irregular webcomic – Page 12

Bread and Codenames

Saturday – more housework! After cleaning various things this morning I got stuck into writing some new Irregular Webcomic! scripts. I want to get another batch made next week if I can, and then complete another batch before I leave for my trip to Germany at the end of October. I wrote about half the batch today – hopefully I’ll have time to finish it off tomorrow.

It was approaching lunch time and I was getting hungry, so I checked the kitchen. We had 2/3 of a loaf of bread bought from the supermarket on Thursday, so I planned to make myself some sandwiches. I grabbed the bread… and noticed that the plastic bag had a large hole in it at the bottom end. Ragged, like it had been torn open. And a big chunk of the bread inside the hole had been… eaten away. It looked like mouse or rat damage.

Now I’m pretty sure we don’t have mice in the house, and we store the bread under a plastic cake cover so there’s no way anything could get in. So this must have occurred at the supermarket, and we just didn’t notice it until now. My immediate problem was that this left me with nothing straightforward to eat for lunch. (I wasn’t going to eat slices of a loaf that’s had mice/rats chewing on it.) So I took the rodent-gnawed loaf and went for a walk up to the supermarket to exchange it, and to buy some lunch on the way. I got sushi. The supermarket exchanged the bread for a new loaf with no issues, and the woman I spoke to said she’d show the damaged loaf to the manager.

This afternoon: more comic writing, distracted a bit by wondering if I have a Lego Boushh or not, and how much it would cost to acquire one (about $35 it turns out – too much for one comic). Then I watched Australia’s first game in the Rugby World Cup in Japan, as they played against Fiji in Sapporo. Fiji got off to a good start and led the scoring until the 62nd minute, when the Aussies finally pulled ahead – and from there the Fijians were visibly fatiguing while the Aussies stormed all over them, scoring multiple more times to win comfortably in the end. Our next game is against Wales next weekend.

After the game my wife and I took Scully to the park for some exercise. We’re trying a new training treat: tinned salmon, which she gets a morsel of for successfully responding to our call to “come here”. She obeys that one reasonably well, but not if she gets distracted by something, so we’re working on strengthening it. The good news is she likes the salmon, and was very keen to “come here” to get some.

This evening I played some games of Codenames Duet with my wife. We lost the first game when I guessed an assassin card. Here’s the layout midway through the second game, where we’re going better:

At this stage I had to clue to my wife MARATHON, ST PATRICK, WEREWOLF, and MONKEY. I considered “hairy” for WEREWOLF and MONKEY, but was stymied by the presence of BEARD. I plumped for “person” to clue ST PATRICK and WEREWOLF, which thankfully worked, and after that it was all downhill to the finish, as we won it handily. So 1 loss, 1 win.

New content today:

Late Wednesday update

I had some strange issues with WordPress last night, so this post is several hours late.

On Wednesday my year 6 Ethics class topic was the Heinz dilemma. I introduced it by reading the text from the syllabus: “Today we’re going to discuss a famous ethical dilemma.” Immediately one girl put her hand up and asked “What, like the trolley problem?” I hadn’t expected anyone in a class of 10 and 11 year olds to be familiar with that, but it was good to hear! I had to say no though, it was a different problem.

I was interested in how this discussion would go because in a previous topic most of the kids expressed the principle that saving a human life was of paramount importance, while previously in the current topic (on stealing) several of the kids had stated that stealing is always morally wrong, because it’s against the law. Often the same kids. So pitting the saving a human life against having to steal to do it led to a lot of interesting back and forth as the kids took their turns to talk. In the end, most fell on the side that stealing to save someone’s life was morally acceptable, but there were a significant number of holdouts who said that because it was against the law, sadly they would have to let the person die. Hopefully the kids will continue to discuss this one after the class.

I spent much of the rest of the day researching and writing annotations for the new batch of Irregular Webcomic! strips that I made earlier in the week. I still have a few more to do to complete the batch, and then it’ll be on to writing a new entry for 100 Proofs that the Earth is a Globe.

New content for Wednesday:

Comic production

I spent most of today making that batch of comics I’ve been working on writing the past few days. Shooting the photos took all morning, after which I treated myself to a lunch up the street at the local “healthy” supermarket, which has a hot buffet lunch thingy. I got a box of various grilled and curried vegetables.

The afternoon was taken up with assembling the comics from the photos I’d shot in the morning. I finished that around 8pm, giving me time to watch some TV with my wife for the evening. And besides looking after Scully and taking her to the dog park for a while, that was pretty much my whole day.

Here’s a sneak preview of one of the strips I made today…

IWC Stranger Things

New content today:

More comic writing

Saturday is housework day! I vacuumed the carpet and cleaned the bathroom and shower. Then got stuck into finishing off writing the current batch of Irregular Webcomic! I managed to polish that off just after lunch. This batch includes the first strips in a brand new theme – which I’m a bit excited about, since I haven’t introduced a new theme for a long time – the Scientific Revolution theme which began in strip 2154. Over ten years ago!

