[218] hunting without weapons

console

< Piro >

"not dedicated"

Wednesday - January 30, 2002

Return-Path: (deleted)
From: (deleted)
To: piro@megatokyo.com
Subject: Today's Comic
Date: Wed, 30 Jan 2002 08:56:12 -0600

Ah yes, another day another com-- oh wait, once again you've let us (your readers) down.Thanks for your dedication to your readers.

That was sarcasm by the way, just in case it got past you.

Sincerely,(name deleted)

- - - - - - -

(sigh)

I suppose a public apology is sufficient? Probably not.

Obviously i'm not dedicated. I obviously don't care about our readers. Its SO fucking obvious. I have been working non-stop for almost four weeks to keep this site alive. I have been working hard to write good comics, not tripe. I have spent the time and the energy to do quality drawings. For almost a year and a half i have drawn around 200 comics. At an average of 6 drawings per comic, that equates to around 1,200 drawings. I try to cut corners on the art sometimes, but sometimes you can't, because it would ruin the effect - the comic would loose some of its potency. When planning todays comic i was faced with some of these choices, and it's obvious that i made a bad decision, since i was unable to finish all eight drawings, some of which are more complex than usual.

So, what can i do to fix this lack of dedication? I average 6 hrs of sleep every night, i know i cannot go with much less. Why didn't i draw more of the comic on tuesday night? Because i was too busy putting together advertising info and working on the banner ad system so that Largo and I can raise the money needed to pay for the bandwidth that delivers this site and all its content, including the forums. Lets see, perhaps i shouldn't be trying to publish that first collection of MT comics. Maybe i don't have the time to work on the layout and build the specifications needed to get pricing and search for printers. Have you ever printed a book before? do you have any idea how much work is involved? Do you have any idea how much money Largo and I are going to have to invest to do it?

Yea, I know. I'm not dedicated at all. I don't care about our fans.

Oh yea, and don't forget that i have a day job. One where i actually have to work the full eight hours i am there. Sometimes more. Boo hoo.

For your information, mr fucking "name deleted", i spent 6.25 hours drawing last night without even a break for dinner. The comic is late because the comic involved a lot of complex drawings, not because i was lazy. At 1:30 i was too exhausted to continue. Can't keep my eyes open, slurred speech kind of exhaustion. You wanna know whats really sad? It's that horrible feeling you get when you *know* that someone write you an email like this the next morning, telling me that i let everyone down. Its a horrible feeling. It sits in the pit of your stomach. It's like leaving a part of yourself exposed to be kicked, and you know someone will kick you when they see the weakness.

Call me a bad planner. Call me a crappy artist who's art isn't always up to par. Call me whiner who goes on and on about how difficult his life is and how hard he works and how no one really understands. Call me someone that always feels he can do more than he really can, who commits himself to things he shouldn't because he always underestimates how much time things take. Call me slow, call me too particular about my drawings. Tell me i just ain't gonna cut it because i don't have what it takes to do this. Call me someone who doesn't really have to do this if its so hard for me to do...

but NEVER fucking tell me i'm not dedicated.

I've been doin pretty good since the site came back up. Thanks for kicking me the first time i stumbled. Very nice of you. I feel very good now.

Now, if you'll excuse me, i need to get back to work, at my day job. You know, the one that pays my bills. The one that i took 15 minutes out of my day to write this with... a rant where i was originally going to write about happier things - the Kanon anime which debut today on Japanese TV, the upcoming Pitaten anime, the beautiful snow outside. I haven't been able to watch any tv or anime lately, or finish playing DigiCharat Fantasy like i want to, someday. In fact, i even made a rant image to use for it, as you can see above.

Can you, mister "name deleted" tell me honestly that you have not played any games or watched any TV or sat and chilled at all in the past four days? If so, then you should be more understanding. If not, then I don't feel ANY fucking need to analogize to you.

Sincerely,

piro

PS: For the rest of you, i apologize for this venting in public like this. You can take if for humor value, if you like.

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< Largo >

"boogie woogie january"

Friday - January 25, 2002

[Largo] - 12:33:00 - [link here]

Man… what a crazy ride…

First up, the most important news, Bioware and Interplay have settled their differences as outlined in this press release. Which means Neverwinter Nights now has a publisher again, and will soon be in my game starved hands.

What this means for megatokyo? Well more updates for starters – at lease until the game comes out, then Largo may disappear off the face of the earth for a few days, but never fear, I will return with treasures from the far off region of the sword coast, treasures such as screenshots! and… umm.. you know, important stuff.

Due to the recent downtime of the site, which was just frustrating on a multitude of levels, I’ve got a linkitage backlog I need to dump, so here goes.

[begin link spew 1.0]

Dave Kellet, one of our own webcomic brethren and author of Sheldon, has made good and hooked up the fine folks at United Media Syndicate. Now don’t worry because this isn’t the Syndicate[tm] with the cyborg implants, chain guns and trench coats. This is the friendly kind, that can publish you and sometimes even pay for your work. Sheldon is a great comic and so it’s well worth your time to click here.

Earlier in the month, I visited Ohayocon, and got stuck on the strangest of panels… unfortunately for me, Strangefour of the webcomic Beta, was in the audience and captured the event in this comic.

Normally, when I visit conventions, I get a little run down, having only our comic to talk about with fans, but for a change of pace – I was asked to host a website design panel, man was that a blast – I was able to spend an hour talking about the virtues of Apache, PERL, PHP4, and MySQL. I even got to sneak in some of my own personal rules to follow about how to design a good relational database… The audience was subjected to me drawing out the various tables and schema that make our site’s backend. ah… it was so refreshing…. I should give up my day job and just teach… hrm.. Great Teacher Largo…

Speaking of webcomics… Just Weird, which holds true to its name, felt that perhaps I should spend a bit more time answering my email, as shown here.

As Piro pointed out, we are doing more advertising on MT, and the rates are pretty affordable, even for just the average joe lynes to buy. We’re trying something a little new compared to most sites, and offering ad banner impressions at a reasonable cost, with discounts for higher volume. email here, for more details.

In my spare time… what little there is, I managed to help out our friends at PvP by settling up their forums this month. It’s good to see them back up, the PvP community seems glad to have them back.

I want to thank Magus of #megatokyo for doing some UBB debugging with me, and for working on a sweet stylesheet, which I’ll add to the list of available stylesheets in the forums later today.

All things considered, 2002 is looking really good for MegaTokyo, with a book in the works, a site redesign later this year, and some special projects lined up in the coming months – it looks like a very good year ahead… Indeed!

… or check into a psycho ward, whichever comes first.