Well, I knew it was going to happen eventually, but I was really trying to put it off a little longer than this.

I’ve maxed my hard drive.

See, this comic is brought to you by the power of a 2 year old iBook G4 with a 40 gig drive. When it was purchased, I thought this was the lap of luxury — it was an upgrade from a 2000-model Pismo (Powerbook G3) with a 20 gig drive. Forty gigabytes! That’s huge! My first Mac had a 512 megabyte drive! I could hold THE WORLD with 40 gigs!

Except that the world has suddenly become 7.5 GB of applications, 10 GB of music, and, shockingly, almost 10 GB of files in the Pictures directory. And of those 10 GB in the Pictures directly almost 7 GB is, well, the comic. There’s another 6+ gig of every other thing I need to survive (everything from finances to old poetry to, oh yeah, the backups of this website) and that leaves me at about 33 to 34 GB filled.

Since the drive only formats at 37 and a smidge, well, things have been tight.

So tight that every single time I try to draw a comic at this point, I’m maxing the hard drive. How maxed? Well, let’s just say I’m very very familiar with the error that says that the comic can’t be saved because we’re out of disk space.

So here’s where we sit. (The livingroom.) (Sorry. I couldn’t help it.) Nighthawk just spec’d out and ordered me a new 120GB laptop drive and an external enclosure for the old drive. But once it arrives (next week?) I’ll have to back up everthing to the server, then install the new drive, and then rebuild the laptop with the new drive.

But until then, well, the buffer is empty because it’s been so damn hard to draw comics with no hard drive space, and we’re really scroungy. Consider this an active solicitation for fan art. You send fanart, I post it. (Obviously within reason, I get to choose, blahblahblah.) Where to send it? How ’bout we go with fanart at kirabug dot com

As for tonight’s comic, I’m trying to throw something small together to get us through the night, but it’s after 11 now and we’ll see what happens. Whatever does show up will probably be late. I do have some standards.

Thanks for your patience and your support.