Archive for ‘Blog’

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The Other Team

by Justin on May 30, 2011 at 12:01 am
The Other Team

About two weeks ago I sat down with Lindsey and we discussed the direction we wanted to take the comic. It started out as a series of one-shot jokes, many of which didn’t make much sense to people outside of our small bowling league, but we realize that we can’t keep that up forever. We’re having too much fun doing this comic to let it die out and we decided that the best way to keep things going was to start a storyline, but we were having a hard time getting it started. ‘Overinspired’ was our first comic that was meant to launch us into a story, and for the most part we have kept more consistency since then, but it still didn’t feel like we had a real story going. It struck us both at once what our story was missing: antagonists.

Enter: ‘Flawless Victory’, a.k.a. the other team, a.k.a. those damned sand-baggers, a.k.a. douche-bags. We bowl with some great people, but we do think that some of them take things a little too seriously. However, very few of them are assholes, which is why we tried hard to make sure our antagonists didn’t look like anyone in particular, though I think that the kid in the black shirt might sparkle in sunlight. Either way expect to see more of these guys.

The website redesign is getting off to a good start. We’ve got a spiffy new background that hopefully isn’t slowing your loading time down too much. Lindsey has already made a footer as well which I’m going to try to implement today. Ultimately our entire layout is going to be different. We’ve decided to have the comic on a separate page and use the homepage for the blog, which will update more frequently. I’m thinking comic updates every Monday and new blog posts on Mondays and Thursdays. We’re also hard at work creating products to be sold in an online store as well as at conventions. At Fanaticon we saw which products people liked and which ones they looked over, so hopefully that will help us have some interesting stuff in the store.

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This is a test

by Justin on June 3, 2011 at 10:26 am
Posted In: Blog

Trying to impliment some of the changes I’ve talked about in previous posts. Please bear with me.

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And we’re there!

by Justin on June 3, 2011 at 11:55 am
Posted In: Blog

Changes are all finished! Welcome to the new and improved bowlcomic.com! As I said in a previous post: the main page will no longer display the comic. Instead it will have the blog, which in case of new comic uploads will include a link to the associated comic. Also we’ve changed the menubar slightly. We now have a link to the comic page which looks just like the main page used to look and displays the most recent comic. You might also notice we have a link to the store. The store is not open yet, as we don’t really have any product to sell, but we’re actively working on remedying that issue. There is no longer a link to the homepage in the menubar, but you can always get back to the main page by clicking on our banner at the very top of the page. And of course we also now have our fancy background and footer images which have been up for about a week.

Now we actually have a place to blog that doesn’t interfere with the comic posts! Starting this week you can still expect our regular comic updates every Monday, and now also a blog update every Thursday! The blog will mostly be comic and bowling related, telling stories that don’t fit well into the comic and keeping you informed on things we’re working on. So check in next Thursday or even better, subscribe to our RSS Feed.

P.S. If you want to skip all the blog updates and just see the comic, you can still do that by just going to bowlcomic.com/comic.

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Rivalry

by Justin on June 6, 2011 at 8:22 am
Rivalry

Had a really hard time writing this page. I knew that I wanted to show that their team had a clear leader, demonstrate their serious demeanor, and introduce a rivalry between Nathan (the guy in the black shirt who has yet to be introduced in the comic) and Parker, but I had no idea how to end it. I like to end each page with a punchline; this is a comedy after all, but I simply couldn’t think of any real zingers for this one. In the end Lindsey suggested Gloria’s casual assertion to Parker’s previous statement. Not particularly strong as punchlines go, but good enough to let us use this page to continue the story.

I’ve got to say I’m really happy with the way this website is turning out. When we started this comic I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. I’d taken basic computer classes in college and knew some very rudimentary HTML, but had never dealt with CSS or PHP. I still don’t really know what I’m doing, but I feel like I’m starting to get the hang of it. I’m sure there will still be kinks to workout, and strange downtime where I’m panicking at home unsure how I’ve crashed the site this time, but it’s at least becoming less common.

For those that missed our midweek redesign last week you’ll notice that things are a little different. In short there are links that will send you to the comic and there will be new blog posts every Thursday. If you’d like to know more, read the previous post.

Thats all for now, be sure to check back on Thursday for my first regularly scheduled blog post. This weeks title: “You guys must really like The Big Lebowski”


Edit: apparently still working the kinks out of the redesign, but we’re getting there.

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Sandbagging Explained

by Justin on June 30, 2011 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Blog

Sandbaggers. The word feels heavy in my mouth, like it’s too thick to spit out. In my opinion there are some people on my league that take it too seriously, but those ones don’t bother me half as much as the sandbaggers. The sandbaggers take it so seriously that they feel the need to cheat the system in order to win. I’ll break it down….

We bowl on a handicap league. You have an average, lets say it’s 150. You then have a handicap, it’s equal to 200 minus your average. In this case: 50. Every game you bowl, your handicap is added to your score, this way, assuming the person your bowling against has an average of 200 or less, no matter how bad you bowl, you can beat someone who is better, as long as you are more above average than they are. All in all it’s a very simply system, but it works. That is until someone decides to abuse it.

Someone who is a decent bowler can intentionally bowl poorly so that they have a low average, and thus a high handicap. Then when they actually need to win they can simply bowl like they normally would when not sandbagging, and easily be well above average. A hands on example would look like this: Lisa is a decent bowler, with an average of 160. But when Lisa bowls on her league, she intentionally bowls around a 120. Because her average for the league is 120, she has a handicap of 80. That means that when Lisa decides she wants to win, she can bowl her actual average of 160 and still get her 80 point handicap, giving her a 240 total, even though she didn’t really bowl any better than she usually would.

What gets tricky for sandbagging teams is to win enough to be in the tournament while still maintaining a low average. This can be done though, by simply winning by as narrow a margin as possible and when you loose make sure you loose by a lot. We’ve bowled teams before that were obviously employing this tactic. They would always bowl after you, and you could actually predict what they would do by looking at how you had done. They made sure to keep the game as even as possible until the 10th frame. That’s when it got really obvious. They waited until every one of us had bowled, sat in a huddle and did some math, then bowled just good enough to win. They did this in all three games.

I’m a competitive person, and I understand that you want to win, but don’t cheat to win. And to all the people who say it’s not cheating because it’s part of the system I say no. The system was designed to give everyone a chance, but the system isn’t perfect. Exploiting a flaw or loophole in a system is still cheating. What I really hate though is how knowing that there are sandbaggers out there has made me suspicious of anyone who suddenly bowls way above average. And really for all I know they’re just having a really great night. Lord knows that I’ve had a few days where I was just unstoppable and bowled 40 pins over my average in each game. I’d hate to think that people believe that I’m sandbagging just because I had a few good games.

To wrap things up, sandbaggers, you know who you are, and you’re messing things up for everyone; please stop. What you’re doing is cheating, and all your victories are hollow because of that. My favorite thing is to see you eliminated in the first round of the tournament by a team that’s just doing there best and that’s put in a few extra practice sessions to get there.

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