Far Out There

Okay, confession time. This wasn’t the page that supposed to go up today, and the explanation is one of the funniest things you’re ever gonna hear this week. You know how I only just got back from MAGFest? You know how I’ve only managed to get two Conventional Wisdom pages done so far? You know how I swore up and down that I wouldn’t try to do more than one convention per month anymore? Well, funny thing: there’s a little scifi con called Illogicon happening in town this weekend, and I was reeeaaaally close to going to that. In the middle of another convention’s comic updates. Mere days after getting back from one of the most exhausting events of the year. Clearly, I am a crazy idiot. Thankfully, I started to get a bit of a runny nose last night, and that was enough to make me paranoid about coming down with con crud. I mean, plunging into ANOTHER three days of cramped rooms full of people with questionable hygiene when I’ve not quite recovered from the last one? I dodged the bullet on catching the plague once, I don’t think I’m lucky enough to get away clean twice. Unfortunately, by the time I came to my senses and resolved to stay home, I’d already pushed back the more elaborate page that was supposed to go up today and gone to work on this single panel one… and then I fell asleep, which is why it ended up being late anyway.

But look! Animation! Yeah, this isn’t COMPLETE filler, because I have been wanting to experiment more with the possibilities of that visor thing the Cap’n has for a while now. There just hasn’t been many opportunities to actually get creative without upstaging something else. Nothing to get in the way of here, though! Let’s see if I can find any more weird things to do with that screen. Incidentally, I should probably add to any readers with short memories that Captain Crosby is NOT a robot, just a dude in a futury techno suit. Gotta remember to keep these details straight.

Oh, but at least I did, if fact, manage to get a fresh TWC Voting Incentive done! Sorry about the continued delays there. I didn’t properly account for how much time that remaining pile of AWA Patreon comics would take, but there’s all finished now. At this point, it’s just the MAGFest comics and regular Far Out There stuff to focus on… and no extra convention over the weekend to bog things down!

(Historical Notes: See, idiot stories like the one up top are the reason why I’d already started scaling back my convention going even before 2020 became 2020.  IDIOT stories.  As for the actual comic, this took a looot longer to re-edit than you’d probably think.  The original animation was kinda sorta really badly laid out, with the one big dot pushing the three little dots out of place as it moved own the line in a way that was SUPER distracting once the loop reset.  So I went through and re-did the placement of everything on all the frames… only to realize too late that my master copies of all the frames weren’t cropped down to the right dimensions yet.  Long story short, I had to go through an absurdly long sequence of copy/pasting layers onto other files and making sure everything was lined up to avoid the animation jittering and all this other stuff you don’t care about.  Point is, I like this version of the page a heck of a lot better than I did the SmackJeeves one, but MAN was I ready to shut down into my own sleep mode once it was done.  And I’m even MORE ready now.  But the important thing is that this latest spree of re-posts got us into 2019!  The last pre-hiatus year!  We’re almost there!  I’m gonna go pass out!)