Category Archives: Uncategorized

dailysnek: coffee smirk

Peggy
March 14, 2018

 

So lately when I’ve been feeling unmotivated to work on the huge, complex backgrounds of Parallax, I’ve been trying to at least make myself open up Illustrator and do some drawings of my cobra character Kalinda. (Who is also sometimes an archaeopteryx, it’s complicated.) I have been referring to these drawings as “#dailysnek” even though they are not a thing I do every day.

Today, I went out to the Meowtropolitan (a coffee shop with a room full of very very jaded cats) with Nick. On the way I decided that it would be nice to work on a bit of design I need to do for Parallax but it was by no means necessary; if all I did was to do a color version of a Daily Snek, that would be perfectly fine. I’ve generally been sluggish and unproductive lately, and I figured actually finishing something would be a nice change from “slowly picking away at complex two-page spread backgrounds”.

Worth noting: the smoke coming off of her cup is one path, with a moderately complex Appearance stack on it.

The bottommost stroke has an asterisk next to its weight because it’s got a variable width profile applied to it.

And here are all of the #dailysnek doodles thus far. Will I keep doing these? I dunno. It’s been fun so far, and people seem to like them. Click them to embiggenate.

the is is the only one that involved looking at an actual photo of a real snake, I should do that more often to figure out how to properly pile up her coils.

And then, having done this, I used the last half-hour of my Mac’s battery life to rough out a spaceship design for Parallax. Yay!

Still needs some work to turn it into something I can drop into Silo and use as reference to model. But there’s a good start there at the bottom, with some shapes that evoke assorted 70’s spaceships (mostly the Liberator from Blake’s 7, which always looked like it was going backwards, and maybe a little of the Vipers from Battlestar Galactica. Though I think I’ll try to downplay that as I work on them, as this is an eight-person shuttle with its own stardrive rather than a two-seat fighter that lives on a carrier.)

the dream of the very very abrupt ending

Peggy
March 12, 2018

There never was any wheelchair. There never was any wheelchair. There never was any wheelchair. Everyone on the bus chanted this as it whirled around me, flashing between being a bus full of tourists and… other things; brief, half-second glimpses of bright lights and carnivals and who knows what. And then they were holding me, a skull coming in towards the armpit of my lifted-up arm. And then with a twist and a thump I was AWAKE, lying there in my bed. None of the slow drifting-to-awareness of my normal waking up; it was like I just fell back into my body and there I was. I lay there slightly stunned for a moment*, then got up, put on my robe, and went to the kitchen, pretty much on autopilot. After a brief encounter with Nick (it’s a sunny day today! also the Northgate mall is turning into offices! also there is a section in its wikipedia page about terrorists and serial killers!), I picked up my phone. Not because I wanted to use it – but because I wanted to see if it still worked, because I have noted that whenever I pull it out in a dream, I always get a clunky substitute cobbled together out of 1990s tech. It was, indeed, an early-21st-century device that worked as expected, so I guess I’m really awake.

 

The wheelchair that wasn’t? Oh, that was from before. I was in a rainy parking lot, and watched a man push a wheelchair through it, and suddenly collapse; I helped him up, and he went to his friends without a word to me. And then the wheelchair was gone and I was on the bus and that’s where we came in, isn’t it?

 

Previously there had been a fairly coherent narrative where I was some other guy, who had traveled a long way to seek the advice of a very Vegas sort of mystic at some kind of convention; he was looking for help with an entity that had been connected to him for long enough that he’d bothered this mystic’s father for help, as well. He was rejected once more, and watched sadly as other people looking for advice were tapped to be in some sort of forming coven; he ended up in a brightly-lit store, watching these other people troop in and acquire flashy new Magic Wands. (Me? I thought. I don’t need one of their wands. I have my own. And there it was in my hand, the plastic one full of water and glitter that I’ve had iRL for several years.) It was kinda sad.

