6/1/2007
Woot! I’ve now been doing this for quite awhile. I still love drawing comics, and I’m now perfectly comfortable with how my site looks. I’ve got an awesome layout, fantastic designs, I’ve fixed most of the small things that were bugging me, and I have lot and lots of awesome products thanks to cafepress. Also, I’m proud to say my site has been ad-free since day one, if you haven’t noticed that yet.
I’m also apparently being published in my new school newspaper; but I really don’t know anything about it. A few people told me that there was going to be a newspaper rivaling the terrible Nexus and encouraged me to look into this new thing that’s coming out.
So I emailed this newspaper – called The Bottom Line – with a few samples asking them if I could be a cartoonist. They emailed me back saying that my work would be published immediately and didn’t give me any other information whatsoever. So I had no idea when it’s being published, in what form, where I can get a copy, how often they want my work, if there’s a format for submitting work, should it always be the same size, and so on and so on.
Then I saw one of my friends carrying the newspaper and I wigged out! I got a chance to look at it and then raced off to find my own copy. I heard they were being passed out on campus, but I couldn't find one anywhere! I finally found a discarded one on a table and just swiped that. I didn't like how they rendered my comic, but that may have been my fault for not putting my logo on it or signing it. Anyway, I am credited on the paper as a "doodler". I may or may not post the comics I draw for the newspaper, because I think they will tend to be more UCSB specific. We'll see; maybe they'll get their own special niche on my site.
6/5/2007
So I was checking my site statistics the other day and I noticed an interesting thing. It seems as though Dry Ice is inadvertently googlebombing my other site: a walkthrough I made for the Populous: Age of Chaos mod. For those of you who don't know, a googlebomb is when you put frequently searched-for key words or phrases on your site just to draw people to it. The words may or may not have anything to do with your site's actual content. Google reads the words and may direct viewers to your page (if you're any good at googlebombing, that is).
Now, I have a link to my walkthrough site in the "links" section. I Googled "Populous Age of Chaos walkthrough", and the Dry Ice links page is somewhere around #7 on the first page of search results. Kind of amusing. The walkthrough's real site isn't even indexed by Google; at least it wasn't the last time I checked. Well, I am glad that it draws a few extra people to my site and gives the gamers a link to what they're really looking for.
Interestingly, if you search for "Dry Ice Snowmen comic" you'll get a website by internet snowman aficionado Kathleen that has a link to Dry Ice. Strangeness! If you search for www.dryicesnowmen.com, you'll get my site #1 (duh) and a bunch of image alternative text. Not too pretty, I'll have to edit that up somehow. Google can sometimes work in mysterious ways.
Update: On a whim, I decided to search for Dry Ice and the walkthrough using Ask.com, which had just done a huge marketing push for its "superior algorithm". Hah! The results were terrible; nothing was what I wanted. That search engine can't hold a candle to Google. For shame. I am embarrassed I even tried it and admitted to the Internet I tried it. Sorry everyone.
6/12/2007
Hey, it's the middle of finals, but I thought I'd do a quick blog. Here's a funny video by the Angry Video Game Nerd about terrible old Nintendo games. It's one of the longer ones, but it's totally awesome. Warning, there is a lot of cussing because he's "angry". Enjoy!
6/22/2007
I have just finished my school for the year, and now I'm onto summer vacation! I'm just about done unpacking. I am happy because I got (borrowed) my very first N64. I never had one when they came out; I just had to mooch off of my friends. I'm psyched to finally get to go through the full Super Mario 64! I've had a major itch to play that game for months. The only thing that sucks is that the controller is worn down, so you have to press really, really hard to actually run forward, and it's only really hard to move in a different direction. The stupid penguin slide race level took me forever because of this physical limitation. I may be investing in some more intact controllers very soon.
In other news, I've been able to finally pick up the html super book. I predicted awhile ago that I'd be crazy busy and wouldn't get to it until summer and I was right. Look forward to some new html tricks and stuff. Maybe. In other news, summer! Yesterday was the first day of summer. Hope you enjoyed it. I applaud you for sticking with a snow-based comic in the oncoming warmth of summer. The snowmen appreciate it.
6/24/2007
I've made a few changes. If you've read the blog before, you'll notice the nice new horizontal bars. Horizontal bars… are awesome. My next demarcation project will be finding something cool for separating out the months from the body of text. I'm not going with anything until I'm in love, however.
I've also put in alternate text for every bonus comic that's actually a transcript, not just the title of the comic. That took a long time. I'm sure there are grammar mistakes, so if you're a grammar nazi, have at it and let me know what I messed up on. I'm going to redo some of them anyway just because they don't reference the actual image when they probably should. Blind readers, I am sorry it was not more accessible earlier, but it's on it's way! I should be revising those over the next week if I don't flake out.
The last edit was I added my email address in more pages at the bottom. Also, my site is given as text instead of an image. I did this to increase the user's ability to comment on my site, and I'm really hoping that the robots crawling my site won't go nuts and spam the bejeesus out of me. If it becomes a problem, it's being replaced with an image.
Still reading the HTML monster book. It's a nice way to pass the time waiting for busses. There are a lot of interesting outdated tags. And a lot of cool stuff. My next biggest project will be a search engine to look for specific comics by the text in them. Yay.