No, no server issues.  No dramatic power outages (we did have that the other night, but not last night).  No other acts of God.  I fell asleep.  Yep.  After a couple of days of exhausting work at my day-job and on one of my other sites, I told myself I would take a short nap and then put up the comic.  Funny, Jim laid down next to me to do the same thing.  We woke up this morning.

Upside?  We feel pretty good.  Still overly busy, but sleep is a good thing.  So is getting the comic up on time.  Perhaps next time we’ll manage both.

Sorry…

I think some of the people who read today’s strip (Issue 140) might feel that Harry is being exceptionally rude to Blip when he finds out he’s married. Well, considering how rude Blip is to him, I think it’s a bit justified. Also, it’s one of those cases where you find out something about someone that shocks you so much, you forget all etiquette. I know there have been people I have met with less than stellar personalities, who I later found out were married. I would be shocked, wondering who the heck would have married them, and secretly wondering how they put up with such a person. Granted, I understand that most people act differently when it comes to family and then outside acquaintances. Still, it make you wonder. That was what I was trying to convey with Harry in that strip.

The next 2 strips (Issues 141 and 142) were incredibly fun for me to do. I dreaded having to design the mayor’s office, but ended up loving it once I was into it. First of all, as a bit of trivia, the mayor’s office design is based loosely on a mayor’s office in a popular video game. I actually studied pictures of several real mayor’s offices in the U.S. and thought they all looked so pretentious! They looked like mini Oval Offices. I wanted something a little less flashy, and decided to do a parody of a movie or game one. Thankfully I found one I liked and used it as a model. I have to admit to not ever hearing of the game, much less playing it. Though, I did learn after the fact that my kids had played it a while back, having borrowed it from a family member.

Can I ask, are there ever any good mayors in comics? Most of the ones we run into are all corrupt and shifty. I guess those types of characters are more fun to write, and make for better drama.

Last, I also have to point to an inside joke, which literally only a handful of our close friends will get when reading the comic. Jim and I have been in a role-playing game since before we were married. I truly date myself here, but the campaign has been going on 16 years!–though only 3 years have passed in game time. It’s a superhero based game, using the DC Heroes universe. My character also happens to run an orphanage. Early in our gaming, I ran a game which had major events happens at the yearly “charity carnival.” Little did we know, that would be a recurring event in our game, and always the source of a lot of fun and drama. Thus, my inspiration to use it in the strip.

It’s really funny because the strip has taken on such a different tone lately, moving away from the “new kids on the block” focus of the Pixels, and widening the focus on the town and supporting characters. This was always our plan from Day 1, but as we mentioned before, we did not want to rush things. It’s neat to finally be writing storylines we came up with nearly 2 years ago! Hope you all enjoy them.

Actually, more like *several* days late. Though, the dollar part is argueable. Despite being a bit behind, our Booyah is up and we’re pretty pleased with it. 

Of course, fresh off the frustration of a server move, I am tempted to spend a page and a half ranting and raving.  Honestly, the move went relatively smooth.  The problem is that our new server has more advanced security, which is good from a general standpoint, but not good that a large number of our scripts and programs didn’t work properly.  That included this blog and a bunch of other stuff.  Not to mention that BMW had a longer time propogating than some of the other sites.  Ah, but I promised not to rant, so suffice it to say it was a pain, but we’ve got it (mostly) taken care of now!

It’s amazing that Bitmap World has been around a year! It truly doesn’t feel that long at all. There was so many plans we had when we started, and we’ve only begun to explore some of them, and there is so much more to come.  We had hoped to start one storyline in particular with this Booyah, but instead decided to do a “birthday” strip with Issue 134. Wanting to do an Easter strip too, we figured we’d just do a few stand-alone strips and will begin the planned storyline next week.

Speaking of the birthday strip, this is again one of those comics that is more real-life than not.  Our kids LOVE bubble wrap and fight over it.  While I have never actually gotten them a roll of it, I’ve considered it.  And I have to admit, I love popping it to.  Why the heck is that so much fun?!  Whatever the reason, it is.  I can totally see my kids having a great time with a big roll of that stuff.  I’m not sure if Jim would be like Harry, thought I’m sure he’d pop a few anyway.

One of the big complaints about some comics in general is that white space is not good.  We have always held that Bitmap World is deliberately minimalistic, since we want to invoke the feelings of the old computers of days past.  Still, adding some additional color is something we have wanted to do, and have made the leap to give many of our “sets” a splash of colors. In all selfishness, we didn’t want to have to go back and color all the past strips, so a convenient little explanation was crafted.

