That was a pretty good valentine’s day.

Nick came over; we slouched in the living room and watched “Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf”. Which is about a really complicated relationship; there’s a lot of embittered hatred in the dialogue, but there’s also a ton of chemistry between Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton that kind of turns it into something I see as a relationship I’d like to be in.

We MST3K’d it, since we’d both seen it before. We constructed an alternate version of it in which Martha and George get a lot of their aggression out by sublinating it through her hyena fursona and his WoW Death Knight character. I am tempted to draw caricatures of them as just that.

The next morning, we sprawled in the living room playing some video games – Sony was having a valentine’s day sale on couch multiplayer games, and I’d picked up Geometry Wars, Rayman, and Guilty Gear Xrd Sign. We played a chunk of Geometry Wars and had a great time once he started to get a decent grasp of the basics; it was a lot of fun helping him learn that.

Now he is gone and I am going to do my homework: after a quick attempt at one round of GGXrdS, I need to go through its very extensive tutorials to actually learn how to play a modern fighting game. Wish me luck…

Things I do: A pile of unused cardboard boxes left over from the last Kickstarter, plus a cushion, becomes a highly adjustable seat upon which to rest most of my weight while trying to stretch my legs out towards splits. There is a long way to go before I can even begin to support myself with my hands on the ground while spreading my legs; doing it this way seems like it will both let me slowly descend as I stretch further over time, and keep myself from boredom by using my hands to manage turning the pages of an e-book.

(The boxes are still folded flat, of course, so they’re just a convenient pile of hard-to-crush cardboard for me to sit on.)

Today was pretty useless otherwise; all I really did was play Sunless Sea. I suspect I am recovering from the huge amount of work I made my body do on Wednesday evening at aerial class. It never complains the next day after a lot of exertion; it’s always two days after. Bodies are weird.

I should figure out what I want for food tonight.

I’ve been using “smart” bulbs to provide some color to the white box of an apartment I live in. I keep on feeling like the weakest link in this is the software.

Because what I want, as someone trying to design her lighting, is multiple playlists. One playlist might be for the studio: blue/green at 8am, to make me happy, awake, and energetic when I work; change this to something orangey/reddish around 6pm to suggest that maybe it’s time to quit working, and then deepen towards a very dim red as bedtime approaches. And then there might be another playlist for the studio for when I want to sit in the reading chair and read: lots of bright white near that chair, reds elsewhere in the room from 8am-7pm, then everything starts getting dimmer as night approaches. And other playlists for different moods.

(And other tricks like the foyer: during the day, I’d love for it to have a few different colors based on the outside temperature, so I can quickly decide which coat I want, then fade to red in the evening.)

(And of course I also want some kind of location awareness: turn the lights on and off when my phone goes in and out of the house, staying aware of the current playlist…)

A bulb, I think, should store the current playlist on itself; when it’s turned on at the wall switch, or turned on by software, it should check the current time and pick the appropriate color from the playlist. Simple, integrates with the existing wall switches. (LIFX bulbs store the current color across a power cycling; Hues do not.)

What I get in all the software I’ve tried is a series of arbitrary time triggers. At this point in time, set these bulbs to these colors. If they’re on at the wall switch. If I want to change to a different mood of decor throughout the whole day, it’s a laborious process of changing triggers. Less laborious than repainting every wall would be, sure. But still enough work that it’s not something I’m going to do lightly.

I dunno. It really just feels like all the software is thinking at too low a level for me. It’s closer to useful than it was back in the 70s or something, when my dad’s studio had individually controlled sets of red, green, and blue incandescent bulbs, but it’s still just not automating a lot of the stuff I find myself doing. “Oh I’m up and want to work, let’s see is it a cloudy day or a normal day.”

It doesn’t help, of course, that there are really not any standards. Everyone has to build their software pretty much from scratch. Maybe HomeKit will help unify this for me, though I’m really not holding my breath.

The past few days have involved:

• My ex-with-benefits visiting for a couple of days instead of the usual evening/night/morning after.
• Circus strength and flexibility class.
• Going to the aquarium with some friends.

When I came home after the aquarium visit yesterday, I had some plans to draw stuff, what with feeling guilty about not touching Rita at all for the past few days. But I ended up falling asleep in the living room for a while instead, and opting to spend the evening re-reading Stations of the Tide.

I feel this was a wise choice. I actually got some stuff DONE on Rita this morning, and should be getting more done before haring off to Introductary Aerial class.

—-

I decided to re-read Stations of the Tide after contemplating an article from someone who’s read one Wodehouse novel and Hamlet a hundred times. I doubt I will ever get to this sort of intimacy with any particular text; I think I’ve maybe read Stations four or five times at most. But there’s something important to me lurking in there; it’s one of the few prose books I bothered getting a new copy of after Katrina, and bothered to keep through a cross-country move. If something happens to my copy I suspect I’ll probably buy a new one despite most of my prose reading being digital.

Wow. Computer-controlled colored lights work really well as an alarm clock. Give the bedroom a pleasant ambience with enough blue photons bouncing around, and I simply wake the fuck up. I’m not fighting the instinct to sleep like when an audio alarm wakes me up; I’m not dealing with a moment of body panic from a loud noise either. I’m just… up. With not the faintest hope of going back to sleep because my entire body has been fooled into thinking that it is time to be awake despite it being kinda grey and crappy outside.

