UTC: Urgent Transformation Crisis

A comic about shapeshifting teenage scientists by Jim Whaley
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Next UTC Page Coming January 25

on January 22, 2023 at 6:00 am
Posted In: Site News
The next UTC page is going to need some extra time to finish. Instead of Monday, it will go public on Wednesday, January 25. (Early Access patrons will see it on Tuesday the 24th.)
Also, while we’re here, I’ll mention that there will not be a UTC page on the week of January 30. In the past two years, when UTC was updating on a weekly basis, I made it a policy to release 4 pages each month, even if the month had 5 Mondays. The 30th will be the fifth Monday, so I will take next week to catch my breath.
The release calendar has been updated, as always whenever there’s a schedule change.
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Next UTC Page Coming December 12 (UPDATE: Dec 13, Actually)

on December 3, 2022 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Site News

Exactly what it says in the title. I was slammed with several hours of unexpected overtime this week, and that ate into the time I could spend finishing next Monday’s new page. I meant to get it done early in the week, because I’m out of town this weekend. (Actually posting this from my hotel room… I had SO LITTLE SPARE TIME this week, it’s not funny.)

Thank you for rolling with these delays, everyone.

UPDATE 12/12: The page was just finished and uploaded to Patreon at 2:00am Monday morning for Early Access subscribers. It will go live here at 2:00am Tuesday, December 13. I’m immediately starting work on the next page to make sure it goes out on schedule next Monday.

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Next UTC Page Coming September 26

on September 21, 2022 at 12:26 am
Posted In: Site News

Page 334 of UTC was supposed to go up Monday, since that was the 3rd Monday of September. Obviously, it didn’t. I lost track of things.

I’m sorry I wasn’t more on the ball with the new release schedule. The page will go up next Monday. I’ll focus on sticking to the proper schedule for pages 335 and 336 on October 3 and 17, respectively.

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UTC Fall Schedule Update

on August 22, 2022 at 2:00 pm
Posted In: Site News

(For the vital info, skip to the TL;DR section)

As you may have noticed, if you keep up with the comic regularly, UTC is slipping behind its Friday schedule more often, by half a day or more.

The “vacation” schedule I’ve been trying out during production on Chapters 14 and 15 — where I take one week off roughly every 3 months — clearly isn’t sustainable. There hasn’t been a single case in the past year where I was able to stick to the designated week off. Something always comes up to throw me off-whack, whether it’s problems at my regular job, personal obligations and activities, or plain old burnout.

The conclusion I’ve drawn from this is that I need to give myself more breaks. I work a full-time job, am trying to maintain a healthy social life, good sleeping and eating habits, and find time to relax and consume content rather than produce it. One UTC page takes on average 8 hours to make. That’s effectively a whole extra day of work per week.

Many of you are probably thinking that I don’t need to justify myself for being a human with regular wants and needs, but it does have to be called out for those who may not know that UTC, and art in general, is a side gig for me, not a career.

Now, here’s the rub: I have 3 long vacations scheduled for the last 4 months of this year. I’ve been planning these for many months now, and have known that I needed to get UTC a few weeks ahead of schedule in order for the comic to update steadily while I’m gone.

Unfortunately, every time I got ahead of schedule, it was undone soon after. When I put extra work into the comic one week, I didn’t have enough energy left to work on it 8 whole hours the week after that, or something else came up that took away time.

I simply can’t get the comic ahead of schedule with the current pace of updates. No matter what, there will be disruptions to the comic’s release from now until the end of the year. So, to minimize the impact on you, the reader, I’m going to work those “weeks off” into the release calendar in as organized a fashion as I can.

TL;DR

Starting in September and until further notice, UTC will update twice a month on every 1st and 3rd Monday. Patreon bonus content will release on the Mondays in between.

The new schedule is organized here.

That means for the rest of 2022, there will only be 9 more pages (well, 8 pages and the Chapter 16 cover).

Feel free to give feedback about this new schedule.

Thank you for continuing to enjoy and support UTC! We’re getting there.

Jim

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Introducing the UTC Release Calendar

on June 23, 2022 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Site News

Now that we’ve got the UTC train rolling again, I found a way to help me keep it running on schedule. And this method also gives you an easy way to see when my “vacation weeks” are.*

This calendar doc lists the tentative UTC release schedule for the rest of the year, including Patreon rewards. The most important days are the ones highlighted in blue (the ones mostly on Fridays). A new UTC page will be posted on those days. The other highlighted days indicate when certain reward content is going to be made available to Patreon backers.

The linked document will be updated continuously through 2022 whenever changes are announced. (The picture attached to this post will not be. It’s just a snapshot.)

*Last year I introduced the idea of taking one Friday off in every month that has 5 Fridays, which is a structured way to force myself to get some rest. There are 4 such Fridays per year and the next one is July 29.

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  • Page 3 of 14
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Recent Pages

  • UTC Continuity Calendar v2 (Oct.-Dec.)
  • CCCLX: To the Next New Weird Thing
  • CCCLIX: We Have Come to Terms
  • CCCLVIII: Thirteen’s Pride
  • CCCLVII: Burden to Bear II
  • CCCLVI: And Down Will Come Thirteen
  • CCCLV: We’ve Gotta Stop Parting Like This
  • CCCLIV: Purple Pelage Stealer
  • CCCLIII: Toxic MascuLeonity
  • CCCLII: Confessions of a Flying Squirrel

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