Before that there was a bunch of the usual dream nonsense about trying to use a bathroom that was ridiculously impractical. Usually that involves me trying to pee in a toilet that’s overflowing, or has been removed, or something; this time it was a taking a shower with a showerhead attached to the wall right next to the toilet. At least the showerhead was on a hose, so it was almost usable. Until the point where that wall and toilet were in the middle of a fast fashion shop in a mall and it seemed more appropriate to deal with buying my stuff and getting out. Very much routine Dream Problems.

 

But damn, that ending. Never woke up like that before, feeling like I just fell into my body with a thunk and woke all the way up in an instant.

* I may have felt compelled to do a quick banishing before getting up, it was that weird

the dream of the classic comics shortcut

Peggy
March 8, 2018

This morning, I woke from a dream about tracing complicated layouts from a superhero comic, which was a little infamous for itself being lifted from another one. I suspect this was in response to me going to bed sad because progress on Parallax is slow, due to the massive amounts of complex background stuff the story needs.

Nice try, brain. I wish this solution would work. But the problem is that I’ve got to invent the remnants of a whole culture, not that the layouts are hard.

the dream of what the fuck am i doing at PAX.

Peggy
March 1, 2018

I dreamed I was hanging out with the Penny Arcade guys at some kind of giant convention. It was beyond super awkward. Way beyond. Also I kept on losing and finding polyhedral dice. Ultimately I ended up next to a tiny submarine sinking into a watery pit in the middle of some sand, which was just barely covering a whole bunch of dice. I am not sure I ever got my dice back but I sure ended up with a purse full of dice.

In reality, ECCC starts today and i am delighted to not be working it,

The Running of the Blades

Peggy
February 24, 2018

Tonight I watched the “Final Cut” of Blade Runner. Last time I saw it was probably on a VHS tape; I’m not sure I ever saw it theatrically. Here are some assorted thoughts I started to type up into Mastodon and decided to move here instead.

Blade Runner depicts a used-up future in which every corner is full of junk, and white people are just another shade in the crowd. But their stories are the only ones that matter to us, it seems.

Every scene is full of smoke and dust. Polluted air, or legalized pot?

Visual theme: Eyes. So many close-ups of eyes on screens. Luminous owl eyes. And of course the scene where Batty pops Tyrell’s head and gouges Tyrell’s eyes out. I turned away during that one. Even when I was a teen boy I didn’t revel in gore like that, much less as a fortysomething lady.

Also holy crap the scene where Deckard comes on to Rachel is super rapey. Trap her against the wall, ignore her saying no, TELL her to say “kiss me”? This is not consent, no matter how much Vangelis wailing away on the synthosax tries to persuade us otherwise.

It is a movie full of Signifying Images that does not care to do more than vaguely hint at what these Significators may Signify. Blah blah unicorn blah blah replicant blah blah Deckard, okay sure, I can see that, mostly coming out of Gaff’s little match-man and his comments at the end. (Apparently Ridley Scott directed it with Replicant Deckard in mind, and apparently the sequel completely goes with Human Deckard.)

I feel like there is something going on with the Off-World Colonies Ad blimp. We see it several times over the course of the movie, with the Off-World Colonies ad slowly being replaced by an Asian lady saying something my English-only ears can’t even begin to comprehend. The last time we see it, it’s flashing its lights into the Bradbury Building as Deckard enters, on his way up to kill Pris: No new life awaits anyone in this movie any more.

It has very compelling set design. Which is helped by the fact that it’s a noir, and every scene is either in the rain at night, or dramatically lit by low-angle sunlight. This hides a lot of the edges of the world in shadow. And hides mistakes. I should remember that, it feels like a useful trick.

The “Final Cut” didn’t include the voice-overs of the original theatrical release. I didn’t miss them. I don’t think I’m going to pop in disc 2, which has two theatrical cuts (US and Europe) as well as the “Director’s Cut”. One version is enough. Especially when Wikipedia informs me the “Final” version is the only one lacking studio interference with the film Scott was trying to make…

the dream of the advertising larp

Peggy
February 21, 2018

I dreamed I was taking part in some sort of LARP about murders in an advertising agency. It was high up atop a bridge, and was a lot of work to bicycle up to.

