It's the last day of 2014. If I'm going to do this, I'd better do it now.

Mostly I feel like this year was dominated by Rita. The second Kickstarter took forever to fulfil, in no small part due to me fucking up and having to reprint the book. I still haven't dealt with the shirts I promised; I should really make that happen. I may have a fulfillment partner for book 3, which will make life a LOT easier.

And of course I drew lots of pages of the comic. Going by the posted dates on my website, it looks like I drew about 100 pages this year! That's more than I thought; I feel like I could have done a LOT more if I hadn't been weighed down by the printing mistake, shipping, and winter blahs. Still, I actually managed to keep to my aim of two pages a week pretty well on average!

I finally got to be the GOH of a convention. Rainfurrest, with a theme of “cyberpunk”. Sadly our plans for the most wicked awesome con book ever (full color with a unified palette running through a lot of the art, French flaps with a super panoramic cover) fell through at the absolute last second, but I had fun. Made the most money I ever have by finally sitting there and cranking out badges on my computer. I'd be buying a small printer if I was planning on doing more furry cons any time soon, but I'm taking 2015 off from furry cons. (I will probably be social at RF2014 and might be social at Furlandia but I ain't dealing anywhere.)

I started a Patreon in February after one of my fans ASKED me if I had one so they could fund me. I think that says a lot about how that site is doing something right. It has slowly grown over the year into something that is paying half my rent on a productive month; I posted nine pages this December and got about $600 before fees. I am definitely going to be figuring out how to thank those folks in the back of volume 3. I am hopeful that by this time next year, I will be paying all my bills by drawing comics. Unless I decide to move to a more expensive place and cover part of my rent out of my savings or something.

I didn't move; I didn't have any upheavals in my social life that I can remember. I'm sure I had a couple of minor tiffs with Nick but our “ex with benefits” relationship is so low-key that those are easily dealt with.

I upgraded my living room with a new projector near the end of the year, and said “well there goes the deposit” when I drilled holes in the ceiling to mount it. That made me feel like an adult.

At ECCC, I pulled together a group booth for next year. In a much better location than I'd been in before. I'm looking forwards to that. And should take care of a few bits of business related to that, now that I think about it. I might do that when I finish writing this.

A few ideas for future projects appeared. I am just hopelessly in love win unreliable narrators; someday I must attempt to write something that actually has a narrator you can completely trust. I think I could maybe fit that in around… 2019?

I failed to find the time to finish a couple of side projects that could lead to more exposure and a little prestige. Oh well.

My mother's health took something of a hit. She's a lot less mobile than she used to be. She still seems to be interested in life, so I'm not too worried yet, but I'm feeling her mortality more than I used to. I'll be seeing her soon when I go down to New Orleans for Wizard World NO, which is really more of an excuse to see her and get some sun than it is a financial thing for me.

This year's exercise choice was pole dance classes. I would probably still be doing them if the studio hadn't closed down near the end of the year. I'm seriously debating going for circus arts next year; it really depends on how well I can get art stuff done in the two hours of bus and light rail it'd take to get there and back.

So that is the notable events in my life this year.

Looking forward to 2015: group booth at ECCC in a great location, finishing Rita, starting the next project. Not too bad. And possibly getting to the point where I am no longer living off my inheritance, either. That would be really nice. And maybe running off to join the circus.

Today:

Mostly laundry. It had piled up, I had to do two loads. I have tried to organize my life so that I only ever have to do one load (since there is only one machine in the building), and it is nice when it works, but having the machine broken last month plus winter fucked up my schedule of laundry.

I still need to fold the stuff. And I still have like a half a load left. All leggings. I may deal with that tomorrow.

Also I roughed out the next couple pages of Rita, so that's good.

Otherwise I just went for a walk, bought too many snacks at Trader Joe's, and sat in the living room reading critical articles on video games. Not much of a day, really.

Thinking about how the raw gameplay of ‘move your blip to avoid other blips’ always seems to get a ‘kill or be killed’ narrative layered on it. How can this be changed?

Direct inversion: You are given reason to want to Not Kill. Imagine you are playing Pac-Man, but instead of being killed by the ghosts when they touch you, you kill them – and it is seen as a bad thing. Perhaps you may have similar penalties as ‘losing a life’: everyone goes back to their starting point, and you can only do it three times. Perhaps you lose 25% of your score. There would need to be some reason everyone wants to be near you, despite the fact your touch is deadly.

Another inversion: ‘Throw blops to keep other blips from touching your blip’ is pretty much always cast in ‘killing’ terms. How can we change this?

Throw blops to turn other blips into your friends. Slowly the game would change, from throwing the right blops to befriend each particular blip (pink blips love pink blops, horses love apples, seahawks fans love blue/green, cops love donuts…), into moving your immense horde of blips around. Until the camera had pulled back far enough that the individual blips were impossible to make out from the group. I imagine eventually you would fill the entire zone, and to do anything interesting you’d have to zoom down and pick one blip to go through a tiny gateway into the next zone; repeat with variations until the designer runs out of interesting ideas for gameplay and/or scenery.

