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T Campbell

Six Degrees of Wikipedia

Submitted by Xaviar Xerexes on February 6, 2006 - 16:26

Another tool guaranteed to waste some of your time! Six Degrees of Wikipedia can tell you the number of connections between say Penny Arcade and President George W. Bush.

Resolutions and Renovations

February 5, 2006 - 18:03 | Gilead Pellaeon

In this month's Through the Looking Back Glass, Gilead Pellaeon spotlights some recent webcomic-related resolutions.Ah, January. It's the time of year when everybody makes their resolutions and starts afresh. Hopes are high, and everyone is ready to attack the new year and really make this the year, the year when "such and such happens", or the year when "I'm finally going to do this and this".

Three Years of Comixpedia

February 5, 2006 - 18:03 | Xaviar Xerexes

A little love letter to the magazine that could.It's the third anniversary of Comixpedia this issue.

2006 is the fourth year we've been writing about webcomics. We've put out 38 monthly issues of the magazine and published more than 600 reviews, interviews and other articles about webcomics. We've posted more than 2500 news posts (that's not counting the magazine).

Firefox Search Plugin for Oh No Robot

Submitted by DrSetebos on February 1, 2006 - 11:49

There's a Firefox search plugin available to allow you to search Oh No Robot.

Need advice-- sicko stalker fan

Submitted by Aleph on January 23, 2006 - 11:34

First off, I have all the social skills of a folding chair. I am in way over my head here and I have no idea what to do. I've been trying to ignore it-- which I do very poorly-- and trying to laugh it off-- which is getting harder and harder as time goes on. It's been months now, and I can't scrape this guy off, and I'm looking to others with more experience who might be able to tell me what to do about it.

Second of all, I'm quite a retard so don't need to bother telling me that. I can't be more concise than this, this is just the way I talk, which is why I try not to talk too much. I realize my speech is really stilted compared to most peoples' and I ask you to look past that. I'm not trying to sound smart or write an essay, this is me genuinely at my wit's end.

Backstory:
We used to have a forum, a really great community of folks, some of whom still keep in touch now that it's gone. My interaction with them is part of what makes the feeling of exposure involved in having a website bearable for me. We got this obnoxious guy who wedged his way into every conversation he could, it got tiring quickly but it was no big deal. He claimed to have a similar PDD to mine, but he acts less like someone on the autistic spectrum and more like a borderline personality.

Trouble began when he began publically (and fairly graphically) discussing an imagined lesbian relationship between two of my characters, one of whom is /seriously/ damaged and very much underage. That surprised and horrified me, I am against any kind of sexualization of children. Rabidly so. Several mods and I told him to cut it out, and pointed out two of the forum rules he was breaking (no advocation of abuse, no obscene content), and locked the thread. He began spawning arguments in favour of sexualizing this child no matter what we did to stop him, started PMing us in attempts to FORCE us to retract our opinions of his conduct (I called the whole idea of sexualizing the child vile). He was repeatedly warned, then we found out he made veiled threats against a mod-- he claims he was simply describing a violent episode from his /past/ that hasn't happened in a long /time/.

At this point we decided we'd already let it gone on too long, we told him to kindly move on with life, and banned him, first from the forum, then when he spawned a slew of false identities to 'ban-evade' as he called it, we IP-banned every ID he used, including an entire college domain, from the entire site. He continued to mail us for a while but his mails went unanswered, we tried the 'ignore till he moves on with life' strategy.

When we had to pull our forum and content management system following a series of hacking attempts (which don't seem to be connected to him) months later, we started a temporary LJ for a few of the members to keep in touch. He showed up immediately, again trying to force us to allow him back into the community, and saying he was going to MAKE me see that he was a 'nice guy'. We banned him. Up to that point I had been trying to be polite and civil, though meticulously clear that all I wanted from him was for him to leave. Someone suggested I be more blunt and aggressive, that perhaps he would back down if challenged. He simply redoubled his efforts, stating even more clearly that he would never stop until I believed he was a nice guy. I pointed out in a post to the thread, that it there was no point in trying to convince me of anything because I was simply not interested in ever having anything to do with him ever again, nor interested in what kind of guy he was. We let him know in no uncertain terms that every anonymous post or post from any ID we connected to him was going to be screened out (unfortunately the mods deleted a bunch of them before I found out, so we only have a few of them on record now in case we need them). His language has gotten more obsessive and aggressive in emails, though his comments in public are mostly mild. He let us know that even if we ban him from our site and our community he will go to other sites and other communities and represent us. He is convinced that eventually he will be allowed to rejoin our community and all he needs to do is negotiate terms. The sheer inability to grasp that he is never, ever, ever going to be allowed near me is upsetting beyond my ability to express.

We've been keeping a policy of 'make him invisible' for months now, but it hasn't worked and today I've just absolutely had it. He slacks off for a little while but he always comes back and takes every opportunity to try to force contact. This has been stressing me out horribly, and slowing down my work-- as an autistic I find this inability to reason or respect boundaries frightening and I can't help ruminating on how very much I want to withdraw and get away from it.

