Div tags aren’t so bad once you get used to them. Like any small animal or younger sibling, you just have to treat them nicely and they’ll repay the favor in kind. Unfortunately, it isn’t always the most intuitive to figure out exactly what your div tag’s specific CSS needs are, and so you can easily run afoul of your div tag. When this happens, look forward to coming home to ruined furniture, broken websites and navigation, and poop where poop was never meant to go.

Some browsers will offer to take care of this mess for you by kindly sweeping it all under the rug, and forgiving you your transgressions. However, you never learn this way what kind of attention your div tag truly requires, and are doomed to repeat your mistakes. Who really wins here? You certainly don’t because you never learn. Your poor div tag doesn’t get the care it deserves, and your goodly browser gets a bad rap for being too soft on terrorism.

Speaking of soft on terrorism, I’ve been having one hell of a time trying to figure out why exactly Internet Explorer 7 was randomly causing all of my blog to be hidden - until I moused over my comic navigation.  Stranger things have happened, sure, but I just want my wonderful writings to be accessible. Is that too much to ask? Well after hours of tears and toil, I think I finally found the culprit: I didn’t declare a width for the two div tags which enclosed my comic and its navigation. I still have no idea why such an error was causing that strange effect, but for now I believe the issue is fixed. If you’re reading this with no problems then I think I rest my case.

Moral of the story: Use Firefox

We all consider ourselves to be individual persons - after all, we each have our own separate thoughts, loves, addictions, and (most importantly) our own bodies. While we probably wouldn’t consider much of the flora and fauna with whom we share this planet to be on the level of sentience at which we claim to be, there’s no denying that we can identify specific individuals of most any given species.

This guy is one in a million

Consider a blade of grass; it is likely part of a larger clump of grass - perhaps an offshoot of a stalk which terminates in a flower. This clump of grass germinated from a single grass seed which came forth as a result of a genetic coupling of two other grass clumps. These grass “parents” in turn were spawned by the grasses which came before it over countless iterations with, due to mixing genes or freak mutations, each generation being born with a slightly different genetic makeup.

Even in something as seemingly vast as a wild prairie, we can still pick out a single plant - an individual member of the current generation, with its own unique genetic thumbprint. But what if we alter the scenario from “grass in a field” to “leaves on a tree”? Naturally, despite that we can pluck a single leaf from the tree, each “individual” leaf in fact shares the same genetic identity as the tree from which it came and is therefore no different from the tree than our nose is from our face… Or so we assume.

You see, given that multicellular organisms on this Earth all grow by forcing their individual cells to divide, we could consider each cell in our lonely tree to have come from its own set of parents, grandparents, and so forth. (Actually, it might be more accurate to say “siblings” as cells tend to split themselves in half rather than giving birth to offspring.) Even more interesting is the fact that, given DNA being as vast and complex and fragile (thus prone to mutation) as it is, each iteration of cells will likely have an infinitesimally small genetic aberration from the cells that spawned it. This foundation of the evolutionary process is what is responsible for such a diversity of species on this planet. In terms of identity, much of our taxonomy is based on physical differences and, more recently, genetic lineage. However, this poses an important question: Exactly how much genetic difference between individuals must there be to qualify them as different species? What about the line between different breeds or races? Given that even the very cells of an organism are capable of genetic variation, how minor of a difference must there be before we begin considering an entity not as an individual but merely a part of a larger system?

So if leaves can be persons on their own, where does that leaf us? Are we simply coherent colonies of individual cells wandering around aimlessly? Mobile societies of selfless biological robotoids working toward a common goal? Or perhaps our individuality is merely our own delusion as we live to serve an even greater organism, of which we are merely its cells?

Read ‘The Lineage of Grass pt.2′

It’s here! It’s finally here! I’ve seriously been working on bringing the new redesign almost nonstop for the past couple weeks now, and it’s just now ready enough for the front page. Granted, I can guarantee there are some tweaks and such that still need to be done, but those minor things (i.e. formatting, Archives page, etc.) can wait for later. As for now, I’m pleased with how the header came out (Super’s usually full of hot air anyway) and the color scheme looks decent as well. I’m considering going with something other than green for the links (even though I’ve got an insatiable love affair with that color), and the background needs a bit of work. All in all however, I think the site is shaping up to look like a real website.

Now it’s not to say I haven’t had my fair share of near heart attacks over this whole thing. Besides losing sleep, I nearly deleted my entire Wordpress installation without backing up my posts first - actually I did delete it, but was fortunately able to reinstall Wordpress and then just pointed it to the still-active database. There comes those little moments of panic where you start taking a mental inventory of what just happened and what all you’re going to have to do in order to fix it. In a way, it’s sort of like losing a wallet - except without that whole ‘potential identity theft’ thing.

Before I sign out for the night, I just wanted to update all of you out in Salt & Battery Land on your favorite online strip. S&B is still on track for this Sunday - in fact, the sketches are all done and I’m waiting to try my new symmetry ruler tool which I just learned how to use. And as an additional hinty-hint, we’re coming up on the first real story arc for Salt & Battery. Just thought I’d throw that out there. =)

Howdy folks! It’s been a few days since I’ve posted much of anything, but here I come with a little bit of exciting technical news:

Since I started doing comics again, I’ve been having a bit of a problem exporting my strips from Manga Studio - specifically, all of the tones (shading) which I had designated as solid gray values were instead outputting as very fine halftone dots. This wouldn’t normally be an issue if I was working at the same resolution as the finished product, but working at a larger resolution and reducing it in size for the web was causing some light interference patterns to form in my nice, clean grays.

For those uninitiated in the ways of halftones in digital images, when you shrink an image with a small, repeating pattern, you will get a kind of artifact called a moiré pattern. In my case, it was appearing as a sort of checkered effect where I had shaded in parts of the strip. I knew this would happen to a degree in places where I had intentionally done halftone dots, but I was a little disappointed that my ‘grays’ also had these patterns, especially since I didn’t want them to output as halftones in the first place.

Well since I recently upgraded to Manga Studio 4.0 my gray tones have been outputting correctly. I don’t know if I just didn’t have the right settings in the last version or if the new program made a difference, but I took the liberty of re-processing all the new Salt & Battery strips so that the grays display properly. While nothing has changed with the intentional halftones (there’s still a bit of a moiré pattern going on), the grays should be showing up much cleaner than before. If you’ve been keeping up with the strip, you may have to refresh your page to see the new versions.

Phew! It’s been a long week filled with coding, crying, and cursing, but I’ve finally started to get the new comic software to do what I want it to do. It’s not perfect yet, and I’ve got a nice long to-do list, but at least it’s functional enough to work with both series of Salt & Battery. I had originally been planning on finishing today’s comic yesterday (what? ahead of time?) but between more coding, buying a bed, and entertaining guests there wasn’t really enough time to get it done. Today, my backup comic day, was eaten up piece by piece first by moving furniture around to get ready for the arrival of the new bed (and to relocate the old one to the spare bedroom), then by being dragged around town running errands and buying things like bed skirts and bed frames, and finally by the awful mess left in the wake of this aftermath which still needs to be cleaned up.

I’m sure I could find some sort of comic inspiration in all of this if I weren’t so damn exhausted. Fortunately I’ve got some good strips brewing up for you in the next few weeks - it’s just a matter of finding time to draw them. =/

Newbie knows you have a treat for him

As you may have guessed by now, there won’t be a new comic up tonight. Rather than get in the habit of postponing comics a day or two and getting off schedule, I’m just going to count this one out and get ready for Wednesday’s post.

So instead of a comic tonight, I present to you this photo I just took of Newbie, one of my pet rats: