Yep I’ve been inactive, creativity-wise…and actually reading the last thing I wrote here, whoo that’s a bit maudlin. Well, these days I’m a lot better, but instead of going the “okay! I’m going to create things again!” route, I appear to have gone the “you know, maybe it doesn’t bother me if I don’t create things” route.

I appreciate the concern and appreciation of those of you who had written things here. Thanks. I’ve spent a fair amount of time in the last few months thinking about…oh, the point of it all, I guess. Creatively I think I’ve historically been driven by a need to be heard, to be appreciated, and to get an audience; but I’m coming around to the question, do I really need to? And I’m kinda thinking no. Which for me, in terms of the typical turmoil in my head, is a good thing, because the turmoil’s been pretty calm lately, and I’m thinking of my life less as stresses I create to force myself in certain directions, and more as taking myself in directions because I feel like it.
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Think it’s time to put Scribs on hiatus again. It’s been a long time since I’ve really been inspired to draw anything, and I’m kinda in the process of learning that you can’t just wait around for inspiration, but…well I’m saying it’s time. I started drawing an arc that I haven’t finished, but you’ll see that it even feels like a farewell thing. Or maybe that’s what it turned into, or…I’m not sure. My relationship with characters I draw tends to be a little complex, I forget a little if I’m the chicken or the egg.
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I went a bit out of sequence with this Scribs; I still have three more comics for the Nina arc to do, but I had this idea that I worked on over the weekend that I wanted to publish.

For years and years I’ve had this idea of a comic set up in a grid format, such that you can start from the top left, and go either right or down from each panel, with the strip still making sense in whichever order you choose. I never really took a shot at it because my thought process generally went:

1) hey, that grid idea
2) whoo, tough
3) lunch

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One of my stats things says I have 400 readers. If it’s to be believed, I mean…I guess that’s good? Right?

Doing another Ustream tonight, probably for not more than an hour. My mom will likely be present, so take that. tonight I’m going to be coloring Scribs I’ve drawn. Hopefully three, but I probably can’t do that many in an hour, because these particular ones are more complicated than usual.

http://www.spinnwebe.com/ustream/

I’m ridin’ the Ustream train that the kids are all loopy about these days. If you have a particularily boring time pencilled in for 10pm EST this Wednesday, I’m going to be live streaming formatting a “see also” comic that I’ve been meaning to get to for a while.

http://www.spinnwebe.com/ustream/

By “C2E2″, I mean the Chicago Comic and Entertainment Expo. And by “appearing”, I mean moving boxes and things, because I’m volunteering to be an unpaid lackey for three days.

Not sure what I was thinking. I signed up four months ago when I was getting Scribs into swing and had some fanciful notion that I was going to get more involved in the comics community, but now I pretty much don’t care.

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I’ve had a massive programmer’s block over the last three weeks, but finally I got somewhere and the biggest part of my admin program is done. Which is good, because my brain decided if I didn’t get this part done over the weekend, I was going to have to draw comics of myself explaining the situation until I did get it done, and none of us would want that.

I can’t show it to you as it exists, but I wanna show it off a bit so here are a few screencaps of it in “action”. The questions editor would be even harder to illustrate this way, and anyway I got six screencaps done and got bored, so that’s it. Though I should probably figure out some way of doing a video cap.

Though now that I’ve finally been able to schedule them, I learn that I have enough comics to update until about August 16, which is a week under six months. Which means that since I’ve started in the beginning of January, I’ve only lost one week’s worth of backlog.

Which is pretty cool, but I realized I have to start scheduling comics I’m currently drawing to the end of the queue, because otherwise I’m just going to push older ones back farther and farther until I’m embarrassed to publish them.

