A nice cup of rabies

Why Haskell? Why not? I keep hearing more and more about it; it just seems... interesting. I don't know if I'll make it all the way through the tutorial, much less ever write anything. But I think trying to pick it up will bend my brain in interesting ways.

Meanwhile, I'm digging through some not-drawing-Tarot-cards things on my to-do list - finalizing the name of the show and rendering print-res promo images for it, thinking about a couple headshots I promised doctorpinkerton I'd draw for COG tv pitchery. If I can get a card done today too that'll be awesome but I'm not going to beat myself up in the least if I don't.

Material gain - success, rank, power. Judiciousness, covetousness, suspicion - or carefulness and order. A hint of discontent and boredom.

Continuing to make it my own: here we have some version of jaded black dragon me, a fine aspect to use for this card. Maybe I should use some variant of Sosael for the 5 of Swords; she'd fit.

Print available on Artspots.

When I got back, I puttered around on the net getting various bits of chip music. And then I took a serious look at the piece, and looked at my sketch. And realized what was missing: the four wands. They're in the background of this one, you see. Plus a few other minor things - scattered coins need to be drawn.

I feel pretty stupid right now. Ah well, this happens!

Also, here's an attempt at a FAQ on my current projects, as some questions are, indeed, coming up frequently.

The Tarot deck:

2. Are you going to make an actual deck? I want to buy this!
I hope to! I need to contact publishers who specialize in this sort of thing, and ones who don't as well. If you have contacts with specialty publishers of mystical stuff, or know a literary agent who might be interested in helping to shop this around bigger publishers, let me know.

There may also be a small self-published run before that. I'm not sure on that yet.

3. Where can I see the whole deck?
On my website! And if you're in the Boston area, there will be a gallery show of the deck at the end of August.

4. Will there be a fifth suit?
While I find the idea interesting, no. There may be one in the expansion pack but right now I really don't want to add that kind of complexity to an already complex project. The 0 of VOID (and the possible court cards to match) is not a fifth suit with the elemental association of 'spirit'; it is an absence of differentiated elements to balance the hyper-defined 99s of each suit.

Five Glasses of Absinthe:

2. Are you going to start working on it again when the Tarot deck is done?
Hell yes! I'd like to be splitting time between Absinthe and the deck right now, but the schedule for this show means I have to focus on cranking out the Tarot cards.

Complete happiness, almost perfection thereof. Vanity, conceit. Goodness and generosity with a touch of foolishness.

Print available on Artspots.

And with this one, the small cards of Cups are finished. Oops, not quite - there's still the 5 left to do! Nothing like misreading your progress chart. But there's still only 29 to go for the exhibit; one card every 2.8 days is the current goal. A couple days of work at the museum and a slow start after the visit home ate my lead.

edit: never mind, it's working now for both. Sorta. I guess it was their end... and now I have some debugging to do.

First, we have T's The City Dreams of Tamino the Cat. Twice a week, he delivers a mysterious single panel. If you're a lazy bitch like me, you can read it via LJ at fitecomics.

Second, we have Ursula Husted's Looking Up. This daily page is a quiet (so far) story about a decaying romance interrupted by a giant hole in the ground. The whole thing is finished, so there's no worries about a sudden dose of chaos interrupting it. You can read it via LJ at lookingup_comic.

And finally, I just added Dumm Comics, a comics collective started by my animation school buddy Gabe Swarr. Five daily strips by five different people from the LA animation scene - three of 'em were trained at Spümcø. You can get it via LJ at dumm_comics.

The Root of the Powers of Earth.

And the last of the Aces!

If you remember my original sketch, you might be wondering what happened to her cock. It's still there; it's just really, really subtle.

Print available on Artspots.

It also, somehow, doesn't surprise me that much. Pretty much everyone I knew in any kind of warez group back in the c64 days, seemed to be a right-winger.

Peace, truce. Compromise. Rest after struggle.

Print available on Artspots.

After a long and exhausting weekend, I managed to get one done. I'm a little behind schedule - but I have the 4 of Wands sitting on my screen at about 75% done; most of what's left on that one is fiddly bits.

I didn't intend for the one on the right to have her foot up the other one's dress in my original sketch. It just kinda worked out that way. Also the swords are cut and pasted from the 9 and 10 because, well, I've drawn enough swords at this point that I feel I can get away with that.

This is pretty cool as it removes some of the worry I was feeling after spending a week in New Orleans and seemingly eating up my lead. I don't know how I managed to do that for a whole month without noticing it; I've been really unstuck in time this whole year so far.

