Something I whipped up for my ex-with-benefits’ birthday. Which is today. And maybe for mine. Which is the day after tomorrow.
Illustrator, maybe like 45min.
Also I drew a sequel. Or rather my pornmonger alt drew a sequel. It is NSFW. You have been warned.
And then she drew another sequel. It’s even more NSFW. Or for opening in front of relatives, if you’re checking your feeds at your July 4 festivities.
So. Splatoon. The light-hearted third-person team shooter in which you are a kid, and a squid.
I do not own own the appropriate game hardware on which to play it. All I know of it is from what people post on the Internet. A friend who does own it was pondering why you can’t swim when you’re being a kid, only when you’re a squid. “Maybe it’s the price they paid for their sentience,” Ian wondered.
To which I replied:
Squids are actually all small clusters of the Paint that have split off into smaller minds. Eventually they will return. But really they are all thoughts that the Paint is having. It takes a lot of effort to swim within It without becoming It again.
Ian: It’s just one giant blob of Grey Goo coloring itself up and playing games with itself.
Me: Splatoon: the most colorful post-apocalypse ever. These arenas are all that remains of the world after the Incident. Squid kids: memories of the people from before coalescing out of the Paint. But all are co-opted into its games, lest they escape.
Ian: 
Me: Huh. I guess it really IS the most colorful post-apocalyptic scenario ever. AWESOME.
Ian: This would explain why so much focus is put on playing by its world’s rules– the relentless urge to “stay fresh”, style-wise. By distracting the memories with a fragmented, nonsensical facsimile of Shibuya centered around fashion and battling, the Paint can keep its inhabitants’ interests narrow.
Me: YES. But what are the real aims of the Paint? What happens when you break out of the endless game into the secret adventure?
Ian: I don’t think the goal is to break out, but to regain sentience by considering the sum of your experiences & extracting meaning. In that way every Miiverse post in the game is a tiny act of defiance.
Me: Is this an extended metaphor for the concept of Maya.
Ian: Possibly! Or a very very extended ARG for custom map editor DLC.
Me: Or Frog Fractions 2.
I couldn’t resist. I drew my squidsona. Her name is Only. She has seen the Tru7h and took the turquoise pill. Her favorite weapon is the spray-can.
I just amended the page for the Tarot of the Silicon Dawn. It’s still not as cool as it was before I switched my site over to WordPress a few years ago, but at least now it has images of all of the cards on it. If you click on them you’ll even get to see the full text of the card.
Eventually I may make it spiffier again but I think this helps give a better sense of the contents than just ‘here is an unboxing video, here is where you can buy it’.
There we go. No more creepy drowned corpses staring at me when I boot my computer up any more. And the real version number instead of the marketing number – I started with Illustrator 8, and I kinda like that reminder that I’ve been using this program that long.
If you want to use this, grab the high-res version and the low-res version, then right-click on Illustrator in the finder, select ‘show contents’, then drop them into contents/resources. You might want to rename Adobe’s ai_cc_splash.png and ai_cc_splash@2x.png before you do this, just in case it bitches come update time.
If you’d rather drop in your own art then you can grab my Illustrator file and go to town. If you keep the ‘type hider’ layer as-is then it’ll hide the credit for the person who drew the original splash screen by putting the same color behind that text.
(The image is a very orange icon I drew for someone a while back, with a few effects added here and there.)
A while back – I think something like a year ago, maybe longer – I got pointed to a call for submissions for an academic journal. The “Transgender Studies Quarterly” was doing an issue called “Tranimalities”, themed around, well, honestly, teh furreh. And even teh postfurreh.
So on a whim I submitted a short B&W comic Nick and I had done a while back for the Anthrocon conbook. I gave it a pseudo-academic title. They accepted it.
And I got my contributor copy today.
I briefly flipped through it after opening the package. Holy cow is it full of academia. I will need to sit down with a stiff drink before trying to actually read most of the articles in this thing.
If you want a physical copy of this sucker, you can order one here.
If you’re just interested in my comic, it’s right here on my site.
I got a comic about a catgirl turning into a robot spider into a serious academic journal. I can’t help but feel like this means I am winning at life.
