Normally, I'd put this up just in tse_comic, but I thought this entry deserved a little special attention.

Cameron once told me he likes the idea that The Shallow End occurs in an alternate universe; a universe in which we might have actually accosted Scott Kurtz, creator of PvP with a chainsaw.

Speaking of Cameron, you might have noticed his name up at the top of the site. That's because he's agreed to start writing TSE. He's really far funnier than myself, and I'm glad to have him onboard. Considering how many failed strips I've written, all of you should be glad he's here, too.

Well here we are in a nice, cozy new site design. What do you all think? This design has my blood, sweat, tears and semen in it. What? You thought that was Hokusai's Great Wave in the panel titles?

I think I drew around five site designs out on paper, some of which I developed a bit further in Photoshop. You almost got this design, which I've been told looks like a winamp skin, but I liked this one better.

As far as I know, all the major bugs have been worked out of it. The only browser I know the site doesn't work in is IE(5?) in Mac OSX. Apparently, it doesn't have CSS support, which is, well, how this entire page is formatted. Switch to Safari or Firefox, and you'll be good. If something doesn't work right for you or looks broken, let me know. I'd very much like critiques of the design. Tell me what you like, tell me what you don't like, what you'd like to see added or changed.

Man, I've really grown a lot in the last two years. Here's what the first site on keenspace looked like, and here's the second design that I've had up for over a year.

Well, that was probably overkill for a news post. Imma go sleep now.

-P.

High res version

The week before HeroCon was utter hell for me. Every second I wasn't at work I was running around trying to get things ready. I wanted to have at least one new strip finished, I wanted to make sure I had prints of comics to show off and sell, I wanted to get the TSE site redesigned, and I wanted to make some prints of my linocut blocks to sell.

Wednesday night after dinner, I went into the print studio at UNCG to print up editions of three different blocks. It was relatively late in the evening, and the only other people in the building were errant grad students working in their studios. Being late, desolate and also very hot in the studio, I didn't think anything of taking my shirt off while I worked. Most of you probably know by now that I go almost nowhere without my iPod. It's like an appendage for me. This night was no exception. I had my iPod on and was rocking out while I measured and cut the paper I was going to use into sheets of the appropriate size.

And so I worked for quite some time, getting more and more into the process. There I was--topless, nipple piercings and tattoos blazing, long hair shaking around as I sang and danced along to Primus' Sgt Baker--when a motion from the corner of my eye caught my attention.

I looked up.

An older security guard was standing in the doorway looking at me. Looking at me like you'd look at the guy who just went on a two minute rant about how you would treat Seven of Nine better than any of her other delta quadrant suitors.

"Murrfle rffflelfl rflding long?" he said as I snapped up and took one of my headphones out. He wanted to find out how long I was going to be in the building.

He didn't actually say anything about my singing, or dancing, or not wearing a shirt. I dunno, maybe topless undergrads singing and dancing isn't that unusual a thing in the art buildling. Ma--

Maybe I need to be spending more time in the art building.... hmm...

-P.

What follows are some more personal reflections about the experience. You may or may not be interested.

( Read more... )

I... haven't written anything funny in here in a while. I'll have to change that ASAP.

-P.