<spinn> I’ve been calling her “pinch face” for like three years now, the story finally needed to be told
<spinn> man just imagine that going lips-first into limbaugh’s airspace
<spinn> “CHLOE KISS RUSH LIMBAUGH NOW!” “I KNOW jack I am TRYING to do that you KEEP interRUPTing me” mwwwwaaahhhh
<Craig> I think her main tactic in doing her job is just to scowl the required data straight the fuck out of the mainframe

First, I almost want to apologize for today’s comic being another Half Life 2 ref (well, tangentially, anyway) so soon after the last one. But I liked the fact that I could say I drew the last two weeks’ worth of updates recently, rather than using up my backlog. I was worried that I would draw months’ worth of comics and just let ‘em pop out on their own and wonder what the hell I’m gonna do when they run out, but fortunately I still seem to be drawing occasionally.

Though I’m trying out drawing teeth in my cartoon mouths, which I don’t typically do, and it feels weird. I feel like I drew dentures on myself.

It wasn’t until after #249 went live that I realized I’ve probably been staring at these ads for too long. I wonder if the next Scribs in that series is going to be about a magical fuzzhat, or something.

I got a few entries for that non-contest I started last week! Which is cool, though I will tell you that if it was a contest, I’d totally be winning.

Man am I amused about this comic. Possibly because I spent a lot of time refining it. Usually the first draft is pretty nearly the final, but on this one I screwed up words, art, and the punchline on the first pass, and it’s probably the most overly-edited Scribs to date. But I’m really glad I did, because that “thank you” about knocks me over every time I read it. I’ve been bouncy about this one for the last day and a half, glad I finally got to publish it.


In other comic news, I randomly ran into this comic, where the artist drew something but kind of had some difficulty working out the details. I decided to punch it up a bit. It was actually more fun than I’d expected. If you’d like to give it a try yourself, here’s the blank version, and if you get any good ones, post a link here, or upload it to my SpinnWebe facebook page maybe? I think users can upload there, though no one’s tried yet, as far as I know.

There are a number of times in my life I’ve seen some grumpy guy go on a whole rant about how a given community is against him, or doesn’t let in new people, or shuns what’s different etc, and that’s why he’s being treated unfairly. And I’d think calm down, man, you just have to try to be part of the group instead of fighting against it. So now I think karma is starting to mold me into that guy.

My latest aggravation on that front is Reddit. I know it’s not meant to be my own personal comic advertisement machine, but hell, there are “share on Reddit” buttons everywhere on the web, and I think my comics are good, so I share them. (In fact I don’t share all of them, just the ones that I think are pretty good.) I shared Figure 4 which I thought was pretty good, and it scores 1 to 3 points depending when you load the page, which I don’t get, but it suggests around 8-ish people voted it up and 6-ish people voted it down. And I was like, man, tough crowd.
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I like to look at Scribs’ ratings on Alexa occasionally, and I see that the site is in the top 2 million sites on the planet. And in the last week, it’s in the top 1 million. Nevermind that Alexa says that any rankings under 100,000 are unreliable…I’m clawing my way up to statistical relevance!

Also, in Top Online Comics (voting link to the right), I’m currently #6, which is kinda cool, but mostly because barely anyone’s using it and it’s mainly on the strength of my home-Starbucks-work voting, but what the hey.

Also!
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For some reason I feel the need to explain the See Also updates more than actual Scribs. Well, maybe not “explain” exactly…ah hell I just like chattin’.

Figure 4 happened at work. Heard that as a guy was walking by in a hallway. Was a very “if it weren’t for my horse” moment for me, but instead of getting eight months’ worth of standup out of it, I got a Tuesday update.

Figure 5 was after Debb and I got supermarket sushi (“what, the gas station was fresh out?” Craig asked). I opened it up and there was a really pointlessly small amount of wasabi in it. “Geez, lookit this,” I said to her. She looks and says, “that’s rude.” And that was when I decided I should take it personally. That was an insulting amount of wasabi.

Comment I just found in my comic update scripts, that I forgot I wrote last week.

function doSingleUpdate($data, $update_time = 0) {

/* while this is all about inserting comics, I'm generally assuming I'm just inserting one at the end of the current comic list. not really planning on inserting a new one in the middle of previously released comics. if I want to do that I can do it manually for fuck's sake, why am I like worrying about this like it's air traffic control */