Today, I saw a link to a story about a 120-sided die. The big question was “what do you do with it?”. Because there are no RPG gaming systems that need that large a space of numbers. And I’m not really sure there should be; part of the fun of an RPG is that it’s a simplified simulation of reality, that aids in improvising stories.
Its creators suggest that since 120 is the least common multiple of the “standard” gamer’s dice set of d4/6/8/10/12/20, one could use a simple set of tables to generate any of the numbers found on those dice. Which would also mean that you could just whip one of these out instead of the usual Crown Royale bag full of a zillion dice and add a bit of minimalist flair to this week’s gaming session.
But realistically, you get this because it pleases some part of you to have a set of Weird Nerd Dice on hand; I don’t play RPGs any more, and never need a set of dice, but I’ve got a few sets of Gamer Dice sitting in the studio closet next to all the art supplies. Dice which I bought not too long after losing most of my possessions to Katrina, knowing that I hadn’t gamed in years, and probably never would; there is simply some part of me that is not happy without knowing that, at any moment, I could provide all the randomizers needed for a game of D&D.
And ultimately? When you play one of these games, one of the things you’re fantasizing about is being an adventurer delving into deep, dangerous places, and coming back with fistfuls of gold and gems. A nice collection of dice quickly starts to take on the appearance of a pile of gems, especially once you start getting ones made of translucent plastic, or interestingly-marbled colors. Running your hands through the ever-growing bag of dice is a good enough cartoon of what your bold thief feels as she kneels atop a dragon’s hoard, running the coins and jewels through her fingers and laughing delightedly before stuffing a bag with what she can carry, and making for the exit before the dragon comes back.
…I think I need to find some decent fake gold coins (or maybe just beg my New Orleans friends for doubloons) and expand my collection of dice now. I have, of course, ordered one of these d120s, as well as the same people’s interesting variants on the traditional 4/6/8/10/12/20 set.
edit. i went on ebay and bought three pounds of doubloons
I'm sitting here sorting through the pile of mail that's accumulated over the past few months while I was too busy grieving to deal with it. Now I know why there was constantly a huge pile of mail on the table when I was twelve; Marie-Jeanne must have been swamped with a similar pile of Stuff Demanding Her Attention after Russell died, plus the extra fun of trying to raise a kid who was falling into his own pit of grief, and of scrambling to figure out how she could get some kind of Day Job to keep things together. I know Elmina (Russel's mother) passed us some major chunks of the money Clayton (Russell's father) had managed to get by some lucky investments. Which I am still mostly living on, to be honest.
And I'm just contemplating all these bureaucracies spinning away, generating all these little notifications. Banks and insurance companies sending me a new letter every so often with an update on my or my mothers' accounts. A retirement fund that I guess doesn't know Mom's died yet asking her to vote on the now-passed board election. A note from her doctor reminding her that it's time for her yearly appointment, the month after she died. A few lingering debts that I missed dealing with when she died that are still sending collection notices. Eventually I'll get all of this covered, and my mailbox will go back to its usual slow rhythm of credit card offers and the very occasional note from a human.
I'm sorting through all of these because I'm plucking out all the tax stuff to send off to my mom's accountant. Along with my tax stuff because I just can't deal with it right now. If ever to be honest, I should just start paying someone to do the dirty work of sorting through all the forms and entering the numbers for me. Think I'm gonna finally go talk to the bank about setting up a business credit card, too, so I can quickly and easily say “I lost this much on my business this year” and get tax deductions for that.
Anyway. Vast bureaucratic machines, running at the slow time of snailmail. They'll wait patiently for me to bother dealing with them.
Today the section of Comics Twitter I follow keeps on talking about how terrible the costume of a Marvel lady hero named “Dagger”, who is basically wearing a white jumpsuit with a dagger-shaped cutout that goes all the way down to her belly-button, if not further. She’s got a themed partner named “Cloak”, who’s a big dude with some kind of shadow powers. And apparently people are talking about Dagger’s absurd costume because they’re going to be on a TV show soon, and trying to implement that full-body boob-window is going to either be a nightmare of glue, or a nightmare of Standards & Practices.