And, interestingly enough, really not much interest in lying in bed and lazily poking at the Internet for a few hours. We’ll see if that persists once I get the lights to the point where I stop fiddling with them.

—-

My current lighting setup is as follows:

Studio – three LIFX bulbs, blue-green themes during the work day, redder ones in the evening.
Bedroom – two Hue bulbs, slowly pulsing red/magenta at 7, then going to warm/cold white around 8. I’m still working out this sequence.
Foyer – one Hue bulb, changing between blue/purple/green based on temperature.

Since this is a mixed-brand setup, I’m controlling it with Lightbow on iOS, which sucks the least of all the light controllers I’ve tried. The foyer is done with If This Then That, which I really wish I could tell to only run during certain hours so I don’t get up in the middle of the night and have a dose of blue photons when it’s freezing.

There is a convention for merpeople  They spend up to $4k on mermaid tails and swim around. They have “mersonas”. It looks utterly absurd in a familiar way. Right down to the brief synopsys of what makes people want to be a merperson.

I totally want to persuade some merfolk to attend furry cons just to make things even weirder. They’d look great splashing about with the six foot tall inflatable pooltoys. Or share a hotel with their con, I mean they’d probably be better neighbors than volleyball tournaments or religious conventions.

But, you know what? A google search for ‘fursona badge’ turns up a lot of images. A google search for ‘mersona badge’ turns up absolutely noting. I… look, I feel like a shameless mercenary here, but I smell money in introducing merfolk to the concept of the laminated custom image badge. My pupils are turning to dollar signs here.

Dealer tables at the NC Merfest are all of $250. Who wants to go initiate the merpeople into the ways of Con Badges? Arphie? Megan?

(actually I think Arphie was already toying with the idea? Complete with the moment of dollar sign pupils even? DO IIIIT)

I just got some Hue bulbs. These are some abstract images (based on the settings I had for the Lifx bulbs they’re replacing) to drop into its settings app to pick colors from.

Stuff I did today:

I drew this. It is based on an amateurish porn drawing a friend linked to in her private Twitter. Which I will not link to publically because that starts to feel like bad form.

I sketched out the panel flow of the climactic chapter of Rita, and was kind of dumbstruck by that. I’ve been working towards the visual trick that happens in this chapter for almost four years; the enormity of finally getting to this point is a strange thing to grapple with. Other people might have shaken it off and just kept drawing, but I am kind of a slacker, so I put the stylus down and went to get some paper towels. Because I was out. And when I finished that errand, I puttered online for a bit, then ran off to circus class.

On the way there I nattered about the weird sensation of being Almost Done With My Biggest Project Ever on Twitter:

I just roughed out the framework for some Rita pages I’ve been planning for four years.
It is still so damn weird to see the end of an artistic journey i’ve been on for four years coming close.
Kinda hard to keep working. I am so ready to be DONE with Rita and move on. And have a vacation.
For what it’s worth, the plans for my next comics also have definite endings.
I dunno. I feel like I want to discuss these end-of-long-project feels with someone else who’s been there.
I guess I was sorta here six years ago when I finished the Tarot deck. I had an external deadline for that, though.
With Rita, there’s just the work.
Wonder if I could push myself to have the whole ending roughed out before my Monument Valley vacation.
Kinda feel like a solid month of NO WORK might be a good idea after I finish Rita.
Maybe clear out old lingering commissions at most. Go somewhere else. Or just enjoy a month of Seattle summer.
I dunno. I’m just sitting here on the bus pondering this, and using Twitter as a place to dump these thoughts.
My blog would probably be better for it.
Also I have a couple games I backed on ks dropping the final version soon. That will help vacation.
I also kinda want to… Not THINK for a month.

I’ve got plans for what I’ll do after finishing Rita, but I think this near-future plan of “take a damn vacation to clear my mind” is a very good one. Once it’s all drawn and I’ve recovered, then I get to deal with edits, the volume 3 Kickstarter, picking up Absinthe, and starting Drowning City. And those things will probably keep me busy for another five years, at least. After that? Who knows. I’ve got ideas for future comics lying around; maybe I’ll work on one of them, maybe I’ll take a break and make a video game, maybe some other crazy opportunity will pop up as a result of all this comics-making. It’s way too far off to make any decisions; mostly I just need to keep myself moving forwards until I’m actually Done Drawing Rita.

Circus class today was Strength and Flexibility. And it was brutal. Among other things, we did one of the most gruelling exercises I know of, the burpee – a horrible hybrid of push-ups and jumping jacks. And because that wasn’t bad enough, we then went to to do something known only as RUSSIAN ABS. I wrote about that beautifully hideous exercise on the bus home.

I had some supper on the way home; when I made it inside, I went straight to the living room and plopped my ass in the giant beanbag chair for a while. I played Pix the Cat (recommended, it’s like a puzzle version of Championship Pac-Man DX, which is one of my favorite modern arcade remixes; also it is very French) until my eyes bled; now it is time for sleep.