Studio Open again for Cars Cartooned, Logos Designed and Illustrations undertaken.

We are open for business again, and as far as the customer is concerned, nothing has changed. Even though we have moved from Sydney Australia to Kyoto Japan.

We have the same Website, Email, Bank and PayPal accounts. We still communicate the same way, mostly be Email.

The only real change is our mobile number is not valid, but we have removed that from the website contact info anyway. I do have a land line phone but don't put that on the website any more.

I will need a new SIM card and that will result in a new mobile number, but really, Facebook Messenger, Line and Skype all work as well and that is all still running the same.

We can be contacted at ArtAndTechnology.

Moved to Japan Again...

This Webcomic linked here talks about lots of things including living in Australia and Japan

Well it now needs updating with the December 2019 event of moving from Sydney Australia to Kyoto Japan. This is the 3rd time to pick up and move country.

It is an interesting thing to do, especially as this time we took our cat too!  This requires much more effort than taking babies or small children. 

Still have a month and a half before the last of our things arrive, but most was delivered a month ago. Our new "studio" is mostly up and running. My light table is in the stuff to get here later, but that isn't a show stopper in any way.

Having already lived in Japan for 15 years previously it a different feeling to move back after a long time away.

More like being back with an old friend...


We can be contacted at Art & Technology

Not changing any hosting or email anytime soon, so that all still gives the impression I am in Australia. At the time the .com.au was a better choice than a .com in our DNS.

YouTube, Your own website and Blog, Cons, Patreon, Kickstarter or Social Media?

What?

I mean if your a creator, what is most useful to you for you to get your work out there to be found?

We have had our website for 15 years but the Internet has changed a lot in that time, so I wish I knew, but have found plenty of opinions on it, and it is all changing all the time.

The short answer is Twitter, Facebook and Instagram are very poor. They are very poor for discovery and the type of interaction they encourage is useless. The algorithms are against you, and they have also impacted the rest of the internet, website and blogs.  I think mostly by keeping people on the closed Social Media sites, as they are addictive, rather than doing something useful.

Any Social Media platform is just a very fast flowing river, where you throw something into it, and a few may have seen it out the corner of their eye before it rushes past down stream, but is gone before any body actually notices it, let alone decides to have a close look at what ever that was. 

Years ago forums were really useful for learning and getting known in a community. But forums aren't a growing area anymore, and groups on Facebook are no where near as useful as a forum.

I made my own YouTube channel 9 years ago, and I think the results I had years ago are far better than now. Videos back then got 1,000s of views. Anything I make now will only get 1 sometimes.  YouTube changed their algorithms, and continue to do so. My guess is the develops at YouTube have fallen for what appears to be a profitable approach used by Facebook, but in reality most likely isn't at all.

My own website gets far more accesses than anything else I've tried. But everything I do, such as blogs or posts to a forum point back to it.

Website URLs take some time to work their way into Google search if you create a new website. I have now done this twice, and so realize how important the DNS I bought is, and how much effort setting up a site with all the stuff needed to be processed by a search engine is.  I made a mistake at the time to get a .com.au instead of a .com but from memory that was the cheaper option at the time, even if it isn't now.

We can be contacted art ArtandTechnology

Quadraphonic Surround Sound..... again - Dolby Atmos Music?

Dolby Atmos Music looks to be taking another run at the Surround Sound Music format.  Discrete, SQ and QS Quadraphonic came and went decades ago as I wrote previously.

Now this appears to be slightly different from the Dolby Atmos used for Movies.

I haven't been able to workout exactly what that is from the marketing hype I've read. Does it have multiple discrete HiFi Audio channels?  Do not know.

Do know that it only fits on a Blu-Ray movie disc, which indicates that it might.

Will it take off?

Probably not.

I expect it is more about DOLBY trying to get a license fee out of every new music playing device rather than any great benefit to the users who now want to just stream not so high quality sound to their headphones anyway...

WEBTOONS and their Huge Reader Base.

We did an experiment and put a variation of one of our Webcomics on WEBTOONS.COM

It is called BOTS IN SPACE if you want to search for it.  It took a bit of work to convert it into vertical single panels, 800 x 1135 in my case. Been there a week and put up 4 episodes.

My Dashboard view is like this:

This was an experiment to see if this massive Webcomics site would result in people reading it without me actually promoting it, and seeing if it differed much from my own website hosting.  To see if the fact it was on Webtoons made any difference at all. 

I had read it did.

Found that it didn't...

Now it isn't a teen high school, fantasy or romance thing, which is what popular Japanese Manga and Anime are, and what looks like the bulk of the popular series there are.  So not a typical work for that market, and as I only have 4 episodes there, that may comprise the result too. 

WEBTOONS comics from the front page look very much like Shonen Jump, one of the main Japanese Manga and the place all this hugely popular ANIME came from.  Very much aimed at 'teens. There is also the girls version.  My comic here does not fit that market at all, but think the next things I try must.

But so far being on WEBTOONS.COM didn't mean anything.  Promoting it to people that are interested seems more important than the actual site it is hosted on.  The WEBTOONS Phone App is slick and makes reading even a 1000 pages easy.  That is how I read Sithrah. But I would say Jason Brubaker already had an audience interested in his previous work reMIND anyway, that made it a success on WEBTOONS, independent of the fact they were paying him to do so.

My Historical/Autobiographical work had a lot of interest when I posted it to a small group very interested in the things I developed during my career. They already knew me, and that is why they read it and gave the positive feedback they did.   If I made a version for Webtoons, I expect it too would only have the same 6 views. I had also posted a link to that on a Facebeook comic page that had given some great feedback on a few pages from it, but the group itself was not interested in it at all. After following that group for a while, and seeing many dozens of the members post their version of Batman, Superman or Sexy Girl Superhero it was pretty obvious story and actual Sequential Art isn't upmost in their thoughts.

So getting possible readers to know why your interesting would seem important before anyone will give your comic a try. Is this just the celebrity culture around now or just a case of it isn't what you know but who you know, or rather who knows you in the world of social media?

An interesting Japan Times article:  South Korea's booming 'webtoons' put Japan's print manga on notice

Update: Sep 26 2019. Now a couple of weeks later, and still at 6 followers. Unless you know where to look, the comic is not easy to find now, being lost in all the other new and updated comics. This just enforces our view that the site itself doesn't help your comic with its vast reader base without additional promotion. Webtoons doesn't help you with that at all.

We can be contacted at Art & Technology