Good kitty.
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Hey guys, it’s your neighborhood slacker letting you know what’s been going on.
As I believe I stated back when this weird little side story started, real life has been fairly interesting, and balancing it with work has been exceptionally difficult. The goal of this penciled style was to speed up the process, but it’s actually taking longer! After three weeks of losing entire weekends and losing my temper at anyone who got within five feet of me on a daily basis, I decided that it was in my best interest to take a few weeks off. Christmas was coming anyway and my stress wasn’t going anywhere.
I’ve since been admittedly entranced by building a large testament to my insanity in LittleBigPlanet, because I dig that thing and it’s given me an outlet whilest I’ve cleared my head. For the record, this thing is about a quarter to a third done. It’s quite grand in its ambitions, but I’d rarely do anything any other way, which I guess is evidenced by my idea of a pseudo-vacation from the main storyline has backfired terribly in its main reason to exist.
I’m not giving up on things or anything, though, as that’s not how I tend to go about this. However, with other projects on the vine and my prep time for con season being down to the last two months or so before ECCC comes to test my fledgling financial stability, Trelldain/HP and its ilk are going to be easing up a bit. I’m not sure exactly what this means yet, as I want to keep updating with some regularity, but the pace will likely slow as I try to make some headway on other projects, including the now year-old Lonely Hooves and some new wares, particularly prints and button designs.
I know this is kind of a bummer and I do apologize if this gives you the sads or anything. That said, I know my readership is generally people more interested in me than webcomics, so I would like to encourage you to maybe take some time to check out some of the other stuff out there and expand your horizons. I strongly recommend MAiZ and Lackadaisy if you’re as into fuzzy things alternating between being semi-adorable and going full BA as your presence here suggests you are.
If you don’t care for tracking spastic irregularity, I recommend checking out Comic Rocket and subbing to HP there. Assuming I can get my serial issues worked out (presently the comic “ends” on Fragments part 6), it should let you know when I get new pages up and out with fair dependency, and it’s also how I went about finally reading Lackadaisy myself.
As for updates, nothing this Monday (doing commission work and LH, might try a stream or two depending on the tasks), maybe next? I’ll try. No promises.
That’s all for now. Toodles!
Alright, spambots, we get it. You’re obnoxious. And you, poll box! You haven’t changed in, what, five years? Time for you to go.
So in case you haven’t noticed, I’ve nixxed that ancient poll and the shout box. Both have been on the chopping block for a while now, but the influx of spambots about lately has led to their removal now instead of in the distant future when the long-pretend-promised site redesign happens.
For the handfull of people still partial to the Shout Box, the site’s comments are controlled by Disqus because of it’s wonderful ability to sift spam from real people, and it allows you to post as a guest with just your email address, but people are adverse to that, so here’s all the other accounts it accepts on top of creating an actual Disqus sign-in that works on any and all sites that also use it as a comment system too:
If you somehow lack literally all of those things but want to comment regularly, or even if you just fit that latter description, I’d recommend a Disqus sign-in. The only emails I can recall them ever sending me are reply notifications, and I think you can turn that off. It’s super easy to set up and works on a lot of webcomics and other sites out there like my personal favorite little hole for gaming news, Siliconera. Regardless, I’m sure there will be a little backlash to this just because some people are oddly adverse to this sort of thing.
That said, to complain about it, you still have to basically use Disqus. :3
So, as the title suggests, illness has taken hold of the household and, as you might imagine, this affected my week pretty harshly. Aside from the comic taking the obvious hit of “Oh look, there’s not jack this week… again,” my work schedule had to be shifted a lot this week to make sure I had the income to do minor things like, you know, pay the bills. A nickel from the ad box every Monday does not exactly accomplish this, so I got to enjoy the office this weekend with the sniffles, but at least able to stand up straight, which is better than I’ve been since the 4th. Oh, right. There was also that whole Independence Day busy-all-day thing.
The short version is the page that had been meant to go up today is in fact not even done being sketched yet, and I apologize but am left to admit it was somewhat out of my hands this time. @.@;
That said I guess I have a bit of a head start for next week, then?