I googled them up and learnt a bit more: she’s a rich white girl, he’s a stuttering black boy, and they both got their powers from Tainted Comic-Book Heroin. Which may have been retconned to the heroin triggering their mutant genes, I dunno, whatever, I’m not gonna change their costumes to “Needle and Spoon” or anything like that.
Also I noticed that Dagger’s costume is basically designed to make it look like her head and neck are the hilt of a giant flesh-shaped dagger. Okay. That doesn’t sound dirty at all when I write it out like that.
So I asked myself “how can I make the dagger stand out against the white suit without making it be a giant cutout”, and the answer was pretty quick: make it pitch-black, and make Dagger’s skin pretty dark as well. Now she’s got a ton of internal contrast, the better to distract you when she pops out of the shadows, while her shadowy partner slips up behind you to kick your ass. I see no reason she can’t still be a rich kid. Also I gave her some shoulderpads because damn, she could use some armor. If I wanted to iterate on this a little more I’d make them work better as the dagger’s guard, but this is about as much work as I want to put into publicizing a Disney brand without being paid. Which is also the reason I left Cloak pretty much untouched, he’s a perfectly fine instance of the Shadow/Batman vibe with a nice little ‘repeated slightly-nervous lines’ thing going in his outfit.
Apparently there have been like four or five variants of Dagger’s costume and nobody’s thought to stop dressing the poor girl like a stripper. And they’ve wondered why girls never pick up her book. There sure are a bunch of geniuses working at Marvel.
And now I go back to drawing a commission of a dark-skinned nerdy girl beating up an alien with her xenobiology textbook.
I just got back from a late-night run to the pizza joint. It was the first time I'd left the apartment in about fifty and a half hours. I got home from ECCC around 8PM on Sunday, and spent all of the intervening time either naked or in a bathrobe, in bed or lying in the living room. With the blinds and curtains closed, even when I wasn't playing a video game. I just wanted to minimize my inputs as much as possible after four days of being in the middle of the third largest comic convention in the US.
I have no idea how well I did at the con. I don't think I made my table back. But I sold about 30-40 copies of Rita 1 to new fans thanks to me dropping the price. I ended up having a friend volunteer to be a Stunt Peggy for half the con, which left me free to spend some time wandering around the con and thinking about how to upgrade the booth I share with a few people for next year – right now we're just acting like a chunk of Artist Alley moved to the main floor area, next year I want to have some larger signage for the group and coordinated tablecloths, so as to hopefully look more professional and important than we actually are at the moment. I'm hoping to create a somewhat quiet visual space in the middle of the con, where every surface is screaming for your attention.
Anyway. I am once again naked. And I am going to bed. I will have to leave the apartment tomorrow for breakfast purposes, as well as getting something for dinner. So I guess the worst of the post-con hermitage is over. I have no idea if I'm going to try to make myself do anything useful tomorrow, though. I won't complain if I don't.
I should probably at least schedule some pole dance classes this week though.
Fucking around with image trace because someone asked how to do this kind of stuff on Reddit.
Process:
import image
object->image trace->make
window->image trace, set it to black and white with a threshold of about, oh, 30 or so. Maybe open up the ‘advanced’ triangle and check ‘ignore white’; I’ll talk about why you might want to do this later.
in the layers palette, drag the layer this image is on to the ‘create new layer’ button at the bottom of the palette.
you are now editing a new copy of the image, in this new layer. Set the trace threshold a little higher.
repeat steps 4/5 until you feel like you have Enough layers to work with. You might want to set these layers to about 20-50% at some point so you can see what’s going on.
Now, you have at least two options here. First I’ll talk about how I did the B&W image with pattern fills.
