Tyler's Own Little World

ComicPress 2.5 should be released some time this week. If you would like to preview the release the beta is available for download here. Testing it out will help make sure its a solid release so your participation is appreciated.

The major goal of this release is to make customizing it a lot easier and more solid as well as updating to the latest features of WordPress 2.5. The final release will come with multiple layouts as well as the release of a new plugin for mass-posting comics (past or future) based on a folder of image files and their dated filenames. This will make switching over large archives a lot more painless.

Been really busy this year. Worked on several projects. Some include the Webcomic related sites Comixtalk, PVP, Looking For Group, Least I Could Do and CAD the Series. Still working on a few more as well as the new version of ComicPress... 2.5, due out within the next week or so and it is going to rock for those trying to customize the layout.

My own comic, Wally & Osborne, has taken a back seat unfortunately. But I'm working to start it back up again soon with a new look and a new site. Even so the comic has been renewed to run another year at Funbrain, alongside Silent Kimbly and NY Times Bestseller Diary of A Wimpy Kid. The new comics will be appearing there soon as well.

A few months ago I made the switch, not to Apple, but to the free and open source Ubuntu. Been using it exclusively for my projects, other than launching a virtual machine with Windows XP to test sites in IE7. The new version of Ubuntu, 8.04, was released today, I'm as excited as a little girl and my machine is upgrading to it as I type this. I've fallen in love with Inkscape and even the Gimp. Gimp takes a little time after years of Photoshop, but it has a lot of features that work so much better and are a lot more intuitive once you spend some time working in it. Together with Bluefish for my code they have made a great Web design and development package. The Looking For Group site was almost all vector done in Inkscape.

Also I've done my first comic using Inkscape and the Gimp, it's actually the guest comic over at Sheldon today. Dave just had a baby and is getting a little break. Speaking of which, my little one is 8 months now and doing well, growing up too fast even, he's a little character.

And finally, "Lost" returns tonight. Awesome.

"I'm doing the work. I'm baby-steppin!"

I realized I haven't posted here for quite some time. Since my last post a lot has happened.

1. Had a brand new baby boy.


2. Moved to the mountains.


3. Helped Scott Kurtz develop his new PVP site.


4. Did an interview for Scott's new podcast, Webcomics Confidential.


5. Released a new version of ComicPress, the comic publishing theme for WordPress.


6. Started updating my comic, Wally & Osborne, again after a long hiatus.


7. Was awesome.

Next on my list is to jump back on Lunchbox Funnies' future plans and the Wally & Osborne book collection along with a few other projects I've been signed on to do in the world of Webcomics.

I along with several of the other Lunchbox Funnies guys handled PVP guest week while Scott Kurtz was at the San Diego Comic-Con. I went with this take on the characters (I'd love for Scott to let me do a regular series like this)...

[ LINK ]

I monitor several e-mail addresses from multiple sites. I get a lot of junk mail, some of it slips through the filters, like this one... but at least this one was entertaining...

Hello my friend!

I am ready to kill myself and eat my dog, if medicine prices here (http://someHKsite) are bad.

Look, the site and call me 1-800 if its wrong..

My dog and I are still alive :)

I finally got Yahoo Music Unlimited and I loves it! I realized that with all the Netflix movies and shows, and Watch Now and Joomla and such, I was being entertained while working but my productivity was really suffering. I wanted to get back to listening to more music while working as opposed to watching stuff. And what better way than to instantly add over 2 million songs to your collection.

I just finished listening to Pink Floyd's The Final Cut, the last album with Roger Waters and if you are a fan of The Wall, it is basically the melancholy sequel to it. I hadn't listened to it since I had it on tape years ago... "The Fletcher Memorial Home for incurable tyrants... and kings!"

I've got access to 31 Electric Light Orchestra albums! I created a playlist the other day of all the Weird Al parody songs with the original songs playing before them (what a geek eh?). I can listen to catchy songs by All American Rejects and Hot Hot Heat without being caught with them in my home CD collection. I sampled the latest albums by Chris Cornell, Dolores O'Riordan & Fergie only to confirm that singers need to stick with their bands and not make crappy solo albums. I listened to the newly regrouped Smashing Pumpkins' single only to be reminded that the Smashing Pumpkins will never be back... although they do have this Rarities & B-Sides collection that I don't have which has their Thin Lizzy cover of Dancing In the Moonlight, one of my favorite songs they do. For max productivity I listen to techno (happy hardcore stuff usually) so I need to get exploring their Electronic/Dance section a bit more and see what I can discover.

