Patreon Get some books Get some ebooks Leif & Thorn
 

Endpiece Portrait
Posted on October 20, 2025 by Erin Ptah

A final group portrait of Sparrow, Patrick, and Bianca. The last piece of art I drew for the But I'm A Cat Person Master's Edition, and the last image in the books.

(Get your own copy of the omnibus in ebook, in hardcover, or in paperback.)

Fan de-ciphering of the Contract

Posted on July 1, 2026 by Erin Ptah

Hat tip to Erat Faciendum for decrypting a bunch of the text I used in the Beings’ Contracts!

As I said on the notes for Chapter 19 page 7:

“For this block of text, I Absolutely Did Not take an entire passage of Hebrew (even a random passage unrelated to golems or contracts) and laboriously replace each character with its Malachim equivalent. I didn’t find an English-language contract, change the font, and let the Roman letters be displayed as the Malachim characters that are sorta-randomly assigned to them, either. It’s in English, but it’s just a bunch of random stuff I was thinking about at the time. Anyone want to go through and un-cipher it? I don’t have the original text anymore. All I remember is, there was a lot about Orphan Black.”

Check out the transcription for the page 7 text. Some of the covered-by-dialogue parts are seen again on Chapter 19 pages 22-23; see also the transcription that fills them in.

It would need at least one more pass to be fully-legible, since several of the Malachim characters have been mapped to multiple English letters. As explained in one of the lines, after doing that final pass…

“It is ironic that the non fake passages should be easier to decipher because every character in the font stands for a single letter in the alphabet of that language but no one has reversed it yet I am kind of disappointed in you all honestly Homestuck never had this problem dammit”

Pride Month discount for the BICP Omnibus

Posted on June 4, 2025 by Erin Ptah

Finally updated my online Gumroad store to have the print versions of the BICP Master’s Edition!

Hardcover omnibus
Paperback omnibus

Ever since the original BICP campaign got fulfilled, I’ve only had these box sets available as add-ons to the Leif & Thorn BackerKit campaigns. And the base price is still a little cheaper if you get them there.

But if you’ve been holding out for the Gumroad versions, here’s a limited-time discount.

Use the coupon code BICPride to get $22 off:

It’s good for 20 uses, or through the end of June 2025, whichever comes first.

Update on BICP’s Easel-to-Toocheke conversion

Posted on January 12, 2025 by Erin Ptah

Previously: updating the BICP site theme, November 2024.

Here’s the headline news from the latest update: Comics can now be put back in the main RSS feed, but it’s not the default, it’s a box you have to tick in Toocheke Options:

Toocheke - Options - RSS - add comic posts to the main feed (box checked)

If you’re using the plugin for your comic site, take a minute to double-check this!

Other changes, both for the plugin and for BICP:

  • We got new “under the header” and “over the footer” widget areas!
  • Re-added the shopping/support menu to the top of every page, and the ComicRocket exchange banner to the bottom
  • The front page has a “Leave a Comment” button on comics again!
  • Turned off the big front-page comment box, now that you can just see where to click
  • Now working in the comic blog posts: readmores, and paragraph breaks (in new posts. old ones seem to be permanently smushed, alas)
  • I redid all the links on the cast page, since Toocheke formats the tag URLs differently than Easel did
  • Added an image to each character, so they can headline the tag results
  • I should ask for characters to get a default Blank Face when there isn’t one assigned. Used to be the tag results all started with broken images
  • Clicking the title of the chapter now gets you a chapter page in the same format as the character results. Added cover images to all of those too
  • Should ask for a default Blank Cover, for the same reason
  • Just realized the conversion seems to have eaten all the tags on regular blog posts. Gotta ask for a fix for that too
  • Will I go through all 150+ previous blog posts and manually re-add tags…? Decisions, decisions

Tweaked a range of colors and margins in the BICP theme, so the new buttons look nicer. And some other bits match.

If you spot any remaining problems or broken links, comment here, let me know!

Got to update the BICP site theme, everyone hold tight

Posted on November 13, 2024 by Erin Ptah

Easel breaks with the next WordPress update, so I’m giving Toocheke a try.

Once everything is reconfigured enough that nothing should be broken, I’ll update this post with a “comment if you see anything broken” message. Stay tuned.

ETA, 11:30 AM:

I followed the official “import your comics from Comic Easel/Comicpress” tutorial, so now I just have a full Toocheke site! Finally brought it into the 2020s.

