busybee comics

Sorry for not posting any comics in a while. Real life and other hobbies have been keeping me busy. I do have a pretty thorough outline of the third (and final!) book of Unity but I’m afraid to start drawing it because holy cow is it ambitious.

But I’m looking forward to doing it all the same.

I went and finally made it so that I can put high-resolution (aka HiDPI or retina-ready) graphics on this site. So far I’ve only updated the images for the various Unity series and for a selection of other recent comics.

The way it’s implemented is, as is always the case with these things, a little bit hackish, so if you’re noticing anything particularly weird (like images being doubled, extra stuff being downloaded, or high-resolution images being loaded on normal-DPI screens), please let me know!

So far I haven’t replaced any of the site graphics themselves; that will have to come later, because I actually don’t have high-resolution versions of those assets, so I’ll have to recreate them (or use this as an excuse to make better ones or whatever). But in any case, now comics look a lot better on my Retina MacBookPro and on my iPad.

(Of course this does complicate my publishing workflow so I’ll have to figure out how I want to handle that going forward… bleah.)

Also, this is only on the site itself for now, because I can’t figure out a good way of doing this that’s RSS-compatible. I put in support for the HTML5 draft specification but most browsers don’t support it just yet.

UPDATE: If you would like HiDPI images in the RSS feed, just subscribe to http://beesbuzz.biz/d/rss.php?hidpi=force instead.

So, there’s this thing called Patreon where you can send a few bucks the way of your favorite creators. A few folks have asked me why I don’t have one, so now now I do.

The way it works is that you pledge a certain amount of money for a certain amount of creative output (in my case, every time I post a comic or a song or whatever), and you can set a monthly limit and so on.

To sweeten the deal, Patreon backers will often get stuff before everyone else; for example, when I’m working on music, Patreon gets the tracks first! And, if I ever get in a spot where I actually have a buffer of comics again, Patreon backers will get to see them before they go live on the site. I’ll also eventually set up rewards for the bigger backers, if I can figure out what those rewards should be in the first place.

This doesn’t mean I’m going to start charging for my content or anything. This is just a way for people to send me money for the things I’m already doing anyway, and it is totally optional (and completely understandable if you don’t chip in).

• Busy with work
• Having wrist problems
• Having absolutely no inspiration or motivation to work on comics
• Depressed about all the above

Hopefully things will be changing soon but in the meantime, if you’re still checking my site manually, I highly recommend you get set up with an RSS reader or use the LiveJournal feed or whatever, because otherwise you’ll be checking for nothing.

my wrists are pissing me off

my (soon to be former) employer is pissing me off

photoshop is pissing me off

my webhost is pissing me off

spammers are pissing me off

being pissed at everything is pissing me off

i need a nap

Ugh, I am so out of practice with making comics. But I wrote a bunch of journal comics while I was traveling, so hopefully I can get back in the swing of things.

So, the transcription queue has gotten pretty long. There are two big benefits to clearing it out:

• Having a full set of transcripts on my site drives more search engine traffic here, which in turn gives me more readers which makes me happier as a creator
• Spammers keep on trying to spam me via empty transcription slots for some reason even though their spam will never, ever make it onto the site and even if it does their HTML wouldn’t get rendered right anyway so I don’t see why they keep on bothering and I wish they’d cut it out but they are really, really dumb apparently so in any case if there’s no pending transcriptions I get less spammers making my life miserable

So, please help out by helping out. Thanks!

You’re a deer.

The queue only appeared empty. OhNoRobot was giving Jukka a break, but now it’s started to point out a bunch of comics that are still untranscribed. The horrors!

Everyone, help SuperDeer Jukka me out and get the remaining comics transcribed! The future of the world depends upon it!

I’ve been too busy with my new job and too wrist-sore to work on comics. But it’d been well over a month since the last one so I figured I owed you folks one at least. September 2014 is the first time I’ve missed a month in the archives in a long time and I feel bad about that for some reason.

After going through another round of dissatisfaction with Photoshop I came back around and decided it’s still the least-bad software for my work style. One result of this is that I decided to increase my work resolution again, and also adjusted my templates to try to maximize space and clarity, as well as widening the aspect ratio a little bit. Hopefully these slight adjustments will improve the look and feel of new comics going forward.

I’ve also been experimenting with some different art techniques. Nothing’s really stood out to me as an improvement over what I’ve been doing, but having more tools in my proverbial belt isn’t a bad thing.

I still want to get back to Unity at some point, and I’m quite excited about what I have planned for book 3, but I just don’t have it physically in me to do things right now.

Hi, it’s been a while. I suck, I know, I’m sorry.

I still have a lot of comic-making that I want to do but I’ve been pretty well engaged in my day job and so I haven’t had as much of a drive to work on stuff that isn’t my day job.

Also, all of the stuff I want to do comic-wise is feeling too forced right now, and I just can’t work very well when it isn’t coming naturally. I want to do the best job possible for book 3 of Unity, and that paradoxically makes it difficult for me to do any job at all.

I should at least start posting sketchbook pages again though, since I’m generating a lot of those (at my Thursday drawing group meetings). What do people think about regular sketchdumps? I never like doing those because they just feel like filler to me but maybe that’s something other people actually like seeing. I dunno.

So, nobody objected to the idea of sketchbook dumps, so from now on Sunday will be where I display backlogs of sketchbooks. These are at the very least an easy way to keep my buffer with stuff in them. I have a bunch of weekly posts scheduled until mid-January, and hopefully by the time mid-January rolls around I’ll have drawn in my sketchbooks more.

Even more hopefully, I’ll have actual comics to add in the midst of all this too!

Update: This stuff is now in the sketchbook section