So I’m at Musician’s Friend checking out a fairly decent Alvarez guitar, which I’ll likely be using to further prove my allegiance to my credit card company in a bit, and I see this synth. Oh god, I want. Want so bad. Don’t have the credit for it, but I will in a few months. Think I’m gonna bum a ride down to Guitar Center tomorrow and see if they have the sucker on display, I need to try this thing out.

If I get this, though, it begs the question of what the hell I’ll do with my Yamaha. Probably give it to my dad, it spends more time at his place than mine anyhow… (It’s a Yamaha DGX-203 if anyone’s interested. A damn fine consumer-level keyboard, but I’m not 100% happy with the quality of the voices, and the keys are a tad stiff, but that’s more of the “synth keys versus piano keys” debate. Still, a very nice board, and a huge step up from my old Casio.)

…

I just watched a couple of videos on Roland’s website. I’d still like to play with it before dropping a grand (plus the cost of the keyboard amp I’ve been meaning to get) but I think it’s safe to say that I’m buying this fucking board the second I’ve got the free credit for it. (By my count, about six weeks from now, give or take.) Sorry, Dad, that Alvarez is gonna have to wait. >_>;;

Nothing new to report, been trying out this “social life” people are always talking about. It’s strangely compelling.

Saw this at Crimson Dark:

If there is any justice in this world, then Joss Whedon must be asked to direct the film adaptation of Deathly Hallows. He gets the whole “magic in a high-school” thing, he’s produced some of the best angst ever seen on television, he knows how to kill off much-loved characters in sudden and heart-breaking ways, he went to an English boarding school, and he even expressed interest in the job a few years ago! This must happen!

I agree wholeheartedly and nominate David Simon for the presidency. I’m still voting for Broodax in ‘08 but I’ll nominate the hell out of David Simon.

Scratch that last bit. I’ve been looking over the stuff I’d need to screw with in Wordpress, and I’d have to give up the “click the comic to go to the next page” feature, which is really slick and should be used more often. I’d also have to give up Brimzero’s glowy buttons, and either change the Brimzero layout or the way Wordpress handles said layout. To get it to work the way I want, I’d have to either write some plugins from scratch, or change the way the sites work. At this point it’d practically be easier to just write the functionality I want into the existing code. (And doing so to TENACITY would sort of defeat the whole purpose of the way it runs.) So I’ma just stick with the clunky update methods I have. (Actually, I forgot how easy I made it with TENACITY 2, it’s actually easier than the Wordpress system would’ve been.)

Girl Genius’s “101″ class is now completely caught up with the start of the “Advanced class!” (The 101 comics predate GG Online, and they’ve been posting it page by page, while posting new GG pages in Advanced.) Unfortunately, everyone and their dog is now trying to read the Advanced Class archives, which kicked the server in the nads and got the CGI script shut down by their host, which is a fairly universal reaction when a script is eating up a ton of a shared machine. (Funny, I’d have thought that the Foglios would have a dedicated server for all their sites, not several independant websites¹.) Ah well, I’ll get my chance later on. I hope.

I’m also planning on switching Brimzero and SEP over to Wordpress, so I forsee many headaches and time lost. I have to figure out if I can set up a frontpage, with the “newest page” sidebar on Brimzero, instead of just displaying the most recent page(s). And “next” and “prior” links on the pages themselves. I might just look up one of them custom comics-oriented themes and wrap the Brimzero and SEP styles around that. (Gonna be a blast getting all this Wordpress crap to mesh with existing designs and keeping it from looking “too Web 2.0,” as Starfyre put it. Yaaay.)

¹ I’m assuming the websites are separate accounts, or even with separate hosts, as GG Online went down when it maxxed out it’s bandwidth a while back, but Buck Godot and studiofoglio.com stayed up. Honestly, I’d have thought it cheaper to rent one dedicated machine than several (which I assume are) reasonably high-end shared servers.² Pretty sure the problem with GG Online would’ve been avoided this way… kinda. It’d still be a huge draw on the server, I’m just pretty sure the script wouldn’t have been disabled, as it wouldn’t be screwing with other customers.
² For those who don’t have the “joy” of running a website, a “shared” server means several websites share a single machine. That’s what I’m on. (Actually it’s a little more complicated, I think Dreamhost has a FAQ somewhere, but it can be assumed that I’m sharing a machine with one or more other Dreamhost customers) A “dedicated” server means you’re renting a whole server for yourself. A bit more expensive (they usually start at ten times what I’m paying for brimzero.net) but it’s helpful, and sometimes necessary if you start getting a lot of people going through your website. The expense and hassle involved is why so many people use Keenspace.^3
3I am not calling it “Comic Genesis.”

Amazon says my copy of Harry Potter is supposed to be here on the 21st. The UPS tracking says it’s in Englewood right now. Has been since 8:19 last night. So the ETA suggests that UPS will take the next 24 hours to move a package to within walking distance of it’s current location.

Ah well, maybe it’ll just get here early.

More of the same. Rediscovered Castlevania: Portait of Ruin. I seem to have been in the middle of grinding minotaurs, or something. All I know is that I’m at level 78 and I still can’t get past that fifth section of Nest of Evil, the one that starts out with the two franken-things. I’m beginning to suspect that it’ll be kicking my ass if I get up to level 99 or 100 or whatever the cap is. Ah well.

Also, I’ve been plotting out more of Brimzero (75% of book 2 and 90% of book 3 need to be written still) and I’d like to apologize right now to anyone who digs Morgin. I kick her around quite a bit in book 1, but this bit I just put in book 2 takes the goddamn cake. And it won’t show up in the comic for years, at least, so I could write down the whole scene verbatim without having to worry about ruining it for anyone who actually reads. Woo.

That no matter what I choose to pay, my credit card company seems to up my monthly payments to that amount. Every time.

Ah well. Suppose it’s good that I’m paying my minimum required monthly every week. My current projection puts this as being paid off in 45 weeks. Less if i get a tax return before I’m through. Ain’t math grand?

How much is a plane ticket to Baltimore again? (Expedia says it starts at $559 for a round trip. O_o Think I’ll just wait for it to hit the online store.)

I would’ve drawn. I wanted to. But I also wanted clean shirts and boxers so that I might be clothed at work and take a damn shower, respectively. So I went to my parents’ house, hung out, smoked perfectly legal tobacco, and didn’t get back until 9:30. But looking on the bright side, the 7-Eleven by my parents’ house still sells Bawls, and there’s a really decent chinese place on the way home. And they gave me a free soup with my chicken.

Drawing may happen tomorrow. I’d like for that to happen, but damned if I can predict the future.

I really woulda liked to have had this done last Friday, but I would’ve done it pretty much exactly like the previous page, and I rather like how this one’s turning out. Just gotta draw those last three panels…