I finished my degree last November. Then I got an email reminding me that I was 3 units short due to a planning mishap, so I finished my degree last December.
I’ve only worked at my casual job a few days this year. I have spent the rest of my time at home or in cafes, working on a to-do list for the BCB site. It has been a flexible list, held in variousnote-takingprograms, with new lines added and subtracted all the time. If something came to my mind, I’d jot it down on the iPhone. If I sat down to plan something, it’d come out as a list of tasks within a larger project.
A lot of the things I accomplished are alarmingly trivial to the user experience, and I’ve felt throughout the process that there’s a real danger that I’m just chasing after an obsessive-compulsive desire to get this list down to zero.
Oh well. It’s October, now. And it’s basically done. So I wanted to review the list, to reflect, to recompose. Let’s go through some major features and sections in order. These notes won’t cover “neat things I’ve done to the BCB site and ‘business’” generally, only those I’ve implemented in this recent push.
Be warned, this post is over 10,000 words long and is likely the most uninteresting thing I’ll ever publish. But hey, that’s for you to decide.
For such a lightly-trafficked rarely-reblogged Tumblog, my posts seem to inspire a disproportionate amount of private feedback and occasional drama. Before I figure out what next to write about, I have some updates on previous posts about bookselling, our burglary and DailyComix.
Books
We have sold 266 copies of Volume One since I finished posting my bookselling experience. That makes for a total of 716, nearing half our print run. My sales predictions were generally accurate, though demand has been very soft post-Christmas. At this stage, the idea of selling hundreds of books in 2012 is unthinkable. But bundles with Volume Two are a very appealing idea!
I am very proud that we have been able to sell so many books at such a premium price. There are a lot of kind, supportive Bittersweet Candy Bowl readers out there.
Comic scraper sites (and apps) pop up at the rate of every other month or so. Typically, they use a webcomic’s RSS feed to “scrape” the comic and use it for their own purposes — whether it’s a collection of their favorite comics in one site or an app that allows a reader to easily surf all of their favorite comics in one, easy place. In general, comic scrapers take only the comic, leaving behind the other elements of the webcomic site — like the blog …and the site’s advertising.
The latest offender: DailyComix, an comic reader app for Android. Load it onto your phone, wait for it to download a comic index, pick a bunch to follow, and read them strip-by-strip in a clunky interface. There’s a free, ad-supported version and a $2 paid version.
On Wednesday, we went to my mother’s place to take care of the dog for the day. She has been barking since the move, and so we were supposed to be there to walk her and stop her from being a nuisance. Which we did! We brought our phones and laptops along (thank God.) And then we went home around 9pm, stopping for groceries on the way.
At 10:50pm, we opened the front gate of our apartment (we have a strange internal courtyard thing, as we live within a secure hotel complex.) This made a noise, and I heard some scuffling inside the unit as I approached the front door. After unlocking the door, I quickly walked down the hallway, first noticing that all the lights were on, then that my iMac was gone, then that the back window was wide open with the flyscreen pushed out.
I thought it was a pretty great success, all things considered. Fun, strange, memorable and mostly problem-free. In the end, it was the kind of gathering I had hoped for.