The afternoon was family time, with an afternoon tea with my wife’s family. We stopped on the way to buy some cannolis from the good Italian bakery near us, but it was nearly their closing time and they only had one left in the display when we got there. So I asked for that and a few other little sweets. Then the owner came out and asked me how I was going, and I said fine, except I’d been hoping for more cannolis. And he said he’d go out the back and pipe some fresh for me! He made some vanilla custard and some ricotta cannolis, but it seemed they were out of chocolate custard, alas.

Scully got to go for a bit of a walk during the afternoon tea.

Thankfully the rain eased off a lot today, and by sunset the sun had actually come out again.

New content today:

Rainy day writing

It rained more today, heavier than yesterday. I wrote Irregular Webcomic! scripts in the morning while listening to the music of Five Year Mission.

After lunch I collected Scully from my wife’s work, and then had to keep her amused for an hour before taking her to doggy daycare. Wife had booked her in for daycare today because of the weather forecast – as we discovered yesterday it’s difficult to get her some good outdoors exercise when it’s cold and raining heavily. I couldn’t let her run around and get soaked in the rain, so I took her to the pet shop where she likes to roam up and down the aisles sniffing everything. And then we went to the daycare place, which is probably her favourite place in the world (besides home of course!). She gets to play with lots of other dogs and usually comes home exhausted. Here’s a photo the daycare people took of her with a friend:

I wrote more comics in the afternoon. Writing a batch of comics can take up to two days of work. I’ll have to finish this batch off tomorrow. That was basically it for the day. Writing comic scripts is the most time consuming part of making Irregular Webcomic!, because of periods of writer’s block, and other periods of doing research. For one strip I wrote today I spent a couple of hours researching the history of various Greek provinces during the Roman era, which included this tweeted appeal for assistance. (I found the answer.) You can probably guess what theme it was for. It’s amazing the amount of research I put into a simple gag comic strip sometimes.

This evening was a relaxing dinner out with wife and Scully at one of our favourite Indian restaurants. We walked up the street, with the rain thankfully just light, easing off for the night.

New content today:

School prep

Saturday is housecleaning day at Chez DMM. After the weekly chores, I spent much of the day preparing for my school science visit on Monday, putting together slides for my talk on the solar system, and calculating what size balls I need to have ready to show the kids the comparative sizes of the sun and planets. I’m borrowing a 600 mm exercise ball from a friend. If the Earth is that size, I need a 160 mm diameter ball to represent the moon – I think the styrofoam ball I used for this 100 Proofs that the Earth is a Globe post will work nicely. It’s 150 mm, but close enough. And then to show the relativedistance between the Earth and moon I need to put the balls 18 m apart, which I think I can just about manage in the school library where I do my presentations.

And if the sun is represented by the exercise ball, then the Earth needs to be a 5 mm bead, and it needs to be 64 metres away! And Neptune needs to be 19 kilometres away! Hopefully this will impress on the kids just how big space is.

On a different topic, I noticed a disturbing thing today. I made a post to the Irregular Webcomic! Facebook page, and as I was doing it I noticed that Facebook was advertising some groups that it thought I “should join to increase your audience”. What sort of groups were these? Let’s take a look at them:

FOR THE BOYS – a group whose icon is a bunch of bikini models
Over 18 PEEP SHOW – icon is a silhouette of a woman
Holden Haters – icon is a Ford logo
Have a laugh Australia – icon is an “R over 18s” logo

So, Facebook, I’d like to know (a) why do you think people in these groups might be interested in my comics, and (b) why is there no feedback mechanism to let you know that these groups are not appropriate, or to hide them as suggestions?

Olive oil flavour

This morning I had a blood test, and had to go to the pathology place while fasting, so couldn’t eat breakfast beforehand. I like breakfast. I don’t really understand those people who skip breakfast or who don’t feel any urge to have food until lunchtime. I wake up ravenous every morning and am hoeing into a bowl of cereal within about 5 minutes of getting out of bed every day. So having to wait until I walk up the street and wait for half an hour at the pathology centre is torture. Immediately after I left I raced to the nearest bakery to get something to eat.

Back home, I worked on writing annotations for the batch of Irregular Webcomic!s that I’d made over the past few days. This is the final step before publication, and can take most of a day, depending how much research I do and how much I write for each comic. But it’s a good feeling having the batch completed. And now it’s time to start thinking about writing the next batch…

I stayed in for lunch today and made myself bruschetta. I’m trying to use up a bottle of extra virgin olive oil that I got as a gift, before it passes its “best before” date. And also some caramelised balsamic vinegar.

It got me thinking about olive oil. We have extra virgin olive oil, for stuff like bruschetta and salads and those things that everyone says you should use extra virgin olive oil for, because it has a strong “fruity” flavour. And we have the “light tasting” olive oil that everyone says you should use for cooking, because it has a less strong flavour that won’t dominate a dish.

