Comic for Monday, June 29th, 2020
…a rather late comic at this point. We are back to Naomi ambition to visit Eliana (to find Ila).
As you can probably tell, I have not dealt with the lack-of-photoshop thing yet, so we are still doing it via my drawing program.
Eliana and Naomi do know each other, but not super well. Eliana could probably put together who it was by what she was doing, and the fact that she was lecturing a red construct in the middle of fighting it. Naomi’s personality at very least tends to be… distinctive, even if she doesn’t currently have purple hair.
Naomi does not really know a lot about red constructs. Her main experience with them so far was Atter’s, hence her referring to them as demons. They also look like creepy monster things (at least in this case and that case) so that fits what Naomi would lump into “probably demons”. Naomi is not exactly a reliable narrator, considering that while she is smarter than she tends to act, her understanding of things can be… strange.
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I did promise an update, and an update I do have. On friday, I gave two week notice to my day job that I’d be leaving. You folks here are no strangers to me complaining about it, and unfortunately with the company restructuring around COVID, things have really just become more problematic. With a huge swath of the onshore resources being cut, I’ve been left with more and more meetings at early AM and late PM hours… currently my daily first and last meetings start and end 15-16 hours apart. It’s a schedule I sort of hate, and ended up disrupting my life for things like, well, drawing comics.
There won’t be an immediate change, and we’ll still be limping along on the schedule until the two weeks are up, but after the two-weeks, there will be quite a big change. I am not going to immediately take another day job. For the time being, I’m going to spend more time on my hobbies and projects, and this is one of those. So, starting in the second half of July, we should at very least get back to regular weekly and buffered updates. Obviously I cannot do the comic for a living as I need to pay rent and eat and things; it will be part of a portfolio of things I work on. I’ll give it about a year to see how well it works, and after that I’ll reconsider and rebalance my schedule.
I’ll also be spending a lot more time on my D&D/TTRPG stuff (as that’s the closet to something that does pay my bills of my hobbies ), and some new projects; between this and that, I’ll be allocated roughly half the time I spent on my day job, which should be enough to get the comic back on track and updating smoothly. I also hope to spend more time drawing in general as it’s a hobby that I just haven’t had time for – I have drawn pretty much nothing outside of the comic pages for months now. Hopefully we’ll actually have patreon content around here again for the first time in a long time, as well just a regular consistent update schedule. In general, I don’t want to try to monetize my work more than I currently do, so there’s not going to be any big changes on that front, just more time and effort spent seeing if I can make them into something that’s more of a thing.
Ultimately this isn’t necessarily a good time to be leaving my job and source of health care, but my job was headed in the direction that I ended up feeling this was a necessary, if unfortunate, step. I was sort of hoping one of the rounds of layoffs would include me, but it became apparent that there was little real chance I’d get laid off, rather I’d just be given more and more problems from all of the other people that were being laid off and it was piled on my plate, a plate that was already sort of at capacity… both in time and stress.
So I’m going to give my hobbies a shot, and see if I can live off them. Over the course of the next year I’ll see if I can grow them to a point where they pay a reasonable portion of my bills, and from there I’ll decide what to do in the future. If I can get fairly close, I’ll keep going with them; if I cannot, I’ll either aim to supplant with contract work in my old day job field (which there is less of right now due to COVID, but will presumably be more of in the future again) or another day job – I’m a pretty well rounded and experienced programmer and tech fellow, so I’m not too worried about getting another day job if I have to down the road.
Anyway; that’s the deal and that’s what’s going on. This is the actual light at the end of the tunnel this time folks; only time will tell exactly what that light holds, but I’m pretty confident that, if nothing else, we’ll as least get weekly updates again, and hopefully more. In addition to my current hobbies, I’ll be adding a few more to the roster; if any of them seem to have overlap with the interests of folks here, I’ll be sure to let you know 🙂
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I guess you’re taking some time off from the comic?
“limping along on the schedule until the two weeks are up…”
Not taking time off, just super-busy wrapping up the job. And limping along, as indicated.
