busybee comics

So I looked at this site in MSIE for the first time in a year or two and saw how badly things were broken. I wonder how much of a turnoff that was for people. Fortunately, it turned out that there was just a bit of overcomplicated legacy stuff in the header which was no longer necessary, and removing it somehow fixed the stuff on the rest of the page as well. Hooray for IE, I guess. Anyway, sorry if that was turning off the 80%30% or so of readers who were trying to navigate the site via IE.

Sorry about the site problems today. I was tweaking some stuff and didn’t realize that Movable Type is case-sensitive with its category names. Oops.

If anything else appears to be broken (pages missing comics or the like), please let me know.

I didn’t have a chance to do this week’s comics over the weekend (between running errands and having a social life for once), so Tuesday’s was a bit rushed (as you could probably guess by my choice of backgrounds) and Thursday’s may not exist since I haven’t even scripted it yet. If you are worried about a lack of updates, you could always make some fanart for me to post.

[EDIT] I’ve got several more scripted, and there will be a comic for Thursday after all. I’d still appreciate fanart, though!

So, lately I’ve been using a lot of my own photos in my comics, both as peoples' hung artwork and, increasingly, for environmentsthemselves. I am completely fine with people trying to figure out where the photos were taken. Guess away! (Ideally on the comment threads for the comics themselves.)

Neogeen had a pretty clever idea: do a bunch of cheap commissions for a made-up holiday called Monster Day. So of course I got a sketch! (If you just want to skip to mine just search on “fluffy” but they’re all excellent.)

I think it’s funny that the monsterified version of fluffy actually has a way to asexually reproduce. (I only chose mushrooms because of my culinary interest! Honest!)

So, from my click patterns, I noticed that a lot of times people would come to the site, check the few most recent comics, then click on the “first” link… and then immediately get discouraged, probably because they then ended up in my ancient journal comics and, in all likelihood, thought “Wait so I have to wade through a few years of this unrelated stuff to get to the comic I was just reading? Eff that.”

It took a bit of hacking, but I’ve made it so that now, clicking on the “first” link will take you to the beginning of the series you were on (on pages with more than one visible series it takes you to the series listing instead).

It’s a bit inelegant (and perhaps even more confusing if someone does it on a sketchbook or fanart entry) but hopefully this way I can keep more readers interested for longer.

I suppose the best solution overall would be to put each comic in its own separate archive but that’s opening up an even bigger bag of hurt, so this will have to do. (Movable Type is awesome except for the places that it really sucks. Not that WordPress/ComicPress seems to do this stuff any better, though — or at all, for that matter.)

I don’t just draw comics, I also sometimes work on music. Right now I’m working on getting an album finished (finally!) and so that’s taking up a lot of my time. So comics may be sporadic or lower-quality than usual for a while. Sorry.

Sorry for missing last Thursday’s update. The album is off to manufacturing now. I’ll try to do three comics this week to make up for it (although really, I did three comics the week before, too, so maybe it’s all good already?). Anyway it’s not like you guys are paying me for this.

Wow, am I at Unity #150 already? It seems like just yesterday I hit #100, but getting to #100 took forever. It’s amazing what maintaining a regular update schedule can accomplish.

In this dream, people were actually actively discussing things in the forum, and it led to a nice inspirational feedback loop which also helped me to attract more readers and get even more ideas for the comic.

(Yes I actually had a dream about my forum. Yeah, I know.)

I need to figure out a better way of doing backgrounds because holy hell I do not like doing them the way I’ve been doing them for the last however-many years I’ve been doing them.

UPDATE: I think I have figured out what to do. I am letting my proverbial hair down!

Update to the update: Man, Wednesday’s is probably going to be kind of surprising. I think it’s looking good though.

Lately I’ve been updating on Monday, Wednesday, and sometimes Friday and/or Saturday (this week is a rarity!). If you’re still following this comic by loading the page directly (and my tracking stats say that’s most of you), you should be aware that I do vary updates from time to time, and if you’re specifically checking only on weekdays, keep in mind that I often post stuff on Saturday and sometimes Sunday. You can always look at the calendar in the corner of nearly every page to see when posts were made (or are scheduled to be made).

Of course, you can always subscribe via RSS or LiveJournal and always see the comic the same day it gets posted, and not have to worry about me posting on multiple days between the times you checked. You also won’t miss news posts, since I know these are so incredibly interesting to read.

For what it’s worth, I try to keep my update slots consistent, when they do happen; Monday and Wednesday will usually be Unity, Saturday will usually be either a sketchbook entry or Womble, and Friday is wide open (Journal comics, fanart, a third Unity, etc.).

