I saw an ad for a comic that looked pretty cool, I think on Crimson Dark. (No links because I’m tired and Google exists.) So I click through, and it’s available as a free ebook download. Okay, the price is right, let’s do it. I need to add to cart. Fine. To check out, I have to register with “non-anonymous” email, credit card, or a scan of my driver’s license. Um, no and no, what the fuck is wrong with you people? So I enter my email. Except it turns out that “non-anonymous” means “not Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc.” Well, I don’t use AOL, and I forgot what my Comcast email is, much less the password, so that leaves my website. Now, I have a mirror of my old email from the last site, shadow@brimzero.net. Don’t bother writing that down, it only redirects to my Gmail. Now I have to wait for them to “evaluate my domain” or some such. So in all likelyhood a Wowio employee will be looking at brimzero.net, trying to determine… something. Perhaps that I’m not allowing any Tom, Dick and Harry to have a brimzero.net email address. Or that brimzero.net isn’t an “anonymous” email service that I’m using. (If it is, I’m getting ripped off. I don’t pay for Google’s hosting, for chrissakes!)

So the point is that Wowio is a fucking broken service. Whoever runs it is an idiot. Nick Schley is a fucking fool for using this service, particularly to distribute a free comic over the internet. (If only he could secure a location, or “site” as it were, on the web, and use this “web site” to allow people to read his comic without hassle.)

On the other hand, the cover looks fucking amazing, the concept of Wowio still intrigues me, and most importantly each of Schley’s books is free, so I’m gonna try and get this thing working, even if it means giving them my credit card number with the promise that they won’t actually charge anything to it. I’ve done that deal with much shadier entities in the past.

…

Oh, dude, they have Lullaby on there, I have to make this work now. But I want to know how, exactly, the creators make money when I can’t find anything that isn’t being given away. I’m not complaining, but this doesn’t seem like it’s gonna cover expenses, much less put money in authors’ pockets. (Edit: Ads in the books. I can live with that.)

…

Well, I broke down and gave them my credit card number, and it took maybe ten seconds, but now I have to answer a survey, and there’s no “Manual Labor” under Job Type. There’s all this shit that’s similar, but not what I do, why can’t they just stick to “burger flipper,” “suit and tie,” “criminal,” “grunt,” and “managment,” the five true job types? Ah well, it’s not important, it’s just a survey.

…

That was actually pretty painless. As this has turned into a log of what I’m doing, I’ve now filled up the five downloads I’m allowed per day, let’s see if it actually works now… Okay, I’m getting an email with download instructions. I fucking hate that, but it’s otherwise pretty intuitive. And not 30 seconds later, I have the email, and the link is to a simple, human-readable URL, so I could conceivably just bookmark this page whenever I download. Jury’s still out on the actual ebooks, though…

…

PDFs. I hate PDF, but they’ve grown on me now that I use Foxit, so we’ll see… (Goddamn this post is fucking interminable.) Well, either my roomate is eating up all my bandwidth or their server is just slow, but it’s still a respectable 100kbps. The PDF is fairly high quality, and I now see the logic behind the download email, as the PDF file has “registered to Devin Goodman” displayed in a few spots. And thank god Foxit has a Save As command, because I forgot that I had the “Open With” button checked in Firefox. God this is getting boring. Ah well, I’m done. Apart from the pain in the ass registration, Wowio is pretty nice, so check that shit out I guess. This is probably really disjointed, but will serve as a constant reminder as to why I shouldn’t be allowed to do anything while tired.

As per usual, if you haven’t been listening to NHB, you are missing the fuck out.

I spent the weekend playing GTA and generally wasting time. And marvelling at this page of The Wotch’s Sunday Special. Those expressions are so very cute.

Something that keeps me feeling all warm and fuzzy inside: My job is not to entertain people, least of all someone who has some beef with the content of the comics. As it turns out, my job is to move lumber and drive a forklift with reckless disregard for OSHA guidelines.¹ If I shipped you crap lumber, then you can bitch.² This is a happy thought for me.

