Shameless Request: Dropbox

posted by Chris on April 18, 2012 at 3:00 pm

Well, it looks like I’ve reached the limit on my Dropbox account — I just barely managed to backup the last comic before finally running out of space. But here’s a really rather nifty thing! If you don’t already have a Dropbox account, you can sign up using this referral link, and we’ll both get 500MB of additional space for free (that’s on top of the 2GB you get free to begin with)!

So if you want 2.5GB of free cloud storage without spending a penny, then head over here with this link!
I’ll appreciate it if you do, as it’ll help make sure I don’t lose any of the original comic files due to my computer exploding. Again.

(Note: I think you may also need to install the Dropbox program, but I’d advise doing that anyway since it makes syncing files insanely easy!)

This has been a public service announcement on behalf of Chris shamelessly begging for some more megs, so he can keep putting files wot are on his computer up into the cloud where it’s all nice and floaty and safe, and presumably magical.

Behind the Scenes: Cam You’re Up

posted by Chris on April 14, 2012 at 1:47 am

So a while ago the question came up of how much of this comic Cameron actually writes. Having recently found an old notepad of his in my desk drawer, I thought it might be fun to show the answer to that question in a little more detail! The following are scans taken directly from the notepad, which show two original drafts that Cam sketched out, alongside the final strips they became.

(Click the thumbnails to view larger scans, or be taken to the final comics)

Next Week On Dragons Den:

Yet Another Fantastic Product:

Those strips are still two of my favourites to date, and I pin that largely on the fact that they were as true to the original drafts as possible. Cam, you need to sketch out more comic ideas!

Also to answer your phone, c’mon man, where even are you.

Two Hundred (but not really)

posted by Chris on April 6, 2012 at 4:39 pm

I figured it might be worth moving all this to its own post, as it ended up a lot longer than planned, and didn’t really have much else to do with the strip in question.

This current strip marks number sort-of-200! I had been naming each strip numerically to better fit with the with the original archiving format applied to the comic, which eventually turned out to be one of the worst ideas as it meant the numbers would suddenly skip one every so often whenever I posted something non-comic-related (and made it even harder to organize or locate individual strips, which would be a cinch if they were named by date and not just now-arbitrary numbers). So while the working file for this particular strip is #200, there are actually only 185 comics in the current archive.

For a comic that’s technically been around since 2006, that is a pretty piss weak number of comics to have, if I do say so myself. I’m trying not to beat myself up too much over that though, since it wasn’t until relatively recently that As You’re Up was mainly just a hobby project that I’d update whenever I’d get around to it.

So yes, this isn’t the milestone 200th comic, and in all likelihood never will there be a milestone 200th comic — because from here on out I’m using a more sensible naming convention on my end, and as a result I will no longer be keeping a tally of how many strips there are!

I could probably keep a tally even with the new date-based naming system, except for the fact that I am just terrible at counting.

Books are haaaaard

posted by Chris on March 6, 2012 at 7:31 pm

So as a few of you might remember, a while back I made an attempt at compiling the first major chunk of comics into a print collection. As you might also remember, that didn’t pan out. Partly due to some generally daft reasons (one proof copy taking 4 months to arrive, looking like someone had set the option for Print Quality to “Nope”), but mostly due to the apparent impossibility to print those comics at anything less than an extortionate price — even without making a profit.

I had mainly been exploring print-on-demand options though, so I decided to look into doing what a lot of advice out there suggests, and just going to a local printer and having a small print run done; you pay more at the outset, but it can come out cheaper overall, and you also get the bonus of being able to personalize the books before they get sent out. Which eventually led me to wonder, are printing houses in the US just generally cheaper than they are in  the UK? After receiving numerous quotes, for both small and large print runs, all the prices that came back were even higher than any of the print-on-demand options. I don’t know… maybe I was just unlucky in never stumbling across a sanely priced printer. Maybe they didn’t want me to find them, afraid that they would have to print atrocities such as this.

Whatever the reason, it reached the point where I was given three options: put a pin in it for the time being, ask people to pay upwards of $30 for a print edition, or sell that print edition at a quality which would make everyone’s eyes bleed. Since I’m not comfortable even approaching those last two options, I went with the pin thing.

Recently I’ve been taking another ganders at the possibilities of printing this collection — and believe I may have found a solution which doesn’t compromise on the price/quality side of things — so things might begin to progress again before too long.

I am curious though, has anyone else run into this problem of being unable to print things at a reasonable price? Or know of a particularly good way to go about this whole comic printing malarkey that maybe I’ve missed? Let me know, in the comments, I’d be grateful (because books are haaaaard).

Donator Wallpapers (Update: now free!)

posted by Chris on November 25, 2011 at 4:22 pm

EDIT: Wallpaper is now free as a voting incentive! I’ve been opposed to having a big VOTE FOR US button on the site, and also haven’t been a massive fan of having a call for donations up there either. So this is a kind of middle ground I’m much happier with; the wallpaper’s free, but by grabbing it you’ll still be helping out a little! If you do end up downloading the wallpaper, then thank you — and I hope you enjoy it! (But why wouldn’t you? It’s me being incredibly suave, and that is just plain awesome.)

–

So this is something I’ve been a little bit iffy about implementing, especially considering how it’s something of an outdated concept; the comic is something I’m proud to offer for free (even more so when I’m able to offer it on a regular basis… *cough*) so I’ve never really rushed to jump on the idea of having a donation button on the site. I figured it may be worth a shot, however, since a little extra revenue from the comic might help me better justify working on the strip from a financial perspective (just to be clear, I don’t mean that in the “rawr rawr rawr, give me money or I won’t draw anymore” sense; I’m going to keep putting out these comics, free of charge, and as frequently as possible no matter what. Just that it might help me to spend a little more time doing those comics, to make them look extra-spanking good, and to ensure that frequency isn’t so much of a problem!)

Once I manage to get some actual merchandise that people might be interested in set up, then I’ll likely do away with it. Have been exploring a few avenues for creating said merch, but most of those avenues have turned out to be cul-de-sacs. Unless anyone would be willing to shill out for a book that either costs three times more than it’s worth, or is printed at the lowest possible quality humanly imaginable.

But for now it’s there if anyone’s interested — a donation of any amount will give you the wallpaper in a variety of sizes (1024 x 768, 1280 x 800, 1280 x 1024, 1440 x 900, 1680 x 1050, 1920 x 1080 or 1920 or 1200) either left- or right-oriented to suit wherever you prefer to keep your desktop icons!

I’m planning to change the available wallpaper every so often, but each one will be up for at least 30 days, so everyone has a long enough chance to grab it if they want before it’s gone!

For now though, we’ll see how things go.