While I recently mentioned that Unity had reached #150, I completely failed to notice that I’m about to hit 300 comics overall! (not counting fanart or sketchbook entries). As of today I’m at 294 (at the point of unity-154), so unless there’s any intervening comics from other series, Unity #160 will also be busybee comics #300! (Of course, if you want to count sketchbook entries for some reason — and I certainly wouldn’t — I hit 300 quite some time ago.)

Yet another thing my joint archive makes difficult to work out.

Oh and on the subject, I guess I also missed the second anniversary of starting Unity on February 12. Funny, it’s only been going for (most of) two years and it’s already my longest-running strip by far, both in terms of strip count and how long I’ve kept my interest.

For some reason, Google Reader didn’t pick up the latest comic or newsposts until about 20 hours after it was posted, and LiveJournal hasn’t picked it up at all. This tells me that something’s broken, but I can’t find what. Argh. In fact, it seems LiveJournal hasn’t picked up any entries since the 4th. This is not good.

If anyone knows what might be the problem, feel free to post a comment here. I was messing around with my in-feed ads a bit, but FeedValidator didn’t (and doesn’t) give any problems with it so I don’t think that’s it. Grr.

UPDATE: Looks like the LJ thing was because I broke the redirector for the (really old) URL that LJ was using. Oops. Still no idea on the Google Reader delay though. I’m tempted to just blame FeedBurner for that one.

UPDATE2: The LJ thing is fixed. Sorry to people whose friends pages have suddenly been flooded by a bunch of comics and rambles. Meanwhile, the Google Reader thing seems to just be a momentary Feedburner thing since a bunch of other comics which use FeedBurner had the same problem.

I draw species with females who have two sets of mammaries so much it’s starting to look completely normal and everyday to me.

I just thought I’d share.

Delos, who writes ArtPatient, was kind enough to do a nice review of Unity. Thanks, Delos!

I now have a pretty good idea of how the first major Unity story is going to end. Everything is falling into place quite nicely.

The answer is me!

Herman the Manatee is a lot of fun. Read it if you don’t already.

[EDIT] Whoops, sorry for the duplicate appearance in the RSS feed. I had to move this to a page with a comic so the archives wouldn’t get broken.

I’m not entirely clear why I have a WikiFur entry (okay, so I’m in denial), but since I have one I would certainly enjoy it if people could fill it with beautiful lies.

I think I will give a free signed copy of my album to whoever comes up with my favorite one. If you post a comment here when you write one I can verify it based on IP address.

So the few creative edits people made to my wikifur entry got reverted (it’s hard to come up with a winner but I think the one that claimed I was Neil Patrick Harris was my favorite, mostly because that one tiny edit got them banned from Wikifur — if you made that one, let me know so I can send you a CD) so we’d might as well go for accuracy, right? I can’t help but notice that basically every artist/character page on WikiFur is either a stub or filled in to excruciatingly navel-gazing detail by the subject of the page. I think it would be cool if my page were filled in to excruciatingly navel-gazing detail by other people (anyway, my self-portrayal doesn’t have a navel).

Yeah, been busy with other things, like having a social life and not getting enough sleep and having righteous indignation at other peoples' righteous indignation (PITCHFORK MOB JUSTICE for the new millennium!). Oh and last Wednesday marked the 300th busybee comic, for those who were expecting a big announcement aside from the one I posted like a week before it went up. So yay for that, I guess.

Real life (work, mostly) has me incredibly busy and tired, so updates will probably be sporadic for a while again (and crappier than usual). It’s best to subscribe via RSS or LJ instead of checking the site manually.

On the plus side, the next several strips are just exposition anyway. EDIT: I couldn’t bring myself to follow through with that plan.

It has been a while since I have greeted the new readers but I should say, hello! This is my occasional comic and sometimes sketchblog. There are a few different comic series which run here. I know the layout can be a little bizarre as a result, but you can always just go directly to the archive page to see what series there are. I hope it isn’t too confusing.

This all started out as a not-very-regular journal comic which was ancillary to my blog. The older ones don’t make much sense outside of the blog context. I hope it isn’t too confusing.

The main comic I do is Unity, a long-form science fiction drama set in the distant future. I don’t have a decent recap of it available but the cast page sort of explains what’s happened so far (although not quite in chronological order). If enough people ask for one I will probably make a chrononormative document. I hope it isn’t too confusing.

