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I have some of the coolest fans…
November 19th, 2007 (1 year, 1 month ago) by Jeff | Permalink | 1 Core Dump
The above picture was sent to me by GPF readers Jeremy and Teresa the other day. Accompanying the pic, Jeremy wrote:

BTW, I don’t know if I sent this to you last summer, but I meant to. My wife and I had a Nick & Ki figure made for our wedding “cake topper” in July, 2006. We had Nick’s hair done blonde to match mine, and I thought it looked great.

And it does. Another fine example of Lanin Thomasma’s excellent handiwork. If you haven’t seen his awesome GPF sculptures, then you need to go give them a look. Lanin has crafted a good dozen (or more) GPF and non-GPF maquettes for me personally, some of which have accompanied me to shows & cons. I don’t really want to turn this post into an advertisement, but these sculptures are so incredible it’s hard not to.

As for the statue in question, Nick looks a little odd to me as a blond, but it definitely fits with the rest of their wedding photos. (Jeremy was gracious enough to share them with me.) I hope you two have an awesome future together. I certainly hope nobody at your wedding was kidnapped by any “evil twins” from alternate universes….

(Random trivia: The “cake topper” for our wedding was Mickey & Minnie Mouse, since we were going to Disney World for our honeymoon. While Nick & Ki existed at that point and I knew they were eventually destined to be married, nobody outside of a circle of close friends and family had read the GPF scripts yet and I certainly didn’t know of anyone that could make custom maquettes for us. Oh, well….)
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GPF’s ninth anniversary
November 2nd, 2007 (1 year, 2 months ago) by Jeff | Permalink | Dump Core
Woo.

You know, I could wax all philosophical, get nostalgic and misty-eyed, ramble on and on about how things have changed between 1998 and now, but… I’d rather not. If you care, celebrate in whatever means you are so accustomed, although I request that if you do so in the name of GPF that you do so in a socially responsible manner. (Don’t want anyone going to jail for some drunken GPF-inspired murder spree.)

I guess I could mention, in the light of other comics celebrating a decade of existence recently, that GPF was actually created in 1997 and I spent over a year developing and honing it before it came online. So in a sense, GPF is also a decade old, although not officially until November 2, 2008. Somehow, I doubt anyone would really count that.

Woo.
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Current GPF schedule plans
October 18th, 2007 (1 year, 2 months ago) by Jeff | Permalink | 1 Core Dump
Following up last week’s post, here’s the current GPF update schedule plans. The strip will continue to update weekly (please hold your groaning until the end of the post) until February 2008. While I’m still trying to be optimistic that I’ll soon be able to increase my updates to at least thrice per week, I’m also realistic enough to know it’s definitely not going to happen with the big fall/winter holidays coming up (namely Thanksgiving and Christmas). So I’m taking the safe route and officially putting off any frequency updates until well after that. Sketchbook reruns will continue on Wednesdays during this time.

For Fridays, we’ll start running the Book 2 bonus story on November 2nd (GPF’s ninth anniversary). This story will run until January 18th, and we’ll double-up on the Sketchbook reruns until February 1st. Like the first book’s bonus story, this will run once and never again, so if you don’t have a copy of the book this is your only chance to see it completely free. Technically, there’s an archived online version available for owners of the book, but you need to have access to the physical book to get in the first time. (Unfortunately, it probably suffers from the same problem as the book 1 online version in that different printings of the book won’t match the questions asked, so not everyone will probably be able to get in. I’m trying to think of a good workaround for this, but I doubt that’s going to happen any time soon.)

Much to my chagrin, I’m drastically chopping down the final chapter of To Thine Own Self… to alleviate the torture to all of us in having it drag on too much longer. If I were still updating seven days a week, I could see spending several weeks each expounding on the wedding reception, Trudy’s internal conflicts about her return, why Patty hates weddings, and what really happened to the Gamester. But even I can’t really justify dragging it out that much, not when we’re getting buffeted by the wind gusts of passing snails. So I’ve cropped Chapter Eight down to the bare essentials, the plot points that we absolutely can’t go without, and I’ll push out some of the otherwise unresolved threads to be answered later on. This means that TTOS will either end on February 13th if I can actually increase the updates to thrice per week in February, or March 3rd if we continue at once per week to that point. Beyond that, GPF will officially enter Year Nine (about a year and a half behind schedule), where I’ll be heavily concentrating more on humor than plot. (Even I need to take a break.)

