Strips up early, updates Tuesday.

Heading out of town in the morning - I'll be back mid-day on Tuesday. I've posted the comics, but there's not much I can do about the contest entries until I get back. Nobody panic, it'll all get sorted out.

Episode 373

Read the comic here.

I was tempted to animate this strip as well, but then it'd be very easy to start expecting the strips to be live action- and I really don't want to start convincing my friends that they need to become voice actors. (Not that I even know anyone who sounds the way Whiskey does in my head.)

Still working on the new sets - Hopefully I'll get enough of a section done tonight that I can take photos for the next few strips. Yes, they're going to be talky. We are starting out on a whole new storyline...

Speaking of that, this might be a good time to talk about the pacing and creation of the strip.

When I first started out, I wanted to tell an epic story, similar to The Order of the Stick. That meant no real focus on being funny every day, and that I could set up plot twists and devices that wouldn't pay off for months (or longer) at a time. After nearly eight months of that, I was pretty burnt out. So I wrote my way into a "chapter break" and planned some time off.

As I took that break, I watched as Ian wove my characters into his S-Team storyline. Ian's strip moves at a fairly steady "week long story arc at a time" pace - I decided I'd give that style a try when I returned from hiatus. For the most part that worked okay. It did speed the story up some, and I was more focused on finding something amusing for each day's strip. But it still wasn't quite "my voice."

Lately, I realized what I really like doing is telling smaller stories. I love working the Advent Calendar arcs - and the Concert Mayhem story that followed was another smaller, self-contained bit of insanity. So, with the latest "relaunch" of the strip, I'm going to be focusing on telling more of these episodic stories. It should let me change "topics" frequently enough that I don't get burnt out, and keep things moving along so that things don't stagnate or become too convoluted.

We'll see how it goes.

Episode 365

Read the comic here.

I know some of you are sick of the "hit refresh until you see the second strip" trick. Today is the last day it'll occur. As revealed today, it was actually part of the plot.

In other news: I seem to have caught that cold/flu that's been going around. BLEH.

For those of you with a life...

Some of you might be wondering why Google has this as their logo today:

The reason? The LEGO brick turns 50 today. (Well, sometime in January, anyway.)

Happy birthday to the solution to, and cause of, all my problems.

Read more about it a the LEGO Press Release.

Nifty, but also Spooky

Looks like Google Maps has updated their photos of my town.

Toys R Us 2008 Preview

I know I still owe you guys reviews of the 2008 Exo-Force and Racers sets I picked up a couple of weeks back, but I thought those of you in the US might want to know that another wave of goodies is due to hit the shelves tomorrow. Check out this screen-cap from their on-line copy of tomorrow's sale advertisement:



Those are the new Star Was, Indiana Jones, and Sponge Bob sets. I know where a chunk of my LEGO budget is getting blown tomorrow...I hope I can still find that $10 off a $100 purchase coupon they mailed me...

Slight Delay

Sorry, everyone. I don't have today's material ready quite yet.

(We're redoing the bathroom in our house, and demolition of the old begins tomorrow morning. Getting everything out of the way took a lot longer than I had planned.)

I do have the photos taken - so I'll be able to catch up over the course of the day tomorrow. (Hooray for break time!) I may even (gasp) get a bit ahead of the publishing schedule.

Anyway, though some of you might be wondering what was up.

This 'n' That

Just a couple of quick announcements.

First, the 2007 Advent Madness pages are up and linked to from the main page. They don't do much of anything yet - just a bunch of "no peeking" placeholder pages. But the foundation for next month's fun is there.

Also, by request, here's a Decpticon version of the Holiday Challenge wallpaper:

Finally, remember that the Webcomic begins a daily run starting tomorrow - so be sure to stop by to see the latest.

Episodes 256-258

Read the comics: 256, 257, and 258.

Back from Omegacon - Wednesday's strip will go up later this evening. In the meantime, here's an "official" post about the strips for the past couple of days. (The Comic Feed now shows up through E258, and the web version is current through 258 as well.)

These strips dive deeply into my personal realms of geek - Neil Gaiman's Sandman series brought me back into the comic fandom years ago, and you may have noticed by now that I'm a big "Matrix" fan.

What's interesting (to me, anyway) is that the makers of the Matrix were also big Sandman fans - their "Morpheus" was named for Gaiman's Morpheus. There was also a lot of imagery and theming lifted from Morrison's Invisibles series. If you're interested in learning more about that, here's an interview with Morrison himself.

It only seemed fair to give Gaiman's Morpheus a chance to take a harsh look at his namesake.

In the area of "production notes", Matrix Morpheus is wearing the wrong pants - the lighting in my workshop isn't the greatest and I realized only in post that his pants weren't quite the correct shade of purple. That's fixed in later strips; just pretend you didn't notice/read this.

Gaiman's Morpheus is a very tall individual - to reflect this in mini-figure format I added some "tooth" bricks to the bottom of his feet. It created a nice "boot" look, and gave GM a bit of a height advantage over MM.

Blog about the Blog

You may have noticed that this page was getting...shall we say...infrequent updates over the last couple of days. This was due to a problem on the Blogger.com side of things. If you FTP your blog to host it on your own site, as I do, their servers weren't completing the request for some reason.

Things appear to be running smoothly now, though. Hopefully things will stay that way for a bit.

Small bit of housekeeping news: I'm going to be at OmegaCon over the weekend. Related travel issues means I may not have web-access (or time) to update the strip on Friday and Monday. I'm considering just posting all the strips through Monday to the web tomorrow morning - it seems nicer than making anyone wait until Tuesday sometime to get their fix. I'll post links here in the Blog - so if you would rather read things "one day at a time" you still can.

November Site Changes

November is a tough month for Website themes. It's a bit too early to go with the "snowy" Christmastime graphics - at least until after Thanksgiving, anyway. I suppose I could try and build a cornucopia out of bricks...

...nah. Too many other projects already on my plate.


Regardless, I had to update the site's Halloween icons and colors to something less "October-y". The new ones may not be month-specific, but will serve quite well as my default set.

The mini-figure in the Blog graphic is in my own likeness, as seems appropriate.

The Misc icon is "Mr. Short", the short lived character from the very first days of Brick House.

Finally, the new "LEGO" avatar is a dwarf from a new Castle set. (Detail photo at left, obviously.)

I just love these new mini-figures - the latest expansions to the Castle theme have all been top-notch. The new skeleton torso/arm setup that allows for posing of the figure, the skeletal horses, the new wizard "lightning" effect pieces...all great improvements and additions. Kudos to LEGO for their work in this area.

Now if only we could see a return of Classic Space...

Site Redesign

I'm in the process of making a few changes to the site, particularly the ditching of the forum, the addition of this blog, and a few cosmetic tweaks here and there.

I've updated the main site's template files (over 1000 pages of content! Who knew?) but I'm sure there are few odds and ends that were overlooked in the sweep. If you happen to spot a page with the old formatting, add a comment here so I can fix it.

There are still a few "deep links" to the old forum in the site. Those will be updated a bit more slowly as I have to port the content out to new html pages.

As far as RSS feeds go, I'm ditching the old rcfeed.xml that I started with. There are currently two feeds you can follow:

• Reasonably Blogged (this blog)
• Reasonably Clever Comic (The actual comic, not shown in the other feed)

If you have a Livejournal, you can follow the feeds by clicking these links:
Reasonably Blogged and Comic Feed

Hope you enjoy the new look - it should make navigation a lot easier.