So for this our first ever Bacon Day Celebration, I present to you a real party treat! Sexy Girls with nothing but Bacon! Enjoy!

For those of you who are unaware of this, there is actually an International Bacon Day, this isn’t just an excuse to show girls in bacon bikinis. It’s a celebrration of the awesome that is bacon, and most bacon day celebrations include social gatherings, themed around bacon (Duh?), where lots and lots of Bacon is consumed. Bacon Day is held on the Saturday before Labour Day, which this year lands it on September 4th.

Bacon Mania has taken a firm brip in the US, Canada and UK and is gradually spreading throughout the world, and I am only happy to do my part. Bacon Mania refers to a movement in cullinary and cultural innovation, centered around bacon, where we see such things as Bacon Icecream, Bacon Ecclairs, Chocolate Bacon even Rainbow Bacon.

Have a very bacon, Bacon Day!

A Deviant Cause was started back in 2008. Spanning two years, work was done on it haphazardly, usually from interruptions to my routine through work, stress, moving, and illness. Either way, the constant stop-start production of the chapter has impacted on the comic both in artwork, and scripting (but mostly artwork).

Looking back over the full story and its art, I feel ashamed at the rate I failed to produce this comic at, and I’m further ashamed at how inconsistent I was with the character art. Things like outfits and accessories, even techniques used to create certain effects. A Deviant Cause, now finished, will undergo a number of touch-ups to its art. Touch-ups required to keep the effects and details uniform. But now, it’s finally finished, we can move on, and the story can now really advance. I think that while we all love Goldie, we’re ready to move pass his fight with the jungle bandits. As always I thank my readers for their continued patience, and look forward to a future of timely updates and better visuals (we can only hope).

With the end of A Deviant Cause, we’re going to skip one update timeslot and chapter 4 of History will commence on 30th September 2010. So mark your calendars, and we’ll see you there for new characters and more adventures.

Now then, in that time before chapter 4 begins, I’ll be working on the 2010 Halloween wallpaper. The contest has closed and we’ve chosen a winning theme. We won’t be announcing who the winner is until the wallpaper becomes available, but that winner will receive the original sketch for the wallpaper, an original drawing of his/her choice, and his/her forum avatar will be a featured guest of the 2010-2011 New Year Party wallpaper. The Halloween wallpaper will become available on 17th October 2010.

Thank you, we’ll see you again!

Along with this comic update is an additional comic update for the Forumverse project Komewnitees. For those that haven’t registered on the forums, Komewnitees (it’s Communities spelt phonetically) is a comic produced entirely by the members of the forum, as a group effort. Each page is done by one member of t he roster and then the next page by the next person and so on, carrying on the story bit by bit. There is no preplanning, it’s all made up page by page! Sound like something you might want to join in on? Get to the forum and sign up!

And don’t forget, we’re hosting a quick fire contest for this years theme for the Halloween Wallpaper. Every year we produce a free wallpaper for Halloween, and the theme is picked by us from suggestions made on the forum. The winning suggestion will recieve the sketch of the wallpaper theme that was chosen, an original sketch of your design by me, and your character will automatically be featured in the New Years Party Wallpaper for 2010-2011.The competition closes September 1st, so if you haven’t registered, you better get to it! Contest is held on the forum.

However we’re not going to scrimp on it, the competition will be held! This is going to be a quick fire competition, I want to see as many theme ideas for the Halloween Wallpaper as possible before September 1st! The winner will be announced within the week and then there is a very brief period of time that we have to get the wallpaper done and out before halloween! Yikes this is goign to be a lot of work!

So if you are registered on the forum, get posting, if you aren’t get registered and get posting! The winner will recieve the sketch of the Wallpaper theme that was chosen, an original sketch of your design by Qeeko, and your character will automatically be featured in the New Years Party Wallpaper for 2010-2011.

Hope that gives you all some incentive to enter! See you all soon!

History is still being updated, but incase you missed the update (even though it’s two posts down (three on Facebook)), History is now gone to the schedule of updating every two weeks on Thursday. The next update should be available ont he 19th.

More work and planning has been going into Omniverse, and I have a few ideas for the layout of the site it’s self. However thats not very helpful, when the first thing we intend working on is the forum… Oh well, you can only work on what you are inspired to do so. I think that the design is pretty solid and it shouldn’t be too hard to make a forum out of that design. I’ll get a few sketches done up and maybe even post them on the forum.

Tomorrow (being Sunday) is the first of the Monthly Cosplay Parties in Brisbane Botanical Gardens. Qeeko, Ritterwolf and Myself will be heading into the city to join in the festivities, and if anyone is around or available, feel free to drop by. Further informationcan be found on the cosplay party’s event page: HERE

Thats all for now!

Ciao

Nonetheless we have big plans for UJ and this slow artist is still determined to keep working on illustration those big plans, however I think time management has more to do with it than I’ve ever before believed. I’ve barely been near my computer over the last week as there’s been a lot of extra hours for me to pick up at the shop, so when I’ve come home Star Trek and trying not to fall asleep in front of Star Trek has more or less filled the rest of the day.

