A nice cup of rabies

finding the right advice

shatterstripes@livejournal.com — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 18:14:50 GMT

Okay. So I have these forms I need to fill out to take control of several of my grandmother's accounts. The thing is, I have choices to make, and no clue which ones to do. And this fear that choosing the wrong ones will result in me losing some huge chunk of it to taxes. Which would suck, as there's enough here to make a major difference in my life.

Obviously, the thing to do is to find an expert in this field and ask. But that's the problem. I'm so clueless about financial stuff (what with being an otherworldly artist type, and broke for most of my life to boot) that I don't even know what kind of title such an expert would have.

So: What kind of expert do I want to find here? Where would I go to find one? (And if one of y'all in the Boston area knows a specific person who does this kind of thing you'd like to point me to, that'd be even more awesome.)

familiar themes

shatterstripes@livejournal.com — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 14:25:31 GMT

Tales of Monkey Island = fun. I bought it last night and got most of the way through the first episode in a few hours; finished it this morning. It was disgustingly cheap for the whole set - I think I might have paid more for MI2 before adjusting for inflation. This is the first of Telltale's games I've actually bought; none of their other licenses have been compelling enough to me.

I dunno how well it works under Crossover or suchlike; I just played it on Rik's machine since he was out. [edit: Seems to work fine, huzzah.]

Is it just me or is the voodoo lady hot in this one?

shatterstripes@livejournal.com — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 12:43:48 GMT

When I woke up this morning, for a few minutes I was convinced that oh shit my day of doing nothing on my birthday was going to be overridden by having to go to the day job - somehow I was completely convinced it was Tuesday, rather than Sunday. Weird.

Looking at the lyrics widget on the laptop's screen after I brought it back up from deep sleep under the bed* and seeing the lyrics to a song off of 77 by the Talking Heads made me realize: it feels strange to have music in active rotation that was written by someone who's now so much younger when he wrote it than I am now. I don't think the cure is to stop listening to music by people younger than I am or anything like that; I'm thoroughly detached from who's being marketed to the Youth Of Today now but I still enjoy hearing new things.

I thought I was going somewhere with this but then I got distracted by looking through the watchlist of my sekrit alt on Furaffinity. She watches everyone back...

Anyway. No plans for anything today, looks like it's going to be a lovely day - maybe I'll just take a sketchbook and go out of the house for a while. Reflex suggests "work on Absinthe" but I feel like I should give myself a little vacation.

* a practice I try to avoid, as it's real easy to just take it out and spend hours lying in bed aimlessly browsing the web; I was reading some PDFs in bed last night.

a milestone

shatterstripes@livejournal.com — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 21:10:01 GMT

Chapter 1 of Five Glasses of Absinthe is now entirely drawn and scanned. Yay!

hmm

shatterstripes@livejournal.com — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 12:24:12 GMT

Looks like the back of my head has decided it's time to start shifting my sleep schedule around for real. I went to sleep around 1AM this morning, woke up about 5:30, then decided to be lazy and went back to sleep... for about an hour and a half. I felt a little spacey afterwards but it's mostly in the vein of "still sluggish from lying in bed cuddling my sleeping boyfriend for a while" rather than "oh fuck not enough sleep". Maybe tonight I'll try just cutting out sleep entirely and call it Day 1.

I have done some interesting things around my birthday but "tried going onto a completely different sleep cycle" feels like one of the craziest.

Oh yeah, birthday: I'll be thirty-eight tomorrow.

closer closer closer

shatterstripes@livejournal.com — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 00:45:43 GMT

Two more pages left to pencil, and chapter 1's pencils will be finished. One page is largely done; the other pretty much stalled at the lettering stage (I do that first so I don't have to cram too much text into a tiny word balloon like I'm Winsor McCay) because the dialogue needed editing down. Thankfully Nick was able to edit that dialogue before leaving for Anthrocon, so I'll be able to get it done in the next couple of days.

