Previous News07.27.2011 - Terrence Marks:A few days ago, there was a Namir Deiter comic about how it takes a couple days to get a password reset in Final Battle Adventure On-Line.
I said, "It's a modern game, Isabel. There's no reason to have people there just to reset passwords. Is there anybody out there who doesn't have an automatic password reset system these days?"
Then Isabel asked me if NamirDeiter.net had an automatic password reset system.
At that point, I got real quiet and tried to pretend I was too busy playing video games to hear her.
It didn't work, and NamirDeiter.net now has an automated password reset system. If you're a subscriber, please make sure we have your current email address on file, since the passwords get emailed to you.07.25.2011 - Terrence Marks:As you can see, the comics are bigger. 70% larger, in fact. We've been doing comics at 650 pixels wide since 1999. Back then, that was pretty big for a comic. You didn't want to get much bigger. All our readers were on dial-up, and they'd get impatient if the page took more than a minute to load.650 pixels wide was a pretty good size. Then one day we looked around and you know which comics were larger than that? All of them. Nobody has to resize and downsample images like they used to. Most of you have transitioned off of dial-up. My current phone loads websites faster than my computer did back then.
Also, the sites got redesigned a bit. Hopefully this will make navigation a bit cleaner and less crowded around the comic. You Say it First got a new logo. The donation bar got a makeover and looks a bit sharper. It looks especially good when it's filled, but I may be biased.
We've still got a bit of work to do, like resizing the donation rewards box, creating ads for Namir Deiter (which is why You Say it First is currently advertising You Say it First), and putting the new logo on all of the pages. NamirDeiter.net has evaded the previous upgrades, and is in need of more attention. But I could keep puttering about with the site design for months, getting all the little details just so or I could put it up and fix the little things over the next week.
I'm sorry about the lack of poll last week. I meant to get this switched over last Monday and ask if you thought the comics were too big, too small, or just right. Turns out that the changeover was more work than I expected, which means that it happened on Thursday, too late for a poll, and that I'm not going to readjust the comics' size unless something catastrophic happens. No point asking if you want it bigger; I'd just be looking for you to validate a decision I've already made.
We've got all of You Say it First resized, and Namir Deiter going back through May 2004. I've done an automated check to make sure all the comics are there. That's not quite the same as looking at them to make sure they're all good, but it's a decent first-order approximation. They're probably all intact and correct, but if you see any problems, please tag them "resize" so we can get to them.
In the meantime, enjoy the hugeness.07.19.2011 - Terrence Marks:Do you regularly read webcomics on a PDA, phone or other mobile device?I had been considered building mobile sites for our comics. It's the way of the future, according to people who get paid to tell us what the way of the future might be. Personally, I've used my phone to read comics a couple of times but didn't really see the appeal. Of course, I spend most of my day either in front of a computer or too busy to read comics.
Yes, including this one. Yes - if they have mobile-optimized sites. Yes - if they have an app. No - I'm not interested in reading comics on a mobile device No - I'm theoretically interested but haven't got around to it. No - I don't have a mobile device. Thing is, the point of the site isn't to show me the comics. I know what they look like before we upload them. My goal is to make the viewing experience as convenient as possible for you, the reader. Right now, under 3% of our traffic comes from mobile devices, if I'm doing the math right. There were two possibilities: either only 3% of our readers wanted to read our comics that way, or more people wanted to but the site needed to be made more mobile-friendly to accomodate them.
I'm going to guess that it was the first one. It looks like the technology isn't mature enough right now for mobile devices to be a viable alternate platform. I'm sure that will change as time goes by, but for now, that's where we are.
07.14.2011 - Terrence Marks:On Saturday, Isabel's computer stopped working. I'm a computer technician. I realize that "not working" is a symptom, not a diagnosis. It had HDD lights, no video (on multiple monitors), no beeps, and no keyboard lights. It was probably the motherboard, with a slight chance of it being a power supply issue.
Was the hard drive intact? We couldn't tell then. The computer was failing at POST, before it even accessed the drives. We had no reason to believe it was damaged, but we had no way of knowing.
It could've come at a better time - when we weren't working on comics or when I wasn't at work, for instance - but we had been talking about replacing the computer. We've had it for seven years. Human years, that is. That's eighty in computer years. I'm not sure we could've bought replacement parts even if we wanted to. And we didn't, since we needed to get it back up and running to get comics done.
I spent my lunch hour trying to figure out what to buy. As I've mentioned before, computer shopping isn't easy. You've got a lot of choices, and understanding what the numbers actually mean is only a little helpful. You might know that one processor can deliver more frames per second when render 3D video, but would that translate into actually working faster at the things we need to do? Or would it not make a difference because RAM is what's really slowing you down?
After half an hour, I realized I wasn't so much looking for new information as trying to get the internet to validate my choices. The computer I was looking at was just as good as the other computers I was looking at, or close enough to it for our purposes.
When I got home, I managed to set that computer up. I got Isabel's old hard drive installed in my computer. The data was still intact. We got everything copied over to her new computer. We're still working on getting things set up and getting all the programs installed, but everything seems to be back to mostly working. It's just taking her a while to adjust to the changes and set things up, and comics are going to be a bit late today.
You Say it First: Favorite Minor Character (not Lemon Tech. Division)
Emily Jake Jane Marla Dalton Lola The Lounge Guys
Lola seems to be a clear winner here, with Jane, Marla, and The Lounge Guys making a respectable showing. I need to set up one of these brackets for Namir Deiter soon.07.11.2011 - Terrence Marks:Blue Deiter had a cameo in Precocious! She's banned for lifefrom at least one museum. About a month ago, actually. I thought we mentioned it before, and I'm sorry for not keeping you entirely up-to-date on Namir Deiter cameos. It's a good comic and you ought to check it out, if you haven't already.Also, speaking of news we should've posted a while ago, here's poll results for two weeks ago. We'll post more poll results later this week, along with the saga of Isabel's computer.
You Say it First: Favorite Minor Character (Lemon Tech. Division)
Robert Ms. Taylor Richard Sinclair Dan Al Fletcher
As you can see, Sinclair took a commanding lead. I was not expecting that. I did not think that he would beat Richard by a 3:1 margin. I'd say we have a bunch of Sinclair/Emily shippers, but, well, he had a 5:1 lead over her.07.05.2011 - Terrence Marks:We watched The Three Caballeros today.A few weeks ago, we went to Disneyland to see the new Star Tours.
So did everyone else. The expected wait time was two hours. Also, it was an hour until the park closed, so we went to see Small World. They had redesigned it, adding various Disney characters to the countries exhibits: Pinocchio in Italy, Cinderella in France, Lilo and Stitch in Hawaii, and so on. They put the Three Cabelleros in South America. That meant a lot to me.
Y'see, I'm a huge fan of the duck. I've been reading the comics - especially Carl Barks'. You don't see it much in America, but Donald Duck and company are HUGE overseas. Normally when I go to Disneyland, I like what they have, but I can't help but think about how none of that stuff is there. I know that it's an amusement park, not a museum but it weighs on my mind because I feel like I'm the only one thinking about it.
So I was glad to see it. I wasn't expecting it because Disney prefers to remember the bits of its history that involve princesses or were made by Pixar.
Saludos Amigos and The Three Caballeros were made at the request of the State Department during World War II to help create goodwill between the United States and South America. It seems to have worked fairly well. Or at least Brazil's version of Donald Duck comics was renamed to "Donald Duck and Jose Carioca". Then to "Jose Carioca and Donald Duck". Then to "Jose Carioca". (as a side-note, many countries have their own editions of Disney comics. Good information is hard to come by, but I believe that it's a combination of original stories and translated foreign stories. I do know that all the Gemstone/Gladstone Disney comics I have feature one Carl Barks story, two or three foreign stories, and one Don Rosa story).
Anyhow, it had been a while since I watched The Three Caballeros. I had seen it once when I was a kid and never had any desire to rewatch it. That's why I wanted to see it - to find out what this character had that could force Donald Duck out of the title of his own book.
Unfortunately, I didn't find out. Both movies are beautiful and brilliant in places, but they're a collection of loosely related shorts about South America. Many of them don't have much of a plot beyond "Donald chases after dancing women". Perhaps I missed it, but Jose didn't have much personality beyond "more easygoing than Donald Duck", which is a very low standard to aspire to.
There's a moment in the title song, about forty-five seconds in, where Panchito Pistoles draws a gun on Donald. That freaked me the hell out when I was a kid and it still freaks me out now. And these guys are supposed to be his friends. I think that's one of the reasons I hadn't re-watched it ever.
I'm going to have to put the duck comics down for a week or two now. I have to whenever I watch the cartoons. Donald has a lot of dialogue and I'll never be able to get through an issue if I try to read it in that voice. In my mind, he speaks clearly and is easy to understand. But maybe in the meantime, I'll try to hunt down some of the Jose Carioca comics, if anybody's got them translated into English.07.04.2011 - Terrence Marks:Poll Results:You are in Lemon Technology. What do you ask for?
Orange Scent #3 Clean Smell #3 Western Spruce Cactus flavorant Ms. Taylor to come back
And it looks like we have a clear winner. Just as well, since Orange Scent #3 eats right through paper, Clean Smell #3 doesn't actually make things cleaner, and Western Spruce is an expensive premium scent.