I loved Calvin and Hobbes when I was a kid. Still do. I’ve had Spaceman Spiff built for years, finally got a head to make a Hobbes to go with him, so it was about time I did a comic. Hobbes never really appeared in Spaceman Spiff fantasies of Calvin’s, so I named him Hobbs, without the “e” to make him a bit different. I can imagine them having that conversation where he makes up a different name that’s more or less his real name and Calvin getting frustrated.
Okay folks, here’s the deal. I’ve got the issues with the site resolved. Turns out the problem was you guys, well, you guys and me since I responded. It turns out that between all of you wonderful people and myself we’ve managed to rack up over 20,000 comments throughout the posts on this comic, and my webhost could not handle that in the price range that I was paying for. To get the site up and running as fast as possible I had to delete all those old comments. All of them. I did back them up though, so if I can upgrade my hosting to something more capable of dealing with it I can put all of those old comments back. That may take some doing though. As of now the only income this comic makes is from the Star Pirates ad you see on the right there, and the occasional donation (you know who you are), and that is basically the money that goes into pay for hosting and so on. I’m looking into the details of how much it would cost to upgrade hosting and whatnot so I don’t have any goals in mind yet, but I very much enjoy letting you guys comment and obviously the forums aren’t what people want, the comments below the individual comics seem to be least objectionable to people. I want that to continue, and I want to go back and reactive the ones that were there. Hopefully it’ll be another few years before we build up as many comments, so I have time before we reach site crippling levels. I want this comic to grow still, I want to expand things but I guess I’m nearing the threshold of how much cheap hosting can support. I’m thinking of starting a kickstarter or some other form of raising money to keep the site up and running and possibly give me a chance to bring back some of the content that I’ve scaled back on (as a reward for generosity, money can’t buy everything, and I need money, time, and inspiration to keep things moving, so we’ll see what we can do.) I will keep you guys updated, and thank you to all the comments on facebook and twitter and those of you who got worried and inquired about what was going on. Social Media is one way to reach out to me and for me to reach out to more readers, so I’m working on making better use of that. I want this comic to keep going for many years to come. I just might need some help from all of you, and that help will be rewarded as best as I can.
Comments are fixed if anyone who made a comment today wants to remake said comment. I know some people did, but I have no record of what those comments were.
You’d probably be far better off with a slice host (linode, kickassvps, etc) and putting LAMP stack on it than going with an already there hosting solution. For linode at least, a 4Gig RAM instance runs $40/mo and allows 4TB of traffic. That is most likely overkill. Then you just need to find which one of the geeks that reads the strip is willing to donate their time to get it setup.
I’ve not interacted with it myself, but it sounds like Patreon is more aimed at this sort of thing (long-term ongoing running costs) than Kickstarter (one-off funding for a specific project)
I agree with this. I also believe that Patreon would be a much better means of gaining financial support.
Perhaps you should look into Patreon for help raising some money for the upgrade. It seems to work for a lot of other webcomics.
Agreed I donate an amount monthly via patreon for another webcomic and would be happy to for this one to keep it going because I think it’s great!
YES!
He appears in only 1 panel, but I now have a new favorite LSG character. 🙂
DOC, YOU SIR ARE AWESOME!
It was explained how doing the Kessel Run in distance equated to it being the fastest (so while it may, or may not, have started out as a goof {like how Doc Brown pronounces ‘gigawatt’} they have worked out a vialble, and accepted, explanation)
I’ll second Guesticus’ comment. The “viable” explanation (more or less) had to do with skirting the event horizons of a cluster of black holes. The closer you went, the faster you made the run, because of the shorter the total distance that you traveled. The faster the ship, the shorter your pass-radius to each black hole could be without falling in. The Millennium Falcon was fast enough to pass the cluster and travel a total distance of under 12 parsecs, which until then was the record shortest-course.
That explanation always felt unnecessary to me. The original script implied that Han was just making nonsense up to impress (what he thought were) a couple of yokels, which seems fine as an explanation to me.