well that was a day

Peggy
February 25, 2014

Got up early, finished a page of Rita, posted it, went to yoga. There was a substitute instructor who was kinda brutal – which was good! Despite me already being achy from pole dance on Sunday. Some things were easier than I expected them to be.

Then I came home to find my website down. I poked at it for a bit and submitted a trouble ticket; I really wasn’t sure if it was my site, or the machine it’s hosted on being a problem. I’m still not quite sure, really. I went out to Trabant to try and get some work done on Rita, but I ended up just nervously fiddling with the site for the most part, especially once the hosting control panel came back up. Something is spiking my site’s memory usage through the roof intermittently, to the point where it gets automatically shut down. I’ll have to do some investigation to try and figure out why; right now it seems to be back to normal. Maybe. I’m not sure.

I came home, hoping to work on Rita. Instead I ended up just reading most of the first three volumes of Promethea, the comic in which Alan Moore tries to slip an Introduction To Majgickqgh course under people’s radar in the form of a superhero comic. Mostly I’d picked it up because I found it sitting in the teen comics section of the library, which amused me given that volume two has an entire chapter devoted to some pretty damn expicit tantric sex. (Not that it really matters, given that the teen comics section is right next to the grownup comics section.) I really can’t say how well it does at blowing people’s mind with Fundamental Majgickq Ideas, what with me having read entirely too much about that in the past.

And then I went out to the comics meetup at the bar. I shared a toast to crowdfunding; Jer had just launched the Kickstarter for his book, and I was having a glass of cider that had been paid for by my Patreon campaign. (Pretty much exactly – it cost $5.25, and that’s how much I get per page right now. Minus Patreon’s cut and the credit processor’s cut, also plus the tip, but whatever. Patreon paid for me to get a little buzzed tonight, and that is awesome, and I thank everyone who made that happen!)

I talked about various people’s projects, got the next two pages of Rita set up and mostly roughed out (there’s some reference I need to find, and the net at the bar hates me), and tried to see how many of the characters from Pogo I could draw from memory. I got eight out before I decided that was enough! I think I could have managed a couple more, but I would have been pushing it.

(click for full size)

L-R: Pogo Possum, Albert Alligator, Howland Owl, Churchy La Femme, Porkypine, Mole, Miz Beaver, Mam’zelle Hepzipah. Some are more off-model than others.

edit. I got a response to my ticket, the problems were due to “system admins had to perform some critical MySQL and disk maintenance”. Which means it is not my fault and I don’t have to spend the next three days trying to figure out what’s gone wrong instead of drawing more pages of comics. Hooray!

hello, body. good to be back.

Peggy
February 25, 2014

Oh man. Yesterday I kinda bummed around feeling achy from Sunday’s pole dance class and not doing too much of anything. This morning, I woke up early. I still ache in places I’ve never ached before, but I’m finding myself bouncy and flexible and eager to move like I haven’t been since burlesque class trailed off. Doing this kind of thing really connects me with the joy of having a physical body like nothing else.

It is quite possible that I am simply one of Nature’s strippers.

the dream of an alternate version of the climax to Decrypting Rita

Peggy
February 24, 2014

Last night I went to pole dance class for the first time. It was fun and probably deserves it's own entry. I came home and pretty much just fell right into bed.

And I dreamed.

The earliest bit I remember involved being in an awkward pit behind some stairs. I had to jump – very slowly and driftily – high enough to catch myself at the top and pull myself up onto the stair landing; this was complicated by there being a two-dimensional neon-glowing cobra wandering around. I caught it, threw it into the little pit I'd been in, and clambered out. The stairs looped around strangely, bringing me back where I'd been in short order; I jumped back down into that little pit, stomped the cobra, then wandered off through a hidden passage, talking to the cobra in a suddenly friendly manner.