Also sometimes (like today) I do dumb parodies of other webcomics and various fiction clichés. Sometimes they are a direct response to specific things but usually it’s just stupid things that I think pass for funny. I hope it isn’t too confusing.

Anyway, feel free to browse at your leisure, or just ignore everything I do entirely, or listen to my music or just talk about off-topic randomness over in the forum or whatever else suits you at the time. You are in control of your own web browser, and I am not the boss of you. Enjoy. Or don’t, if that’s your preference.

I finally got around to doing something useful: story recaps! They are available in chapter-sized digests underneath the last strip of each chapter, and also the chapters and the recap of the full story so far are available on the archive page. The recaps basically just retell what happened in the story, but I err on the side of explanation for things which aren’t completely obvious. So even if you think you know what’s been going on in Unity, I suggest reading the full recap, if only because I spent a lot of time writing it.

I finally got around to tidying up all my image files' locations to make things a bit better-organized in the backend, but I may have missed updating a link or two. Let me know if anything’s broken.

Saturday night I finally got around to watching Silent Running. I can certainly forgive anyone who thought that movie was an inspiration for Unity, because it certainly would have been if Rendezvous with Rama hadn’t. I highly, highly recommend watching it. (I also find it interesting that both things came out the same year.)

Also, read Rama, while we’re at it. Although you shouldn’t bother with the sequels “coauthored with” (i.e. almost entirely written by) Gentry Lee. They start out okay but get pretty terrible pretty quickly (with thinly-veiled SOCIAL COMMENTARY and an overly-literal deus ex machina) and use cheap cliffhanger tactics to keep you reading them even though they are not at all worth the effort, and it upsets me that some part of my memory is now involuntarily devoted to them.

I could not hold my stylus steady tonight. Gah. I need to seriously cut back on the coffee and/or martinis.

I posted this comment over on an article about “right or wrong” with webcomics at The Floating Lightbulb, but in the event that Bengo decides not to publish it for some reason, here it is again: It’s a bit naive to think that a content feed is inherently destructive to item sales. If you look at a site through an update feed, do you actually look at the news box or the store? With a content feed, news posts and store items and the like can be put right into the content feed - but with an update feed they generally do not.

Also, in my experience, update feed items are very easy to overlook when skimming. I do usually end up going to the site directly for comics in which are provided in the content feed, since they’re often too wide for my reader, but the content feed can include a lot more than just the comic.

For example, the content feed on my comic contains the comic, the news posts, some non-intrusive PW ads, and the comic’s transcription, if it’s available. Those are things that most people would never, ever see if they were to just look at the comic on the site. If you would like to help to prove or debunk my point, please post a comment on this news post indicating whether you saw the news post via the feed or via the site.

If you’re one of those freaks who actually prefers comics to only provide an update (rather than full content) feed, you now have that option. (I really don’t understand that preference but I won’t stop you from choosing it, either.)

Dudes, dudettes, and dudes of varying and/or indeterminate gender,

I’ve been having a resurgence of my long-standing wrist problems lately, specifically that my carpal tunnel syndrome is back once again (unlike my long-standing tendon problems which have always been fairly cyclic for the last 12 years or so), and I don’t want to leave people in a lurch again. So I would really really appreciate it if people would make guest comics and other such filler for a while while I figure out how to deal with this. I’ll post pretty much anything people send, even.

Also, if someone wants to take over guest artist duty on Unity for a while, that would be even more awesome, although I’d prefer it be someone who can draw at least as good as I can (meaning the bar is low).

Love, fluffy

For now I seem to have my wrists under control, so I’m feeling comfortable with starting up on comics again. However, I am about to go on vacation for two weeks so even though I’ll have my portable Wacom with me I don’t know if I’ll be doing much comicing.

As mentioned previously, I am rather busy with things. I just got back from Spokane the other day and now I’m on my way to Chicago. I have a few Unity strips in the pipe but I haven’t had time to finish them or anything. I am a busy bee. I would certainly appreciate guest art in the meantime.

For a while there it was really dicey but I think I’m getting things under control. I just have to take it easy for a while. I’ve done a bit of simple doodling (to appear here over the next few days) just to keep somewhat in shape, and Drake has offered to try finishing the next Unity for me. We’ll see how that goes — I’m pretty optimistic given the fanart he’s done over the years.

On that note, however, I’m definitely not ready to give up drawing for myself. I look at my current stuff and compare it to things I drew even 3 years ago and can’t help but see how much I’ve improved, and when I look at my much older stuff I can’t help but think that I absolutely must keep this up.

