Is this really my first blog entry since 2006? Unless LiveJournal is lying to me, it is indeed.

So my car is in the shop. It went in on Friday morning as Friday and Saturday are my days off and I thought why not give my mechanic two days to work on it? Well, they got to it around Friday afternoon, and needed to run some more tests, and I said that wasn't a problem, I'll pick it up tomorrow. What they didn't mention was that "tomorrow," Saturday, they were closed.

So here it is Sunday, and I am without a car. Living as I do twelve miles from my place of business, this can be a bit of a problem, particularly as the nearest bus stop is over a mile from my work. I could make it work in the morning, true, if I started out early enough, but there is no way I could walk that distance after work in time to make the last southbound Sunday bus.

Then I recalled that Austin buses all have bike racks on them. What better way to break in my brand-new bicycle that I bought on impulse on Friday than to shove it onto the front of a bus and ride it down Riata Vista Circle from the bus stop to Apple?

All it required was catching the 1L at 38th and Guadalupe at 9:59 (whereas, when driving, I head out at 11:00)... change buses at North Lamar Transit Center (don't forget the damn bike, I repeated over and over the whole way), and take the 383 to Oak Knoll. From there, a nice leisurely ride to Apple in the late-winter sun. Now that I think about it, it was mostly downhill, so it may be a pain in the ass going the other way.

While I hadn't forgotten how to ride a bike, I had forgotten how hard it can be. Hopefully as my legs get stronger and I get lighter, it won't continue to be like this.

Nonetheless, the verdict was... I love it! Fuck the extra hour. I spent it reading, whereas at home I'd probably spend it watching some nonsense on TV, or worse, the internet. And, a little quick math... I drive about 25 miles on a given workday. My car gets (hopefully) around 25 miles to the gallon. So that's one gallon a day, and as everyone knows, that works out to around $3. The bus costs $1 for a day pass. And I get some exercise in the bargain.

What kept me from doing this before? Quite frankly, it was a set of priorities that may or may not be valid -- the thing that kept me off the bus was the time involved, including that one-mile walk. Why leave the house at 9:50 when I can leave the house up until 11:10 and still get to work on time? What about all the wasted time -- getting to work early because that's when the bus comes, etc? These things were the dealbreakers.

Now that the existence of the bike has tempered the effort involved to a great degree, I'm less inclined to care about the "wasted" time -- in fact, I'm starting to see this time as being less wasted than time I would have otherwise spent. I can read. I can write. If I really, really want to watch something, I have an iPhone in my pocket to watch it on. But since the iPhone only accepts video in one format, it takes deliberate effort to encode it, so I won't be in a position to just passively watch whatever happens to be on at the moment.

I'm actually pretty jazzed about this. I think I'll start off doing this two or three times a week -- see how it works on a weekday. But I think it's going to be a pleasant change.

Xaviar Xerexes over at Comixpedia has a regular feature wherein he compares cartoonists' early work with their more recent stuff, as a way to show how the art of webcomics evolves over time. I really dig this feature, as it shows that even people at the top of the game today started out as pathetic suckasses and I feel less bad about my own art.

As for my art, while Monkey Law is probably too young a strip to merit this kind of critical treatment, I did think it would be fun to whip up a comparison of a couple of similar shots from ML's first year and today... here's Monkey Angst in a bar:



Here are the strips these panels came from:
Old
New

OK, so I'm a total ignoramus when it comes to things LiveJournal. I've had this account for a while, but never really grasped what to do with it. Hell, someone else (and I have no idea who) set up my comic's LJ account, monkeylaw_comic. Myself, though? No clue.

So when I saw this post on Fleen on LJ icons used as marketing tools, I had no idea what that meant. So I looked into it.


And now I figure it's not such a bad idea. Not just the use of icons for marketing, but the use of LJ in general. People do read crap on here, for some reason.

OK, so here we go... I'm now a LiveJournal user, in earnest. So...

uh...

Yesterday I masturbated twice. Hoo-ya.

There. Now I'm a LiveJournal user.

Peace out.

So I decided that this year will be the year that my webcomic, Monkey Law, will finally become popular. It's one of those things that you wake up in the morning and decide -- you're going to ditch the retainer, quit the marching band and the chess club, and start nailing cheerleaders.

So I started advertising. Took out an ad on Comixpedia, as Xaviar Xerexes has been a longtime supporter of my strip, and that resulted in a trickle of people over to my site. Then I shelled out a little more money and bought four days on Something Positive and whoah, Jesus... over a thousand people clicked on my ad the first day. I don't know what kind of numbers a popular webcomic draws, but a thousand people who clicked on the ad! I mean, I never click on ads. Never even occurs to me. So many comic sites are so laden with ads -- hell, sometimes I think DJ Coffman is about to enter Yirmumah! in the Daytona 500 -- they don't even register with me. Apparently that's not the case with everyone, and thank God.

Now all I have to do is create comics of high enough quality that people will want to keep coming back.

Yeah, right. All I've really set myself up to do is make an ass of myself more publicly.

I'm boned.

I only hope that I remember to delete this initial test entry when I start using the LiveJournal in earnest.