Some good news though is after all of my hard work, I have a day at the Brisbane Ekka planned, the Ekka being a yearly exhibition/festival,  I intend to really enjoy myself there. Well rested and enjoying a day out, this artist may feel a bit more creative again.

History Chapter 3 Page 32, updated last night!

We’re currently still struggling with managing our time and getting more of the comic done, but we have been workign on it over the past two weeks, and we do have some pages to upload! Finally! The upload actually went up last night, but we got distracted and haven’t had a chance to actually do the update post.

In an attempt to try and get the comic back on schedule we are also going to change to days the comic updates. Because of the current time constraints, we will be changing from a weekly update (which we have yet to be able to keep) to a fortnightly update (every two weeks). Also the update day changes from Monday, to Thursday.

So expect the next update on the 5th!

So in the coming months I’ll be taking small steps towards Omniverse, by creating a new layout for the site and the Forums, one that will mirror a slightly lower tech version of what Omni will look like. Hopfully this will mean that the minor changes between the two versions won’t throw any of our users off too much, and there will be less to ahve to get used to in a single weekend.

We still have no dates yet for when the change over will take place, but what we have come to a conclusion on, is that UJ will probably be closed down for the weekend that the switch takes place so that no one looses any information during the switch over. Last thing we want to do is to download the database, and while we’re modifying it, someone writes a compelling and thrilling epic on the forums, only to find out when the system switches over the database has been rolled back by two days.

Now some different news. I have been in talks with some guys from Brisbane, and I’m working on plans for a monthly event here in Brisbane. We’re looking at setting up a regular meeting of anime, comic and games fans, presented by UJ. There’s no details at the moment, but more will come as the discussion and plans go on.

I don’t want to keep anyone out of the loop on this one!

Thats what Wikipedia defines Evolution as, but it’s not always confined to organisms. Through developments and successive changes in ones state, throughout a person’s life time we can say that we evolve personally, mentally or spiritually. A TV show that is constantly building upon it’s plot adding ot the themes and stories, until it appears to become a different theme all together can be said to have evolved. Even computer programs, as new versions are released where developers have tweeked and built upon an original concept to create a program that may be quite different from it’s predecessor but still retain everything that made it the program it was.

So to does Ultima-Java evolve, and while we are updating and compesating for changes in the Wordpress, Comicpress and phpBB systems, we to have split away that which is Ultima-Java from that which is mearlly the programs by which it is presented, and we are developing and evolving a new improved foundation, on which a better and more efficient set up can be created.

In the background of these superficial updates, an all encompassing site is being built. This new site is called Ultima-Java: Omniverse.

The biggest problem we’ve had so far with UJ is all the different logins. There is a login for the forum, there is a login for the site, there are logins for each of the comics, and there’s a login for the Mumble, and aside from just allowing anyone to post on everything, there’s no real way we can make UJ as it stands, a single login site. So things are changing. Drastic changes.

Already the programming of this new site is underway, which will allow access to the homepage, and leave comments, post on the forum, view comics and post comments, view and upload to art galleries, create your own comic page, amongst many other new features that we intend adding to UJ, all through a single login. We’ve discussed this once or twice on the forum, and asked for peoples oppinions on other features they would like to see on UJ, and though the forum response has been limited, I have had a lot of feedback through Facebook (which you will be able to link your account too), MSN, and on Mumble.

Our biggest worry was loosing all the posts and haveing to get all the members to sign up… again. Again… again. However we have put our efforts into this and we have solved atleast half of the problem, by extracting data from the current UJ database, and reinserting it into the database structure that we are looking to use. The next task is to make sure we can retain all the posts. This isn’t much of a consern but we can see it has potential to become one.

The plan for the building of Omniverse is going to start where we percieve to be the priorities. Ultima-Java was built as a community, and I think we have lost sight of that fact. As we’ve kept the forum tucked away from the web. Directing people to the site rather than the forums. However Omniverse is going to take us back to basics.The first part of Omniverse to be built will be the Forums, as it will be the forum log in that will give us control over everythign we do on UJ, from there, we’ll look at the comic pages get them usable and active, and in doing so make comic hosting available for everyone who is registered on the forum. The comic pages will not only be controlled by the users forum account, but will also be plugged into the forum it’s self, showing recent updates and comments in their own threads on the forum. the next stage will be the homepage, this is forseeable as a particularly short stage of the projects but will help tie everything together and solidify the previous two stages. With a few extra surprises in there to boot!

Untill the pages are replaced by Omniverse pages they will remain as they are now.

Overtime we will provide you all with glimpses of what various pages and functions we will have, and keep you informed of how long we have left on our current project. At the moment the forum part of the project is still in it’s infancy, so we can’t give a date yet on it’s completion, but like I said, from now on updates will be more regular and we’ll keep you all very well informed. Don’t forget that we want to see your feed back on this, throughout the development stages so that we may be able to adjust our plan to suit the needs of our members. Any ideas you have for features and functions, feel free to post them on the forum in the Omniverse Thread. If you have any questions about the Omniverse site, then please feel free to field them here too!

One thing you will have seen on the UJ Facebook Page, the UJ Youtube page UJ:TV, or maybe even my Twitter page, is the new UJ logo. That was designed for use on the Omniverse site. So incase you haven’t seen it yet, here it its!