I'd pretty much decided to go acquire a Vita today on which to play Jeff Minter's new game TxK. After discovering my mom was in the hospital, I was pushed over the brink – I wanted something to distract myself from worrying about her.

This isn't the first time Minter has been a system seller for me; the promise of him working on an ultimately-cancelled game on the GameCube was part of why I got one of those (that and Treasure doing exclusives for it), and his Space Giraffe helped sway me to a 360. Minter's a long-time favorite developer since the c64 days; I'm pretty much one of his One Thousand True Fans. I'll buy pretty much anything he puts out on a machine I have. So this review may be kind of biased.

I now have a $250 device (including the expensive Sony memory card it didn't come with) that plays a sweeter version of Tempest that was in the original arcade cabinet, and fits in my pocket. As always I wish I had a spiny wheel, and holding the Vita for extended periods of time starts to hurt, but goddamn, I have a $250 pocket sized device that plays a note-perfect version of Super Tempest, this is everything ten year old me didn't dare to ever dream of. Well, actually purse sized, what with me never wearing pants. But you get the idea.

I've only had a few games so far. Started to get the hang of its systems. Seen the delightfully chill bonus round twice, and very quickly died.

It is, of course, not actually a vector display. But it's a perfect fake. I can't see any pixels, and the Vita can throw around a hell of a lot of fake vectors. Lots more than a real vector display ever could. TxK is quite unabashedly Tempest, but it's super space Tempest that never has to worry about how long it takes to move the beam around. Every level is full of weird faint background elements, the enemies are surprisingly detailed.

It looks pretty in screenshots, but it's amazing in motion. Everything is silky smooth; the abstract neon shapes are instantly recognizable as one enemy or another. It doesn't rely on sound cues as much as Giraffe did; this is a game for one sense only. But it sure makes that sense happy.

One thing I like is that once you begin to get the hang of it there's a lot of little moments that make you feel awesome. Getting saved from an enemy because you picked up a power up as it was dragging you down the web, which made the AI droid pop up and shoot it. Saving yourself from an enemy dragging you down by a timely super zap. Spawning an extra life (cued by a robot voice saying “extra”), dying, and grabbing the life (robot says “life”) as you drop down onto the edge of the web. It makes you say “Yesssss!” when things like that happen, and there's a decent number of them. Ultimately this is a cruel and unforgiving game, but along the way to your doom it wants to give you a lot of little moments where you feel like a rock star. That's important!

It does feel a little cramped sometimes. The tiny screen plus the odd shapes of some levels means it's easy to lose track of enemies off the edge of the screen sometimes. And the short throw of the Vita's stick is honestly little different from using d-pad so far. This may change if I get some of those attachments that mimick the horns on a PS controller, I may just not have much finesse due to how I end up holding the thing.

Me being me, I kind of wish it had a “more visual feedback” mode. But I am in the .5% of the gaming public who was wired to appreciate Minter's previous Tempest riff “Space Giraffe”. Most people are not a life support system for a visual cortex like me. This game can be appreciated by people who have devoted a more normal amount of their processing power to their eyes. And if it does start feeling easy, hey, 360s are cheap now. You know what to graduate to.

I spent $250 for this game, and this game alone. There are a few other Vita-only games I'll probably get later on. But I feel like I will be getting my money's worth even if I buy nothing else for this machine.

I guess that's a pretty strong recommendation.

If you already have a Vita it's only ten bucks. If you have any love for arcadey shootemups, or for vector displays, I think this one is really a no-brainer of a purchase.

So yeah. Since about mid-december of last year, my fridge has kind of been a wasteland. There’s stuff in there of unknown age and freshness, a package of bacon that was half-consumed at some point, elderly lettuce that may have never been opened, eggs of unknown vintage.

Every time I came home from a trip, I’d just sort of look at all this stuff and think “ugh I don’t know if this is any good and I don’t want to try to figure that out because I have no energy” and then I’d either go get pizza or grab some cheap pasta, because these things are just so simple.

I mean, I also had no energy because winter. Travel to New Orleans for a couple weeks, come back in the dead of winter, feel drained. Go to San Francisco for a long weekend for Further Confusion, come back with some serious con crud that might have been pneumonia. Plus it’s still winter. No energy. And just as I’m starting to recover from that, I went down to New Orleans for Wizard World.

