Inspired by this post on dooce but not nearly as witty. Can’t decide if it’s funny or lame, so it’s a bonus comic. Might mean I move Saturday’s back to Sunday, but I haven’t decided that either.
Funny, or lame?
Tag Archives: comic status
New comic schedule
With martial arts wiping me out every Monday night, it’s been a long time since I had a Tuesday comic up on time. I hate that.
I mulled over a number of solutions, but the one I like best is shifting to a Wednesday/Saturday schedule. So that’s what we’re doing, starting today.
It’s been that kind of day.
Chance has some kind of stomach bug or something — he’s been off-and-on puking with the runs for about four days, and the particularly emphatic projectile vomiting he did at 2:00 am pretty much sealed his fate for a trip to the vet tonight.
She rehydrated him, put him on a bland diet, and told us to bring in a stool sample as soon as we could. And one for Kaylee too, since whatever it is could be contagious. Whee, stored poop.
As if that wasn’t enough fun, I also let myself get distracted while driving (Chance was attempting to swan dive across the car) and bumped an SUV in front of me at a red light. Since his truck was taller than my car and he had a tow hitch, his truck looked fine, but my car’s all scratched up. Joy.
To top it all off, I pulled out a container of tomato sauce from the freezer and heated it up to go with the tortellini for dinner, only to discover it was beef barbeque, not tomato sauce. And not very good beef barbeque I might add. That didn’t go as well as planned.
I do have video of Kaylee (for those who’ve asked) but I haven’t had time to process it — a lot of it is much longer than necessary, filled with dead air and the like, and the last thing the internet needs is another 7 minute long dog video full of nothing worth watching. Maybe this weekend. But doubtful.
Anyway, suffice it to say not much drawing has been done and I’m exhausted, grouchy, and extremely headachy. The comic won’t be overly late this weekend, but it will probably be lame.
How we’re gonna do this thing
So obviously I missed last Tuesday’s comic, and with Saturday’s comic being due up in a matter of hours, it doesn’t make any sense to post it now.
Instead, I’ll post one next Thursday and that should get us back on track.
Granted, there’s no guarantee of quality — in fact, the first one up is quite sketchy, but at least we’ll be closer to a schedule.
Home sweet mess
We drove home from Virginia Beach yesterday, in fairly good weather and making fairly good time. When we finally reached the house, we found Houdini-Dog still in the kitchen where he belongs, for a change.
That was the good news. The bad news was that the only reason Chance was still in the kitchen was because the bathroom door had blocked his ability to pop the gate all the way out. So instead, he shredded the corner of the carpet he could now reach. Whee. Nothing like a 6 hour drive to come home to a pile of shredded carpet, carpet padding, dog toys, and poop.
So my first hour home consisted of mopping the floor. Joy.
Anyway, it didn’t take us long to get settled in — the house was mostly clean before we left and my sister left the place in pristine condition for us when we arrived home (sans Houdini’s attempts to escape via carpet burrowing, which she clearly couldn’t have predicted. Hell, she even unloaded the dishwasher for me.) so we mostly just need to catch up on laundry and the mail.
Sounds so simple when I say it that way, doesn’t it? How come it alway takes so much longer?
The other thing I need to do is transfer files off the laptop and onto the desktop so I can finish Tuesday’s comic, start Saturday’s, and generally get off my ass in getting my online life back in order. WordPress needs an upgrade, the Mac has a security patch to install, the laptop’s optical drive is dead, etc. etc. it never ends.
In an attempt to get off my ass a little faster, I threw out two thirds of the RSS feeds and comics I read just so they wouldn’t pose a distraction. I’ll probably throw out more as the next week or so goes. How well that will actually motivate me, I can’t say. But here’s for more blog and less late comics.
More ruins
For those of you who like these things (and I know you’re out there) here are 20 Abandoned Cities and Towns from Around the World, as also presented on User Friendly.
Speaking of comics and ruins, I plan to get to a Saturday comic done, but my travel plans have temporarily delayed it until we reach the beach.
On comics, from two different angles
First, I think I might have actually found a way around the now-infamous elevator comic that has stalled Night Fugues for months.
Second, I spent a significant amount of time today harassing my fellow Information Architects about a Boxes and Arrows podcast that implied there was a difference between storyboards and comics, at least as far as the artifacts of the design process are concerned. Since I’m coming from the comic side of that dichotomy I thought it would be important to know the difference between a “design” comic and a “normal” comic, especially since I thought storyboards were comics. A storyboard is a piece of sequential art that expresses design and behavior of a system through a story that provides insight into the user’s mental/emotional state, which pretty much defines “comic” , so what the heck?
A conversation with my mentor led me to a conversation with another excellent IA, which led me to a printout of a presentation from this year’s IA Summit discussing how you could use a comic instead of a storyboard to present design ideas. That presentation was done by Kevin Cheng one of the creators of OK/Cancel, a design-oriented webcomic I’ve been reading for years, and it recommended the same books for writing comics to express design that I own in order to improve my comic production skills — Will Eisner
So, having read the presentation and worked with storyboards for design (even though I’m not first-hand familiar with either one from start to finish) I’m willing to take the chance and summarize the difference between a storyboard and a comic when it comes to design.
Storyboards are comics by the definition of any comic author anywhere. But in storyboards, the panels generally concentrate on the screens and their functionality, business and user goals, and similar sawdust-flavored information.
A comic (as stated above) is is a piece of sequential art that expresses something through the act of telling a story. A comic (like any piece of fiction and some nonfiction) is generally showing the growth of the main character through their interaction with other characters, their environment, or themselves. A comic visually provides insight into the user’s mental/emotional state as well as that interaction with their surroundings.
A design comic (which is where we use the comic to express the design of a piece of software) keeps the same character focus that we find in standard comic strips and comic books. It uses sequential art to express high level design ideas (probably pre-wireframes) to add clarity to the growing user scenarios and situations, and share the user’s growth through the
story.
Or to sum up really quick and easy, storyboards are a) more likely to be higher fidelity detailed designs or wireframes, b) more likely to express business goals and user goals in the margins instead of in the comic, and c) really really boring to read.
*Updated 4/24 at 7:12 am when I not trying to type on the iPhone while falling asleep, and thus could correctly link and close tags.