GPF News Archive

Hey, gang. I hope you're enjoying Jim Alexander's Algernon's Dilemma reruns featuring Professor Wisebottom. I know I'm enjoying the working vacation, using this time to do some much-needed site, archive, and scripting maintenance. Thanks to Jim, my buffer's been rebuilt to a record a high (twelve weeks at one point) and the GPF server has received a major software upgrade. I even have a vacation planned for August, one where I'll actually be able to get away from both the day job and the comic. Thanks, Jim!

But that's not the meat of this News post, folks. I have two very important announcements to make. Our Premium folks have known about these items for a while (membership has its privileges), but now it's time to share them with everyone else.

Jeff to appear on TWiT's FLOSS Weekly: I am ecstatic to announce I've secretly been in talks with Randal L. Schwartz—legendary Perl hacker, technical author, and founder of Stonehenge Consulting Services, Inc.—about appearing on his weekly podnetcast over on TWiT.tv called FLOSS Weekly. For those not in the know, FLOSS Weekly talks "with the most interesting and important people in the Open Source and Free Software community" and is, in my mind at least, the premiere place to learn about what's new and interesting in the FLOSS universe.

To be honest, the conversation started as an inquiry about GPF sponsoring the show, in hopes that it might be some highly targeted advertising worth pursuing. It's unlikely I could even afford it, of course, but as the old saying goes, it never hurts to ask. (There's also an old saying that if you have to ask, you can't afford it, so we'll see.) I was surprised to learn that Randal not only recognized me and the comic, but immediately put me on the "short list" as a guest. I pitched to him the idea of talking about the intersection of online comics and FLOSS, potentially bringing in other cartoonists with a FLOSS bent who could contribute some really interesting ideas to the conversation. (I have two in particular in mind who have tentatively agreed to come on; watch my Twitter feed for more announcements.) While I certainly wouldn't mind the ego boost of it being all about me and GPF, I feel it would be more in the spirit of the show to abstract the topic and talk in general about how FLOSS is both helping and influencing cartoonists not only in how they produce their comics but how they release them.

"Taping" for the show is scheduled for Wednesday, August 19th at 1:30pm Pacific Daylight Time, which is 4:30pm Eastern Daylight Time or 8:30pm or 20:30 UTC. TWiT streams live video all their tapings, so feel free to join us at TWiT Live to watch me and the other cartoonists make idiots of ourselves and hop in the chat room to talk back as we record. If you can't join us live, the podnetcast should be released sometime on Saturday, August 22nd. You can subscribe to the show through your favorite podcast catcher (iTunes, Zune, whatever) at the official FLOSS Weekly site linked above. I'll post a reminder on the front page the week the of the recording.

GPF books are coming back to print: Ever since Plan Nine Publishing effectively closed its doors, GPF books have been out of print for a couple years. Fortunately, though, we haven't been sitting on our laurels (much) and I'm happy to say that dead-tree editions of GPF will be coming back out in the very near future.

While it's still too early to make a detailed announcement, I can say that the new publisher will be Moonbase Press, which has put out new editions of Bill Holbrook's Kevin & Kell books. I've been very impressed with the quality of Bill's latest books, and his testimony and the reputation of Moonbase's owner, Accidental Centaurs' John Lotshaw, helped seal the deal. Premium subscribers can check the Rumor Mill for the current details of the next GPF book, including the cover, title, and a summary of the contents, as well as a rough plan of how GPF books will produced going forward. Full details will be disclosed here when they've solidified. We hope to open up pre-orders for the next book sometime in August, with plans for John to have some available at Dragon*Con (even though I won't be there).

Meanwhile, I'd like to also announce that Moonbase as acquired the remaining stock of Plan Nine's books and has placed up them up in their store. Supplies are very limited, but these are the last of the "new" Plan Nine titles we have. We only have copies of the first three books available; sorry, but there are no copies of Surreptitious Machinations. Additional details and links can be found on the Book Sub-site.