busybee comics

Today’s Unity is #242, and begins the epilogue proper; #255 will be the last one. Feel free to, I dunno, make guest art, talk about the story in the forum, ask questions about things that happened previously, or whatever.

As I’ve said before, though, just because Unity (the series) will be over doesn’t mean there won’t be any more stories set in Unity (the ship). I have a few ideas banging around for other stories set in their universe, although for now I’m looking forward to working on something else for a while. Whatever I do will, of course, continue to be published right here on this very site/RSS feed/LJ syndication/whatever.

One of the biggest misconceptions that people have about the comment threads here is about having to register to post comments; since comments are handled by a forum, people tend to assume that they have to register to post, which is not the case. I’m finally pulling in some of the code from my blog to try to display comments inline as part of an entry, which I think makes it less obvious that it’s a forum and makes it more obvious that anyone can post a comment.

Obviously there’s a lot of kinks to work out but I’m working on it. I wanted to get the functionality in place first. So, let me know if something particularly baffling happens; for example, I’m sure that somewhere in the archives there’s some comics which have a colliding “basename” and so they’ll try to have their comment pages at the same URLs as each other. This is yet another artifact of how my Movable Type hacks work. Fortunately, it’s pretty easy to resolve. But there may be other technical problems as well. We’ll see.

(Edit: According to SELECT entry_basename,count(entry_id) AS n FROM mt_entry WHERE entry_blog_id=5 GROUP BY entry_basename ORDER BY n ASC; there shouldn’t be any colliding page names, at least.)

I’d appreciate if some folks could help out. Normally I’d do a bunch myself but my wrists are crapping out again.

In other news, the remaining Unity script is now fixed in place, aside from the minor edits that always happen when I do the layout. It will definitely be ending with #255. At the current rate, that puts it at about February 3 (assuming I don’t have a post schedule slip or a bunch of must-do journal comics that push Unity back or whatever). So if you want to make any guest art to run after Unity completes, February 3 would be an excellent target! You can of course email it to me at fluffy[at]beesbuzz[dot]biz or send me a PM via the forum or whatever.

I thought maybe I’d try doing all of the last 5 in one week but I definitely don’t have the time to pull that off. I apologize in advance for the weekend splitting the coda up oddly.

That’s it for Unity. Right now I have a bit of a backlog of journal comics I want to draw, and I’d also like to take a bit of a break from drawing comics so I can focus more on my music (it is time for FAWM!), but I’m pretty sure to have a lot of other comic stuff coming down the pike, including more stories about Icarus 184-31A. I hope you’ll stick around to see it!

Working on Unity was a great pleasure. I learned a lot about my artistic process, character construction, plotting, and dialog, and I think I’ve grown a lot as an artist over the last few years (and not just in the way Wii Fit keeps admonishing me for). I’m surprised it worked out as well as it did, and how different it turned out from where I started and where I expected it to go. My characters kept me guessing right up until the end.

Eventually I’ll decide how I want to go about dealing with value-added versions; I see no point to selling a .cbz of “as it appeared on the site” (since people can always just use the series browser if they want to read it straight through), but I’ll definitely want to do a full-resolution .cbz (which would be a lot of work to put together) as well as an ultra-special archive of all my source files, various notes, etc. Both of those are going to be pretty big, though, and will fill the better part of a CD and a DVD, respectively, so I’m not sure if a digital storefront is the way to go just yet. We’ll see.

The new series is Pernicious, only done how I originally intended it (cartoony, tropey, and self-referential). Please enjoy.

I hate to do this to everyone, especially so soon into a new(ish) series, but there probably won’t be a comic for Monday, since I have to do some last-minute family-related travel over the weekend.

UPDATE: Monday is safe. The rest of the week may be in peril but I’ll probably be fine.

This is a Unicode representation of how much pain I’m in combined with how much other stress I’m under right now: ●

Similarly, this is about how much I care about making a decent comic right now in light of that: .↑ (The arrow is just a visual aid to help you find it)

Can I get you anything? A sandwich? Maybe a nice hot cup of pesto?

I am guessing that my recent comics aren’t terribly interesting, what with the total lack of transcriptions. Oh well.

I’m cleaning up some of the site template code, so if you notice anything weird (broken RSS links, disappearing transcriptions, etc.) let me know.

Sorry for the less-frequent updates lately. I’ve been pretty busy with things that aren’t comics lately (mostly work and having a social life for a change).

I mentioned this on Twitter quite a while ago but forgot to mention it here: if you really want to ask me questions in the web 2.0 style, here you go.

but real life got in the way of getting it done until now. Cliffhanger chapter endings don’t work so well when they come on a Monday.

If you want to make your own fonts, this Flash app is pretty darn neat. I’ve been using it to finally make a phonetic Hiero font (just a basic pixel one for now but I’m still learning to use it effectively). It hides a lot of power in a pretty simple interface.

I finally got around to adding numbers to all of the past Unity strips' titles, which is something I’d been meaning to do for a while. Everything looks okay but if you notice something funky, let me know.

Since switching to a WebKit-based browser, I’ve been pretty annoyed at how the transcript popup works compared to how it was in Firefox, and really the old approach was kind of sub-par anyway. The new way should be a bit more clear, especially with regards to transcripts that are missing, and also the old inline-popup thing made Google search results less useful, especially in light of the transcript now always being on the entry’s comment page anyway. I know this is just a bunch of rambling that just amounts to yet another “let me know if something is broken” newspost but, yeah, that.

It’s been pointed out to me that some people might be lost trying to read Planetfall without having read Unity first.