More updates as soon as I have them….
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Too ambitious
October 12th, 2007 (1 year, 2 months ago) by Jeff | Permalink | 5 Core Dumps
Last month I stated that I hoped to have GPF back to a M-W-F schedule by November. Nuh-uh. Not gonna happen. While Ben’s sleep patterns are much more predictable (save for the occasional oddity like this past Wednesday night, where none of us got more than two hours sleep) and we’ve made significant headway in cleaning up and organizing our basement, I haven’t gotten any strips done since that September 10th post. Getting seven comics done in that week must have been a fluke, because I certainly haven’t been able to repeat it.

The hardest part of maintaining my schedule has to be the scripting. Drawing the line art is difficult because it means I have be sequestered in the basement at the art desk for about a half hour to an hour per strip. I’ve been working on ways to do the line art digitally, but all those R&D efforts have been largely on hold since Ben’s birth. And while it’s possible for everyone else to come down to the basement with me, I really don’t want to dictate what everyone else can do just to buy me art desk time. (At the moment, there’s little down there to entertain Ben with anyway.) Doing the digital half of the strips (clean-up, text, colors, etc.) can be time consuming but at least I can do those on the laptop in the living room with the rest of the family, so I can be a part of what’s going on and readily available if someone needs me.

But scripting is tough because I really need to shut myself off from everyone else and concentrate. Big stories like To Thine Own Self… usually have a large, overall time line that I follow from the beginning, but I very rarely script things down to the individual strip level that far in advance. Individual strips, jokes, and dialog are usually written as I come to them unless they are so critical to the plot that they need advance planning or I come up with something so good I can’t afford to forget it. So before I work on each “week” of strips (Sunday + six dailies) I hide myself somewhere quiet and script each line of dialog, block out each panel, and occasionally reorder things if necessary. This way I have a plan by the time I get to the art desk so my time there is most efficiently used and I’ve got a second chance to improve the art before it becomes semi-permanent. Scripting is time consuming because I write out each line of dialog (which I don’t do during the art desk phase; I just leave sufficient space and add the text digitally), occasionally erase and reword it, and sketch every panel. Often I have to think hard about how the dialog flows, who says what in what order, and what kind of punchline I can use for the last panel. I actually think scripting is the most time-consuming part of the process, because to do it right I can’t be interrupted. I can step away from the art desk or laptop and come back with little mental paging; scripting is a mindset, and when I am forced out of it, I often have to reorganize my thoughts to get back to where I was when I left. And none of what I’ve mentioned so far has brought research to light, since many times I have to go back and re-read old stories to make sure I get all the back references correct.

And that’s where I am now. I’m in the scripting phase for the next “week”, and I just can’t get enough time together to step away from everything else to hide myself away and just write. I may need to re-evaluate my process and look for alternative scripting methods, like typing dialog and descriptions into the computer first at times when I can’t sketch. I’ve tried that before, usually when I’m working with another artist for a crossover, but it rarely seems to work well for me. Part of the scripting work is figuring out how much space the dialog takes up per panel and balancing text versus art so one doesn’t overpower the other. That’s hard to do in a word processor. But right now, I can’t think of anything better to do than forsaking my family and effectively ceasing to exist for several hours.

