Post B15o3bVWjnfvtfUzhY by orva@social.orva.fi
 (DIR) More posts by orva@social.orva.fi
 (DIR) Post #B13I8XFmOb2lImWMPQ by jsstaedtler@mastodon.art
       0 likes, 0 repeats
       
       In 1999 I started a daily webcomic called Avalon. (No connection to Arthurian legend, that's just the name of the fictional town it took place in.) It was a high school comedy/melodrama with a 3-year story arc, which ended without a proper conclusion in 2004 (with a brief continuance in 2006).I never settled on what to do with it next, but I'd rather pursue other story ideas than revive Avalon. So now I'm releasing it in #CreativeCommons CC-BY so that *anyone else* may do something with it!
       
 (DIR) Post #B13IgpZomEIvyaFNo0 by jsstaedtler@mastodon.art
       0 likes, 0 repeats
       
       Avalon is still online, but not in a very accessible or high-definition format.  So my next step is to republish it all on my own personal site, https://bigraccoon.ca .There's a technical hurdle there: I saved all of the strips as greyscale GIF files (which was the best lossless format for web at the time), and they won't be hard to convert to PNG... but there are some large-format and full-colour strips still in the original Corel Photo-Paint files that I need to re-export 😖
       
 (DIR) Post #B13IzbESKkqSzPCl72 by vga256@mastodon.tomodori.net
       0 likes, 0 repeats
       
       @jsstaedtler 🙏 that is just awesome. well done.
       
 (DIR) Post #B13JQr77OV9042llJ2 by jsstaedtler@mastodon.art
       0 likes, 0 repeats
       
       There's also the matter of the story content: it was a different time back then, and I was a different person who created something I now find troublesome in places.  Since the '00s, I've constantly wondered how I might be able to "fix" parts of Avalon, but that would mean putting way more work into it when I'd rather look forward to different projects.My big hope here is that, if anyone wants to see more of it or done better, that can still happen even without me having to be involved.
       
 (DIR) Post #B13Jc1QtMw8TFlLKCW by aperture@snug.moe
       0 likes, 0 repeats
       
       @jsstaedtler unrelated but i love that site name thats very good-carrie
       
 (DIR) Post #B13SGSfOKgeKvyv1o8 by sabrina@fedi01.unicornsparkle.club
       0 likes, 0 repeats
       
       @jsstaedtler That's good timing! I've been re-reading webcomics I used to follow back in the day and Avalon was one I was considering next.
       
 (DIR) Post #B13TZg5MlW8U0anMpM by jsstaedtler@mastodon.art
       0 likes, 0 repeats
       
       Another technical issue that I have to laugh at: the strips I published online ~25 years ago were 600 pixels wide—fine for most displays and available bandwidth at the time, but barely readable on modern devices. So I'm going back to the original images made from scanned pencil drawings, which are over 3000 pixels wide, but plagued with roughness and artifacting that was smoothed over by converting to low resolution. :BlobCat_MeltTears: I'll have to do some batch processing for image quality.
       
 (DIR) Post #B13Ufu5zgm1v9Tcb4q by jsstaedtler@mastodon.art
       0 likes, 0 repeats
       
       It could be worse, and my less-than-half-my-current-age self could have not saved those original high-res copies.It was a weird workflow: I drew line art with mechanical pencil on copy paper, and scanned it to digital in *1-bit B&W mode*.  The line quality was *terrible*, but I could quickly draw or erase bits of it to make the lines reasonably clean—entirely using a mouse. :A_BlobCat_Melt: I then did flood fills in greyscale, which were easy because of the sharp, pure black lines.
       
 (DIR) Post #B15o3bVWjnfvtfUzhY by orva@social.orva.fi
       0 likes, 0 repeats
       
       @jsstaedtler Wait a second! I remember that being one of the webcomics I read in high school! What a coincidence to bump into it again like this.
       
 (DIR) Post #B16CuJGpfebtaFI4qu by oblomov@sociale.network
       0 likes, 0 repeats
       
       @jsstaedtler @orva you just made me think about the long list of dead links in my feed aggregator and bookmarks 8-/I don't think I followed many on bigpanda though? Smackjeeves and Keenspace are the ones I remember. I wonder how many are on archive.org?(These days, ComicFury is THE hosting I love the most.)
       
 (DIR) Post #B16qoX81EOLOzYy6eO by tailsteak@mastodon.art
       0 likes, 0 repeats
       
       @jsstaedtler ... this toot came across my feed and smacked me (one of the fogeys mentioned) in the face.  God, the person I was, twenty years ago...
       
 (DIR) Post #B17BUT9CQ8uhtInK52 by orva@social.orva.fi
       0 likes, 0 repeats
       
       @oblomov @jsstaedtler I mostly discovered new webcomics through link collections that authors often had in their comic sites. Then I had the ritual to go through bookmarks in specific weekdays to read them (or google reader when I learned about that and feeds).And yes, those dead bookmarks and feeds are a bit sad. Not necessary because those comics have reached their conclusion, but the _feeling_ from those times. I don't know if it is just selective memories, but it feels like webcomics and blogs from that time were a lot more "pure". Even if ads and merch were present, nothing was optimized around that: stories contained advertisement unfriendly themes and imaginary, art and stories were more raw, etc. I miss that feeling.
       
 (DIR) Post #B17BUb84kClge8KXRI by jsstaedtler@mastodon.art
       0 likes, 0 repeats
       
       @orva @oblomov YES, I too had the browser bookmarks sorted into days of the week, and I always looked forward to getting to the computer and checking all of that day's in turnNow I try my hardest to get notified when new stuff is available, and RSS is a convenient means for that.  I generally don't use bookmarks anymore, instead I keep a site open in a browser tab and refresh it whenever I remember it exists :BlobCat_MeltTears: