Real progress on homelessness, from the last damn people you'd expect.

I've tried not to be too political on this blog. Couldn't really avoid it with the government shutdown, but all my previous blogs were mainly political, and I wanted to break away from that. But this issue is near and dear to my heart; I've seen homelessness up close and personal. Some of the closest people to me were homeless once, and the general hatred and indifference of society to their plight fills me with sadness and rage all at once, so I decided to post about it.

Anyway.

Utah is the reddest state in the nation. Redder than Texas. Redder even than Nebraska or Oklahoma. It is more Republican than a white guy in a Duck Dynasty shirt taking off his gun holster to have sex with his wife on a bed made of money. Utah is so Republican that Mexicans not only don't want to immigrate there, but insisted we take it with us along with Texas and California. Utah is more Republican than saying hi to a cop on your way to a stockholders' meeting. Utah is more Republican than Sarah Palin saying anything.

Point is, you would not expect Utah to be the first state to solve homelessness. And yet.

A present I made my friend Brad for Christmas.

There was only one rule: no money could be spent whatsoever. Brad is big into Star Wars, so I figured I'd make him a portrait made out of the opening crawls of all three Star Wars movies. (I refuse to acknowledge the existence of the prequels.)

Anyway, this is it to the left. My friend Vera was watching me draw this at the Bean Broker, and seemed to like it, so hopefully he will too.

A Facebook convo with Friend X.

Friend X
Dude, thought you'd love this one. My mom posted it on Facebook earlier today.

Friend X
Random photo of horses, check. Contrived and non-specific feel-good religious message, check.

Stuart Richards
That's... breathtakingly awful. I am in awe.

Friend X
Literally laughed out loud at the horses.

Stuart Richards
Like, what are they doing there? The horses look confused too.
They're all looking at you, like "What now, crazy person?"

Friend X
They're like, "WTF are you doing to that photo? Adding a preachy acronym? Naaaay, bro. I vote naaaay."

Stuart Richards
And then they harrumph.

Friend X
Perhaps the easiest overlooked but most random thing is the copyright claim.

Stuart Richards
Good point.
I mean, when you create gold like that, you don't want someone stepping on your legal rights.

Friend X
I copyright the word faith as an acronym. Sorry. All your hopes of making a killing on tee shirts at Family Christian Bookstore are dead now.

Today's 503.

I actually got one out on time, try not to look so shocked.

In the Facebook post I made to the comic's group about it, I linked the TVTropes article for "Put On A Bus." That's kinda what I'm doing with Shellie now. I feel like the character has a lot of potential, but I haven't been able to realize most of it.

Part of it's because other characters are just bursting with potential. Saffron's going to play a key role in the next chapter, being the center of the characters' resistance to a Very Bad Thing in "The 503rd Oregon (The Left Must Hold)." Tina's going to be one of the key players in the chapter after that, "Five-Oh Fantasy Three." Seymour is going to take center stage when the group eventually starts a clan in Online Moon Game. The Aussies are going to go on vacation here soon, and that's going to be a big plot.

Record Breaker Day.

Aww yeah. Traffic's picked up a lot on The 503 lately, and this is the day when it broke the previous record for yearly hits.

The 503 is a pretty unique comic, traffic-wise. It's not a gag-a-day comic, and even compared to something like Questionable Content or Something*Positive, it's very story-driven. As a result, you can't really read just one, so a lot of my readers wait for a while and then read a bunch all at once. I see this when an unreasonably large amount of my traffic comes from people Googling the comic to find it again, because they didn't bookmark it the first time.

The comic had a really strong summer, and although traffic's slowed a bit since then, it hasn't slowed much. September was one of the strongest months on record, and October's lining up to be the same, even though typically these are the weakest months.

It may be the case that the comic is finally - finally - starting to break through. I certainly hope so. I'm not doing it for fame or anything, but I certainly wouldn't turn it down.

Oh, one more thing.

New comic's up today.

They've been at a bar for the past few strips, but this is a new scene. It's one of those strips that tells the story through subtle details, through the art. And Saffron's really adorable in it.

This is also the end of my buffer. I've already cut a bargain of sorts with my readers to just not update on Wednesdays for a while, so the next one's due up on Friday. I'm gonna go down to the Jolly Swagman Bean Broker now and try to get a couple more in the buffer.

One final thought: I've only had Facebook removed from my bookmarks for a few hours and I already feel a lot more productive. I even caught myself mindlessly browsing and instinctively going to where the bookmark used to be. This is gonna free up so much time; I should've started blogging earlier.

Found a background I can settle on.

The old one just felt too... musty. A yellowed map of trade routes between principal Atlantic ports from the age of sail. I mean, it's awesome in the right context. But this isn't it.

I ended up using an image I've loved for years: this. I found it on this page, it's about some stormchasers that travelled through Chadron in 2006. The oldschool font in the header kinda goes with it, makes it all look vaguely Western. And I've always loved thunderstorms on the Great Plains; they're just not the same anywhere else. And the best ones are the ones like this, where you can see the fronts colliding.

Anyway, on to figure out all the sidebar thingythings.

Looking for a new blog background, and-oh shiny!

I'm searching through my pics, and then I found this:



There's a great story here.

Back to blogging.

It's all kinda familiar, and yet a bit disconcerting.

This was prompted because I finally got sick enough of Facebook. I got sick of people I can't unfriend posting shit I can't tolerate, sick of being exploited instead of making a few bucks by running my own ads by the things I say, sick of the constant game requests, sick of the complete and utter timesink it has become, sick of every damn thing on there.

I'm not too sure about the blog title yet. I may switch it out; I haven't decided yet. For what it's worth, "no regrets when the worms come" is a line from this song:



For that matter, I'm not sold on the background either. It's a retouched version of the background I had on my old Myspace (remember that?) crammed into 300kb because that's all Blogger allows. I played with other backgrounds - one with the night sky, one that was a picture I took on the way back from Rapid City one evening. Nothing jumps out and says "I MUST BE YOUR BACKGROUND."

So everything's kinda touch and go. I don't know what this space is gonna look like in a few days, but I'm sure I'll muddle through somehow.