In 1999 I started a daily webcomic called Avalon.
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In 1999 I started a daily webcomic called Avalon. (No connection to Arthurian legend, that's just the name of the fictional town it took place in.) It was a high school comedy/melodrama with a 3-year story arc, which ended without a proper conclusion in 2004 (with a brief continuance in 2006).
I never settled on what to do with it next, but I'd rather pursue other story ideas than revive Avalon. So now I'm releasing it in #CreativeCommons CC-BY so that *anyone else* may do something with it!
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In 1999 I started a daily webcomic called Avalon. (No connection to Arthurian legend, that's just the name of the fictional town it took place in.) It was a high school comedy/melodrama with a 3-year story arc, which ended without a proper conclusion in 2004 (with a brief continuance in 2006).
I never settled on what to do with it next, but I'd rather pursue other story ideas than revive Avalon. So now I'm releasing it in #CreativeCommons CC-BY so that *anyone else* may do something with it!
Avalon is still online, but not in a very accessible or high-definition format. So my next step is to republish it all on my own personal site, https://bigraccoon.ca .
There's a technical hurdle there: I saved all of the strips as greyscale GIF files (which was the best lossless format for web at the time), and they won't be hard to convert to PNG... but there are some large-format and full-colour strips still in the original Corel Photo-Paint files that I need to re-export 😖
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Avalon is still online, but not in a very accessible or high-definition format. So my next step is to republish it all on my own personal site, https://bigraccoon.ca .
There's a technical hurdle there: I saved all of the strips as greyscale GIF files (which was the best lossless format for web at the time), and they won't be hard to convert to PNG... but there are some large-format and full-colour strips still in the original Corel Photo-Paint files that I need to re-export 😖
There's also the matter of the story content: it was a different time back then, and I was a different person who created something I now find troublesome in places. Since the '00s, I've constantly wondered how I might be able to "fix" parts of Avalon, but that would mean putting way more work into it when I'd rather look forward to different projects.
My big hope here is that, if anyone wants to see more of it or done better, that can still happen even without me having to be involved.
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There's also the matter of the story content: it was a different time back then, and I was a different person who created something I now find troublesome in places. Since the '00s, I've constantly wondered how I might be able to "fix" parts of Avalon, but that would mean putting way more work into it when I'd rather look forward to different projects.
My big hope here is that, if anyone wants to see more of it or done better, that can still happen even without me having to be involved.
Another technical issue that I have to laugh at: the strips I published online ~25 years ago were 600 pixels wide—fine for most displays and available bandwidth at the time, but barely readable on modern devices.
So I'm going back to the original images made from scanned pencil drawings, which are over 3000 pixels wide, but plagued with roughness and artifacting that was smoothed over by converting to low resolution.
I'll have to do some batch processing for image quality. -
Another technical issue that I have to laugh at: the strips I published online ~25 years ago were 600 pixels wide—fine for most displays and available bandwidth at the time, but barely readable on modern devices.
So I'm going back to the original images made from scanned pencil drawings, which are over 3000 pixels wide, but plagued with roughness and artifacting that was smoothed over by converting to low resolution.
I'll have to do some batch processing for image quality.It could be worse, and my less-than-half-my-current-age self could have not saved those original high-res copies.
It was a weird workflow: I drew line art with mechanical pencil on copy paper, and scanned it to digital in *1-bit B&W mode*. The line quality was *terrible*, but I could quickly draw or erase bits of it to make the lines reasonably clean—entirely using a mouse.
I then did flood fills in greyscale, which were easy because of the sharp, pure black lines. -
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It could be worse, and my less-than-half-my-current-age self could have not saved those original high-res copies.
It was a weird workflow: I drew line art with mechanical pencil on copy paper, and scanned it to digital in *1-bit B&W mode*. The line quality was *terrible*, but I could quickly draw or erase bits of it to make the lines reasonably clean—entirely using a mouse.
I then did flood fills in greyscale, which were easy because of the sharp, pure black lines.Current Status: There should be 603 total strips but I've only collected 598 of the original high-res files
Kinda hoping those remaining 5 actually *exist*
The low-res strips published to the web were numbered sequentially, so I'm gonna have to go through them one by one and confirm whether I have the corresponding original.
I do still have all the pencil & paper drawings but I really don't feel like scanning and colouring any of them again 25 years later
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In 1999 I started a daily webcomic called Avalon. (No connection to Arthurian legend, that's just the name of the fictional town it took place in.) It was a high school comedy/melodrama with a 3-year story arc, which ended without a proper conclusion in 2004 (with a brief continuance in 2006).
I never settled on what to do with it next, but I'd rather pursue other story ideas than revive Avalon. So now I'm releasing it in #CreativeCommons CC-BY so that *anyone else* may do something with it!
@jsstaedtler Wait a second! I remember that being one of the webcomics I read in high school! What a coincidence to bump into it again like this.
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@jsstaedtler Wait a second! I remember that being one of the webcomics I read in high school! What a coincidence to bump into it again like this.
@orva Yay, that's awesome! There really ought to be a directory of turn-of-the-millenium webcomics and what their authors are up to now, so us old fogeys can reminisce
(We should just revive bigpanda and change the links to point to present-day resources)
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Current Status: There should be 603 total strips but I've only collected 598 of the original high-res files
Kinda hoping those remaining 5 actually *exist*
The low-res strips published to the web were numbered sequentially, so I'm gonna have to go through them one by one and confirm whether I have the corresponding original.
I do still have all the pencil & paper drawings but I really don't feel like scanning and colouring any of them again 25 years later
Update: I have accounted for the 5 missing high-res files!
3 of them were named incorrectly, but I found them and renamed them, bringing the missing count to just 2.
For one of those, it seems I saved the original high-res scan of the line art, but not the coloured version. So I just have to colour it in (or, uh, *greyscale* it in—not terribly difficult).
But for the last missing file... I don't even possess the line art. 😬 Just the low-res web version, which maybe I can upscale...
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Update: I have accounted for the 5 missing high-res files!
3 of them were named incorrectly, but I found them and renamed them, bringing the missing count to just 2.
For one of those, it seems I saved the original high-res scan of the line art, but not the coloured version. So I just have to colour it in (or, uh, *greyscale* it in—not terribly difficult).
But for the last missing file... I don't even possess the line art. 😬 Just the low-res web version, which maybe I can upscale...
But here's something interesting: I drew a "bonus" strip at one time, but I don't think it ever got published to the web? I need to confirm, because that would be the first "new" Avalon comic strip in almost 20 years
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@orva Yay, that's awesome! There really ought to be a directory of turn-of-the-millenium webcomics and what their authors are up to now, so us old fogeys can reminisce
(We should just revive bigpanda and change the links to point to present-day resources)
@jsstaedtler @orva you just made me think about the long list of dead links in my feed aggregator and bookmarks 8-/
I don't think I followed many on bigpanda though? Smackjeeves and Keenspace are the ones I remember. I wonder how many are on archive.org?
(These days, ComicFury is THE hosting I love the most.)
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@kenobit preso! Speriamo arrivi presto ❤️
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@lritter I also think curiosity is an admirable trait
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@Gina I read it « radioactive superdough » and started asking for the recipe.
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@lritter there were people trying to return the drives to the group that conducted the experiment
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@aeva sure. prosocial. absolutely. i would never assume that there is gold on that stick.
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at any rate I think it's clear that trying to train prosocial behavior out of people is just as absurd as trying to train antisocial behavior out of people if not more so, and maybe we can start looking for better solutions
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@kenobit mi sembra incredibile...grazie!
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I don't think living in a maximum security prison of digital paranoia is good for us as a culture
