Back from Jellystone

Hey everybody, thanks for having the patience to wait out my hiatus. Julia and I returned from a week long camping trip to Yellowstone, and while we saw many astounding animals - including a couple of adorable black bears -we luckily had a better time of it than Hector and Valdosta. Please enjoy the (hopefully) more regular updates from here on out.

Hard Drive Destroyed, Now We Get MS Paint Comics

Well, it always happens to me sooner or later... I use a computer long enough, and the hard drive fries crispier than a funnel cake in a Southern county fair. Fortunately, I have long made it a habit regularly to back up everything I create. Unfortunately, my 2.4 GHz dual core, 3 GB RAM laptop - my entire art studio, if you will - is a useless brick until I get my new hard drive in the mail.

In the meantime, all I have is our underpowered netbook - armed with the fun, yet evil (in a vague Comic Sans kind of way), MS Paint program. But the show must go on, and I bring you this week's less-than-appetizing The Remonstrance, in all its jagged glory. This is the first time I've ever used MS Paint, and I have to say, its simplicity is deviously addictive.

Twitter Redux

I posted on the subject of Twitter a few months ago, when I was testing the waters of this technology, both for my comic and for my personal life. By now, I've figured out pretty much what I like and don't like about tweeting.

First of all, it's just not a big deal. I think it's pretty funny to see Twitter hyped on the news as the next cutting edge communications medium that all the hip and tech-savvy kids are into. Really, Twitter is a super simple technology, seemingly used by mostly businesses and older people, that allows you to broadcast your short message through a site that is all too often down.

I don't find it useful for my personal life; Facebook gives me a similar broadcast outlet with the benefit of allowing friends to comment on my posts. Additionally, on Facebook I don't have to scroll through reams of out-of-context conversations such as:

sometwitteruser: I knew it! RT @othertwitteruser It's all my fault! The apocalypse is here. (47 minutes ago from web)

What?

Also I learned from day one that most of the people who followed me were basically shills for pornography sites, a common Twitter user experience I chronicled through Valdosta.

I do think it makes for a useful tool for promoting your product or service, since these types of posts aren't necessarily conversational and can be 140 characters or less without seeming artificially short. For this reason, while I've deactivated my personal account, I've retained @theremonstrance. So far I've mostly used it to announce new comic postings, but I do enjoy being able to follow other, more entertaining comic artists. I mostly see my Twitter feed through the iGoogle TwitterGadget; I rarely go to the actual Twitter site. When I had two Twitter accounts, I used the excellent and simple Matt web application to make posts.

In short, I would definitely recommend Twitter for anyone who wants to promote something (comic, band, dog walking business); but for personal stuff, I'd prefer almost anything else (e.g. Google Buzz) that allows for commenting, unlimited message size, and isn't always down.

Delay for this Week's Comic

Hey gang, sorry for the lateness in comic posting this month. Julia and I just returned from our 5th wedding anniversary trip to Utah - we did some sweet snowboarding, Mormon watching, and cheered on the Saints from a cool Irish pub in Park City - but I haven't had a chance to finish the next comic. Hopefully I can get that out this week. In the meantime, why not visit a webcomic portal and discover something new?

Late Comic, No Excuses

This week's comic is not yet done, and I don't have a good excuse except for the fact that I've been busy with something different every day. In the meantime, check out Nedroid Picture Diary, a cute and coolly stylized comic I have been digging lately (and maybe it's just me, but the I find the bird's big, dead-looking black eyes irresistibly unnerving).

Get Yer Tweets Here

I haven't done anything nerdy to shake up the site lately, so I decided to add the latest tweets from my webcomic twitter feed to the front page. I used the very nice python-twitter library, which made accessing the Twitter API a breeze for me in my favorite scripting language.

I'm not a huge Twitter user, but I do post comic updates and short news bits, as well as any cool comic-related links I come across. If you want to see a pretty comprehensive list of other webcomic authors to follow - some of whom post spectacularly funny tweets - check out The Webcomic List's Authors on Twitter directory.

In a Literary Mood

I realized that I subconsciously based the titles for my last couple of comics from literature; last week's from a David Eggers novel, and this week's from a story by the insufferably racist Lovecraft (whose collection of stories I'm still trying to slog through). Could I be any more pretentious?