Leaving an IT job with notice usually involves a spike in phone calls. You would think this would be easier than the normal job, but typically it results in fewer available hours.
Yep, massive pain to leave an IT job responsibly. Most especially when you’ve been there a while and you’re the guy that knows a variety of important things. Compressing it to two weeks is nearly impossible in a lot of cases, but you do your best.
Yes… hundreds of things that were tagged for “later” have suddenly had to become “now”. As I created a lot of the systems we have used or deployed, the realization that the person that knows how all those systems works and has been on-call to handle them for so many years going away has been rough.
Not to mention that a lot of projects need my attention before I’m gone for this or that, and most of the people that all of this would have been handed off to are already gone due to the COVID layoffs… it’s been a tricky one.
In part it is more than just all the stuff I made… a lot of stuff has been handed off to me over the years as other people left; any redundancy has been stripped away by lay offs and attrition.
Friday… Friday is the light at the end of the tunnel… 😀
…Also my credit card number was apparently stolen and used for fraud, and speaking of lack of redundancy… only had one of those 😀 That’s been fun to deal with……. No idea where/how they got it as I’m fairly careful with that sort of thing, but be wary and check your credit card statements occasionally folks.
I heard when I was younger that 3 or 4 credit cards was optimal for credit score, so I collected them and used one for most things and another for riskier places of purchase and ignored the others. It’s worked pretty well both in terms of credit score and ability to stop using one card for a couple of months without too big of problems.
So… It’s Friday…
CONGRATULATIONS!!!
?
I hope.
Either way, have a nice weekend!
Thanks! Monday will be my first day of my new “job”… making sure there’s an on time comic update 🙂
I am pretty confident we’ll get a comic tomorrow. In the future, we’ll be back to the night before for them getting posting once the buffer is restablished, but we aren’t quite there yet… the most productive thing I did this weekend was figure out how to cut my own hair (…as in make it shorter at least…)
Playing with fire? That tends to make it shorter.
Professional hair clippers really aren’t that expensive. Searching just now, two of the google ads were only about 25% more than a single hair cut where I last had my hair cut (at a friend’s wife’s salon, whose services I was using to be supportive, rather than going for a discount), or 400% more than a single hair cut back when I was in college 30 years ago.
That having been said, if you have no training and didn’t grow up with them, professional clippers may not necessarily be 100% intuitive. I’m not sure, I wouldn’t know, as my mother was a beautician, so grew up in a house with professional hair clippers. Even with that exposure growing up, however, I still spent a bit of a time figuring out how to work out the intricacies of using the clippers on a head that isn’t a few feet in front of me, but is instead right where I am. It’s old hat now, but the first time took a bit.
I’ve always found it frustrating how much of that ‘now’ is spent on making more things that will never get documented by the author, rather than on documenting things previously made that weren’t documented properly.
Technically, if the remaining team is sufficiently competent to properly maintain what was already written, they’ll be able to to take properly documented requirements to implement something the leaving programmer could write in two weeks time. Of course, this is only the case because my “properly maintain” includes the programming expertise to debug and correct bugs, rather than management’s idea of “patch the results of those existing bugs.” Management’s idea generally won’t possibly work, because the code written in such a short time by somebody who knows they’re not going to be accountable for it is generally so bad it’s not at all possible to manually correct all of the errors it produces. Assuming it actually makes a significant number of changes. There’s also some I’ve seen that simply generated testing output, or would abend before managing to break the first database record.
But most of the people I’ve seen leave on two weeks notice have been tasked with writing multiple pieces of crap in that time. Stuff that would *normally* take them more than two weeks to do individually, and enough of them to normally take months, suddenly get “done” within the span of two weeks, and it takes *YEARS* to debug it all. I’ve had better luck with a few of them by simply writing them from scratch, using the festering crap left behind as poorly and oddly written requirements, not even copy-pasting a single line from what they hacked out in two or three days time with no testing.
