Because web browsers can be just as divisive as religions I try not to judge, mainly because people throw rocks at me when I do. But I probably haven’t concealed the fact that – as far as the Pulp-O-Mizer is concerned – Firefox stands out as the Village Idiot of browsers. That’s a problem, because Firefox has been gaining in popularity lately and so a large proportion of Pulp-O-Mizer operators have been getting a rockier experience than I’d like.

Within a week of the Pulp-O-Mizer’s escape from the Secret Laboratory I managed to fix almost every Firefox problem, including some unique problems with older versions of the browser. There was just one big, annoying problem left: Firefox would often draw the Pulp-O-Mizer layers twice when it was rendering a web resolution graphic.

Chances are you’d only realize that had happened when it was the distressed overlay layer that was drawn twice; some of those Firefox images turned out to be extremely distressed, as did I, when I saw them. From time to time a Firefox text layer would be also drawn behind the foreground layer – a bug so improbable that I sort of admired what Firefox had managed to do, there. This was almost certainly another instance of the same problem.

Well, about a week ago I thought of a way to work around that and this morning – when I was finally able to try it – it looks as though I did. Firefox will now draw a web resolution image slightly more slowly, but (I think!) without any risk of drawing the layers twice.

I made one other change. When I was building the T-Shirt images it turned out to be very important that I draw the text layer behind the title layer. In rare cases – when your text was overlapping the title graphic – the T-Shirt image would be slightly different than any other version. So I’ve changed that, too.

Now both the Pulp-O-Mizer preview and the web resolution images place the text layer behind the title layer; and soon I’ll change the product templates so that mugs, iPad covers, and other products will do the same thing.

Very few of you will notice that change. But the Pulp-O-Mizer knows.

But of course that’s not the only Pulp-O-Mizer update: all along I’ve been using those spare hours (!) that I find under my pillow to add more image layers for your Pulp-O-Mizing pleasure. The latest of those are the one-two tag team of Dinosaurs and Leprechauns. Dinosaurs, because… well… Dinosaurs! And Leprechauns, because we just need more choices in that Holidays section.

I’m not a big fan of early 20th century Irish American merchandising and so I don’t have a lot to do with shamrocks, leprechauns, and other Madison Avenue excesses. If I can help it. Therefore I made my leprechaun look a bit like Hunter S. Thompson. I’m a complicated person.

It pleases me no end to say that LoneStarCon3, the host of the seventy-first World Science Fiction Convention, has decided to conspire with me in a Pulp-O-Mizer cover competition. Anybody who has registered for the 2013 Worldcon in San Antonio, Texas can enter.

There’s a special "WorldCon #71" title image that only the contestants can use, and which they must use in order for their entry to be considered. Entrants can unlock the super secret WorldCon title by following the instructions on the competition’s page.

Entries are being accepted through May 31st. So if you’ve registered for WorldCon… go forth and Pulp-O-Mize! And if not, why not?

I’ve been experimenting with the process for offering T-shirts and hoodies through the Pulp-O-Mizer. At the moment, I’m cautiously optimistic.

Supporting T-Shirts requires some more muscle from the server. I’m not sure yet whether that will amount to too much muscle, especially under the heavy load that the Pulp-O-Mizer sometimes attracts.

It’s a sturdy contraption, but it does need to co-exist with other contraptions on the same shared server. So we’ll just have to see.

Yesterday’s work went faster than I expected – which is as nice as it is unusual – and the next step at least doesn’t require me to be any smarter than I have been up to now. The final, or penultimate, or semi penultimate step, though, will take smartness on a grander scale.

And then, with my smartness expended, I’ll have to see how many resources the whole process requires from the server and reduce that load, if I can.

It’s a thrilling adventure!

It’s so thrilling, in fact, that I keep meaning to chronicle all the highlights of the past few weeks. But I’ve been too busy! At first I was patching up all those parts of the Pulp-O-Mizer that weren’t quite ready for the public when the public, suddenly, poured in; then I had to catch up on some other work; then I added a few new image layers; and now I’m working on The Question Of Shirts. So the True Life Story of the Astounding Adventures of the Pulp-O-Mizer may have to wait so long that I won’t remember what it was any more by the time I sit down to type it up.

All in all, that’s not a bad problem to have.

The UK Steampunk band The Men That Will Not Be Blamed For Nothing is sponsoring a contest for their Facebook watchers using the PULSATING POWER of the PULP-O-MIZER.

Through Friday, by which I mean Friday in Old Blighty, they want you to post a Pulp-O-Mized advert for the band. You can see the details on their Facebook page where they’ve announced that prizes will include two tickets to their show in London on April 27, plus some other things that may include posters, CDs, and T-shirts. And awesomeness.

Through midnight (Pacific Time) tomorrow you can get one of my archival prints for free, if you buy two more at the regular price. Oh! The savings!

This applies to my Retropolis archival prints and also to the prints from The Celtic Art Works. It’s a good deal, if you’ve been procrastinating. Come to think of it… it’s still a good deal even if you’re not procrastinating.

So, okay, that happened. It turns out that if you design something that you hope people will enjoy and play with and spread, and then you let the link go free out in the world… they enjoy it, and play with it, and spread it.

Now normally when I share a link to something of mine a few people will look at it and a small percentage of those few people will share the link with their friends. So yesterday I decided to open up the Pulp-O-Mizer to a few more people by posting the link publicly because, really, who pays any attention to me, anyway?

Well. Thousands of pageviews later I guess I have more data than I can really analyze (though mostly, things look pretty excellent). My tweet of yesterday got retweeted by several people who are more, I dunno, twittified than I am; that went on to Google+ with a surprising amount of response; and I couldn’t let my Facebook followers get outdone, could I? So I invited them in, and now the Pulp-O-Mizer has passed its unscheduled stress test with flying colors. And that’s neat. Pulp-O-Mizer images are already turning up in blogs and fora and at Tumblr and in other places.