Some cards will still go from sketch to final art in a day, but this means that I can step back from ones that're giving me trouble with an easy conscience. And honestly, I'm fairly confident that I can get most of it done in two months anyway. Realizing this mostly means that I can do things like go to the MIT Steer Roast tonight without thinking 'I should be finishing the 4 of Wands' all through it.

I've seen this kind of schedule trick pulled in animation - I know that Kevin lied to John K about show deadlines now and then, to try and compensate for his deadline-breaking habits - but I never thought I'd find my subconscious pulling it on me. I'm not complaining, either. I got a lot of good work done at high speed, and I'll probably half-forget this and try to keep the pace up for the mistakenly-early deadline.

The root of the powers of Air. Invoked (mental) power; justice, force, strength through trouble. The hand that changes the material world.

I needed a little of that last due to Illustrator crashing and losing some work - just building the gears, thankfully. If the figure hadn't been saved I probably would've given up for the night. But I persevered and here it is.

32 to go for the exhibition; 37 to go for the deck entire. Maybe 41; while starting to think about the Court cards I found myself wondering if Void needs a kind of shadowy court of its own - king/queen/knight/princess of Chaos, of Absence. I dunno. I need to examine this idea as I draw and color the traditional Royals.

Print available on Artspots.

Hopefully I'll have the Ace of Swords done before I go to sleep, and a start on another card's Illustrator phase. Maybe the Ace of Wands; the Aces are generally pretty quick.

The book I ordered on the court cards arrived today; I read it while walking out to do some errands. It is, indeed, worthwhile; it's giving me a lot of ways to think about these sixteen cards - and it makes me feel less stupid about having troubles with them, as the introduction claims that a lot of people have trouble with them compared to the Trumps and the numbers. Sketches of them should start happening soon.

Hmm. At this very moment I sorta feel like I'll just be glad to be done with this project - all the excitement is gone for some reason. I hope it's just the tiredness talking, as I'm normally pretty enthusiastic about it, even this far in. Maybe I'm just freaking a little because last week ate up all of the substantial lead I had, and I have some hard work ahead of me to keep up. Of course, I also have a whole month to deal with printing, and my intent was always to have that month also include a little room for things to slop over into.

I probably just need a bit of food and some sunshine. It's warm enough that I could go work in the studio instead of on the bed, too - that might help a lot.

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The flight up was uneventful, except for the bit at the very end where the plane ahead of us in the line for landing braked too fast and we had to abort the landing rather than climb up his tailpipe. That was stressful. I didn't know what was going on until after we were out of it and the pilot came on the cabin speakers, but I could sure tell something was going wrong. My body tried to do fight-or-flight reactions to the crisis I knew was happening, even though that was less than useless.

But after coming home i fell asleep for a while, curled up with Rik, and all the stress from that has just fallen out of me.

The Museum of Science has a couple more days of work for me on that project, and of course there's also the Tarot deck. Additional reference for that has arrived while I was out, and it's time to get down to it.

Tomorrow.

Tomorrow I get up at ugh-o-thirty in the morning to get on a plane to fly back to Boston. I miss my boyfriends, a lot.

Her requirements:
* has to work with OVER-THE-AIR broadcast; she does NOT have cable and doesn't want it.
* must not need a subscription to a schedule-listing service (somehow I suspect this rules out anything but free software)
* needs to be able to record up to 3 streams at once. She has this many VCRs in play and does occasionally have them all going.
* needs to be forwards-compatible with the forthcoming change to digital broadcasting - we don't want this to become useless in feb09 when the analog signals go dark.

So what's your experiences? What've you tried playing with, what was hell to set up, what worked instantly?

OS doesn't matter; what matters is that she can run it without much more technical acumen than her existing setup requires. I won't be trying to implement this right now; I'd just love to hear what's worked for people.

Despair, cruelty, lying, subtle dishonesty. Yet another unpleasant card from the high end of the Swords.

I've been working on this one for a while; it was in progress when I had to drop everything to go down to New Orleans. I fooled with it in fits and starts over this very complicated week.

The swords-in-word-balloons was a sudden bit of inspiration that let me finish it. I didn't know what to do with the last couple of swords; I tried hanging them on a suggested wall but it wasn't working.

Edit: Less colors, slight composition/contrast tweak. Still not spectacular but much better. Less is, quite often, more.

Print available on Artspots.