shatterstripes

Today I got out of bed, puttered on the net a little bit, then got down to work on the next page of Rita. After about an hour or so, I realized how absolutely gorgeous it was outside. So I threw my computer into its bag and hopped on my bike to go out to Gasworks Park. (Which is, well, a park made of the grounds of an old gasworks. The big rusting industrial fixtures are still there, fenced off. The hills in the park are probably full of toxic runoff, but it's beautiful, with a gorgeous view of the city.)

There, I worked for a while longer, and pretty much finished the page. Came home on the bus (my rear tire seems to have a slow leak), finished it and posted it. I'm hopeful that this means I'm starting to remember HOW to get myself to work on stuff again. Which is very good.

My right side aches from yesterday's expedition to the Y. But I know that will pass. I'm debating if I want to join for a few months; I gotta check out a couple more of the classes first.

I drew this a couple months back and it's been sitting on my desktop ever since. I'm cleaning the desktop so I guess I'm posting it.

( big image that will probably break table-based layouts oh god why are you people still using those anyway )

So today I saw a link to an indy game sale. A bunch of stuff on a bunch of various platforms - iOS, Android, Mac, PC - at crazy low prices. I looked through the stuff available; most of what was interesting I'd already played, or even acquired through a Humble Bundle or suchlike. But there was one that stood out: Scoregasm.

Now, to be honest, I really haven't enjoyed most arena shooters since "Geometry Wars" came out. I didn't care much for that, and there's a ton of arena shooters that don't take inspiration from anywhere but that. This one, however... Woo. Scoregasm mixes the usual arena shooter stuff with the high-intensity feel of a vertically scrolling bullet hell game from Cave or whatnot. It's smart bomb owes a little to Treasure's great arena shooter Bangai-o. But it's also got a lot of its own ideas to bring to the table.

Each level happens in a constrained arena. Some are big, some are small. Some are more complex than others. At the end of a level, you unlock one, two, or three new levels to choose from depending on your performance. But - and this is the cunning bit - it doesn't depend on your raw score. Oh, no. It depends on your combo. Which, as combo meters tend to do, goes up when you shoot stuff in rapid succession, drops when there's a lull in the explosions, and resets to zero once you die. And the best way to get combo, of course, involves taking lots of risks so as to have a lot of enemies on-screen at the same time! It makes for a nice tension, especially when finishing a level with a high combo starts "Frenzy", where a ton more enemies spawn.

Oh yeah, and there is also a female voice moaning orgasmically whenever you do well. It defaults to off. It's either tacky or funny or maybe both.

Anyway, if you like the kinds of games I like, you'll probably like this one. Especially for a mere three bucks.

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Things done today besides "played Scoregasm for a couple hours"? Went to the local Y and checked out a couple classes they offer. Think I'll revisit yoga but I'm not so sure about Zumba. But I definitely need to get SOMETHING going with the mid-day bump & grind at the Academy of Burlesque on hiatus, there's a belly-dance class at the Y I definitely want to check out this weekend.

How strange. I think I just dreamed the outline of a Tim Powers novel.

 

I was in something like Disneyland, watching this technician guy drive a little boat around a pond. then I was reading his handwritten notes on things and learning about another ride where they'd been trying to fix it for days. he was sure it was a software/sequencing error but the other folks insisted it was mechanical; this meant that they had to keep on firing it up to test it... with a human on the big power switch. which was dangerous, people get killed throwing those things. (apparently this dreamworld had no OSHA)

 

then I was a young boy living in a car with the dude, who was now Jim Smith. He was writing a letter to Garfield. or rather to the producers of the show. there were brief drafts like "where's my fucking money" but the actual letter was much more polite.

