Sunday, November 23, 2008

Thursday, November 20, 2008

Toshio

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Man knows his priorities. And shops at the same store as Cloud Strife.

Thursday, November 13, 2008

Sunday, November 9, 2008

Sarcasm

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He brings the pain; I bring the pun.

Thursday, November 6, 2008

This is not a joke.

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On time and burning hot! In more ways than one. Now if I could just write a blog posting...

Tuesday, November 4, 2008

Dialogue-driven

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Final Fantasy III, anyone? Know what I mean? Eh? Say no more, say no more, nudge nudge wink wink.

I really screwed up on delivering THIS in a timely manner, for which I apologize (again). The exciting and highly-anticipated climax on Friday, quite possibly!

Friday, October 31, 2008

RPGeez

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If anyone was bothered by (or even noticed) the delay in posting this comic...thanks. And I apologize. I hope the sting will be eased by the fact that this one is a special, super-awesome edition! Fun to make; I sure wish I could draw these by hand, though...so much faster...

Sunday, October 26, 2008

Friday, October 24, 2008

Better off not knowing

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High-class humor, here on Otherwise Employed.

Sunday, October 19, 2008

Thursday, October 16, 2008

Monday, October 13, 2008

How self-aware can you get?

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Another wordy one. This condensation thing is difficult! I don't know how water does it. Well, actually I do know how water does it. As I probably said last time this happened, the strip's a lot more concise than it was at first blush, or at least draft, so be grateful. If you can fully parse the name of the game, my congratulations to you, and also my pity. Because it means you're like I am. In one respect, at any rate, that of fanatical RPGism or some such.

Friday, October 10, 2008

Call the Bluff

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Mmm...good flavor!

Sunday, October 5, 2008

I make this mistake often

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To really get the joke here it is necessary to have read the preceding comics. I trust you've done so. For your own good.

Thursday, October 2, 2008

Sunday, September 28, 2008

[Overly-Literate] Callback

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Although really, after last comic's reference...

Thursday, September 25, 2008

Sunday, September 21, 2008

Thursday, September 18, 2008

part four

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This one took some extra work; it's probably clear why. It sure was fun, though. Originally this comic - minus the conclusion - and next Monday's were one, but I realized that was too much compression, and that there was plenty of content for at least two strips. Plus I get the last panel of today's production, which would not exist otherwise. At least, it wouldn't until I thought of another use for it. Really it was a panel that had to be drawn.

Sunday, September 14, 2008

Thursday, September 11, 2008

part two

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The saga continues! If you've stumbled across this comic and like it, please feel free to leave a comment imparting this information. If you've stumbled across this comic and don't like it, well go right ahead and leave a comment yourself, if you like that idea (but be constructive, please). Right now I don't have an on-site stat-counter, and even if I did it wouldn't tell me what people thought. If anyone outside the crew I already know is reading this is, er, reading this, and has a reaction, I'd sure love to hear about it. I'm contemplating the practicality of making an email address available for this purpose, but it certainly would be superfluous right now when the only readers I know of are my family and one or two of my buds...

Sunday, September 7, 2008

part one

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I have come to a profound realization. And that is that Monday and Friday are better publishing days than Tuesday and Thursday. And that on-time is good. Two profound realizations! So this is now a Monday / Friday, on-time enterprise. Hallelujah, brother! I have come to comfort the sinner and return the stray lamb to the...oh, sorry.

Thursday, September 4, 2008

*sigh*

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I was all over getting this done on time. Thanks, XP Service Pack 3, for choosing that moment - and the next five billion - to make yourself downloaded and installed, stealing all my computer's puny resources in the process. Oh well. I guess it's a good thing to have. Probably.

Tuesday, September 2, 2008

What's your point?

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I hope it's obvious those're cobwebs in the last panel.

