Added 1 new A* page:The reader who snapped up the original art for the recent episode 18, page 52 sent me a nice photo of what he's done with it:
I dunno if it's as impressive as that physics degree hanging under it, but it's looking pretty spiffy in that frame, if I do say so myself! Nice job! :)
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You may or may not remember the "#cmdprompt" Twitter text adventure game I started up a year and a half ago, before discovering that it was gonna be way too much work, but brave reader @jrmoore91 has had it in mind of late to the point where he's starting it back up! If you like text adventure games, and you like Twitter, or maybe just one or the other, this may be the hot cup of Chai you've been waiting for. You can always find the latest progress under the #cmdprompt hash on Twitter, and J.R. tells me he'll be keeping a history of it logged elsewhere on the internet in case Twitter only wants to show you the most recent parts.
I've taken some clumsy pokes (you know, if I recall correctly, I never *was* really much good at text adventure games!) at helping start this new story of J.R.'s off, and of course anyone is welcome to jump in at any time and tweet some commands to @jrmoore91 using the #cmdprompt hash tag. Basically it goes something like this. J.R. might tweet something like this (this is an actual tweet from today):
@jrmoore91 wrote:
You find a massive tome with a locked clasp, a small notebook, a flask, pencils, and a jackknife. The voices approach the barn. #cmdprompt |
And then he'd take the *first* usable reply back, with a #cmdprompt hash in it, as the next command to parse. I sent this:
@smbhax wrote:
@jrmoore91 Eep! Quickly examine barn. #cmdprompt |
And then in theory he'll give an update based on that, and the adventure will go from there. Simple, right? But who knows where this is gonna go! (Also my dilly dallying seems to have put us in some trouble in the barn there, so hopefully someone can bail us out of that. :o)
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I started last week with the "contribute" button on the A* store page, and over the weekend finished with the purchasing buttons for downloadable e-book A* episodes on the episodes page: switching them from PayPal's "Donate" button to a customized version of their "Buy Now" button.
I'd been using "Donate," like many people do, because I wanted people to be able to give whatever amount they felt like giving. PayPal's mini-documentation on the Donate button says you're only supposed to use it for "fundraising," and once you raise a total of $10,000 from Donate buttons, they'll ask to see the paperwork showing that money has actually gone to some sort of charitable cause. I knew about that, but I'd used "Donate" anyway, like everybody else, because I didn't know how else to have a button without a fixed purchase amount. (Besides, I'm a poor webcomic artist, I need fundraising for food and rent! :P) But I was listening to an old episode of the Webcomic Beacon Newscast--listening to webcomic podcasts makes me feel better while working on A*, somehow :)--in which they reported that a while back PayPal actually did crack down on someone who raised a load of dough with a Donate button--shut down their account, freezing the funds! Well, as a webcomic artist I am pretty much reliant on my PayPal account for income, so while I don't expect to get anywhere near $10,000 from episode e-book downloads or donations in this lifetime, I don't want to do anything PayPal might frown upon if I can possibly help it, so I thought I'd better take another look at seeing if I could find some other way to make these transactions happen.
And It's bad because I don't remember now where I found it through Google, but somewhere I noticed that as long as you don't specify an amount for a "Buy Now" button, it will act just like a "Donate" button, and let the purchaser specify their own amount. Perfect! So I got the buttons switched over and we should be all super-legit now as far as the big PP is concerned.
During this process I also happened across some webcomic site selling e-books of their chapters much like I sell A* episodes--in fact the selling page looked pretty much exactly like mine does in general layout, with a big vertical list of the episodes, and buy buttons down the right--and they were using Donate buttons too, and I *should* have made a note of what webcomic it was because I meant to try to contact them and mention what I've just told you about the buttons. Dang. It was some fairly popular webcomic too, as far as I recall, and hm the page background was white, and the Donate buttons were modified to gray, maybe? Darned if I can find anything that sounds like it in my browser history, though, ugh. Well, if you know which comic this is, maybe let me know so I can send them this tip just in case they find it useful.
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