Update news! Isabel has been going through a lot lately, including a serious case of artists block.
Right now, we've got the next comic inked. We hope to have that finished on Tuesday. We'll be going on a Tuesday/Thursday schedule for a bit. We'll see how that goes and, we appreciate every one of you.
We've got the last few comics fully colored and shaded. NamirDeiter.net members have been given an extra month on account of the delays and the sketch preview of the upcoming comic has been posted there.
We're still sick. It's getting tiresome. Ended up leaving work early; makes me really appreciate that I can work from home. Don't need to worry about getting my co-workers sick. Don't need to worry if I'll be up for driving home on days like this. Makes this whole experience...not good, but significantly less bad than it would be otherwise.
Anyhow, you deserve cool stuff. Here's one of my favorite gaming stories. An older couple join a Star Wars RPG. They don't know much about gaming. They don't know much about Star Wars. They do, however, know rather a lot about small-unit commando tactics.Hope you enjoy it.
We took last week off. The plan was we'd hang out and relax and come back feeling recharged. Unfortunately, right after we caught that Mew we got bad colds. We spent the week sick, medicated, and generally unhappy. We're still working through this.
We hope we're feeling better soon. We hope we're updating again soon. And, y'know, able to breathe normally.
We went to Anime LA earlier this year. It's in Ontario (California), which is 55 miles due east and, therefore, 55 miles closer to us. We aren't complaining.
We mainly gave away ribbons, like last year. We'd have a challenge or a game or a short quiz.
One of our ribbon quizzes was about what webcomics people read, and we learned something valuable - half the kids these days read comics on cellphones, usually via Tapas or Webtoons.
We had suspected that, but it is a very useful thing to know for certain. We've been doing this for a while. Back when we started in 1999, cellphones had a resolution of "Maybe it can show text". The internet has changed and perhaps we should do more to take those platforms into account.
We gave away the Magikarp ribbons again - the song has since been released in English which means a few more people knew it. I think it was up to six.
Occasionally, I'd ask if someone knew the Magikarp song and they'd say they didn't because there was no such thing. I'd take out my phone and...nobody would be able to hear anything because I didn't have speakers and it was slightly loud in there. So maybe next year I bring speakers.
We also had a Star Fox ribbon. I had a bunch of trivia questions prepared. After about the third person, I realized something: Isabel and I love the Star Fox series. The Star Fox comics that ran in Nintendo Power were a formative influence on her. Those comics ran in 1993, which makes them older than the average attendee.
So, asking people to name the characters on the ribbon was a bit much. (It was Fay and Miyu, who appeared in Star Fox 2 which was only officially released on the Super Nintendo Classic last year. In 1995, Isabel wrote to Nintendo asking if Star Fox 2 had been cancelled; they wrote back and reassured her that it was not and had merely been delayed a bit. 22 years later, it's a bonus game on a re-release of the console which makes that technically accurate).
So the questions got a little easier, like "Name a member of team Star Fox". One person pointed out that Pigma was a member of the original Star Fox, with James and Peppy. He got one each of all my ribbons for that.
I don't think anybody named Krystal, which surprises me very much. She apparently didn't show up in the last three games (two of which were both remakes of Star Fox 64...), but I'm sure if I had asked that question a dozen years ago she'd be top three at least.
By the end of things, we had given away several hundred ribbons and collected several hundred ourselves. We knew a bit more about potential readers and everyone else knew a bit more about the Magikarp song. I'd call that a win.