It's cluttered this time, for which I apologize. Probably I should have gone the route of additional panels, which I did consider, but for the moment I'm reluctant to add any more, er, layers of complexity. Of course the larger amount of text meant I also had to shrink the size, which makes it harder to read. Sorry again. I hope the more legible font I'm using now will be sufficient - I can read the words easily enough, but then again I already know what they say. Let me know if it's problematic. With any luck I can condense the humor sufficiently in future comics that there won't be many more like this. Cluttered, I mean. Otherwise I'm quite pleased with how this came out.

Except of course that Studio started annoying me again. Here's what makes me really angry: when I draw something and then go to erase the excess...and I can't. The eraser just doesn't work. No matter which layer I'm in! Argh! It's phenomena like this that drive a man to drink, or at least swear, or at least complain in a web posting.

Thursday, August 28, 2008

The Emergence (of True Darkness)

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You would not believe the things that happen to me to prevent the actualization of my glorious plan to post new content on the morning of the day promised instead of mid-afternoon or late at night. And I'm not just talking about phenomena like how warm my bed is especially when contrasted with the cold of morning air, or that I need to do other stuff that, to reiterate an earlier point, has nothing whatsoever to do with the content of this comic. It's crazy. Crazy, I tell you!

I'm still working out the kinks of my (admittedly still primitive) process. For instance I noticed (and am therefore going to mention it so no one can think they've got something on me, at least based on this comic) right after I posted the latest that I was not consistent in the font sizes. Also I left "degree" capitalized unnecessarily, and I forgot to hyphenate "fast-food" (not that anyone besides me would care about this last). I could go back and change all this, but it'd be a pain and is not really worth it when, to quote a classic movie, "she may not look like much, kid," anyway. But she's got it where it counts. Which is sarcasm.

Anyway, the above considerations notwithstanding, I have become sufficiently proficient in the basics of Jasc Studio that any excessive time I spend is now just to decide on the right phrasing or get a posture just right, as opposed to wrestling with the program's mechanics. It's better this way.

I thought the scripts I came up with way back were pretty finished, at least in some cases, but even the "very finished" one that became today's comic is in its published form much, much funnier than it was when I first wrote it. So if you don't think it's funny now, be glad you didn't see it then.

More on the way. Much more. Maybe even on time.

Props to fast-food clerks and sewage workers, by the way.

Tuesday, August 26, 2008

I've been there...

May I present: (I may)



The yuks keep coming. But not the yucks, I hope. I still haven't used any of the pre-written scripts I came up with; they're mostly self-contained and somewhere along the way I decided maybe I wanted some 'story' structure and progression. I blame Sam and Fuzzy. Today's comic may be the last of the prologue episodes, though. Then the real humor will begin. Boy oh boy.

Thursday, August 21, 2008

No warning

Hoorah, it's a new comic, featuring exactly 98% less frustration! Sweet! No commentary this time. I'm fairly certain it doesn't need any.





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(I just hope no one says "Why's he trying to return a paper towel tube?")

Monday, August 18, 2008

Waking from a Dream

I decided to make a webcomic! A Strong Bad Email seems appropriate here. Make sure you click on the all-caps word at the end. This comic is an enterprise in conjunction with my blog, which currently features an epic and hilarious fantasy story in installments by me, so make sure to check that out as well. There's no real parallelism in content, at least not yet. Anyway, I guess I ought to finish with the ado and produce the comic, and then apologize afterward. Voila (click it):






Sorry about the size, first of all (aha, innuendo, hilarious). This is one of those things I have to figure out, whether I can scale the comic any larger without damaging the visual clarity, or if this is a consequence of Blogger's formatting that I just have to accept. If you didn't follow my instruction above, know that clicking on the comic opens the image at full-size, which makes it, you know, readable.