So no big comeback in November. Sorry, folks, but thems the breaks. Nobody could be more frustrated about it than I am. I’m not sure what, if anything, I’ll do for GPF’s ninth anniversary. The strip will likely continue on the weekly Monday schedule at least through the end of the year; there’s no way I’ll be able to up my schedule with the winter holidays coming up. The Sketchbook Reruns will probably continue the “Rejected Story Month” updates during that time, and I’ll probably run the Book #2 bonus story on Fridays once the Book #1 bonus runs out. After that… we’ll just have to wait and see.
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The (ambitious) plan
September 10th, 2007 (1 year, 3 months ago) by Jeff | Permalink | 2 Core Dumps
It’s been a while since I’ve made an update here on the state of all things GPF-ish. Of course, the official state of the comic stuff should come only from the GPF News, but I tend to occasionally give those of you who visit this site (both of you) more nebulous, wishy-washy updates that may or may not come to pass. I guess the blog has taken the place of the old Rumor Mill, only not restricted to just Keenspot PREMIUM subscribers. (Man, I feel guilty for not keeping that up. But truth be told, I honestly haven’t had any “rumors” worth posting there for ages.)

Things are moving along slowly but surely. I will assume everyone has read the September 3rd News update by now. The important thing to pull out of that one is that Miscellaneous Fridays will be the Book 1 bonus story until the end of October. This wasn’t my first or best choice, and I was very reluctant to use “exclusive” content from one of the books as main page filler. Still, that content is now a good seven years old and will not remain permanently archived on the site in a freely available form (you have to have access to a physical copy of the book to access the online archive), so I will assume this is okay. I also didn’t have much else I could pull of the old archive DVDs that would buy me enough time to play catch up. I’m still sitting on the Book 2 bonus story, which at twelve pages could last me a good three months of weekly updates, and I’ll pull that out of the hat if I have to.

However, the extremely ambitious plan is to get GPF back to three real comic updates per week by November. This, of course, will mark GPF’s ninth anniversary and will be a perfect opportunity for an at least partially triumphant comeback. Fortunately, this is looking a lot more possible that it was several months ago. It’s still going to be difficult, but at least it looks more obtainable than it has for the past year.

The biggest obstacle to upping the frequency has been Ben’s sleep schedule, which has been very erratic and difficult to manage pretty much since he was born. However, we’ve had a major success in getting him on a pretty regular schedule lately (although he’s only been complying while literally kicking and screaming). This has freed up some of my evenings again; I managed to get almost an entire old-style week’s worth of comics (one color Sunday and six dailies) done last week. We’ve also finally started making some headway in cleaning up the basement, which for over a year after our move back to West Virginia has remained a catch-all of unpacked boxes of stuff we haven’t found storage for. Now most of the moving stuff is packed away or discarded, my GPF corner is an organized and semi-efficient workspace, and the remaining unpacked boxes are lined against the walls, making much of the floor space actually usable. More storage space is on the way (once I put those do-it-yourself cabinets together) and many other home improvement tasks should be relatively easy to complete.

What remains to be seen is what will happen to Tuesdays and Thursdays if GPF actually does return to a three-updates-per-week schedule. The two primary options are to (1) let the T-days lay fallow as they currently are or (2) move the Sketchbook reruns there and update them twice per week. Option #2 has the obvious benefit of increasing page views and thus ad revenue, but with the detriment that it depletes the backlog of sketches twice as quickly as they are generated (as new Sketchbook updates occur only once per week). I suppose Option #3 would be to make one day Sketchbook reruns and the other Miscellaneous Thursdays or somesuch, but I’d rather not go that route; I’m running out of miscellaneous stuff as it is. I think the most likely scenario is Option #1, with the possibility of Option #2 leading to the ultimate goal of GPF returning to at least five updates per week (M-F). (Six or seven updates shouldn’t be likely for the foreseeable future.)

As for story line stuff, that’s pretty much up in the air. I have a number of loose ideas of where I want to take the comic once To Thine Own Self… finally comes to an end. I think I have only one or two really major story arcs left unresolved that I want to complete before I can comfortably see the strip end. I might take a diversion from the main comic and move Surreptitious Machinations II into the main archive; as awesome and ambitious as the idea was to make it an exclusive pay-only feature, I think it might be more practical to simply finish it and get it out into the open. Since it’s already scripted, it would just be a matter of finishing the art, which I’m already over a fifth of the way done with anyway. It would also provide an excellent diversion for both me and you, the readers, as we take a break from the main cast and from TTOS’s weighty length.