And then, of course, there will be much Illustrator action. I had pages 1-20 all queued up when I started the first chapter going. So far I've gotten a total of one page in the space between 21 and the end completely finished. I've got several others in varying states, of course, from 'raw scans set up in AI' to 'just needs some clutter added to one background'. I think I'm glad I ended up not going to Anthrocon, though. I'll need all the time I can get to stay ahead of the queue until the chapter ends. The endless fiddly detail of Wormwood cityscapes is replaced by the endless crazy detail of a wild party.

And if you're going to AC... have fun, and be sure to read our contribution to the program book! It actually ends in that version!

(The ear seems to be getting better; the antibiotic/anti-inflammatory eardrops are helping a lot. Still no real news on my intent to try polyphasic sleep; I'm waiting until I have energy to spare for a few days of utter sleep-dep until my schedule breaks and phase-changes.)

bits and blobs

shatterstripes@livejournal.com — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 11:34:23 GMT

I got the proper eardrops yesterday and they do seem to be helping. Hooray for combined antibiotics/inflammatories!

Absinthe hits its tenth page today, which is coincidentally where that crazy double-page spread of the city falls. If you've been thinking of linking to it, now would be a lovely time! We even have a cute little animgif banner hanging out on the links page, if you like using those. (And a big thanks to that little wave of people who linked to it a couple weeks back - it definitely showed up in the stats!)

I'm still working on training my body to expect a twenty-minute nap every four hours. It has been an intermittent productivity boost, despite the drain and hassle of the ear stuff - it's easy to say "I just woke up, let me go get something done!" or "Naptime soon, better get something done!" instead of staring at the internet for inconclusive hours. It's also been a bit of a hassle; last night, for instance, we had to interrupt lying around MST3King a series of Doctor Who* so I could nap between the last two episodes. Today will be the first time I deal with bending the dayjob around it; hopefully the ear will clear up soon and I can try dropping the nighttime "core sleep". Good thing I ain't doing AC.

* Full Circle, wherein Romana's wish to not have to leave the Doctor is granted, Adric and his Star of Excellence In Stealing Things are introduced, and an entire spaceship full of people is saved from the cabbage men from the marsh in a climactic rock-n-roll battle between Mistfall and The Deciders!

tofu pants!

shatterstripes@livejournal.com — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 22:30:20 GMT

An inquiry into whether or not Nick was cooking something led to him chasing me around the house, putting on a comedy French accent, and threatening to put me in rubber pants and stuff tofu down them. This needed to be memorialized with a crude 20-second doodle in Illustrator.

Also, I went to see a doctor about my ear today. He agreed that it looked infected, what with all the white goop he saw in there, so he wrote me a perscription for ear drops. Except he fucked up and put down the abbreviation for the right eye instead of the right ear. Which I only realized after carefully scouring over the packaging and directions. And he is the only person who can remedy this, and he is gone for the day. Feh. Oh well, tomorrow I can get it faxed.

"massachusetts"

shatterstripes@livejournal.com — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 12:03:00 GMT

I've lived in this state almost four years now and I still can't spell its name right.

influences go on the sleeve, right?

shatterstripes@livejournal.com — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 20:56:34 GMT

Man, this face I just drew for the Wind-Up Boy on page 30 of Asinthe is the most Phil Foglio thing I have ever drawn. Moreso even than anything I did in the period where I'd just discovered him somewhere in the "What's New!" days and was trying soooo hard to imitate him on and off.

Seriously, it looks like he leaned over my shoulder and drew this expression or something.

Having disparate influences is pretty fun once you get to the point where a very (insert influence here) piece of a drawing just falls out of the pencil. And then the next one looks like someone different. It might lose the Fogliosity when I pass it through AI; I dunno. We'll see if I try to retain it or just let whatever happens happen.

slowness

shatterstripes@livejournal.com — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 15:19:06 GMT

Today and yesterday have been weird. Thursday, I woke up with inexplicable ear pain. At first I thought it was wax buildup to the point where it became a plug rattling around in there (this happened once before when I was young), but after trying to dissolve it had no effect and my throat started to itch with phlegm dripping down it I have begun to think it's an ear infection. Ugh.