I can't remember how I got here from there, but after a bit I was in a car with my mother, talking a nighttime drive through a semi-ruralish area. In the sky, I showed her some of my plans for the next bits of Rita: a scene in a kitchen between Rita1 and Carol1. Rita was glowing; the lights went out and she disintegrated into an angular line drawing, as if she was in a vector game, then those lines simplified and broke up and rearranged themselves into a really complicated array of sine waves plotted in slight 3d perspective. The waves overlapped and flowed (and I winced at the shortcuts I'd taken here and there in animating this). Then the waves shifted from a horizontal flow to one going up and to the right, and coalesced into a multicolored line. Every few color changes, a sub-line would branch off briefly, taking a little 45° turn, then another one back to parallel the main line. Some of them went backwards; they all ended after a very short time. But as the line scrolled by, some of the branches started getting longer and longer, growing little sub-branches of their own, splitting and spreading until there was too much to fit in the frame at once. The view scrolled back and forth some, examining the whole width of this design.

I felt like this sequence went on a bit too long, and needed to be cut down before it actually went into the comic. (I have a climax planned that sort of touches on some of the same themes I felt this was abstractly discussing, by the way.)

Then we were at an earlier point in the drive, before I showed off this sequence. Instead of taking a left turn to a long looping detour, we jinked right into a military base, and drove into a tight little tunnel. The car was now a little off-road four-wheeler, and I was hanging on the back; I had to duck my head lest it be brushed against the bright yellow plastic of the tunnel.

We came out into an office and got off the four-wheeler. I was presented with a check I'd given the clerks the last time I'd been here, that hadn't gone through. Probably because I'd signed it “Katie Rice” instead of with my own name. It was also an oversized one of my business cards but that seemed to be perfectly acceptable. So I dug in my bag and found another card – I had to awkwardly tear it off of a set of three, that were I perfectly cut – and wrote a new check for $20 (covering both that bad check and this passage) and handed it over. We were free to proceed.

Which we did on foot, instead of on that vehicle. There were several large rooms, connected by tight little tunnels I could barely get through. Eventually I ended up by myself in a dark, vast arcade, full of huge versions of games. And lots of people wandering around. Nobody was playing the games, the y'all seemed to have places to be. I paused before a reinterpretation of Dig-Dug that had you zooming through space, following chains of fruit bonus pickups at high speed, then diving into giant space gourds full of dirt for what I assume would have been some form of more digging-oriented game play, but I wandered off around that point in the demo.

I wandered to a different part of that room, organized like a bookstore. As I went up and down the aisles, I dug a handful of change out of my right pocket, and started filtering out the quarters. I am pretty sure I ended up with more quarters than I had coins of any kind at first; dream money is weird I guess. I put the quarters in my right pocket, and the other coins in the left, without at all remarking on the fact that I was wearing jeans – something I haven't really done since before I transitioned.

Now that I had quarters, I wanted to go try some of these games. But instead of going directly back, I went through another tight tunnel to an area I'd been in before, I think it was some kind of spa? I can't remember. Whatever it was, the tunnel got tighter, until I had to turn around and start climbing down through its close embrace of loose cloth.

And then suddenly I was awake.

I lay there for a bit, deciding if I wanted to get up. And then the ipad beside my bed emitted a gentle chime. I picked it up to see what it wanted me to do. The lock screen merely told me it was 7:00, so I unlocked it, and found myself in the Kindle app looking at “The Oversoul 7 Trilogy”, which I'd been reading the night before. It's a weird book about an “Oversoul” being examined, and having to jump between the various humans it's connected to. Interesting synchronicity.

It turned out the chime was a notification for the now-cancelled appointment for a Comcast tech to poke at my net (it went down yesterday, I made an appointment, then a tech showed up to fix the net for a different apartment in my building, and fixed mine while he was at it). I rolled over and decided to go back too sleep, but couldn't. Eventually I picked up the ipad and started writing this. When I got to the point of writing about it going ding, another notification for the same appointment popped up and went ding again.

I'm never sure if synchronicity happens because some part of my brain is looking for patterns, or if there's something actually there. Who knows.

