Toonbots message board: *taps foot*

Napoleon Sat Apr 14 14:54:41 2001 Re: *taps foot* > if ye need a guest week, don't fret to ask luv. *cackles evilly* ...er, no, I'm not thinking evil 'usurp-the-meta-cartoonist-and-claim-his-place' thoughts, heavens no, why do you ask?

Michael Sat Apr 14 15:40:31 2001 Re: *taps foot* > *cackles evilly* > ...er, no, I'm not thinking evil > 'usurp-the-meta-cartoonist-and-claim-his-place' thoughts, heavens no, why > do you ask? Try it, snail girl.

Napoleon Sat Apr 14 16:09:02 2001 Re: *taps foot* > Try it, snail girl. Oh, YEAH? Well, um... maybe I WILL! Yeah. That'll teach you.

Michael Sat Apr 14 16:20:35 2001 Re: *taps foot* > Oh, YEAH? Well, um... maybe I WILL! > Yeah. That'll teach you. You go, girl. But it's gotta be with the Toon-o-Matic. In fact, I'm going to make this offer to the lot of you. Submit some XML that you've rendered yourself. You get full credit and the link of your choice, and it'll go into the regular episode lineup. Right now, it's going to be somewhat challenging (right, gopher?) but once I recode the Toon-o-Matic to work on an SVG basis, that eliminates the Postscript dependency, which is the wackiest part of the current architecture. The hard part of this recoding is that I need to write a text-extent calculator which runs against the OpenTTF library (which is included with ImageMagick, actually). Currently, I'm calling Ghostscript and then using the actual size of the resulting graphic to get the text extent. That's why the captions are spaced so oddly. But if I render text via SVG directly into the drawing, I lose the ability to see how big it was -- which sucks. If I don't know how big a caption is, I can't know where to put it. Thus the block. But we'll see if I get to it today. If not, I'm at my Mom's place tomorrow and Monday, and there will be no programming there, I can tell you. (Not her fault. But I like to talk to my family once in a while.)

Chris Sat Apr 14 17:37:47 2001 Re: *taps foot* > You go, girl. But it's gotta be with the Toon-o-Matic. In fact, I'm going > to make this offer to the lot of you. Submit some XML that you've rendered > yourself. You get full credit and the link of your choice, and it'll go > into the regular episode lineup. Right now, it's going to be somewhat > challenging (right, gopher?) but once I recode the Toon-o-Matic to work on > an SVG basis, that eliminates the Postscript dependency, which is the > wackiest part of the current architecture. This brings up something I meant to ask earlier -- when the public-use version of the Toon-o-Matic is released, will we be able to insert our own clip-art heads, or just use the 'standard' ones?

Napoleon Mon Apr 16 01:57:53 2001 Re: *taps foot* > This brings up something I meant to ask earlier -- when the public-use > version of the Toon-o-Matic is released, will we be able to insert our own > clip-art heads, or just use the 'standard' ones? Yeah, Chris is just dying to do an episode using that doctored picture of me with a Hitler mustache...

Michael Sat Apr 14 15:48:59 2001 Re: *taps foot* > You haven't been updating Micheal...what's a girl to think.... Pickle > Crisp is one thing...but it's been over a week...*sigh* Pickle Crisp is a *classic*, glych. I want to make sure it gets all the air time it needs for you fully to understand its fundamental je ne sais quoi. > if ye need a guest week, don't fret to ask luv. What? Guest week from a ... traditional cartoonist? How retro. Seriously, I've been sick. And I *still* haven't done the recoding necessary to get the Toon-o-Matic running on my new machine. AND I'm literally hours away from releasing the first production-quality beta for my workflow toolkit, and that just plain takes precedence. Because cool as Toonbots is -- and I know you're cool enough to get it -- it doesn't earn me anything at all, whereas workflow stands a decent chance of making me Larry Ellison, or at least Larry Wall. (Of course, Wall is far cooler. But Ellison is far richer.) Toonbots will just make me Krazy Larry. So bear with me just a tad longer. I'm going to finish my release now (just a little debugging yet before I push it out into the world) and then I'll see about slapping the Toon-o-Matic upside the head. At the least I want to see how Tirdun's XML renders. The captions are likely to be too long, but that can sometimes add to an episode's charm.

Emsworth Sat Apr 14 16:08:50 2001 Re: *taps foot* > Because cool as Toonbots is -- and I know you're cool enough to get it -- it > doesn't earn me anything at all.... Perhaps it could, to some extent, at some point. Considered the possibility of selling Toonbots greeting cards (with source code inside)? Or as Tirdun suggested, Jihad T-shirts?

Michael Sat Apr 14 16:14:30 2001 Re: *taps foot* > Perhaps it could, to some extent, at some point. Considered the > possibility of selling Toonbots greeting cards (with source code inside)? > Or as Tirdun suggested, Jihad T-shirts? HAHAHAHHA! Yeah. I'm sure all six of you would buy one. Even Pete Abrams still has a day job. Scott Kurtz is the only Webtoonist I know who's supporting himself from his work, and that's because he draws the gaming crowd. No, after four years running my own business, I have something of a clue about what puts the bacon on the table and what won't. Tooning won't. It's fun, and the use of XML and graphics has had one spinoff already in Real Life (a plat map for a real estate development, for which I earned, ooh, tens of dollars, but the realtor is a longer-term customer) -- but you just don't make money from a fanbase of dozens. Don't worry, Emsworth. I'm not quitting. Just busy.

glych Sun Apr 15 11:56:40 2001 Pete Abrams... Does not have a day job.... Becasue I asked him about that. He did for the first two years...but after his fanbased hit the 3000 mark he told me he went full Sluggy. But you're right, Toonbot's is full time- and who said anything about "drawing" the guestweek..i know a we bit of Pearl... I can do it! -glych