¹ Not being a complete idiot, I actually stick fairly close to what OSHA³ says is right by virtue of the fact that it’s mostly common sense anyhow.
² Actually, one guy did. He couldn’t remember who gave it to him, but I was standing right there when he whined at my boss. He didn’t point out that he never once got out of his truck and helped, or even looked at what I was giving him.⁴ Picking out “good” lumber is another of those things that aren’t my job.
³ The Occupational Safety and Health Administration is responsible for keeping your workplace safe. No matter where you work, odds are that if it’s legit, OSHA provides equal parts necessary safeguards that you likely take for granted, and worthless bureaucracy that any good employee will turn a blind eye to.
⁴ Fuck you, he had it coming! I’m friendly and helpful to most customers, but goddamned if some people just plain don’t deserve it.

I got me a copy of Another Mindless Rip Off. So happy.

Also, apologies to those who haven’t gotten shirts yet, I’ll be moving in a month and I really have to focus on that. I’ll try and get them all taken care of once I get settled.

Not much to say. Did Jenn, inked. As usual, my lineart loses a lot without any colors behind it. I need to take notes on this kinda shit for my black and white stuff. Like SEP, strangely enough.

I’m getting over the “but what if I’m pissing this person off?” phase* regarding Karen Healey, so I didn’t go to any extra trouble making Jenn all gender friendly or whatever they call it. Though the pose is every bit as good as Amy’s, and fits Jenn’s character fairly well (as does Amy’s, by the way), I’m sure this would lose points because she’s leaning backwards. I’m sorry, because she’s “bending over backwards to make her breasts more prominent.” >_> (I also notice that I drew her head at the proper height compared to Amy’s, but drew her shorter than Amy, which is factually inaccurate.)

*This happens pretty often, but after a few days I always come to my senses and ask myself “just who’s holding the pencil here?” While a lot of ideas will end up sticking with me and influencing my work, for the most part I realize that I don’t actually give a fuck what a complete stranger would think of me if they even knew I existed. If by some act of masochism they read my comics, they’ll either like them, or they won’t, and I’ll keep drawing either way because I’m not doing this for their benefit. (Matter of fact, I’m being pretty fucking generous giving this stuff to them for free.)

(And by the way, she’s not bending backward to make her breasts more prominent. She’s looking upwards. If I’d wanted to make her breasts prominent I probably would’ve designed her with larger breasts in the first place.)

I was reading Scott Kurtz’s latest blog, and I started wondering: what, exactly, is the difference between Photoshop 7 and CS2? I’m seriously drawing a blank. All I got is a slightly improved interface, and that I can remap Gaussian Blur to Ctrl+B. (And that’s just a bonus effect of the first point.) If I fullscreen, which I hardly ever do, I can scroll the document past the screen edges. I never use anything that wasn’t in PS7, and it lags. (I realize that a 1.8 Ghz Athlon 64 isn’t going to win any speed contests, but the speed loss compared to PS7 is unholy.)

I think I’m gonna try using PS7 again for a while, it turns out it’s still installed, so yay me for not cleaning out my hard drives like I should. And set aside some cash for a new processor, maybe get on the dual-core bandwagon. Didja know they’re putting two processors on a single chip now? (What worries me is that, if I recall correctly, there now exist quad-core processors. I might understand that if there were any programs outside of video editing and 3D rendering that actually took advantage of multiple cores, but unless you plan on running four processor-intensive threads at once it’s just a cock substitute that goes in your computer. Like a really tiny H2. With four Hemis under the hood. Or something.)

Would’ve gotten something done tonight, but I’ve been playing a lot of NetHack at work on my breaks (god bless whoever first thought to port it to Windows CE) and I took it upon myself to find not only Nethack for Windows, which isn’t exactly tough, but a 3D version of NetHack. My logic being that while the game is fun regardless (though I find it hard to play in the original ASCII), I have a fairly powerful computer and I may as well find a version that’s nice to look at, and possibly adds some functionality. And of course I didn’t. I did find Slash’EM, which has some interesting new features and such, and the GTK+ version supports the large isometric tileset, but damned if it wouldn’t be cool to see NetHack in full 3D will all the DirecX 9 bells and whistles.

