So I am totally out of ideas. Last night I opted to blow the comic off rather than try to force anything through. I may update a comic tonight if something strikes me. Though the odds of being struck by an idea are, at my best estimate, far less likely than the odds that I’ll be struck by a car on the way to or from work. (Though it would give me something to write about. And the inability to actually write it for the next day or two.)

(This is also the very reason I’m taking so long to start TNP: I want a completed plot, and at least a chapter of scripts, before I start drawing. Of course, it would be going quicker if I wasn’t dragging my heels on that as well…)

I can only assume that Max has the same rompler as I do, a Yamaha DGX-203. It’s not bad as a “good enough” keyboard, but the sound engine has a little noise to it and I’m not too wild about the samples. I’d like to replace it with a Roland Juno-G when I can afford to drop $1000 on a new keyboard.

The “DX7″ mentioned in panel one refers to the Yamaha DX7. I saw it in Sonic State’s Top 20 Synths Ever videos, and although there are probably synths I like more, I love the way that thing sounds. (And a quick check on eBay shows that one would cost me about as much as the MicroKorg, thus making panels one and two weirdly inaccurate. Ah well. If he’s anything like me, Max’s perfect world would probably be amended to the MicroKorg plus the entire top six of Sonic State’s list, as well as numbers nine (Access Virus), thirteen (Mellophone) and twelve (Juno 60). Except for the MiniMoog, those things sound good, but not that good.)

I can also guarantee that either my dad or brother-in-law will act out panel three with me, damn near word for word.

And seriously, if I saw a fucking vintage Juno 60 or 106 in some guy’s yard sale, I’d buy the thing in a heartbeat. And then take it home, lock the door, and go back to the yard sale so I could slap the guy and tell him what an idiot he just was. But I’d make damn sure to get the keyboard the fuck out of there first. ^_^

Just watched David Malki’s Expendable. If you’ve got half an hour to kill, check it out. And make sure to watch the credits, if only to hear Kristopher Straub’s song. (Warning: Straub uses reverb on his vocals like current-gen video games use light bloom. Don’t listen if you have a fear of bathrooms. (I kid. The metric ton of reverb actually sounds really good.))

If I can think of anything suitably offensive, there’ll be an HoD about the movie later on. I’ve been writing a lot of soft, “I don’t want to make anyone cry” bullshit of late and damned if I don’t want to make some people cry.

Anyhow, well done, Malki! Expendable was awesome and I’m still blown away that you can fly a plane. (Though I’m disappointed that the man behind Wondermark doesn’t fly a steam-driven zeppelin or some shit. For shame, Malki.)

Also, read Wondermark. Also awesome, but much less expendable.

Click for the full screen cap, just ’cause.

I know people may be thinking, “Sprite comic? Where are the sprites?” and/or “Recycled art? Lazy!” So I thought I’d show what I have to do in order to get a new sprite. It won’t disprove allegations of laziness because those are, well, true, but it does allow me to say “well if I’m so lazy, let’s see you do it.”

If you’ve got a sharp eye, you’ll notice that all the art in HoD is recycled from the same set of templates. I have a “master” PSD file for each character which includes everything you see, plus the original sketch. The lines are a layer filled with black with a vector mask applied over it, meaning the lines are fully vector, though the mask means I can paint new colors and such on the lines themselves. Kind of a happy compromise. To make a new sprite from the template, I have to modify the lines, which usually involves adding things to the sketch with ye olde Wacom tablet, getting my vector on, and then painting and erasing the flat color layers to match. Once I’m finished, I merge all the layers except the sketch and the white background, apply a little bloom, copy it off to a new document, undo, move the eyes, and repeat. (The eyes, via a little simple layer and clipping mask trickery, can be repositioned so that she’s looking up, down, left, right, what have you.) Since I’m not saving my changes to the master file, I try and get every expression I can think of rendered down. The end result is that I have a folder full of PNG files for every different version of every character that I’ve ever used, and a few that haven’t been used yet. These are the sprites. They’re a much higher resolution than your average ripped-from-an-NES-game sprites, but game sprites would also be much higher resolution if the entire game industry hadn’t abandoned them entirely in the polygon wars of the late 1990s.

It’s about damn time I cleared this up.

What worries me is that I was making these sorts of jokes long before I read the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and found out about the mattresses and ratchet screwdriver fruit. Though a joke similar in theme to that, on strip number 42? Wow, there’s a word for shit like that: coincidence.

They’re watching a review of Clive Barker’s Clive Barker’s Jericho by Clive Barker.

Max isn’t being entirely accurate. If you just said “press button,” Zork would ask you which button. I bet if it just chose one at random, we’d have made damn sure to be more specific in the future. (As it turns out, in the future it’s a moot point since typing is a dead art.)

Pi, much like pi, keeps on going…

and going and going and going…

In other news, progress on the plot outline of The Next Project is continuing, albeit slowly. I expect to have the first rudiments of a script hammered out within the next month or two, and have the comic launched by the end of March, but officially I’m still saying “early 2008,” which gives me about 183 days total, of which I’ve already burned 8. (92 days if you want to refine “early” to the first quarter of the year.)

I sleep now.
EDIT: Gradient’d!

You should already know what they’re discussing, but just in case:
Sunday, January 06
Monday, January 07
Tuesday, January 08
Much like his namesake, Pi just keeps on going.*
Oh, and Pi’s antfarm. And since I’m linking strips like mad, God Emperor Pi the First. Hell, just start here and just keep going until you’re caught up. As I said, none of this should be new to you because you should already be reading Schlock Mercenary.

(Incidentally, Kevyn’s right epaulet was stated as holding 320 milligrams of antimatter, resulting in a 13.75 kiloton blast. Of course, he’s since adjusted the load of his epaulet grenades, but that doesn’t alter the fact that there is several orders of magnitude more antimatter laced throughout Pi’s boomex.

*There’s a “Pi” on the Schlock forums, so for all I know I just slighted a complete stranger. Let it be known that I was referring to the number pi.

Didn’t get much of anything done this weekend, though I did record a song for NHB Idle. It sucks, but if you want to hear me attempt to play the guitar and sing a cover of John Prine’s Dear Abby, reworded to be an NHB in-joke, by all means download this five megabyte MP3 file. If the timing sounds weird, it’s because I can’t actually play guitar, so I had to edit out about three seconds of silence at each chord change, and cleverly decided to bounce the resulting project down to stereo before checking it against the original. Much like a multi-layer Photoshop file, there’s not much that can be done once it’s merged down into one layer (or track in this case).

Also, I almost did another NHB in-joke, but decided against it because it would’ve been harder, and I honestly expect at least two people to submit that song this week. Anyhow, if you were listening to The Last Production last Saturday, (or grab the podcast off autopodcaster before it falls off) then this 290 kilobyte MP3 will sound pretty wacky, assuming you know what song is being played.

This is why you should not draw while drunk. Or post to blogs while drunk.

The penis is why you shouldn’t take requests while drawing while drunk. As is the santa hat on the top hat. Blame my sister for those.

You won’t get “that’s pretty wacky” if you haven’t listened to NHB lately. Or you could listen to this clip. It’s quickly become a meme.

Happy New Year!