I’d checked ‘ignore white’ in step 3 above. This gave me a set of paths that were just the black parts, as opposed to solid black and white.
make a new layer at the top of the stack, call it ‘construction’. Probably lock all the other layers so you don’t interact with them by accident.
somewhere above the image, draw a horizontal unfilled, stroked line that’s around half again as long as the diagonal of the image.
effect->distort and transform->zig zag. If you want wavy lines like this then choose ‘smooth’ in the ‘points’ section.
alt-drag the line to well below the bottom of your image.
select both lines, object->blend->make. Then object->blend->blend options and fiddle with the settings until you like the spacing between your lines.
select that whole blend and drag it into the swatch palette to make a pattern fill. You could also do object->pattern->make but that will immediately throw you into the pattern editor mode, and we don’t need to do that here.
Hide the ‘construction’ layer. Show everything else. Select all the image traces and do object->image trace->expand. Sadly you can’t expand multiple image traces at once; you have to select them one by one. I feel the most efficient flow for this is to unlock one layer, select all, expand the trace, lock the layer, then go on to the next one, but whatever works for you. You might want to record an action or add a keyboard shortcut to the image trace expand as it’s pretty deeply buried in the menus.
Lock all your layers; unlock one and do edit->select all. Then pick the wavy lines pattern swatch you made.
Lock off that layer, unlock another one. Select all and pick the wavy lines pattern swatch.
Choose the rotation tool and start to rotate the image. Before you let go, press the ~ key. This is a switch that says “only transform the pattern fill”; you’ll see your outlines replaced by bounding boxes of all the paths. Maybe hold down shift to constrain it to 45º angles.
Repeat steps 10/11 until you’ve dealt with all your layers.
Enjoy your cool artsily separated photo. You could use whatever fill pattern you like for this.
(As a side note, the ~ trick to move a pattern fill around in a shape works with the scale, reflect, and arrow tools, as well. It does not work with the free transform tool.)
And here is another way to do it: opacity masks.
do those six steps at the top of the post, but turn off ‘ignore white’ in the image trace options.
In the layers palette, click on the circle to the right of the now-empty layer’s name.
In the transparency palette, press the ‘make mask’ button. Check ‘clip’ and ‘invert mask’.
Click on the big black square that appeared in the transparency palette, and paste. Now you have an opacity mask. You can see its outline if you do view->show edges, and you can see it in the transparency thumbnail’s palette, but nothing shows up on the screen. That’s because the opacity mask is a greyscale image that affects the transparency of what it’s attached to, and right now it’s attached to an empty layer.
Click on the empty square in the transparency palette to go back to editing the layer, and draw something in it. Maybe a big black rectangle. Maybe a colored one. Maybe a pattern fill. Maybe draw two circles and blend them, that’s what I did here. And then duplicated and slightly offset them to create a cool morié pattern in the image.
Repeat steps 2-6. If you want to move some of the stuff you drew in step 6 without moving the opacity mask, then click the chain link between the two thumbnails in the transparency palette. Otherwise you’ll move the opacity mask as well.
Enjoy your cool artsily separated photo. You could also try unchecking ‘invert mask’ on one layer and using it to overlay art in the lighter areas of the image, rather than the darker.
There are other ways to do this – you could expand the image trace (with ‘ignore white’ on), turn it into a compound path, and use it as a layer clipping mask for the layer full of whatever imagery you want to draw; you could probably do something involving destructive operations with the Pathfinder palette, too. Which is a major sin in my book as I like to do non-destructive edits whenever possible.
If I was to rank these methods from most to least editable down the line, it’d be opacity mask > pattern fills > layer clipping mask > pathfinder stuff. For instance, I wanted to add a little extra shadow under the chin to help distinguish it from the face. With the opacity mask method I could just go into a layer mask and draw some black shapes over the image trace. Adding more shapes the pattern fill way can be a little finicky with keeping the fill patterns in alignment; adding more shapes to a complex layer mask is even more fiddly, and destructive pathfinder operations have to be done completely from scratch.
You can also do a similar trick with Astute Graphics’ WidthScribe palette, if you feel like spending some money for a plugin that only has a bunch of YouTube tutorials and no manual.
I dreamed I was looking at a few pitches for cartoons.
