Yay: More Adverts

by Gremlin on Friday, 3rd June 2011
Posted In: Blogue

See? I know what you people want: more adverts on the site!

Okay: probably not. But this is actually kinda cool. I tripped across pixazza.com, which integrates adverts into images [there are some images on this site, you see], theoretically identifying elements in a given image and tracking down adverts for related stuff.

Oddly, the system’s not great at identifying elements in, like, stickfigures. I’m sure the problem’s totally on their end.

But, in playtesting the thing [I've only had it for a couple days now], I’ve worked out a couple things. One’s that the adverts don’t interfere with the hovertext function—something I’d been a bit concerned about, which woulda caused me to undo the whole thing. The other’s that, my stickfigures bearing no resemblance to reality, I can go in and tell the system what’s going on, picking the adverts it should be serving.

So far, mostly, it’s all contextual. The system tries to guess what I’m on about, based on titles and hovertext and, in cases, the text of an entry beneath a given strip. The system often sucks at that. But, with 279 published strips to date, I haven’t really had a chance to go through and talk to the system about each and every mistake it’s made.

But we’ve discussed a couple strips now. F’rinstance: Velociraptor Awareness Day should at present have an advert for a Ninja v Velociraptor shirt I kinda dug; OnMouseOver, that’ll kinda fade in off to the side [I'm not sure about all browsers yet] and become available. I’m not sure what happens if and when the shirt itself becomes no longer available—like, if someone stops advertising it. I guess we’ll find that out later.

Anyway: that’s kinda the news. In case you’d noticed that images now have neat little overlays advertising something you hadn’t asked about. And of course it gives me yet one more thing to do every day: watching for adverts however loosely related to a given strip, and teaching the system to agree with me. Though I can’t promise that that’ll necessarily happen every day.

In other news, if you’re wondering why there are adverts at all, I grabbed one of these yesterday:

It should get here on Monday Tuesday. Meanwhile, I’ll see whether I can get the system to link to it through an advert….

EDIT: It wasn’t in the system. But I found a backpack designed to clip a mountainboard to. That could come in handy, after you just grab the board itself from http://shop.mbs.com/mountainboards/mountainboard/atom-line/mbs-atom-95x-mountainboard.html

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ooo

Animation

by Gremlin on Wednesday, 1st June 2011
Posted In: Blogue

A few weeks ago, I was looking through the strip from what was then the end to the beginning—the beginning kindasorta having been in 1998, when I made the animgif in Splut.

Since it had been eleven years and all, I started up LightWave [no longer Version5.6, of course] and more or less rebuilt the object, rigging it and animating it for about a second at 30fps before compiling the frames down at 12fps:

The negative looking second half is the alpha channel; I included it to let those who get how CG works figure out what I’d done in the primary shot with celshading and all.

So, that kinda works. I’m contemplating doing a little more with it sometime. I’d have to build a few more objects and run a real screentest—probably around a minute long. Whenever I get around to that, I’ll let you know how it works out.

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Fandom

by Gremlin on Sunday, 20th February 2011
Posted In: Blogue

I’m starting up a FanPage thing for Stick Primo over at facebook.com: facebook.com/StickPrimo.

It’s separate from the Like Button I’ve already got here. So, go over there and click Like—unless you hate the webcomic for some reason….

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December

by Gremlin on Thursday, 2nd December 2010
Posted In: Blogue

The good news, I suppose, is that November’s over, and therefore the book is functionally finished. Or at least written. There are a lot of things left to do to Stupidae, but adding words isn’t one of them.

Which means for one thing that it can be read cover to cover now, as it were. Not easily, since the navigation kinda sucks; that’s kinda my next step—making the site more readable—before working up formats for the Kindle and then CameraReady files for actual, printed books. But, if you can stand clicking on the next sequential page to move on before I get a more useful set of Back and Next arrows [or something] in place, the thing’s there to be seen now, approximately in its entirety.

For another thing: I’ve got slightly more free time now, letting me focus a bit on the webcomic. Somehow, I managed to avoid missing a day in November [though, in a couple of cases, I got the next day's strip online with about two minutes to spare]; but everything was kinda rushed. I really shoulda got everything done for November back in October, so I wouldn’t have to worry about it. But, I didn’t.

What counts is that, while I’ve still got way too many things going on, less of them are terribly timecritical, meaning that the webcomic can kinda take priority for a while. Whether that means that it’ll get better, or more complex, or whatever it might be lacking in this fall, is hard to guess; but, if it sucks from now on, it won’t be because I’m throwing ninety-odd percent of all efforts into writing a book. For the moment.

I’m also still pondering merch a bit. Something else I probably shoulda done a while ago, if only because the last couple weeks have been the major annual shopping season. Then again, the comic’s still new enough that I’m not expecting a huge demand for…whatever merch might end up being. That I’m not even sure what the merch will eventually be is also a factor.

In any case, I’ve at least got time to write these little updates again. Even if I should be using the time more to write new strips, and try to get at least a week ahead of deadline. For a change.

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NaNoWriMo

by Gremlin on Saturday, 6th November 2010
Posted In: Blogue

Strictly speaking, this has nothing to do with StickPrimo.com. Which is in its way the problem.

Lately, I’ve been in something of a rush to get the next day’s strip done and uploaded before deadline, mostly because, now that it’s November, I thought it would be fun to nearly enter the nadacontest at NaNoWriMo.org and bang out a book this month.

In fact, I didn’t enter the contest; I never have and I likely never will. But I’m okay with writing a book containing at least fifty thousand words during November; that’s something I’ve done before and will likely do again.

This time, I’m writing Stupidae which, if you’re in the right place at the right time, might be being advertised in the leaderboard at the top of this site. The neat thing is that, beyond committing to write the thing before the end of the month, since I’m not actually entering the contest to prove wordcounts and all, I’m just writing it online at stupidae.com, whereat You the Reader can at your option just reload the hell outta the site to watch the book expand paragraph by paragraph.

At first, I thought it would be fun to do the book that way. Then I quickly discovered that it really kinda got in my way. Then I got over it. Now, at present sixteen thousand words [32%] in, it’s proving fun after all.

One note, now that I suppose you’ve already clicked on the link: to the extent that StickPrimo is crushed into something of a familyfriendly format, Stupidae really kinda isn’t; if you’re somehow terrified of the CarlinList, you might wanna give it a miss.

Otherwise, it’s a little like this webcomic would be, supposing I could cram several hundred words into each panel.

Which I can’t do. I already kinda tried that. No good. At all.

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