I’m still not a very good artist, but when I don’t spend all weekend drawing I feel a massive void. Fortunately I have other projects to keep me busy (music production mostly) but that still doesn’t satisfy me like spending a whole bunch of time drawing comics.

Thanks again for submitting your work for the Cartoon Art Museum’s Monsters of Webcomics Virtual Gallery.

I’m pleased to say that your work has been selected for inclusion in our exhibition, and will be featured in the Virtual Gallery along with a wide array of webcomics from around the globe. This historic exhibition will include over 100 artists, making this one of the largest exhibitions in the Cartoon Art Museum’s 24-year history, and we’re thankful for your participation.

I am pleased as well! My stuff will be in a museum! I think this is only the second time this has happened.

Here’s a full press release of the exhibit, and also you can read more about the goings-on at the Cartoon Art Museum on their LiveJournal.

In any case, if you happen to be in or near San Francisco, the exhibit opens tonight, and will be running until December 6th. It would be fun to have a shared outing so as to meet up with as many readers as possible; I know a bunch of you are from around here too.

It feels like forever since I’ve drawn a comic, probably since it is. Drake is still working diligently on Unity 189 (which seems to have somehow turned from a normal 3-panel strip into a full-page setting-establishing epic) so here’s a journal comic sort of about something that happened back in July. It’s not up to my usual low standards but I needed a warmup.

I finally have some time (and wrist strength) to work on comics again, so that is what I’m doing. I’d like to apologize to Drake who had to put up with my vagueness in direction. I hope he still finishes the version of Unity #189 he was working on, since while it was quite different than what I intended it was still an interesting take on my little world, not to mention much better-drawn than anything I’ve ever done.

If it wasn’t painfully obvious by the fact that plot threads are getting wrapped up faster than a dead fish at a newspaper convention, Unity is coming to an end. I’m not sure how many strips there are left but a rough script for the rest of the series has finally precipitated out of my rough working outline like so much sucrose in a super-saturated sugar solution.

This chapter is maybe two thirds done, and then there is just one more (fairly brief) chapter to go. But it’s not really an ending so much as a beginning, as I have plenty of ideas for other things that can happen in Unity’s universe (although I haven’t started writing any stories around them just yet).

Also, when it does wrap up (and I’m excited to have finally managed to see a comic series all the way through to the end!), I’ll release the whole series in an easy-to-read CBZ file, maybe for a nominal fee (would $3 be reasonable?), with some of the more egregious problems cleaned up and the files saved out at full resolution. If anyone has any suggestions for a simple digital-media store that isn’t Paypal-based, I’d be willing to hear them.

Komix! is an interesting comic-aggregation site which appears to make it easy to subscribe to many webcomics. Of course, Google Reader (and any other RSS aggregator) can do this as well, but Komix! adds a few other useful comic-specific features; notably, it allows you to discuss with the rest of the Komix! community, rate individual comics, and also provides a site overlay which makes it easy to quickly peruse an archive by title and rating and a few other things. It has recently relaunched, and if you don’t like using an RSS reader for comics for whatever reason, Komix! might be more to your liking.

In any case, here is the busybee comics listing.

I probably need to take another week off.

While this is a continuous process, my linkroll has been modified enough over the past few weeks that I suggest you check it out again. There are probably a bunch of comics you’ve never seen on there.

but manageably so, for now. We’ll see how this goes.

I’m curious about aspects of my readership (this means you): How did you find out about my comics? How do you read my comics? (RSS, LiveJournal, manually browsing, bookmark, etc.) Why don’t you ever post comments? (Or: What would get you to post comments?) Anything you’d like to see more of and/or less of? Will you be my friend?

As always, you don’t actually have to register for the forum to post a comment on this thread.

I don’t like having to make newsposts like this, so I’ll keep it brief. I’d just like to point out that between my full-time job, my comics, and my music and audio production projects, I barely have time to do all the things that I enjoy doing, so why would I spend every waking hour posting “dozens of missives, ranging from polite to deranged, from various genders, stolen identities, nationalities, etc.?” He doesn’t even have the decency to provide a single shred of evidence, so I ask that you just apply some critical thinking. In short: I have not done any of what he is claiming, and I don’t even know if anyone is doing what he’s claiming.

I sincerely apologize to the vast majority of you who have no idea what I’m talking about. Hopefully we can simply leave it at that.

Thanks.

Archive Binge is a great service which allows you to create a retroactive RSS feed in order to catch up on comics with large archives. I’ve been using it to catch up on a few huge ones that I haven’t been able to dedicate any time to reading, and now my comics are on there as well! So if you’ve been wanting to read my archives but haven’t known where to start, now you can.

