Hello again, seasonal depression. I haven’t missed you.

I haven’t missed the way you distract me from taking my pills – including the vitamin D that helps drive you off. I haven’t missed the way you make me disinterested in turning on the sunlamp – which drives you off. I haven’t missed the way you make me not want to exercise – which keeps you away. I haven’t missed the way you make me not want to work – and getting stuff done makes me happy.

Hello again, black dog. How did I chase you away last time? The memory of that’s always the first thing you take.

Mavericks has mostly been running fine for me, but I’ve noticed some weird stuff happening with the display of indexed PNGs here and there. In Finder’s column view, Preview, and Quick Look, they’re all washed out. Check it out:

On the top left, two Preview windows, showing the 256-color GIF and 256-color PNG versions of the same file. On the bottom left, two Finder windows in column view, showing its previews. And on the right, a Finder window in icon view. Which gets the PNG perfectly right. Weird, huh? It treats 24-bit PNGs fine, but indexed PNGs turn pale. (I also checked a 16-color PNG, and a 256-color-with-transparency PNG – same thing.)

It seems to only be Finder, Preview and Quick Look that do this. Here’s a couple Safari windows. I just threw those two images into a Mail message, and they looked fine there, too.

Most peculiar. And rather annoying.

Is it just me, or everyone on Mavericks? Here’s a couple of images to download and check out, if you’re curious. See what Finder’s column view, Preview, and Quick Look do.

edit: a couple people on Twitter have reproduced this. I’ve submitted a bug report to Apple.

Dear Apple:

Why is it that, despite having nineteen of the 44 albums Rush has released (basically every studio album and a couple live albums), I only just now found out they released another studio album last year? You have my entire library in iTunes, and I’ve checked the box in the prefs that says “share details about your library with Apple”. The play count on all of these tracks is high, and the skip count is low. It is not a big leap to make the assumption that I like this band, and will seriously consider buying new stuff from them. There are other bands or musicians that it’s pretty obvious I’m a fan of, too. I just found out Pop Will Eat Itself came out with a new album two years ago, for instance. Bought it within a few minutes of learning that fact.

Seriously, I’d love to have a feature where iTunes could look at my library and start telling me “hey there’s a new album by this band you obviously like” or “hey there’s a new solo project by a member of this band you obviously like” every once in a while. There’s a ton of data to mine here. Maybe a personalized tab in the store? Intermittent emails? You’ve done various attempts at music discovery, sure, but they’re aimed at “if you like these artists maybe you’ll also like this person” – you’ve done nothing on keeping me aware of new stuff by people I’m already into. I guess you assume I keep up with music news or something? That I actively seek out and subscribe to the mailing lists of artists I like? Hell no, that sounds like work.

You have enough data on my listening habits to hazard a reasonably good guess at what new albums will make me say “SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY”. Why aren’t you doing this?

Love, Peggy.

edit.

Oh, wait, there IS such a thing. Hidden away obscurely: go to the store, find “my alerts” in the column of tiny “quick links”. And you can turn on exactly the kind of thing I’m asking for here. Though it isn’t smart enough to only show me stuff I don’t already have. Man can I just make this the front page of the music store or something? Because fuck telling me that Justin Timberlake has a new album, show me a bunch of stuff you think I will probably groove on.

Well, now I know, at least, and it’s turned on. Such as it is.

Here is a moment that best sums up my experience of Geek Girl Con 2013: A woman had a conversation near my table with two guys, in which she decided she was going to totally ship them. They didn’t protest too hard; two dudes dressed in black suits with matching purple ties DO look kinda… shippable… especially when one of them casually leans on the other’s shoulder.

Here is another moment that best sums up my experience of GGC2013: A pair of cosplayers wandered by, both tarted up in skin-tight black latex. One was Black Widow, the other was Hawkeye. Neither was crossplaying. They had a pretty good pair pose worked out, with the Widow taking a dramatic low crouch at the drop of a camera in front of a dramatically-standing Hawkeye; after that, Hawkeye announced that he would also do Hawkeye Initiative poses upon request.

It was really neat to have the dudes being objectified for a change, is what I’m saying.

Not that there wasn’t any lack of skin-tight outfits on ladies, mind you. But there just seemed to be an expectation in the air that if anyone was gonna be public ogling property, it was the dudes, not the ladies.

Also I made something like 5x what it cost me for my table, despite being in the somewhat out-of-the-way Artist’s Alley rather than the main floor. I’ll be back next year.

I spent the morning sitting on the beanbag chair in the living room, writing up responses to an interview that’ll be appearing on another cartoonist’s site sometime next week. Now it’s noon.

I think it’s time for me to take a shower and consider what I want to do with the day until Nick comes over for the usual weekly dragon pettings.

Oh, and speaking of which, here is an interview with Nick on the subject of… um… stuff, I guess? There isn’t really an overarching theme to it, it’s just some questions and some answers.

Also, man, it’s hard for me to get moving, even with the sun lamp. Dana and I have been kinda kicking around the idea of some kind of winter cartoonist migration, possibly with SOs, and I think I really need to see if we can make that happen next year. Because I am just fucking dead. I like Seattle but I break when the sun goes to hide.

