Need More Proof? Todd Is A Squirrel
This day in Great Outdoor Fight history: I remain conflicted to this very day what the most disconsolate part of this tableau is — the smallness of the snack tent? The underwhelming nature of the “feast”? The lone spork? They could have at least made some “Dinosaur” Potato Chuds.
- It was in the early morning hours of yesterday — having twins means he’s on Baby Duty until 5:00am — that David Willis launched the Kickstarter for his fifth Dumbing of Age book, which funded out before he went to sleep. Hardly surprising, as the prior four DoA books have funded like clockwork (at rates of 273% to 370% of goal), although I don’t recall one funding out in less than eight hours before.
It also doesn’t hurt that Willis puts together his books and sends out his stuff on time; as a result, he generally increases his backer count by about 600 folks from book to book, meaning the just under 700 backers and 177% achievement on a US$22,000 goal (as of this writing) is just an ordinary outcome for him. Checking out the ol’ FFFmk2, we’re looking at US$120K to 180K, which would be in the range of double his previous best funding level.
Then again, he’s already go more backers than his first collection, and will likely come up with 2 to 3 times as many by the time the campaign ends in 28 days; if the per-backer averages hold, he’d be looking at US$78K to US$117K, and he hasn’t yet unlocked all the stretch goals, the things that convince people to move from intangible rewards to physical rewards. It appears that the twins need not worry about starving before their first birthday.
- Something else that need not be worried about? That Fleen readers will be uninformed about the goings-on in Eurocomics, thanks to Fleen Senior French Correspondent Pierre Lebeaupin, who has a choice recommendation for us:
Tim from acupoftim.com draws pages about a number of matters, from his admiration of Maddox to what became of Totoro to figuring out what the deal is with these darn squirrels, but he is best known for stories on his various workplaces and coworkers, published in Quotidien Survival.
He also had a side blog, Glauque-Land, where he publishes photos of his explorations of various urban ruins and other abandoned buildings. Which caught the interest of a Flammarion imprint, and today they are releasing a book of his photos, with accompanying text and illustrations he created for this purpose.
Maybe more interesting than the publication by itself is the story he published (as comics on his site, of course) of the whole process from his side, especially his attempts to keep a level head and dealing with not being in control of everything. Check them out if you can read French.
My French is rusty, but you ain’t need to read French in order to see what the squirrels are up to — no good is what. Doesn’t matter if they’re French or otherwise, squirrels are not to be trusted. And curiously, this appears to be one area where animals outside Australia are more dangerous than those inside Australia … this should indicate how incredibly evil and malicious the little brush-tailed bastards really are.
Spam of the day:
Verizon Services FREE 30-day HBO NOW® trial – Let the binging begin
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. No. Get bent, Verizon. I’ll let SquirrelCo put their lines into my house before I upgrade my service with you.
My pleasure, Gary.
If I could make a suggestion for mark III of the FFF, it would be a corrective factor to account for the immediacy of the connection between the creator and his audience. Indeed, creators who are able to mobilize half their audience (assuming exponential decline, at least initially) in 12 hours will have at the 24th hour a Kicktraq prediction higher than an equivalent creator who can only mobilize half their audience in 36 hours, while their totals will be about the same. The same goes for two KS who could have the same Kicktraq prediction at the 24th hour and differ wildly in the end.
I feel this is visible for instance for the respective preorder Kickstarters of Dumbing of Age and Girl Genius (two works with interesting parallels, by the way), who happen to run at about the same time each year: Dumbing of Age funds faster at first, even in absolute terms (Kicktraq even failed to sample a point before funding for that one too), but doesn’t reach the same totals Girl Genius does (not that this prevents each creator from envying the other); and people familiar with both creators know that David Willis has his audience on relatively fast media platforms (Twitter, Tumblr), audience which is in general younger and more connected, and his webcomic updates daily, while the Foglios publish on “slower” media (e.g. a LiveJournal blog, I don’t think Studio Foglio even has a twitterfeed other than Othar’s) and “only” update 3 times a week; I even suspect a significant portion of the Girl Genius audience does not even read the comic on the site regularly and prefers reading the books.
However, I have no idea whatsoever on how to determine that corrective factor, or even on the basis of what data to determine it from.
By Pierre Lebeaupin on 03.02.16 3:44 pm
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