If you visit YouTube, be sure to look up the song, Code Monkey.  It’s a great song written by a talented free-source musician, Jonathan Coultan Jim and I both love that song, particularly since we are the programming types.  I have dreamed of doing a mini-movie to the song using Bitmap World characters.  I may still yet…perhaps when I get more time in the future (whenever that will be).  Still, I wanted to somehow give a nod to the song and did so through this comic.  This is another slice-of-life strip.  My kids can’t stand when we like their stuff, even though we’re the ones that got them interested in certain types of music/movies/shows.

Last, the Easter strip. Honestly, we didn’t plan this one to be a big commentary piece. We were just talking about the Easter Bunny and then the idea was tossed around about the Macrohard bunny being at the mall, and then it went from there.  That said, both of us do find it ridiculous that there has been a trend of companies to “claim” holidays, and even seasons, as their own.  Did you know that Country Time Lemonade, Corona, and Borden’s Ice Cream all claim to be the official sponsors of Summer?  I wonder who they pay royalties to, Mother Nature?

There’s a ton to this Booyah, so remember to check out our News page for details.  We actually had more planned, but our server woes had to come first. The good news is that next month we’ll have a nice Booyah too!

Happy Spring, everyone.  And Merry Easter, too.

My friend, Anne, has a popular Blog. It’s simply called, “Cooking with Anne.” From the first time I heard that, I thought it sounded like a good title for a cooking show. That was what spurred the idea of making it a show in the Bitmapworld universe. I ran the idea past Anne some time ago, and she graciously gave me the green-light to go for it. Even though I toyed around with this concept months ago, today’s comic (Issue 133) is the actual strip I had in mind from day one. Anne is very smart and sassy, and I knew that would be reflected in her BMW alter-ego. I just thought the idea of this total chauvenist coming on her show and trying to take over was hysterical. Of course, I immediately knew how she would end up handling him. Her ending monologue, however, came to me as I was doing the actual strip, and I totally love it!

On a somewhat-related note, there was a webcomic that was/is called “Cooking with Anne,” done by Ben Bittner. It’s a short piece and is not your conventional cooking-show type take on the title. When Anne was first starting out, she wanted the URL, but Ben had it for his strip. That comic has not been updated in a while, and Ben no longer kept the name, and after switching hands a couple of times, Anne just got the domain for herself recently.

If you are looking for some great cooking, be sure to check out Anne’s blog. It’s a great read, and the recipes are soooo good. Oh, and if you were wondering why the strip has been running late lately (aside from our server woes), you can look at Anne’s site design, which was done by the BMW team (Jim and me under our Mirz-Jiles moniker). We’ve been doing web-work to make extra money while Jim is still out of job.

At my last job the big push was to get everyone certified. Honestly, the company really didn’t care if you knew how to do the work, they just like to brag that all of their employees were certified. I took classes, and I boned up with study manuals. I passed tests too. Though, to this day if I had to recall much of it, I couldn’t. I can program. That’s something I can do. I’ve been doing it for 27 years (I’m not that old, I started when I was 11). My last several jobs were programming jobs. Yet, when I went on interviews, I was constantly being asked to take these tests to prove I could code. Granted, I know there are a lot of script monkeys out there who manage to do okay writing little scripts and such, and they want to weed out the casual coder from the hardcore programmers. Still, I hated being treated like I didn’t know what I was talking about when I had done this for how many years. So, what did I have to go and do? Get certified.

I guess my big gripe is not certification in general, but the move Corporate America has made to have *everyone* certified. That whole idea that it’s not good enough for you to do your job, but you have to have a piece of paper to prove it.

Oh, and the fact that all of it COSTS so much. Seriously, thousands of dollars for classes, hundreds of dollars for study materials, and two or more Ben Franklins at a crack just to take the test. Frankly, I think it’s a big conspiracy to make all of these testing companies richer. But, hey, that’s just me.

We actually had a different strip planned for Tuesday, but as fate would have it, Jim needed to put in a water filter on our kitchen sink. He had done this project done before a few years back, with the same filter model in fact, so he expected it to go quickly. His plan was to get it up, and then finish off our scheduled comic. We expected it (the strip) to be a few hours late, but considering we are slowly on the mend from all being sick and playing catch-up in the various areas of our life, we hoped our readers would understand. Of course, as Murphy’s Law dictates, the project which was to take a few hours ended up taking a LOT longer. I can actually report that Jim gave up on it last night, and is in the midst of completing the project as this update is going up. As the project stretched from “I’ll be done in another hour” to “I have no idea when the heck I’m gonna finish this,” I couldn’t let the irony of the situation slip by, so I decided to forego our planned strip and draw one about the situation. Living in an old house, we are used to this type of thing. Though, from what I have heard from others, this is a common occurrence. Even though we come to expect this, every time we hit a big unexpected delay, it’s still upsetting.