Anyway, that's the dream I had this morning.

the dream of being a confused old lady simulation

Peggy
February 22, 2014

I had a confusing dream that included working on Rita in front of a wide floor-to-ceiling window, leaving my apartment to find myself in some kind of multi-artist studio, and finding myself lost in the crowded space behind the desk of someone who worked in lots of real media and small sculpture.

Then some people found me and brought me back to my place. They started digging in my closets. The woman came out half hidden in a brightly colored bondage sack of some kind; when I unzipped it she was wearing a blue and white harlequin fetish outfit, and may have become rubber. Then the guy spoke softly to me and plugged a thick, multi-strand cable into my right eye.

I woke up with a start, convinced I am actually in some kind of virtual rest home for broken brain dumps.

Then I went back to sleep because it was like 5AM and I didn’t feel like getting out of bed.

I would sort of like to work the blue and white artificial harlequin into Rita but I don’t think I have the room. Oh and also the sequence of Rita I was drawing in the dream was an extended superhero riff, which… no, just no.

Speaking of Rita, once I get out of bed I’m going to make two little tweaks on things the printer caught, and send off what should be the final files for book 2.

finally watching Asterix cartoons

Peggy
February 21, 2014

Nick came over yesterday; as we often do, we curled up in the living room and watched some media he’d brought. This time it turned out to be “Asterix in Britain”. In Dutch.

And I discovered that I’ve read enough Asterix that it really didn’t matter that it wasn’t in English (aside from the occasional veddy veddy English interjection). I know the characters, I know the general shape of how the story’s going to play out. I’m sure we missed out on a lot of the jokes and terrible puns, but on the other hand this also forced Nick to pay more attention to the visuals then he normally would – I joked that he was seeing this cartoon the way I see everything.

This was the first time I’ve seen one of the films; I knew there had been a few (Wikipedia says there are eight animated features, and four live-action) but had never tracked any down. I was really, really impressed by how lovingly animated all the jowly, pudgy people of the Asterix world were; everyone had just about exactly the same level of detail as the drawings in the comic.

I never realized until now what a whiny baby Obelix can be, though. Or that Asterix and Obelix are basically professional freedom fighters – about half the stories are in the general format of “A&O leave the tiny Gaulish village they defend, wander into some other part of Europe, and push back Roman forces there”.

Anyway. I’m debating between taking a nap, or taking some overdue books down to the library and poking at some Rita down there. Having a carb-heavy cookie at the cafe with Nick this morning probably didn’t help my awakeness, to be honest.

definitely feeling spring

Peggy
February 19, 2014

Today I’m puttering around the house in 4″ heels. I just got out of the bathroom, where I dyed my hair back to its usual color of a red-to-orange gradient. (With a big black patch at the back because I really need to bleach it again but whatever.)

I am also trying to return exercise to my life so I can be in something like the shape I was during the year of burlesque.

Hello, glamour. It’s been a while. I’ve missed you.

Edit, a couple hours later. Summon your glamorous self and you get it; Glamorous Peggy came out, weighed herself, sighed at what Mopey Peggy let happen to her body, and signed up for an intro to pole dance class. Because I have no willpower for Just Exercising, but hell yeah will I go Learn To Dance.

(Glamorous Peggy did not sigh too hard, as I’m only about 7-12 pounds above my weight during Peak Burlesque, plus being kinda flabby. I’ve been letting myself go but I haven’t been REALLY letting myself go.)

MOOCH

Peggy
February 19, 2014

Wake up at 3:30am, according to the phone's clock. Put phone back down on the floor next to the bed.

Have a drink of water from the glass sitting next to the bed.

See the word “MOOCH” floating in the very bottom of the glass, in luminous white letters. Just for a moment. Then it blinks out.

. . . .

I'm pretty sure this was just some crazy refraction going on with the water, the bottom of the glass and it's clear stem, and the white “3:30” on the phone's screen, pointing straight up to the ceiling, plus my bad eyesight when the glasses are still on the floor, but damn that was unsettling.

Back to sleep.

