GPF News Archive

Hey, folks. Yes, I'm breaking another long dry spell without a News update with what is hopefully some useful information. There's plenty of things to cover, and some of it is very good news (for you, I hope). First, though, the bad news....

GPF to remain weekly in March: While my output of comics continues to grow ever so agnoizingly slowly, it still hasn't risen to the point where I'm confortable increasing the main comic's update schedule. Thus, the comic will remain weekly for the month of March. As promised, I am constantly in a state of re-evaluation on this, and as soon as I believe I can increase the update frequency without exhausting the supply, I will. However, now for the good news....

New temporary Wednesday and Friday features: In an effort to keep you guys entertained during the rest of the week (and, to be blunt, to get our page views—and thus ad revenue—closer in line to where we used to be), we'll be adding two new temporary features that will update on Wednesdays and Fridays of each week. This content will appear on the main page in place of the regular comic, but the respective archives will be kept separate (i.e., this bonus stuff won't go into the main comic's archive). Links will be provided so you can easily access the different content on days when it's not being featured on the main page, so you don't have to worry about missing a regular comic if you don't get to see it on Monday or Tuesday. Once the main comic's production frequency increases to the point where I'm comfortable updating three days a week, these temporary features will go away and be replaced with regular comic updates.

For Wednesdays, our temporary feature will be reruns of our long-running PREMIUM-exclusive Jeff's Sketchbook feature. Each week, we will take one sketch out of the vault for two days and put it out into the open for the world to see. Then, when the Friday feature runs, the sketch will go back into the vault and will become an exclusive feature again. Non-subscribers can think of this as a special sneak peek at what you've been missing out on, and as an incentive to consider getting a Keenspot PREMIUM subscription. Loyal subscribers should not fear losing one of their perks, however, as the sketches selected to run during this period will be from the beginning of the Sketchbook archive (and thus has been available to you for almost five years now) and, as previously stated, it will become exclusive again once Friday comes. The rest of the Sketchbook archive will remain locked up, so non-subscribers will not be able to browse the archive. The regular Sketchbook updates will continue to run every Monday just like always with fresh, new, never-before-seen sketches that won't be going onto the main page (unless, heaven forbid, we're still running this schedule five years from now).

Fridays, at this point, will be a hodge-podge of whatever else I can throw at you. To start out with, we'll be running a four-month mini-series event entitled Mischief's Night Out. This 16-page mini-comic was originally written to be the bonus story for a reformatted version of our third book, which unfortunately did not have a bonus story the first time around. The reformat offered me a chance to add something new, and the number of pages available gave me plenty of room to write an expanded story, both in lenght and in page dimensions. Unfortunately, the reformat of this book never occurred, and I've been sitting on this story for almost three years now. So, as the inagural Miscellaneous Friday feature, we'll be running this story for the next few months. A word of warning, however: this story contains material of a slightly more adult nature than what you've typically seen in GPF so far. It pushed a number of boundaries that I normally don't push very often. I wouldn't exactly label it "not safe for work," but I would probably recommend that you don't read it at work or school anyway, just in case.

Once we've exhausted this Mischief story, I'll find something else to run on Fridays. That is, of course, assuming that the main comic's update frequency isn't ready to increase by then. What will go into Miscellaneous Fridays will largely depend on what content I can find that I deem appropriate for viewing and how much effort it will take to prepare it for your consumption. That means it could be bonus GPF material like the Mischief story, pre-GPF comics I have produced over the years, or other potential goodies like fan art or guest comics. We'll just have to see what comes up.

One important note to pull out of that previous paragraph, though is the "how much effort it will take to prepare" comment. Lest anyone out there think that I'm spending valuable time preparing this extra content when I should be making the main comic, each of these extra features have been selected specifically to take a minimum amount of time and effort for me to get them ready. The Sketchbook update has been reduced to occasionally running a Perl script and uploading a few files; while the Mischief story required a tiny bit of extra effort to prepare the subsite, it otherwise will take no time out of my schedule to fill four months of Fridays. Rest assured, the main comic is still my top priority (comicking-wise), and increasing the update frequency is still the primary goal.

My business trip in April: This was already mentioned on my blog, but I will be attending the ID+SCORM conference at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, on April 5-6. This is a far cry from the normal shows & cons I normally do, as this is a techincal conference and I'm going as part of my day job. However, just as I mentioned the business conference I went to back in 1999, I'll mention this one as well, just on the off chance that there's some avid Faultie out there who is also going to be in attendence. More details can be found in the previously linked blog post and at the ID+SCORM site.

The e-mail backlog contiues to grow...: I know I keep saying this all the time, but I'm horribly behind on responding to e-mail, and it's not getting better any time soon. If you've written me and you're expecting a response, you need to be very patient. I do read every e-mail that comes into my inbox (that doesn't get eaten by my spam filters, but I do try to snatch legitimate messages from their jaws on the rare occasions they try to eat them), so I guarantee your messages have reached me. However, I try to prioritize when and to whom I respond to based on numerous factors, and many e-mails that don't necessarily require a response are acknowledged and appropriately filed.

Here's some important things that bear repeating: While the overwhelming majority of the archive has now been transcribed, there's always the opportunity to improve some of our Oh No Robot transcriptions; just make sure to follow the rules set forth in the January 9, 2006, News post and the related Oh No Robot forum thread. Don't forget that if you find yourself scratching your head over the current events in the comic itself, make sure to check out the News post from November 6, 2005, which includes a bunch of notes and back references that should help clear up some of the confusion. Also, additional notes for the Official Unofficial GPF Wiki can be fond in this forum thread.