Obviously, I’d prefer people to get up to speed by reading it (or at least the textual recap), but if they just want to know what the setting is, there’s a quick primer that explains the setting and, if you want, the major plot points of Unity devoid of any story.

If you count sketchbook/filler entries, today’s comic is the 500th posted to this site! To celebrate, I’ve changed the little “buffer” box at the bottom of the page to track the number of comics instead so that these milestones don’t go as easily unnoticed.

EDIT: Although that also counts guest art. That doesn’t seem quite right to me. So we haven’t hit 500 yet — but we will soon, since I haven’t gotten a lot of guest art! (That was not intended as a passive-aggressive hint but feel free to act on it anyway.)

Thank you. I appreciate every single one of you.

If you could, though, please spread the word. Just tell one friend or one forum or make one Twitter post about how much you like my comics. It doesn’t have to be glowing or even positive — just anything that causes people to maybe look at my stuff, and decide that they like it, or hate it, or have any sort of reaction to it at all. It would mean a lot to me.

Thanks.

I decided to fiddle a bit with how I draw my self-portrayal’s plaid. In my mind it was always red and black, but my quick-and-easy technique made it so that it would be red and dark-red. But I decided to experiment with a slight modification which makes it come out red-and-black.

For comparison’s sake, here’s how the old plaid looks and here’s the new style.

(Oh and I keep forgetting to draw the horns so I think that I am officially calling it quits on those. They were cute while they lasted, though.)

OhNoRobot has been pretty good and all, but they have some built-in load-limiting stuff that apparently makes all transcription buttons disappear when their site is under too heavy load. Unfortunately, this seems to always kick in during the times of day that people are actually trying to transcribe my comics. So transcriptions have fallen way behind.

I should just write my own, but I am lazy.

So, what do you think about this shorter-arc format? I think it works a lot better for me, personally.

If you want a full-resolution version of the last comic without dialog (for desktop wallpaper or whatever), here you go (and here’s a massive 32-bit PNG version).

A bunch of time commitments (both work and music stuff) is in the way of me making comics, so if anyone wants to make guest art/comics/whatever for next week, feel free to email them to me and I will almost definitely post them, as long as they are SFW and avoid English-language profanities.

Planetfall finished up just when I was getting very busy with otherthings. It’s taking me a little longer than expected to recover from those other things. Hopefully I’ll be starting my comics up again soon.

In the meantime, why not draw some guest art?

Jamie Noguchi, the talented graphic designer who draws Yellow Peril, is trying to get funding for Puppy Cow, an adorable yet udderly terrifying plush toy. This is certainly worth creating a Kickstarter account for if you haven’t already.

I was working on more Pernicious to distract myself from some pending bad news, but the bad news came faster than I expected. So it might be a little while before this goes any further. Probably just as well since I only have three more laid out and I have no idea where this chapter’s going yet aside from how it’s supposed to end.

As always, I’d appreciate any guest art (especially comics) that people want to send my way.

I’ve been far too exhausted to work on comics. I know this sounds like a glitchy loop pedal now but I would still welcome guest comics or fanart or whatever.

Yeah, it’s been a month since my last comic. Yeah, I suck. I’ve been busy. I’m still busy.

This next story is only 10 strips long, and I will attempt to get it all posted over the next two weeks, Monday thru Friday. It’s also a bit racier than my usual fare. I hope you enjoy it!

I have proven to myself that I can do daily updates. I have also proven to myself that just because I can doesn’t mean I should. Time to go soak my wrists in hot water for a week.

Time kind of slipped away from me, and I got busy with work and music projects. I’ve had a few Unity stories pinging around in my head for a while, and maybe I’ll get around to doing one soon since I’ve got a whole bunch of free time coming up soon. (Plus, I hardly want my TDOR comic to be the first thing people see for another month…)

This is one of the stories that’s been pinging around in my head for a while.

I decided I didn’t like how obtrusive some of the ads were in the RSS feed, and it’s not like they were really getting me anything, so I’ve removed them. Let me know if you see anything broken etc. etc.

Although that’s only for people who are using the direct RSS feed, rather than the FeedBurner feed. I actually would prefer if everyone just moved to the direct feed (http://beesbuzz.biz/d/rss.php). I’d discontinue the FeedBurner feed except that a lot of people still use that one, and FeedBurner/Google love themselves some lock-in and make it very difficult to transition people away gracefully (since it’s not really in their best interests to lose all that potential advertising revenue from a comic that has all of 75 readers). I’ve turned down the ad obtrusiveness on FeedBurner as far as it will go but I don’t see any way to disable the ads outright anymore.

If I do end up discontinuing the FeedBurner feed I’ll be sure to let everyone know.

I’m proverbially going home for the holidays (or, literally, to my parents' house) from the 24th thru the 30th, and it’s both unlikely that I’ll have a full buffer of comics scheduled in time and likely that I’ll be unable to work on comics much while I’m there. So don’t go nuts if I fail to keep my comics updated next week.

I haven’t had time to work on comics themselves, although I did upgrade the aging Movable Type 3.36 I had before to 5.0. I don’t like the new user interface. It seems to be hyper-optimized for the sorts of things that I’ve never actually used a CMS for, and makes simple site management a pain in the butt (and also wants to manage EVERYTHING, not just the entry text). Also, it’s freaking unstable from the admin panel (update: turns out I was running out of memory, which was easy to fix by removing a couple of templates that I don’t actually use). Very annoying. I might actually just get around to writing my own dang CMS since it’s not like the upgrade has fixed the duct-tapiness of it all (although I can probably simplify my templates somewhat, at least).

Anyway, I’m heading back to San Francisco on the 30th (i.e. today) so hopefully updates will start again soon.