In general, I like to be candid about my creative mistakes in the hopes that you can avoid similar ones. It’s hard, when starting out, to know what to trust of yourself. When beginning a new series or project, how do you know if you can follow it through? Especially if it’s an ongoing one, and not a strip with a defined beginning, middle and end? What if you get through six months of stories and hit an impenetrable wall?

Maybe that’s a fallacy on my part. I don’t think Charles Schulz started Peanuts worrying whether or not he’d have enough material to last him fifty years. But it’s a paralyzing worry I have. I know that we (Scott, Dave, Brad and I) have preached that you should launch a project quietly and then grow it over time: you evolve it and direct it towards what you really want. It can’t begin there.

I had to reply to this comment on yesterday’s Chainsawsuit about reblogging and how attribution gets removed, because it was succinctly incorrect enough to warrant special attention. HeapBigMeatMountain writes:

Yes, it’s bad.. but I do understand *WHY* they feel they must remove attribution.

Now, with all the draconian copyright laws and stuff.. Not JUST the artist, but his publisher/whatever-big-scary-corporation might have control over the toon. You post.. they find out.. then you get SUED out of existance.

If you remove all that info.. the odds are in your favor that most folks on the internet will laugh and either be too lazy or ignorant to concern themselves with finding out who did it/where it came from. Thus, it reduces the chances of a lawsuit (still doesn’t make it right.. ) and having to pay money just to share a laugh.

Laughing should be free… Don’t harm the laughs.

This infuriates me. Laughing is already free, you troglodyte. The thing that breaks almost all of this viewpoint is that new-media entities such as webcomics actually want you to share their stuff. I want you to reblog my comics. I want you to spread them around because I want more people to be aware of them and enjoy them and laugh at them.

I just also want them to be able to find their way back to my goddamned website. Is that so much to ask? You don’t have to put “Chainsawsuit is (C) and (R) Kris Straub 2007-2012 All Rights Reserved” in the blog or anything. I’m not going to sue you. My copyright is already maintained by the mere fact that I created the comic strip. All I’m asking is that you don’t bring my image into Photoshop and delete the URL from the corner! That’s all you have to not do.

The last time I got bored, I wanted to end Starslip, and I ended up rebooting it. Effectively, I cleared away the parts that weren’t working for me anymore, or were holding me up, because I kinda believed it was going to end back then in 2009.

Thinking that it was ending was freeing, because suddenly I didn’t have to listen to what it was "supposed to be" anymore. I made it more into what I wanted. When I did that, I wondered why I had waited so long.

I don’t think it’s always an option, but I think "what if this guy died? what if this was turned upside-down? what if none of this mattered?" are all good questions to ask yourself when you’re stuck and bored.

I will not answer everything, but it is worth a try

And now, here are some faces automatically identified by iPhoto, in crowd scenes in the backgrounds of photos I had.

Recently I was made aware of a micropayment “donation” website, kachingle.com. I would like to be able to open this commentary by saying that the core concept of Kachingle is interesting and sound, but if this is the first you’ve heard of Kachingle, I don’t want “Kris had a nice thing to say about it” to be your initial impression. Most of what I have to say is extremely negative.

Okay, you know what — I have to present the core concept to discuss why Kachingle is doing something absurdly irresponsible. So here it is. Micropayments don’t work, as they have been presented in the past, because I can’t afford to give 25 cents — even 5 cents — to every site I use and like on the web. Even in those tiny increments, we would be talking about $30-$60 a month, and I’m not willing to pay that, even though if pressed I would say most of the sites I use deserve it.

Kachingle asks, okay, what if we made the upper bound on your spending each month $5? Whatever number of sites you wish to say thanks to, they’d split your $5. If there are more sites, they’d all make less, but at least they’re getting something, and the good news is you’re not on the hook for more than the $5. That seems kinda reasonable, right?

Not the irresponsible way Kachingle is managing it. This is not the micropayments solution provider anyone asked for. And I think Kachingle knows it. This is how they present it: