Issue 3 Released

It’s here. The halfway point for NYC2123: Dayender. So what are you waiting for? Head on over to the home page and git yer mits on it.

All Your Locations Are Belong to Us

We know where you are. Last week we wrote about gVisit, a great service that uses Google maps to show the location of the last 20 visitors to your site . I like Google maps, and I like the fact that gVisit is free (though for a donation of any size -- we gave them five bucks -- they will track the last 100 visits to your site). However, I was kinda curious to find out what the traffic patterns around here look like on a more long-term basis, so we signed up for a ClustrMaps account (which also has free and not-free versions). This thing is truly bad-ass. Click here to see which places love us and which ones don't. Rio is digging us. Siberia, not so much.

OPPC (Other People's PSP Comics)

Made in DNA has helped out with NYC2123 in various ways, including the translations for the Japanese signs which appear in the barge city sequences in Issue 2. He's currently working on his own mangalicious comic for the PSP entitled "ZIPPER." I got a chance to read a sneak preview of the manuscript this week and it's great. The illustrator he has lined up for the project is ninjariffic as well, so the whole thing promises to be a quality read. Check out his ZIPPER work blog, where he chronicles the development of the project.

Who Reads This Thing?

Well, a few people here and there, judging by the log files. But more specifically, where are these people when they're reading it? You can find out by looking at our stats on gVisit, which (I can only assume) uses IP addresses in http request headers to geo-locate site visitors and overlay the data on Google Maps. Pretty nifty. It only shows the last 100 visitors, so you'll see some pattern shifting at different times of the day, but most of you are in Europe and North America.

NYC2123 Magyarul

Issue 1 of NYC2123 is now available in Hungarian thanks to much hard work on the part of Rebeka Vitez. You can view it online or download for the PSP. Thanks Rebeka!

More on PSP Image Sequencing

If you are reading this, you will probably want to read a newer post on the same topic here.

Here are some things we've learned recently by talking to folks at Sony (thanks, guys!) and through a fair bit of experimentation. This is probably only of interest to you if you are creating re-mixed or translated versions of NYC2123, or if you are creating your own sequence-based content for the PSP.

1. As you probably already know, the PSP organizes images by create date from earliest to most recent. Which means if you are creating sequential content (like comics) you need to save the images in the order they are to be viewed (save 01.jpg, first, then 02.jpg, 03.jpg, etc.).

2. Unfortunately, some unzippers (certain versions of Windows' built in archive tool for example) will give the files new create/modified dates when uncompressing the files (this is ridiculously stupid, but true). So if the files are zipped using WinZip, and unzipped using Windows, you might have problems. Here's why: When WinZip and other archiving tools add files to an archive, they order the files internally in way that is not necessarily human-friendly. In other words, WinZip does not order the files in the archive according to filename or create/modified date. However, this doesn't matter in most cases -- a file zipped with WinZip and unzipped with WinZip will preserve the create date and write out the unzipped files with their original create dates, which will allow you to view them in the proper sequence on your PSP assuming you followed Step 1.

3. But... when Windows uncompresses the Zip file, it pulls the image files out in the order in which they are stored in the archive. And because Windows (at least in some versions of XP) will give the files new create/modified dates to files as it's pulling them out of the archive, you'll end up with files that don't have your original create dates. The files will have create dates that match the order in which they were stored in the Zip archive, which as I mentioned above is is not by name or date created/modified if you are using WinZip, WinRAR or others to create the archive. This means that those files won't be in the proper sequence when transferred to your PSP.

4. So, to avoid tools like Windows reorganizing the images we recommend using the built in Windows archive tool to create the Zip file. If you use Windows to create the Zip file the JPG files will remain in the correct order when uncompressed with the Windows archive tool, WinZip or any other unzipper that we've tested.

5. However... there is a very specific way in which you need to use the Windows archive tool in order to achieve the desired effect. First, view the files in Windows Explorer. Next, select all the files you want to Zip and then, from the File menu choose "Send To> Compressed (zipped) Folder." If you simply select a bunch of images and the right click on them to Zip them up, Windows will sometimes order them with whatever specific image you happened to have right clicked on first. If you do all of this right, then an archive uncompressed with Windows will pull the files out of the archive in the correct order, so even if it modifies the create date, it will do so in the proper sequence. And since WinZip and other tools will extract the files and preserve the original create date, you'll have no problems there as well. In short: Don't use the right-click context menu to Zip your files in Windows -- do it from the "File" menu.

So the overall summary is that you should save the JPG files out in sequential order and then use Windows archive tool From the File menu in Windows Explorer to create the Zip file. This is basically a huge work-around for the fact that some versions of the Windows unzip utility modify the create dates of files as it unzips them. (Thanks, Bill!)

Obviously, this advice is useless to you if you don't have access the Windows XP compression utility, but it's the only bulletproof method we've found. We haven't had time to figure this out for Mac or other platforms, and there are undoubtedly scenarios even on Windows that we are overlooking.

In the end, you're going to want to thoroughly test the decompression of your Zip archive using a number of different unzip tools to make sure that whatever your readers are using will do the right thing when it comes to sequencing the images for viewing on the PSP. This should be vastly more simple, but it isn't.

Any insight, advice, corrections or additional information on this topic is welcomed.

T-Shirt Remix Action

If you don't feel like buying a t-shirt from us, you can make your own. AkuAku has posted a PSD file and instructions for making an NYC2123 t-shirt using inkjet iron-on paper.

Press Release

You're nobody until you have a press release. Until you realize that everyone has a press release, and that news stories aren't written by reporters at all, but are just press releases picked up by bots that relentlessly churn through the interminable sea of RSS feeds looking for keywords that are identified by some secret algorithm as being "newsworthy." So you're still nobody even if you have a press release. But at least you're a nobody who's been thoroughly scoured by bots.