Lots of subjects! This is going to be a long one I think!


I’m Behind on Everything! But I’m catching up with a smile on my face!
There’s a lot missing from the site! Defenders content, contact info, Dialogue Search, etc. And things left to automate too! News Headlines, Forums, Comics Posting; all these things are not automated yet. But we’re making progress, a little bit every day.
On a personal note, I’m feeling my way through the way I want everything to happen in this new lifestyle of mine. There’ll be some growing pains as I flex my elbows and shape my schedule. I’m feeling a little overwhelmed right now with the new little details in my life, but every day gets a little more shiny! Give me a month or two and we should have our groove back!

On the Comic Itself: I know it’s been cliffhanger after cliffhanger in the strip. I really appreciate the elbow room to tell the story right instead of trying to crowbar it all in by the 25th of August.  I really was thinking about doing that. Also I was fearing having to just end things. But as all of this has unfolded I am thrilled to have this happy medium. “The Fall” will run as I always intended! That in and of itself is enough reason to sincerely thank each and every one of you Defenders of the Nifty and New Defenders 20+ for allowing this to happen!


The Store will stay closed for a bit! I’m thinking it won’t  open until October! Maybe later! I can’t even think of fulfilling orders until I get Book 17 locked down and figure out how to get all the bookmarks and pawnz out!


Speaking of The Defenders Exclusive Pawn and Bookmark of the Month: Everybody who’s been a Defender 20+ at Level 2 or higher for all of September will get a digital version of the Dark Gwynn Pawnz and the Dark Gwynn bookmark. Level 3 or higher lands you a printed version sent to you.

This monthly reward-printing is new to me, but I’m sure will go smoothly! I’ll keep y’all posted on that! If you want the yet-undesigned Demon-Spear Psyk Pawnz and Bookmark make sure you’re at level 2 or higher for all of October (level 3 or higher for a printed version)! This is a Public Service Announcement.

On to the biggest thing I need to get my tail in gear on:
The Archives- I need to finish my Archives Approving! This is my new top-of-the-list as of today!  We fixed a lot of the bouncing and bandwidth issues on the archives and got some calendar navigation in! And by “we” I meant ‘Team Not Including Me’. I said at site launch that “Chapters 48-64: Haven’t looked at yet! Uncharted Territory! New Readers AVOID these Chapters, rows of many strips may just be GONE! (It’ll take me maybe a week to clear these up!)” Well I haven’t had that time yet. Who knew lightened my workload was so much work? No more excuses, I’m doing it!!!


BONUS BEHIND THE SCENES: How We Remastered The Impossible Archives:  Here’s some insight on how the bigger archives were created. At one point I was doing one hi-res file per comic. (Back when comics were rarely more than 1 row). Theses would be dropped into books. Then, for the more epic stores I started doing larger comic files. These had to be broken down into multiple pages at book time. Then I was like ‘what a pain in the butt! I’ll just lay these out in book form directly and pluck from them the individual comic files. So some comics crossed pages. Some pages held multiple comics. And the patterns varied over the 20 years Sluggy’d been going on.

We have hi-res pdfs of the books, but sometimes books had different layout, comic order (sometimes holiday stories were moved to the back to the book for example), and the pdfs were sometimes missing filler art, guest artist weeks, and the random wacky things that have fallen into the archives into the years.

So with all that mess, how does one create a higher-res archive?

The team turned a computer into the Ultimate Sluggite! It read every comic, breaking it into slices, pouring over every detail, and matched the low res archives to my hi-res various files. For TWENTY YEARS OF almost DALY STRIPS! That’s 6,696 comics made of 8,445 low res files sliced into 12,215 rows matched against 5,511 high res pages to produce 10,050 matching high res files! THAT’S INSANE! And I dig that one of my biggest fans is a robot forced to be a fan against its will! OK I like to think that way at least!

In conclusion: We’ve done so much! So much left to do! Every day is getting better! THANK YOU DEFENDERS! And this was one long news story!


-Pete

A new comic has been posted at Sluggy.com!

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This is about Congo Bongo, except for the parts that aren't.

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I lived for 8 years under President Ronald Reagan, a shallow, stupid, evil man who wrecked the economy and laughed as gay men, and others, died of AIDS, who made deals with our enemies to get elected, and I said, “at least it can’t get worse than this.” I lived for 8 years under President […]

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In that treasure trove of old documents from my mother, I found this little surprise: she’d also saved one of my extra figures from my research at the University of Oregon, the stuff that led to me working with Judith Eisen. That’s another oldie — Mom must have asked what the heck I was doing […]

The government's official forecaster raises its prediction for UK growth in 2024 and 2025 but reduces it for later years.

Angela Rayner told the BBC restrictions would be placed on new social homes in England.

The former First Minister will be joined by crime author Val McDermid for a night entitled "Books & Banter".