The Facts:

On the one hand he is in Australia, and thus not only beyond the reach of a restraining order, likely beyond the reach where he can do any real harm. On the other hand, he has spoken repeatedly of showing up at conventions, and how he believes he could get right up to me without my ever knowing he is there. I don't go to conventions (duh) but some of my staffers are already known to do just that, and some of my best friends in the community live in Australia. Normally I would not expect someone to go to that kind of trouble and expense just to track down some unknown girl with an unpopular webcomic's staffers, but he's already mailed one talking about violence against people he can't make agree with him, and he seems totally unable to just move on with life and go somewhere else. He has access to a bunch of IPs and I don't know for certain that we could track him down through any of them. He's irrational, and I simply don't know what irrational people are capable of. He talks about his domination/bondage fetish and other things about his twisted sexuality like it's part of daily conversation. He claims we slander him, but we haven't said anything about him or to him at all except a few responses in November telling him he's burned bridges, asking him to go away and move on with his life, and a mention today when I hit my frustration limit after seeing him attack us on another site as well. And I guess this, but I don't think you can call it slander considering I'm being as careful as I can to keep it about the problem itself and not point him out in particular. I don't know. I am just trying to give all the information in case there's anybody out here who recognizes this kind of person and knows what to do.

I feel like there's no solution to this, and I know I've handled it poorly so far. Because of the way my brain is wired, it's really a problem for me, my brain keeps grinding on the problem desperate to resolve it in some way. It's not even that I find the idea of his managing to find us and harm us that credible, the fact that he simply won't go away and move on with life is really hard to deal with on its own. Normally I would deal with such an irrational intarweb stalker by simply disappearing, getting new IDs and new emails. I don't have that option with the webcomic. Is there anybody out there who knows how to deal with a sicko fan who won't stop for months, or am I just stuck with this guy until he crosses some violent line?

I'm trying so hard to keep a happy shiny face on and be optimistic, but if there's more of this in the future when/if we DO become popular, I'm pretty sure I won't make it through another year. Finding him still at it this morning just as I was heading for bed was just more than I could deal with.

Please, somebody, tell me SOMETHING that will help me believe there's a reason not to just close up shop and vanish.

Thursday News Beat

Submitted by Xaviar Xerexes on January 12, 2006 - 11:55

It's like Tiger Beat only news-ier!

Read more for news about Fell, Fleen, Goats and the Wiz!

You can read online the entire #1 issue of Fell by Warren Ellis at Newsarama.

Jeff Lowrey over at FLEEN posts on webcomic collectives. Jeff, given that FLEEN is a webcomic critics collective does that mean "...the majority of webcomic CRITICS are lonely geeks living in garrets and basements, and need all the friends they can scare up or pay for."?

Zoinks! Magazine $6 for 6 Issues for all of 2006

Submitted by DrSetebos on January 11, 2006 - 18:42

Bill Charbonneau is one crazy Canadian. He's decided that the special holiday pricing for Zoinks! Webcomic Magazine subscriptions of $6 for 6 issues was soooo good, he's extending the offer for all of 2006! You have absolutely no excuse not to subscribe now.

Zoinks! Webcomic Magazine is a bi-monthly 'zine that is working to build webcomics awareness in a more mainstream audience. Zoinks! features interviews with the movers and shakers of the webcomics industry, reviews of webcomic works, and lots and lots of pages of webcomics by the cartoonists you know and love. Sign up in time for the February 2006 issue, which features interviews with Gisele Lagac� and T Campbell of Penny and Aggie, Tim Buckley of Ctrl+Alt+Del, and Barry Gregory of 01Comics -- ships January 30!

Week 1 of the January Issue

Submitted by Xaviar Xerexes on January 9, 2006 - 02:36

Our January issue is called The Future Issue and in our first week we have new stuff, new technology and a look at what might have been.

Neil Cohn leads off things with a feature on the grammar of visual language. Pay attention, there'll be a quiz later!

Next we have an interview with William Simons and T Campbell, the duo behind the relaunched comics-on-your-iPod site, Clickwheel. And in this week's review, Frank (the artist formerly known as Damonk) Cormier looks at three ground-breaking webcomics, Brambletown, Nowhere Girl and Pierced.

Xaviar Xerexes takes a turn at Through The Looking Back Glass and looks at the state of the webcomics press and the issue of whether creators have any business writing about webcomics.

We also have two brand new comic-columns for 2006 - both of which we posted earlier this week: Checkerboard Nightmare by Kris Straub and The Antecedent by Bryant Paul Johnson.

Clickwheel Back With Version 2.0

Submitted by Xaviar Xerexes on January 6, 2006 - 12:54

T Campbell blogs about the reboot of Clickwheel which publishes comics in a format designed for display on the iPod. It appears that there is already quite a lot of material available for downloading.

From reading the site it sounds like anyone can get an account to publish their comics with Clickwheel, but artists must first send sample work to Clickwheel (see the FAQ for more details.

The Book On Webcomics

January 5, 2006 - 18:03 | Phil Kahn

The book Webcomics: Tool and Techniques for Digital Cartooning by Steven Withrow and John Barber is a comprehensive overview of the state of webcomics. Webcomics: Tools and Techniques for Digital Cartooning is a helluva book. If nothing else, it's full of a ton of useful information and thoughts on webcomics art and business. It's got tutorials, round table discussions, theory, and even a big ol' gallery of webcomics.

But in writing this review, there's been one thought sticking in my mind: namely, this is a wonderful book... but who is it for?