page 1134 – surely it’s friendly
(Historical Notes: WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOA this page turned out cool. I mean, the top panel could have been better, because at first I’d planned to do this as an animation and avoided gradients, but other than that… MAN. The whole reason I ditched the animation idea was because that second panel was turning out SO well that I couldn’t bear dialing back the detail. EVERYTHING going on outside that window is fabulous, from the scary clouds to the awesome lighting to the subtle purple line art on the new ship to just how good the ships themselves turned out… heck, I actually wound up re-using the ship line art on SEVERAL later pages. This whole page is so good, I don’t even feel bad about leaving it up on the homepage for a day or so while I finally get some sleep!)
They’re still hungry, but they’re too terrified to realise it, or to eat.
Also, sleep is important. Have good sleep regularly.
We joke, but my appetite gets RUINED whenever I’m busy or stressed out.
Right at the moment I post this, you are, on my screen, somehow number 2 on Top Web Comics. Though, equally, if not more, confusing, is the fact that Earthsong, a comic that was completed in 2016, is at number 9.
The somewhat odd thing (or maybe not odd at all?) is that the comics just below FOT in the top 5-ish spots now are the same ones that used to regularly be right around FOT in the mid -teens. which implies that they didn’t all suddenly get 10x as many readers/voters, but instead that everyone else in the top dozen or so (except the #1, which still has 12x as many votes as FOT at #2) all suddenly lost 90% of their voters at once. It seems pretty unlikely that all of the top dozen were on smackjeeves. Besides, the sudden, strange drop happened weeks after smackjeeves went belly-up. The only guess I have is that they were all using some “trick” somehow to get extra votes, and TWC changed their algorithm to defeat that “trick”. No idea what “one simple trick to get 1000s of extra webcomic votes” they could have been using, though. curiouser and curiouser….
The Internet runs on strange magic indeed
And now currently at #3 is some comic I have never even seen in the top 50. Clearly the sharks smell blood in the water from the apparent demise of the regular Top 10s and are attacking! (Which is to say mounting some sort of get out the vote campaign or something I guess.)
So, everybody vote as hard as you can!!!!
Or, as they say in chicago, “VOTE EARLY AND OFTEN!”
Edit: have you got your like it /hate it pics loaded for the month? none of them are coming up….
Oh dang, I’ve been so busy trying to get all this other stuff done that I forgot all about that!
That viewing window behind them seems to have gotten a lot larger vertically than it normally is. I guess it enlarges automatically when there’s something interesting to see?
I’m sure Tabitha has her face glued to the window at the fascinating-and-totally-not-terrifying-at-all ship. And of course Avatar is fascinated too because it’s new information to gather.
I think it’s more a case of me occasionally drawing the window SMALLER than it’s supposed to be. We’ve seen wide shots that show this particular room is several times taller than other rooms on the ship, but I think I’ve habitually cheated on that in order to hit the top of the window into a smaller frame (in order to make it instantly clear what part of the ship we’re looking at)
So…it shrinks whenever there’s nothing important to see…or when it knows it needs to fit into the panel frame. That’s some pretty good AI on that window.
Only the most genresavvy of spaceships come with the optional meta-spatial adjustment add-ons.
The Cap’n may be cheap, but at least he’s willing to pay for the REALLY important features.
(who cares if there’s not money left over for ‘frivolous features like extra emergency life support’ or ‘escape pods’ – one must have priorities!)