(Note: The above paragraph should not be misconstrued as rumblings that GPF is coming to an end any time soon. I’ve always kept the option open that if I had to I would end GPF if the needs of my family were too great to let it continue. My family has and always will remain my top priority and will always come before the comic. However, I still have plenty of ideas and I’m sure more will present themselves as time continues. At the moment, I only have two major stories I’d love to see published before I brought the strip to a comfortable conclusion, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t tons of smaller, lighter story arcs I could pursue. When I started Surreptitious Machinations, I was afraid I would have to end the strip once it concluded because I would run out of ideas. Quite to the contrary, SM seeded even more story ideas and kept feeding the comic all the way up to today.)

I suppose that’s all I have to tell you for now. I’ll try and give you a greater feel for how likely the schedule increase will be as the time draws closer.
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State of the comic…ish
March 20th, 2007 (1 year, 9 months ago) by Jeff | Permalink | Comments Off
I apologize for the quietness, everyone. Busy, busy, busy on this end. Thought I’d drop a quick post in to update you on a few things.

Good news: Feedback is so far very positive on the three-updates-per-week thing. Even though it’s not the main comic, you guys have been very open and accepting of the Sketchbook reruns and the new Mischief mini-series. It’s still not ideal in my book, but I’m much rather have you guys coming back more often, and this should provide us with good, solid updates through about the end of June.

Bad news: I’ve received an odd complaint or two about the fact that the Sketchbook updates aren’t showing up in the official GPF RSS feed. Yup, thems the breaks. The GPF RSS feed is an odd hodge-podge of bizarre coding which shoehorns Keenspot’s Autokeen automation software into doing things it was never intended to do. In general, though, I’ve been able to do some pretty amazing things with it, and my RSS feed is the loose basis upon which most of the other Keenspot RSS feeds are built. That said, the way I’ve coded the Sketchbook rerun updates is very non-standard for Autokeen, which means it can’t take advantage of Autokeen’s many features. That also means I have no clue how to insert the Sketchbook reruns into the RSS feed without resorting to some pretty nasty manual tweaking. There’s a point to automating things, of course: to completely avoid manual tweaking. I’m looking into what I can do to include the Sketchbook updates into the feed, but on one hand I’m not sure if I even should. One point of RSS is to allow you to come back and look at things at their permanent home at a later date. Since the Sketchbook reruns are transient and can’t be accessed directly outside of the two days they’re on the main page (without a PREMIUM account), I’m not sure if it even makes sense to put it in the feed. I’m still waffling back and forth on that one. (I should point out that the regular Sketchbook updates are in the PREMIUM-only RSS feed, which is accessible from the High-Def index.)

Worse news: I did my semi-monthly comic production calculations and February and March (as of this posting) are both down. That means that while I still have my buffer, it’s dwindling slowly instead of building slowly. I’m actually down to 0.75 CPW. That, of course, means no increase in the main comic’s schedule for April. Actually, at this point, I wouldn’t expect a real update on this until July anyway, as I’ve already planned for the bonus updates through the end of June. However, as stated previously, I’m constantly re-evaluating these calculations, and I try to keep updated on them when there’s anything worth updating.

Slightly annoying news: Yes, I’m aware there’s a typo in Monday’s comic. Quite a few of you have been very helpful in pointing that out, to which I am always grateful. (I always prefer to catch and fix typos while they’re only online, before they reach more permanent media like the books.) But I’ve been so blasted busy that I haven’t had time to correct the strip or even make a News post stating that I’m aware of it. So no more e-mails please… at least on this particular typo. It’s in my queue and I’ll get to it as soon as I can. Thanks.
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Update on several things…
February 17th, 2007 (1 year, 10 months ago) by Jeff | Permalink | Comments Off
I know I’ve been silent for a bit, but as usual that means I’ve been rather busy. However, I thought I’d pop a quick post up to keep you appraised of a few things worth updating you on.