Working:

  • Comics all look nice, stayed in order, are correctly sorted by chapter
  • The 170 still-queued pages look like they imported fine [ETA: they did not! Have reached out to the theme creator about it.]
  • Menu is good
  • Most of the menu pages are, if not as pretty as before, at least functional

Not working:

  • Character tags. They show up under each comic, but only to go to a broken link [ETA: working now! I guess it just took that long to index]
  • Fonts imported from Google. Text shows up in the Overlock font when I’m logged in, but not when I view the site in a private window — readers, is it working for you?
  • Search for comic text. I get search results for words in comic titles, and blog entry titles/text, but not comic entry text [ETA: the latest update to Toocheke fixes this]
  • “All pages in chapter” gives you just a list of comic images, no links to the individual pages with notes/comment sections/etc
  • [ETA] In the already-posted pages, the conversion process ate all the paragraph breaks. Every transcript is now mashed together in a single block of text. [ETA 2: The latest update to Toocheke should fix this for future imports! But my already-imported ones are stuck as-is, and I don’t plan to go manually fixing them.]
  • [ETA] New comics aren’t showing up in the RSS feed. Have notified the Toocheke creator, cross your fingers for another update

Currently I don’t have a child theme. And it looks like I might need one, to adjust some of the more finicky details. (Mobile site layout triggers when the browser is under 992 pixels wide, really??)

In the short term, though, a chunk of ad-hoc custom CSS can carry us through. It’s enough to get the BICP site style and visual branding on track.

ETA, 10 PM the next day:

Knuckled down and spent most of the evening on a child theme! It is, again, up to Mostly Functional. Here’s the actual CSS, if you want to take a look under the hood.

Still haven’t sorted out everything, but all the edits from the ad-hoc CSS should’ve been incorporated here. Plus a range of new fixes and customizations, large and small.

ETA, Nov 23:

Throughout the week after this post, I pushed a couple dozen updates (with increasingly-minor changes) to the BICP For Toocheke child theme. The latest one is from November 20, and I haven’t touched it since, so we might be done?

If you spot anything that’s still glitchy and/or hard to read, let me know.

Friday Webcomic Recs: A little more serious now

Posted on September 6, 2024 by Erin Ptah

I rec a lot of lighthearted comedies, but these more somber series are worth reading too.

Fantasy with serious issues:

Kochab – A lost skier trying to survive a snowy wilderness and find her way back to her village stumbles across and awakens a fire spirit trying to fix the home that she’s let fall apart around her. Complete!

Fairmeadow – Wayward Orcish soldier Goma finds herself in a commune of pacifists deep in the Cascadian wilderness. Isolation has allowed the commune to thrive in the shadow of a century-long war, but Goma’s arrival brings troubling reminders of the world outside… Ongoing.

Just serious reality:

fresh meat – A girl with clinical depression and her first experience with a psychiatric hospital. (Yes, they’re anthros. It’s realistic anyway.) Complete!

what happens next – A constellation of extremely-online young people grapple with various abuses and traumas, up to and including an actual murder, while their main social outlets are the woefully-unprepared communities of true-crime podcasting and Tumblr. Ongoing.

Joe vs Elan School – Graphic memoir about the artist being kidnapped into an abusive, culty “school” that’s typical of the “troubled teen industry”, how he got through it, and all the traumatic fallout it left in his life. Complete!

Friday webcomic recs: Complete Fantasy Adventure/Romance Comics

Posted on August 30, 2024 by Erin Ptah

Adding another handful of recs to the Finished Webcomics reclist! Go check these out:

Puffer and Clarissa – In a post-apocalyptic flooded planet, a supervillain’s daughter has to team up with a girl from the ship town her mom just invaded. Complete graphic novel is crowdfunding now!

The Stoop-Gallants – He’s an accidental necromancer, she’s read every book in the local villain’s library, they’re a wizard who’s convinced their powers are due to a clerical error, they’re on a quest to the big city that will either solve all their problems or give them a bunch of new ones. One of my top favorites. (The new comic by the same artist, Avalonia Ruin, is now on my Webtoon reading list.)

Lore Olympus – The gorgeous, award-winning, modern remix of the romance of Hades and Persephone. Finally wrapped, with a triumphant “how many cycles of abuse can we break in one day?” finale, and an adorable flash-forward kiddo for the happy couple.

Vampire Boyfriend – Lighthearted couple moments with confident ray of sunshine (not literally) Peg, and spooky old-fashioned vampire Neculai. (No official ending, but it hasn’t updated since 2021, so I’m counting it as wrapped.)

Norm and Sparkletina – Heartwarming pet adventures when the world’s most boring guy adopts a sparkly Deviantart reject. (Also no official ending, but it’s been more than a year since the last update. Short and sweet slice-of-life.)

Friday Webcomic Recs, 8/23: Finished and funny

Posted on August 23, 2024 by Erin Ptah

Today’s new additions to the Finished Webcomic Recs page: some comedies! Roughly in order from least to most amount of plot:

NOT/BUT — One-off strips about an artist reframing his negative thoughts. Inspirational in a low-key, matter-of-fact, “huh, yeah, that’s a good point” way.

