Got up early, finished a page of Rita, posted it, went to yoga. There was a substitute instructor who was kinda brutal – which was good! Despite me already being achy from pole dance on Sunday. Some things were easier than I expected them to be.
Then I came home to find my website down. I poked at it for a bit and submitted a trouble ticket; I really wasn’t sure if it was my site, or the machine it’s hosted on being a problem. I’m still not quite sure, really. I went out to Trabant to try and get some work done on Rita, but I ended up just nervously fiddling with the site for the most part, especially once the hosting control panel came back up. Something is spiking my site’s memory usage through the roof intermittently, to the point where it gets automatically shut down. I’ll have to do some investigation to try and figure out why; right now it seems to be back to normal. Maybe. I’m not sure.
I came home, hoping to work on Rita. Instead I ended up just reading most of the first three volumes of Promethea, the comic in which Alan Moore tries to slip an Introduction To Majgickqgh course under people’s radar in the form of a superhero comic. Mostly I’d picked it up because I found it sitting in the teen comics section of the library, which amused me given that volume two has an entire chapter devoted to some pretty damn expicit tantric sex. (Not that it really matters, given that the teen comics section is right next to the grownup comics section.) I really can’t say how well it does at blowing people’s mind with Fundamental Majgickq Ideas, what with me having read entirely too much about that in the past.
And then I went out to the comics meetup at the bar. I shared a toast to crowdfunding; Jer had just launched the Kickstarter for his book, and I was having a glass of cider that had been paid for by my Patreon campaign. (Pretty much exactly – it cost $5.25, and that’s how much I get per page right now. Minus Patreon’s cut and the credit processor’s cut, also plus the tip, but whatever. Patreon paid for me to get a little buzzed tonight, and that is awesome, and I thank everyone who made that happen!)
I talked about various people’s projects, got the next two pages of Rita set up and mostly roughed out (there’s some reference I need to find, and the net at the bar hates me), and tried to see how many of the characters from Pogo I could draw from memory. I got eight out before I decided that was enough! I think I could have managed a couple more, but I would have been pushing it.
(click for full size)
L-R: Pogo Possum, Albert Alligator, Howland Owl, Churchy La Femme, Porkypine, Mole, Miz Beaver, Mam’zelle Hepzipah. Some are more off-model than others.
edit. I got a response to my ticket, the problems were due to “system admins had to perform some critical MySQL and disk maintenance”. Which means it is not my fault and I don’t have to spend the next three days trying to figure out what’s gone wrong instead of drawing more pages of comics. Hooray!