of all if it is. I guess that's my destiny in life.
9/1/09: I decided to do my comics whenever I felt like it rather than on a deadline. That and doing backgrounds is painstaking work means it took longer to do this week's single comic.
9/7/09: Galwyn was hard to draw, so that's all I did this week. Now that the backgrounds are out of the way, it should be a little bit easier to do the next comics.
9/13/09: Stuff was a little easier to make this week. I'm continuing this comic because it seems to be better than the other stuff I was doing and it gives me something to do when I'm depressed.
9/20/09: I've started work on a blog based internet novel in the vein of those blogs they had for LOST. You can find it at http://phantasmocheesefactory.blogspot.com/2009/09/. I'm also working on a hypertext novel that uses up all the variations on my Earth and All Starships novel. It sort of ate up a lot of time I could do for comics, but I still am working on making more.
9/27/09: I found a program that allows me to make video games, so I've been messing with that, my blog novel, my interactive fiction novel, and I've been procrastinating a bit on this comic. But I'm still doing at least one a week.
10/4/09: I'm done with the blog fiction, until someone posts a reply. Right now they seem more interested in my Bally Fitness crap. Oh well. Gives me more time to make comics and other stuff. I'm still working on the hypertext novel, but other than that I just have roleplaying games and this. And if I focus on them, this should continue.
10/11/09: My mom's birthday and mine are in the first couple weeks of this month. That kept me kind of busy, but too busy to make more stuff! Almost did five this week.
10/18/09: I think the reason nobody comments on my comics is because they're trying to be nice and think my comics suck. I get more responses about my artwork. I sometimes wonder if the pictures are too compressed in the comic format, or maybe I'm trying too hard. Also, this keyboard is bad. The backgrounds were very detailed so maybe it'll be easier next week.
10/25/09: I had to make another background, so it took a long time again. Might be easier this coming week.
11/2/09: A horrible week. I somehow got H1-N1 and only felt well enough to lay down. I managed to get one background done and some drawings of Kabby, and some other stuff, but I think my health suffered for it. We hid in the dark on Halloween so the trick-or-treaters wouldn't get sick. Horrible.
11/8/09: Still recovering from swine flu. I just barely got one comic page done this week. I had to make another background, it seemed. Probably won't be too much better next week, because I have to draw Doggie's mansion.
11/12/09: C'mon, people! I had broken links all over my page, missing pages, and nobody had the common decency to even tell me something was wrong! I guess this only proves that on the internet, there is a lack of good will in human beings. I've been writing this stuff here for weeks and weeks and weeks, and the damn link didn't even work.
11/16/09: Just gave the website and comic pages a major facelift. Honestly, it is easier to go between pages now, but I worry that people with slower internet connections will have to wait too long to have all the image icons loaded. Just when I think I'm good at something, something always happens to me that ruins it and renders all my efforts worthless. At any rate, I got my current comic done, but I didn't post until today because my dad took a surprise trip to the hospital and I stayed up too late waiting for him, so I slept instead of posting the week's comic. I guess it would have helped if I hadn't been working on my "Zorarber" pictures for Furaffinity and Deviantart.
11/20/09: I still haven't made the comics for this week. Why? Because apparently nobody reads these comics because the navigation structure is too difficult to figure out. I spent the majority of my available free time editing html on all the comic pages. I guess nobody uses dial-up and worries about the time it takes a page to load or something, so they want button links on their pages. So that's what I added. 400 of them, one for each page. And the fatigue caused me to put malfunctioning code on at least fifty of them, and I had to go back and fix every one of them. Honestly, I don't think anyone is going to care. In fact, maybe they don't care if I even make new comics. I suppose this does make it easier for myself to navigate the pages, though. You get what you pay for, people, which is nothing.
11/29/09: Well, I managed to finish the comic from last week, and did a couple for this week, too. Hopefully I can figure out some ways to get more of these done on time.
12/7/09: I guess Jim Davis and other people like that didn't have regular jobs, so they could afford to do nothing but draw stuff all day. I can't. That is why I can only make two of these comics a week. I was lucky to get this much done. But I'm glad to have work.
12/14/09: Christmas time is coming up. Stuff happens. I've been trying to impress my Jewish friend with some Hanukkah art, but he still doesn't seem to want to talk to me. Oh well.