Anyway, lots of music to listen to while I hopefully get more drawings and comics done. Although I just got Battlestar Galactica Season 2.5 Disc 3 in the mail today from Netflix, and they just added The Office seasons 1 and 2 to Watch Now.... curse them!

Star Wars nerd alert! I'm sold. The new Clone Wars 3D animated series looks like it's going to be pretty cool. I'm really digging the style and the character designs. Sneak Peak Trailer.

I just finished season one and got the first disc to season 2 today from Netflix. I had tried watching the old series (I watched it as a kid) but I just couldn't make it through them, that bad.

The new series didn't interest me at first with the newly redesigned Cylons (I love the old ones) and the human cloned ones (boring). But with all the nerd hype of the series I had to give it a try an now I'm hooked. It's nice to have something to entertain me while I'm buried in website and illustration work and frustrated that I don't have much time to work on Wally & Osborne lately.

I work on the computer and my drawing table a lot so it's nice to have music or shows going. If I'm doing something boring or tedious I prefer shows. I have a second monitor set up so I can play DVD's on it.

Been finding some treasures on Netflix's Watch Now lately. Watched The Fisher King the other day, a great film by Terry Gilliam, kind of mixed a modern tale with a bit of his more fantasy stuff, Robin Williams is great in it. It's not quite so family friendly as Baron Munchausen (on of my all-time favorite films) or Time Bandits though. Was cool because I hadn't seen it in quite a few years.

They have some good documentaries on there as well. Saw one called Dark Days, about this community of "homeless" people that had built dwellings in an abandoned NY railroad tunnel. Was a pretty wild peak into their lives by Marc Singer who filmed down there for a couple years. Aside from living in darkness they have pretty advanced setups for being homeless, even electricity as they have apparently tapped into Amtrak's power.

Another movie I caught on there for the first time was The Fastest Indian with Anthony Hopkins. It was a good film, he could be one of my relatives from Vermont in that movie.

I just got a Joost invite too, Joost is TV on the internet, there are channels but you can just pick what show you want to watch, when you want to watch it. It's distribution is peer-to-peer to help handle the volume. Some major networks are offering shows on the free service. Right now I'm watching Stella (with Michael Ian Black)on Comedy Central, oh man I forgot how funny it was, totally wacky, I only ever saw the pilot and always wanted to see more. Joost is in beta and invitation only, if you want an invitation let me know your e-mail address, I'm not sure how many it lets me give out.

"They're not doctors, they're retards."

This kind of stuff confuses me as much as it angers me. I know it's been going around for awhile but it shouldn't be old news until it stops.

meme

Netflix activated the Watch Now feature on my account a couple days ago. Where you can instantly watch selected movies from Internet Explorer. The selection is similar to the big bargain bin of DVD's at Walmart, but there are actually some keepers and they are continually adding new movies.

It uses embedded Windows Media Player instead of some stupid Flash video player which is really nice, because all (real) videos played on my computer automatically output full screen to my TV here next to the monitor (thanks to my nifty ATI video card).

Watched Down Periscope the other day, was pretty funny and good too. Probably check out some of the documentaries and stuff, I can only do so much music working at the computer, nice to have commercial free video options.

I launched a new site for ComicPress (the theme for publishing comics with WordPress) with the release of versions 2.0 BE and 1.6 CE:

http://mindfaucet.com/comicpress

The blog will have lots of helpful stuff for anyone publishing comics on the web as well as for users of ComicPress.

Welcome to the pre-release party of the comic publishing theme for WordPress! ;)

I'm looking to have the new ComicPress site go live by Monday morning as well as the official release of the new theme, but wanted to make it available early to my friends.



I don't have the demo site up yet, but you can view the test site here to see how it comes out of the box: http://mindfaucet.com/test or you can see a version of it being used here with just a few image and color customizations: http://checkfamilylacrosse.com

As you can see, this version actually comes with snazzy documentation! Woohoo!