NHS England chief executive Amanda Pritchard says the decision, in July 2020, was very disappointing.

Adults expected to die within six months would be eligible under the proposals for England and Wales.

Probability of operating an alarm clock

Start-ups launch drinks that look and taste like coffee but they say are better for the environment.

Firms are advised to practise operating with pens and paper in case of a computer meltdown.

From ex-policemen to former physicists, cyber-security firms search outside the industry for staff.

Greener software could make devices last longer and use less electricity.

Paints now promise to make your house cooler, warmer, or simply peel off.

Start-up firms are looking for ways to dye clothes using less water and heat.

Robotic "coaches" programmed to guide stroke patients through rehabilitation exercises could soon be tested in Scotland.

Cyber Correspondent Joe Tidy has an AI clone of himself built to see how sophisticated they can be.

Ofcom warns social media companies could face fines if they don’t comply with the new Online Safety Bill

The EU ordered Apple to pay Ireland billions in unpaid taxes in September.

Zhang Yiming's fortune has leapt to almost $50bn, according to a newly published rich list.

The YouTuber hired the firm to look into claims that a co-host had sent inappropriate messages to a minor.

Why are still no closer to unmasking the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto?

It wants commitments on prices and 5G if the creation of the UK's biggest mobile network is to go ahead.

One of the president-elect's most visible supporters, Musk could be given a role in Trump's White House.

On the campaign trail the president-elect pledged to make America "the crypto capital of the planet".

Its record price is making headlines - but that's just one part of the cryptocurrency's tumultuous story.

Jim will sadly be unable to attend Norwescon this weekend as perviously scheduled. He sends his best to the attendees and convention and looks forward to seeing fans at future … Continue reading "Norwescon Update!"

Jim will be attending Comicpalooza May 24th-26th in Houston Texas! Tickets are available on Comicpalooza’s website. For schedules and for any changes in times or location, please visit their website.

Jim will be attending Hal-Con this November 8th-10th in Halifax, Nova Scotia! For tickets, head to Hal-Con.com. Please visit their website for all information about schedules and events.

The British overseas territory was invaded 40 years ago, beginning a short but bitter conflict.

London 2012 chief Lord Coe admits that the current Olympics in Beijing will be the last Games of its scale.

The following is a statement issued by the BBC

The BBC has launched an independent review, led by former Head of Sky News Nick Pollard, to determine whether there were any failings in the BBC's management of the Newsnight investigation into allegations of sexual abuse of children by Jimmy Savile.

However, on the basis of material available now, it is apparent from information supplied by the Newsnight editor and programme team - that the explanation in a blog by the editor of his decision to drop the programme's investigation is inaccurate or incomplete in some respects.

By way of correction and clarification:

1.The blog says that Newsnight had no evidence that anyone from the Duncroft home could or should have known about the allegations. In fact some allegations were made (mostly in general terms) that some of the Duncroft staff knew or may have known about the abuse.

2. The blog says that Newsnight had no evidence against the BBC. No allegation was made to the programme that BBC staff were aware of Mr Savile's alleged activities, but there were some allegations of abusive conduct on BBC premises.

3. The blog says that all the women spoken to by the programme had contacted the police independently already and that Newsnight had no new evidence against any other person that would have helped the police. It appears that in some cases women had not spoken to the police and that the police were not aware of all the allegations.

The BBC regrets these errors and will work with the Pollard review to assemble all relevant evidence to enable the review to determine the full facts.

Update 23 October 2012: The BBC has published an additional statement which it issued to Panorama on 22 October 2012. You can read it here.

BBC coverage of the US election, which my colleague Jon Williams trailed here a couple of days ago, brought the highest traffic to BBC News Online so far this year, and set a new record for us on mobile.

On 7 November, there were 16.4m unique browsers across the website and mobile, 8.1m of which came from the UK. That makes it the highest traffic day of 2012 so far and rivals our two biggest previous days during the August riots and the March Tsunami, in 2011. During the England riots, on 9 August 2011 there were there were 18.2m unique browsers, 10.9m of which came from the UK.

The peak traffic point yesterday was 07:00-08:00 GMT, which saw higher usage than lunchtime, maybe as people checked the results as soon as they woke up. UK usage figures yesterday were 50% higher than the average for 2012, and ex-UK usage was 75% higher than average.

We spent a lot of time working out how to provide the best possible service on mobile, so it's encouraging to see that nearly 5m mobile devices visited BBC News Online yesterday, a record figure for us on mobile, accounting for about 30% of all users yesterday (on an average weekday, we'd expect mobiles to account for about 24% of users).

Steve Herrmann is editor of the BBC News website.

BBC World News will soon be available in Burma. Those are words that, even six months ago, I would not have imagined writing. But Burma, a byword for media censorship and repression, is starting to open up.

