Attending a friend’s wedding.
Dressing nicely to attend a friend’s wedding.
Knowing that I should dress nicely, but not so nicely as to become the center of all attention – it’d be rude to upstage the couple getting married.
Attending a friend’s wedding.
Dressing nicely to attend a friend’s wedding.
Knowing that I should dress nicely, but not so nicely as to become the center of all attention – it’d be rude to upstage the couple getting married.
As noted previously, I’m switching my net from Comcast to Centurylink. Today, I stuck the old modem into the box along with the giant new modem/router they sent me, and took a bus up to the Comcast office in Bitter Lake, then visited Best Buy to attempt to buy a Centurylink router that didn’t do wireless.
On the way, things got interesting – about halfway along my trip on the second bus I had to take to get up to Comcast, someone tried to do a right turn from the lane to the bus’ left, and would have gotten run over if the bus driver hadn’t slammed on the brakes. Passengers went tumbling, and the car clipped the bike rack on the front of the bus, knocking off one of the wheel clips and probably fucking up the wheel of the bike sitting on the rack. Nobody was hurt beyond some bruises, as far as I could tell – the bus was empty enough that everyone had a seat.
The bus driver and the driver of the car were clearly gonna be there for a while, so I got out and walked the remaining four or five blocks. Along a busy road with no sidewalks, because this is the fucking suburbs and nobody ever walks there. Blah. I was kinda tempted to just walk right down a lane in protest. I did not; I reached the Comcast offices without further incident, and gave them back their modems, then walked about a half hour to the Best Buy in Northgate.
They only had one router, which also did wireless, so I sighed and got it.
Upon getting home, I got it plugged in and running, then made the mistake of trying to let it be the master wireless router, and have my two Airports extend the network. This did not work very well at all; I don’t recommend you try this. I wasted at least an hour and a half trying to make this work before turning the wireless off at the modem, and using the Airport that was formerly sitting in the living room repeating the other Airport’s net as the master router. Now everything seems to be mostly working.
I guess now I’ll either slack off for a while, or work on the RF take-home commission I did a good sketch for on the bus…
I was sitting around answering questions in the Illustrator subreddit when I found a link to a neat tutorial on faking toothbrush splatters in Illustrator.
So I tried it out.
I added a wrinkle to it that the tutorial didn’t bother with; instead of having a lot of duplicated shapes with grained-up gradients over flat fills, I just added a new fill to my shapes with the Appearance palette, then gave them various linear and radial fills that I added the grain filter to and set to multiply mode. Less shapes are better, in my mind, because it’s a ton easier to go in and tweak things for just the right curve.
(You could also just draw the grainy gradients inside the shapes, which upon reflection would probably be a bit faster, but I dunno, I just like the technical sweetness of the Appearance palette sometimes.)
I’m pretty happy with how this turned out for a 15-minute doodle. I may have to do a more involved piece using this effect sometime in the future.
Here’s the AI source if you want to poke around.
(If you’ve read Rita, please do not try to read any significance into my color choices – this is just me picking random colors that felt fun together.)
I decided to take a couple extra days of vacation after APE. This will more than eat any profit I may have made from the con, but after three cons in as many weekends, I need a vacation.
So here I am in a motel. All my tweets say I’m in the “Cow Hollow” neighborhood – between Filmore and Van Ness, on Lombard. I have absolutely no plans for things to do, and while “finding a nice place in Golden Gate Park to sit around and quietly draw” feels like a pretty good agenda, I’d like to have a few other ideas.
What would you do if you were in SF with a couple days to kill, and no car?
Memo to self: Make pretty signs for prints and tarot prices. Also maybe “take a business card!” ones. Also add some backing to the Rita signs so they don’t flop all over.
I can’t help but feel like living in a world where people do things like this means I’m in the good future.
(Starts boring but give it until about 45 seconds in. And don’t fast forward to that either.)
A team book: “Big Barda and the Furies”. Or possibly just “The Furies”. It would concern the adventures of the much-neglected lady asskickers from Kirby’s “New Gods”.
I would want to look over all the various additions folks have made to the team over the years to pick my final set of characters. But they would all have costumes like the ones for the original set: fully clothed and armored, rather than the skimpy cutouts of most lady supers.
Artist: Not me. Someone who is faster than me. Someone with enough animation training to keep them simple and active, and enough sense to not draw them all as identical Hustler pinups.
The introductory issues would focus on how BAD ASS they are, in the manner of XTREME 90s Image books. Their morals would be set up as ambiguous – they were originally Darkseid’s elite fighters, and while Barda dragged them to the side of light in their original appearance, they seem to have bounced back and forth over the years. I’d have them mostly be heros, albeit fractious and conflicted ones.
Story arcs:
One of the Furies reverts to Apokalypse programming and has to be stopped. Probably a good intro arc, it touches on their history and establishes a general theme for the series – conflict between what they were raised to be and what they are now.
A trans fangirl Fury wanna-be is rejected due to (a) being a mere human rather than a New God and (b) being “male” in their eyes. She goes off and Batmans herself into something that can compete at their level. Dunno if she gets in after that. She might not want to any more.
Standalone issues where Much Ass Is Kicked. Whatever baddie is fun to draw, really.
Various arcs of cosmic/paradimensional adventures. About half their adventures should be on Earth, half out in space/the future/whatevs.
At some point during a future adventure one of them strikes up a relationship with one of the LSH. I want to say Braniac-7 because GREEN SKINNED BISHI CYBORG YUM. Complete with very female-gazey drawings thereof. But whatever works in current Continuity.
The Wikipedia page on them notes that at one point they appeared on Earth in the guise of hookers, with Granny Goodness as their madam. This is exactly the opposite of how I’d treat them. Ugh.
Mr. Miracle appears now and then – he IS Barda’s husband. She pretty much always saves his bacon, not the other way around. (Rescuing him from some scheme always works for a filler issue!) His costume is super objectifying, he is a lithe acrobat with a prominently displayed crotch!
If I ever want to do a superhero story I could probably file the serial numbers off this and have fun. Not sure if “playing with Jack’s toys” isn’t half the fun here though.
Anyway. I should go back home and get to packing for APE.
Things I need to do today:
Things I want to do today:
Things I need to do soon:
Things I want to do soon:
I really wish there was more overlap between the ‘need to do’ and the ‘want to do’ lists. Why did I set myself up for three cons in a row. Fuck you, Past Peggy. I need to not do this to Future Peggy ever again.
I went to the eye doctor again today, for what is hopefully the last tweak on my contact lens prescription. We started with some that were definitely a little farsighted, and have been bringing them down in small jumps.
Spending a week being farsighted has me thinking about How Vision Works, and, more importantly, how Superman’s super vision could work.
I’ve arrived at a few theories:
These are not mutually-exclusive theories, of course! Any or all of these could be part of the reason his Kryptonian eyes are better than ours. We can also posit two solutions to the x-ray vision – either a set of receptors in super-eyes that are responsive to that portion of the spectrum, or another nicitating membrane that shifts the wavelength of incoming light down a fair ways, into whatever his visible spectrum is.
Anyway. I’ve been enjoying walking along with a relaxed focus distance that is actually useful; I can focus close to see nearby things, and am slowly learning how to focus out at a distance. It’s not something I’ve ever really done due to having an uncorrected maximum detailed distance of about one foot. Hopefully I will manage to get a decent amount of strength in, and control over, the muscles that alter the focus of my eyes soon!