Starslip - Comic
Starslip - Comic


Time Friends 1

Time Friends 1

PAX 2010

I will be at PAX this coming weekend! I’ll have a booth with Scott in Bandland at PAX, and I’ll be on the following panels:

Pitch Your Game Idea

Saturday, 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM, Pegasus Theatre. You’ve got 45 seconds to deliver your idea to our panel of experts. The top three pitches will be picked for prizes and swag! (Please note that this is an open forum — there’s nothing keeping anyone, judges and attendees alike, from stealing your ideas! If you’re not comfortable with this, please don’t pitch your idea!)

After Hours with Scott and Kris

Saturday, 8:00 PM - 9:00 PM, Pegasus Theatre. PAX welcomes its first official late-night talk show featuring Scott Kurtz and Kris Straub, the talent behind PATV’s Blamimations. After Hours with Kris and Scott promises an hour of laughs, celebrity interviews and maybe even a musical guest — it’s a show so spontaneous, we won’t know what’s planned until the show’s over. Concert counter-programming at its finest!

Blamimations ALIVE! with Kris and Scott

Sunday, 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM, Pegasus Theatre. PA: TV veterans Scott Kurtz (pvponline.com) and Kris Straub (chainsawsuit.com) take you deeply behind the scenes of their hit Blamimation series for one magical hour. Will you help come up with the next breakout hit character? Will you watch it come to life? Will you see Kris and Scott BS for 55 minutes? No, maybe, and yes.

I will have the F Chords book, as well as a couple copies of the Tweet Me Harder book (in addition to my usual merch). If you don’t find me at the booth, be patient and come on back; I’ll again be serving as PAX’s media ambassador and potentially running around the show floor. See you there in like six days.

I just spent the better part of two hours trying to get the old Halfpixel database up again so I could look at my old work on there, from when I was making Time Friends, Origin Story, Bad Cop Ineffectual Cop, and adding to that blog. I remember that being just an enormous clot of work that vanished.

Looking at what was recoverable, I found that it was a lot less than I thought it would be. It took on this mythical aura in the years since 2006. I don’t know whether to be disappointed, or relieved that I didn’t spend thousands of man-hours on something that would go away.

An old favorite

This broke me into little pieces. We should all be as fortunate as these two. If you’re like me, don’t watch it at work. (via @kmcshane: If this doesn’t make you tear up, you’re not human: http://bit.ly/9pllxJ)

This is incredible, obviously NSFW lyrics

Scrapers

I would have submitted this to Webcomics.com as an article, but this is directed at kind-hearted, well-intentioned developers, not the producers of comics. There are a lot of scraper websites and apps being produced at any given time. A scraper looks at HTML on a page (or possibly in an RSS feed), locates the salient content — in the case of webcomics, the comic image for that day — and either hotlinks the image or copies it to some other server. There, readers can view all the day’s comics without having to see blog posts, comments, ads, logos, anything.

I’m not saying “stop scraping” because that will never happen. There will always be people who do this as a hobby or as a service and they don’t care about ownership or what’s happening. That’s why we always recommend having your URL in the image itself, so at least there’s that. You’ll never prevent that kind of sharing (and there are even occasions where you don’t want to).

But the kind I think that’s preventable is scraping done out of ignorance. Who doesn’t want a place or an app that’ll strip out all the noise and just deliver your favorite comics to your phone without having to visit eight different comic sites? I get it from a reader standpoint. And I get that it’s a neat project from a developer standpoint.

I think though that that kind of developer doesn’t see the harm in it — and even, with some amount of pride, will approach a cartoonist and say “check out this app I made that lets readers get your strip on their phones!” There’s three problems with allowing that though, and three reasons why I say no.

1) Sites are elaborate for a reason. Webcartoonists provide content that is free to read. But a couple things make it worth the cartoonists’ while.

One is advertising across the site and trying to foster a good connection between advertisers and audiences. I pulled near-pornographic ads from my site; generally cartoonists don’t callously run whatever is going to make them a fast buck. On the contrary, readers’ interest drives successful advertising. If it’s a sci-fi strip, it stands to reason (unobtrusive) ads for a sci-fi book or movie would be relevant to their interests. They are potentially useful for the readers too. I wish I could block all the dumb smokeless cigarette ads out there because my audience doesn’t care about that. As a content provider you need to engender that kind of relationship.