 

then the car started rolling while he was out of it, and it became apparent he was a ghost in the ensuing chase. the car kinda careened down hills a bit faster than he could run, taking turns seemingly of its own volition. I tried to work the brakes but to no avail, not the driver's side brakes, not the passenger side brakes. I was in the front seat so I couldn't have gotten to the brakes for the rear seats - evidently this car had lots of pedals! Ghost Jim neatly caught up once, just diving into/through the trunk to try and fix something - or maybe just to get in the car - but it moved too fast.

 

Finally, the car slowed to a stop and Ghost Jim caught up. It was imperative we ditch the car now, so we drove it into a parking lot and found a quiet shaded spot in the back under some blossoming trees to rapidly take out a few important things / magical artifacts? the people who ran the lot came out and Jim made arrangements with them for something, then we went into the ratty little convenience store on the lot.

 

Jim wanted to buy some porn magazines but as a young boy I was pretty disinterested. and not allowed. (It is possible that I was the only person who could see him.) so I went out back and fiddled with a generator under his direction; we sabotaged it so that as the sun warmed it up it would stop working. the people at the parking lot would thus hopefully forget us in dealing with this, or something?

 

a cut, and I was lying on the floor reading an interactive book that was having layout problems. the c64-font text flowed badly no matter how I turned it. still, I could read the story: the perfect little city was having this pink pixelly weirdness spread through it and all the inhabitants were singing the same song. then my mother leapt frantically over me, her metal peg leg* nearly landing on me, and ran to the bedroom to unplug something that was beeping.

 

then I woke up, with bits of that song in my head.

 

I woke on my back, which always feels weird - I stopped sleeping on my back when I was like six, due to chronic allergies.

 

overall the dream had the California feel of several of Powers' books. hard to pin that down in words. also the guy I was with kinda shifted slowly - he was still identified as Jim but he started looking kinda like a Jack Kirby self-portrait after a while.

 

*my mother has two perfectly good human legs, but NOT IN THIS DREAM.

A good while back, I got my belly button pierced. It was a secret bit of femininity, back when I was still presenting as a guy.

I've had a few different things in it, but for years, there's been one piece of jewelry in there - a largish pink thing, with a few dangly bits. I just kinda lost the other ones I had; the removable bead would come off in the shower or something like that, then the other half would vanish as well. But this one has stayed.

I think the last time I changed it was back when I was living in Boston.

This weekend, I finally picked up a couple cheap little adornments. Yesterday I snagged some alcohol from the drugstore to sterilize them in, and let them sit overnight.

And just now, I unscrewed the piece that's been in there for the past four or five years, took it out, and put one of the new ones in. It feels weird to have something else in there.

(Honestly this one also isn't quite garish enough for my tastes, now that I see it in me. I need to find a decent source for more lavish ones, or acquire the bits to make my own...)

Next page of Rita is like 90% done, but that last 10% is a lot of fiddly detail that I haven't come up with a good way to automate. I would love to have an equivalent of Painter's "Image Hose" - scatter brushes are close, but right now I really wish I could drop a HANDFUL of different shapes into a brush, and have it choose 'em at random.

There MIGHT be a way to do it with symbols but I don't think there is.

I just scrawled out a color rough for the FC2013 website. It involves the same two adventurers from the flier being besieged by bizarre tentacle monsters made up of cute fox parts. It makes me giggle. I think it may be a keeper.



I might post some more of the process once the site's up.

My grandmother's house will be on-screen at Cannes.

A while back, while i was procrastinating on selling-or-renting the place, my mom got contacted by a location scout who wanted to use it. I said yes, they filmed part of "The Paperboy" in it and gave me a few thousand dollars.

Okay now to get down to working on Rita, and finishing the page I almost managed to do last night.

Today was pretty much a wash. I spent it trying to chase down bureaucratic shit back in MA, then kinda idled waiting for UPS- I really wanted to go for a walk but I knew that would summon the van. Dealt with bank stuff (more inheritance), then had no energy left. And now it's close to bedtime with nothing at all drawn today.

 

I gotta rejigger my habits and start doing Pomodoros again; that really worked to keep me going.

