HELP ME AND MY FRIENDS STAY EMPLOYED! SUPPORT AMERICAN ANIMATORS!

Coelasquid June 13, 2012 2:54 pm
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15 Comments

This is more of less the same post I had on Tumblr, but it’s really important(!!!!) so I’m posting it here too. If you want to skip all the gum flapping, the kickstarter I’ll ultimately be pointing everyone to is over here.

The folks in my audience may not know that I work at Six Point Harness animation studio (the folks behind Nickelodeon’s El Tigre, MTV’s Good Vibes, The Drawn Together movie, and more). And you may or may not know that Six Point is home to Ed Skudder and Zack Keller, creators of the Mondo series, Dick Figures. You probably remember it from posting animated gifs of the characters doing funny things on your tumblrs a lot.

The style of Dick Figures is very much about using simple character designs to allow animation quality you wouldn’t normally be able to pull off with a youtube series budget. The people here work very hard on it, and have really made something to be proud of.

Some fans have expressed interest in a Dick Figures movie, so Ed and Zack have decided to take it to kickstarter. Crowd sourcing the movie like this means that they would be able to make it their way, without having to rely on producers who would turn the process into a matter of committee approval and quite likely turn it into something completely different than the creators envision.

Funding this project would be amazing, it would completely revolutionize the options available for the creators of animated features in this day and age.

The kickstarter is asking for $250,000 for a half-hour special, but if we make it to $700,000, we can produce a full hour and a half feature film. Contributing to this kickstarter, or even just spreading the word along means you are personally supporting the livelihood of every person in our studio.

And I cannot stress how much that means to all of us.

Okay, *now* it’s 100%

Corbin June 7, 2012 3:23 am
Posted In: Uncategorized
25 Comments

Hey guys,

Corbin here, just filling out a brief status update. We’re back up and running, as far as I can tell. I haven’t found anything broken in a few hours, so I’m moving us from “everything is broken and also on fire” to “any problems you may see are actually features in disguise” mode.

This is the official post-mortem. The short version: Some hardware failed. This is a completely natural thing. Due to some awkwardness and a lack of proper preparation on my part, we weren’t able to immediately get back up on our feet, but I just want to stress that this was an act of God and not something we could have guarded against any better. Please don’t email flames to Dreamhost; they’ve been really great throughout the process and gave us a pretty good turnaround for a weekend failure.

The technical details aren’t that interesting. We didn’t have snapshot backups, so it took a bit of leg work and facepalming to get everything back in place. (We now have snapshot backups. I learned the lesson.) Fortunately, the database was unharmed, so all of your comments are still there. (Yes, even the stupid ones.)

Thank you for flying Manly Air, and we look forward to many more comics with you all!

~ C.

Not back to 100% yet

Coelasquid June 6, 2012 10:27 am
Posted In: blog
11 Comments

Long story Short, Dreamhost had a hardware crash that killed the site and lost a bunch of data. The folks at Dreamhost didn’t seem to be doing anything to fix the problem, so internet guardian angels Corbin Simpson and Jon Hayward stepped in and got things running again. The most recent backup we had was from February, so there are still plenty of things to patch, fill, and fix.

Please do not send me emails, facebook messages, Tumblr notes, and Tweets asking if I’m aware my page is messed up. The bombardment of people demanding personal explanations when I’ve already made individual posts outlining the situation is more stressful that the outage itself. Thank you.

Squidbump

Coelasquid March 22, 2012 12:33 am
Posted In: Uncategorized
15 Comments

Brett got me this MEGASQUIDDDD from the Squid Kids Ink booth down at Wondercon as a happy shack-up-anniversary kind of present and I LOVE IT SO MUCH I just want to pimp out their store to all you guys. I’ve already procured a handful of their little babby squibs for some of my friends (and myself)

They’re awesome because they’re only like ten bucks and they’re super cute and they make everybody happy so they’re pretty much the perfect present for anybody who loves squids (by which I mean they’re pretty much the perfect present for anybody) They’ve got a bunch of shirts and stuff too! All equally adorable.

Everything is designed and produced by Nate Mitchell, who has been the sweetest guy to deal with in ordering stuff (I had to get something sorted out with the address on one of the giftsquibs I got and he was really quick and friendly about getting back to me!) so if you buy his swag you can feel all content that you helped out a self-made independent designer and generally awesome bro!

The store is over here at Bigcartel, and he’s got a blog of his exploits over hereabouts! Thanks guys!

I’M AT WONDERCON RIGHT NOW

Coelasquid March 17, 2012 3:49 pm
Posted In: Uncategorized
5 Comments

Stop by small press booth 74 to rock out with my and the Glam Rock Gorilla guys.