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.

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.

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.

But then I posted Figure 6 a few hours ago, and so far, it’s gotten one vote. Which okay, I guess is kinda early to expect anything, but man. This amzingsuperpowers gets 28 points, and it’s an okay comic, but of course they know amazingsuperpowers so they vote it up. And I wanna complain about this Subnormality but I can’t too much, it’s pretty good. But christ 135 upvotes in the last six hours? That only happens because Reddit loves Subnormality.

But I can almost kinda get along with that—benevolence through popularity is just a human thing, fine—but then I saw Lunar Antics Comics – How Would Aliens View our Society? was linked shortly before mine, and somehow it gets five votes. Five? For that? Maybe because of the talk-to-your-kids angle, because it certainly isn’t for the comic. And it’s not even a link to the comic, it’s basically a link to the blog post advertising its sale on Amazon.

Here’s the comic they give as an example:

Seriously? Formulaic much? This is the silver medal over ventriloquist pervert pants? Just to help you out here, I’ve made the formula somewhat clearer:

Just for the heck of it, I decided to make it a better comic open to lots of interesting possibilities here. It’s not even that great of an attempt but it’s like original comic times eleventy.

Basically I gotta stop thinking of these linking things as useful and keep doing what I’m doing. Which sucks, because that was kind of my pre-hiatus plan, where “just do well” was the #1 to #3: Profit. It’s a good thing I have five months’ worth of Scribs in the wings, because if I had to draw this week’s comics, it wouldn’t happen.

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!

Number of Ryan Norths who said he liked my Scribs ads: one! I saw some bugs in Project Wonderful’s new code, which I sent along to the support address, and he replied with some questions about the bugs and some compliments for my ads: “Thanks for your clever ads – I really like them, and they make the network fun!” I’ve been geeking out over that for the last hour or so.

Hm, reminds me that I gotta get that Jack Pendley page back up, actually.

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.

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 */

Also I’ve signed up for several web comic ranking lists with votes n stuff. I was thinking about getting fully involved with them, but all the vote incentives, watching the numbers, the constant pleading…it’s like trying to sell Amway to your relatives. So I just have them there, and if you feel like clicking through to vote, fine, and thanks. But ain’t no thang.

I’ve had some reactions to the Series Two Scribs art, and responses have been more mixed than I’d expected. It didn’t even occur to me that some people would prefer the previous minimal style over this; I’ve just been thinking of it as “better”. Fortunately I’m at a point where I’m happy with it — usually this feedback would make me all stupid and second guess myself, but nah, I think it’s okay. Actually right now it’s still sloppier than I want, but the later ones are pretty good. Not sure how much time it’s actually going to take to get to those, though.

Oh, and P.S.: for those of you who read the comic via RSS, I’ve decided I’m leaving the comics in the feed. I’ll just have the question answers linked to the site, so you’ll just have to get a taste of the site every so often.