Ok, now, before anyone wants to give Sydney a lecture on the minute difference between the term “texture” and “mouth feel” just be aware, she does not care and will hit you. Apologies to any foodies out there but to anyone who isn’t that into food, it’s kind of an obnoxious term. Obviously Sydney feels more strongly about it than most.

This page took far longer to write that you might guess, but it was because for a long time, there was a section of dialog with Sydney asking what meal this was, and Peggy explaining that Supers eat more than regular people, and also suggesting that since the amount of extra food they eat doesn’t come anywhere near explaining where they get the energy to fuel their powers, she thinks they just eat a lot cause they don’t have to worry about getting fat. I liked the exchange, but it didn’t really move the page along to where I wanted it, so eventually I cut it.

#makecomics: I don’t know why I like drawing them eating. For one thing, I find drawing people sitting is weirdly difficult, for some reason it makes me mess up the length of the torso, especially if there’s a table bisecting the view, but the worst part is all the junk on the table. Think about what’s on a table at an average restaurant. Usually multiple plates per person, silverware (forks are especially difficult to draw in perspective with the curvy neck and the flared bit before the prongs) cups or glasses, salt and pepper, sometimes other condiments. If drawing a cup or a plate doesn’t sound like a big deal, well, it really isn’t, until you have to do it in perspective, then the difficulty goes up a notch. Then there’s all the stuff on the plates. A fully stocked dinner table is actually one of the most fiddly sorts of things to draw short of something very precise and technical like a car with the hood up showing the engine and all the hoses and stuff. Drawing something like a warp engine might be challenging, but you can just make up what it looks like and no one can say you’re wrong. At least until the second time you have to draw it and then it has to match the first drawing, but everyone knows what a dinner table should look like.

By the way if you’re not following me on twitter you’re missing out on gems like this:


So the hosting move. I apologize that so many people had trouble getting to the site, for those of you who care here’s a quick explanation. To move a site you have to update the DNS servers, which give human friendly names to internet sites, so people can type “grrlpowercomic.com” instead of 132.161.55.71 or whatever the actual IP address is. Normally before you switch a site, you have it up and running using that raw IP address which you can use to get to a site regarless of what the DNS servers are doing, only the IP we got from the new host wasn’t working for some reason. Instead we tried switching the DNS server, then attempted to quickly upload a mirror of the site to it, a process that normally doesn’t take very long. Something we didn’t count on was the size of the files involved. Grrl Power has gotten over 130K comments because you guys are awesome, but that makes for a larger than average database, and the upload kept crapping out. So we switched the DNS back to the old hosting until we could get someone in tech support at the new hosting to help us out. The problem that occurred for some people was one of Godaddy’s DNS servers didn’t catch the switch back, and was pointing at the unformatted site with only a maintenance message on it. Eventually that got sorted out so hopefully no on is having any issues now.

We made a second attempt while on the horn with a level 2 tech support person, and that went so smoothly that I didn’t get a chance to use the moving graphic I drew, which is a shame cause it’s one of the cuter picture I’ve ever done of Sydney so I’ll just post it here. Hopefully I won’t actually have any cause to use it for a while, things seem to be running pretty smoothly here at the moment.


Here’s the link to the new comments highlighter for chrome, and the GitHub link which you can use to install on FireFox via Greasemonkey.