Saw William Gibson complaining about GamerGate recently and thought how much he’s aged, and how ungracefully, since GG and Operation Disrespectful Nod reminded me of the Panther Moderns.

– this comment on Hacker News

I have never made that connection. Now I kind of want to re-read the Sense/Net infiltration segment of ‘Neuromancer’ with that interpretation in mind. I suspect I will be a hell of a lot less prone to think of the Panther Moderns as totally rad this time.

I mean, angrily depressed thirteen year old boy me me thought the Moderns were pretty rad. But he thought a lot of dumb stuff was pretty rad. Including the word ‘rad’.

And think about it: the Moderns’ part in the raid, if I recall correctly, was to play atrocity videos on all the building’s screens, make a psuchoactive chemical leak, and DDOS the place. Their aesthetic was full-body video camoflaugue suits and total anonymity.  Yeah, in my headcanon, Lupus Yonderboy is now totally sea lioning the Sprawl equivalant of #gamergate when he’s not being a l33t ha><0rr.

Stuff I did this evening:

• broke the connector on the battery pack I’ve been using inside the still-not-finished Octoclock while removing it to use it to power the Witchin’ Coat
• powered up the Witchin’ Coat via my computer’s USB and decided what fabrics I want to use to diffuse the LEDs (a white fabric, with a sparkly black one atop it)
• half-assedly cut and sewed one panel that will have LEDs attached to it
• picked all the conductive thread out of the coat, and removed the LEDs from it

I think that is enough for now. I took some notes as to the exact way I want to stack things (coat, LEDs, white fabric, black fabric) and am now going to put all the bits away until next time I want to fool with this.

Earlier today, I got the next page of Rita halfway done. Not as much as it sounds as it’s just a single figure that takes up half the page. There’s some background stuff I’d like to do as well; I might fool with that while I eat some dinner but I probably will end up just poking at the net.

And of course half the day went to just slouching in the living room playing video games. I have been playing Diablo 3, and finally got to the point where it started being slightly challenging – the last few bits of Act 4 actually kind of woke me up, and the final boss of that made me finally change up the mindless tactics that had carried me through the game. Finishing Act 4 finally unlocked difficulty levels beyond the first three, which are named “normal”, “hard”, and “expert” but should be called “beginner”, “easy”, and “normal” IMHO. I’m not sure I’d actually recommend it; the gameplay is okay but the story is so by-the-numbers, and the whole thing is kinda grindy. That’s been tickling some part of my brain that just wants to be awake but kinda bored during the deepest parts of winter; basically I guess it’s a good game to hibernate to. I’m also hoping it will be fun for local co-op when Nick gets back in town.
Anyway. I typed this up while eating. Which I’m pretty much done with. So I guess now I’ll post this, go brush my teeth, and go to sleep.

For the past couple of days, I’ve been dealing with a cold. I had no energy, everything sucked, all I wanted to do was lie in the living room playing video games. This morning, I woke up at about 5AM with a bloody nose. Presumably from all that nose-blowing. I grumbled and went back to sleep for a while.

Now I am up, and I feel much better. Which somehow seems… I dunno. Weird? I just lost blood, and somehow that seems to have finished up the cold.

I doubt, however, that I could have skipped the past couple days of clogged-up misery by sticking a leech up my nose.

Today there is an invitation to drop in on some friends up in the suburbs. There will be cookies and meat and whatnot.

Tomorrow there is an invitation to FaceTime with some friends in New Orleans.

But it is winter and all I kinda really want to do is stay inside where it's warm and enjoy the silence of a day with very few cars on the road.

I dunno. Ever since Christmas stopped being HEY I GET ALL THIS LEGO AND ALL THESE BOOKS it's kinda lost its allure. Especially because around that time is when my father died. It went from yay bright lights and gifts to a reminder of a big emptiness in my life, and it's never really recovered. Well, sort of. I don't usually dwell on my dead father on the day, but I am definitely much more likely to spend it in solitude than to seek out people. I kinda lost what little interest I had in seeking out people then. And it didn't help that it kinda became “the day we'd get dressed up and go eat somewhere with Grandma, while she bemoaned the fact that her husband and sons were all dead”.

This sounds much more depressing than it actually is! I just enjoy solitude and silence on these CELEBRATE FAMILY TOGETHERNESS!!!!! holidays. Thanksgiving is like that too. I go home a couple times around winter, but make a point to never do it over a holiday. Quite possibly because that would remind both me and my mother of the fact that my father's dead and we'd just cry a lot. Him dying on my birthday just really kinda ruined all holidays for us, to be honest.

(It is good to HAVE invitations to spend time with friends on these holidays. That keeps me from feeling like nobody loves me. But I'd really just rather sit in a quiet warm place and read or something and eat very little and not talk with a single person.)