One was about a bunch of foxes, and every time the size of the device you were watching it on changed, there would be more or less foxes. Obviously you would have to rotate your phone/tablet regularly to show this off. It did not have a name. I don't think The Mobile-First Foxes is a hit.
The other one was one of those shows set in normal suburbia with a twist. This shows twist was that everyone was a cartoon thigh bone with little legs at one end and a face on the other. It was called The Bonely Walking Boners, and was mostly an excuse to say “boner” a lot. I don't think my subconscious is allowed to come up with tv show ideas any more.
So remember that show pitch I made to show to Nickelodeon at SPX? They didn’t take it, but I’ve been continuing to work on it, with a lot of help from Nick – to the point where the front page of the pitch now has both our names.
We’ve been hanging out and figuring out things about the characters and the world. It’s starting to become fairly strange and very much its own thing; hopefully soon it’ll be in shape to toss a new version of the pitch by my friend who works in Nickelodeon’s development department and has offered to pass it around there.
Recently I decided we had enough textual revision for me to start fooling with a theoretical intro for the show. Or rather for a pair of intros, since there’s one for each side. I spent a morning watching cartoon intros on YouTube, and ultimately decided to start by borrowing the shot sequence from the “Real Ghostbusters” cartoon from the 80s. It’s a pretty efficient minute-long sequence that nicely introduces the team, gives you a tiny hint about their personality, tells you what they battle against, and that they are pretty confident in their job.
I rendered this down to its bones – just a quick list of shots described in the most generic terms possible – and started drawing versions of each shot that fit Parallax. And as I did this, I had to make some visual decisions I’d been putting off. Namely, what everyone’s spaceships looked like. And what each side’s logo looked like, since I wanted to swipe the way the Ghostbusters intro filled the screen with the logo like three times. That’s a nice piece of sigil work right there.
But mostly the spaceships. I’d been putting off the spaceships. I do not love drawing spaceships and didn’t really know where to start. It needed doing, though, so I finally sat down and came up with a good way for the two sides’ battle craft to combine: the Federacracy’s fighters would just happen to be the right size and shape to be carried around by the Union’s mechs. Which are faster-moving and more maneuverable, but lightly-armed.
This choice cascaded into other things: I wanted the Federacracy’s ships to be better-armored than the bigger Union mechs, but I also wanted them to be light enough to be carried around, so I ended up deciding that their Lucky Ancient Technology Find was great force-field technology. Which then gave me some inspiration for their logo.
I also figured out things like explicitly codifying the Union’s spooky take on VR – every ship/planet/etc they own seems to be much larger on the inside than the outside, because a large percentage of the people there are actually simulations being run by the local AI, in a sprawling virtual world. Conveniently these people are referred to as “ghosts” who live in the “ghost halls” of the ship, and can’t be seen by non-Union folks without the standard augmented reality implants they all have, so they come off as Creepy People Who Talk To Ghosts We Can’t See. And that gave rise to a plot idea about a Union “ghost ship”, drifting between stars in power-conservation mode with the whole crew living as ghosts. Who then become fitful holo projections, then half-finished “zombies” crawling out of the respawn tanks when the Federacracy crew finds them and digs through what they think is a dead hulk looking for intelligence/a mcguffin/Ancient artifacts/whatever.
We’ve got a nice little list of A- and B-plots that we’re in the process of winnowing and shuffling into about a dozen episodes. Turn those into a couple paragraphs apiece outlining each episode, and I think I’ve got a pitch. There’s still some art to do – I’m redrawing all the character portraits now that I’ve redesigned the uniforms, and taking a second design pass on at least the Union crew – but I feel like that’s not a ton of work. I could be wrong on that. We’ll see.
