Blógünder Schlock

Howard and I will be leaving for Worldcon tomorrow.  After that Howard spends a week at GenCon.  The result is that he will not have much time for blogging here.  Howard intends to micro-blog using twitter, so if you want the very latest info, please check his twitter feed or facebook page.  I will be attempting to post Schlock related convention highlights here on this blog.  My more personal thoughts will go on my blog.  If all of that is not enough convention coverage for you.  You should head over to conreporter.com.  They’ve got a good dozen excellent bloggers who will all be posting about Worldcon.  You will be able to get a non-Tayler-eye view of some of the events, including the announcements of Hugo winners almost as soon as they are announced.

Still need more cool stuff on the web?  Run on over to xtremedungeonmastery.com.  The first of three fun video commercials is up.  The other two will be posted at intervals between now and GenCon.  There is also a link to a really cool online card trick you can use to amaze your friends.

Today is International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day. This is the day when celebrants post works for free online, originally in reaction to a kerfluffle of sorts over at the SFWA in 2007.

I don’t have a list of this year’s participants, and it’s possible the movement has lost steam over the last 48 months given the fact that lately every day is Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day. When can you NOT find great writing and art freely provided online by professional writers and artists? I recently read three fantastic non-fiction essays over at Baen’s Universe. I donated, but I didn’t have to.

At any rate, my participation in the event today is nothing new. It’s just another daily installment of Schlock Mercenary. I suppose I could opine and ramble about what this means, and whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing. Am I destroying the economy, or am I rebuilding it? Or am I somehow doing both, serving as an agent of the democratized remodeling of the world of publishing?

I don’t know. And regardless of my current thoughts on the matter I’m sure the historians and the economists will settle the matter over drinks in a decade or two.

Yesterday we got the advance copies of The Scrapyard of Insufferable Arrogance along with six advance copies of the slipcase, Schlock Mercenary Munitions Canister I. I took the Munitions Canister (slipcase) with me to the Keep where it was unanimously received as attractive and (once handled) “really STURDY.” When I put the “Not a Step” sign on the top of the design I thought I was being silly. Now, however… I think that box might just work as a step-stool.

But it’s clearly labeled to prevent you from doing that.

Boxes and books are on their way to Schlock HQ, and are due to arrive in about four weeks. The launch party is at CONduit in Salt Lake City, and the shipping party is going to be about a week later. If you’ve pre-ordered, you should receive your package in early June. If you haven’t pre-ordered it’s not too late! We can still make at least 100 boxed sets of books before we run out of Under New Management.

My friends from Writing Excuses have generously offered to host a discussion area for me at The Time Waster’s Guide under the “Local Authors” section of the forums. You can find it under my name rather than the name of the comic, which is a subtle yet ambitious statement about how Schlock Mercenary is not the sum total of my creative work.

Right. That Epic Fantasy Trilogy I’ve been meaning to write is still a few years out.

Anyway, there’s a new community to be found under “Howard Tayler.” I’m not removing support for the Nightstar, BLC, or legacy Keenspot forums — I’m just adding one more place where folks can get together and talk about overkill, and the absence thereof.

I should point out that there’s also a Schlock Mercenary Facebook group that I’ve never blogged about, so if you’re already signed up over there the community is ready-made for you.

And speaking of Facebook… if you’re really hard-core, there’s a Howard Tayler Fan Page for you. Well, for ME… but you can use it, and it’s a lot faster than waiting for me to acknowledge a friend request.

Are there online community-type things you’d like to see me doing? Shout out your suggestions below. This is a good year for that since I’m not really planning to go anywhere.

It’s been just over a week since we introduced an RSS feed here at Schlock Mercenary. In that time almost 1500 of you have subscribed. Some of you are consuming the feed via Live Journal, others are using Google Reader (my personal favorite).

What’s important is that you’re now getting the comic however you want to get it. Save up for a week, and pop Schlock into seven tabs using Firefox’s Bookmarks Toolbar. Install the link into your myAol, Newsgator, or My Yahoo! page. If you copy the javascript from this Live Journal post, you can install Schlock onto any webpage of your choosing.

Or, now available, Get Schlock Mercenary via email.

You choose.

Schlock Mercenary has finally embraced the promise of its premise and stepped into the twenty-first century. There is a Schlock RSS feed, which includes the strip, footnotes, and navigation buttons, and which can be consumed just about any way you want to consume it. As an avid LiveJournal reader let me point you at this link here where you can “friend” Schlock Mercenary and use LiveJournal’s comment system to discuss the strip.

The feed comes just in time, too. On August 28th Schlock Mercenary will be celebrating strip number 3000 after 3,000 consecutive days of no missed updates, no fillers, and no guest strips. That’s just two weeks from now.

I needed SOMETHING to brandish jubilantly, and an RSS feed will do. Although now that I do the math, I may have advance copies of Schlock Mercenary: The Teraport Wars to brandish as well. Throw in a few party hats and I’ll be all set.

And now, the FAQ:

Q: What about ad revenue? There are no ads in the feed!
A: There is a “buy Schlock stuff” button under the comic. That ad pays really, really well.

Q: No, seriously. Aren’t you going to lose ad revenue from this?
A: I’ll let you know. I don’t think so, though.

Q: What isn’t included in the feed?
A: Well… it’s got the strip, it’s got footnotes, it’s got five buttons and two links to get you to appropriate places on the site… I’d say it has everything, but I know I’ve forgotten something.