And when I’d go to the store while I was back in Seattle, I’d be like “I dunno if what I have in the fridge is good or not and I don’t wanna waste it”. And then I’d never check on the age of that stuff and the cycle just continued.

Well, fuck it. I’m home again, and I won’t be traveling until the middle of May. It’s time to cut my losses and just empty all this ambiguity out of my fridge, and start actually putting some furshlugginer protein into my regular diet again. “Empty fridge” is at the top of my to-do list for today, followed by “Rita” and “triage phone messages”, because I have a bunch piled up that need to at least have the notification cleared on my phone.

HI IM A GROWN UPPE oh god fml

(Next week: START DRAGGING MYSELF TO YOGA AGAIN and unkink my damn spine. Same thing: I’d come back and be all “oh god I’m pooped and besides I’ll just be leaving in a week anyway”… for a couple months in a row.)

Well shit. I start working on one of the other things in my to-do list for today – “triage phone message” – and up at the top are a couple from mom mom, who is in the hospital. Apparently her shortness of breath while I was visiting her was from more than being out of shape.

She said it was nothing super major, but they kept her overnight. I just called her and she sounded mostly okay; she asked me to call her back in like 5-10 minutes. I guess because there was someone visiting her room, or because she was talking to a doctor or nurse, or something.

So I guess this is a brief reminder to go visit your parents if you’re living far away and still on good terms with them. ‘Cause they ain’t getting any younger. Neither are you, but that’s probably not going to be a problem as soon as it will be for them.

Edit. Yeah, the nurse was doing things. It’s looking like congestive heart failure. Which she’s been in the hospital before. They’ve got her on something to get fluids moving through her, and are having trouble getting all her records because of computer problems. She’s in bed and a friend is bringing her the iPad I gave her before Christmas, so she’ll be distracted at least. She’ll be in the hospital for at least the other night.

Hopefully she’ll be back home with another medicine added to her regimen or something, and nothing worse!

My ex-boyfriend-with-benefits just asked if I’d consider becoming his ex-wife-with-benefits. I told him I would be honored to stomp on his dime store plastic ring, wear half of it on a chain, and throw the other half in his stupid face.

♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️

This is really not what I expected adulthood to be. But I’m enjoying it.

This past weekend, I went to a comics convention down in New Orleans. I cursed Past Peggy when I got on the plane, because I really did not want to go to another con just yet, what with the recovery from Further Confusion taking a lot longer than normal due to what might have been pneumonia circulating in the dealer’s room, but I think overall I’m glad I went.

I didn’t break even – I’m down about $200 – but I had a pretty good time. I sold all of the Tarot decks I brought, and would have sold a couple more if I hadn’t been super low on stock. I sold about half of the copies of Rita 1 I brought (down to 9 out of ~20), and am going home with less than ten business cards out of a hundred. I’d say that’s doing pretty good for my first time at a con in this area.

Plus seeing my mother, catching a COG show, having the Krewe of Chewbaccus roll through the show floor several times, and getting to tug on Bondage Harley Quinn’s rings for a photo. And wandering around yesterday taking a bunch of mood notes for when I do ‘Drowning City’, and finding a half-remembered sculpture that really needs to have Something Important happen in front of it in that comic.

If I take next year off from furry cons like I’ve been toying with, I will DEFINITELY be doing Wizard World New Orleans again.

It was never a high-stress con, so I spent a lot of time sitting at my table watching the passing crowd, and tweeting about the costumes that amused me. Which I will now cut and paste into this blog post. Also there will be a few photos. I didn’t really take many because I hate hollering for passing costumers to stop, as it feels like a lead-in to HIGH PRESSURE SALES TACtICS, which I have a serious aversion to. If someone stops a costumer I like in range I’ll usually snag a shot, though.

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I’m doing Wizard World New Orleans this weekend. Sleeping at my mother’s place, so it’s real easy to break even.