The comic is a little...rough around the edges to be sure, but at least it's done, which happening was seriously in jeopardy not an hour ago. This project was undertaken by me with full awareness of various deficiencies that would impede its completion. These deficiencies stack nicely in a manner I will detail. The first difficulty is a certain lack of artistic talent on my part, at least in the visual realm. But stick figures serve just fine when well applied, so no deal breaker. Very well, but even if I could draw anything fancier than pretzels with character, I might as well not bother because I don't have a scanner. Annoying, but that at least is something that could conceivably change in the future, contingent upon certain affairs that are in no way connected with the content of this comic. Anyway, when stick figures are all you're going for, just drawing it on the computer is a viable possibility, except that Microsoft Paint, for all its virtues, is ill-equipped for this sort of venture. But that's OK, since I've got a free trial of Paint Shop Pro, except that I don't know jack about image editing software, pardon the double negative.

The result has been an exercise in frustration. Heck, I don't even really know how to make much use of Paint - it's been a long time since I doodled aimlessly with that digital paintbrush on my mother's office computer while waiting for her to be ready to go home. Paint Shop Pro is a whole other beast, on an entirely different layer, if you will. I'm well aware that lots of people know how to use this sort of program and it must seem silly that I should have problems producing what you see above. Normally I'd be the one "conde-sending" instead of being on the receiving end, but when you don't do anything with the visual arts, even Photo Shop for Adobe's sake, and you haven't used a program utilizing layers since high school's Auto CAD class, then trying to learn the basics while at the same time producing a comic with the intention of posting it in short order the same day becomes a more formidable task. Small wonder that what I (naively) hoped would be an hour's work, tops, ended up taking...well, many more. Oh, the fun I had trying to figure out why certain lines were shimmering and how I could make them stop, and then closing the file before making full use of certain important layers and opening the file again to discover those layers as separate entities were gone... Even when I did finish at glorious last, for some reason Blogger doesn't like to be reliable in the matter of uploading images or at least my images (they're clean, I swear!), which meant I had to try far too many times for far too much additional time, before the comic finally appeared on the page as you see it now.

Enough. Sometimes education hurts, and even though I wanted to post this comic this morning and at this point I might as well be doing it tomorrow morning, it is still today, and I got 'er done, as it were. With any luck the stuff I learned slowly and painfully today will allow me to speed up production considerably next time.

It is funny - people always ask or make claims about computer proficiency or technology expertise, but that's really not specific enough. Someone asks me if I can use a computer - well, of course I can use a computer, at least if "use a computer" means turn one on, or if we're operating at a higher level of professionalism, produce a word document or play a decent game of Age of Empires or surf the web or turn out some sort of webcomic shenanigans. But there are many kinds of software of the use of which I am completely ignorant, and even many aspects of just running and tweaking a computer's operating system that I would be nearly as inept at manipulating as someone who's never used a computer before. Just so, I consider myself a technology buff, but it's really only so in certain areas. I don't know how to make use of the advanced features of a digital camera, or even some of the basic features without prompting. I couldn't recommend a particular audio compression format to anyone, unless it was someone I hated. Let's face it - we sure love our generalizations, but the truth is most of the time they're unfounded (not that that's a surprise). I wonder how many more things we take for granted are in fact unfounded generalizations the nature of which only comes to light when it's problematic. That would be, and in fact is, my semi-philisophical or perhaps just sophistical babble for the day, at least on this webpage.

Regarding the nature of this strip, you should be able to get some idea of the general themes just from this first comic, but more will be revealed soon enough. Of course I probably don't need to point out that the events depicted therein are in no way reflective of the experiences going on in my life right now and I really have no idea of where the inspiration and ideas come from. Yeah.

Regarding longevity...it's hard to say. I'd love to get a scanner, which would definitely speed up the process no matter how skilled I get with computer software, and I intend to do so, but who knows when. As for these ideas out of the ether, I may well run out eventually...but the first day I definitely decided I was going to do this comic, I slammed out early scripts for seven weeks' worth of strips, and that's not including at least the first two or three you're going to see. Frankly I'm not worried about the spring running dry, and certainly sarcasm is never out of season.

Updates on Tuesday and Thursday, unless I'm driven more crazy than usual by production. Today's counts as tomorrow's; that's not confusing at all, I'm sure. Hope you enjoy and stick with me, because this is just the tip of the vitriol.

Er...now that is confusing...