I've been doing a pattern of one Gardenia comic, then a Zoararber fashion design and then another Gardenia comic. Then I do real life stuff like eating, chores, and whatever else that comes up, so I don't always make as many as I might possibly do, but that's okay.
12/20/09: Christmas time is coming. I'm disappointed that my job makes me take the wrong day off. I have absolutely nothing going on Christmas day, but Christmas eve, when stuff usually happens, I have to work. And I had to work Saturday to make up for the holiday, which doesn't make sense. Anyways, I think next week's comics will be a little more plentiful because I didn't hang out with my friends and I'll have nothing to do on Christmas day. If I can squeeze in gift art for my mom and a Christmas picture for the comic series around the 24th or 25th, it would be great.
1/20/10: I wish I could have died in 2009 with grandma. So much shit has happened at the end of 2009 that I really wish I had never been born. The ultimate worst thing is spraining my hand. The most recent comic is the best I can do with this sprain. I can type fine, but whenever I bear pressure on that swollen joint I feel extreme pain. The story about Frankenbob is going to have to wait until I can actually use my hand for something other than making crap. Of course, nobody reads these comics anyway, and if they do, they think it's crap and don't think there's any difference. But I notice. And I know I can do better, and the whole situation is giving me a crisis of faith. Yes, I'm not strong enough to be a happy little religious boy when deprived of my only real joy in life. I know, I know, some folks visiting here might tell me that I should find joy in Jesus and all that. But that's a different kind of joy, and it doesn't give me as much entertainment at 1 AM in the morning when I'm bored and awake. I was given some skills in art, and this sprain is forcing them to atrophy, and I'll be just another slob who lays about his house playing video games and not making anything out of his life. Even if this sprain heals in, what, five weeks, my stuff at Furnation is gone and I've got to start over from scratch on a different server. This shit is piled up on me in addition to lots of other bad shit. Why have I just suddenly earned the right to have a bad year?
2/16/10: This has been the year from hell, and it's just getting started. I went without drawing for well over a month. I got real good at drawing with my left hand, but didn't bother inking any of it because it looks horrible. The comic about Bummer dating a Moslem was drawn and inked with my left hand, and computer colored probably with my right. After that, the chiropractor that was treating me said to go easy on my right hand and not put pressure on it. So I didn't for I don't know how many days. I'm still not doing good. The chiropractor thought I was fine and didn't need any more treatment, and my hand looked like it was doing fine, but today it's been swelling up again and starting to hurt. I hate to do this, but I think I might need an x-ray if this keeps up. It's hard to tell if I'm recovering or worsening.
2/21/10: This entire year seems to be a year of trial. Nothing seems to be going right. Work is going okay, I guess, but everything else is messed up. My chiropractor said I'd be fine the way my hand is and to just exercise it. It's still swollen and won't extend. Good news is I can still write and draw without pain.
Yesterday I had a crisis, though. I guess I took too long uploading stuff to Webcomicsnation.com, and I contracted the Internet Security 2010 virus. It looks just like Windows Security, but it demands you go online and give them $50 to buy their software, or it won't go away. I spent all day working on it. I saw that the program was called AV.EXE, so I deleted it from my computer and Regedit. But when I erased it from Regedit, the programs were no longer associated with the icons, so I had to do a safe reboot and reload the operating system. Apparently it changed my FTP into a trial version, which sucks, but my other stuff works, which is better. I sure hope those virus people never find me again. They probably will because nothing is going right for me this year. I'm lucky to have my Furnation site back up and a working computer.
3/1/10: I've been working on a lot of my grandma's old sketches, in hopes of getting good at art like she was. I've been posting them at Mogwai-toejam at Deviantart.com. I've been trying to do one a day so I can get through them quicker and back to making comics. I almost posted the new Cupcake story comics, but didn't get them finished in time. I laid down this Sunday night and didn't realize I'd fallen asleep until the following morning. I'm going to be working on this week's comics all week long so it'll be action packed! I've learned a few things about gallery sites. Namely, it's best to post a whole slew of stuff at once rather than one at a time, even if that's all you have for that week.
3/6/10: I'm ahead of schedule, or behind, depending on your perspective. Taking a tip from people's comments about other comics, I've decided to finish a run of comics before posting it so the story can be contiguous. In between I'll put more gag comics, which will help to keep things at a steady pace. My finger is still screwed up, but I'll keep using it.
