That's all I got for you til next week! (9/15)

Also FYI the preorder thing for the troll shirts is over, which means... well, it means you can still order 'em! But only the sizes you see there now. Seems like people liked this idea. We'll try to keep them stocked best we can.

Later!

I will direct your attention to the talented individuals who are responsible for much of the lovely artwork drifting and panning and flickering throughout the latest page. A few new faces there! Also the song, "Crystamanthequins", you may have heard already. It appears in Volume 5, and was written by Erik Scheele, a remix of two other great songs by Alexander Rosetti and Perry Sullivan.

I will leave for SPX on Friday, and I will not be making my way back until midweek! There will be a scarcity of activity on this website in the meantime, a predicament all too familiar lately. This will give you plenty of time to digest the gaudy pyrotechnics on display in the recent update, and by the time I get back, you may have settled down. It is then and only then will we attempt to have a reasonable dialogue.

At that point I will begin lowering us responsibly from the present lofty altitude of this story arc, and we may proceed with business as (and please note the disdainful use of quotes and capitalization) "USUAL".

By the way, I will be going to SPX this weekend in Maryland. I hope to see you there, even though statistically speaking, this is quite unlikely!

That will be the last update while I do a bit of animation. It ought to take... maybe a week? Let's call it a week.

I'm sure I could do it faster. In fact, I can't really promise I won't! (<- horrible thing for me to say, ensuring rampant F5ing several days from now until time of next update.)

But I will err on granting the task a wider berth. I keep making this pact with myself, sort of like a recurring New Year's resolution that has no particular affiliation with any calendar event, that I will try and take it easier on this thing now and then. I repeatedly fail to honor this resolution, and like that pledge to lose those stubborn holiday pounds which so easily falls by the wayside, I cannot seem to shed the drawing hours. And so I keep drawing and wallowing and eating ice cream.

What am I even talking about anymore.

Hey guys, guess what the next album is all about! No, your guess is wrong. It is a Squiddles album. Surprise!


Here is an important thing to note before all else. This album comes with a full-length animation! That is a link to the trailer. The full version comes with the download.

A lot of the same people who have contributed to MSPA animations lately worked on that animation. In fact, they did 100% of it! Conceptualized it and storyboarded it and drew all the assets, all under the supervision of a very skilled Flash animator named Peter Turner.

This album began percolating many months ago, and as with much of what this music fellowship works on, it snowballed in quantity and silliness and awesomeness over an extended period of time. It began with Alexander Rosetti's great single track (1st in playlist), a snippet of which found its way into the big [S] Descend mashup.

The idea we formed around that song was to make an album that would serve as the soundtrack for a fictional cartoon show for kids, full of ridiculous happy tunes with strong themes of friendship and chock full of squeaky noises and aquatic gurglings. Seems to me like they pulled it off. It's very easy to picture this as a real show now!

Most of what you hear and see is musician/artist-conceptualized. I didn't have much of a hand in it other than the original idea. The guiding principle for working on Squiddles stuff is, any idea someone has for it automatically becomes Squiddles canon. So really anything going on here, candy corn shrimp, skipper Plumbthroat's connivings, underwater unicorns, all that came together through the collaboration of these artists while I sat quietly and boggled vacantly at their shenanigans. These guys are a bunch of nuts. But they are your nuts, and now their work is yours as well.

Go buy this (cheap!) album and have yourself a friendship aneurysm.

Hey! Check it out. You can buy troll shirts and dress like your favorite troll, and/or don your colorful zodiac sign of choice. Pretty neat!

There'll be a pre-order phase of two weeks. Considering this is a TON of unique shirt designs and presents a stocking challenge, I'd like to get a sense of how many of each type people want before making them. Important: pre-ordering is the only way to get certain sizes! Like the smaller or bigger sizes. After pre-order's closed, all you can get will be more standard sizes. So if one of those sizes is your cup of tea, better hop on this soon!

Now that this whole ensemble of silly characters and their escapades are out in the open, I felt like a decent number of people would enjoy the opportunity to grab an OFFICIAL shirt bearing one of these simple, striking designs which are also recognizable to those with the lowdown on astrology. Who knew that tying the zodiac to a bunch of angry alien kids was the only way to make it cool? I sure didn't. Also, if you are planning to do some cosplaying, I don't know how the HELL you think you are going to pull it off without one of these shirts. I really don't.

This is something I'm handling outside of the elegant Topatoco framework, for a number of tactical reasons. One, flooding my storefront suddenly with 12 unique designs sounds kinda clumsy. Two, I'm really not sure how many each of these would sell since there are so many different designs to pick from. They stay so busy making shirts for tons of artists that I like to try to be sure designs I send them will have a ghost of a chance of being worth their hassle sales-wise. So I'm riding herd on this myself along with my Chief Corporate Officer of Strategic Corporate Actualization Strategies and Paradigm Corporatizations, and together we will do it guerrilla style with paypallery and homespun mailing shenanigans.

Sellin' stuff is fun!

Not as fun as buyin' it though. ;-)

I guess I should warn you that the closer we get to wrapping this segment up, the closer I will get to making another animation. This will likely mean a good plenty of days with no updates at all once I start. I have not started yet but I probably will soon. I will let you know.

There is a guy whose work I have followed for a long time and his name is Tauhid. He has a new project called Epicsplosion which looks rather exciting, and if you enjoy the content on this site you will likely agree. It uses a similar format to MSPA, though with considerably more polish applied to the panels and overall presentation. And most interestingly (IMO!) he's going for a true "choose your own adventure" format, with branching story paths. This is something I tried with MSPA in the early going with Bard Quest, and in fact it was originally going to be one of the defining features of this site. But it proved to be pretty challenging to keep up with multiple story paths in any non-trivial way, so I just proceeded linearly with PS and HS thereafter.

While he was preparing to work on this, he and I talked a bit about the various challenges and pitfalls of the medium. I think he's chiseled the approach down to something pretty effective and manageable, and certainly the result is attractive. Personally I hope he keeps up with this, because it could turn into something pretty fantastic. The best way to keep him motivated I suspect is for us all to show support with our keen and frequent attention!

Hey, speaking of bros who I've been bros with forever, I also noticed Michael is selling custom comics at a bargain price. Seize on this opportunity or know the meaning of lifelong regret. In case it wasn't clear, Moe is the best webcomic on the internet. Period.

ALSO speaking of bros, thanks a ton to Matthew for helping me out with the update script I was having problems with. Now posting an update DOESN'T require me shutting down the whole site for 15 minutes. This is a major advancement!