KEVIN TRACY: It's June already! So, some quick bullet points I want to hit before taking questions:

1. Donald Trump is guilty of other crimes, but the New York hush money conviction was outrageous and scandalous.
2. The Home Media Server I built is heating up my office an additional 15 degrees. I think it's going to move to the basement.
3. The MSPaint Comic as a webcomic is coming back, but probably only monthly.

Okay, bullet points read. Any questions?

Q: Have you gotten any feedback about the Robin Williams joke in the webcomic?

KEVIN TRACY: Only that it's irreverent, but I would argue it's hilariously so.

Q: Is that Katie's character design?

KEVIN TRACY: For now, yes. When I first draw a character, at least a regular character like Katie will be, it takes a few dozen iterations to kind of hone in on a character design. As I draw her, I'm going to be adding more volume to her hair, as I'm really not happy with how flat it looks. I also want to figure out some way to add mascara and eyelashes to her character as that's kind of the first thing I noticed about her when I first saw her. It will change, but that change will happen organically.

Q: You look heavier than in The MSPaint Comic and the old webcomic.

KEVIN TRACY: Yeah, I'm a lot heavier than I was in the Air Force and in the late 20 aughts. Thanks, jerk.

Q: What's the plan for displaying the comics?

KEVIN TRACY: So, years and years ago when I drew The MSPaint Comic as a webcomic, I ended up using a PHP script called Comikaze Comic Manager. So far as I can tell, the project was last updated in Sourceforge in 2014.

Now, the website for Comikaze is no longer valid, but it looks like that's a relatively recent loss. According to the Internet Archive's WayBack machine, the site was under construction and promised that Comikaze was going to be rebuilt to run faster and better than ever as late as January 2024. However, that message had been up since March 2013 after the project had been officially discontinued for a period with the creator suggesting people use Comicpress.

Comicpress is a plugin for the despicable WordPress, so you know how I feel about that (even going back as far as 2010).

Unfortunately, WordPress is kind of screwing us. Because of the proliferation of WordPress, the ecosystem is not very sustainable for indie webcomic scripts like it was in the late 20 aughts. As far as I can tell, there are no independent scripts for webcomic content management systems. That leaves us with two options:

• Install Classic Comikaze
  I have my old installation files, so I could use the latest version of classic Comikaze, dress it up with PHP and HTML, and hope it works in a secure way that keeps my server from getting hacked. And it might not work, because that was built for php4 a long, long time ago, and if it does, I don't know how confident I'll be about its security.
• Old Fashioned HTML and PHP, like everything else!
  So, this seems like it would be a no-brainer, and I am leaning in this direction. It's the most secure option and creating new comic pages is not much different than creating news updates and other content. The problem is that after busting out a webcomic, I really don't want to take an hour to create a new page, change the metadata, and go through the whole process. These webcomics are a lot of work and it would be nice to just automate the process.

I'm not giving up on finding a script to handle this yet. However, this whole process is probably going to delay the webcomic from coming online.

Q: Are you going to upload the old webcomics and will those be all grouped together or presented as different comics?

KEVIN TRACY: Oh man, that's a tough question. Instinctively, I want to group them all in one webcomic. However, the old webcomics are not and even these new ones I'm creating are not necessarily cannon in The MSPaint Comic universe. I'll talk about MSPaint Comic Canon in a unique post, but for now, the only Canon stories are The MSPaint Comic: Volume I, The MSPaint Comic: Painting North Korea Red coloring book, and The MSPaint Comic: Pixels for Christmas. The reason this is difficult for me is because I really want Painting North Korea Red to be a webcomic where fans submit colored pages and every time you load a comic, a random fan's submission is shown on the page. I think that would be SO cool! Because it's Canon and because it would require some special coding, I don't think that should be a part of the same webcomic as the others.

Q: Weren't you going to eliminate Google Ads?

KEVIN TRACY: Google Ads are driving me nuts! I want them gone, but I'm going to hold off until the webcomic is loaded onto KTracy.com. Once that's complete, I'm going to figure out the best way to strip Google Ads from all KTracy.com pages, except for the webcomics. Again, that would be much easier to do with a different theme so the prerequisite coding for Google Ads is not present every time you load a page.

Q: Any plans for June around the KTracy Palace?

KEVIN TRACY: Katie and I are going to get our hands on some ornamental grasses and plant a natural privacy barrier on the back of our property.

I mentioned it in my bullet points, but the home media server is severely heating my office and I want to put it downstairs where it's cooler. I eventually plan on moving my office down there, but we've got some work to do before we're ready to do that.

Q: Are you going to finish your basement?

KEVIN TRACY: Eventually. I want to frame out the walls and build a bathroom with bidet, an office for myself, and a playroom for kids that will eventually be in our lives; which will eventually transition into a home theater. Don't ask about the kids. I don't have any major announcements to make or news to report.

Q: Okay, but I have to ask, with regards to kids-

KEVIN TRACY: I just told you, no developments. Press conference over! I have a webcomic script to hopefully find.