I just can’t wait to rebuild the code on this site, and to not have Error! and Please update now! messages and little red Xs in my face every time I try to post something >:|

So what happened. Well,  just as I was about to take the site down for repairs, I  learn they’re about to release a major new version of the engine I use to run this site.

Good: It will fix my issues and keep them from ever happening again. Bad: For me, it will require rebuilding the site.

Since I’m gonna rebuild the site anyway, my options are: rebuild the site now, only to have to rebuild it again when the new engine comes out, OR, just wait for the new engine to come out and only rebuild once.

Well, there’s no way I’m going to rebuild twice, when they’re right about to release this update.

Thus: Joyride gets paused until the update comes out.

Unfortunately, they won’t give an estimate for the release date. I tried asking and was ignored. ;; So were the other people who asked.

Sooo… right now I have no more idea as to timeline than you guys do.

It’s very frustrating.

I will keep you informed, though, so please keep checking back.

I got back from my trip, recovered a bit (A 2000+ mile drive is surprisingly exhausting!), celebrated my birthday, worked on my house site, worked on another special thing you’ll hear about eventually, and now I’m ready to resume Joyride.

However, there is the small matter of the broken site to attend to first. I haven’t been able to fully fix that because it’s more the software and web host’s issue than my own :C (I can’t remember if I mentioned this before, but it was basically: my webhost changed some stuff, then Comicpress changed some stuff in their latest upgrade, and that killer combo exploded things on Joyride).

So I have to resort to the good old fashioned “delete the system completely and then re-install everything” method. Which… is going to suck. At least for me it will. For you guys, no content, posts, or pages will be lost. For me, though, I’ll have to migrate all of that stuff onto the freshly installed system. So here’s what’s gonna happen.

• Soon, the entire site will disappear completely for a short while.
• When it comes back, it might look weird before I migrate stuff.
• Then I will begin migrating all the content. This has to be done by hand and may take a while.
• After that things will be back to normal!

So, the site may disappear for a bit, but don’t worry, I’ll be back~

Here’s a random Rei to amuse you for an additional two seconds or so!

Ugh I have to be awake in less than 4 hours ;_; orz

I have two days of driving ahead of me ;_;

Site repairs and updates will happily resume after I get back ~

There were a few major bugs that popped up after launch, in the middle of Act 1, and at the time I only did quick patchwork temporary bug fixes on them. But now that I have the time, I’m fixing those bugs for real. It should make things smoother.

There might be some screwiness for the next week or so as I work.

When we first moved really far away from our entire family, nobody EVER visited us and we were like “;__;.” Gradually, though, over the years, we got used to our lonely existence. But then suddenly in the last couple years, all that rapidly changed — people I hadn’t seen for like a decade were swarming us. So somehow we became ttly popular recently.

Next I have to go to a cousin’s wedding. orz After that Joyride will continue.

In other exciting news, I got some baby worms. I made a compost home for them today. They’ll be nomming on old rotten food and turning it into soil for the future garden of my Strawbale house. A sustainable use for food that would go to waste otherwise n_n I’ve never done composting before so hopefully I can get this right :|

Act 1 – Rhythm. My goal here was simply to get back into the rhythm and habit of updating a webcomic. It was painful and pretty fail at some points, but overall, I succeeded.

Act 2 – Fine Tune. Since I have my rhythm back, I can focus on tweaking and refining everything. I’ll also be working on improving my speed, but since I’ll be building my house this summer/fall, things will still progress slowly during that time.

Act 3 – Speed. By now I’ll probably have completed work on my house, so I’ll really be trying to improve my speed. I need to be able to make 2 or more pages a week (with my current speed, I can do that, but I have to spend ALL my free time that week on page making. Which is exhausting.)

Act 4 – Hopefully by now everything is pretty solid and straightforward. No major obstacles will be blocking me.

Thoughts at the completion of this stage

Act 1 has completed. On average, I was able to update every 6.9 days. Since my entire setup broke at some time during this Act — monitor failure, tablet failure, two separate massive hard drive corruptions complete with data loss, and then my entire computer breaking — AND I had a surgery, I think I still kept to a pretty good beat.

I definitely found my pace in this Act. Actually, it’s probably better to say that my pace found me.

When I restarted Joyride last year, I was right in the middle of a stupid, painful sort of artistic “rebirth” where I was reevaluating everything I knew. It’s hard to explain what my thoughts were at the time, but in retrospect I guess I was just insecure. Where do I want to go with my art? What technique should I use to get there? Is my technique sufficient? Is it possible to become a truly good artist while still drawing in the manga style? While making comic pages? Is it even a valid art form? I thought I knew the answers to all those questions, but suddenly, then, they slipped away.

This is the reason it took me so long to begin Act 1: I didn’t know my own art anymore. At one point, my little brother saw the first pages I was working on and said something to the effect of “that’s nice… but it’s not your style. It doesn’t look like it was drawn by you.”

Well, I continued to be confused about what I should do right up until I was facing the first deadline for Joyride, a few pages into the Act. The first time pressure was applied to me, guess what happened? Without even thinking about it, I automatically reverted to my old way of doing things. I literally rediscovered my own technique.

It looked better than the pages before it. It felt better to create than the pages before it. And I realized what a huge mistake I had been making.

Stop worrying objectively about your skill, your method, what kind of artist you’re labeled as or what category your art is supposed to fit into. Just draw. Whatever comes out then is “you.”

By the time I truly realized that, I had come to the second big point of this Act: always design things properly. In the rush of getting my style back, I fell into my old, bad habit of designing things as I draw them on the page for the first time. This has only left me with a bunch of things I now have to tweak because I didn’t get them right the first time I drew them. _{There’s probably a person out there who gets things right the first time they do them, but that person is not me.}

Now, I have resolved to fix these problems and design everything properly from now on so that I can continue with full confidence.

Before I even began Joyride, I decided I’d take a few weeks off after every Act to make sure I have the next Act in order. I almost decided not to do that for this Act, because, as noted, I already had to take time off due to all the technical problems. But I realized I really should take this break in order to set myself straight; I’m going to use the next few weeks to practice intensely, and solidify the final phase of this strange artistic metamorphosis I got caught up in.

When I next see you in Act 2, my transformation will finally be complete. I’m pleased that it was mainly working on Joyride that showed me the right way through this phase. To that end, it’s the readers who have showed me the way, since I wouldn’t be working on Joyride without them.

Thank you 100% for reading. <3