Oddly enough, I am quite chipper despite this - as long as the sun is out. When the clouds that have been plaguing Boston for most of this month cover the sky, my mood drops, but when the sun's out I'm really upbeat; despite the ear pain I've gotten a couple more pages of Absinthe pencilled (4 more until the first chapter's all pencilled!) and some work done in fits and starts on the Illustrator side too. I'm perky to the point that I'm noticing it; there was a time when something like this would've sunk me into doom and gloom and fear, but now, well, I'm gonna go see about it Monday one way or another if it hasn't cleared up, it's annoying but it's not making me miserable. My personality has changed somewhere over the past few years to a much sunnier base state.

To make things even stranger, the back of my head has decided that now is the time for me to experiment with polyphasic sleep. I'm not getting much in the way of lengthy sleep right now anyway, the reasoning seems to be; why not try taking advantage of this disruption to make a phase-change? Right now I'm just napping on schedule regularly, to get my brain used to the idea; once I'm done with this ear infection I'll probably try pushing into the full "uberman" schedule of 20-minute naps every six hours. Not having an all-week-long day job will make this a lot easier than it could be otherwise.

I dunno, the back of my head just tells me to do things sometimes, and every time I've listened it's turned out to be a pretty good idea.

Experimental Anti-Movellan Dalek

shatterstripes@livejournal.com — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 22:45:13 GMT

I figure that, well, the Movellans are sexy robots, at some point the Daleks would try (badly) to emulate that to gain the sympathy of other races in their endless war against half the Doctor Who universe.

For Exdrawminate!.

pretty comic

shatterstripes@livejournal.com — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 21:59:40 GMT

Hero is pretty, and clever as well: it plays with the form by delivering all its text as tooltips. The words separate from the pictures like oil and water - but having to hover the pointer over the images to summon forth the words, with their location controlled by wherever you put the cursor, brings them together, and forces me to dwell on the images far more than anything else I've seen with the words pulled out of the balloons that tether them to the drawings.

It keeps on making me think of The Little Prince, too. Despite a complete lack of baobabs.

memo to self

shatterstripes@livejournal.com — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 16:54:42 GMT

When leaving the house through a door that locks behind you, make sure you have your keys with you. Taking the trash out on the way to the store is an awesome idea; climbing up onto the balcony to get in is not!

workflow fiddling

shatterstripes@livejournal.com — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 12:41:33 GMT

The other day I sat down and cleaned off my computer's desktop. Took every single file or directory that was sitting out on it and put it somewhere in my filesystem, or tossed it. Then I changed my backdrop from my own art to some photographs of deserts I got off of Flickr. Then I started hiding the dock for good measure.

I am now trying to only have one program visible at a time. I don't know why I'm doing this; I just am. I'll say this: it's nice to only ever see the new mail count on the icon when I feel like switching programs, instead of having it change in the corner of the screen when it checks mail once an hour. One less distraction from that precious, easily-interruptable state of creative focus.

I dunno if it's helped. But it's different, and it's making whatever part of my brain wanted it this way happier.

Meanwhile I've almost got the most panel-packed page of the first chapter of Absinthe done. Nine panels is a lot of work - 1889 paths versus the 1603 of the super-detailed city spread that takes up pages 10/11, and I still have the last panel to do. This comic is a hell of a lot of work but it's not as if I could let someone else handle the Illustrator part of things. [edit: finished it, 2173 paths. Wow.]

philip glass on sesame street

shatterstripes@livejournal.com — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 03:08:05 GMT

[helpless giggling]

shatterstripes@livejournal.com — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 17:53:40 GMT

Darkeseid Minus New Gods [NSFW if you are worried about explaining why you are laughing like a hyena at these pictures of a lumpy grey dude ranting to thin air.]

soon, the building explodes

shatterstripes@livejournal.com — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 09:37:47 GMT

Today is when Absinthe switches from 'establishing Absinthe and Hester's relationship' into 'Absinthe steals stuff'. The next month of pages is going to be full of running around and craziness and snappy dialogue!

And explosions. What kind of story opens with a heist and doesn't have explosions?

I hope everyone's been enjoying it so far! In another five pages it'll be at the point where I've decided it'll make sense to actually try to promote it a little; the premise will have been firmly established, there'll be some jaw-dropping cityscapes on display... and hopefully around then I'll have most of the first chapter in the can.