Now, I don’t know if it’s just me, but I can’t taste any difference whatsoever between “extra virgin” olive oil and “light tasting” olive oil. Not just the current brands we have either – I’ve never noticed any difference between any of the brands of either we’ve had over the years. I’m honestly beginning to think this whole “fruity” and “light” olive oil flavours are really just the Emperor’s New Clothes, and a way to make us all buy more olive oil because we “need” to have two different types. They all just taste equally bland and oily to me – none of them have anything that could remotely be called a “strong” flavour that might dominate anything else. Can anyone actually taste a difference between these olive oils?? Or even taste them at all??

And on another note, I took some photos of flowers. This winter in Sydney has been ridiculously warm. Besides flowers everywhere, there are new green shoots and leaves on many of the trees already as well. This is all at least a month early, possibly more. Take a look: magnolias, irises, lavender, azaleas.

Sunday Morning Breakfast Cereal

This morning I woke up with the idea for a new random text generator: Random breakfast cereals! But more on that later. First it was a Sunday morning walk with the wife and Scully. We did a roughly 5 kilometre loop, stopping at a nice bakery/cafe along the way for morning tea.

Back at home, I finished work on tonight’s new Darths & Droids comic. Then I implemented the random breakfast cereal generator. Technical coding details follow in the next paragraph (feel free to skip it if not interested in coding nitty-gritty):

One issue critical with this generator was a problem that Andrew Coker and I have wanted to tackle for some time. The idea was to generate a cereal name (e.g. Crunchy Chcolate Bombs), and then a description of the cereal. But the description should use some of the same words as in the name, so that it’s described as “Scrummy bombs of chocolate with extra marshmallow bits” rather than, say, “Yummy shreds of bran with raisins”. To do this we needed to store some of the randomly generated words in a context dictionary and then recall them later on using variable names, rather than just generate more random text. Doing this required quite a bit of code refactoring, and a lot of heavily nested text replacements in the partially munged output string. This of course generated a slew of bugs with other replacements such as capitalisations and stuff. So we worked together to track them down and squash them. After a few hours of coding, we think we have it working properly.

TL;DR: Here’s the brand new mezzacotta breakfast cereal generator!

Another thing I’ve been doing is getting back into my Italian language practice. I’ve been practising regularly on Duolingo for a few years, doing some every day, but I slipped after my last overseas trip and didn’t start up again when I got back home, until a few days ago. Now I’m back into doing some revision every day. Fortunately it seems like I haven’t forgotten too much! If you use Duolingo, you can follow my profile here.

And a photo today, another behind-the-scenes of a set I built for the Cliffhangers theme. It might not be obvious where they are from this, but when you see the actual comic hopefully it’ll be convincing enough.

Comic maker, makin’ comics…

It’s Saturday, and the day when I finished off making that batch of Irregular Webcomic! strips that I photographed back on Thursday. I composed some of them that day, but most of them waited until today.

While assembling the comics, I did my usual thing of changing the scripts and punchlines of a few of the strips. For one of them I solicited advice from my friends on our private chat channel, on whether to go for a broad audience punchline that was not necessarily as funny, or a narrower audience punchline that I thought was funnier. They agreed that the narrow punchline was in fact funnier, so I used that. My general philosophy is that I’m happy to target a fairly small niche audience with a technical punchline that nobody else will fully understand, as long as it’s funny enough for the people who do understand it.

On a slightly different note: have you ever wondered how I keep track of which characters have which coloured speech bubbles? Wonder no more! Here is a little image file that I keep handy and always have open when I’m assembling new comics. I can easily use Photoshop’s eyedropper tool to sample the exact colour of each major character’s speech bubbles, so they remain consistent across strips. (I didn’t do this early one, and some of the characters’ bubbles changed colour once or twice, but I’ve been consistent for a long time now.)

IWC palette

Comic making day!

This morning I finally managed to get my act together and photograph a new batch of Irregular Webcomic! strips. I pulled out the Lego and started work about 8:30. I had to run down to the garage to get a particular character from the boxes of Lego stored down there – one I haven’t used for over 1000 strips. I also contemplated rebuilding a complex thing for a set, but that would have taken an hour or two extra just to do that, so I improvised with a photographic background.

I finished photographing about midday. That’s about typical for a batch – during which I photograph enough frames for 20 strips – or 4 weeks’ worth at one per weekday. During the afternoon I began assembling the photos into comic panels and adding dialogue. I’m about halfway through that – will need to finish it off another day. And then after that comes the writing of the annotations and then uploading everything to the staging area of the web server so they can update automatically. All up it’s about two full days of work to prepare a batch like this… after the writing is done. Doing the writing for a batch of comics can take anything from 1-3 days, depending how inspired I feel and how easily the jokes flow.

As well as the comic panel photos, I took a few behind-the-scenes shots, to show you what the overall set looks like. Here are a couple of shots of the entire set that I built to represent the Cambridge University particle accelerator lab, as seen in comic #4036. The sets are usually very empty outside the bounds of where the camera will see!

Apart from household chores, meals, and a bit of Italian language practice, that’s pretty much my entire day today!