Tuesday, January 22nd, 2002
Well, I had no idea I’d be gone this long from the scene. No, I haven’t given up, and yes, I’ll put something up again soon. In the meantime, this is now my second year in the web comic trade... I’m not giving up my day job. In fact, I’m still searching for a day job, so feel free to contact me if you have any leads you think I could benefit from.
Friday, September 14th, 2001: How to Help
Donate blood, if you can. I know that blood banks are full in many areas, but eventually they will need more; be ready when the banks are ready and give what you can.
http://www.redcross.org/donate/give
Red Cross Phone Numbers
Canada: 1-800-GIVE-LIFE
US: 1-888-2-DONATE
New York Missing Persons: (212) 560-2730
Wednesday, September 12th, 2001: How do you speak of the unspeakable?
Yesterday was a trajedy unparalled by any my generation has faced to date. I wanted to post a message to this site but found myself at a loss - how do you speak on something like this? What words can convey the shock and horror of yesterday’s attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon? I couldn’t think of a single thing. All I’m left with is hope and sympathy for the survivors and those who still have family and friends missing in the aftermath of the assault. I really wish I could express what I’m feeling more strongly, but I try and even after all these hours, I can’t find the words.
Sunday, August 26th, 2001: New Design Launches
This marks the introduction of the new standards-compliant design for October’s Fools. Please, if you have any questions or concerns about it or just want more information about how/why I’ve done this, email me. Certainly feel free to email me if it looks like the CSS design is working but has a glitch or problem that you’d like me to know about.
Friday, August 24th, 2001: Phase 2 Site Redesign Underway
Just a note to those of you lucky enough to be able to reach the Keen* servers that I’m well into completing phase 2 of the site redesign. I’m going with a CSS layout scheme instead of using layout tables as part of an effort to be more true to web standards. I’m making some effort to ensure that people using older browsers will continue to be able to use the site, but you will be much better off if you visit with a more current browser. This link should help you find something that will display the site properly.
I’m also giving Flash a test run; it does the vector graphics I’ve come to favor much more justice than either gif or jpg can do, and allows the comic to be resized dynamically with the browser window, as well as allowing you the viewer to zoom in and out of various parts of the image; no more hard to read text. If it’s too small, just zoom in for a better look. The only .jpg comics you’ll see here from now on are those I did in Photoshop; I tried converting them to Flash, but it was a very painful process and resulted in enormous files that nobody on a modem would want to try downloading.
Monday, August 13th, 2001: October’s Fools Reaches 50,000 Hits
Another glance at the site stats shows me that OF has just reached the 50,000 mark as of the 11th. Thanks for hanging in there with me as I get my act together! As part of trying to get that act together, I’m finally trying to iron out the problems with the website that I’ve been having. Once I have that more or less under control, I’ll be doing some more drawing, and maybe an actual comic or something. ;)
Update: I’ve finished the first round of fixups to the site, and while there are still problems with it, I’m leaving it for the moment to take a break and let ideas stir around in my head. Specific known problems include the Links page, which wasn’t behaving very well last I checked, and a problem with the pages displaying far, far too wide in Mozilla 0.9.2, 0.9.3, and in Netscape 6.1. I also checked the site out with Opera 5, but it seems to display quite nicely in that one, no problems that I’m aware of.
While I was fixing site problems, I took the opportunity to update the cast page with new face shots for Bill and Abby, and several of Brenda - including one drawn by Illiad of User Friendly shortly after I came up with the idea for October’s Fools back in October 2000. It’s pretty cool to have fan art from such a web comic luminary, especially when it predates the actual comic itself.
Update #2: I’ll try to make this the last update for the day. ;) I’ve just changed the Store link to point to my new CafePress storefront, where I’m featuring the ‘Brenda at the Beach’ artwork from August 7th’s comic on several items of merchandise. Get ’em while they’re hot!
Sunday, August 12th, 2001: NetMind Mind-It Service
It occurred to me while marveling at my site stats that despite the fact that OF site traffic didn’t drop a lot during my months of inactivity, it did drop noticably. With that in mind, I signed the site up for NetMind’s Mind-It service. It will enable you to be notified via email whenever the site updates, so you won’t have to worry about missing a new strip.
Wednesday, August 8th, 2001: Random Note Thingies
I’m feeling quite a bit better about OF than I have in a while. Part of this is a re-evaluation of the strip and what I want to do with it, and partly it’s due to my efforts at drawing new parts of it. I’ve also gone back and re-read what I’d done before, and I’ve realized something through all this - writing a comic strip is nothing at all like writing short stories, which is what I’m accustomed to. Looks like I have my work cut out for me... but I can appreciate a good challenge!
