Moving Forward….

by Gremlin on Friday, 2nd September 2011
Posted In: Blogue

We’re through another day of rapping about this neat idea of getting the strip into actual newspapers. The chatter to date is promising. In fact, as the story goes, and granting that I’m only talking to my own people, who are then talking to theirs, we’ve got things wrapped to the point that the money’s agreed on, leaving just the actual contract to receive, read, and sign—probably in that order.

The casual demands being thrown back and forth include Pay Me [there's an actual number attached to that one; I'm not gonna tell you what it is], and Promise to Do This for at Least Another Six Months, and You Can Run the Comic, but I’m Keeping the Website, and Okay, but We Need Four Panels—Not Just One, and so on. There’s compromise [when it came to my little salary, they compromised a lot], but the deal as it’s been relayed over the phone has everyone feeling pretty good about all this.

I should see the actual contract later today. Then spend the weekend reading it over and over. And then whatever. Probably signing it and making this happen.

Then there’ll be more news about all this.

Meanwhile, and almost cooler, this showed up here on the site today:

Of all the various webcomics that have been advertised on this site in the last year or so, this is the first time I’ve got an advert for something I was already reading every once in a while. There have been adverts for other cool comics in the last year, and a few for some not so cool comics [you know who you are; get better, damnit]; but, with the cool ones, it was seeing adverts for them here on the site that clued me into to their existences in the first place. With SMBC, its existence isn’t news; I’ve known that it’s pretty cool for a while now.

I’m not sure why that thrills me. But it’s really cool that this stupid stickfigure thing I do not only seems to demand a spot in an internationally known newspaper, but magically attracts the attention of SMBC. That’s just awesome, to me.

So…yeah. I just wanted to brag about that for a minute. Bye now.

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That Was Almost Stupid

by Gremlin on Tuesday, 30th August 2011
Posted In: Blogue

Dumb luck I happened to glance at my EMail, since I rarely do that this century.

Hidden among renewal notices for various sites which would expire in September if I didn’t have them set up to autorenew, or if I were to undo that for some reason, was a small notice to remind me that, when I grabbed StickPrimo.com about a year ago, I never told the system whether to assume that I’d want to keep it:

“stickprimo.com”‘s Registration expires on 2011-09-02!

(Note: if you look at the whois data for this domain, you MAY
see an expiration date of one year later. This DOES NOT mean
the domain has been renewed! The registry “auto-renews” all
domains, but they are then deleted if not EXPLICITLY renewed.)

This domain will expire unless you explicitly renew it at the

Domain > Registration section of our web panel at

https://panel.dreamhost.com/?tree=domain.registration

** Even *if* your renewal is free, your hosting is not!

** If you renew a domain for free and then cancel your hosting,
you will then have to pay the $9.95 for the domain registration.

** Even if you let your registration expire, your *hosting* will
renew and you WILL BE CHARGED unless you close your account at:

https://panel.dreamhost.com/?tree=billing.accounts

Also, you might want to change your renewal settings using the
Domain > Registration area…

“Yes” : We will always make sure your domain gets renewed.
“Ask” : Your current setting, we just send you these emails.
“Let Expire” : We will not bug you, nor will we renew your domain.

Remember, if your domain registration expires:

1. Your web site at that domain will stop working.
2. Your email at that domain will stop working.
3. After about 30 days the domain will be available for anyone
in the world to register again!

Anyway: Problem solved; I changed the setting from ASK to YES.

I’m just a little amused that I totally forgot the mindset I’d had a year ago: that it might be fun to see what happens if I start up a webcomic, which might have meant wasting ten bucks to have the domain for a year. I’d tell you what I’ve made by having the webcomic since grabbing the domain, but I’m not gonna; here’s a hint though: more than ten bucks.

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Better News

by Gremlin on Tuesday, 23rd August 2011
Posted In: Blogue

I haven’t heard much in the last couple days about actual newspapers looking to print Stick Primo, so I’m not sure what to expect about that anymore.

