Naturally the next step was to spend 4 hours trying to figure out how to set up some git repositories on the internets. Most of which were either crazy complex or required money to avoid the crazy complex bits. But I didn’t want to pay money to people  just so that other people can’t see how bad my code is <_<

Then I found you can just use dropbox as your master repository then use dropbox magic to put it on the internets. Supposedly there is potential issues if you have more then one or two extra people pushing to a dropbox repository but I’ll cross that bridge if and when I cross it.  For now heres the code  to do it so I can find it whenever I set up new projects

~/project $ git init

~/project $ git add .
~/project $ git commit -m “first commit”
~/project $ cd ~/Dropbox/git
~/Dropbox/git $ mkdir project.git
~/Dropbox/git $ cd project.git
~/Dropbox/git $ git init –bare
~/Dropbox/git $ cd ~/project
~/project $ git remote add origin
~/Dropbox/git/project.git
~/project $ git push origin master

Then you can do a clone from the dropbox to wherever on any other computers you set up.

Theres also a cool script to do this with the command git dropbox but I can’t seem to get it to work. https://github.com/agnoster/git-dropbox

I think most of why I like this is its kind of a hack. I would probably still use it over other solutions just for that fact. I suppose things like github have the built in bug trackers and pretty web ui which are cool, but where do you put the duct tape?

So in an attempt to carve out my own little spot of the my servers virtual landscape I first thought to use the colorful blocks of minecraft to make giant islands of sprites, you know sort of a virtual Dubai. But I am a comic artist at heart, and when I told friends I was planning on making a comic inside minecraft and they groaned, I knew I had a winning idea.

The comic was a pretty simple idea as it needed to be given the built in limitations of the engine. a more complex comic would have needed to be bigger and building one of this modest size was still a considerable time sink. It measures 30 blocks across and 19 blocks high. For reference to non minecraft players, your character is 2 blocks high. so in game it looks impressively big. If I had it to do again I would swap panel 1 and 2 to make the punchline stronger but I don’t think I will fix it in game because its a lot of work.

I found this comic really creatively satisfying to create. I think its because its a really limited media, and the limitations are inspiring creative ways to work within them. The technical challenges of getting it built were fun in themselves. I had to use graph paper in order keep track of which blocks needed to go where, while I was building the comic it was impossible to actually see what I was building, my view was restricted to just what blocks where on the top of the stack while I was standing on them. The hardest part was dealing with the day/night cycle. I guess it was a bit like a real construction project in that sense, except that even if I had found a solution to properly light it to see I still ran the risk of creepers coming along and destroying my monument to them.

The build would have been drastically simplified if instead of building it tall I had made it flat on the ground. I would have then been working on the face of the comic and seen what I was doing. It also would make tweaking it easier, the skin tone was made of sand one of the few blocks that have a sense of gravity so editing the face meant a lot of extra work as erasing a sand block meant the other sandblocks moved down and I had to delete the entire column. I also would have died a lot less building it.

However I think I would have missed out on my next minecraft comic idea. I want to take advantage of the fact that when you look at the comic from the opposite side then what was intended you see a mirror copy of the comic to do something clever. I want to make a comic where it can be read from either side and still work as a comic. Thats pretty close to the ultimate use of the tool, before I start needing to learn how to work with logic gates. I guess I could also have taken advantage of the 3d nature of the game to make something like the explosion in 3d but thats just kind of tacky really.

And then one day maybe I’ll make comics on paper again.

I dunno how hulu does it but it always matches the perfect ads tailored for me. Clearly i should rush to the store to get me some monastat

What then followed was a flurry of activity from spam bots. Its not uncommon to get spammers @replying you when you use keyword laden tweets. What seemed unusual abou this tweet was I got four spams in rapid succession. It was 2 in the morning so spammers were probably the only one who even saw that tweet the first time. But it inspired an idea for a game. The premise is simple, how many spams can you get from a single tweet, without the tweet being meaningless on its own.

The rules are a bit more complicated to pin down because the mechanisms behind the tweet bots are still a bit unpredictable. I tried repeating the tweet earlier today to attempt to see if I would get similar result. I still got a spam tweet, but only the one. without the results being repeatable it certainly loses a lot of the fun factor in crafting the perfect storm tweet to destroy your messagebox. I still think there is something here though that could be a lot of fun. possibly. I need a lot more data though.

Anyone else wanna play with me? For now you can just post your best score in the comments along with any suggestions. I guess were on the honor system as tweet bots don’t @reply to the tweet itself usually but just to the user directly so there isn’t the metadata linking spams to specific tweets even if I knew how to pull that info.

I think I’m doing ok for a first attempt but I see obvious room for improvement. Today’s strip for instance was really a clumsy way to set it in motion. Honestly that page was destined to be weak. I wanted to abort from the storyline and that planet and get to the ship asap. I need to learn to make story bridges funnier. The rest of the week I should be able to inject more of my personality into. I get to introduce a new set of characters, who are function as one entity. The needlessly mysterious people who paid for the ship. collectively reffered to as ‘the company’ I have ideas as to the peoples true identities, which is helping me write for them. But likely they will change before they were revealed. I mean if they are revealed. Thats way down the line I see as I currently see no reason that they would ever need to be shown. At least not until I’ve had all the fun with them I can.