Also, as with everything even remotely connected with GTK+, every different window in GTK Slash’EM has it’s own taskbar item, and they’re constantly stealing focus from each other. So I’m basically torn between the extra options and iso graphics, and the well-written program. Though the inclusion of an “Undead Killer” job helps Slash’EM a lot. I’m naming the next one “Buffy” in the hopes that she won’t be killed by a fucking kitten. (Ever been hit by a train of pissed off mobs in an MMO? Imagine the last one is a fucking kitten. There’s just no living that shit down.)

Would have more, but I got a bit derailed by those damn posts. This is Amy, looking surprisingly more like her actual age than… well, damned if I’m not ripping off Aaron A. yet again…

I was deliberately trying not to make this look cheesecake-y, mostly because the wonders of trackback mean I might well have to defend this sketch. Defend it with words and ideas and pointy objects. (In that order. If violence wasn’t your last resort, you failed to resort to enough of it.) Anyhow, I think for the most part I pulled it off. If I’d bothered to draw the rest of her, she’d be resting her weight on one leg (that’s why she’s leaning to one side like that), which is a fairly natural pose for a person at rest, and I’m not drawing any unnecessary attention to her tits, which aren’t larger than her head. (Granted, she is wearing a tank top, but I wanted to show her tattoo. I want it to be impossible to picture her without it, plus it’s fun to draw.) So if nothing else, Karen Healey’s blog has had an effect on at least one cartoonist for at least one evening.

The whole cube-head thing I’ve been trying is working out well, though I’m still working on mapping it out to a less realistic style like mine. (In this case, her cheekbone is a tad too low for my taste, and her ear is too high. But I always seem to draw my ears too damn high.) I’m fairly happy with how the body came out, especially considering that I didn’t use any real guides. (Though it leads to inconsistent artwork, I prefer the results, and I definitely prefer not ripping my hair out and getting an ulcer, which is where sticking closely to guides was leading me.)

Earlier tonight I mentioned that I was going to be doing some site redesigning. Basically, I’m going to change the site around a little so that going to brimzero.net loads up a portal page of sorts instead of Brimzero. It’ll have links to all three of the comics, as well as Volatile Contents and subvert apathy. The graphics for the comic links will be all new, instead of recycled artwork, so you can expect similar sketches of all the major characters by the time I’m done, as well as (possibly) a couple of characters I haven’t introduced in SEP yet.

I knew I forgot something with the last two posts. In the spirit of the previous two posts, I’d like to point out something that drives me nuts: weak women. See, I work in a lumberyard, and therefore have the “pleasure” of dealing with builders who come in to pick up material. And every so often, I get a female customer. And almost invariably, they’re either the homeowner or someone’s wife. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. (Well, there is something profoundly wrong about a homeowner picking out material. Man or woman, nobody should be picking out structural material except for the people who will be building with it, because unlike a homeowner they know what the fuck they’re doing. Relatively speaking, a lot of contractors wouldn’t know competence if Bill Watterson punched them in the jaw.) But my point being, every time I see a woman in the yard, I get my hopes up that this will be a worthwhile human being, and more often than those hopes will be dashed and said woman will watch me work, scared to death of picking up a five pound board. And it’s not just the annoyance of someone with functioning arms watching me load their SUV (another annoyance; any competent builder will own a truck), but the knowledge that they’re not incapable of helping. For the love of god, my mother is barely over five feet tall and weighs no more than 110 pounds, she’s a tiny fucking thing, but she doesn’t shy away from a little hard work.

And this annoys me when men do it, don’t get me wrong, but with these women I always get the distinct impression that they excuse their behavior with the assumption that manual labor is “a man’s work.” As if it’s okay because they’re “just a girl.”

Note that this is more venting on people who annoy me than any deep commentary, but it serves as a warning: I just might require you to lift a few bags of concrete before I listen to any bitching or moaning. ^_^

(For those curious few who still give a damn about the comics despite me not updating them in months, this is also why out of the seven female main characters in Brimzero, SEP and NSR, four are at least a little fit (in fact, two of those four are in excellent shape), and a fifth becomes extremely fit as the story progresses. It’s not only something I respect, but something I find attractive.)

