Fallout 4

Peggy
November 25, 2015

Kerri: “so what’s the Fallout 4 verdict?”

My response:

It sure is another open-world game from Bethesda. You’ll never be shocked or amazed while playing it, but there sure are a lot of side-quests and sub-systems to distract you and fill up your winter hours.

And the characters are slightly less robotic than usual. They actually make attempts to emote instead of standing there like plastic automatons delivering woodenly-acted tapes. Still ain’t gonna win an Oscar or anything for its acting.It is a huge pile of okayness that I will probably put hours into, finish the main quest, snark about it, and do about a third of the sidequests of. And every moment I run out of action points and have to do the realtime combat up close, I’ll wish I was playing Bloodborne instead, because holy crap the weapon swap method is so awkward.

I’m also just never much of a fan of the post-apocalypse setting tbh. I keep on looking at its dingy, run-down future and wishing I was playing a similar free-form game set in a bright, happy, optimistic future. Something best summed up as “GTA Coruscant”.

(There was an actual open-world rpg set among the scumlings of Coruscant in the works for a while, but it got canned despite looking pretty promising. That makes me sad every time I think about it. But it doesn’t have to actually be the Star Wars license; I’d be happy with any giant future city full of aircars and ray-throwers and aliens and a customizable PC and sidequests.)

the dream of most of the people in my life whose death affected me in any way

Peggy
November 25, 2015

Wow. Lots of dead people in my dreams last night. Kara, Marie-Jeanne, and Ricky.

Ricky revealed to me that he had faked his death, and was hanging around being mysterious and working on an indy video game and going slightly crazy from solitude. Though the huge scars on his wrists suggested to me that no, he really hadn't faked it at all.

I don't remember what the hell Kara or Marie-Jeanne were doing in my dreams. Something about a song and traveling with Kara?

If Russell had shown up, that would have been pretty much everyone whose death really affected me. What the heck.

oh winter

Peggy
November 24, 2015

Last night, I stayed up until 6AM playing Fallout 4. I slept late, unsurprisingly.

I finally crawled out of bed just now, at almost 4pm. Stuck my nose outside and was greeted by a blast of 48º wind.

Hello, winter. I didn’t miss you.

removing depressing mundanities

Peggy
November 23, 2015

Today, I cleaned my toilet. It’s been needing it for… several months, now. It was a bit meh in the summer when I went down to New Orleans to be by my mother’s deathbed, and by the time I got back it had matured into some dark spots on the inner lid that helped refresh the dark spots in the bowl far too quickly.

This was, of course, pretty depressing to see every time I went to the bathroom. But I was also depressed about my mom’s death, and pretty soon I was depressed due to it being winter, as well.

Every time I’d go to the bathroom seeing the state of my toilet would make me feel just that tiny bit shittier. But I could never wind up the mental energy to just fucking clean the thing – I’d have to figure out how to remove the lid so I could put it in the tub with something soaking into the top for a while. It felt complicated. Just thinking about trying to figure out how to do this was depressing.

This is what depression looks like.

I finally did it today. And made a stab at the clean laundry pile that’s been sitting next to my bed for about as long. I feel a lot better about my apartment now.

I’m sure I’ll still be mopey and sad. I’ve got two very good reasons to. But at least I’ll have one less stupid fucking household chore gnawing at the back of my head, making me a little bit sadder every time I tend to a fundamental bodily need.

I feel like if I get nothing else today, cleaning my fucking toilet is still a major accomplishment. Dealing with laundry on top of that? I’m winning at life.

some black dragon

Peggy
November 21, 2015

Today was a special day on my calendar. Peganthyrus' Birthday. Twenty years ago, one of the wizzes on Furrymuck @newchar'ed her for me. What started as kind of a joke became an identity that would end up being all-encompassing for me; when I transitioned, I tried a few names, but it was pretty inevitable that I'd settle on a name that shortened to Peggy, just like hers did.

I never noted the exact day I decided to start transitioning. So I can't celebrate that day like some people do. It was somewhere in the end of summer around 2001-4. But I can log onto Furrymuck and type “examine me” to get a solid date on creating the first female identity I'd spend time as. And that's good enough.

I don't make a big deal out of the day. Ever since my father died on my twelfth birthday, birthdays lost their magic for me. I tried doing something for Peggy's Birthday a few times but my heart was never in it.

Anyway. Twenty years ago, I started pretending to be a black dragon lady on the Internet. Which eventually lead to me realizing I was much more comfortable in a female identity, and even more eventually starting to do something about that.

