6/19/2002:

Yay for high concept art strips! Woohoo! I realize that a Charles Babbage reference was used in PVP the other day and that the whole time travel thing has been done to death. But in a discussion with a fan who is thinking of starting his own webcomic about originality and stuff, I got over a lot of neuroses over using similar jokes. A couple months after Scrubs started, I had a strip in the Sil art hopper waiting to be drawn but then Sinfest used a similar joke, so I told her to draw an alternate script.

About the subject of the strip... waaaa, my computer is so slow. Khai is here in town and we were geeking out yesterday, and so there were three Powerbooks in the apartment, outmuscling my wimpy 1st gen iBook 2001. The iBook isn't so bad, especially now that I'm 90% Classic free and rising, but against Sil's brand spanking new 667 MHz monster, it is so long in the tooth that said tooth is growing into the jaw, threatening death. See those 700 MHz iBooks? I'd streak a retirement home for one of those. Random Apple insiders tell me that Jaguar will make my iBook much faster, but you know what? Everyone else's laptop will get that much faster too. What good does that do me? Yeah, I'm a petty individual. I want my machine to match or beat its big brother, while costing about $1000 less. And back in OS 9 land, it did that job pretty well.

Mozilla, I love you. You and your tabs. And your popup window filter. But you are slow. Really, you are.

Graduation is on Friday. I get my diploma Saturday. I was thinking, should I keep my diploma with me or send it home with my parents? This isn't a "this was for them and not me" sort of thing; I want to walk and all that. This is a very practical "I'm going to be moving around a lot and I managed to lose my passport in the move to this apartment so perhaps I should keep this $120,000 piece of paper in a more permanent place" sort of thing.

Let's talk about addresses for a second. I've always put down my permanent address as my parent's home in Milwaukee. But now, I hear that I'm supposed to use my address I'm living at, due to me not being a dependent since i'm not a student anymore. That makes me want to cry. I mean, my apartment next year is no more permanent than the one I'm at now. Really this feeling of being overwhelmed by the adult world is just a sign that I don't really know how to take care of a lot of things on my own (like taxes). And now I am responsible for them all.

But my parents can be responsible for my diploma, until I get a house. That's what I'm thinking.

Real Genius came out on DVD. I highly recommend this movie. My brother and sister rented it frequently when we all lived at home. And hey, before I developed my own pop culture filters, I just accepted everything they liked. That explains a lot about my tastes, I think.

Oh, and I started concept work on the new comic project. I'm still not concrete on whether I do idea #1 or #2.

Idea #1: Take the "Missed Connections" personal ads in the Reader and make longer comics out of them. New characters every week. The strip looks at the types of people who believe in instant connections and also in the guiding Hand of Fate™ that will make the other person read the Missed Connections portion of the paper. I got this idea a little while ago and I really like it. I'm just scared of doing longer artwork on a constant schedule. I wanted to do this in Flash with stick figures, but with the characters changing every week, I think I'd really need real sketches.

Idea #2: Continue a Scrubs like existence with 4 panel comics chronicling the lives of the apartment next year. I've already spoiled all the pseudonyms in blurbs past. But Jason's been clamoring to be in a strip for ages, so maybe he won't mind being "Jason." If I do idea 2, idea 1 will probably be done as weekly short story, rather than a comic.

Either way, I'll be blogging, and probably more frequently than I do now.

Send me your thoughts on idea 1, idea 2, the idea of blogs, and the Babbage difference engine at newcomic@kipster.org.

-kip