I want to work on the pages leading up to the sex scene now, but I gotta go to the dayjob today. Drat. Maybe I'll have enough energy if I blow off work a little early tonight... [edit: Or, hell, I'll work on it before taking off - I managed to get a page from 'lettered and halfway blocked in' to 'halfway done with the pencilling'.]

Also at some point in these last few pages of pencilling I really ought to take some progress shots for a "how we make this thing" page. I started to do that for the page I worked on this morning but it's one of about four pages whose thumbnails are seriously cut up, and I'd rather show an example of the typical workflow than one of the exceptions!

the body adapts

shatterstripes@livejournal.com — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 22:26:29 GMT

Man, I have been spending entirely too much time using the padded stylus of my Wacom instead of casually unforgiving pencils and pens lately. I did some work on pencilling Absinthe and my right ring finger is complaining that its protective callus is long-gone. I gotta spend more time away from the net just drawing.

Unrelated: AAAWWWW.

merchandise!

shatterstripes@livejournal.com — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 03:03:37 GMT

So! Remember that t-shirt design I posted a good while back? With Absinthe jumping? I'd dumped it into redbubble and mysoti and ordered a single shirt from each a couple days after launching the comic. The one from mysoti still hasn't shown up even though I ordered it a few days earlier than the other - but the one from redbubble showed up today and it's awesome!

Photos tomorrow or monday; I may just wait to post it in lj until I stick it in the "shop" page on the comic's site and make a blog post there directing people to the first piece of Absinthe merch!

And there's more to come. I nailed down the wind-up boy's design in something I might put on a shirt; more importantly I have a decent drawing of him to refer to while pencilling the last five pages of chapter 1! Also I probably need to make a shirt with Hester, given that she had fan-art before the comic even launched.

Otherwise, I mostly just spent the day making a couple Tarot decks - one for an order that's taken entirely too long to happen, the other on spec. I will probably make a few over the next few months so I have a stash to sell while at Rainfurrest and Foolscap.

kat

shatterstripes@livejournal.com — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 14:26:26 GMT

According to Cartoon Brew, this was done by Spitting Image for King Features in 1996. Gorgeous.

haiku

shatterstripes@livejournal.com — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 04:05:24 GMT

this keyboard is gross
I should clean it more often
like, oh, every spring

Seeing the Elephant #17

shatterstripes@livejournal.com — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 01:51:56 GMT

Damnit, I am not starting another Tarot deck. Not until I get Absinthe done!

Intergalactic Hunter Gerry Carlyle

shatterstripes@livejournal.com — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 21:42:12 GMT

It's been a month since I had a chance to do the "rework obscure public-domain pulp stuff" thing on Ellis' board, what with launching the comic and all. But today I needed a way to goof off instead of drawing the rest of the pencils for chapter 1.

Intergalactic Hunter Gerry Carlyle ran for about three years in "Jammy Dodgers!", an anthology comics magazine that was best described as "Cracked to 2000AD's Mad".

It's not immediately clear, so let me state up front: Gerry Carlyle is a woman.
Gerry Carlyle was created by Arthur K. Barnes and appeared in a series of stories in Thrilling Wonder Stories from 1937-1946, several of which were collected in Interplanetary Hunter (1956). Gerry Carlyle is the beautiful and fabulous galactic big game hunter, a sort of Frank Buck Rogers, who works for the London Interplanetary Zoo, capturing dangerous alien beasts on far distant and often dangerous alien worlds, and bringing the BEMs back to the Zoo. In this Gerry is assisted by her bold and rather clever sidekick Tommy Strike, with whom Gerry has a love/hate relationship.

absinthe downtime

shatterstripes@livejournal.com — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 18:14:02 GMT

Absinthe is down for a bit today, Wordpress 2.8 really didn't like the ComicPress stuff; I discovered the extent of this after upgrading my local test site and so have to do some manual reversion.

edit: Okay, got everything done about six minutes after saying "gee this ftp upload is taking longer than I thought, I'd better post to LJ". Everything's cool!

And if you're running a comic based on ComicPress + WP, do not upgrade - they've hacked the manager plugin to not crash WP2.8, but it still has an issue with the 'next/prev comic' links not skipping the other blog posts.