It’s a good thing too, I’m still behind on fixing the broken site code.
Yesterday’s comic is the first of the strips I’ve done using Poser as an aid to visualization. I was inspired by Keenspot’s Bikeeni Summer 2001 page, thus the beach scene. For the moment, I’ve settled on this as the art style I prefer; I find it looks better than what I was doing in Photoshop, and I find it easier to do, too. A winning technique all around.
Wednesday, July 18th, 2001: Status Report
Well, I’m back in drawing mode again. I’m not drawing comics right now though; I’m drawing a bunch of images to spark my creativity and get more story ideas flowing. Since I’m going to try and keep this up for a while, I thought I might start posting some of the images I’m coming up with as teasers for things to come, in place of new comics. Watch for the first of these over the next day or two.
Friday, July 6th, 2001: Yeeesh!
Wow. I just looked at my archive pages for the first time in a long time; the site is really showing the symptoms of a hasty original design soon overgrown with new needs. I think it’s time I worked out some of the kinks a bit, no? I looked at it in Mozilla 0.9.2, and suffice to say that if you’re using that browser, you are not reading this text. Heh.
To go along with the HTML tweaking, I should mention that I finally started working on the actual cartoons again. And even better, my hand isn’t suffering too much in the way of undue cramping. No estimate yet on exactly when the next one will be posted, but I’ll get it up as soon as I can... for now, I’m just enjoying the simple act of drawing it.
Wednesday, July 4th, 2001: PayPal International Donations
PayPal has enabled international members to use their webaccept feature, so I’m including a donation button on the site. Naturally, I don’t imagine people will use it until I start putting more comics up, but it’s part of my process of getting myself revved up for a return to comic life; an excuse to work on the website a bit, get back into the habit and so on. Once again, I’d like to thank everyone for bearing with me; I’ve received absolutely no hate mail, which I’m taking as a good sign. :)
Thursday, June 12th, 2001: Breaking the Silence
Okay. I think I’m going to break the silence that has come up lately with a bit of an explanation. Not because I feel I need to, but because I want to. A lot of things have convinced me lately that this was a really lousy year to begin a web comic, but the worst is now behind me. At least, I hope it is. Without going into details, there was a battle with cancer in the family, and it has ended as such battles too often do. With the unpleasantness behind me, I’m looking to October’s Fools and the amazing numbers of viewers it has gotten despite my lack of updating as a perfect means of getting back into a more expressive mode of thinking and acting again. So, with any luck, I’ll start putting new comics up again in the next few weeks.
Saturday, April 27th, 2001: The State of the Onion
Sorry for the lack of recent comics and updates here, but real life has taken a few odd turns that I won’t get into. Suffice to say that I probably picked the wrong year of my life to begin this project, but now that it has begun, I’m not about to give up on it, so here’s what I plan to do about it. I have no idea when things will be calming down to what passes for normal, which means that I pretty much have to give up any pretense at promising when regular updates can begin. So until it happens on its own, I’ll have to update when I can find the time to do it.
Saturday, April 7th, 2001: Eeep!
Well, I’m still kinda sick and this week has been busy as hell. But, the most significant reason for lack of updating this time is all Peter Molyneux’s fault. Damn him and his Black & White game, too! I am sooooooo hooked on this, it’s unbelievable. Really. You’ve got to try it to really see why. I’ll be back to cartooning as soon as I can stop myself from playing...
Saturday, April 1st, 2001: April Fools!
What? Where’s the april fool’s joke? Well, there really isn’t one, unless you want to count the section-heading proclaiming april fools. March didn’t go out as much of a lion up here in Ontario, Canada, but it did leave me a parting gift; some sort of illness or virus or some such thing, which is making my weekend miserable. Rather than spend time whining about that though, I’ll be trying to recover; if I can get a comic up tomorrow, I will. If not, it’ll be Friday.
Saturday, March 31st, 2001: Webcomics From Canada Page Goes Live
I really don’t have much to comment on in the October’s Fools world, beyond saying that I really am starting to like working in Photoshop rather than Illustrator. I’m quite pleased with yesterday’s strip, even though it didn’t actually involve any of the characters at all... heh. I’ll probably go with a mix of Photoshop and Illustrator from now on, depending on the needs of an individual strip. I’ve upgraded my system to Windows 2000 this week, and it was a relatively painless upgrade, not like *last* time I did some upgrading... I’m pretty impressed. Win2K really is pretty decent. But anyways, on to the actual news topic de jour.
