If not for Half-Life and the original DooM, my video card would probably rust. (The artifacts I get in Episode Two suggest that it has already done so, but that’s more likely because it’s an old AGP Radeon 9800 with probable surge damage. [Fact: Every computer component ever connected to a bad power supply¹ can be considered faulty, even when apparently working. Fact: One mislaid screw plus one live power supply equals one puff of smoke and one dead power supply. Simple addition, really.])

Disgaea is coming out for the DS. This is both incredible (I can’t be bothered to play any console but my DS these days) and devastating (I easily lost entire days, 16 hour stretches, to the PS2 version). That, coupled with the probable but not certain addition of a part time job to my schedule, will likely mean that I will somehow find a way to draw even less in the near future.

On the other hand, I’ve been working out a rough idea of how TNP’s going to go, and may very well be bored enough to write out the damn script (finally!) sometime before Disgaea DS comes out. So, y’know, there’s still a slim chance I might get off my ass and start working on the comic I claimed would be out, oh, two months ago?

You know what’s scary? ed watched an entire episode of Powerpuff Girls Z for Smarter Than Tim. I couldn’t last more than ten, maybe fifteen minutes. Shamefully, ed’s flickr account is dead, so there aren’t any pictures at the review, but in theory it can still be read. Come to think of it, what’s my Official Detractor (a most important office, if I do say so myself) doing these days? I should track him down. As well as a dozen other people I never see anymore because I can’t be bothered to go to forums or turn on AIM.

Also, I really regret not seeing Dark Knight this weekend, as I think I would’ve been even more amazed by the Watchmen trailer had I not known that I was watching a trailer for the Watchmen movie going in. That said, it’s a pretty damn cool trailer, and the movie looks impressive, though I have my doubts on how they’ll manage to pare the comic down into two hours. (When did shit stop being 90 minutes long? I am baffled at this. Baffled, I tell you.) You know what? I’m gonna change this post’s title from [null] to something from the comic. Yes, this seems reasonable.
(more…)

I’ve been thinking about ren faires, and I’m wondering: do people just reenact the dark ages because “omg, it’s just liek LOTR!”, or is there perhaps a dumber reason? Then it occurred to me that we, as a species, hadn’t caught up with the pre-renaissance level of science and mathmatics until about 1997. (Clearly hyperbole. No angry emails.) This prompted me to think that guys like Euclid, Pythagoras, Aristotle, and Kevin Sorbo came across ideas like “a²+b²=c²“, “the Earth is round,” and “the cake is a lie” before they got around to thinking up the concept of pants. I got as far as thinking of going to a ren faire in a toga and shouting to random people that the Earth “is round” and “is composed of ultimately indivisible particles” before I realized that “ren faire” implies them glorifying the Renaissance, when the likes of Galileo, Da Vinci were trying to hoist society out of the dark ages. Which just goes to show how little I know about history offhand. (No really, Englewood Public Schools, I understand that there was a holocaust and it was a Bad Thing, but I think it might be a tad irresponsible on your part that if not for my own research, I would’ve graduated high school not knowing that the Cold War existed. Which is no small feat given that I was around to witness the tail end of it. [Fun fact: I learned about the Bay of Pigs in an economics class. Then again, that was at an alternative high school after I dropped out of real school, so maybe they were saving American history, post-1945 for our senior year.])

To put the absurdity of this line of thought into sharper contrast, yesterday the most interesting thing I could think of was “If anyone ever needed a swift and ruthless beating, it was Scrappy Doo.” My reasoning being that the little fucker might stop picking a fight with every animal, vegetable and/or mineral that came within 30 feet of the Mystery Machine after a hate crime level ass-whupping. And also because, like all Hanna-Barbera cartoons, every second he goes unbeaten is an affront to god. (Though I make an exception for Yogi Bear’s sidekick, Boo-Boo, because there is nothing about him that suggests he hasn’t already been defiled enough. Except maybe his little bow-tie.)

And now you know what kind of shit goes through my head while I’m waiting for the coffee to kick in. I will point out at this time that every commission I get will keep me occupied and away from this blog. Hint hint.

