page 1169 – No, seriously, where were we?
“It TOOK ME OVER A YEAR TO COMPLETE THIS SENTENCE! YOU’D BETTER LISTEN TO THE REST OF IT!”
No, but seriously, I had to so some REALLY extensive edits to this page half-way through because I realized I’d drawn characters in drastically different places from where they had been the last time we saw them. It’s quite difficult to reconcile the fact that around a year and a half has passed with the fact that all that was “only two pages ago.” It really does a guy’s head in, man.
In other news, I was really hoping to have some Voting Incentive stuff up and running with this update… and TECHNICALLY I do, it’s just nowhere near as much as I was hoping for. For some reason, I had a MASSIVELY tough time setting up the subdomain for the Incentive gallery. Like, it was one of those things where my hosting service tried to idiot-proof the whole “start a new site” process by hiding everything behind a simplified interface… which wasn’t working, requiring SUBSTANTIALLY more time and effort figuring out how to get around and do things the slow way. I eventually worked it out, but it took so much longer than anticipated, I didn’t have time to actually start drawing anything. Heck, as of right now, I’ve only barely managed to even start re-posting any old stuff. But yeah, that’s the good news: technically The New Voting Incentive & Patreon Gallery now exists and has SOME content on it. Hopefully I’ll get enough done over the course of this week to actually have a proper link to it and maybe even some new material going up. That all depends on how much OTHER work I manage to get done over the next few days, of course?
What’s that about other work? Oh, I dunno, I just noticed there’s a certain date coming up in a few days, that’s all…
To me, Layla looks relationship-interested in Marshall. Especially with her arms behind her back, which would puff out, and thus emphasise, her chest.
I’m not sure whether to make a joke about Layla not WANTING to emphasize her chest, or her not NEEDING to. 🙂
Personally, I feel that “Not needing to” fits closer, but I still have to reply that her arms are still close to being in the “touch your elbows behind your back” trick position (stereotypical thing to ask stupid/ignorant/both girls to do, telling them that there’s a cool trick if you manage to touch your elbows together behind your back. The attempt pushes forward the pectoral muscles, aka the chest, making their breasts look bigger, while also ensuring that the view is unimpeded).
Layla may not be conscious of it, but she’s definitely in a position that gives Marshall a clear and easy view of how large her chest is, with nothing but the inherent properties of her top to mask it with both her arms being behind her back. Which has to be the case, because you didn’t draw her right arm, so it has to be hidden behind her.
Yeah, they’re both supposed to be back there. Honestly, my INTENT was to suggest that she’s trying to look cute and demure, so as not to intimidate Marshall. Because let’s face it, Layla’s probably intimidated a LOT of people without even meaning to over the years.
True, but she’s also probably seduced a LOT of people without meaning to over the years, too.
After a few days, I thought about what I said in this page, and have to add this: It’s entirely possible that Layla’s interaction with boys (excluding Trigger), when looked at externally, only has two settings, Intimidating or Hot (aka, Seductive). The only middle ground is Hot AND Intimidating. So Layla toning down the Intimidating also has the side effect of her accidentally ramping up the Hot, which makes her seem more seductive.
Accidentally seducing boys may also be partly why she thought it would be so easy to seduce Kevin (though if he was less oblivious it probably would have been), and also why she didn’t seem all that great at deliberate seduction.
Though that’s something she shares with Trigger; he caused Jenna to have a crush on him without trying, despite, well, frankly, not being all that nice to her a lot of the time (though that wasn’t really his fault, he hasn’t exactly had the time to learn social skills.) His attentions towards Skye were, however, rather more… ahh… yeah. At least Layla doesn’t approach “Internet tech giant” levels of creepy like Trigger did.
I assume Layla has also found a lot of the attention from people that thought she was deliberately being seductive rather uncomfortable (as you would) which would contribute to her preferring looser clothing and tighter necklines.
Looks like May got hit by the fourth wall a bit there as well as the floor… (temporal confusion is one of the known symptoms).
I’m a little worried the boys might overhear some of the Stilez-avoidance advice and decide to go check it out…
Hopefully Avi remains distracted by other boys out-competing him on cuteness, despite them not even trying to compete. (Imagine if Marshall and Trigger actually tried! They’d… probably end up less cute. Huh.)
Nice to see the start of the gallery again, though that’s another thing that makes me wish I had bothered with the three hours or so it would have taken to make a script to backup all the comments from Smackjeeves… but I didn’t expect it to die like it did so quickly. (even worse is I did in fact start making it, and had worked out the necessary regular expressions for scraping and URL extraction for traversal, so basically the actually hard part)
Any estimates on when we might get a fanart page again?
Trust me, dude, there’s no you can feel as bad as I do about not just plowing ahead and re-posting everything myself while SmackJeeves was still around. Heck, I’d actually started copying all the old comments back and the end of 2019, but gave up on it. If I’d have kept with that, we wouldn’t have NEEDED anything to do that job for us.
As for the Fanart, that’s coming, but it’s a bit lower priority since it’ll require the least about of set-up. I’m trying to get the ball rolling on hardest, most time-consuming stuff first, while saving the easy bits for days when I don’t have it in me to do anything too complicated. And don’t worry, I’ve got all the fanart saved!
Nice to hear about the fanart!
We again need the hard evidence for the domination of certain characters’ popularity compared to others, and we will eventually regain it!
Also, I just checked, the old forum content is still a thing that exists! Of course it hasn’t been touched for two years. But if I suddenly produce more fanart at least there’s a place to put it I guess. (even though it’s not as cool as an actual fan stuff page)
You know, I’ve been debating whether it’s worth putting a link up to the ol’ forum. I mean, I guess as long as it’s still there, I might as well, right?
Yeah, might as well include links.
Though, speaking of links, the styling for your dropdowns (noticable in Cast) makes the links hard to read, the red on grey isn’t great.
There are colour contrast tools specifically for website acessibility around that it is a good idea to look at, you just copy in your text and background colour hex values and they give you a rating for how good it is. A lot of them also suggest similar colour values that should make it easier to read.
More on the page than the website, I told a friend how before the hiatus one of the characters got pulled down onto the floor and hit her head, and now updates have resumed a couple years later she was in the background groaningly asking what year it was.
He found it hilarious 😄