Auctionfest, Round Two! Thanks, Kayuda!
Posted March 13th, 2007 by Howard Tayler
If the six auctions that opened Monday morning aren’t what you’re looking for, here are six more, again sponsored by Wotan LLC as part of their Kayuda launch. Kayuda is a web-based visual wiki, a mind-mapping tool, and a non-linear writing tool that allows you to track ideas and the relationships between them.
As I said on Monday, Wotan purchased these pieces from me, and then told me to auction them off and keep the proceeds. So there it is, I got paid twice. But wait… all of these but one (I bet you can guess which) appear in Schlock Mercenary books, so I already got paid once for the artwork.
I am SO doing the happy-dance.
I’ve been using Kayuda to help me organize some of my story notes, and I like it. I think you’ll like it too, especially since you can try it out for free. I don’t usually say “please support our sponsors,” but the Kayuda team has been very generous with this campaign, and I’d love to see them get lots of attention as a result.
Here is a list of the auctions that opened Tuesday evening:
I’ll understand if the bidding on “Howard’s Happy Dance” stays down around $0.99. I drew that one just for this campaign at the express request (read that “contractual demand”) of the sponsor. The Cover Art auction is a different story: It includes all three inked pieces I used to assemble the cover, and this is the first time I’ve made something like that available.
Go check out the auctions (here’s the full list), and give Kayuda a try too.
March 13th, 2007 at 7:05 pm
Whoops!
The auctions don’t go live for another hour…
March 13th, 2007 at 7:53 pm
Oh, OK. I was wondering.
And the Happy Dance poster only going for 0.99?!? My prediction is that it’s going to be the most hotly contested. I mean, it’s the one with the mercenary aspect! :D
March 13th, 2007 at 9:43 pm
I want the Dancing Howard poster so very, very much! Why must you taunt me during finals week when the blessing of financial aid is at its lowest ebb? Why!?
March 13th, 2007 at 9:52 pm
Incidentally, posting these auctions on eBay is very, very dangerous!
I placed bids for these, then was drawn inexorably to the RPG section, where I bid for no less than four different core rulebooks. Your eBay link, Mr. Tayler, like drink in the Victorian era, has led me to ruin! Ruin, I say!
…but ruin with some very nice d6 games…
March 14th, 2007 at 12:21 am
Of course, you only get paid twice for the dance. Unless it appears in the next book…
March 14th, 2007 at 3:18 am
You won’t be surprised if the Happy Dance stays around 99 cents? Howard, I’m shocked. I thought you knew your audience better than that. As of 6:15 this morning, It’s going for $36, which is more than everything else except the cover art. Honestly, it’s the piece I was most interested in.
March 14th, 2007 at 6:24 am
*sigh*
I swear, I don’t understand you people. Or maybe I DO, but the extent of my understanding doesn’t extend past “what kind of funny sci-fi you’ll tune in for every day.”
March 14th, 2007 at 7:18 am
The Happy Dance is very anime, partly the roundness of the head but mostly the mouth: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/71/Astro_boy.png
March 14th, 2007 at 8:01 am
“I drew that one just for this campaign at the express request (read that “contractual demand”) of the sponsor.”
Hey! I didn’t ask for it until you asked if you could use the previously-done cover art. And you were the one who said [something like] “because that would mean I’d effectively get paid again.” And even then, it was mostly a joke…I mean, if you’d really pushed back, I’d have let it slide. You started it, Mr Tayler!
“contractual demand”. Hmph. Ya big Schlockie Meanie. }:^>
–Dks
Kayuda’s Chief Evil Overlord
March 14th, 2007 at 8:10 am
Right now I’ve got about four hundred and eight point seven-nine additional reasons to not complain about any of this, lest I come across as some kind of selfish ingrate. :-)
March 14th, 2007 at 8:12 am
Damn. I’d love to try out Kayuda, but they don’t support Safari.
March 14th, 2007 at 9:49 am
Hi Jay,
Yeah, I know. :
March 14th, 2007 at 10:14 am
Drat, it ate everything after my smiley.
As I was saying….
As a Mac user, I was really sorry that we couldn’t support Safari. Unfortunately, S2.0 does not have the JavaScript support that we need. S3.0 is supposed to and, if it does, we will almost certainly add it to the list of supported browsers.
In the meantime, can I induce you to download Firefox ( http://getfirefox.com/ ) and try Kayuda? I’d be tickled pink knowing that the TronGuy was using us.
–Dks
The KayudaGuy
March 14th, 2007 at 12:13 pm
I only use FireFox when Safari doesn’t work. It’s bulky and slow by comparison, and doesn’t act like an OS X application. I also complain at sites that don’t support the OS-standard browser on MacOS.
That said, I do have it installed…I’ll have to try it.
I’m a little surprised you’re pushing the limits hard enough that Safari doesn’t have features you need…
March 14th, 2007 at 12:26 pm
It does look like an interesting tool. An organization that I’m the president of is about to reexamine its purpose for existing…sounds like Kayuda might be of use. We’ll see.
March 14th, 2007 at 8:31 pm
Safari’s better than Firefox? (Apart from the JS limitations, that is.) Yet another reason to make my next computer a Mac.
Hey, if Howard uses a web application to organise his story notes, and the company that runs it is run by Schlock fans… If I were Howard, I’d be taking a real good look at their privacy policy. Don’t want any leaks, right?
March 15th, 2007 at 7:47 am
Safari is better than Firefox for speed and standards compliance. (It was the first browser to pass the ACID test.) If you depend on lots of Firefox extensions, though, you’ll be disappointed: similar functionality is built into Safari for some of them, and there are plugins for others, but Firefox’s range is much broader.
March 17th, 2007 at 4:29 am
I think I know why the dance did so well.
1) Comedy!
2) For single-page random out-of-comic art, it’s always nice to see things that smash the fourth wall. The author. Characters from the strip thrown into the present day world, or the past, or a well-known fictional world other than the comic. Far-side-esque single panels that are out of canon, but still cool-looking or funny. Work intended for the comic that got scrapped. Stuff we’ve never seen before, mixed with stuff we have that makes it recognizably from the strip. Basically, surprise us! :D
Your comic does a great job of staying surprising and funny. And comics, at least for this comic fanatic, are somewhat more about concepts than art.
March 17th, 2007 at 7:04 pm
Sam said:
“Hey, if Howard uses a web application to organise his story notes, and the company that runs it is run by Schlock fans… If I were Howard, I’d be taking a real good look at their privacy policy. Don’t want any leaks, right?”
Sam,
You have NO IDEA how hard it’s been to keep from asking my DBA any leading questions about what’s in Howard’s workspace. :>
In all seriousness though: we take the privacy thing EXTREMELY seriously. Shoot, recently one of the devs asked me if he could email a Dutch user who had been having some trouble getting his accented text to render; the dev wanted to ask the user what encoding he was using so that we could fix the problem. I told the dev “No, you can’t email him”; our privacy policy says “The only thing we use your email for is to send you your password” and we’re going to stick to that.
Similarly, if you set a workspace to private we’ll stay out of it. Oh, we’ll run some database queries that pull information out that we use for our stats–how many nodes you have, how many links, how many of the links are named, how many K of text do you have, what % of your nodes have text, etc. But we don’t go randomly browsing through the text just to be nosy…or even to satisfy burning curiosity about upcoming Schlock plot. :>
–Dks