TxK Considered As A Work Of Abstract Art

Peggy
February 18, 2014

Tweets from a little earlier:

I have this sudden urge to write a review that starts “With TxK, Jeff Minter has established himself as one of the preeminent abstract artists of this age.” I would then go on to establish a context firmly grounded in abstract art, thoroughly ignoring Minter’s strong identity as A Maker Of Games. Because I kinda feel like it DOES stand on its own as an art piece. It’d be totally at home next to one of Kandinsky’s abstractions – maybe as an eternal video loop playing itself, maybe as a framed screen with a set of controls mounted beneath it.

I mean it is also an abstract art piece that occasionally urges you to INGEST CLOCKWORK MALAISE but that’s part of its post-modern charm. It’s much less self-deconstructing than Minter’s previous take on this theme; Space Giraffe was a deliberate inversion of the Tube Shooter in a lot of ways. And SG occasionally became a little too self-aware – the dreamy atmosphere of its bonus rounds were constantly punctured by comedy burps. TxK is more interested in being a pure, polished instance of its theme, and thus keeps the deconstruction to the sides.

But I’m drifting into more normal game review territory. Hmm. Compare the shattering effects to the broken angles of the Vorticists. I mean TxK can definitely be placed into the Futurist/Vorticist space. Look at some of this stuff. In particular:

Minter’s work is clearly in a different medium (and better reproduced; the Futurist/Vorticist work is phone camera shots taken in the library from a book on that movement), but I feel like there’s a definite set of shared visual concerns that unites his abstract art with these earlier works. Futurists and Vorticists were fascinated by movement, and found ways to stutter and shatter images on the canvas to represent it in new ways; Minter continuously shatters and fragments his subjects to create shimmering fireworks on his tiny little glowing canvas.

Anyway. That’s it. I should get moving on my comic book but I really wanted to spend a few moments actively playing the “are games art?” game by considering something solidly and enthusiastically A Game as a piece of abstract art.

10/10, I bought a fucking Vita just to play this thing and it was totally worth it.

The Lego Movie (contains spoilers)

Peggy
February 16, 2014

I just saw The Lego Movie. It was fun and clever and generally a treat for the eyeballs, but I feel like it has a serious conflict with itself at its core.

Spoilers behind the cut, if you care. Continue reading →

Peggy
February 16, 2014

Yesterday I went out running for the first time in forever. As I expected, my calves are aching like crazy today. They should hopefully be recovered by tomorrow, at which point I will go out running again. My winter travel is over; it’s time to get back into shape.

Yesterday I also took the bus and light rail down to the airport Hilton to attend a staff meeting for Rainfurrest. There are now several things I need to draw, unsurprisingly; this is part of how the artist GoH pays for her swanky suite in the hotel. I basically played TxK all the way down, with surprisingly little drop in battery charge on the Vita.

I was planning on going to a party yesterday evening, but it would have involved more bus riding, and the weather turned really shitty in the afternoon, so I just stayed home and poked at the web while my legs were beginning to grumble about what I did to them in the morning. And um played some more txk and um I had a few rounds of it before I got out of bed this morning and no shut up I don’t have a problem it’s perfectly normal to see a glowing web with things coming up out of it when you close your eyes i can stop playing any time i like.

Today, I think I might go to Trader Joe’s and get a few bits of food things. The fridge is oh so delightfully almost empty, and I aim to keep it that way, but I do need a few more things in there. Bacon and eggs for occasional protein-heavy breakfasts, for instance!

I’m also vaguely debating going to see the Lego Movie. It sounds really, really fun, except for an aggressively gynophobic bit at the end because LEGO IS FOR BOYS NOW. Apparently. Sigh.

I may also try to record a video for the Patreon campaign I’m putting together, and soft-launch that. I had a couple people say they’d totally support me if I did one, so I may as well see what happens, right?

Aaand, a possibly-TMI brief dispatch from the world of transition: this morning I woke up with an aching need between my legs that could not be fulfilled because it involved the vagina I don’t currently have. Arrgh. I really need to get things moving on fixing that soon.