This morning she showed me a couple of articles in the newspaper on the convention. Both of them really focused on the fact that people dress in crazy costumes to attend the show; there was mention of meeting tv personalities and little else. Nothing about the vast horde of people like me, selling the weird comics they’re passionately dedicated to drawing, nothing about the larger entrepreneurs selling licensed or semi-licensed stuff. Just the costumes.

Because, of course, costumes make for interesting photographs.

I find this interesting because I’ve seen the furry fandom get the same kind of coverage, and change because of it: the furry fandom is a lot more focused on dressing up like an animal character, in no small part because that’s what it’s been promoted as by the media. So new furries have come in with the expectation that, hey, I need to come up with a character and get a fursuit made. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing – hell, I’ve got a friend who pays her rent entirely by making fursuits – but it’s a thing.

Maybe I should start dressing more outlandishly when I sit behind a table, simply to increase my chance of getting interviewed by Normal Media covering the con, and have a chance of getting the pitch for my work included in a widely distributed article. Although it’s also enough hassle that I should make sure I’m having fun doing it, too; doing things solely for business sucks.

WWNO has been extra crazy for a comic con, because it’s in New Orleans and it’s close to Mardi Gras. Everyone’s ready to party; the Krewe of Chewbaccus has been rolling through the show floor intermittently, complete with brass band playing nerdly favorites. I think I’m going to come back next year, especially if I go through with my plan to take a year off from furry cons and see if I miss them – I definitely need a convention somewhere below the Mason-Dixon Line to take the edge off of a Seattle winter! Business hasn’t been amazing, but it’s been decent for my first appearance at a con. And it’s been fun.

My tweets yesterday were a running list of Interesting Things I Saw Passing My Table. I’ll probably copy them, and today’s similar tweets, to a post about the con tomorrow evening or Monday.

Since Halloween, my hair has been white. Sometimes white with blue streaks or tips, but mostly just white. Standing there in the shower, debating if I wanted to do anything with my hair before taking off to Wizard World New Orleans tomorrow, I realized: this is not the right color for my hair; I’ve felt a little not me all this winter because of this. My hair should be red. With yellow-orange tips.

Somewhere in the past years, that’s just become… my natural hair color. It’s the one that makes me happy when I look in the mirror, even in the dead of winter. It’s the one that feels right.

It feels rightest when it’s a little faded, interestingly enough. Having it be the super-intense hue of “just dyed yesterday” feels a little off, feels like I’m begging for attention a little too much. But slightly faded red, going down to yellow? If I could convince my hair to grow in that color, I’d be delighted.

Anyway. I need to get dressed and do some laundry and get some dishwasher detergent so I can run that and I need to throw together my clothes for the coming week too. I’m really kinda wishing I hadn’t decided to do this con, it’s too soon after FC and I really still want to hide in my dark lair drawing and getting petted now and then. But Past Peggy thought it sounded like a good idea so here I am running around. I’ll be spending a few days before and after the con just bumming around New Orleans, hopefully I’ll get enough sunlight to help me make some real headway on the comic.

Now and then I make the mistake of looking at threads on DA’s forum about whether or not digital art is “really” “art”. Usually the arguments for “not” seem to center around (a) the lack of an “original copy” and (b) the perceived lack of “soul” in the work.

Now the “original copy” argument, I think is just fetishization of scarcity. I like that my art has no “original” to lose; it’s just a whole bunch of files that I back up to several places. I could run naked out of my burning apartment and lose no more than a few hours of work at best. If you want to fetishize scarcity like that, I guess that’s okay, but it’s sure not my idea of a good time.

The other thing – the lack of “soul” – is a weirder thing. I’ve never really been able to parse why digital art wholly lacks this quality; often proponents of this tend to point to the actual brushstrokes, erasures, and other maker’s marks found within the work.

And really, this one? This one is just weird. Because when I look at my pre-digital work, the look I’ve always been chasing is one that’s simplified, stripped down, and free of maker’s marks. I’ve been drawn to methods of making large fields of solid color for years, and the less there is to them, the better. Cut paper, silk screen, airbrush, stencils, they all involve huge amounts of pre-planning that suck the life and spontaneity from my work. With Illustrator, I can just stop thinking about all of that and draw.

Arguably, this is what you get when I bare my soul: inhumanly precise shapes and lines, the eerie grace of a robot’s dance.