Q: Why did this take so long? What were you waiting for?
A: I thought that RSS had to be built in to my updater engine. This thought was shared by both of the two engineers I challenged with the project. This made it look daunting, to say the very, very least, and progress was glacial. The updater is scary. Fortunately a bright guy named Mark Shieh came along and volunteered. He pointed out that the whole thing could be built independently. Then he went and DID it. When I dared to say that it was great, he could stop, and I’d wait for updater engine changes before getting my “perfect world” feed, he rolled up his e-sleeves, dug back in, and made my “perfect world” feed. It didn’t take long. It took about three days. But we waited about three YEARS before properly starting the project.

Q: Is Blogunder Schlock included in the feed?
A: No. The blog has its own feed at http://www.schlockmercenary.com/blog/index.php/feed/, including a comments feed at http://www.schlockmercenary.com/blog/index.php/comments/feed/

Q: When will we see attorney drones again?
A: Right now, if you go re-read the archives in the correct places.

Q: When will Schlock Mercenary: The Teraport Wars be available for pre-order?
A: At the end of this month. I’m waiting until I have advance copies in my hands.

Q: You’re just making up questions now, aren’t you?
A: I’m trying to anticipate you people. It’s harder than it looks.

Hey, who wants a Schlock Mercenary RSS feed?

(I sure do!)

Programmer and Schlocker extraordinaire Mark Shieh has cobbled something together for all of us at http://feeds.feedburner.com/SchlockRSS. This feed won’t give you anything except the comic (no footnotes, for instance), but Mark is working on that.

Try it out! Let’s see if we can BREAK it. Programmers LOVE that.

… here is a picture I took last night as I drove towards Las Vegas. The crepuscular rays were much more pronounced in person. I blame the camera phone.

In order to get this photo onto the web I needed to 1) mail the picture to my gmail account, 2) upload it to LunaPic for cropping, 3) save it back to the local drive, 4) upload it to the blog.

I’m sure there are faster, 21st-century ways to do this, but this wee, ancient laptop (Win98) has no working USB port, and no image editor installed. Oh, and I don’t have a FlickR account.

Twitter forces you to say whatever you plan to say in 140 characters or less. That’s not much room. It’s like a diet for verbose writers.

(The above paragraph can be twitted with just 3 characters to spare.)

That got me to thinking about diets in general, and how I have a hard time keeping track of what it is I actually eat and when. So… Twitter to the rescue. Starting Monday I’ll be twitting (or is it “tweeting?”) my meals, my gym trips, and my daily weight and body fat (as measured by the scale in my bathroom.) I’m going to try it for at least a week, and we’ll see how it goes.

If you’re following my tweets (www.twitter.com/howardtayler) then I expect this will get quite boring for you. It’ll probably be boring for me, too. This is an experiment, and experiments often are.

In the past I’ve found that the most effective diets for me are those which cut simple carbs to below 30g per day. I’ll be trying to eat the same way this time. From a scientific method perspective, since I lack a true control group, the easiest way to test something’s effectiveness is to only change one variable at a time. The variable here is “reporting.” I’m testing Twitter, not low-carbing. I already know low-carbing works.

For the record, this is not an invitation for any of you to start offering me diet advice. If even one reader out of a thousand decides to email me with suggestions, I’ll be buried in unsolicited advice on weight loss (read: SPAM.) If you’re an MD, a PA, or an RN, I ESPECIALLY encourage you to not send me advice. If I want it, I’ll pay you for it.

Okay, let the tweeting begin (in about 15 hours.)

Some of you may have seen your posts disappear. This is because Akismet thinks you’re dirty spammers, and I need to teach it otherwise. I get a lot (a VERY lot) of spam, and the Akismet queue ends up quite deep.

So… if you post, and it doesn’t show up immediately, that means it’s been trapped. Email me, and I’ll de-spam it, teaching Akismet that you’re actually okay by me.

Sorry for the inconvenience. Fortunately this is MORE convenient than wading through the spam would be. We have 8,300 legit comments on 561 posts here, and Akismet has trapped 85,000 spam comments. Do the math: we’d be 10:1 under spam without it…

I’ve known for weeks now that there is a petition demanding that Uwe Boll stop making movies (like Bloodrayne, of which you may recall my review.) I’ve also known that Boll himself has said that he will indeed stop if enough signatures are collected.

Most of you probably know this already too, but apparently until I post the news, you’ll keep emailing me, so I’m caving in.

And now my thoughts on the matter: My dad used to warn me about sucker bets. “I bet you I can make that cat play the piano,” was the example he often used, followed up with the statement: “Never take this bet unless you really WANT to see the cat play the piano.” He never explained how it would be done, or how the weasel-words would cheat the sucker out of his wager. He just laid it out as a truth.

Uwe Boll has proven to be a masterful manipulator of publicity AND a masterful filmmaker. In the case of publicity, he’s turned negative news into name recognition, and in the case of films, he’s taken fine (Oscar-winning, even) talent and churned out deplorable tax-shelters. I don’t LIKE what he does, but I have to give the man credit: he’s got me convinced that the cat can play the piano.

What will happen if there are a million signatures on that petition? I suspect that Boll will either weasel a way into demonstrating that there are NOT one million or more signatories (and I’m sure there are enough of us signing several times to make the case for him) or he will find a way to take this list of “one million people hate me” to the bank for some marketing endeavor or another. Or, worst case, the petition will top out at around half a million, and it’s like we ALL went boxing against Boll and got our noses bloodied.

Maybe he was speaking rashly. Maybe your signature really will end his torturtous treatment of our favorite video games. But where Boll is concerned, I’m always ready to expect the worst.

I’ve been tempted to rent “In The Name of the King,” just to see how bad the film is, but I realized that if I do, Boll wins AGAIN. I’m not even allowing myself the privilege of enjoying the bad reviews, because that’s just another kind of cat playing the piano.