I’m always starting new projects, I must have ten or more on the go at any one time. I do get them finished… eventually but I find it hard to stay focussed.
In fact Odd-Fish as a whole was partly an attempt to break this habit and force me to keep up a sustained effort over an extended period of time without letting it fall by the wayside and so far it’s pretty much worked. Odd-Fish has been studiously undated regularly for the last ten months.
But at what cost? Other projects, most notably Biro-Art have fallen foul of my old habits in favour of Odd-Fish and nor Biro-Art has only been updated once in nearly a year. It’s not that I don’t want to update, it’s just that I never seem to get the time. There’s always something else that needs doing, like an new Odd-Fish strip or something to watch on telly or the constant daily urge to eat and sleep.
I’ve even been avoiding getting any new games so that I don’t spend hours shooting monsters when I should be wrangling a biro.
It doesn’t help that it’s become a hell of a lot more busy at work either. I used to use drawing as a way of avoiding boredom on long, quiet shifts but now there’s no such thing. Our branch is no longer open overnight so my beloved night shifts are no longer available and the service stays stupidly busy well past midnight these days so I’ve pretty much given up even taking out a pencil at work any more.

Usually I’m not too keen on asking for donations, but circumstances are forcing my hand so I’ve placed a tips jar on Odd-Fish.
As I’ve mentioned before,
several UK Internet Service Providers including the one I’m with, Virgin Media, are installing spyware called Phorm on their servers in order to track its customers we habits, read their email and generally look over our shoulders in order to give us ‘more relevant advertising’ so I’m moving ISP to a small company who have pledged that they will never implement Phorm or anything like it. Unfortunately, moving ISP involves the purchase of a new telephone line and new broadband modem and router, an expense I really don’t need right now because of my other, more important reason for the tips jar.
My cat, Ziggy, an eleven year old huge tabby tomcat has developed a lump on his ‘wrist’ and is now only using three legs. The Vet says it might be a tumor (hopefully benign) but he has to go for an x-ray and possibly other tests then surgery if it can be removed. The x-ray alone is going to cost between £100 and £300 ($190 to $580) so I am throwing myself on your mercy.
If you enjoy my little corner of the web, if Odd-Fish makes you smile, please leave a couple of pennies, whatever you can afford in the PayPal tips jar so that I can still eat once Ziggy’s vet bills are paid.
Thank you in advance.

On Wednesday and Thursday visits to Odd-Fish took a major upturn. Instead of my usual 8 to 10 thousand daily page views I got 31000 for Wednesday and 37000 for Thursday all thanks to Stumbleupon users liking the ‘Strife & Nightlife‘ comic.
Delightful though it was it caused some headaches.
My image host, Servage, decided that I was using too many resources and pulled the plug on me without warning.
I had to desperately move everything to different hosting as quickly as possible. Of course all this happened during an upturn in traffic so lots of people got to see a comic site with no damn comic.
I specifically chose the host I was using because of their huge bandwidth allowance- 5000gb a month but it wasn’t because of bandwidth they killed me. Oh no, I’ve only used 83gb at the time of writing this. No, they pulled the site because I was getting too many hits at once, or to put it another way, my site was too busy and it slowed their server.
If a simple comic site can do that I hope no one they host ever tries to run a business on their server! a few too many customers shopping at Christmas and bang goes their site.
What the hell is the point of having five terabytes of bandwidth if the server can’t cope with user load to match!
What REALLY got me angry was even when the traffic rush was over and I’d moved some files elsewhere to lighten the load they point-blank refused to unsuspend my account until the 12 hour punishment period expired. What sort of crappy customer service is that? Way to piss off your customers guys!
Anyway sod them. I’m closing the account and going to a host that doesn’t power their servers with Sinclair Spectrums.
Rant over. Smiling now.