Tag: webcomics

The 2016 100

The 2016 100 — or — How to Build a Better Casey

Last updated on April 5th, 2021 at 10:39 pm

I can’t even lie, guys—coming up with a list of 100 goals for the fourth year in a row was hard — ridiculously so. I’m a very different me than I was when The 2013 100 came out, back when free time was still an abundant commodity I didn’t even know I was taking for granted, trying to fill it with countless things that’d keep life interesting.

A problem I most definitely don’t have in 2016!

As I work at surviving the upcoming year—especially with our second child’s imminent arrival—I needed to make the list a lot more realistic; I’m all too skilled at chasing ambitions that exceed my lifestyle’s capacity, and I’ll need to keep wary of that in 2016 if I want to see myself make it out the other side!

So without further ado, The 2016 100. It took a couple of days to polish off after recovering from the gauntlet that was 2015, but I feel like it’s a list that will really make waves in this life o’ mine should I see it finished!

But hey—that’s what I say every year 😂

Thanks for reading!

1) Write an amazing series for Black History Month
2) Win a vacation for my dry cleaner
3) Watch Creed; Mad Max: Fury Road; The Martian; Ant-Man
4) Take Eric to a sporting event so he can stop complaining about getting left from sporting events
5) Phase my old 3.5″ hard drive out
6) Get rid of my old electronics
7) Stop biting my nails
8) Get rid of the wedding thank you cards I never sent
9) Clean out the basement crawl space
10) Build shelves into the crawl space
11) Give my FWD Powershot 2 to my old manager the hockey coach
12) Do the CN Tower Edgewalk
13) Sort out my old TD employee RSP
14) Consolidate everything down to a single notepad

Though a chiropractor I started seeing late into 2015 told me I’d developed some mild sciatica in my back, I didn’t need him to tell me I carry too much STUFF. In a digital age where we can pack mountains of information into a single device, there’s really NO NEED for me to carry all the draft posts and note that I do—save the fact that working from hard copy’s the way my brain’s WIRED.

In 2016, I need a little more focus to keep all my ideas stored in one place so I’m not constantly carrying EVERYTHING in my house made of paper, knowing that I probably scribbled SOMETHING on ALL of ’em.

15) Sort out the Internet situation at home so I can stop relying on tethering to LTE data
16) Learn enough Spanish to understand my sister-in-law’s Mexican wedding in May
17) Find time for date nights, which will involve finding someone who wants to babysit two kids… how about we just find more awesome things to do at home, just in case?
18) Try Uncle Tetsu’s cheesecake
19) Get to 0 drafts on CaseyPalmer.com by converting everything into live posts
20) Install the growth chart for my kids that we got at my office baby shower
21) Update all the old content on CaseyPalmer.com
22) Upgrade the site infrastructure to better support contest traffic
23) Redesign the heck out of the blog (Twenty Sixteen, what up)
24) Find the time to pack more lunches for work
25) Clean up and optimize my Pinterest account (I still have that copy of Pinterest Savvy lying around somewhere)
26) Shave more regularly
27) Hand out my remaining business “cep” cards so I can put in a new order (wait—do we still do business cards?)
28) Clear out the bookshelves to prepare for Baby #2
29) Replace the lost key to our 2011 Ford Edge
30) Figure out what I ACTUALLY need to run my site and invest in THAT.
31) Replace our bathroom sink
32) Meet with the people who I never seemed to schedule in through 2015 (Aaron, Emma, Ria, Adrienne, Dianna)
33) Get a Brookhaven Computer Cabinet

The 1% of the Casa de Palmer workspace I use to do all the things isn’t the best—in fact, it’s falling apart. As I get older and start formalizing my #BloggerLife, Sarah and I agree that my workspace should evolve to show that. It’ll take some saving to make it happen, but it’d be a nice addition to the home.

CONTINUE READING: That’s just a THIRD of the list. Click here for the REST! “The 2016 100”

Content Generation Like it’s 2003!