Scenes From A Multiverse — Fun, colorful parody gags from a range of sci-fi settings. Sometimes you’ll know exactly what canon they’re riffing on, sometimes it’s just having fun with tropes.

Cupcake War Machine — A combat bot from a grim greyscale cyber-war future gets revived in the peaceful rainbow even-farther future, and repurposed to be an assistant bakery-bot. Can he adjust to the culture shock?

Skin Horse — The adventures of the shadow-government agency that liaises with supernatural, sci-fi, and mad-science-Americans. What the X-Files are to the FBI, these folks are to social services. A long sprawling series with a lovable ensemble cast.

Friday Webcomic Recs, 8/9: Complete on Webtoon

Posted on August 9, 2024 by Erin Ptah

It’s been years since I last did a webcomic recommendation post…but I’m adding a batch of new series to my Finished Webcomics rec list, and I figured, why not put them in a post while I’m at it?

These are all on Webtoon, and some of the updates can only be read in the app. Annoying, but sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do.

In order by title:

Cursed Princess Club – Princess Gwen’s two sisters (and one brother) are classic fairy-tale beauties, so why is she…not? Cue the friendship and shenanigans with a secret local support group for cursed royalty, who might be able to help her out.

The Divine Intervention – Lilo & Stitch if it was about a misfit trickster deity (who really likes bees). Short and extremely sweet.

Doris Doodle – She’s a retired old-fashioned cartoon living in the present day of a Roger-Rabbit-esque world, when she accidentally goes viral on social media. Can she ride the wave back into a steady career? (Does she really want to?)

Mage & Demon Queen – Adventurers are supposed to be trying to kill the fantasy final boss, but this hopeless lesbian just wants to date her. Long-running slow-burn romance and they do finally get together and there’s still more comic to go after that!

The Masked Henchman – Superhero adventures from the POV of a temp who works for the villains. Cheerful and funny.

What Happens in Carpediem – In a fantasy MMORPG where you can get bonuses from marrying a fellow player, what do you do when the romance starts getting a little too real?

I’m trying to connect my webcomic to the Fediverse! Here’s how that’s going

Posted on October 20, 2023 by Erin Ptah

Update from The Future (July 2025):

A while back, a plugin update (not for ActivityPub, a different plugin) crashed the site. Only way to fix it was to whip out Siteground’s “deactivate all plugins” option, then go back into WP and turn them back on one-by-one.

I didn’t change any settings. But the fediverse integration stopped working after that. At least, on the feed for my personal Mastodon account, no more BICP updates ever showed up. None of my troubleshooting was able to find out why.

More recently, this post came across my feed, suggesting a possible problem:

  • Fediverse instances have public/private keys. When one instance (say, Universeodon) sees another (say, the BICP site), it caches the public keys
  • If BICP’s public keys change later, so they no longer match whatever Universeodon has cached, Universeodon will treat it as an imposter and refuse to interact with it
  • If I ever let the domain expire, then some nefarious person scoops it up and tries to impersonate me, this will be a helpful security measure
  • If I accidentally change/regenerate/overwrite the keys on the domain while I still own it, I’m just screwed
  • Where can I, as a site admin, find my public keys? Don’t know. If they change, can I change them back? Don’t know.
  • Do they get regenerated if the plugin gets turned off and back on? Maybe!

I don’t know if this is what happened, and I don’t know how to find out — I just know that it sure would explain a lot.

For now, I’ve deactivated ActivityPub completely, and I’m using the XPoster plugin to auto-share designated posts to my personal accounts (it does both Bluesky and Mastodon). It’s just regular crossposting, not full fediverse integration, but it’s automated and it hasn’t stopped working. Which is good enough that I’m not going to keep fighting with AP to get all the bells and whistles back.

(Original post follows. It should still work for anyone who’s doing this fresh. Just…don’t deactivate the plugin ever, apparently.)

First, some quick background, just to make sure everyone’s on the same page. Skip the opening if you already know this part!

Wait, what’s the Fediverse?

ActivityPub is a decentralized (for real, not in the way blockchains are “decentralized”) social networking protocol that’s been getting a lot of chatter lately. It’s like “what if RSS, but with more of the interactive features of social media?” Or “what if OpenID, but we actually got it to take off?”

Services built on the ActivityPub protocol include Mastodon, Pleroma, Pixelfed, and Misskey. None of those are single sites — anyone can start and run their own Mastodon server, hosting as many other users as they’re open to — and then all these independently-run setups federate with each other. So, collectively, they’re “the Fediverse.”

And if you have an account on any installation of any of these services, you can follow, comment on, and generally interact with any of the others.

Read More