Every now and then, I see other artists muttering about people biting their style and/or cloning crafts they’ve done limited runs of. I think they’re going about it all wrong.

When other people are biting your style, that means you are awesome – you have carved out an idiom, and you have defined it so well that you get people shamelessly imitating you. That’s pretty awesome! You’ve blazed a trail into the wilderness, and a few people are following you. If you like having other people hanging out in this place you found, then you don’t have to do anything – but if you don’t, if having these people drawing the same way you do is making you itchy, then it’s time to move on. Open yourself to new influences, strike out on a new path, see what adding something new into the mix can do. It’s the universe telling you to level up.

When people are copying a crafty item you’ve made, sure, that means they’re riding on your coattails. If it’s moving for them, then that means that this thing you came up with is so cool that the world wants more of it than you’re willing or able to make. Do you want to own the market for this thing you came up with? Then own it: take on an apprentice (maybe even one of the people shamelessly ripping you off, if they’re close enough), hire someone to make the things, or look into ways of mass producing it and throw that sucker on Kickstarter. Clones are the universe’s way of saying “this is a cool thing and I want more”. This, too, is an invitation to level up.

If you’re comfortable where you are, that’s fine. But acknowledge that you are making a choice to not move on, and that other people will be joining you in this pretty sweet new artistic territory you’ve carved out.

(Disclaimer: Nobody’s ever made a serious stab at biting my style or cloning a thing I’ve made. Arguably I am just talking out of my ass here.)

Today, I got absolutely no art done. Instead I spent much of the day doing some bookshelf organization – I put a lot of stuff on the shelves that had queued up on the floor next to them, and on the coffee table in the studio. I had a good excuse to do this: Ian and Nero were going to come take my couch. They'd just moved into town, in a house with three other cartoonists, and no furniture. Now they have a couch. Which left my apartment amazingly quickly; a couch moves a lot faster when you have five dudes hauling it instead of one lady and her boyfriend!

Said couch has a history. I got it from Erin, who gave it to me when she moved in with her boyfriend, who had a better couch. She got it from another artist. It is chock full of artist farts, and will become even more so soon.

Meanwhile, my living room is much more spacious; the giant beanbag chair I've been using instead of the sofa is no longer crammed into the space between the couch and the wall with the TV screen. Instead it's got a nice healthy amount of space on all sides. I'm going to find a small table to put the 360 on and hide all the cables involved in that and the subwoofer, and then I'll be pretty happy with my living room!

Miss Fussyspider is, of course, MUCH happier with the state of the living room. It still needs work – it always will – but it's much tidier, and has closer to the Right Amount Of Stuff in it.

Of course, even as I say that, I had more stuff show up today…

The top two books are definitely going to Lucy this Christmas, along with some art supplies. The bottom two… well, maybe they'll stick around here, they may be a little advanced for her right now. Also I kinda want to pick up some stuff from them myself.

I may do some art today even with all of this furniture moving. Tonight's SICAGA, I figure I'll take my sketchbook and the ipad and work on the roughs for the “demon booty call” story I've been kicking around with Nick. I've already got one page sketched out, I'd like to have a few more soon.

I also announced the third stretch goal for the Rita 2 Kickstarter: if about 350 people buy a book, I'll drop the price, because I'll be able to order enough to get a lower price from the printer without having a closet full of the things for the next six years.

Recently, I went running for the first time in something like a month. It took me a week to recover; my legs were killing me for days. Yesterday, I went running again. Today? I almost feel ready to run again.

I bitch about the human body, but it’s self-repair is pretty good sometimes. I just wish I could get in shape, then tell the self-repair and self-optimization routines to keep me like this instead of constantly having to convince my body it needs to be ready to spring into action at any minute by regularly pushing its limits.

It’s still on notice. As soon as I can replace it without a drop in the quality of my life, I’m off this coral reef wrapped in meat and onto something more easily repaired, upgraded, and backed up.

More and more, I am feeling like the right way to present a graphic novel on the web is to have page 1 or chapter 1 (depending on which is the fundamental Reading Unit of your comic) show up on the front page. Have easy, obvious links to the next reading unit. And have a link somewhere to the latest page, for the people who want to keep up manually.

Smack people in the face with your story’s initial hook, the instant the page loads. Don’t put anything in the way. Don’t dump the 300 pages in and expect them to get hooked.

It’s okay to have the first/latest page(s) be one click away – IF they’ve got big, bright, attractive links that are clearly one of the most important things on the page. Opplopolis (by the same guy behind ‘Nine Planets Without Intelligent Life’, if you remember that) is a good example of that mode.

(If you’re a young artist who’s improved a lot over the course of the comic, this may be a bad idea. I’m mostly considering long-form web comics done by artists who Know Their Stuff.)

I'm playing this little Megaman-like game called “ARES: Extinction Agenda”. You get to control two different robots on a linear quest through a space station populated by an evil machine-possessing gas.

As you play, of course, you acquire new powers. You also level up. And the thing that just struck me is this: One robot is portrayed as young and inexperienced, while the other is old and cynical. And yet both of them start at Level 1.

Why isn't the old warrior, like, level 30 or something?

That might be a pretty cool way to structure a game like this. Play through as the youngster, then once you do that, you unlock the old warrior's campaign. Which is generally MUCH more high-powered, right from the start.