Month: August 2007

1.) “62% More Awesome” will officially be going on sale
tomorrow!

2.) Sunday’s book party was fantastic. I’ll be putting up a full write-up with pics later today…but for now: fantastic. We had 150-to-200 people show up over the course of the night — including two Sheldonistas who drove two hours to get there! Good times!

3.) Happy Leaf Studios has created another awesome video from the Saturday-only Storyline strips. Check it out, here: here!

4.) The Sheldon transcription project has officially completed! Woo-hoo! All the archives are transcribed and entered — which means you can search for your favorite strips using word snippets, phrases, or favorite punchlines. Give it a try, here. (…points for the first person to e-mail me with the funniest search and/or search result.)

Our Saturday-only story keeps rollin’ along! For those followin’ along, here are the previous installments:
1 ,
2 ,
3,

4,
5,
6, 7, and 8.

1.) Limited Artist’s Editions for “62% More Awesome” are now available in the Sheldon Store! First dibs were offered to Sheldon newsletter subscribers, so there are only 83 copies left as of this blog post. Snag your copy now before they’re all gone!

Whoever is lucky enough to get the last copy gets an extra-special sketch of awesomeness inside.

2.) Regular editions of “62%” will be available in the store next week, after the book launch party.

3.) Regarding orders from the Sheldon Store: some readers have noted that I’ve been refunding excess shipping fees after we’ve shipped their order out.

The goal, for me, is to charge folks *exactly* what it costs us to ship…and no more. Shipping can be expensive enough as it is — and nothing gets me more ticked than when an online store or an eBay seller tries to make their shipping fees a profit center. I always shake an impotent fist at those people.

The Sheldon Store has some automatic shipping algorithms in place that try to apply the right shipping costs to your order, and they’re pretty accurate, 95% of the time. But whenever a reader was charged more than was needed, or whenever we spot a shipping efficiency that the computer missed, the excess gets refunded. It’s the right thing to do.

4.) Also! As a final note for today….I really like Flaco’s little T-Rex arms in today’s strip. Something about that just made me chuckle to draw.

On behalf of Sheldon readers worldwide, two pieces of Sheldon original art were sent off today to Germany and Canada, in thanks for the over-the-top work put in by Shalaina and Toby. These crime-fighting action squad Grammarians, between the two of them, edited over 1500 strips, and transcribed countless more.

For their thank-you gifts, Shalaina picked this
piece of original art, and Toby picked this one. Good choices, I think!

So, with thanks from Sheldonistas everywhere, I hope you two enjoy these Sheldons framed up on your wall!

And for everyone else…check it out! With just 200 strips left to go, the searchable database of Sheldon toons is runnin’ like butter! Like butter, I tells you! Type in a few words to search for your favorite strip, and BAM, that baby is up on your screen.

One thing I love about “Sheldon” is that it allows me to make Shakespeare jokes one week, and Apatosaurus/Pokemon jokes the next. You ain’t gettin’ that in your daily “Cathy”!

Speaking of Pokemon, this isn’t the first time the strip has commented on Pokemon’s weird Japanese/English contraction names. Check out this earlier strip.

1.) Don’t forget! The “62% More Awesome” book party is this Sunday, 7-10PM, at the ultra-cool lounge in The Crescent Hotel, Beverly Hills. Free signature drinks from PINK Vodka and Vitamin Water, free sketches, and free, lasting friendship!* Check out how cool this place is: Go to their website, and click “photos”. Come on out!

2.) We are cresting the hill on strip transcriptions: only 300 more strips need final approval, and we’re done with the archives! Woo-hoo!

3.) I have not forgotten about my San Diego Con report! It’s a-comin’! I promise! Stuff with the new book has kept me powerful busy.

4.) I love sayin’ stuff like “powerful busy”. I feel like a 1840’s prospector in the California Goldrush. And that’s a powerful good feelin’.

*True.

A Sheldonista bought the Original Art for
a 2005 strip….and when I pulled it out of the art archives, it was like reading a strip I hadn’t drawn. I have no memory of it.

Anyway, I thought I’d share it with you, as it cracked me up to re-read it. I love it when the photographer says “Eünt you brought a little duck…vot a statement!”

Good work, Dave from two years ago! Dave of today had completely forgotten you had drawn this!

Do you remember the project we started about 9 months ago? The one to transcribe all 1900 Sheldon comic strips, so that you could search for your favorite strip…just by typing in a word, a description, or a scrap of dialogue?

Well, I’m happy to report that we’re very, very close to that final goal. As of now, all 1900 archived strips have all been transcibed! And of those, 1430 have been edited and approved by the official Sheldon editors — the crime-fighting action squad “The Grammarians” — and put into the system.

Special, HUGE thanks go to two Grammarians, Shalaina and Toby, who have so far edited 760 and 540 strips, respectively. They have gone above and beyond in the project, and I’ll be sending them both a Sheldon Original Strip of their choosing, as a thank you from all of us.

In the meantime, why not test out the fruits of their labor? Go to the Archives Search page, type in a word like “awesome” or “Klingon” or “jazz hands” or “Winston Churchill”, and see how many strips come up! Even with 500 strips left to go, the system works really well!

Time for another installment of our Saturday-Only Storyline! For those followin’ along, here are the previous installments:
1 ,
2 ,
3,

4,
5,
6, and 7.

After literally hundreds and hundreds of e-mails, we’ve gone ahead and added shirts and buttons to the Sheldon Store! Huzzah!

(The new book will be going on sale in a few days, though — so you may want to save on shipping by waiting to order your book/shirt/buttons all at once. No need to spend more money on shipping than you need to.)