I got an email from Lazy yesterday about a webcomic list he has started up - a list devoted to the webcomics of Canada, defined as being drawn by a Canadian or at least someone currently living in Canada. The idea of course is that, since Canadians are so funny in general, why not make it easy for the whole world to find the funniest webcomics on the ’net? ;) You can check out the list from here, or on my links page.
Monday, March 26th, 2001: D’OH!!!
Oops. Um. Er. Sorry about the borked comic today; I had it done last night and I breathed a sigh of relief as it had turned out all right, and only hours later discovered that it wasn’t working. And then I noticed another ’space comic that wasn’t working, so I assumed too quickly that it was a ’space problem. However this afternoon I discovered it still was not working, and by then, no other ’space comics had issues. So I investigated, and came up blank. No reason my comic shouldn’t work. The file was there, there were no HTML problems, no scripting problems. So why was it coming up as a broken image?
Turns out it was a bit of a PEBKAC issue. (In computer jargon, PEBKAC stands for ‘Problem Exists Between Keyboard and Chair’, or in other words, it’s the user’s fault - in this case, the user being me.) When I completed the comic last night in Photoshop, I saved it as a .jpg as is normal; however, I forgot to change the colour mode from CMYK (suitable for printing on paper) to RGB (which is what computer monitors use.) Silly me. Turns out CMYK jpeg files do not work on web pages. Oops again...
Wednesday, March 21th, 2001: Another New Artistic Experiment
The more I use Illustrator to draw October’s Fools, the more limiting I find it to be. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a wonderful program and I will likely continue to use it for some time to come, but I do find it hard sometimes to get the lines exactly the way I want them. Friends have been suggesting that I try drawing the traditional way, but I can’t stand the thought of using Microsoft Paint. Then they point out that no, that wasn’t what they meant, I should try using paper and pen/pencil.
Now, this revelation utterly shocked me. “What!? You can draw without a computer!?” I’m still not entirely sure I believe in this phenomenon, but they described what it’s like, and I can see the advantages. For starters, you can draw in a power blackout, presuming you have lights to see by. Now I’m not sure I want to go all out and actually try drawing on this “paper” stuff, whatever it is, but it did occur to me that I might be able to get results closer to what paper drawing is like if I were to use Adobe Photoshop instead of Illustrator. The results are both encouraging and frustrating.
I’ve been using Photoshop for a good long time now, but I have always used it to do photographic retouching and such, I’ve never tried painting, drawing or sketching with it before. So while it does offer some advantages over Illustrator, I’m trying to use a program I know well in ways I’m not accustomed to, which requires some retraining. Not the kind of retraining I underwent with Illustrator itself; there, I had no preconceptions of its use to foul me up. I’m now learning a whole new side of Photoshop, and it’s... well, kinda neat actually. But also difficult. It’s also putting a lot more of a strain on my ability to draw than Illustrator does; Illustrator sheilds me from a lot of my own limits in the way that it helps guide and smooth out the lines. Photoshop doesn’t do that.
So I guess what I’m trying to say is, unless I get incredibly frustrated with the quality or lack thereof with this experiment, you may find a different looking October’s Fools strip on Monday.
Friday, March 16th, 2001: New Motherboard Received
THIS was a surprise; yesterday afternoon a package arrived via UPS, and inside was my new motherboard from Intel! I hadn’t expected it until today at the very earliest, and was counting on next week. I spent a few hours performing the most painless motherboard transplant I’ve ever done - the only real problem I’ve had so far was getting the CPU into the thing, but that just took some patience. Using the system now is so much easier; every single computer problem I can remember experiencing over the last 6 months has vanished without a trace. I can even use BeOS again, which is a relief. So to make a short story even shorter, October’s Fools’ future is once again assured; with a stable platform to work on, I’m confident that I can cope with the demands of doing the strip again. :)
Wednesday, March 14th, 2001: 25,000 Hit Benchmark Reached
October’s Fools has reached a new benchmark level in number of hits; thanks to all of you, OF has reached 25,000 hits. Not bad for a brand new comic that updates only twice a week, I think.
Tuesday, March 13th, 2001: Another Nail in the Coffin of my Computer Woes
People say many things about Intel, some good and some bad. They’re really coming through for me this time though, I’ll tell you that right now. I just got off the phone with one of their customer service reps, and I’m really impressed. Polite, friendly, helpful, and willing to send me a free VC820 motherboard with 128 megs of PC700 RDRAM because my current CC820 motherboard has been recalled. The combination of new motherboard and RAM, and the new tablet should HOPEFULLY end the majority of my problems in doing October’s Fools. I’m a happy camper this week, lemme tell you. It is still possible that there are problems I’m facing that aren’t related to the motherboard issues, but I’ll nail them in time, I’m sure.
