April 02, 2001

Woo hoo! I did it! I cranked out seven strips (one sunday, and six dailies) on Saturday, and another two (one sunday and one daily) on Sunday. It was relaxing, exhilarating, and kind of hard on my inking hand. But as of right now I've got a 21-day buffer. Woo hoo! again I say.

My wife told me that you're all probably sick of hearing about the buffer. If you are, I apologize in advance for this: Woo hoo!

In other news, this last week I bought a CD-ROM burner and a set of mulitmedia speakers. The burner came with some MP3-ripping software, and I've cheerfully been ripping my CD collection into MP3 format. You'll all probably call me a Luddite, but I've never used Napster (and have no intention of starting now). As a creator of intellectual property (several times over, in three different industries), I think that the rights of the music publishers and artists should be respected by the Net community. Still, I can see the appeal of compressed digital music, and look forward to building a personal MP3 collection.

I also look forward to the battles between Big Business and the Powers of Progress over how to pay for intellectual property. Hopefully I'll someday get paid for the schlock I crank out, and these court battles are baby-steps in the right direction.

At any rate, the reason I bought the burner is so that I can start permanently archiving the large TIFF files from which I create the web-friendly PNG files of Schlock Mercenary. They were taking up too much disk space, but I need to keep them so that I can do a book'o'schlock someday (now all I need is a publisher).