12.25.2009 - Terrence Marks:

Merry Christmas! Santa Blue stole you Better than Valentine's Day last week. Today she stole Elemental Story, part 1 which was a surprise to all of us here. This Sunday she'll pull off her last heist of the year - Brisbane's Quest. It's a cute wordless story about Brisbane, Kimberly, and Valentine's Day.

12.19.2009 - Terrence Marks:

Two technical questions, if someone can lend a hand:

I'd like to create Facebook and/or Myspace pages for our comics. I'm strictly a web 1.0 kind of guy. I code the sites in a text editor. I'm still kind of suspicious of inline frames.

I don't really know what I can do with these sites. What kind of awesome stuff would you, the readers, like to see there? At the moment, I don't see what the fuss is about since we have our own website. Then again, I didn't see what the fuss was about CDs until I noticed that none of the albums I liked were coming out on vinyl anymore.

So, what can I do with this fancy new media that's a better use of my time than updating You Say it First's cast page, or replying to your email, or (more likely) watching MST3K?

Secondly - and this is the more difficult one - I've got a hard drive that I need data recovered from. The drive is detected, but fails just about any test I can throw at it. I can't get a file listing off of it; at the moment, it's showing as a 1GB recovery partition (which is correct, and gets a file listing), 32GB raw FAT32 partition and 127GB of unpartitioned space (which is incorrect and should probably be one 159GB NTFS partition).I want to repartition it so that the two larger bits are together. I want to do this without losing the data. I've tried a few linux bootable drive recovery utilities, and have gotten far enough to realize that they can be dangerous if you're not sure what you're doing. I'm not sure what I'm doing. Suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

12.18.2009 - Terrence Marks:

We wound up spending the day orchestrating a party for our five-year-old nephew. We had a great time. He was kind of grumpy, though. Anyhow, between that and errands it's late. Over on You Say it First, my blog has been updated if you care to read that.

12.17.2009 - Terrence Marks:

Our year in review, part 1

Firstly, we've both been doing the online comic thing for ten years now, both together and separately. Mostly together, and I'm glad for that. I've been thinking a lot lately about how many of the cartoonists I knew back then are still doing it and how many of them aren't. I'm glad we're on the "still doing it" side of the equation.

Secondly, it looks like I'm writing exactly half of You Say it First this year. To date, Isabel wrote 161 comics, and I've got 148. This story will go on for at least two more weeks (we're at about 4 PM on the second day of a three-day cruise), which will put us at 161-162. No, this doesn't mean that I win. Isabel also wrote every single Namir Deiter and a majority of the bonus content at NamirDeiter.net.

(This is a count by story arc; I wrote a few comics in Isabel's stories, and she wrote a few in mine. If we were to go comic-by-comic, I figure it'd mostly balance out)

I'm proud of this - my first guess was that I wrote a third of the comics. I haven't counted up previous years and this may be a high point for me with two big stories, Minervacon/Ten Minutes and Singles Cruise, and I'm proud of both of them. I was hoping that Professor Marvello would have shown up at the convention, but I didn't have any lines for him besides "My oriental magic is powerful,I say! Powerful!".

Thirdly, 2009 saw the rehabilitation of Unlike Minerva and commentary on almost the entire run. Some of it, I genuinely had nothing to say about. I know I'm not the only person who did commentary on their series, and am amazed that others haven't run out of things to say. It was different than I remembered it. Better in certain places than I remembered it, and worse in others. (Or, rather, some of the parts I expected to be horrible were bad-but-fun, some of the parts I had been proud of, I do not regard fondly upon rereading). Anyhow, I like to think that I learned from it, both doing the comic and re-reading it.

12.16.2009 - Terrence Marks:

Yes, Santa Blue stole another library book on Sunday. Same as she will every Sunday in December. She's been suspiciously eying Better Than Valentine's Day, a Spare Parts book featuring Todd and Shandra on something that's almost a date. We'd like to thank everybody who signed up for accounts and remind you too that you can get free access to this book if you sign up before Sunday.

12.08.2009 - Terrence Marks:

A few days ago, Isabel was making tamales for us. We're trying to start a tradition. She wound up getting burned by the steam and it blistered. It got a bit worse last night. Now, it's nothing dangerous. Painful, yes, but not dangerous. Also, there's very little that can be done besides waiting for it to heal. But she is working.

12.07.2009 - Terrence Marks:

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Blue. And if you had an account over at NamirDeiter.net, she stole a library book for you last night. Same as she will every Sunday this month. She's suspiciously eyeing Auditions, a bonus book from 2006 that stars Jun, Tori, Brisbane, Kimberly, Tipper, Charles, Todd, Shandra, and a few others.

If you already have that book, she and her hooligan elves will grab something else from the pile for you.