Note that I’m not blaming the people who are leaving and writing this mess. They’re doing what they’re told. And when it was me in that position, I unfortunately had to agree with management: the thing I was writing couldn’t possibly have been written by the existing team members, they needed a new programmer (I’d been the only one on the team, which was a big part of why I decided to leave abruptly.) So I wrote copious comments explaining the why, and hoped whomever they found to replace me could figure out what I’d intended.
“and it takes *YEARS* to debug it all.”
That’s a bit humorous. You think it will eventually be debugged.
I think you know better, and just want to keep Hope alive!
I absolutely know better, but there’s also an element of truth to it regardless.
We’ve retired dozens of scripts written in times like this, without replacing them, because the scripts turned out to be more problematic than they were worth.
My coworkers have also performed the ‘use the existing script as poor requirements documents’ technique, but with less success. Mostly because I have over 20 years of experience, and I’ve mostly worked with people who have 0-10 years of experience or are sorely incompetent for reasons not related to their years of experience.
We’ve replaced others by writing up new requirements and implementing from scratch, despite the existing implementation.
I am aware of companies which have gone under because of such scripts. I’m aware of companies which were bought out for pennies on the dollar because of such scripts.
All of that said, the remainder that either will get fixed, or will only be kludged and rekludged to try to mitigate the bugs which never actually get fixed, will still consume years of debugging time over the course of their existence.
There’s also an element of “it’s pretty demoralizing to tell someone they’re creating more problems than they’re solving” to someone in their final two weeks of work, even when they already know it. I glossed over the dates and didn’t realize we were on Past’s final day, I just realized that the comic had only updated once since I had time to check, so it was probably still in those two weeks. I did have something I felt should be communicated, but I wanted to be careful about not sounding too critical of the whole thing.
I’ll be back on Monday; as others have mentioned, this is my last week at my day job, and predictably has resulted in chaos; I should have a comic up on Monday, and from there on… pretty confident we’ll be at least weekly for a bit. Not going to go too crazy with promises right now, but I think we’ll be back to schedule at least.
Got it. Comic expected 7/27. I’ll see ya then.
If she’s not part of the assault team trying to kill you, then you should let her in. Even if she’s not there to protect you directly….you just know she’s going to wipe out said assault team anyway out of boredom. (Or worse, they’ll attack in the middle her trying to have a conversation! So rude!)
As for the lack of doors, maybe pick up a piece of wall on your way in, leave it in a doorway? Even if it falls over when you knock, at least you can have a laugh at it…
The only real downside I see is that buildings containing Naomi end up with large holes in the walls more often than normal.
Then there’s the argument to be made that this tends to happen as she enters, and the damage is already done.
Let’s be honest. If you’re going to be attacked, that’s actually the BEST time for Naomi to come by for a social visit.
Point of direction!! The holes will not be “downside”. They will simply be sideside, or horizontal, if you will
Both excellent points.
At least if Naomi categorizes you as friend, then it is an excellent time for a visit from her.
And if course if Naomi is trying to fly again, then those new openings may be downside.
“…people trying to break in and KILL me!!”
“… between me and your not-demon, we already beat them up.”
Thank you Naomi for reminding me why I should never piss you off. Or Peter.
Whoa, big changes. I can’t speak for the masses but I, for one, will be upping my Patreon subscription immediately.
All I hear is MORE COMICS!
Alright, that’s some deep stuff. I do sympathize, I just can’t admit it publicly.
The patreon thing is a good idea, Pittsburg. I’ve just upped a bit too. I know it’s just a couple dollars, but please look at it as support and endorsement!
I appreciate that, and I do intend to make sure patreon rewards and just… general fun content is back in the future – I’ll probably put both more writing and art there in the future.
I will put the word of caution that we won’t see changes quite yet. Still two weeks more at the job before I can start really moving more time into things. I just wanted to let people here know what the score was and where we are going, as many of you have been more patient with the schedule 🙂
My hope is over the next year I can make all the things I do more… more stuff, more people, more projects. We’ll see how it goes, and either way I think it’ll be more fun for everyone.
Yeah, I’m going to up mine too. (Probably won’t get around to it until next month though.)