Leckford writes

Less than a year after the previous page, here’s a new one
 
You will see I am belatedly taking up Dave Sim’s pre-Gerhard technique for speeding up the drawing of backgrounds: everything happens in rooms with the lights turned off. In this case, the gravity is turned off as well, which adds to the confusion.

It has taken over a year but there is a new page to go with the new URL for TOSS, my Star Trek fan comic.



In this episode, Wheel has found an excuse to loiter in a monitor room.

I am using iftt.com to automatically post new episodes of TOSS and Percy Street to my Tumblr tumblog. I don’t think it is yet possible to do this to my LJ so I will be haphazardly updating by hand as usual instead.

I have given TOSS, my comic set in the Star Trek Original Series era, its own web site: http://comiccalledtoss.me.uk/

Now all I need to do is get my act together so I can also give it a new episode … In the meantime there are some character sketches on my Deviantart gallery.

There is a new home for Percy Street at a proper webcomic address: http://percystreet.net/

Technobabble follows (copy this in to your next Star Trek script):

It turns out that creating a new web site is getting easier and easier. This time around I bought the domain name from French registrar Gandi, who provide a domain name server with a choice of management UIs—easy, normal, and expert. I have Nginx running on my Linode virtual private server humming away somewhere in London, so adding another site was a matter of creating a user percystreet, adding my SSH key to its known_hosts so my upload script works, and editing the upload script to upload to the new account, and configuring Nginx to serve the enw files and redirect from the old addresses ot the new ones. Nginx configuration is sooooo much easier than Apache.

A little while ago I tweaked the CSS for the comics pages to eliminate as many distractions as possible from before or to the left of the comc itself—this reflects my annoyance with other sites (especially news sites and forums) that have layers and layers of navigation and ‘branding’ before you get to the bit that interests you. Hope you like it!

Coming back to Percy Street after a while, I find myself wanting to simplify the template for these teasers—it gets reformatted badly on both LiveJournal and Tumblr, and is fancier than required anyway. Now I think about it it is about time Percy had his own web site. Something to ponder.

Update (12 Sept): Created percystreet.net

!

Google and Tumblr have forced my hand and Leckford is now Alex or Lx Leckford, where Lx is pronounced the same as Alex but is more pretentious.

This is because I wanted to create a tumblog for my comics-drawing persona, lxleckford.tumblr.com, because posting to Tumblr is easier than LiveJournal and it is a convenient way to track non-work-safe comics-related Tumblrs. I also have a Deviantart account (~leckford) which I also need to work out some sort of plan for. I move content between the two of them as I work out what belongs where.

Sorry for the long delay—I ceased to exist for a while while my in-real-life counterpart got absorbed by work and domestic issues for a year or so. The first four panels of this page have been waiting a year and a half for me to get around to the last two. That may be some kind of record, but not in a good way.

Here’s a gag I might work in to the story in the future:

It has come to my attention that some people think the new Trek movie is incompatible with Trek canon. Allegedly J.J. Abrams was taken aback to discover that Simon Pegg knew about continuity and even cared about it.


Of course the movies have NEVER been sticklers for continuity. The first film radically revised the costumes, the models, and even the Klingon make-up, not because the narrative involved these things having changed, but intending that this would be taken as how they had always looked had the TV series had a movie budget. To top it off, the story ends with Human society absorbing a god-like being (V’ger transmits all it has learned, including instructions for uploading your consciousness into transcendent machine intelligences, before it vanishes). This is the end of the Trek: the human race will surely transcend in short order, leaving starships behind like abandoned toys.

Even if you want to interpret the new uniforms as just being a rebranding exercise within Starfleet, they scuppered this by implying in dialogue that the movie followed on more or less immediately after the five-year mission. Ignoring this line, the movie looks more like it was set twenty years or so after the TV series, which would make the actors relatively young (being only ten years older), thus cleverly representing the improved medicine of the future. They missed a trick there.

The second through sixth movies even more blatantly take place in a different timeline. You want evidence? The new uniforms use a rank structure, department divisions, and insignia entirely different from the previous movie and the TV series. Technologically they seem to have downgraded: There are bunk beds in the officers’ quarters and CRTs on the bridge, and it seems phasers no longer have a stun setting. Faced with the incomprehensibly abstract adventures of a post-V’ger hyperculture, Paramount have stepped sideways into a more-primitive timeline where adventures still involve fisticuffs.

Curiously enough, the Next Generation series is more like an immediate sequel to the original series than either of the movies timelines. They say it is set 85 years in the future of the movies era but if you had to guess from the styling and the way technology works, they are set at most a few years after the original series.

I could go on but this rant is too long already. In the end I think it is easier all round if we view the various contiguous chunks of Trek stories as defining separate continuities, much as different treatments of DC’s Batman and Superman can co-exist on the networks and even the newsstands. The new film may well be enjoyable, mindless, explody fun and could even kick off a new space opera franchise. My insignificant webcomics can continue in their own not-quite-canonical timeline.