Another real location, the only gas station that most people consider to be in the town of Sausalito. There really isn’t room for another. On the other hand, there are several places where boats can get gas. It probably says something about the town that there are more places where boats can fuel up then cars. Of course the boats usually have to pay an extra dollar or more a gallon, so if your going to sell to a market, sell to the boats and actually make some money.

I’m totally with Kay on the amount of fuel question. Diesel fuel is about 7 pounds a gallon (its slightly lighter than water so the ‘pint a pound’ mantra doesn’t quite apply) and that makes each one of those can about 35 pounds when full. Sure, that’s nothing in the Gym, but carrying it at the end of your arm for a mile and your going to find that your joints aren’t fitting together  right anymore at the end of your walk. I mean he could carry a hundred pounds in each hand for a mile like Tam estimated last comic, but he wouldn’t be doing anything at all the next day, and maybe not the next week.

On the drawing, I initially had a more complete background in the lower panel, but I found that the characters were getting lost, so I just made most of it go away.

However I have the ability to also add posts. I wanted to share this little image that I finished recently. It’s the background of one of the pages, and I realized that in the final product a lot of the image is going to be hidden by other graphics and text, which kind of hurt. I just like the Golden Gate Bridge. It’s the most photographed bridge in the world for good reason.

So here is a little drawing that I like and I hope you like, and a preview of some of what will be showing up in book 2.

Just a background?

Here we continue with some of Tam’s internal thinking. Predicting stock-markets can be seen as similar to breaking codes. She doesn’t have to actually make any predictions (though she could), she can do her trades at random, and then realize the most successful trade for each second. This was the point when I realized she was actually pretty scary.

Imagine a gunman with a similar power who walks into a room with 20 targets and the gunman has 20 bullets. He could hit all the targets as fast as he could pull the trigger and not even have to open his eyes. This doesn’t mean that she is unbeatable, it’s just then in any roll of the dice she can always take the best conceivable roll, no matter how unlikely. Playing D&D and need to roll 20 5 times in a row? She would do it on the first try, if she is paying attention.

As for how she earned the initial $5, there are many sites on the internet where people can trade programming services. The typical format is that a person would put out a description of work in the shape of requirements and then people would put in bids for the cost to meet those requirements, often with a description how the product they would provide. This could be snippets, functions, sub-programs or whole program suites. Kind of like eBay for programming. I did a couple of those jobs and determined that the rates of pay were too low for me. After all anyone in the world can access these, and if you have a laptop in the middle of Africa then you might be willing to do programming work for a buck or two an hour, and still be the richest guy in the neighborhood. I couldn’t compete with that. Tam of course wouldn’t care as most programming tasks would be completely trivial for her.

This page, and the two after it, are largely to introduce us to Tam. Tam is all about perception and thinking, so I figured it was better to show some of her thinking. As I have been fleshing her out, so to speak, I have found that she is even more intimidating than I expected.

The thing about encryption may need some clarification. One theory of quantum computing holds that they might be very good at breaking codes. Most modern encryption attacks use one of two broad classes of attacks, either brute force or vulnerability. Vulnerabilities are stuff you hear about in the news, where a hacker uses a technical trick to make a code easier to break than it should be. Brute force is just trying password after password until the hacker gets the right one. Brute force attacks are why you shouldn’t pick simple passwords. With modern encryption it is supposed to take much much … MUCH longer to find the right password by randomly guessing then it does to encrypt data in the first place. However, with quantum computing it may work that multiple passwords are tried simultaneously.

This is what Tam is doing, when ever she is presented with a password barrier she tries ALL of the possible passwords at the same moment, but only the instance where she has randomly picked the right password is the world that ends up actually existing. It is not actually clear if this is something that is possible in the real world, but some current quantum theories seems to indicate it could be possible. If you want to read a really good piece of Science fiction that explores some of that you could check out Anathum by Neil Stephenson. Toward the end of the book a character who is in tune with the quantum copies of himself goes through a password protected door using exactly the method I just described where he selects a code at random, and then works to make the world where he picks the right code the ‘real’ world.

She went ahead and broke into all of the available Wi-Fi networks so that she could access the internet in parallel and get better bandwidth. I am fairly sure she can’t read all the pages simultaneously the way she guesses codes as when she was done she would have only read one, but she does read very very fast.

It may be shown in some sort of flashback but I don’t know that I will ever get to that part of the story so I will explain some things here. Kay initially had a  completely different boat, and Tam effectively came to life for Kay on that boat (A Columbia 40). The one time Tam was not on either boat was when she was being transferred, but she had no awareness at the time so her argument that it didn’t count is pretty valid. I would have loved to put all that in the comic, but I am really trying to avoid long stretches of time where essentially nothing happens.

For those who want to know ALL the details, you can read these posts.

Of course this leaves me in a bit of a long-term quandary. My whole format is very strongly created with the intention of at least being able to create a hard copy version of this story. If I put too much in the special notes for those who are willing to read extra online, where am I going to put all that stuff in the printed version? Also, am I leaving out too much for those who buy the PDF book in advance? Those people are not just jumping the gun on the story, they are actively supporting me, and I shouldn’t be giving them a product that is defective in any way.

Maybe it’s enough if the information down here isn’t critical.

Just one more page.

It does feel good to be on track to make this first deadline. As you can see from the thumbnail sheet there is only one space left. The first and last pages are next to each-other on the sheet so that spreads can be grouped. If you look at it you may notice that I tried to layout the spreads, not just the pages.

Here is thumbnail page as a preview.

I finally decided to stop riding my own entirely home-made jalopy welded out of scrap and bought a used car off the lot in the form of WordPress /Comic Press / Comic Easel. Actually it’s not a used car and the system is very customisable. Critically WordPress is allowing for a whole lot of stuff that I just didn’t have the time to write on my own. I had to decide if I was making this website because I wanted to program or because I wanted to draw. Programming can be fun, but it was becoming a chore that got in the way of making good artwork. So here is the new site and I hope you guys like it as much as I do, or at least that it doesn’t get in your way which is all I can really ask of an interface.

I have received some questions already about why all the changes. In this first post I will answer some of the why. There are a few parts to that.

Early – Really? I drew this?

SailorsFreedom was initially started as a way for me to practice with a new Wacom tablet I got. The story took hold of me and I ended up putting much more work into it then I ever planned, but I continued to use it as a learning platform. I didn’t worry about continuity or consistency very much and treated every update as a little experiment. In some ways that adds to the experience I think. I can look back and see all the ways that my digital artwork changed, and I suspect some readers really like that aspect of the site. The downside is that as a whole it looked very amateur – because it was. Well, now I think I have figured out how to make a web-comic that looks good, tells a story, and really is the comic I want it to be. So I am making that comic.

Example 2 – getting better.

OK, that explains the format, but what about the content changes? Why did you take down all of my favorite comics?

The original SailorsFreedom was Not Safe For Work. This had a lot of negative consequences for me and the potential for more problems in the future. One, it was tough for me to share and get feedback from friends and family. By definition I couldn’t share it with co-workers. I couldn’t get a second opinion from my kids, and a lot of my friends and family would have no idea what I was doing artistically. Also my wife works for the State Department, and soon we are moving to a country where my old website might have been illegal by the local rules. That was a legal limbo I would just sooner avoid. So I retro-actively made the whole website something I can share with anyone, and I found that I didn’t really miss the comics that are gone. Yes, some of them were pretty good artwork, but none of them were truly critical to the story I really want to tell.

So now it’s SFW and I find myself pretty happy with the change. The old panels will still be available on another part of the site. If they aren’t there right now, I just haven’t gotten around to moving them yet.