fanmail from some flounder?

Peggy
August 27, 2012

I woke up to e-mail from a dude who saw my Tarot deck last night when his girlfriend and her husband were showing it to him. He’s a maker, and wanted a print of the Six of Swords to hang in his office, and in the space at home where he passes his love of making stuff to his daughter Eleanor.

I hopped out of bed, woke up my computer, rendered out a big bitmap of the image in question and uploaded it to DA so I could reply with a purchase link. How could I not? My full name is Margaret Eleanor Trauth.

There’s a part of me that’s continually amazed whenever I get an enthusiastic response. I guess it turns out that there are a lot more cartoon-loving polyamorous nerds who grew up with their heads full of SF out there than anyone really thought there would be. And I have made a Tarot deck that speaks to them like no other can.

(Also I really need to put something about general print prices on my site. Honestly I could probably do fulfillment by using DA or some other internet printing service (any suggestions, folks?) and having it shipped to the buyer’s address.)

a test

Peggy
August 27, 2012

This is a quick test of MarsEdit because I really hate writing blog posts in the web UI. The big question is not so much “will MarsEdit work” but “will the LJ cross-post plugin catch this post and do its thing”.

edit. Huzzah! It did. I HAVE A SYSTEM NOW.

soundtracks

Peggy
August 27, 2012

I spent a couple hours tonight playing “Limbo”, which I’d gotten in one Humble Bundle or another. It’s a fabulously depressing game, where you’re a little boy in a grey silhouette world where pretty much everyone and everything wants to kill you. After a while it abandons all pretense of reasons for things to want to kill you and just sticks you in a giant deathtrap.

This is incredibly dire, and after a bit I really stopped sympathizing with the kid and started laughing. It started feeling like a videogame adaptation of Gorey’s “Ghaslycrumb Tinies”.

Especially after I got tired of its soundtrack of creepy atmospheric noises and started making iTunes play the HAPPIEST MUSIC I HAVE. New Pornographers! CAB CALLOWAY! Going through an immense deathtrap of spinning gears and buzzsaws felt a lot funnier when it was accompanied by bouncy jazz that I’d hear in a Betty Boop cartoon.

So that’s my evening, then.

oh yes yes yes

Peggy
August 25, 2012

Woohoo. I just queued up two more pages of Rita. Admittedly this is because I’ve arrived at a place in the story that needs to be super-minimal again, so I was able to knock them out very quickly. In an attempt to not completely try the patience of the people who’re actually reading each new page as it comes out, I’ve queued them both up for the coming week.

These pages are also the end of chapter VIII, so this might be a good time to catch up: start of chapter VIII, the start of book 2, or even the start of the whole thing, back in spring of last year.

I think this is pretty close to being the halfway point of the whole story, too – book 1 was five chapters, and I’m hoping to keep books 3 and 4 about the same length. Though I would not be surprised if each successive book is a little longer than the previous one, as I realize there are more things I have to set up for the ending than I’ve anticipated, or things I thought would be brief throwaway lines that turn out to need more exploration.

a passing wish

Peggy
August 25, 2012

I kinda wish there was a way to declare some kind of inheritance for Illustrator’s templates. So that, say, my Rita template would have a specific size, layer setup and swatches, but it’d be adding this on top of the brushes contained in my default CMYK document. That would be awesome. Because then when I wanted to add another brush to my default loadout, I’d only have to add it to one file instead of several.

It’d also probably be kinda confusing to implement though.

ouch++ awesome++

Peggy
August 25, 2012

I just got another session done on my tattoo. Now the right wing has the black and the brown that makes up its trailing edge. No photo yet, I kinda want to wait for the swelling to go down before I take any!

I suspect this is gonna itch like crazy as it starts to heal. We will see! And at least people might hopefully quit praising my “henna tattoo”.

back from the void

Peggy
August 24, 2012

Oh, man, it feels good to be queuing up a page of Rita again. You’ll see it Tuesday.

old

Peggy
August 24, 2012

Tonight, I feel terribly old. This happens now and then.

Last night Nick came over. We played around with the Icehouse pieces I’d been handed a while back. Played a few turns of Gnostica on my deck, got distracted and ended up just building cities with the little plastic pyramids and destroying them with a little pseudo-Godzilla keychain I had lying around the coffee table.

This morning, once we (ahem) finally left the apartment, we went to a coffee house. Where he got some work done and I just puttered on the net. When he left, I plopped myself in the studio chair and re-read Asterios Polyp. Which I’m kinda still out on – it’s both brilliant, and really hard to like. For all that it foretells its ending.

I got a grand total of one whole hour’s work on the next page of Rita. It’s annoying. I’d work all damn day fiddling with the tech crap of the site, but drawing this comic is like pulling my own teeth sometimes. Even though I’m a lot more proud of it. Maybe because of that – the goal is more ambiguous, the stakes higher. I know where I’m aiming with it, and I think I can get there. But it’s not easy.

And ultimately one hour of work is better than none. Which is what I accomplished on it the past couple weeks as I wrestled with my site.

I really hope I can clear stuff out of the way soon and just… work on the comic. For days on end. Get a groove going. There’s always something else I need to split my time between: a few commissions, Bugtown, the anthology, con attendance, helping out WITH cons… I didn’t know how good I had it when I’d wake up for days on end and know that I was going to work on Absinthe, or later, that I was going to work on the deck. Switching context is expensive and draining.

unexpected con attendance

Peggy
August 22, 2012

Huh. Apparently I applied to exhibit at APE this year, because yesterday I got a letter from them saying that I’ve been accepted. I’ve got a full table, #758 it seems.

Past me, what have you gotten future me into?

I guess now I should cast around and see if anyone else in my circles is hitting APE and is willing to share a room.

(Also I am breaking my rule of “not exhibiting cons I haven’t attended beforehand” here, but, well, I’ve also decided that I need to start stepping outside of the good ol’ furry fandom.)

less css is good css

Peggy
August 22, 2012

When I was working on the FC2013 site, I got introduced to LESS. And it has really transformed my workflow for writing CSS, especially when using new CSS3 features that have a ton of different vendor prefixes.

Check it out: here’s the LESS for the top menu on the new version of my site.

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