It looks like I did all of 35 pages of Rita last year. That’s… not as many as I’d like. I really want to about double that, so I can finish book 3 by the end of the year. Ultimately it’ll be done when it’s done, but holy crap that’s slow.

On the other hand, I also did ten conventions last year, one of which was Anthrocon, plus a couple trips home. Each of those ends up being a bite out of my work time, both for going to the con itself and recovering. I also did some chunks of work on stuff for Interesting Venues, which I need to spend some time finishing off in the next month or so.

It also looks like I managed about 46 pages in 2012. I dunno. I feel slow. Maybe this is the year I try to push myself to do comics like it’s my day job that pays my rent or something.

It may also be the year I move to a place with better heating; it’s just hard enough to keep my place warm that this might be a factor in my general lack of spoons. I should probably also find some way to exercise more, I’ve been pretty lax these past few months.

Or maybe it’s the year I hook up with some other artists in Seattle and co-rent studio space somewhere downtown. Having a place that I go to Work might help a lot; I like my home studio but it’s real easy to slack in there too.

Right now I’ve got four cons definitely lined up for this year, and four that I’ve applied for, or that haven’t opened their apps up again. Three are in town, three are in Portland, two are in California and one’s in New Orleans. So that should be less super-stressful travel, at least.

And maybe one of these comic cons will result in a connection with a publisher. That’d be nice; not having to wrangle printing and distributing my books would give me a couple months that I could work on drawing instead of publishing. I’m not holding my breath of course.

Well that’s three hours of my life gone to frobbing computers, then.

A few days ago, I lost my phone. It didn’t show up on Find my Iphone, so after a few days I just told it to wipe itself when next connecting to the net, and got a new one. I was tempted to try and go without it for a while, but I’m going to need to have net connectivity next week when I sit down to sell stuff at Further Confusion.

Today I got a new sim chip for it and started setting it up. Download the apps I really use on a regular basis and a couple of maybes, then… jailbreak that bastard and start installing some tweaks. Because it’s just not my phone without spending several hours changing little things around.

I’ve still got to finalize the arrangement of crap on the home screen, but it’s usable now.

Last night: stayed up until 4AM fucking with some Skyrim mods. Mostly this one, also the beginning of this one.

Tonight: stayed up until 4AM lounging in the big purple beanbag chair in the living room eating cookies, poking at the internet, and drawing a naked picture of my dragon avatar with hooves. [NSFW: titties]

Well I guess that’s marginally better? I am so totally not gonna make yoga tomorrow morning. Today. Whatever. It’s not tomorrow until I sleep.

Ah well, at least I spent about four hours in Illustrator according to Time Sink; I got the map for the back of Rita 2 done. I just need to add one thing to the stuff surrounding it, and draw one last backer, then it’s ready to send to the printer. Hopefully I can make spending about that much time working a regular thing again; it’d be nice to start making dents in my to-do list again. Winter, feh.

map teaser fragment

I decided to watch some sunsets in Proteus. Would you like to share them with me?

I just went to go see ‘Frozen’ on impulse. I’d heard it was good. I don’t agree.

HOLY SHIT IT WAS AMAZING.

It wasn’t perfect. It spent a little too much time establishing the usual Disney setups of TWOO WUB and DEAD PARENTS. There were way too many songs. But that TWOO WUB completely fell apart, and one of the songs is about THE JOY OF BEING ALONE where nobody expects you to be anything and you can WORK ON YOUR CRAFT. And there were TWO major female characters, which meant they both actually got to be SPECIFIC people instead of both being The Princess.

And the stressed-out misunderstood witch-queen gets to KEEP HER POWERS AND BE HAPPY AT THE END. There is a HAPPY ENDING FOR THE WITCH in this movie. AAAAAHHHHH <3 <3 <3 <3

please go see this and make it a big success so maybe there will actually be more animated movies that give the ladies some fucking agency instead of just having them passively wait for a man to solve everything.

Anyone who says games aren’t art can shut up right now, because I just played an impressionist landscape painting.

It’s called Proteus. I think I probably got it in one Humble Bundle or another; it was just sitting in my Steam library when I decided to futz around while doing my laundry. The initial start was rocky – I encountered a bug where it takes several minutes to boot, with no loading screen – but once I got past that, it was magical.

I wandered around chasing frogs and scaring chickens. I stood on a lonely mountaintop surrounded by what might have been gods. I listened to the music made by passing standing stones in sequence, which was a part of the slowly-changing symphony of the world. I sat under a tree just beneath the cloudline, watching a shower of rain pass by.

At times I began to feel a little lonely. I could have enjoyed a companion, who wandered around with their own agenda. Someone to throw a ball back and forth with, to chase across the terrain. Maybe a friendly fox who comes and goes as she pleases? That would feel about right, to me.

But the loneliness passed, and I was swept away by the low-res beauty of this little toy world in motion.

I didn’t decide to take screenshots until late in my session, and Proteus has a way of very decidedly letting you know that you have finished your viewing for the day.

I stood before a magic picture, and wandered through the serene world it showed for about an hour. Why is this not a genre of game? Landscape painting. Hell, get something like this running on a Raspberry Pi, put it on a flat-screen, and hang it from the wall.

It cost me like $10. Even if I never play it again I think it was well worth it. People who make games, I urge you: Learn from this. Clone it. Turn it into a genre.