If anyone’s wondering about the car, it had three separate things wrong with it, and the dealership wanted $750 to fix it. My counteroffer was to walk away from the loan. Their counter-counteroffer was to fix the damn car like they should’ve before selling the fucker to me. Awful good of them to look out for my credit rating like that.

So I haven’t been keeping up on Octopus Pie like I ought to, so I didn’t know that Meredith Gran had switched to traditional ink until Sam Logan blogged it. How very Web 2.0. (Incidentally, it looks good, though I miss the more dynamic line weights she used to have.) Then I pop over to Questionable Content (this is what I do before going to work) and note that according to the good mister Jaques, Meredith Gran owns a Cintiq. Christ but that’s not dedication if she’s leaving something that expensive sitting idle to slum it like the rest of us. O_o

Hey, lookit that, something got updates! I wanted to use some of the concept art I had for TNP as the placeholder image, and it’s been bugging me how the link to Starfyre’s blog was buried down at the bottom like that. (Incidentally, visit it, he’s an awesome writer. Not that he ever blogs, but his short stories kick ass.) So I dropped the links to the dead comics (they’re linked on the comics page of Volatile Contents and the blogroll here anyhow) and gave the remaining four equal billing. (And I dug up that old pic I did of Maya and Mireille, thusly making the picture link for Starfyre’s site 100% more badass.)

I also have a little JavaScript on there to display a description when you mouseover the link. I couldn’t find fuck all on Google, since most rollovers switch images instead of hiding / unhiding elements, so I’m ashamed to admit I “borrowed” the code from the Goats website. Said code is one line, and it would’ve been pretty trivial for me to figure it out if I was used to JavaScript, and I then worked it over to meet my specific needs, but still, not 100% mine. (Of course, it had to be, since I’ve never used JavaScript at all before.)

Anyhow, click the image for a full-sized screencap, or just view the page yourself. And if someone with Safari could take a look at it for me, I’d be much obliged. I can only test it on Firefox, Opera, and IE6 on this box. (IE7 should work fine as well, but I’ll have to fire up my laptop to check.) IE6 doesn’t play nice with the min-height attribute, so the box keeps resizing (it’s normally 200 pixels tall, and will grow taller if it needs to) but that’s not critical, and it still works okay otherwise.

I’m sure nobody cares, but the reason I have an IP punched into firefox in the screencap is because I have Apache running on my machine to test PHP. I set the bookmark to my computer’s IP on the network so the bookmarks still work when Foxmarks copies ‘em over to my laptop. Also, if you’re wondering about the Google search, (thank god I wasn’t looking for anything embarrassing), I was looking for Shadow Dragon Executive Force, which I lost the link to somehow. I was looking at that picture for TNP and wondering what they do different for their camo patterns on clothing. And also, y’know, I lost the link and wanted to check it.

Also, what few people read this may be interested to know that while I will not be turning comments back on for this blog, I have posted the link to the forum over on the sidebar, thus simplifying the process of interacting with the other two or three people who still follow this stuff. I’ve also cleaned up the links a little bit. Woo.

So… y’all remember the car? Large, gas hog, burgundy, costing me something like 13 grand over the next five years? It broke. Hell of a way to end my week off.

I’m really wanting to start drawing again, so the sketchblog category here might actually see some use again, and assuming I get off my ass and get a finished script together, TNP will be starting sometime… well, not soon, but sometime. Hopefully sometime in 2008, at least.

For those curious about the car, it’s something to do with the fuel, engine, and their complete refusal to play nice. At idle, it feels like it’s within spitting distance of stalling. Add this to the failure of the fuel gauge to work and the annoying habit to put an “out of fuel” message on the dash, regardless of the actual level of fuel in the tank, and I’m thinking there’s something wrong with the electronics. (Or I have a clogged fuel injector and screwy electronics. But I don’t have much experience working on gas engines.)

But if I’m lucky, this will be covered by the service contract that the dealership set me up with when I bought the car, and at most I’ll have to pay a $50 deductible. If not, I’m walking away and buying another fucking bike. I can buy a really nice one for one month’s loan and insurance payments. (Ah, walking away. My little way of telling the dealership “You did a real number on my credit¹, but sit back and watch me crater this bitch.”)

