busybee comics: Ascent

So, now you can comment on individual comics and news posts. (Actually I didn’t intend for news posts to be commentable but I goofed and the threads ended up getting created anyway, so I figured I’d might as well make them accessible everywhere.) So now at least forumbot posts to the forum.

(so lonely)

I’m looking into ways to better-integrate comments into the site itself, and also means of making it so you don’t have to register for the forum (while not allowing people who want to sell Vioxx and Thalidomide and whatever to leave their spammy crap everywhere).

ARGH the last six strips I’ve done have all been in the same room and that is SO BORING TO DRAW and will probably be even more boring to read. At least you won’t see that for two weeks though but STILL. (The end result is I’ve really skimped on my backgrounds and really I don’t think things suffer for it. Maybe you will disagree.)

They are what take so long on Unity, and they are totally un-fun to do. Guh.

I’ve been busy lately. Just not with the comic.

This latest comic came down to the wire for lateness (and I even had a run-in with Photoshop crashing and me losing all the coloring). Not that it really matters or anything.

I kind of lost my energy for doing comics for a while, but then I got some encouragement and helpful advice from an unlikely source. (Thanks, Dan!)

Of course, this is still just something I do for fun in my spare time and other aspects of life still have me devoting my energy elsewhere, so it’ll probably be a while before I get back to three comics a week.

I’ve come up with some pretty darn good (at least, I think they are) ideas for Unity (to follow along after the current mini-plot which I actually wrote a couple months ago) and now I actually have quite a bit scripted (about 12 strips, plus sketches for where it goes after that). So much for the “completely make it up as I go along” ideal. (Actually I think this will help things a lot since having a more concrete idea of where to take it is definitely helpful.)

For those who care, I’ve put up a fairly detailed look at how I make my comics. It doesn’t discuss the parts where I get drunk and/or depressed over my general ineptitude.

Sorry to everyone who reads by RSS and was just spammed with EVERY SINGLE COMIC EVER MADE. I was tweaking my RSS template and messed up.

I’ve been fighting off a bad sinus infection turned bronchitis for the last few days, so I haven’t felt like working on comics for a while. Sorry to keep my readers hanging! (Both of you.)

Okay, I’m sort of drawing again (even though I still haven’t moved yet). I think from now on, whenever I finish a strip, I’ll just schedule it to appear as soon as there’s a day that there isn’t already a strip (i.e. immediately if there was no strip that day, or the first midnight which doesn’t already have a strip), rather than trying to do things based on an even-keeled buffer with a publication schedule and so on. Everyone reads via RSS or LiveJournal anyway (and if you don’t, you should!) and by having too much of a forward buffer it actually has the opposite of the intended effect because I start to procrastinate.

(nt)

A comic! I must finally be getting settled into my new place.

For some reason (probably due to me updating from a very slow connection — Movable Type hates that), the RSS feed didn’t get checked by Livejournal or Google Reader any time between the 9/15 and 9/17 updates. Bizarre. The upshot of this is that depending on how your feed reader is set up, you may have missed some stuff.

Sometimes it’s hard to tell. I hate to be all “wah post in the forum” and stuff, but could people please post in the forum? (You don’t even have to register or anything, in case that wasn’t obvious.)

What’s good? Bad? Indifferent? Is the story too obvious, too obtuse? What aspects should I focus on? I have a very clear path in mind for what’s going to happen — and I want to know I’m on the right one.

Also, what about site things? Obviously I changed the name of the sub-site, and I’ve also tinkered with some navigation things. Is there anything else I can do to make things a bit better? Should I drop the global “jump to beginning” button since it no longer really makes any sense? (Should it just go to the series list?)

How can I help you to enjoy this?

I haven’t been getting much sleep lately and I haven’t really felt like working on Unity so much. I’ve been working on other things instead.

Obviously I do have time to work on the comic again.

By the way, I’d like to express my deep appreciation to Smarasderagd, who has been doing a quite diligent job of transcribing comics pretty soon after they’re posted.

Okay, OhNoRobot is having too many problems lately, and I’d rather have the transcription accessible directly on my site anyway. Does anyone know of any decent self-hosted transcription tools? (If not I guess I could write my own which is probably easier for me to deal with anyway, but, meh.)

Due to other time commitments I don’t think I’ll be able to update the comic regularly for a while. Sorry!