Anyway. The rest of this post is a bunch of the sketchbook pages I filled up while thinking up all this nonsense. Enjoy this glimpse into the process of designing a whole world.
okay where are the second two characters on each side hanging out
maybe I’ll use a different pair of characters in the first shots, I dunno
also what on earth do their ships and launch areas look like oh geeze this is a huge can of worms here
your body gets dissolved into goo to pilot a Union mech, it helps to basically be made of infogoo pretending to be a biped.
maybe I’ll think about the propaganda shots instead
the checkmarks were added afterwards, of course
okay, logos. Starting with the stuff I doodled in the original pitch.
hey what if I try putting a few bits of majgickal imagery in these logos?
Have I mentioned that for a while we referred to the sides as just “red” and “blue”? Red is the Galactic Union (thrifty posthumans rising out of the ashes of the Old Empire/creepy space goths), Blue is the Federacracy of Planets (a peaceful trading network/dire industrialist polluters).
Hey the Fed’s logo is a NETWORK that COOPERATES, what if their fighter ships can do a Voltron thing? Rad!
Nick thought the whole Voltron idea was kinda dumb and I agreed. had to explore it though.
“the Fed ships can be used as guns by the Union’s creepy mechs” yes this is very good
“Enemy Mine” is the working title for the season 1 closer, vaguely inspired by the book/movie of the same name.
i googled “sci fi gun’ and kitbashed a few things on the first page of results with the R-Type ship, nailed it.
how do these things dock in the mothership, okay I can finally rough out the “Fed character runs to their spaceship” shot
now I gotta figure out how the Union mechs look when waiting
new plot idea comes from the world, links to another idea in the pile! Yay!
“the union mothership is a huge-ass spacegoing tree that looks like a giant squid made of cathedrals”
I’d done some design on the uniforms for both sides, and wanted to see how the characters would look in their new gear. And do some redesigns that involved actually looking at the animals they’re supposed to be.
I googled “baby alligators” to make sure Atber is the cutest damn alligator you can imagine. He needs more ‘robot’ signifiers though, I kinda forgot that angle. Or I might just drop it.
“okay how does Dana draw the unicorn in Heavenly Nostrils” yeah that’s good let me use that to inform the shapes of this unicorn dude then
what the hell am I gonna do with this little vampire bat dude I dunno ugh
then I talked to Nick who reminded me that Edward is a disaffected rock star type and it came together quickly
always leaving his jacket open to show off his meticulously sculpted pecs like the narcissistic trash he is, nailed it. the glasses might end up being a big visor instead.
Next: design Union mechs (which is coming along), do a round of work on the Federacracy characters who are not already Just Perfect (Olivia and the Baron were designed back around 2003, and I really just can’t improve on them, I’ve tried), do nice drawings of the revised cast in their revised uniforms, (possibly in ZBrush, which I am attempting to learn this week) make at least one decent picture of each capital ship and a drawing of the fighting craft, and of course hammer on that list of a dozen episodes and that list of plot ideas until it feels like there is some flow between them all and a decent balance of standalone/arc-y stories, and turn those into nice tasty little paragraph summaries. Then it’s ready to start pitching to the various Sausage Factories as a tasty new kind of sausage they could hire me to make.
This weekend I did a social thing that involved taking the light rail down to the Ranier Beach station and getting picked up in a car. In the gap between getting off the train and getting in the car, I managed to drop my phone somewhere in the dark; when I got back to the station, it was gone.
But this is the future, and Apple lets you track your devices. So I know that the next morning it went to a homeless shelter just off the Othello rail station. I’d set it to lost mode that night, so all it was doing was displaying a message asking to contact me and give it back; I’ll assume that whoever found it ignored it, given that it’s been a few days.
So today Nick gave me back the old phone I’d given him; he’s never actually gotten it set up with a SIM, and wasn’t using it.
All this felt like something that should be marked with a new picture of a cartoon fox to be my background for a while.
The phone I lost had been bought via this new program where you pay for the phone on installments and get one upgrade, which worked out fairly cheaper than my usual upgrade cycle of not minding being a generation or two behind; I guess I should drop by the Apple Store and see how losing the phone affects this. And mmaybe get a new one because I’m really gonna miss being able to pay for stuff via NFC.
Fucking around with image trace because someone asked how to do this kind of stuff on Reddit.