For the past week I have been trying to get in touch with the Massachusetts court system - I need a new copy of my name change documents and their website is absolutely useless in telling me where to get ahold of one, whether it be from them, or through a third party who charges a high "convenience fee".

And nobody there seems to have e-mail addresses.

So I've been trying to phone them.

But the thing is, I'm three hours behind them. And I usually don't get going until noonish. Normally this would not be a problem given that normal business hours go until 5pm... but "Due to budget cuts, the court's hours have been shortened to 8am-3pm." That's all I get on the phone. Can't even leave a fucking message. I mean, what the fuck. I just want to leave one asynchronous request for fucking information here.

So I would just like to say FUCK YOU to whatever small-government don't-tax-the-rich ASSHOLES have been involved in making this situation happen. Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.

(Oh and also WHY THE FUCK CAN I NOT SEARCH THE DAMN DATABASE OF RECORDS FROM THE NET and ORDER COPIES WITH A CREDIT CARD. Why is this the provenance of various companies that charge a markup of like 50%. Who are undoubtedly now lobbying to keep this from being a function the court itself performs because they would be out of business.)

I saw the spot with Zzzzzz's piece from yesterday being painted over today.

 

Twice.

 

Graffiti is pretty ephemeral sometimes!

But Zzzzzz(zzz)? noticed too.

New today on the 50th and Roosevelt graffiti wall near my apartment. I'm sure I have absolutely no idea who this "Zzzzzz" is. At all.

I wandered onto the University's campus. I am sitting on a gently rolling hill in the shade of a tree, with my laptop perched on my knees. I'm about to get some more work done on the next page of Rita.

This, my friends, is the life.

Seeing this go across the intertubes today reminded me. I've switched to Backblaze for remote backups (DollyDrive had some issues due to how they implemented it) but I haven't tested it yet.

Now I have, and the files I got back were what I expected them to be. With directory structure intact if I grabbed stuff from multiple directories. So yay! Now I don't have to worry about grabbing my computer if the apartment catches on fire or something.

If you ain't got offsite backups happening, start some. If you've got backups but they haven't been tested, test 'em.

I wonder if there's room on my building's roof for a beehive.

I wonder if there's roof access.

I wonder if my landlord would kill me if I just put some bees up there.

edit. http://pugetsoundbees.org/ - they have monthly meetings just about in walking distance (Washington Park, just across a bridge from the University), and regular "work parties" where folks tend to the apiary they have in there. Bees!

Looking at my closet, with everything but 4-5 pieces of clothing hung in it, I have come to the conclusion that I have too many clothes.

Obviously the solution is to move somewhere I can wear the same stuff year-round; having a summer wardrobe and a winter wardrobe takes up a lot of space!

Preferably this would be a place where I can dress for summer all the time, of course. I'd go crazy in Ever-Winter.

Edit. Counted the stuff hanging in the closet. It was a little over 120 things. I went through it and found 23 pieces of clothing that just don't work on me and put them in a pile for Goodwill. I'd purged like 4-5 things while doing EPIC LAUNDRY FOLDING the other day; this has been the first time I've ever gotten rid of clothes because they just don't look good on me. When I was a boy I didn't give a shit, I just wanted baggy stuff to hide in, and then after Katrina destroyed that wardrobe and my tiny beginnings of a girl wardrobe I just needed STUFF TO WEAR.

My body has changed since then (there were some hand-me-downs from a tall friend that I was delighted to discard because MY TITS ARE TOO BIG FOR THEM NOW), the way I carry myself has changed since then, the way I want to be seen has changed since then. So it feels pretty good to get rid of clothes that fit a less fit, less outgoing Peggy.

About forty-five minutes later, a SIGNIFICANT DENT has been made in the pile. And there's a small pile of stuff that's going to Goodwill because it just never looks good on me. I think it's time for a break - I'm gonna pull something over this shocking red slip I'm wearing, and go out to the farmer's market for a few things.