Deed The Inky

So, the spammers seem to have woken up from hibernation, and are doing their best to utterly destroy this site’s comment system. Right now this site is set up so that I have to approve every comment, ’cause I don’t want anyone to get hassled by ads on here. I decided a long time ago that I wasn’t going to make money from advertising stupid crap on this site, and that means no-one else gets to either. Here at Deed The Inky we give away stupid crap for FREE, thank you very much.

Anyway, my point is that I have received about 120 comments in the last 24 hours, all of them complete bullshit. BUT, the spammers have also taken to copy-pasting comments that are already on the site and hiding spam links in them hoping I can’t always tell what’s legit and what isn’t. I think so far I have it all sorted, but if your comment doesn’t show up, or you find a repeated one somewhere that is spam, please let me know and I’ll take care of it.

Also doing a whole buttload of cartoons today and tomorrow, regular updates will resume Monday! For real this time. I’ve had a hard time keeping all my plates spinning lately because I’m switching jobs/working 6 days a week full-time. But that’s starting to ease off now, just in time for the season when no-one looks at comics.

Hello. Today’s blog entry is one of those “Tip Of My Hat, Wag Of My Finger” types of deals, except not stealing directly from the Colbert Report somehow. Uhm… onwards!

I have had dealings with two computery-type companies lately. Firstly, Toon Boom, who make a program rather abstractly named Toon Boom. It’s the animation software that all the Expired Copyright Theatre animations were made with. I just upgraded to Animate, which is the pro software that RANT DOG is made with. Anyway, I bought version 1, and as these things are wont to do, version 2 was announced almost immediately. I just chalked it up to “Stuff happens”, but then I got a very nice email from them saying that because it had been less than 30 days since I bought version 1, they would send me version 2 for free! As in, a $600 piece of animation software. For free. So unless the follow-up email asks for me to send a money order to Nigeria, Toon Boom is very awesome people.

I also bought an EA game from Steam (Red Alert 3, shut up it’s fun) which refused to play online. I Googled it and it seems the common opinion is that EA sent out a bunch of serial codes that don’t work, and refuse to admit it. Some people have managed to get it fixed via tech support, others appear to be boned. So I wrote to tech support, who said they would get back to me in 24 hours, a week ago. I think I am in the boned category.

Oh well. Now I don’t feel so bad about playing Spore all the way through on someone else’s computer and never buying it. Ba-zing.

Once again, apologies for the lack of updates in the last week-and-a-bit. Things have been a little bit chaotic for me, partly because I just started a new job. I am now an assistant animator, working on the RANT DOG cartoons! Somehow making those expired copyright theatre animations has translated itself into an employable skill. All it took was an insane fluke of luck whereby my friend Arthur, henceforth known as OPTIMUS PRIME SUPERFRIEND NUMBER ONE sold a computer to Norm, the Rantdog director, and mentioned that I use the same software for animation that he does, and things progressed from there. How the hell Optimus Prime Superfriend Number One remembered what software I used (Toon Boom Studio although I recently upgraded to Toon Boom Animate, in case you were wondering) is a mystery for the ages, but anyway. I pretty much have to salute whenever he enters the room now.

SO, yes. Take a look at the RANT DOG shorts, they are pretty awesome. Up to now they have all been sort of unrelated, but this years are all part of one continuous narrative, whereby zombies emerge from the Alberta Tar Sands and all manner of hijinks ensue. Due to the nature of animation (ie it takes FRIGGING FOREVER) none of the work I have actually done has appeared yet. I think my stuff should start to appear in episodes 3-4, but I’m not sure. When you see a zombie stripper dancing, that was (partly) me.

Oh yes, and normal Deed The Inky service will resume Monday. Sorry again.

I found a link on Reddit to a site called ShadyURL. You give it the address of your website and it makes a new URL for it that sounds super shifty. So now, along with deedtheinky.com you can also access this site by going to http://5z8.info/taliban-meetup_b3d2_racist-raps. Try it out!

Also a second recommendation to DickensURL, which does the same thing but gives you a URL which is a line from Charles Dickens. Ours is http://dickensurl.com/4303/Old_Marley_was_as_dead_as_a_doornail.

OH HELLO. So for the time being I am dragging my ass a little bit on updating the film site (it’s on it’s way soon, honest! I am just doing like 20 things at once right now) but in the meantime, they have their own page on Deed The Inky if you want to look at them. For the time being I have just uploaded the major ones, but if you want to see my fledgling efforts you still can on my Vimeo page or on Youtube.

Okay, I will leave the iPad alone now.

Hello. A while ago I took part in a Comic Jam at Happy Harbor, a comic shop in Edmonton, where I live. The idea for this particular one was to draw a random panel of a comic strip, then pass it to the next person. It was good times. Anyhoo, until I get to doing another one, you can see the results here. See if you can figure out which ones are mine.

It is January, so that can only mean one thing. Time for the annual breaking-of-my-vow-to-not-stop-updating-the-web-comic-for-a-whole-year. But for good reason: it’s website redesign week!

This time the site looks similar-ish – the colours and most of the artwork are exactly the same, the layout is different but nothing crazy – however, under the hood it’s been completely redesigned from the ground up. I’ve made the big switch, from basic HTML (which I was completely coding by hand myself) to PHP, specifically WordPress with the Comicpress addon. What this basically means is that every time I upload a comic, the page is made for it automatically, it’s added to the archive automatically, the RSS is done automatically… basically it eliminates the extra hour I used to have to spend after drawing every cartoon trying to make it fit into the site. Not that this was a lazy decision. I had to re-upload all the comics dating back to 2004, all 300 of them, plus I had to transcribe them all and write little blog entries for each one. Altogether I’ve written about 15,000 words in the last seven days, and that’s not counting this.

Anyway, the site should be a lot more usable now – the ‘Random’ feature actually works now, as do the archives (which are also nicely formatted and everything) and there’s even a search feature. The main one is at the top, but on the bar below the comics there is a ‘Search Transcript’ feature which lets you search through all the text in a chosen comic too. SWISH.

ANYWAY, if you happen to find any problems or weirdness, please let me know at mark@deedtheinky.com

OH. Also you can comment on stuff now too. We’ll see how much of a good idea that turns out to be.

First of all, Happy New Year everybody! I hope you all felt appropriately shitty this morning. I know I did. SO, my New Years resolution this year is to keep doing Deed The Inky three times a week, all year, no exceptions. To this end I am going to have to streamline things a little bit, so some cartoons will be simpler black and white affairs, like todays. I don’t think it really detracts too much and it takes like 1/4 of the time, so… yes, we will see.

In other news, during my daily perambulation around my favourite other webcomics I discovered this…

I loves me some Toothpaste For Dinner, but this is a bit rich seeing as their site doesn’t even have a links section. So yeah, not really all that surprising. How about spreading the love around a little bit there, Stretch?