Do you ever get the feeling that you’re putting points into a skill – without having any idea what it is?

Whenever I wander through the local park, I find myself experimenting. How quietly can I walk on this leaf-strewn gravel path? Can I balance along this log? How can I traverse this terrain most efficiently?

Today I discovered that walking very, very slowly, such that I’m crouched on one foot for several seconds at a time while the other lazily finds a place to stand, creates a fascinating little rippling sensation in my hip if I move my hips just right. It feels more stable, too. Bodies are complicated, and it’s fascinating to spend time re-visiting things I worked out long ago to see how I can refine reflexive movements like “walking” for different purposes.

But I still keep feeling like I’m slowly trying to put points in a “cat burglar” character build or something.

Mooned around the apartment for a while.

Went out to Trabant and worked on Rita. Didn’t get the next page done yet; my queue is slowly emptying again. After skittering away from it to poke at the web instead for a while, I finally realized that I needed to hash out some things that weren’t quite right about the next few pages I have roughed out. So I fixed that. Which involved adding another page to this chapter – but I’m still pretty damn close to the end of this book.

Then I went to the comic shop. Got some of the usual stuff, and, on a whim, browsed the quarter bins. In them, I found a couple treasures: a color Konny & Czu story by Howarth, and this crazy, crazy thing from 1989 called “Gammarauders”. It’s from DC, based on some wacked-out TSR boardgame about people piloting cybered-out giant animals in a comic post-apocalypse world. It is loud and garish and everything DC’s current comics are not, and I was immediately in love.

I mean, look at this craziness. It’s just so pop. All the full-bleed panels in an American sized comic book give it a real immediacy when it’s in your hands; I’m gonna have to experiment with this someday. And you can tell the artist is having a blast doing this.

Some research at home revealed that it ended after ten issues. Hunting up a torrent let me see the sad disintegration of it; after the first three issues, the original penciler started getting substituted for by someone with a much more normal DC style every other issue. And the original penciller’s pages started slowly looking more generic-DC, as well. Which is very sad because this “Martin King” guy had a really fun style that sat somewhere between American comics tradition and the Japanese action cartoons that were starting to become a cultural force over here; every page was just bursting with energy and craziness. The scriptwriter stayed the same for every issue, but the dreadfully sane art for half the books really dragged the whimsey down.

Martin King is kinda hard to find on the net, what with being overshadowed by Martin LUTHER King Jr. He seems to have drifted through DC fairly quickly; in addition to six issues of Gammarauders, a DC wiki credits him with all of five other comics, two of which are Who’s Who and thus probably just have a couple illos by him somewhere in them. If he’s done anything else for any other comics presses, I have no idea.

Anyway, now that I’ve read the entire run of this obscure piece of madness, I think it’s bedtime.

I just googled myself and found the best thing I’ve ever filled a “about you” field with:

From the swampy miasma of the Crescent City an ancient beast arises. Its serpentine path weaves across the continent, a long black tail trailing to Los Angeles, to Boston, to Seattle – ah, there she is, in all her manic glory: Peggy.

Man I’m tempted to rewrite the about page of my site now. Which needs some css work anyway.

(Why was I googling myself? Well, a friend IMed me with a quote from her SO: “Is Peggy’s last name Trauth? She’s famous!”. She wasn’t around when I responded, so I decided to see if googling “margaret trauth” would turn up anything new and interesting.)

I just booked a flight home to visit my mother next month. I’ve been procrastinating on it for a while, and finally did it.

I’m trying something a little new: I got an account at Tripit, and forwarded the booking confirmation to “plans@tripit.com”, after setting up an account there. They parsed it, and stuck it into a calendar that I can point iCal to. And that I can point their mobile app to. I’ll be playing with that on my next trip, and comparing it to Gate Guru, which does much the same sort of thing. It’ll be interesting to see what it feels like to have a purpose-built app to aggregate all the information one wants when taking a flight, versus my usual habits of “manually create stuff in iCal, swearing as I convert times for cross-timezone flights, and throw stuff into Evernote as well”.

Woohoo! I got on the scale this morning and saw a number below 160 for the first time in a year or two. I’m getting back to the zone where I start to shift from “looks pretty good” to “omghottt” in my own eyes. And that’s really what matters – when I’m constantly seeing my reflection as HOTTT, my mood is tons better, and I’m even more outgoing and friendly. And confident. Which is attractive.

Nick came over yesterday. We futzed around: went out for some food, came back to my place and caught me up on Venture Brothers. Which meant four episodes back to back.

Then the next morning we went out to the cafe and poked at projects. I ALMOST got the next page of Rita roughed out – its gonna be eight or nine complex panels, so it takes a while. I might split it in two so I can give things a bit more breathing room, at the expense of making the longest chapter in the whole story even longer. Splitting it up may also make it happen faster; I have a terrible time getting into any kind of groove on pages with more than about six panels, I find.

We wandered up to Ravenna Park for a bit, then I saw him off to the bus. And went back to the park, where I just hung out on a shaded bridge for a while, lying there and listening to the birds. I'd intended to get some more work done on Rita but I ended up browsing the net for a few hours instead.

Tomorrow is market day. I'll probably try to get some progress on Rita, and might wander out to a regular spin jam down in Capitol Hill that I found out about recently. And then tomorrow is a party. Weekends, yay.

I just pulled my scanner out of the closet. It’s a Canon LiDE 60; it’s served me well for many years. I haven’t been using it much lately because I’ve been working direct in Illustrator. It worked just fine the last time I used it, no problems at all.

I tried to scan with it. The system scanner driver wouldn’t recognize it. I fiddled with it for a bit, then remembered my HP printer also has a scanner in it. So I poked at that. Ended up having to connect a physical cable to it; for some reason it doesn’t want to scan over the network, and I didn’t want to get lost in the rabbit hole of trouble-shooting that.

When I finally got a scan of the pencils I wanted out of it, it had applied all kinds of autocorrection and was utterly unusable. Despite the fact that the scan UI insisted all the autocorrection was turned off.

I ended up pulling out my phone, putting the sketch in question on the ground outside in the sunlight, and photographing it. Throw that into Evernote, then pull it out on the computer for work in Illustrator. Total time: maybe 30 seconds? With an image that may not be quite as high-res but is infinitely more usable for my purposes.

Welcome to the future, where everything is either awesome, or a complete clusterfuck of incompatibility.