Also, I’m working on some drawings for a new site design I’ll be applying soon to brimzero.net, so I should have a scetch or two by the end of the night. (Fancy that, a sketch posted to a sketchblog.)

I’m getting the impression that the more I talk on this topic, the more phallic my titles will become, until I end up with “penis-oriented title.”

I’ve been reading more on Girls Read Comics (And They’re Pissed) (I love that title), and I’ve been thinking more on the stuff I said last time. Today I’m going to go over a future plot point from Brimzero. I have a few more, but this is the only one I have in mind which wouldn’t massively spoil the plot.

In the first draft of Brimzero, Tracy starts out the comic wearing a skirt. The two times I drew her below the waist in chapter one of the current draft, I drew her wearing pants, but I’m calling it a continuity error brought on by my poor memory. Anyhow, Tracy is taking up what boils down to a martial art, so Morgin loans her a pair of baggy jeans to replace the skirt. This has always been in the script, because A) it’s common sense, a skirt is useless for anything except sitting or standing, and B) I detest skirts for the aforementioned reason. Although I agree with Karen Healey’s criticism of a flying superheroine wearing a skirt, I did not write that scene in response to her.

I also would like to register my discontent with Supergirl, I Choo-Choo-Choose You. Now, I’m familiar with the joke from the Simpsons, and I realize it fits the content of the article, but when I see “Choo Choo” and a bunch of pink, my mind immediately goes to one place and one place only, and not even a mention of Something Positive in this post is bordering on blasphemy. Though I’m willing to bet that although S*P seems like something she’d like, she never got past the first strip, for the obvious reasons.

Ah well, something to think about while I’m staring at a blank sheet of paper and weeping gently at the thought of yet another night without anything drawn.

So I’m reading Girls Read Comics (And They’re Pissed). And it’s good. Well thought out, and not once have I been accused of being inferior on the basis of my gender. I’ve not read a whole lot of the archives yet, but so far I recommend checking it out.

But…

So here I am thinking about what Karen Healey would think of my comics. Now, there’s a lot of women in my comics. None of them are that simple “sex object” so prevalent in society. But if you look at what I’ve done so far, you start to notice things. Like Amy or Morgin in various states of undress, independent of the plot of the scene. I could go on and on with reason after reason of proof that my comics are misogynistic. But at the end of the day, I write and draw what I like. I think it’s the only way to do any sort of creative project, especially one that will take the better part of a decade to complete. You’re going to be spending a lot of time on this, so you’d better like it, right? (It also guarantees that you have a mutual interest with any fans you have.) And likewise, I write my comics to be compelling to me. Let’s take page 24 of SEP. One could easily argue that I’m setting Amy up as a weak person. Now, if you read the pages leading up to it, you’ll see that she was having a fairly traumatic dream. What hasn’t been mentioned, but will if I ever get around to the next page, is that she’s been living on the streets for weeks, possibly months, and that she has similar dreams nightly. But justifying it within the story isn’t the same as justifying the way I wrote and drew it, right? Well, we’re brought back to my point. When I look at her, I feel bad for her. I empathize, and I want to do what I can to help her, and that’s the reaction I wanted. Not everyone will react the same way to the scene, of course, but that’s what I was going for, and it works for me. The same is true of all the partial nudity. I can give you a convincing reason as to why Jenn and Amy were sleeping nude (or just topless, we don’t really see and I neither know or plan to tell), and I can tell you how and why it fits into the overall plot, and it does, but the bottom line is that I’m a straight man, and I like the way the female body looks. No misogynist conspiracy, I’m just drawing what I like. (This is also why I draw women in loose jeans and t-shirts. I find that more attractive than spandex-clad G-cup pinups.)

And remember Rule Number One: If you find some hidden meaning in my comics, odds are I wasn’t the one who put it there. I’m just trying to tell a good story, and I’ve neither the patience nor the desire to dilute that down with various metaphors and such.

Also good to remember is Rule Number Two: Everyone’s entitled to their opinion, but that doesn’t give you carte blanche to say anything without thinking beforehand. (Oh yeah, I’ve got high hopes for the comments on this one…)

For those who are curious, Rule Number Three is to stand proud and tall, get up there and dance like an idiot. (AKA, have a sense of humor about things.)