Ships It Friday
Terms.
Share the comics. That is what they are for. This page says how, in plain words, so that nobody has to guess and nobody has to ask for the obvious.
The short version
Post a strip, credit it, link back here, leave it as it is, and do not sell it. That is the whole thing. Everything below is that sentence with its edges described.
What you can do without asking
Take any strip on this site and:
- post it to a social account, a group chat or a forum
- put it in a slide deck, a talk, a workshop or a lesson
- drop it in a newsletter, a blog post or an internal wiki
- pin it above a desk, print it, stick it on a monitor
No email required, no form, no invoice. Two conditions, both small:
- Credit it. "Ships It Friday" somewhere near the strip, and a link to shipsitfriday.com where a link is possible.
- Leave it alone. Do not crop out the wordmark, redraw a panel, replace the words, or pass a strip off as something you made.
What to ask about first
Ask before you:
- sell a strip, or sell anything with a strip on it — shirts, stickers, prints, mugs, the usual suspects
- put a strip behind a paywall, or in anything a reader has to buy
- run a strip in an advertisement, or in content whose point is to sell something
- build a product, a bot or a feed out of the archive
- redraw, translate, animate or otherwise remake a strip
None of these are automatic refusals. Most of them are a yes. They are just conversations rather than assumptions, and the way to start one is at the bottom of this page.
For anyone who needs a formal name for the terms above: they line up with Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0, and reading that licence will not mislead you about what is allowed here.
What belongs to whom
Ships It Friday is mine — the name, the wordmark, the six characters, the archive as a collection, this site and the code behind it. The licence above is permission to share the strips. It is not a transfer of anything.
Sharing a strip is not permission to launch a newsletter, a merch line, an account or an event under this name, and it is not permission to suggest that something unconnected to this site came from it.
The same courtesy runs the other way. Where a real product, company or mark turns up in a strip, it belongs to whoever owns it, and nothing here implies that they are involved with this site, endorse it, or have ever heard of it.
Machine reading and model training
Using this archive, in whole or in part, to train, fine-tune or evaluate a machine-learning model is not permitted under the licence above, and no text or data mining rights are granted by publishing these pages. That includes scraping the site and it includes reusing a copy someone else scraped. Ask, and say what you are building.
Nobody in particular
Every character here is invented and every situation is made up. The cast are not based on real people, and the disasters they cause are not based on real incidents at any real company. Any resemblance to a deploy you personally lived through is because these mistakes are universal, not because somebody told me about yours.
Nothing on this site is aimed at a person, a team, an employer or a product. It is a comic about the trade being hard, and about all of us doing it to ourselves.
How these are made
This site is made with AI. The premise, the cast, the house rules and the standard a strip has to clear are mine, and they are written down. The scripts and the artwork are generated against that brief; I read what comes back, throw out what does not work, and edit the wording when it needs it.
Nothing here was drawn by hand, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. Now you know before you read one.
Getting it wrong
Most misuse is somebody moving fast, not somebody being a crook. If a strip has turned up somewhere with the credit stripped off, the usual outcome is an email and a fixed caption. This section exists so it is clear that the credit was always part of the deal, not a favour.
Changes
If these terms change, the date at the top of the page changes with them. Every version of this page is in the repository's commit log, so the history is public whether or not anyone asks for it.
Asking
Anything on this page — a use that needs a yes, a credit that needs fixing, or a question about where the line sits: ping@shipsitfriday.com.