Plaidophile

The year began just hours after my grandmother died.

I'm giving Kickstarter a try, for getting funds for publishing my comics.

Now that the news is public, I'd just like to spend some time reflecting on the good times with Chris (Findra).

I've been doing most of my blogging over yonder. It feels way more productive, somehow.

I haven't worked on comics in a while and I feel like I should be doing them but I'm just not motivated to. I have a few Unity stories on the backburner but none of them are really exciting me (two of them are pretty depressing, and one of them isn't really gelling into a story yet although maybe it doesn't need to either). I also have a bunch of journal comics that I sketched out but never finished (and none of them are at all timely anymore), and neither of my other ongoing series-ish things (Pernicious or Womble) really appeal to me right now either.

I feel like I should maybe just come up with a new set of characters and series to get things flowing again but nothing I can think of really feels like something I want to develop at all.

Maybe I should work on something collaboratively with someone else. Let someone else do the writing for a while, maybe. I mostly just feel like drawing without having to come up with stories to draw.

It doesn't help that Photoshop CS4 doesn't run very well under Lion, CS5 is just a glitchy and unstable pile of poo, and I still can't find any other drawing apps that are worth a damn. Maybe the trick will be in working in the constraints of some crappy drawing app though. MS Paint Adventures certainly doesn't suffer for it, for example.

• ∆songs: 5 Song Fight solo efforts, 2 Song Fight collaborations, 4 covers, 6 remixes, various sound experiments and short soundtracks produced, ~20 songs written but not recorded, 2 live shows (both went way better than any shows I'd done before)
• ∆comics: 120 published; 1 long-running series completed (Unity), 2 short series in their entirety (Unity:Planetfall and Unity:Breeder), 1 long-running series rebooted (Pernicious), 1 short series started (Unity:Meat), several miscellaneous one-offs and journal comics
• ∆artwork: various smatterings posted to various art-sharing sites
• ∆body mass: unchanged within statistical error; still fat a little overweight
• ∆grandparents: -2; grandfather(paternal, age=99y1w) passed in August, grandmother(maternal, age=99y7m) passed about an hour ago and I'm still processing it. Remaining grandparents = 0

All in all, the year could have been better, but it could have been a lot worse, too.

Since I'm in a break between comics, and I've been completely redoing my MacBook because of upgrading its hard drive and adding a dedicated NAS to my network and so on, I decided to go ahead and upgrade to Photoshop CS5. Which is, frankly, terrible in how slow and laggy it is.

I've owned a copy of Pixelmator for years, and they've improved it immensely over that time, but there are still a few glaring deficiencies in the UI. They've finally gotten the brushes to work really well, but now I'm finding that all tools are set to use the same brush all the time - including the eraser, which is always sized exactly the same as the brush tool. Which makes drawing much more of a chore than it should be.

So, once again I'm looking at alternate drawing apps. I have VectorDesigner as well, but vector drawing has never really agreed with me for a number of reasons (usually tablet pressure support is rudimentary or even nonexistent, and I also like being able to screw around with things at the raster level which I find to be much more flexible, even with its "inaccuracy"). This also pretty much rules out Inkscape, although I might give it a try again anyway.

GIMP on OSX is of course a joke (the various native efforts are in perpetually primitive states, and the X11 version doesn't support tablet pressure since X11 on OSX doesn't support much of XInput).

Basically, I need a drawing app with the following features:

• Runs on OSX
• A drawing/sketching-friendly workflow
• Tablet support (pressure, subpixel brush positioning)
• Layers (ideally with groups, and group blend modes)
• Magic wand selection and filling, as well as fast selection refinement (expand and contract at least, ideally with fast keyboard access)
• Is affordable and I can justify paying for it with the understanding that I'm an amateur who likes drawing for fun and doesn't intend to ever make money on this

There's a lot of free/cheap drawing apps out there, but most of them have critical flaws that make them pretty much not worth working with. It seems like there's a whole bunch of niche apps which work pretty well for their niche, and then Photoshop is what everyone else turns to, ignoring that it's slow, bloated, and massively overpriced for just a drawing app...

Now that Unity is over and I've gotten tired of drawing journal comics, please allow me to introduce my new series that you have most certainly never seen before, de^x/dx.

For anyone who wants to meet me in person and, I dunno, watch me work on my comics or something, there's this thing going on that I will be at, December 12 at the Cartoon Art Museum. I'm scheduled to be there 11 AM to 1 PM but I'll probably stick around for more than that.

12/3 Of course, this being the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco, CA.

Today I went to APE with Pat and Mark. While there I met, chatted with, and bought things from the following cartoonists whom I admire:

• Shannon Wheeler
• Meredith Gran
• Aaron Diaz
• Keith Knight

and I also bought some stuff from a bunch of cartoonists I'd never heard of before. Also apparently I was sharing the same oxygen as Jeff Rowland at one point without realizing it. Oh well.