¹ The dealership took out about a dozen loans in my name. Most were rejected as I have next to no credit history. Unfortunately, every loan application will do a little damage to your credit score until it falls off a few years later. I doubt they did serious damage, but that was a pretty goddamn low number to start with. And I don’t know what walking away would do to my credit score, but I doubt it would be good.

Finances being what they are, I’m getting rid of some stuff via eBay. Specifically, my copies of Guitar Hero and Karaoke Revolution, as I can’t stand to play the fuckers any longer. I might also be listing my DS and all the games for it, but I rather like my DS. (Though I never play the thing, and it would be a good excuse to get a black one down the road when I can afford to buy games again…)

While I don’t expect anything to come of this, I figured I may as well post about it here. So if you’re interested in the games and/or helping me out, take a look at my listings and don’t pay any mind to the username dating back to me weeaboo phase. (I’d change it, but I want to hang on to what little feedback I’ve got.)

Oh, and [insert requisite mention of commissions here].

This is something that I was planning on adding as a footnote to a bit of TNP. While the bit, and therefore the footnote, might not make it into the final draft, this does bear mentioning. (Also, 1: this is the kind of shit I think of when my mind wanders, and 2: the act of committing this kind of shit to paper (or disk as the case may be) is exactly why the dude at MicroCenter should’ve tackled my ass the second I attempted to purchase this laptop. Seriously, though, I love my laptop, even though it has less GPU performance than a TRS-80¹.)

Anyhow, this bit which will probably never get used hinges on the high-pitched whine a standard-def TV screen makes. Doesn’t seem to happen with CRT monitors, just CRT televisions. Anyhow, the footnote would explain this, and adds that “I can hear it despite it being obscenely close to the frequency of the ringing in my ears. How is it that you people don’t notice it?”

If this does make it into the story, it could be assumed that if the TV is left on, it would probably not be muted, and thus no footnote is needed. Though I will add that as a child, I could wake up on weekends and know that my dad was watching TV because I could faintly make out that high-pitched noise, despite not being able to hear whatever it was my dad was watching². And again, y’know, the ringing in my ears. I seem to be the only person in the world who hears this.

¹ Lest anyone think I’m making shit up and revoke my nerd cred, let it be known that I’ve never used a TRS-80, but I do own a TRS-80 Pocket Computer³ that I will eventually find batteries for. Thrift stores have some awesome shit sometimes.
² Incidentally, I have that same TV set in my bedroom right now. It’s as old as I am and probably emits less radiation than an atomic weapon. Probably.
³ If you’re dying to know, I have the PC-1, the first of the three versions listed on that page. I found it at a thrift store for either $4.50 or $11 a few years back and bought it because it was so damn cool-looking⁴. I also got the printer dock with it, and can’t seem to get that to work either.
⁴ Specifically, the buttons. You know how most tiny PDA-like things use rubber buttons that are a bitch to push? Of course not, because you’re not obsessed with cheap keyboard-equipped PDAs like I am. (I have owned no less than seven, including the HPC and the TRS.) Anyhow, those rubber buttons suck. You know the buttons on your TV remote? Try typing with those cocksuckers. So the hard plastic buttons on the TRS were like the holy grail to me at the time. (Now I have the HPC, which has laptop-style buttons, and, y’know, a laptop.) Also awesome was the cool green tint of the LCD and the metal casing. (I love how old 1980s portable electronics had actual metal in the case instead of cheap plastics. Ask me about my AIWA walkman⁵ sometime, and I’ll explain in great detail how it kicks ass. And how it too was rescued from a thrift store. Except that thing actually worked. (At the time, at any rate.))
⁵ For those in the MySpace generation reading this, the Sony Walkman was popular enough back when it was still relevant that the name became synonymous with portable cassette players, kind of like the iPod. And just think, in twenty years you’ll be able to write about hard drive based MP3 players and wonder to yourself if anyone reading will need the concept explained to them, just like I’m doing with audio cassette tapes. (This of course assumes that the MySpace generation isn’t wiped form the face of the earth by a meteor, vengeful god, or some other great justice.