There have been very few errors, judging by what I’ve found in the temp folders. I can’t be positive about their causes because the sheer number of page views is making it hard for me to match a file to a particular session (and its browser). But I do have a couple of things to look at.

In the meantime, I finally admitted to myself that the thing is out in the world now and so I cobbled together some changes at the Thrilling Tales site so that the Pulp-O-Mizer would be accessible through normal channels. Which I guess means I launched it. Much to my own surprise!

If you have feedback or problems with the Pulp-O-Mizer you can add them to the comments on this post. Note that off-topic comments are likely to be deleted, even if they’re brilliant.

A few notes to get you started:

When you just want to combine images to get something that you like it’s a good idea to turn all the Text Areas off. That’s why I put the On/Off buttons right in the title bar for each Text Area: you can turn them off even when the menu’s been minimized.

Look at the Presets! They’re there to give you illustrated examples of things you can do.

If you run into trouble (especially when you try to make a Pulp-O-Mized product) your first step should be to look at the manual at the bottom of the Pulp-O-Mizer page. The “Browser Compatibility” and “Trouble Shooting” chapters are especially useful.

Although it’s explained in the Users’ Guide I will mention here again that Pulp-O-Mizer images are not available for use in commercial products (like books, eBooks, or tea cozies). In any case the images you render from the Pulp-O-Mizer page are too low in resolution to be suitable for that kind of thing.

I see now that I let my blog lie fallow for an entire month, which is unusual. But I’ve been hard at work on the PULP-O-MIZER pretty much all of this time… apart from driving through a snowstorm and getting knocked on my backside by the flu for a few days.

By the time the holidays rolled around I had all of my intended features in and working and I’d also been through a series of optimizations and changes to get PULP-O-MIZED product creation working on the iPad and (I hope) on Android and Windows RT tablets. I haven’t had any way to test those yet, even by proxy. I could use some Android tablet and Windows RT testers, in case that sounds like you. Just let me know.

(In fact I’d be happy to have more testers of any description. I’m not going to give a public link to the PULP-O-MIZER just yet but if you’d like to test it, let me know and we’ll see if we can make that happen.)

Long before those features were all in, anyway, I could see that I wanted some things to change. Most of this involved rearranging and reworking the text entry controls but it also meant adding some new features like selectable typefaces and colors, along with an on/off switch for the drop shadow behind the text elements. So once my brain had recovered from the flu I got to work on those. They’re in now, and they look like this:

There’s another feature that I’m reluctant to add and there’s one more optimization that I may tackle even though it might create some new problems. So I’m trying to make my mind up about a couple of things and just working on new image layers while those issues get sorted out. There’s the documentation to finish, too. So I still have a pretty full plate, and the whole question of where the PULP-O-MIZER will make its home is kind of up in the air, too.

I’ve been hoping to unleash the PULP-O-MIZER on a hapless world by the end of the month: but we’ll see. I want it to be very polished before that happens and there’s no way to be certain exactly when that’ll be. But soon! Or soonish! Or soon-like!

Something like that.

That’s an actual quote from a tester who doesn’t even owe me money, so, you know, it may mean something.

This image is a sneak peek at the output from my upcoming addition to the Derange-O-Lab at Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual. Another version of it will also go live at Retropolis because once you start Pulp-O-Mizing you just can’t stop.

The deal is, you have menus full of these science fiction pulpy backgrounds, and menus full of these retro science fiction pulpy people, and menus full of titles from the inspiring (Thrilling Tales of Wonder from the Radio Planet) to the amusing (Inadvisable Science) to the head-scratching (Hearts and Pistons).

And then you write your own titles, as you see I’ve done in this example. Which could be anything, and which might appall me, because in spite of what my tester thinks the Internet was invented to, you know, appall us. Or maybe that’s just me.

So anyway, when you’ve picked your background and your characters and your title and you’ve added your potentially me-appalling text, then the system will render out a web resolution graphic suitable for Facebook posts, blog illustrations, and so on, but then it gets better and better because you can also get a high resolution version of the cover as a poster or on other merchandise like fliers, coffee mugs, and whatnot.

Because the other reason the Internet was invented was so that I could shake all the change out of your pockets. And the Pulp-O-Mizer will commence its shaking, well, pretty soon. Pretty soon.

Update: and now you can play with it on the Pulp-O-Mizer page.

Now, at Retropolis: the question, if not the answer, that occupies all our thoughts: Where is My Jet Pack?

Because this is an area where the Future That Never Was has completely outclassed The Present That Really Happened. You can keep your iPhone; you’re perfectly welcome to keep your GPS and your full body scanners; you may enjoy your traffic cameras and your edible deodorants. I don’t know; somebody must be enjoying those, it’s just that I have no idea who they are.

You’re welcome to all of them. All I want, and all that any right-thinking person should want, is a jet pack. If you need to ask why then I feel truly sorry for you, but at least I guess I’ve narrowed down the answer to that that edible deodorant question.

Now I think we’ve been quite patient. Sure, if we got overexcited by the old Gernsback magazines then it’s possible that we cancelled our vacations in the Antibes and sat by the door, waiting for our jet packs to be delivered. That, I admit, was overly optimistic. But honestly! It’s been decades since then. Actual decades. And I don’t think that any of us is getting any younger.

So our jet packs have to be arriving soon. They just have to. And to make the wait more bearable, try these T-shirts and coffee mugs from Retropolis that make no bones about the fact that we want our jet packs now, thank you very much.