I also exchanged some words with Stephen Notley and chatted a bit with Andrew Farago and Shaenon Garrity.

After that I went to the Cartoon Art Museum's APE party and hobnobbed with some of the above, and also met Rob McCarthy, Jonathan Lemon, and a few other fellow monsters (whose names I forget, unfortunately), and most importantly, Jesse Reklaw who I have admired for a long time and who was probably the single most influential person when it came to my decision to start webcomics to begin with. As it turns out, he was glad to meet me too — he had been trying to find my email address so he could give me a copy of his first book, which had a strip I'd written back in 1999 (or rather, which my subconscious had written when I was like 5 but which I submitted to him in 1999).

Anyway, between all the merch I bought and the money I donated to CAM, I completely drained my checking account and spent nearly all of it. And it was worth every penny.

Thanks again for submitting your work for the Cartoon Art Museum’s Monsters of Webcomics Virtual Gallery.

I’m pleased to say that your work has been selected for inclusion in our exhibition, and will be featured in the Virtual Gallery along with a wide array of webcomics from around the globe. This historic exhibition will include over 100 artists, making this one of the largest exhibitions in the Cartoon Art Museum’s 24-year history, and we’re thankful for your participation.

I am pleased as well! My stuff will be in a museum! I think this is only the second time this has happened.

Here's a full press release of the exhibit, and also you can read more about the goings-on at the Cartoon Art Museum on their LiveJournal.

I will have to finally go to CAM and maybe even meet Shaenon and Andrew in person!

1. Hm, Juni has gotten into a situation where it's finally talking to Kali again. I guess it should do a recap. It would be a good way to explain some of what's going on to the readers anyway.
2. Okay, this dialog seems okay but it's not really going anywhere, and what the hell do I draw? Juni, Chandra, and Kali talking to each other with Juni thinking of past events?
3. Meh, this is really annoyingly boring. Maybe I'll just write it as a chapter of a short story to post over the weekend.
4. Okay, since this is just text I can be a bit more verbose. I'll expand this dialog a bit. No need to be cryptic, words are cheap.
5. Okay, what was one boring strip has become a dozen paragraphs of boring dialog. And I'm still stuck with where the dialog goes from here and how this moves the story forward.
6. REWRITE TIME

It's not like I'm that great an author or artist now, but man I used to really suck. That's so embarrassing.

Yet another comic series, this one intended to fill in that big gap in the market of "things to read on Saturday." (I am also still working on Unity, and there'll still be occasional journal or random comics.)

This would be the most likely candidate.

I'm just sayin'.

The problem I always run into when creating a new comic is it starts to rule my life while I'm still in the "OMG my brian is exploding with ideas" stage. I've slept about 9 hours this week, and most of those were before I came up with the idea for Unity. Plus, in what little sleep I've been getting, I've been dreaming that I'm Juni, and waking up unsure of what's real. I've also not been eating or drinking much, and have gotten somewhat dehydrated as a result.

Hopefully I won't just burn out on it, because I really love the ideas I've been coming up with for it. The difference is that I just have little scraps of dialog and things to maybe or maybe not do, rather than things I need to fit into a big planned-out plotline that I'll get bored of. I've actually deleted as much as I've written because it's gotten invalidated by the ways the actual strips have gone, which I think is a good sign.

I'm a glutton for punishment and disappointment, but I'm starting yet another new attempt at a comic (back to my serious, extended-narrative nature, á la Eaveston). Episodes will start running on the 13th (when the current sketchbook buffer runs out). One thing I'm trying hard to do is to avoid planning too much of the story ahead, which I think is where things always go awry for me (because I end up getting bored with all the stuff I've already planned out), so I'm doing whatever I can to avoid thinking of plotline things.

I do have some aspects of the environment worked out (I know some things about the main character, and generally what the environment is, and some of the early setting-establishment things which will happen to the main character) but I'm trying my hardest to not come up with anything else. And of course, the whole need to discover everything as I go along is the design of the comic.

Hopefully this one will last a while.

So, real time has finally caught up with Eaveston. In 24 days, Cynthia was to arrive in the processing center of a constructed techno-utopia slash Libertarian pipe dream in the southern Pacific, and would soon meet a genderqueer, semi-insane IT professional going by the name of "fluffy" who was obsessed with Bemani games. (Keep in mind this was before I took on that moniker for myself, though sie was definitely based on me.)

I'm not sure if this'll last but I've decided to take de^x/dx in a new-ish direction (or more accurately, not locking myself up in a single comic series). So now I have a home for the other little doodly ideas I have.

This decision was somewhat inspired by reading John K's weblog. I was thinking too hard about how Cherry and Jen keep on going off-model when I do draw them, and then John K has a whole bunch of rants about how one-offs and evolving characters work a lot better (with plenty of concrete evidence showing how this is true).

(This actually happened on August 4. I sketched it that day but didn't get around to inking it until just now.)