Another is all the connections to other facets of that strip, like the community forums, or blog posts with relevant news or con appearances, and ways to contact the cartoonist. All that stuff gets taken away by a scraper.

Finally, site branding is eliminated. Ideally the website should fully support the tone of the content. It should be an experience that enhances the content and draws a reader further in. A scraper kills all that branding effort — or worse, replaces it with the scraper’s own brand.

2) We’ve already provided a trimmed-down way to view the comics. It’s RSS, and in most cases, it delivers the comic image (or a link to just the comic) to every reader that wants it. If that’s how a reader insists on receiving the strip, then here it is. There was anxiety about RSS killing websites and advertising, but at least RSS still lets the provider control some of the secondary goods. Blog posts show up in comic RSS feeds for a reason, as does the occasional ad. It is a compromise, but it’s a good one.

3) It wasn’t opt-in. This one is the biggest sin to me, and it’s important even if you don’t care about (1) and (2). Typically no permission is given for a comic’s inclusion in a scraper app. So the cartoonist hears about it second- or third-hand. And the cartoonist then sends an e-mail to the scraper and asks to have their work removed.

The developers at whom this write-up is aimed at are often apologetic, and polite, and remove the comic immediately, and they have my appreciation. I know they are well-meaning; they just want to use their talent to provide a useful tool. I just wish a little more research was done beforehand, before they went to all the wasted effort!

The trouble is, if you make an app like this opt-in, you find that almost no cartoonists want to participate. So the app dies for lack of comics in its stable. I’ve heard pitches from more idealistic and impassioned developers, who talk about blog access and even revenue sharing. But that’s not the cartoonist sharing in their ads. Those ads are running on someone else’s content. That would be the cartoonist sharing their revenue, and there’s no reason to do that.

So be smart, guys. Don’t spend all that time coming up with the coolest app ever — and some of them are really cool — only to get in trouble later and make a bunch of cartoonists mad and end up with no content for your service. Even if you totally disagree with my other points, cover them bases and ask permission first!

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.] http://www.tumblr.com/audio_file/971306410/tumblr_l73ujshY3S1qzeotg

There’s a livestream of Tweet Me Harder this evening, but get caught up with last week’s show, the highlight of which was John Allison reading aloud TMH fanfic he wrote for the show. I was certain it would be terrible and hollow as all things from other English-speaking countries are, but it really spun me around!

tweetmeharder:

SHOW 56: Bad Machinery / 59min / August 11, 2010

Kris and David stare down the promise of immortality, defer their physical pain, hear tales of machinery gone awry, and world-famous fanfic author John Allison has a rare treat for the fellas.

Download the MP3

Just minutes ago woke up from a dream. A remote orbital station above some forbidding planet. Cut to an interior: a huge, empty, hangar-like room, like a cargo area. Huge picture windows looking down at the planet. A single turbolift door in one part of the room.

Familiar blue chyron titles in one corner of the view: “Cause of Death.”

An ensign, unsure, hesitantly exits the turbolift. He looks around the well-lit, empty space. Mounted in a corner of the ceiling, a viewscreen. It turns on, showing an alien wearing a Starfleet uniform. A superior officer.

“Ensign. This is the room where it keeps happening.”

The room isn’t completely empty though: a podium-like wooden pedestal stands next to a long jewelry-display-case like object, large enough to hold one person inside. On the podium on some kind of holder, sticking straight up, is a syringe with the needle pointing into the air. It is full of something. A little bit lower on the podium is a severed alien hand, complete with frayed Starfleet uniform cuff still at the wrist.

“The creature came up with one of our early shuttle runs, that much is certain. Everything else we know about it: it is completely invisible, soundless, undetectable via any means we have. We have reason to believe it’s susceptible to the tranquilizer in the syringe.

“We can’t explain why, when it kills, it leaves the left hand.” The hand belonged to the last ensign to enter this room.

“We’ll give you four hours. Good luck.” The screen switched off. The doors shut and locked.

Now I was the unsure ensign. I approached the podium in the deathly-silent room. The floor was carpeted, so I made no sound; not that anyone understood how it hunted. I pulled the syringe off the stand and held it out in front of me like a weapon. I began to methodically sweep the room.