I suppose I'll work up a list of changes/new features and such, but for now just go download it...

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Let me know of any problems, maybe catch them before release, as well as confusion or typos in the documentation. Thanks!

I'm currently illustrating a couple new comics, one takes place in the world of Lacrosse, called The Check Family, if you are like me, you might not be too familiar with the subject or the jokes, but I'm having fun learning and handling the art duties. It's updated three times a week and is also syndicated at LaxPower. The other comic is for the official NCAA blog, Double-A Zone and is updated weekly.

I've also been doing illustrations for a publisher of school workbooks, so some of you schoolkids might even get to see some of my artwork there in the future, as well as being helped in learning math and such. Plus I've just picked up a project in which I'll be doing some interactive Flash games and animation at a government website to help teach kids about health.

In other good news, Funbrain has signed on with Wally & Osborne again, and the comic will continue to run there as well as at my site. To keep regular updates they will continue to run repeats for a while until a good buffer is built up to start running new ones 5 days a week. This is added motivation for me to get my schedule back to that as well.

I've also recently helped update buddy Ryan Sias' website to the ComicPress theme for WordPress I created. So he's now got an automated archive, an RSS feed and commenting. This week he is running a best of week, so go check it out at Silent Kimbly dot com. I've also been hired on to build a couple other websites for some comic creators with new stuff coming out. As well as trying to finish the final release of the new ComicPress 2.0 theme for publishing Webcomics with WordPress. Busy busy.

Did an interview with my other Ryan buddy, Ryan Estrada, about his new Web reality show where he gets sent on crazy, sometimes dangerous missions in India. You can read it here or start watching the episodes over here.

My recent vacation of 11 days was packed with stuff, one of those ones you come home from needing to take a rest from it, rather than resting though, I just came home to a ton of stuff to do, but I'm getting caught up and planning on getting my comic updates back in gear.

I helped Ryan Estrada get his new site launched. He wanted to run the front page like a blog showing his latest stuff as he creates it, but then have a beastly archiving system for like all 300 of the various comic series and content he produces. It navigates pretty well. Maybe if I did something similar I would start some of the projects I never want to do because I don't want to create a whole site just for them.

I also started an all-ages comics collective with seven other wonderful comic creators (Including Ryan). Go check out Lunchbox Funnies. I don't even have the energy to say much more about it other than it is going to be the awesome and deliver the goodness of thousand cute little puppies.

Read the official scoop at Newsarama. Also there is an interview with me at Comixpedia.

Welcome to 2007. I did the cover art for Comixpedia this month.



It features the top 10 people from Comixpedia's People of Webcomics List For 2006 engaged in various snowtime activity. I'm in the the desert of the US southwest and currently buried in a couple feet of snow.

Here's my last piece of art for 2006. I needed to do something to contribute to the 10th Anniversary of RockToons. Surprisingly, Johnny Cash had still not been tooned there so I thought he would be a good choice.

Back in May, Mark Danielewski contacted me about working on some artwork for his new book coming out, Only Revolutions. I had done a page of artwork for his previous book, House of Leaves (actually that book went to a full color remastered edition so I got a copy now with my old artwork in full color).

Anyway, this book is definitely unique and a real task to put into images. It has two main superhuman characters, Sam & Hailey, who's summer road trip takes the course of a hundred years, in different centuries from each other yet happening parallel. You read the book one way for Sam's point of view of the story, then flip it over and read it the other way for Hailey's. It bounces around actual historic events and is entirely written in poetic verse on top of that. Though their stories are the same, they are kind of the reverse of each other, and the actual details differ depending on who's perspective it is. So I'll just stop there, enjoy the artwork.

Hoping to maybe see it available as a large poster or print eventually.

I've been posting the hand drawn detailed frames from my comic to my gallery to display larger versions of them.

Here's another animation I did a few years ago, a music video for Tori Amos' Taxi Ride song, for the Taxivision thing. I did it in just a few days that I had some time free, the actual character animation is much too limited, but it was fun and a learning experience anyway. The point of the video was that sometimes "change" in life is good, finding a better path to take, using actual currency change to be symbolic. But I'm not sure that was clear, instead I think it appears to just say: "Money, it's awesome!"