First, I’ve noticed several of you have tried to register for commenting, which means the mailer script previous mentioned seems to be working. I know this because I’ve been getting messages each time someone signs up. Unfortunately, I’ve received reports that when you try to log in to comment that you keep getting redirected to the login page (or just getting a blank page). Looks like we’ve still got some bugs to work out. The good news, however, is that I’m in the process of trying to move the blog to more reliable hosting. It’s probably going to end up “hidden” somewhere on Keenspot; it will be on their servers, but it won’t be accessible from the Keenspot header drop-down or main page. That means there will probably be ads to offset Keen’s hosting costs, but that also means I’ll get a little extra ad revenue (or PREMIUM subscriptions) for each visit you make to the blog. This is something I don’t get at the moment, and it sure beats spending money on hosting elsewhere. If for some reason Keen elects not to host the blog (which is within in their rights as a host), then I’ll probably be moving to some other host where I will be paying, and they’ll probably be ads anyway to offset the cost.

Now for GPF. I haven’t fully decided on this yet, but I’m seriously considering adding a few extra updates starting in March. Now before you get all excited, these additional updates will probably not be comic updates. I’m still not comfortable with my comic generating output to increase the update frequency. However, I am considering some optional extras to be updated during the week to keep you guys coming to the site (and, to be completely honest, to keep my page views and thus my ad revenue up). Most likely, the main comic will update on Mondays and will remain weekly for the time being. Then there will be additional updates on Wednesdays and Fridays with extra content for those who are interested.

The primary candidate for the Wednesday update is reruns of Jeff’s Sketchbook, our PREMIUM-exclusive weekly extra content. Now, for your PREMIES out there, this won’t be a permanent thing; this is only filler until the main comic is producing at a frequency that I can do M-W-F updates again. In addition, I’d start running the Sketchbook from the beginning, so sketches that run on the main page will be around five years old. The freshest sketches will continue to be on the Sketchbook site. Another bonus for PREMIES is that these Wednesday reruns will not go into the main GPF archive; they will run on the main page from Wednesday to Thursday of a given week, and then will only be available again from the Sketchbook archive, which requires a PREMIUM subscription. Thus, non-subscribers will get a weekly two-day peek at five-year-old Sketchbook content, which will then go back into the vault where only subscribers can see it. I like to think of it as an incentive for non-subscribers to sign up, and as a trip down memory lane for loyal Faulties who already have a subscription.

The Friday update is, unfortunately, the big question mark, and why this entire plan may fall apart. I currently don’t have a long-term content stream to populate the weekend. Like the main page Sketchbook update, Friday updates would not go into the main GPF archive. However, depending on what gets run, it might go into its own archive elsewhere on the GPF site. Prime candidates are some of my old junior high, high school, and college comics (if I can find any that aren’t blatant copyright and trademark infringements), some sketches and concept art not currently in the Sketchbook, or other similar non-GPF content. I’ve also seriously considered abandoning my plan to make Surreptitious Machinations II a PREMIUM-exclusive and running it as a weekly main page feature. The updates would then go into their own archive, which will remain open and not behind PREMIUM. The problem with this last one is that SM2 is only about one-fifth of the way finished, and I would either need to spend extra time finishing its pages (thus taking time away from the main strip) or running rough scripts (which are complete but very sketchy and sometimes difficult to follow) and then replacing the sketches with finished comics later.

Of course, I’m always interested in what you guys have to think about these ideas. Unfortunately, since commenting doesn’t seem to work at the moment, I invite you to visit the GPF forum and discuss it there. In fact… there, I’ve created a thread especially for it. Please give me your thoughts.

And now, for being so attentive, here’s a fun little teaser for another upcoming comic. This ought to keep you talking for a while.
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Still no schedule update in February
January 24th, 2007 (1 year, 11 months ago) by Jeff | Permalink | Dump Core
Well, I just performed a new version of the GPF production schedule estimation that I previously mentioned. For review, I took the dates of recently finished comics (i.e. since the last estimation calculation), converted those dates to week numbers, and calculated the average number of comics I’m producing per week. Unfortunately, this copy of the calculation includes the Christmas and New Years holidays, so the estimation is abysmal: 0.58 comics per week (hereafter referred to as “CPW”). Thus, I’ve effectively produced half a comic per week, or a comic every two weeks, since mid-December. That’s not good. However, when I ignore the holidays (which are usually light on comic production anyway, but that’s typically hidden from you by my once legendary buffer) and only focus on the month of January thus far, the outlook is a bit better: 1.67 CPW. That’s technically better than the previous 1.27 CPW I calculated the last time, but it only covers three weeks, whereas the previous calculation covered almost four months. When I extend the previous calculation to encompass September 2006 through January 2007 (a nice five month average), the total average comes to 1.44 CPW.

Bottom line: I’m doing better, perhaps even increasing my production more than the last time. But there still won’t be a schedule frequency upgrade in February. Sorry, but GPF will remain weekly next month. Bummer. However, sometime in March is my next scheduled Keenspot Newsbox, so hopefully I can increase the schedule by then.
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GPF schedule upgrade? Not in January…
December 5th, 2006 (2 years, 1 month ago) by Jeff | Permalink | 2 Core Dumps
If you guys think you’re frustrated by the slow pace of my currently weekly update schedule, I’m at least twice as frustrated, if not more. Needless to say, I’m not happy with my recent projection about how long To Thine Own Self… will take. (See my comment at the bottom of that post for the shocking analysis.) So I’ve been strongly considering stepping up my update frequency to at least twice per week in an effort to get things moving. Of course, being the geek that I am, I can’t comfortably do that unless I know my current production schedule can handle it. Some freakish thing about accepting reality and not having demand (posting of comics) exceed supply (the production of such comics), I suppose. So I decided to do a few quick calculations to see how many comics, on average, I’ve actually been producing lately.

Of course, being a lazy geek, I didn’t particularly want to waste time writing a whole new program to do this, so I fired up MS Excel to fling around a few cells. I’m certainly no spreadsheet wizard, but I’ve done my share of cell munching over the years. Unfortunately, I quickly found out that my small business version of Office undoubtedly didn’t have the function that I needed. (Undoubtedly, I don’t have some Analysis ToolPak or some such installed.) Fortunately, OpenOffice Calc came to my rescue with the function I needed. I took the file dates of all the comics I’ve produced since Ben was born and put them in one column, then used the WEEKNUM() function to convert the dates to a single value. It didn’t really matter what that value was, so long as it converted all the dates for a given week to a single identifying value. I then performed a count of the number of comics produced in a given week, then averaged all the counts for the 11 or so weeks the range covered. Of course, since this is only Tuesday the current week technically isn’t complete, but I still consider it a valid experiment.

The bad news is, the average is 1.25 comics per week. Thus, it would be completely impractical for me to increase my update frequency in January, as I wouldn’t be able to sustain that frequency. However, the good news is that I’m statistically producing comics faster than they’re being consumed, so the buffer is ever so slowly increasing. Thus it’s conceivably possibly that the update frequency may increase in February or March. I doubt I’ll be able to increase any production through December because of the holidays, but as Ben gets older and things get more settled in my job (there is a strong possibility I’ll be brought on full-time by my employer in January), I’m hoping that next month will let me develop a more stable comicking schedule.

Just thought I’d let you guys know that I’m not sitting on my laurels here, eking things out agonizingly slowly just to tweak you. As proof, here’s a PDF snapshot of the spreadsheet. I’ll try and keep you guys updated on my progress as I can.
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Some anniversary, huh?
November 2nd, 2006 (2 years, 2 months ago) by Jeff | Permalink | 3 Core Dumps
I sit here typing one-handed with a baby sleeping (finally) in the other arm to confirm that yes, there’s no celebratory anniversary pic on the GPF site today. (Today is GPF’s eighth anniversary, for those who didn’t know.) I know a number of you have asked or hoped for one and have even given me plenty of ideas, but time just hasn’t been on my side. When I did get a bit of time yesterday evening, I made an executive decision and worked on actual comics (and nearly completed the digital half of one). I thought producing more content was more important than working on some quick sketch to celebrate an arbitrary date on the calendar. Sorry to those who are disappointed. However, I have uploaded the latest batch of finished strips, so GPF is on track for a return to updates (albeit one per week) on Monday, November 6th.
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