Category Archives: Ideas (blog)

bug babble.

Upgrade complete!

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Well, it took the removal of at least 35 screws and most of the bottom half of my (already out-of-warranty) iBook Dread Pirate Roberts, but we replaced the original 40GB drive with a 120, and boy is she sweet. I’d already bumped her to 1.12 GB of RAM a few months ago, so she was cooking in the RAM department already. The only thing holding her back has been a distinct lack of space to use as a scratch disk — complicated and compounded by the fact that both Photoshop and Mac OS X will happily use the entire freaking drive as extra RAM for pageouts if they need to.

But now? Wow, my images actually open quickly, which means I can do things like finish the Nuclear weather rock print. It’s sweeeeet.

When you don’t have the right tools, drawing can be a really painful experience. But once you do, the inspiration flows like water.

Another Quick Update

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Ideaphile Jamie sent me fan art inspired by the last news post to get us through the weekend. A huge thank you to Jamie!

Dread Pirate Roberts (my iBook laptop) is in many pieces on the diningroom table right now (call it drydock if you wish) but I’m out the screwdriver necessary to remove 3 screws, so until I find one, well, we’re stuck. It’s not easy being sans computer either, let me tell you. I just paid off my house again in Animal Crossing: Wild World and I’m up to two rooms on the 1st floor and one on the second floor.

Hoping either Lowe’s or Radio Shack has the screwdriver I need or we’re dead in the water. We’ll see….

A quick update

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  • The new hard drive is here, sitting next to my laptop, but I probably won’t get a chance to install it until Saturday.
  • I’m probably working some overtime today/tonight to free up some hours because have a viewing to go to on Friday for my next-door neighbor, so time’s kind of tight.
  • I’ve got a spare comic I might throw into the queue… I’m not happy with the writing for it but it’s better than running nothing at all… if I convince photoshop to play nicely and let me finish the comic I’m working on for the “at the restaurant” quasi-storyline I might not have to. We’ll see. Or, y’know, someone could send some fanart to kirabug at kirabug dot com… no really, anything will do… send your pictures to dear old captain kirabug, send today, send right away….

Update on prints, or "That’s why they’re so expensive!"

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I mentioned the possibility of doing a print run for the Nuclear Weather Rock comic and then promptly didn’t mention it again outside the forum. This should remedy that.

I found a local place where I can get short runs of full color prints done for very reasonable prices. I can do a run of 15 prints at 11×17 inches for under $2 a piece (almost impossible everywhere else I looked) or 10 prints for like $2.10 each.

Aaaand if that were the only expense I’d sell ’em for $5 a piece and double my money and feel really good about myself.

But then beyond the print cost there’s the Paypal fees, and the shipping fees, and depending on how I ship the container fees and I can see why a poster costs $15 on some of these websites now. :(

If I can find a shipping method through the US Postal Service that will mail prints in a tube (including the tube) for under $2 a piece, I can do a print run of either 10 or 15 prints, charge $6+$2 shipping (or $8 total), and I only have to sell 6 (or 8 if I do 15) to break even. If I actually did sell all 10 (or 15) I’d actually make a profit on something I did for the comic for the first time ever.

(Unless you count that incredible $5.50 I’ve made from Cafepress in the last year. I can’t eat at McDonald’s for $5.50, so that doesn’t count.)

I could even do a run of 5 prints at $6+$2 shipping, and still break after selling 4 prints. It’s more likely that I’ll hit 4 prints, but less likely that I’ll make a profit, especially as the 5th print would be for my wall.

Now, if I can’t ship for $2 or less, then I’d have to ship USPS Priority Mail and they cost $4.05 per package to ship. At that point I break even (barely) selling exactly 5 prints for $10 (That’s $6 per print plus $4 for shipping) each. At $8 ($4 for the print and $4 for shipping) I have to sell 9 of a 10 print run or 12 of a 15 print run.

Aaaand so far, ideaphile peri-renna is the only one who’s expressed an interest in a print. So, well, it’s all up in the air but if anyone else is interested, I’d love to hear about it. Hell, I’ll sign up for you if that’ll up the interest.

Meanwhile, my respect for the big successful comics that actually make a profit doing this every day has gone up tremedously.

Drive-ing me crazy

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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.

Ugh

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Yesterday, I was fine. We went to Penn Raceway with my folks and my brother and played the horse rases. It was awesome, and definitely something I’d be willing to do again. Somehow there’s something just much more interesting about it than playing the slots down in Atlantic City.

After that, we went back to my parents’ house and ate sandwiches and pizza and the like, hung out for a little while and came home. No problems there.

Went to bed at a decent hour (well, relatively decent) but I couldn’t sleep – I’d sleep for 15 or 20 minutes then wake up. And I was hot and I was cold and I was hot again and I was pretty nauseous and it was a pain in the tail because I was supposed to go in early this morning because we’re so far behind in our work.

And when I woke up this morning I discovered that overnight my body had converted to a snot factory. I’m stuffed up and my head is just throbbing and my eyes are watering and my throat’s sore. I’m betting it’s a summer cold (since I haven’t had mine this year). I just wish I’d’ve seen it coming. I’d’ve done something about it yesterday.

So it’s almost 10:30 and I got some more spotty sleep between 7 and now and I’m drinking water and probably going back to sleep.