Irregular Webcomic!

Irregular Webcomic! #99 Rerun

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 10:11:00 +0000

2012-02-22 Rerun commentary: Guarding the Holy Grail for that long must have been really, really boring.

Talking about the movie scene of which this strip is a parody: What did that knight eat, anyway? Did he live off the life-giving essence of the Grail and not require any other sustenance? You'd think he would have aged a bit more gracefully.

In this strip we see the use of LEGO castle walls as backgrounds. These are great pieces for backgrounds, as they're fairly large, which means you only need a few of them to throw together quickly to make a large background. And they have interesting shapes which gives the background some texture that you don't get with a neat wall of monocoloured bricks.

Irregular Webcomic! #98 Rerun

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 10:11:00 +0000

2012-02-21 Rerun commentary: Much of Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith was filmed at Fox Studios in Sydney, my home town. (As was Episode II: Attack of the Clones.) So when they needed extras to fill set backgrounds, they did casting calls for people to show up and audition. The headline of this strip is an actual cut and paste from TheForce.net on the indicated day.

I did think about going along to try out, but now I'm not sure why I didn't.

Irregular Webcomic! #97 Rerun

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 10:11:00 +0000

2012-02-20 Rerun commentary: It seems you can't even hide from spam if you're in exile on Dagobah.

Although that's not a great representation of Dagobah there. In hindsight, I should have used my swamp set. I really have no idea why I didn't.

Irregular Webcomic! #96 Rerun

Sat, 11 Feb 2012 10:11:00 +0000

2012-02-18 Rerun commentary: Oooh, it's the first appearance of the Charity Collector Guy! I never came up with a name for this character, beyond "Charity Collector Guy". I think at this point assigning him any name would be impossible, since anything else would sound wrong.

By the way, I'm resisting the temptation to explain all of the jokes in these rerun annotations (for those strips where I haven't already gone into detail about an explanation, that is.) I think that might be going off on too much of a tangent.

Irregular Webcomic! #95 Rerun

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 10:11:00 +0000

Thanks to That Cat Girl for the marvellous script for this one.

I posted the photos only to my LiveJournal and asked for suggestions for a script. And my idea to foist some of the creative requirements off on to someone else worked wonderfully.

2012-02-17 Rerun commentary: Still no backgrounds apart from the blank white wall behind the set.

It's around this point that I was starting to realise that writing a gag every day was difficult work. I ended up doing several strips in this manner: taking photos first, posting them, and soliciting script suggestions. Eventually I managed to get into a writing rhythm and build up a buffer of many scripts so that I didn't face this problem any more.

This strip was really motivated by the recent acquisition of a new LEGO set, with the rope bridge and skull idol thing as shown. It's nice to show off spffy new sets.

Irregular Webcomic! #94 Rerun

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 10:11:00 +0000

Thanks to Constantine Thomas for lending me his CPU cycles to render panel 3 with POV-Ray. The image took 46 minutes and 55 seconds to render at 320 by 240 pixels. The full image is shown here at that size:

My geriatric Pentium II took over two hours to partially render the same scene, getting only 60% of the way through it. I need faster hardware!

2012-02-16 Rerun commentary: Pentium II... wait... that means I've only upgraded my computer once since 2003.

No wonder I'm starting to feel a bit behind the times. I bet a current-day home machine in a relatively standard configuration could render that image in a minute or two.