In September I visited Burma to begin the negotiations which led to this breakthrough in BBC distribution. I was struck by how rapid the media changes are for a country where state media had been long stuck in a repressive timewarp.

A World Service team visited the state broadcaster. We saw the most surreal newsroom I have ever visited. There were no journalists there. "Why not?" we asked. "We don't need them yet. The news hasn't arrived."

We learnt the news is literally delivered once a day by the state news agency. The job of the journalists was to read it out, word for word, unaltered.

But those journalists and editors are now keen to have the BBC's help in learning about open and balanced journalism. It will be a long road, given the ingrained habits of censorship and self-censorship.

But the BBC, through its pioneering media development charity BBC Media Action, is able to offer training to editors and journalists to teach them what independent journalism is. Even officials from the Ministry of Information, the former censors, asked if they could go on BBC journalism courses. Alongside the desire for training, the opening up of Burma to international broadcasters is naturally to be welcomed.

However, there is a long way to go. The massively popular BBC Burmese service, which we estimate is listened to by more than eight million people a week, is not yet allowed to broadcast within Burma. It is transmitted only on shortwave, faithfully listened to, as Aung San Suu Kyi has done for so many years. We urge the government to fully open its airwaves.

And we told the Burmese government that the BBC would continue to scrutinise the country closely. Indeed, as it becomes possible for our journalists to travel within the country, reports such as Fergal Keane's recent searing Newsnight film on human rights abuses in Rakhine state, will form a key part of the BBC's role in the country.

We will also continue to report the progress being made in the political and economic spheres.

At this early stage of opening up, it is hard to know if the hopes of media freedom will be fulfilled, but it is at least an encouraging sign that the BBC can now report from and to the country in English.

Authoritarian governments everywhere are asking themselves if they can and should hold back the free flow of news any more. And, as they ask themselves these questions, politicians, officials and journalists are looking to the BBC as the international exemplar of quality, impartial and independent journalism.

Peter Horrocks is the director of BBC Global News

It is no secret that recent Arab uprisings have placed enormous burdens on the shoulders of BBC Arabic journalists responsible for reporting news from the region.

Covering the Arab world is not always an easy task - we need to mix sensible caution with a dose of courage in covering political issues that attract so many disputed views among Arabic-speaking audiences.

Our guiding principles are the BBC's values, its editorial guidelines, its ethical code, which are our reference points to maintain impartial, balanced and accurate reporting.

Across the Arab world - whether it's Tunisia, Yemen, Egypt or Libya, Bahrain, Syria and Iraq or the many other countries in the region - we know that audiences want access to objective and independent news, far removed from an agenda that favours one party, religion or sect against another. That is why audiences are turning to BBC Arabic.

Last year, our latest figures show that overall audiences to BBC Arabic have risen by more than 17% to a record high of 25.3 million adults weekly. That includes a big surge of 2.9 million in Saudi Arabia and 2.7 million in Egypt, where TV viewers in particular turned to the BBC to better understand the events happening in their own country. Our radio audiences are also holding up despite the reductions in transmission. Online is proving to be more of a challenge, but we are working hard to understand the needs of digital audiences and those for whom social media plays an increasingly important part in their lives.

In 2011, following the fall of the Mubarak leadership, we watched as ordinary Egyptians carried banners saying "Thank you, BBC!" But meeting the high expectation of audiences has a price and sometimes it's been a heavy one.

March 2011 brought a strong reminder of the risks that our staff face in covering the news - one of our reporters was arrested and tortured by Muammar Gaddafi's forces during the Libya uprising. In early 2012, our reporter in Yemen was beaten and received death threats from supporters of the outgoing president.

We are also challenged by those who disagree with our coverage. In countries such as Syria and Bahrain, BBC Arabic has been accused of bias.

The criticism comes from opposition and government alike. It may be a valid argument to say that getting criticism from both sides, in the case of Arab world certainly, is an indication of balanced coverage.

On Syria, for example, we had a series of documentaries looking at the civil war from a number of perspectives.

The first one, exploring what it's like to work for a Syrian television channel that's the mouthpiece of the government, was the butt of criticism and threats from Syrian opposition quarters. We followed it up with a programme charting a day in the lives of six Syrian women, five of whom were anti-government activists.

In our day-to-day news coverage, presenting a variety of voices from Syria is essential to us. And that is what distinguishes BBC Arabic from many media outlets in the Arab world which promote political views and agendas, and that is what we are determined to keep.

BBC Arabic marked its 75th anniversary in January. Arab politicians and ordinary people have expressed their appreciation of our track record of impartiality and trusted news. I am confident that the coming years will see further achievement on all our platforms - TV, radio and online.

New Cyanide and Happiness Comic

New Cyanide and Happiness Comic

New Cyanide and Happiness Comic

New Cyanide and Happiness Comic