Slashdot Mirror

that's a really shitty Friend Bear rip off.

this pretty much sums it all up.

I am the sysadmin and part-time artist for Friend Bear and I agree that there is not much to profit from with the webcomic world. We run our site with unrestricted free access to our content, on our DSL connection in the basement here in Edmonton. Our DSL is on a static IP, we pay for "business-grade" DSL at our house to keep our provider from blocking our port 80 outgoing packets and unfortunately our domain name is registered through Verisign (although I'm working on getting it transferred). We have few expenses. The DSL costs us about $48 CAD a month, although I would be using it anyway if we weren't running the site here so it's not exactly a "true" expense. The domain name is $29 USD a year. We don't have a problem with bandwidth since the strip isn't huge (not everyone can dig surrealist, MS Paint-drawn crudely sketched strips), but there is a problem: We get told all the time about how we should be selling merchandise and/or accepting donations. I have nothing against a donation based system or selling merchandise - the problem is getting merchandise put together. We have a cafepress link up but it doesn't generate much revenue because CafePress is too expensive, especially to the majority of people who read our strip (Canadians, since our marketing is word-of-mouth only and I'm Canadian). I can't convince people a Friend Bear t-shirt is worth over $30 Canadian. I don't think it is. *grin* Anyway - we have been told by many that we need to make a compilation of our strips in book form and get it published, but I haven't got much of a clue how much money it would cost to start this initiative, or where I'd go about doing it. Does anyone have any suggestions? It's funny because I actually work at a publishing company as a graphics artist/page layout guy, but they probably wouldn't go for putting something like Friend Bear out. It would have a limited distribution and would not make a lot of money. I don't really want advertising on our site, and I don't want the strip to be a big capitalist sell-out, but I would love a way to make enough money for Friend Bear to be my day-job and thus have enough time to put new strips up -all the time-. I have no idea where to start, though. Does anyone?

The best online comics somehow escaped mention. Without a doubt, Penny Arcade and Friend Bear are the two funniest comics around these days. Userfriendly? That piece of junk was, in my opinion, never funny. Dumb jokes about the same computer shit every week? No, thanks; PA has that category in the bag.

Hell, even CC vs. CC is better than some of this crap :) I never understood why some of this stuff got so popular - maybe I'm spoiled.

Cheers,
levine

Friend Bear >>> Pokey.

http://www.friendbear.com

Honestly, I don't care. Friend Bear is much funnier anyway.

(-1 offtopic)

Honestly, I don't care. Friend Bear is much funnier anyway.

(-1 offtopic)

C++ is SCARY.

Oh, and if you want badly drawn comics, Friend Bear looks like it's entirely drawn in MS Paint.
Hilarious, twisted stuff.

Washington Post:

The site is, in no small part, an online clubhouse for Microsoft haters; news items about the firm are accompanied by a small picture of Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates as a Borg, one of the human-machine chimeras from "Star Trek: The Next Generation" who say, "Resistance is futile -- you will be assimilated."

The Washington Post makes me sick with their pro-MS slant to everything, and their tech writers in their business section are -horrible-. Fast forward is *occasionally* worth reading, but that's it. Thank god they really only run tech stuff once a week..

That got me to thinking this morning as I bought my paper.. wouldn't it be cool to have a print version of what's going on/what had happened in the web the previous day? I would certainly plunk down a quarter to get some slashdot headlines, the register headlines, some article blurbs, security stuff, recent security holes, penny-arcade, sluggy, and friend bear on the comics page, some 20 page editorials by Jon Katz :)..

I find print format a lot more friendly to read for longer periods, and it's nice to have something to read on the metro (not all of us have laptops, and even if I did, the paper is a more efficent way of reading all this I think.)