There’s a new version of Illustrator. New versions of all of Adobe’s stuff but who the hell uses that obscure Photoshop thing? Not me. Pixels are so 1986.
Running down the “What’s New” page on Adobe’s site:
Today I hung out in a cafe with Nick and revamped my table signs for “Decrypting Rita” and its fliers. I wanted to add some of the blurbs I’ve been getting from various famous folks. Then I had the brainstorm of putting a copy of the flier on the sign behind them, so that if I happen to run out, interested people can use their phones to take a photo. I then went on to make some signs for the Tarot deck and its fliers that pulled the same trick. Now that I look at these, I am tempted to put the covers for books 1 and 2 on the signs for them, as well – the covers are pretty eye-catching IMHO.
(All of these signs are a little bit taller than the thing they describe; I put them on my little wire stands, then put the item in question on top of them.)
Before that, I took this elephant down from the top of my bookcase and told him some good news. He belonged to my mother when she was a small child, and hung out in her library when she was an adult. Neither me nor my aunt has any idea what his name is. Now he’s on top of my bookshelf. I figured that since I could’t call Mom any more, I’d tell him instead: I’ve got a spot in the dealer’s room at this year’s Worldcon. And this morning, a major modern SF author wrote a blog post about cool online comics he likes that included Rita. Which he noted was totally not anything like Hugo suggestions. At all. Completely.
If I ever end up with any awards, I am going to show them to this elephant, and keep them next to him. It seems like the closest I’ll ever be able to come to telling Marie-Jeanne how far I end up going.
So you want to do a graphic novel. That’s great! And you think you have the writing and drawing chops to do it all by yourself. That’s great too!
But if you want it to be entirely painted, and your only idea of how to write is to throw a few characters into a situation and see what they do, you’ll probably never finish it.
Because comics take a lot of time. And comics don’t pay very well. And shit happens.
Figure out where your story is going, and how to get there in about 200 pages, and find an art process that won’t take too much longer than the pencil and inks of the B&W days. Or you will never finish your story.
(Me? I’m 10-20 pages away from finishing Decrypting Rita. It’ll be 200-210 pages, depending on if I decide to do the epilogue I’ve been debating the need for. But my mother dying kinda took the wind out of my sails for a bit. I’ll probably get back to it soon; I’ve been working on it fairly frequently for four and a half years now, and comics are kind of my day job thanks to Patreon.)
Yep. Lookin’ good. If you’re on an iPhone 5, tapping on either image should pretty much fill the screen with it.
The bottom bar stuff doesn’t feel like it’s in the right place yet. Needs some work still. And the ‘clock turning into an arrow’ icon for the deferred tasks kinda gets lost at phone size. But it looks pretty good for about a half hour of drawing the character art and two hours of fooling around with layout and icons.
Next I guess I should mock up the tag list, and the task/tag editing screens. Add in a few more sample images of Kalinda showing up and making comments, and I think I’ll have something I can post to various places programmers hang out and hopefully find someone willing and able to turn this into a thing I can run on my phone and tablet. Or maybe one will show up before then.
Damnit. My brain keeps on reminding me that I haven't called my mom in a while and it's long past time to tell her what I'm up to and see how she's doing; we talked every week or two.
I want to tell her that hey! I applied to deal at this year's Worldcon far too late, and got in, isn't that cool? And then tell her a bit about the whole “Sad/Rabid Puppies” Hugo vote-stuffing thing going on this year, and my hope that this will have Worldcon attendees aggressively looking for the kinds of stories that group was reacting against, which is a thing “Rita” definitely is, and even aside from that it's a chance for me to get my stuff in front of the audience that's going to vote for next year's Hugo with the final volume of the story well on its way to completion, and, well, just wow, I've gotten to a point in my life where I feel like a major award like that is actually something I have a modest chance of getting and that's pretty cool.
And then I'd hear about whatever she might have been reading or watching and doing, maybe a bit about her surrogate grandchildren, maybe explain some bit of technology she was curious about, whatever.
But I can't have that conversation with her. I can never have this kind of conversation again. And every time my habits poke me to pick up the phone and call her, I have to remember that, and I get to miss her all over again. I'm sitting in bed getting tears all over the iPad as I write this.
Anyway. I'll be at this year's Worldcon in eastern Washington, selling the usual stuff.