On the other hand, based on the server’s statistics, the thing’s doing pretty well just online. A few days ago, we were hitting about seventy-five thousand views per day. Now, we’re averaging ninety, because we’ve had a couple days in the last week with over 100,000 hits.

Supposing that keeps up, the math gets easy: ~36.5milion hits annually. Which is just cool.

I wouldn’t hate getting thirty-six million hits per day. But, for now, I’m good with just hitting six figures.

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Good News….

by Gremlin on Tuesday, 16th August 2011
Posted In: Blogue

A couple things, potentially related.

One: just about precisely a year into this silly little project [the first official strip was last year, on 25th August], StickPrimo.com is now averaging roughly twenty-five million hits per year. Based on half a million per week. From seventy-five thousand per day. Meaning that, if I wanted to drop the round numbers, we’d be at 27,375,000 annually. So that’s kinda cool. I think.

Of course, it could always be more. Feel free to work on that. Tell your friends, and especially your enemies; let’s see if we can get to a million daily hits before we simply break the damned server.

Not that it’s all about the server. Necessarily.

The other bit of news—whether it’s related—is that I’ve just heard from my publicist that a couple of major newspapers [meaning that I at least have heard of them] are showing an interest in grabbing up the strip to wedge in among their, like, professional cartoonists.

That’s not something I was expecting, even granting that, about a hundred years ago [back in the eighties], I kinda minored in cartooning in college. Though that quickly jumped off the rails, landing over in CG Land; since about 1985, I’ve been doing more polygonal 3D stuff—theoretically like TransFormers, but with an actual plotline of sorts. Meaning that I’ve made the whole thing way too complex, and therefore something of a nonprofit hobby.

This webcomic isn’t strictly CG. I mean: it is, in that I make it on a computer; but it’s not polygonal, for the most part; it may amuse you to know that I mostly do it in Crash5—my term for Flash5, from the nineties:

If there’s a moral to the story, it’s that you don’t in fact need the latest and greatest software to make something happen. You just need something you’re used to using. I’ve heard that there are still people out there using pencils.

So. I’m not sure what any of this really means. Twenty-seven million annual hits is good, supposing that keeps up or gets better. And having the webcomic cloned into daily print would probably rawk, provided that no one gets uppity about the content, or laughably expects me to have a strip ready more than a few hours before the deadline. Sometimes I’ll have the strips done a month in advance, especially if I’ve got some thematic thing going on; for the most part, I like being able to glance at twitter.com, see what’s trending, and react to that—a few hours later, at midnight mountaintime, when the next strip can go live.

I guess we’ll see what comes of it, over time. Maybe nothing. Probably nothing. My stuff’s less popular than that of Michael Bay, after all.

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-

by Gremlin on Tuesday, 26th July 2011
Posted In: Blogue

Subtracting a couple things from the site again.

Well, one, anyway.

After giving it some time to serve any purpose at all, I cut out the code sticking overlaid adverts to the images. I was getting paid for it, but it wasn’t worth having the damned things. Also, what I hadn’t known in the beginning, since they didn’t show up on my phone, was that they did show up on tablets—and not in a good way.

So, those are gone now.

Also kinda gone, even before I’d had a chance to code in a little icon for it, is G+. The little +1 thing is still there but, since my profile was suspended after I sneakily used my name, I can’t personally click on it anymore.

If you’re curious, their problem was that I claimed that my name is Gremlin. And that broke their little brains.


Because they’re morons

The latest word on the matter is mine. A drooling imbecile calling itself Bayle accused me of using a fake name, offering to unblock my profile if I gave it my real one; I replied by asking it what my real one was; that was four hours ago, and I haven’t heard back from the ‘tard.

So, I guess, until or unless google.com hire smart people, I’m not using G+ for a while. And, on the subject, I caught something on CNN [like, on television] about google.com being the only company in the US trying to hire people right now; and no one’s applying. So that’s entertaining to note, even if it means being kicked out of G+ yet longer.

Oh well. Less staring at chauvinistic animgifs, I guess. It’s not all bad.

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