What's all this?
Trigger and Freewheel is a webcomic, simple as that. It updates at midnight Eastern time, Monday through Friday. There is no roster of characters or complicated storylines, just a joke a day. You can start reading any time, at any point in the archive, and not feel like you're missing anything.
There have been 500 published comics since April 1, 2008, when I started this. In retrospect, that was a pretty stupid day to begin. Now all my
n-year anniversaries and April Fool's comics will have to be one and the same. Ah well.
Who draws this comic?
Well, I suppose I'll have to take the blame for that one.
Oh, you want like a bio or something? Well, if you insist. I'm Scott Smitelli, a 38.725 year old web guy/sound guy residing in or around the Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina area. I studied Computer Science at the Rochester Institute of Technology, which lasted all of two years. I transferred to the New York Film Academy, eventually doing freelance sound work on film and video projects. When the economy tanked in 2009, I jumped back to web development. In my spare time, I enjoy computers, music, dumpster diving, getting lost, the smell of rosin-core solder, meandering through Wikipedia, and making lists of things. Sentence fragments. Probably other stuff too.
I'm easy to get in contact with. Just shoot an email to
scott[at]triggerandfreewheel[dot com] (after reassembling that email address, of course) and who knows, I might even write something back!
What does "Trigger and Freewheel" mean?
It's a mode of synchronization in some audio software, and the opposite of "Full Chase Lock." In the simplest terms, trigger and freewheel means that one audio device tells another to "start playing now" and nothing more. The two devices continue to play in sync because they share a common clock rate. In full chase lock, the first audio device not only tells the other one when to start, but also constantly announces the current chunk of time it should be playing. This looks more like "start playing now... you should be at 0.01 seconds... 0.02 seconds... 0.03..." the entire time. You'd think that full chase lock would offer better synchronization, but it often creates clicks or glitches in audio. Sound hardware doesn't like being micromanaged any more than the rest of us do.
In actuality, I picked the name because it sounded kinda cool, and it didn't have many Google hits. ;)
Do you have any merchandise available?
Not yet, but I have plans to eventually have shirts (at the very least) and maybe anthology books or other printed tchotchkes. First I have to collect enough rabid fans to ensure that the stuff would actually get bought. But it's on my list.
I am intrigued and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
Uhh, yeah. I'll just throw you a few links.
And if you
really enjoyed the work I do, you'd click this little button:
What do you use to draw the comic?
The bulk of the material on this site was drawn directly into Photoshop CS-something-or-other with a Wacom Bamboo MTE-450. That's right, the cheap one. All the line art, fills, and text are created within Photoshop. I prefer to do the drawing on a Mac, but I've been known to use a Windows laptop if I find myself traveling somewhere. Occasionally I'll use screenshots from other pieces of software to help convey a joke (you'll find I use Adobe Audition a lot for that - partly because I used to stare at that UI every day). I've also been known to trace pictures of real-life objects, like cars for example. Those are notoriously hard to draw without some guidance.
What about this website? What did you use to make that?
I used my bare hands. Oh, and PSPad on Windows.
I hand-coded everything here from scratch: the archive system, the database stuff, the HTML templates, the stylesheets - everything. The graphics were created in Photoshop, then prepared for the web with IrfanView.
You're not funny and you can't draw and I don't like you.
Duly noted.