On Thursday, we will be starting the storyline featuring our 100th strip contest winner, Evil Couch. Unfortunately, it took us this long to get to it because we didn’t want to simply do a cameo, but wanted to incorporate him into the strip. A real-life incident actually gave us some good material for the arc we’re planning. Be sure to check back.

In addition to everything else that’s going on, Michelle has come down with strep throat. So you’re getting a rare blog entry from me. When it rains, it pours. Except it’s actually snowing around here.
 
We feel bad when we deliver a comic late. And we feel really bad when a Booyah is late. So, we wanted to put something up.
 
In case you’re wondering, No Rest for the Wicked, MegaTokyo, Absurd Notions, and Nine Planets Without Intelligent Life are four webcomics which are famous for being late or missing updates. Although you probably guessed that already, but mentioning it gives me an excuse to link to all of them.

Sometimes the biggest delay in doing something, particularly a webcomic, isn’t so much one large thing, but a dozen little things. Though, yesterday, we had a pretty big deal with one of the kids’ schools, and that put us back. Again, we appreciate our reader’s understanding. Some people have asked us why don’t we make a buffer of strips. We have made small buffers in the past, just 2-3. But usually when we have extra time we concentrate on story development. It’s not unlike us to sit and have a pow-wow about what’s gonna happen next and in the future. That’s also easy to do when we’re cooking dinner or cleaning around the house. Multi-tasking!

There has been one thing we have been doing a lot of work on, and that’s getting together a new system for doing the strip’s lettering. We use a custom font that I created. However, due to limitations in the font program that created it, the font is not rendered perfectly when we do that lettering. It requires hand clean-up and kerning. For a wordy strip, like today’s strip (issue 116), that process can take almost as long as drawing/piecing the comic. We’ve been searching for a program to remaster the font. Hopefully when we do, it will cut down the overall time to do the comic, which will be a good thing.

It’s been in the single digits and teens around these parts for the last couple of weeks. It’s almost been too cold to do anything. Spring is a while off, but we can’t wait. The cold weather stinks.

This issue and the storyline to come are actually inspired by real events. Recently, a couple of our kids have been bitten by the “love bug.” Of course, in grammar school, there’s no real love, just little crushes. Still, it’s incredibly cute. Our son received a gift of little trinkets from a girl for his birthday. One of our daughters recently got a letter from a secret admirer. I still remember my first “kindergarten crush” and I hope that this little arc will bring back fond memories for our readers. Who was your first crush?

The Pixel kids do come off as a little dense at times. I never view them that way, though. They are just kids. They are caught up in their own worlds and don’t know everything–even if they think they do. The Pixel kids are quirky, though. It makes for good comedy, but our own kids tend to be that way too, so we personally find it endearing. Speaking of today’s strip (Issue 115), I think we can all relate to talking at cross-purposes.

The bonus of this new storyline, is that it is going to allow us to work in a few things that we have wanted to for a while. We also wanted to mention, we got a lot of positive feedback from the strips with the robbery and Blip. Don’t worry, there will be more to that arc coming soon. If you’re a regular reader, you know we take pride in pacing things out. All in good time. As promised, there will be some exciting things coming at our year anniversary mark in March!

As much as I like to think I’m a “hip” mom (and the fact that I use the word hip probably proves I’m not), there are sometimes the generation gap hits me. Usually any time I see some piece of pop culture which seems absolutely idiotic to me, but keeps my kids enthralled for hours. Of course, the kids–my kids and the generation of 20-somethings–are the ones that are target audiences nowadays. They have the disposable income, and the naivity to truly believe they need everything that advertisers tell them. While not quite as exaggerated as in Issue 114, there is a trend where news is focusing more and more on entertainment and fluff as a way of keeping viewers. One of our major newspapers has a spin-off paper that is actually performing better than the main paper. It is “tidbit” news, where you get just a paragraph or two synopsis of the story. The rest of the pages are filled with news of the moment. What happened during Britney’s breakdown. Is Angelina Jolie pregnant? That’s what people want to know. In the last major election, there were polls that showed that most people cared more about the outcome of American Idol than the presidential election. It’s sad, but certainly a true statement of the world we live in.

As for Harry running around after all the kids, all I can say is that is Jim’s life–almost verbatim. 90% of the time our kids want daddy. Be it getting a bottle, changing a stinky, or kissing a boo-boo, they want their daddy. Of course, I win in the food category, but only because Jim can’t cook! Oh well, having grown up in a single-mom home, I don’t complain. I’m really happy and lucky I have a great husband who’s such a good dad. Though, I’m sure–particularly at key moments–Jim wishes that for a little while those kids would want their mom instead!

One more note, we are totally proud of our very techno, pop-culture sounding celebrity names! Can’t you totally see a rock star with the name of Xeon Neon?