Short Version: Tablet broke, ho goody, need to send it off to get fixed, go buy things to help support us and an adorable kitten.
He is adorable.
Long version is as follows:
Tablet’s charge port randomly broke off and fell into the thing so now I need to send it off which means, iunno, no pages for a month or something? I need to do some things but the repair should be paid for this time so that’s something.
In the meantime, there’s a bundle of new prints in the shop and a nice shiny new button set~ so go ahead and iunno give me all your money or something? Sounds like a plan, you should totally do that. For anyone waiting on the Pony set, I’m aiming to have that up by next weekend so keep your eyes out (and sorry for the wait for some of you who’ve been lurking about for a while).
PS. We got a kitten and if I had a picture I’d totally post it here. Oh yes. You’d give all your money to the cuteness. You’d do it. Meow. His name is Milo, and he is ours now.
That is all for now. I shall keep you all posted on the progress of tablet repairs, but in the meantime, are you familiar with our recent social networking affairs? I’ve rigged up a Google + page just for SoT, and we’re getting along quite well with our new friends at Comic Rocket. Perhaps check these things out whilest you’re waiting around for me to stop floundering with technology, AKA my mortal nemesis and eternal foe.
We’re back from ECCC and I’ve had some proper unwinding, so it’s time to spew out an update to make up for the lack of a page this week (sorry!).
As I think I have previously stated, ECCC was my first time showing in an Artists’ Alley. We learned a lot and wound up doing okay as I adapted our button line-up to match the crowd (see title), which leads to some further announcements here in a moment. First, though, let me just say that we had fantastic neighbors that I honestly don’t think we could have gotten by without. To our left was Larry Lewis, who kept our spirits up and was just generally a cool guy. On our right were two people whose names were not hung on a giant sign over their heads, but they were also appreciated greatly, for we learned a lot and got several ideas watching how they functioned and set up, and they helped keep LM’s spirits up. It was a lot of fun, and even though we didn’t turn a profit, we learned a lot and the experience will help me down the line. I sold a few books, learned a lot about reading a crowd and attracting people’s eye, and hope to apply that to future showings (which I will also be discussing in a moment).
One of the things learned is adjusting to your audience – we had some goods on day 1 we wound up pulling because they were doing more harm than good, and I wound up staying up making pony-related button designs (which I am dang proud of) both nights, the first as an experiment, the second as the result of people wanting the other ponies instead of just the Dash thing I did. I regret nothing, and have AJ affixed to my coat sleeve. They are delightful and will wind up in the store sometime in the near future, so stay tuned for that!
As a result of the brony catering, I attracted the attention of one of the people organizing Everfree Northwest, who proceeded to tell me I need to get into the Artist Alley there as well. Will Zaron be publicly showing off his Brony-ness? Um, well…
You caught me.
This leads me to something else I’ve been dancing around. Something that started as a song and has grown into my new venting project. Something distinctively fanfictionish, which I’m a bit ashamed of, but screw it. I am most likely starting a second, updates whenever webcomic about Lonely Hooves, a blank-flank grey pegasus who serves as my vessel to basically parody whatever the heck I want. I went there.
There is some evidence to suggest I am already well into working on this.
So what does this mean? Well, on top of my showing at Stumptown in Portland at the end of the month, there’s an incredibly high chance me and LM will be storming Seattle once more in August for Everfree. I have more button designs up my sleeve and a print or two I want to do that I think that audience would appreciate, and Lonely’s adventures will hopefully entertain them as well as most of you guys (I seem to have a high brony percentage in my audience). SoT shall continue as priority uno, while Lonely will likely continue siteless or at best as a subdomain for the moment. We’ll see! I am not officially announcing beans yet. ;o
But yes. ECCC was a lot of fun, I learned a lot, and it gave me the motivation I needed to reveal my weird secret project I’ve been poking at for a couple weeks. There’s more of that and a store update on the way, so keep an eye on the blog here and I’ll keep you all posted! 
Until then!
-Zar