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1) CHOICE OF NUMBER OF PANNELS. Being a hard-core Bloom County fan, I'm rather used to the four-panel format. And of course 6- or 8-pannel "Sunday" comics would be lovely... as well as a 1-pannel Far Side sort of thing.
I was originally going to do it this way but it became too much of a hassle to make an editor for. Three panels was ideal because the editor was nice and simple. Any more and you're doing some insane multi-page editing and it becomes really irritating to manage. The idea was for the strip creator to be very, very simple to use and to give you immediate fun results. So with that in mind, I wrote it hard-wired for three panels. So this probably isn't going to happen unless I rewrite the entire thing, which I'm not planning on doing any time soon unless I get some kind of government grant or something.
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2) THOUGHTS >>AND<< SPEECH. There are endless comedic possibilities for a character able to say one thing and think another in the same panel.
Nice concept, but I can't even begin to think of a way to make that possible. To put another dialog box in there would mean you'd have to stack them and then you'd just have one dialog box coming out of the top of the other one and it would be strange. In straight HTML (which is how the comics are rendered), you don't have the luxury of layering things unless you plan it out well in advance. Maybe in the future when CSS is less insane.
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3) A SCORING SYSTEM THAT MAKES SOME SENSE. As far as I can tell the scores are done by pure addition. An AVERAGE would be better, since my older comics will always be higher ranked than newer ones just because people voted more... even if they gave it a "1." I don't even mind not knowing the score as long as I can really know what people think is funny.
My math advisor tells me that this method would suck because every new comic would automatically jump to the top, having a 100% average. So basically it would still make no sense.
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4) LEAGALIZATION OF COCAINE. Or my winning a comics contest once. Either one is as likely to happen.
I have no power over the comic contests but I'll see what I can do to get cocaine legalized for the medicinal treatment of "laziness" and "being pleasant to talk to".
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5) MORE CHARACTERS. It can't be THAT illegal to scan in some pictures from the newspaper comics. ;>
It's illegal enough that I don't want to bother putting them up and taking them down again when I get letters from lawyers. I've watched other odd comic strip projects get hassled by United Media and as much as I like to promote anarchy, I also like to sleep a lot and not get a lot of stressful phone calls and e-mail.
I occasionally get submissions of new characters, but they're usually only like two characters and a background and a link button for the comic they come from. I think I save most of them, but I'm not going to bother making a whole new category for two characters. I hate to be a dick about it, but it's just not worth the time and effort to add them.
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6) ABILITY TO EDIT POSTED COMICS. But you knew that already.
I wrote an editor. Still haven't decided if it's wise to put it online or not.
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7) ABILITY TO EDIT COMICS OTHER PEOPLE POSTED. Because some people just aren't funny, they shouldn't be allowed to have their own comics. If this rule seems unfair, then maybe a rule that if someone's comics are mind-numbingly stupid we can get that person's address and go beat the living crap out of him.
For this to work, I'd have to appoint an arbiter of funny who decides what is and isn't funny and that sounds like no fun at all. Then I'd have to listen to whining and complaining that people's unfunny comics got deleted and that, yo, would suck. I'm all about the freedom.
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I don't want to sound bitchy, nor do I want to repost something that other people have already posted (although I'm sure I did). I just wanted to get this off my chest. You may all now commense ignoring or reviling me, whichever is more convenient.
Well, you now have my excuses/explanations. If I seem unmotivated about adding features to the strip creator, it's because I am. It gets a tremendous amount of traffic and is still working, which is a pretty significant feat in my book. If I start diddling with it, I risk ruining this precarious balance which I treasure so much.
If I were to start "hitting the pipe" as they say and adding new things, I'd probably be working on getting a bit nicer web design for it. The comic list page is pretty damn atrocious and the profiles could be way nicer, etc. But I hate web/graphic design more than anything in the world except maybe injustice and cancer.