For those of you who are “counting bullets” (and we just knew there would be a few) please note the speedloader that fell from Roland’s pocket on the previous page; and Max swinging the cylinder shut here.
We got you covered. Brace yourself for next week.
Bobservations
RELOAD
So, you might have noticed a few minor changes around the site. This is because the latest WordPress/Easel update broke it — again — and I had to kludge it back together in a hasty panic. Again. It wasn’t a big deal — Frumph, the blessed designer of Easel, who continues to improve things for free despite having to suffer whiny website weenies on a daily basis — had thought coding a two-pixel buffer around the comic in the latest update would give a cleaner look. However, since I had already pushed the dimensions of the current site right up to the last pixel, the extra four pixels made the whole thing fall apart like mishandled Jenga blocks.
I expanded the dimensions to accomodate, so it looks more or less okay at the moment, but a few things are not quite centered and the “3 Minute Max” header art is now about ten pixels too short. I could fix that easily enough, but Frumph has already announced that he will be removing the two-pixel buffer from the next update (apparently we were not the only site to suffer) so I would just have to change it back in a week or so. In the meantime, pretend not to notice.
But on the upside, there were a few goodies added to this update that I liked, and so I have incorporated them into the site. One is a Bookmark, up there to the left of the comic under LOCKDOWN. Apparently, if you are one of those people who only drop in occasionally to catch up on pages, you can use that to jump back to where you left off.
And the other is this “More” tag, which allows me to hide the blog under a Read The Rest Of This Entry link, so that people who only want to see and comment on the comic don’t need to scroll down through the whole blog to get to the relevant buttons. And for those who do like the blog, it’s still here.
I’m informed that at the moment it only works for the most recent comic page, but I’m sure they’ll change that in a future update.
But man, I swear this whole “Dealing With Updates” thing is starting to drive me nuts. They have become a near-constant bombardment. I feel that we, as a populace, may need to assign an actual day of the week for doing nothing but trying to undo, put back, or otherwise deal with the various updates to Hulu, Flash, Gmail, WordPress, Safari, Firefox, Chrome, iTunes, FaceBook and various operating systems and cellphone apps. Call it “Flash Friday” after one of the most notorious offenders. It could soon expand into an entire ritualistic festival, including heavy drinking, sanctioned curses, anointed backup drives, and the ceremonial burning of Adobe products in effigy.
In EULA we trust. Amen.
— Bob out
Bob, thanks for pointing out the speedloader. I went to the previous page and spotted it, but I would never have picked up on it by myself. Also, thank you for all the effort that you and your son are putting into giving us this great story.
We appreciate it, Paul! It’s actually a lot of fun taking your main character and putting him through hell. I suspect Will Eisner secretly felt the same, given what he’d do to The Spirit.
I’ll add that continuity in “handedness” was at the forefront of decisions regarding blocking at the earliest stages of this comic. For the record: Roland is right-handed, Fynch is left-handed, and Max is ambidextrous.
That will be one heck of a shot to make, wounded, oxygen deprived, hanging out the back of a moving vehicle with someone else’s pistol at a small target… the stuff of Heroes, neh?
“Million-to-one chances happen nine times out of ten.” ― Terry Pratchett
Heh I haven’t read enough Pratchett, obviously! I enjoyed the one Disc World book I did pick up, though.
You sure there isn’t a Chinese god (reference the previous day’s blog post) for “updates”, Bob? 😉