One of my co-workers from the Spumco/Nebulous days was there and dressing in borderline drag. Pringle looked astoundingly good in that green plaid lady’s coat. I’m not that surprised to have seen him; before falling asleep I distinctly recall pondering some old dreams about returning to the animation industry, where Gabe showed up.

I looked at a list of things that needed to be drawn to fill out the pretend agency’s gallery of previous work, and declined to spend time on any of them.

thoughts on transmitting one’s values to one’s kids

Peggy
February 20, 2018

It is five in the morning and I am lying in bed thinking about cultural continuity. Specifically, I am thinking about the ways my parents communicated their culture and values to me without a single word: the books and magazines lying around the house. After I learnt to read, I started reading pretty much anything I could get my hands on – first the little shelf full of kid’s books they kept in the living room, but pretty soon there were visits to the library every week, and me picking up whatever was lying around. That stack of audio magazines my dad subscribed to? My mom’s subscription to New Yorker? Stuff off the lower reaches of their shelves in the back room? Anything I could reach was fair game. Sure, there was stuff that was specifically My Reading Material that they had no interest in, but and I sure wasn’t reading everything they did, but there was a lot of overlap. And a certain amount of my parents shaping me by what they chose to subscribe to for me, as well.

I consider my current reading habits: lots of stuff on the screen. If I had a kid, how much of my tastes would be transmitted to them? They wouldn’t have any magazines to read. Most of my books are in the Kindle app, except for the comics. They’d probably end up getting lost in the horrors of Deep Youtube, populated by people hollering racial slurs over video games, idiots narrating their lives, and corporate-owned characters getting kidnapped by evil dentists who bury them up to their necks in sand, or whatever the hell else The Algorithm has decided is Popular now.

It’s the same with music: no stack of records or tapes or CDs for a kid to browse and maybe fall in love with a few things. Especially not if I was one of the zillions of people who have apparently quit buying any music at all and stream it instead. No treasured DVDs of movies or games. Just… data.

I suppose there are Family Plans, ways to share a collection of licenses to media in the cloud with your spouse and kids. But those are never the first thing on anyone’s list of features to implement; things are solitary and siloed as a matter of course. And I’m not sure that’s really a good thing at all.

Raising a kid now must be pretty complicated and scary, given that there are literal Nazis out there hoping to recruit any lonely, bored people they can…

(and on the flip side I guess there’s all those queers out there happy to help validate a kid’s explorations and drag them down into that world, where gender is a construct and all those other horrible things? Kids get into weird shit, it’s part of growing up. I’m just wondering how much less of a grounding they have in their parents’ values now due to Ambient Media Lying Around The House.)

Thirty Thousand Pounds Of Memories

Peggy
February 19, 2018

Holy crap that opened up an old wound.

Today I found myself humming bits from two Harry Chapin songs, both off of “Verities and Balderdash” – one of the tapes I inherited when my father died. I used to listen to it on and off when I was younger, and took it to California along with the rest of my tapes and CDs. And like almost everything else I owned then, it was in a shipping container in one of the parts of New Orleans that got inundated when I gave up the animation dream and moved back there.

It was never a favorite. But it was one of my few lingering connections to my father.

So when I found myself humming half remembered fragments of “Cat’s Cradle” and “30,000 Pounds Of Bananas” today, I pulled them up online and played them. And holy crap I was not ready for the upwelling of old loss and sadness that released. It didn’t help that “Cat’s Cradle” is the first song on that album, and it’s all about ruing the disconnection between a hard-working father who never quite has time for his son, until the son grows up to be just as hard-working and just as lacking in time for Dad.

And of course, for me, there’s no option of having time for Russell any more. There hasn’t been for about thirty-five years, now.

I’ve mostly dealt with it, over the years. Don’t think about him much any more.  Don’t have much cause to.

Mortality sucks.

Twisted Romance #3!

Peggy
February 16, 2018

 

So today I came home to a box full of this on my doorstep. It’ll be in stores on the 21st. It looks pretty fabulous.

i are a real comixr now, thousands of copies of a thing I drew have been made and I did not have to lift a finger for that to happen once I was done drawing it. Woo!