100 Happy Days — Can You Be Happy for 100 Days in a Row?

Last updated on April 4th, 2021 at 02:11 am

#100HappyDays—Day 28—Fish 'n' Chimps—Comic #46—Getting Ready to Come Out of the Closet
If you thought my humour was juvenile now, you should’ve seen me back in 2003!

It was my son’s 4-month “birthday” today, but I barely got to see him.

In a day preceded by three hours of sleep, fraught with everything from a site crash to slow progress with work things due to the March Break coworker exodus to the site files that refused to migrate, I came home to a kid ready to sleep from a day filled with visitors and stimuli.

My day wasn’t as exciting as his, though. It was all about:

  • Finding a hidden cache of old posts that were properly formatted, which could replace some old ones on my site that needed some touching up
  • Trying to delete the old posts, only to find that my site couldn’t handle all the load of deleting 100 posts at a time, crashing the site for a few minutes and making me finally decide to make the leap to a Virtual Private Server (VPS) to handle the stress I put on my site
  • Realizing that I’d tried all this before, and the ones that were there before were the result of the very same course of actions I was trying
  • Delete these “new magical files” I came across so I never make this stupid mistake again

But though I nearly obliterated all the stuff I’d worked so hard on (again…), I was happy that my plan to reintroduce Fish ‘n’ Chimps to the world was coming together.

So what if I made them in an age where 1024 x 768 was the standard resolution, giving me comics that are way too small for the modern monitor?

So what if they show the humour of a Casey Palmer in his late teens and early twenties, utterly juvenile and devoid of a solid storyline?

So what if in 2003, I was acting like this:

It’s progress. I’ll take it.

#100HappyDays Day 28/100, parfait!

The second logo for Casey Palmer, Canadian Dad

The DC Comics Guide to Digitally Drawing Comics

100 Happy Days — Can You Be Happy for 100 Days in a Row?

Last updated on April 3rd, 2021 at 02:24 pm

#100HappyDays—Day 15—The DC Comics Guide to Digitally Drawing Comics

Some days, nothing all that amazing happens—some days you’re just maintaining. #100HappyDays Day 15 was like that: just working on keeping things going with lots of emails, Facebooking and tweets to make sure that the relationships stay alive. Went in to the 9-to-5 early, came home early, and spent a bit of extra time playing with DoomzToo since I was home well before his bedtime for once.

But it’s not like I took photos of any of that 😊

Instead, here’s what I’m reading right now to show my resolve for getting back in the webcomics game!

I spent some time working on the Fish ‘n’ Chimps website, taking all these pieces of the past decade and putting them together again, trying to build a site that’ll show the journey from then ’til now.

Today was a good day.

The second logo for Casey Palmer, Canadian Dad

The Problems With Making Webcomics

Last updated on November 8th, 2020 at 12:56 am

For anyone who’s only known me for a little while, I’ve had a dream for the longest time—to put a comic story together from beginning to end.

For the past decade, I’ve chipped away at an idea I’ve had for a comic named Fish ‘n’ Chimps—I even went as far as working on the webcomic from 2003-2006 and making print comics to sell at comic conventions for a number of years.

But that was like diving into the deep end without checking to make sure that the pool was filled.

Since then, I’ve been chipping away at this idea of mine, changing it from an idea for a gag comic from someone just exiting their teenage years to a storyline of a far grander scale, reflecting everything that I’ve learned in the last decade. Character sketches have given way to storylines; ideas scrawled on napkins and scrap paper found their way into what’s starting to resemble a script.

But as they say—the devil’s in the details. The longer I work at the idea, the more complex it becomes and the higher my standards rise. What started as an unfocused idea has grown with startling clarity—the only problem now will be finding the time to make it a reality.

A cover idea with my main Fish 'n' Chimps character, Doomz
Hey! What’s that over your shoulder?!

With a subway delay giving me an extended commute on my way home from my cosmic twin’s housewarming party, I sketched this out from ideas I have for later into the storyline—I guess all that I need to do now is start actually drawing the comic so I can get there.

The second logo for Casey Palmer, Canadian Dad
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