Included the first page of thumbnails I did. I don’t really think there is any major spoilers in the doodles. I don’t think they are intelligible to anyone who is not me.

Its actually inspired further changes. I’ve finally decided I need to put up a single page to gather all my projects. I like to go where my creative passion leads and even people who want to follow what I’m up to have a pretty hard time. My hope is that this will help.

Ideally I would just learn to keep projects I start going. But where is the fun in that?

The issue is that the answers are rarely (if ever) provided by anyone who is anything approaching an expert, often its just by people looking to post things because there is profit sharing involved in it.  Most savy people just regard all of these as spam, and I’m inclined to agree.  For whatever isn’t easily found online, I’m competent enough to go find at a library.  Going to a library is sort of my last resort though, because although I do have a love for books, my dyslexia limits our relationship.

So I am endeavoring to build a better search engine, luckily it turns out google has tools to allow me to accomplish this. http://www.google.com/cse/. Which I plan to exploit to the fullest. Currently its just the start of a blacklist of q&a sites, though I do have other plans to further tune the results once I figure out how the tools all work.

You can play with my custom search here

currently blacklisted:

http://about.com

http://answers.yahoo.com

http://www.blurtit.com

http://yedda.com/

http://www.answerflip.com/

http://www.faqalert.com/

http://www.fluther.com/

http://qna.rediff.com/

http://www.askmehelpdesk.com/

http://www.linkedin.com/answers

http://www.mahalo.com/answers/

http://askville.amazon.com/

http://www.anybodyoutthere.com/

http://wiki.answers.com/

http://www.answerbag.com/

Its functional now, from what I understand. If you want to lob suggestions at me especially of sites in need to be blacklisted, you can post them in the comments.  Also, I found out I can add people to the team so you can contribute directly though it might be to a more limited way the documentation is not entirely clear…  If your interested in that I just need to know your google account email so I can send you the invite.

I don’t know why but I feel like babbling about things i learned making my new site.

The first thing I decided to do was remove practically every trace of a calendar because I don’t think that thing has ever done me any favors. I don’t know what good it does even for a person who does update consistently. In the extreme cases you get No Pink Ponies where every update is further and further backdated into the past. He’s now about two years behind his schedule and it’s just really awkward for everyone involved. It would be would crushing to be putting up new content and making it out to be that old. I dunno how he does it.

Stumble Upon, I am beginning to see why people love this site as a marketing tool. A single person sharing the site generates a noticeable amount of incoming people. Almost all my traffic for chrono loran is coming from there. The rest is direct hits which is mostly me fiddling with the site. Compared to deviant art which is a pain to post stuff to and no one ever really clicks through to the website. In fact I saw an informal poll on the site that dA users overwhelmingly preferred reading their comics via deviant art which i don’t understand at all. It was something like 90% that voted that they wanted it on da over anything else. There was something like 600 votes for it when i saw it so it has some statistic use. Twitter has been even worse for me, which is surprising as it seems like a perfect fit. But the conversation amongst comic people is surprisingly one way. What I’m learning is that although many many people use the web comic and comic hash it apparently does nothing but make them feel like they are doing things.

I always forget how many people do things and then don’t even think to see if its doing anything for them. It seems insane. So I’ll probably go back to being light on the twitter hey new comic posts as the only people interested will already see it from somewhere else. I mean except the time Nikki somehow lost my rss feed…

All in all Chrono Loran may be the first website I actually finish building including making those superfluous character pages. What a weird concept.

Meanwhile most of my other projects have been grinding to a halt. Possibly for the best reason possible. My art style has been changing pretty substantially, as i’ve made a breakthrough regarding sketchbooks. I’ve started to use them to you know sketch like crazy. I used to let the fear of ‘ruining’ my sketchbook with terrible sketches keep me from using them for much at all. But now i’m filling up all the half filled sketchbooks I own like a mad man.

Interestingly enough, the one Character I’ve managed to complete the design of is the one giving me the most trouble writing. Maria is hard to write because I don’t really have a lot of experience with the sort of thing that she would consider driving forces. The natural instinct of this kind of character is just to make her violent and hit people a lot. I guess because its cute when women hit people who are being stupid. Its a horrid cliche and actually seems like it is exactly the sort of thing Maria would fight against. And even though i still see this as a collaboration project, I don’t want to bug Nikki with every retarded question, just every other one. The only thing I can think to do with her is make her completely ineffective. You know a bit like Starscream. Which I say despite knowing the one person who comments on the blog isn’t into transformers and the only possible ones she would have seen is the shitty bay movies. But I don’t care because its the perfect characterization of her.

Starscream is also a scientist and Maria can transform into a jet. See perfect metaphor!