└ posted on Friday, 2 April 2021, by Novil
The page for the Kickstarter campaign for The Complete Gaia is now almost done. Click on the link to see a preview of it. I plan to launch the campaign in one or two weeks.
Apart from the anthology that collects all 950 comic pages, there will also be a supplementary book which contains a making-of and Gaia related artwork by other artists.
I still need to shoot a short introduction video for the campaign. But most importantly, I’m currently waiting for info about shipping costs from my distributor.
As you can see, the Sandra and Woo books will be made available for purchase again too.
└ posted on Saturday, 27 March 2021, by Novil
Yuna’s game against Logan Hunter is based on a game between the chess engines Deep Mind Alpha Zero against Stockfish. It was also called an “Immortal Zugzwang Game” by popular chess commentator agadmator. You can watch the game on agadmator’s YouTube channel.
The position on the board before Yuna blundered her queen in strip [1254] Yuna’s Immortal Zugzwang Game III happened in that game and is as follows:
I then played a couple of dubious, but not completely outlandish, moves to arrive at the following stalemate position in strip [1255] Yuna’s Immortal Stalemate Game I:
└ posted on Sunday, 10 January 2021, by Novil
Here are two diagrams that show how often the main and supporting characters of Sandra and Woo appeared in each year. Note that there were only 20 strips in 2008.
You can click on the images for larger versions.
Here is the total number of occurrences:
- Sandra: 655 (52% of all strips)
- Woo: 436 (35%)
- Larisa: 392 (31%)
- Cloud: 260 (21%)
- Richard: 152 (12%)
- Ye Thuza: 112 (9%)
- Yuna: 91 (7%)
- Lily: 87 (7%)
- Zoey: 87 (7%)
- Sid: 66 (5%)
- Landon: 56 (4%)
- Luna: 53 (4%)
- Shadow: 53 (4%)
Notable characters who have not appeared in at least 50 strips yet are:
- Butterfly: 38
- Woo’s kits: 33 at most
- The Devil: 32
- Hitomi: 31
- Michelle: 28
- Ruth: 24
- Seeoahtlahmakaskay: 24
- Taylor: 19
Number of new strips per year:
- 2008: 20
- 2009: 105
- 2010: 107
- 2011: 106
- 2012: 104
- 2013: 100
- 2014: 104
- 2015: 105 (incl. 1 illustration)
- 2016: 115 (incl. 17 MSPA inspired illustrations)
- 2017: 105
- 2018: 96 (incl. strip #1031 with seven rows)
- 2019: 97 (incl. 2 illustrations)
- 2020: 95 (incl. 2 illustrations)
- Total: 1259
└ posted on Saturday, 12 December 2020, by Novil
The Zodiac 340, the second-most famous unsolved encrypted message after the Voynich Manuscript, has been deciphered by code breakers David Oranchak (USA), Sam Blake (Australia) and Jarl Van Eycke (Belgium)!
└ posted on Saturday, 24 October 2020, by Novil
I’ve received enough applications already. Please don’t apply anymore!
As you may know, the Gaia anthology will be supplemented by a making-of book. The book is now almost finished and already in a pretty good shape in my opinion. I’m now looking for an editor, who must be a native speaker, to give it a last editing pass.
The editor must look for remaining spelling mistakes, grammar errors and phrases that sound off to a native speaker. As the book isn’t meant to win a literary prize, I’m not interested in (more expensive) in-depth editing. In particular, I’m not interested in extensive discussions about minute details. Moreover, significant changes would break the page layout, so those should be kept to a minimum.
The text has 24,000 words and comes in form of a nicely formatted Microsoft Word document. I’d suggest that the editor provides the fixes and comments by using Word’s editing features. But I’m open to another workflow as long as it doesn’t result in too much additional work on my end.
If you’re interested, please send your application to novil@gmx.de which must include:
Your rate for editing the bookA short description why you think you’d be a good choice (references, etc.)
I can pay with PayPal or Transferwise.
There will probably be additional editing jobs in the future.