It lets you start reading at any point, as well, so if you want to start with a particular series, just go to my archive page, select the series you want to start with, and use its first comic as the start date for the Archive Binge feed.

Anyway, while you’re there, I’d also recommend using it to catch up on Templar, Arizona and featuring Talking Guinea Pigs!. There are a few dozen other comics that I haven’t had a chance to check out yet, either. I’m sure there’ll be something there you like.

Why must you keep on making even the most implausible (and arguably scary) aspects of my science fiction feasible?

(Next step, programming a platypus via sparkle electroreception…)

Between me being busy this whole weekend and my usual wrist problems, I haven’t been able to work on comics much (aside from today’s journal comic, obviously).

Not only did all three updates happen last week, they happened every week this month, and there was also a bonus “random” and a sketchbook on top of that. That’s pretty rare for me, so I’m pleased about it.

My copy of the latest Ratchet and Clank game finally arrived and I’ve been itching to play it. Knowing how the previous one went, I am not likely to get anything else done this weekend, including comics.

I’ve mentioned this before, but within the next few months, Unity will be ending. I have decided that when it does, I will provide some options for a “collection” version. For various reasons that I won’t go into, it seems natural to me that it should be released initially as a DRM-free ebook of some sort. So here are the options I am thinking of:

• A .cbz of all the strips as they appeared on the website, for $1
• A .cbz of all the strips at my full working resolution, with the various text layout errors corrected, and with chapter title cards and extra “author’s notes” for $3
• A .zip of all the strips' original .PSD files, as well as the previous option, for $15. This is for the obsessives who want to see all of the Easter eggs that I (mostly accidentally) buried behind foreground elements and speech bubbles and so on, or who want to make sprites out of the characters or parody strips or whatever else people can think of that would benefit from having the separated layers. (These would require Photoshop CS3 or later to look correct, but they’ll at least be semi-functional in anything that supports layers and the PSD format, such as GIMP, Pixelmator, etc.)

If there is enough interest in a print edition I’d probably go the Lulu route, although setting that up would be a huge amount of work and, if it’s in color (which is important to the story), it would also be enormously expensive, so that seems like something of a last resort.

Just to keep things simple for me, I’d probably use Dreamhost Files Forever, although its UI kind of sucks. If anyone knows of another digital file fulfillment system that lets me just set a price on files and have them provided to people when they pay money, I’d be open to suggestions (including something that uses the Google Checkout API or whatever).

I’d appreciate any feedback.

I must say, it’s pretty amazing that Smarasderagd took the time to reverse-engineer the font I use for spoken Homin text (Blambot’s “Miskatonic”) and then used it to figure out what Juni was mumbling on this strip. Of course, it would have been a lot easier to just enter [Homin text] and have me fill it in at my discretion, but it’s the fact people are willing to take that extra little bit of effort which makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

I will be a guest in attendance at the Cartoon Art Museum’s Webcomic-Con 2009 on December 12 from 11:00 AM to 1:00 PM. I will probably just be there with my laptop and Wacom tablet and will work on comics or something and chat with all the people who have never heard of me before. Maybe I’ll bring a netbook with the entire Unity archive or something. Who knows.

Anyway, if you’re in or near San Francisco and want to meet me in person, come on over and check it out. There will also be many much better cartoonists there, and of course the CAM itself is pretty neat.

Goodness, what’s this?

So, it’s that time of year again: The Webcomic List awards time. I would appreciate it if people were to nominate my comics for such a silly thing. If pressed for categories, I’d suppose that you could consider it for best comic (as if), best writing, best color art, most improved, best longform (specifically for Unity), and whichever character awards you think are appropriate.

I would, of course, not be so gauche as to self-nominate, especially since that is not allowed. I will be nominating other comics, however, but my specific choices will be a secret.

I have Friday’s comic written and laid out and so on, but tomorrow I will be busy with work trying to put some finishing touches on an important demo for Big Boss and I might not have a chance to finish it. If it’s late, I’ll hopefully get it up Friday evening, or worst case I’ll finish (and post) it during the CAM webcomics convention on Saturday.

Luprand was recently kind enough to review Unity. As a warning, the review does include a few things that I would consider somewhat minor spoilers (in that he straightforwardly explains things that I would have hoped a reader would figure out on their own), but still, it’s a nice review. He posts other good reviews as well, and is well worth subscribing to in your RSS aggregator of choice.

I did a layout-breaking guest comic for lastres0rt, in case you’re interested.