(And I must confess that I feel faintly annoyed that the day before is now the Transgender Day Of Rememberance. Yay! Let's think about all the dead trans people the day before the day I pegged as my own Trans Anniversary Day! Because even after fleeing from my original birthday after it became the day I was plunged into a twenty-year-long depression when my father died on it, I still have to think about death on the new one. THANKS EVERYONE. Not that this spoiled any major party or anything, I spent the day mostly just hiding in the living room playing Fallout 4.)

oops

Peggy
November 16, 2015

Sunday night: Went to a party. Had a good time. Came home. Ex-with-benefits was waiting. We cuddled some then went to bed.

Today: Wake up. There was a delayed money-related task on my calendar for today. I also wanted to get some comics work done. Instead I ended up sitting on the stool at my desk, looking at videos and stories of people playing video games in creatively “wrong” ways.

It’s barely five, and the sun’s down. I think today’s just a total write-off in the service of all the social energy I expended last night. I’m okay with that.

RAWR

Peggy
November 14, 2015

RAWR

So yesterday I wandered down to the Apple Store, with two goals in mind: check out the New USB3-Only Macbook, poke at the iPad Pro, and get a new phone.

The new Macbook? I’ll stick with my 13″ Air. I could probably use my normal set of Illustrator palettes on its little 12″ Retina screen, but it’s not enough of an upgrade in other ways to make me feel like biting. I’ll wait a few months and see if Apple decides to refresh the Air with a Retina screen and a 1TB drive option.

Similarly with the iPad Pro; while I have visions of using it with AstroPad for working in small spaces, I really just don’t feel like I want that enough to pay $800-1100 for that right now.

But a new phone, yeah, I wanted a new phone. Apple Pay and a decent battery life again; the power on mine’s been shit lately. I qualified for their new plan where you buy it on installments, and get a free upgrade to the latest phone every month – running the math showed that it was pretty close to the cost of buying a new phone every two years. So I got a gold 6S. Which is definitely proving to be a bit too tall for me, as I suspected – I can’t reach to the top of it while holding it one-handed. Especially with the naked exterior being so damn slippery.

So I went looking for cases. And discovered that there is a place that will print custom art on translucent cases. I promptly drew out an idea I’d had ever since putting a black case on my previous gold iPhone: a dragon swirling and curving around in the darkness, colored the gold of the phone’s case. Originally I’d thought it would be cool to do in a starker style that could be realistically laser-cut out of plastic, but since I was doing this in ink on plastic, I let myself get kind of detailed.

How will it come out? I dunno! I’ll probably post photos when it comes next week, if I like how it works. And post a ‘buy’ link for it too, because maybe some of my fellow dragon fanciers out there will like showing off their golden-backed gizmos in a similar way.

Drowning City: first step.

Peggy
November 10, 2015

Drowning City - first panel

These are the first two finished panels of The Drowning City. They look pretty much exactly like I envisioned the comic looking fourteen years ago when it started to really take shape.

They took a bit more than an hour to draw, not counting the half hour or so I spent drawing the sword and making it into a brush so I pretty much never have to draw it from scratch again. Some of that time was spent swearing at Illustrator and trying to nail down a weird bug where the Graphic Styles panel stops working properly; ultimately I ended up just working out of the panel where I had the library of styles I’m keeping in another file. I really need to spend some time trying to nail down exactly what makes the Graphic Styles panel start glitching out and submit a bug report.

There will be many more panels to draw before this comic is done. But having the first ones done makes it feel much more like a thing that’s really going to happen.

Temporary store closure.

Peggy
November 10, 2015

It’s winter. I am a solar-powered Southerner living in Seattle; I’d rather use what little energy I have on drawing new comics than on shipping stuff.

If you want a copy of the Tarot of the Silicon Dawn, you can get it on Amazon or most other online booksellers.

If you want a copy of Decrypting Rita, I should be doing a Kickstarter for the omnibus (and a small run of book 3 for those who have 1/2) sometime in winter 2015/spring 2016. Keep an eye on the comic’s Twitter, Livejournal, Facebook, or its RSS feed. Or follow my twitter/blog/etc (links here). I’m pretty sure I won’t shut up about the Kickstarter when it happens.

warmup: human version of dragon self.

Peggy
November 8, 2015

human-peganthyrus

I dunno, this just sort of happened this morning. It’s a human version of that dragon lady I like to draw myself as. Which is distinctly not quite the same thing as a self-portrait.

Mostly this ended up being more experimentation with faux airbrush techniques. I’ve been thinking about those a lot lately what with deciding that’s how Absinthe should look. Blurred shapes, the occasional gradient, and a mezzotinted rectangle over the background, but not the foreground. Also a few shapes with the ‘grain’ effect applied, one of which is an opacity mask to fade out the foot.

About a half hour, not including the time lost when Illustrator crashed and kindasorta managed to save some work, that I had to cut and paste back into the original document because I have a thing about retaining file creation dates that I should really let go of. It’s really been unstable lately and that’s kinda maddening.