Category Archives: Announcements

Hey, there’s something coming up that I want to tell you about!

Announcements

Taking Calendars off the Calendar

To quote Professor Farnsworth: “Good news, everyone! Bad news!”

We will not be producing a Schlock Mercenary Monthly Calendar for 2016. The 2015 calendar sold well enough with other merchandise to not be an outright loss, but the books and slipcases were what carried last year for us.

This year we’re looking at the Planet Mercenary production schedule, and we simply cannot justify taking time out to make a calendar when the project for which we’ve accepted money in advance is not yet complete.

We’re also delaying our print run of Schlock Mercenary: Force Multiplication until after we’ve got Planet Mercenary queued up for print. This hurts a bit more, because not having a new book out in time for Christmas shoppers is the very definition of “leaving money on the table,” but again, having accepted money in advance for a thing that is not yet finished, I cannot in good conscience spend time on other projects—not even profitable ones.

There’s an update over on the Planet Mercenary Kickstarter page if you’d like more details on how that project is going. The salient point? It’s keeping me busy enough that the only other business activity I can justify is the daily updates on the comic. The movie reviews? Okay, I can’t really justify those, except to say that going out to see a show helps refill the well on the other stuff, and I might as well tell you how the show went.

This morning was spent on Mayhem cards for Planet Mercenary. This afternoon I have a week of comics to pencil and ink. This blog post is happening in the cracks, and the crack is swiftly closing…

Announcements

That DNS Thingy Yesterday

Yesterday there was a connectivity outage around one of our DNS name servers at bkwm.com. This wouldn’t have been noticeable to the general public, except unbeknownst to us, the hosting provider for the backup name servers had been blocking DNS traffic “for security purposes.”

The result? Lots of people couldn’t find schlockmercenary.com.

Sandra’s out of town, and this is something she usually handles. In her absence I panicked and decided to make matters inestimably worse by using her Dotster login (Dotster is where the schlockmercenary.com domain is registered) to point to different name servers.

This is something with which I had zero experience. Contrary to our wildest hopes, but to nobody’s actual surprise, I made an amazing mess of things, and motivated millions¹ of panicked readers to tweet at me, email me, or otherwise attempt a back-channel ping. The DNS servers I pointed at weren’t configured correctly, and simply pointed the domain at the parking page.

As of this morning I am an expert². Also, I did not get much sleep, and the work day I wanted to have yesterday was spent on urgency rather than importance.

The excitement accelerated a “skunkworks” project I’ve had Gary Henson of Plus 14 Ltd working on: x.schlockapp.com, a new engine upon which to build Schlock Mercenary on the web. He threw bandaids at things, nailed two windows shut, and then we pointed people at the under-construction site so they could get their Schlock fix independently of me getting DNS fixed. This means that site is no longer “skunkworks.” It’s out in the open, and it’s not really good for much besides delivering the comic³.

The salient point: DNS is working now. If you can’t find comics at schlockmercenary.com, caches need to be refreshed (some of which may be on your ISP.)

 

¹ dozens
² on the Dunning-Krueger scale
³ it is, however, an amazing piece of work, destined to be the greatest thing since ALT-code superscripts.

Announcements

Skunkworks Schlock Site

We’re mid-project here at Chez Schlock, but http://x.schlockapp.com is in a state where it’ll function nicely as a mirror if things go wrong with the official Schlock Mercenary server.

The biggest piece of the project is an infrastructure rip-and-replace. The site is being built on a commercial content management engine, and for now we’re building it to look pretty much like the old site. Except for the places where we’re not.

Why the change? Lots of reasons, most of them having to do with the stuff I need to do, rather than anything y’all see. I needed a clean admin interface with some specific functions, and the old one was not clean, and the functions I wanted were buried or missing.

Comments are not enabled. It’s not that we don’t want feedback. It’s that we don’t… okay, you know what? Right now we don’t want feedback.

Hey, look up there! A comic strip! For FREE!

UPDATED: 
When I jokingly said “we don’t want feedback,” I meant it. Keep it to yourself until we’re further along. Do not tweet it at me, or that tweet will be the last thing I ever read from you.