Sheercore

I’ve set up a twitter account for Sheercore; you can follow us at @sheercore.

I’ll (try to remember to) tweet whenever a new comic is out, and perhaps offer some additional thoughts on life, interdimensional travel, and the art of making weak jokes about technology and popular culture while saying “fuck” a lot.

All of the main cast-members of Sheercore also have their own twitter accounts, by the way: Me (Matt), Chris, Neil, Lauren, Steve and the so-far-highly-mysterious Iain.

Sorry for the huuuuuuuge delay in updating Sheercore. I’ve been working on cool things, and was just too busy and/or lazy. I PROMISE TO BE BETTER IN FUTURE. SERIOUSLY.

We don’t have a t-shirt just yet, but I can at least offer you some desktop wallpaper. You can now proclaim your Star Trek nerd status even as you order the curvy and ambitious young Ensign Candi to join you in your Ready Room.

There’s a preview of the wallpaper below, and you can click it to download the full-size version.

Make it so!

Footnote: for those who are wondering, the font used in the wallpaper is Myriad Pro Bold Condensed (from Adobe); it’s a decent visual match for the LCARS font from Star Trek.

It’s been years since I created an LCARS layout, but back in the day I used to make quite a few. Michael Okuda (Scenic Art Supervisor from The Next Generation and all following Trek series) once took a look at my displays and sent his compliments. True story.

You may recall that the topic of critical awesomeness was discussed in this comic, and it’s an idea that appeals to me for obvious reasons. Can one person be just too awesome? I think the answer is: “Yes.”

I’m talking about the level of awesomeness that would cause some kind of subspace anomaly to form just off the port bow. (Worf would instinctively fire phasers at it, but they’d have NO EFFECT.)

Anyway, if you’re concerned that you might be in such a position yourself, you can now warn people by using this desktop wallpaper I created. There’s a preview below, which you can click to download the full-size version.

And remember: just because it scares people doesn’t mean it’s bad – so stay awesome! (Just NOT TOO MUCH!)

OK, I removed the Google AdSense ads after only 24 hours, because I quickly realised two things:

1. Because the topic of the comic changes constantly, and because there’s not a large body of text, the ads aren’t particularly well-targeted, and indeed are usually just sites relating to comics in a generic way.
2. The actual available ads just aren’t that relevant to you, the reader of a webcomic (except by coincidence), and some are downright irrelevant and bizarre.

So, AdSense is gone. Instead, I’ve set up 5 ad spaces with Project Wonderful, and if you’re interested you can sign up and put your own ad here on Sheercore – right now, it’s FREE!

I intend to only serve ads for sites that are relevant to Sheercore (other comics, nerdy stuff, computing, scifi, etc), so hopefully this should work out well. If you’re interested in advertising here or in serving ads on your own site (or just interested in how it can be free right now), navigate over to Project Wonderful and read about it (it’s another endeavor of that sneaky Ryan “Dinosaur Comics” North chap)

The other cool thing is that the model is based on ads being displayed rather than on clicks, so you don’t have the click-fraud thing and I don’t need to encourage you to click the ads! (Though page-views are of course gently encouraged.)

It seems we have some actual ads up already, and if you’d like yours to be there, go sign up at Project Wonderful and set it up.