I’d like to take a moment to talk about a topic that’s very dear to my heart: What’s your backup strategy?

A hard drive can fail at any moment, and it’s often hard or even impossible to rescue all the data on it. While most people don’t have data on their hard drive that is as valuable as mine, in particular the original PSD comic files, there is still a lot of data on most hard drives that is very hard or time-consuming to recreate.

Therefore, you should have always have a relatively recent backup of all your data! Here is a summary of my current backup strategy:

• All my personal files are within a single folder on the hard drive. This makes it easy to create a complete backup of them.
• I have a complete backup of this folder on my second PC at my parents’ house.
• Every second weekend I copy all changes to the second PC. So even if a fire should destroy my flat, I will still have a recent backup of all my data.

This simple strategy could certainly be improved. But it’s already significantly better than having all your data in just one physical location.

If you want to inform yourself about the topic, you can find a lot of articles about reasonable backup strategies on Google. If you want to use a cloud service to backup your personal data, you should consider encrypting the files first before uploading them so that nobody else can look at them.

Miracles do happen!

It is now possible to get to the next comic strip by clicking on the current comic strip.

Now if this isn’t a good reason to re-read the entire archive, I don’t know what is. 😉

I received a lot of promising applications for the job as webcomic reviewer and I want to thank everyone who applied again. In the end, I decided to hire the following three people and I’m confident that they will write webcomic reviews with a quality you won’t find elsewhere after the discontinuation of El Santo’s famed Webcomic Overlook.

• Robert Howard: Robert was the author of the defunct webcomic review and analysis blog tangents.us (Archive.org link) which featured extensive commentary on selected webcomics.
• Tom Speelman: Tom is a freelance writer who has written articles and comic reviews for publications such as Comics Alliance, Sequart and The Mary Sue.
• Elena Cordero: Elena is a rookie in the world of webcomic reviews. However, she wrote a convincing application and so I’m hopeful that she will be an excellent addition to our review team nonetheless.

I received a lot fewer applications for the position as TV Tropes article improver. If you’re interested in that position, you can still send your application to novil@gmx.de.

I’m looking for assistants who are either able to produce fresh content of high quality for our websites (Sandra and Woo and Gaia) or able to do some promotional work for our comics. For a start, I’m looking for people able to fill the following two positions. You must be a native speaker of English and have good writing skills for both. The ability to deliver good work by working on your own without constant supervision is very important! I will pay with PayPal.

Webcomic reviewer

Your task is to regularly write detailed reviews of other fantasy webcomics which will then be published on our website. I have written a review guideline that outlines how your review should look like. If you are interested in this position, please have a look at this guideline now! Beyond that, I’m fond of the review style seen in the discontinued webcomic review blog Webcomic Overlook.

I want to make one thing clear: I’m looking for a webcomic critic, not a webcomic fan! The quality of webcomic reviews is often poor. I want to publish good ones!

If you think that this is something for you, please send your application to novil@gmx.de. Of course it would be good if you could include an example of a similar text written by you. Please also give me your estimated charge per review. I already have a payment amount in mind, but I would like to see first if it’s way too high or low based on the applications I receive.

TV Tropes article improver

Do you know one of our two comics almost as well as I do? On top of that, are you somewhat familiar with TV Tropes? Then you could help us by expanding the articles on our comics: Sandra and Woo at TV Tropes, Gaia at TV Tropes. Of course always within the terms of TV Tropes.

Things that can be improved:

• Add missing links to the discussed strips, characters or story arcs.
• Add relevant new tropes. (Sandra and Woo already has a lot of listed tropes, but Gaia has very few.)
• Improve the quality of the wording so that it’s fun to read the article.
• Add mentions of our comic on the associated tropes pages.

I thought about paying by the hour since I have no idea how to measure the complexity of the added “chunks of information” without making a science out of it. So I will probably try out several applicants for an hour or so each and then continue to work with the ones who delivered the best work. So please include your hourly rate in your application to novil@gmx.de.

Depending on the number of applications I will receive, don’t expect any kind of answer before Monday next week.

A big “Thank you!” to all the people who voted for the Sandra and Woo adventure on Steam Greenlight! The campaign was successful and the developer team Feline Fuelled Games will now be able to sell the game on Steam at a budget price if everything goes according to plan! This is great news for all of us since Steam is by far the biggest distribution platform for indie games. Feline Fuelled Games, which is headed by mother, now has two greenlit games. Their other game, Roll-playing Game, is an arcade game inspired by Marble Madness.

The developer team is now working on the remaining main issues discussed in the campaign, in particular the quality of the animations and some character models.