I am feeling like Thursday was a day where I had all of two spoons. One of them got used up in the unpleasant task of hanging up a small load of laundry that the dryer completely failed to do anything to the day before, and in negotiating for a date this weekend. The other one got used up on doing some very basic beginning stuff on the next page of Rita.

Any day when I don’t get out of bed until 2pm is probably going to be a wash, and Thursday was one of those thanks to this @#$% lingering concrud.

* * * * *

A while back, I’d grabbed copies of all of the Harry Potter books and dumped them into the Kindle app. A week or two ago I’d idly read the first chapter of the last book; over dinner, I pulled that up, and started reading. And kept on reading until I was done. Really, it felt like it should have been named “Harry Potter And The History Dumps”, since a significant portion of the narrative drive was Harry wondering just who the fuck Dumbledore was when he wasn’t being Harry’s Cryptic Advice And Quest Dispenser, then wandering around and learning just that. Either that or “Harry Potter And As Many Dangling Plot Threads As I Can Wrap Up”.

I came to the book from a strange place: I’d read, oh, books 1-3? Maybe 4? not too long after they came out, and really not been interested enough to go any further. I never bought them; my mother had gotten them, and I read the ones I did while hanging around her place for a visit. Then later I saw the first movie when it came out. I was largely unimpressed by all of these. And then much later I read Harry Potter And The Methods Of Rationality, a lengthy alternate-history fanfic wherein Harry was raised by loving parents and taught to be a SCIENTIST! who then proceeds to question all the unquestioned illogic of the wizarding world. It’s no more realistic, but I could recognize a lot more of myself and my smart friends in a scarily smart Harry who’s thrown into a world full of adults who blithely accept what seems to be patently and obviously Wrong than in the original Harry who mostly seems to be good at getting people to do work for him and at playing the one position on an absurdly-imbalanced team sport that actually means anything to the score.

So throughout HP7 I was constantly surprised to see the characters acting like the official versions rather than the skewed fanfic versions I knew better. The biggest discontinuity involved Draco Malfoy; in the originals, he’s little more than a cipher; in HPMOR, he’s a main character, who grows and learns quite a lot as Harry attempts to cure him of his blood-purity beliefs by teaching him science and making him propose and execute experiments. And in a broader scope, Sytherin House as a whole felt really underserved; their mass defection in the big battle at the end of the book was a big eye-roll for me. And of course Harry? Depressingly a Hero. He’s got several artifacts of Ultimate Power at the end of the book and he doesn’t even ponder the thought of fixing this broken, fucked-up wizarding world for a page; he just sleepily does what he can to render them useless, and then he’s done.

(Of course I could also note that this really wasn’t a book with much room for any characterization. It was all about going down the list of every single dangling plot thread from the six previous books and tying them into a narratively satisfying package. I’m not sure anyone really felt like they had any volition in the face of that.)

And at the end of it all, I really felt like absolutely nothing changed in the canon world. Sure, Harry managed to defeat Voldemort. Or rather Dumbledore managed to defeat Voldemort with nothing more than his ghostly hand firmly lodged up puppet-Harry’s butt. But the wizarding world, at least as shown in the really quite unnecessary epilogue, seems to have returned quite firmly to the status quo as seen in the beginning of the series. Didn’t learn a thing.

Which I guess is probably quite depressingly realistic, isn’t it?

Anyway, that’s some early-morning thoughts on a six-year-old novel most of you have probably read, digested, and put well behind you.

I am now part of a successful stretch goal on someone else’s Kickstarter.

Warning: don’t go do a last-minute pledge based on expecting a whole ton of Peggy art, I’ll probably only be able to contribute a half dozen pieces of art at the absolute most because I’m so damn busy with Rita. Pledge because you like the idea of a crazy prog-rock SF RPG with some Peggy art as a tiny bit of seasoning. But still; my inner eight-year-old is going “holy cow I’m a real pro now, I’ve been asked to be in an RPG.”

Meanwhile I am annoyingly behind schedule on Rita again, thanks to catching something at Furlandia. I thought it peaked in the middle of this past week but I’m still coughing a lot. It is not fun and I hope it’s done soon because I’m really tired of just wanting to sleep so I can not be coughing.

Stuff I blew off today:

• Aikido class
• Drawing tomorrow's page of Rita

Instead I just kinda slept until TWO and did the basic setup for the next page. And ordered a new rubber cock [NSFW] off the Internet. And got a room for Further Confusion. Which took like an hour of focused waiting for the reservation system to respond – apparently there was some maintenance on the system accidentally scheduled for RIGHT as FC was scheduled to open the hotel blocks. Whoooooops.

My excuse for doing so little today is that my immune system still seems to be cleaning up after this Furladia concrud. It sure is lingering. I seem to be doing better today than yesterday, at least.

Also I did some laundry, and was once more annoyed at how utterly useless the drier is at actually drying. I need to bug the landlord about this; I'm really tired of having to deal with a couple loads of wet clothes.

But right now I think I'm gonna go to sleep. Hopefully my body will clean up this sore throat while I sleep, and I'll be ready to tackle the next page of Rita. Maybe this coming week I'll even get back on schedule and start trying to build a buffer again.

Stuff I blew off today:

• Aikido class
• Drawing tomorrow's page of Rita

Instead I just kinda slept until TWO and did the basic setup for the next page. And ordered a new rubber cock [NSFW] off the Internet. And got a room for Further Confusion. Which took like an hour of focused waiting for the reservation system to respond – apparently there was some maintenance on the system accidentally scheduled for RIGHT as FC was scheduled to open the hotel blocks. Whoooooops.

My excuse for doing so little today is that my immune system still seems to be cleaning up after this Furladia concrud. It sure is lingering. I seem to be doing better today than yesterday, at least.

Also I did some laundry, and was once more annoyed at how utterly useless the drier is at actually drying. I need to bug the landlord about this; I'm really tired of having to deal with a couple loads of wet clothes.

But right now I think I'm gonna go to sleep. Hopefully my body will clean up this sore throat while I sleep, and I'll be ready to tackle the next page of Rita. Maybe this coming week I'll even get back on schedule and start trying to build a buffer again.

Maybe it's just nostalgia, I dunno – I was certainly getting flashbacks to being a twentysomething guy happily making a cartoon hedgehog run around while playing it – but Sonic 3 And Knuckles is still just a really cool game.

Let me tell you how cool this game is. Level two is the dreaded water level, which in a Sonic game is usually the most terror-inspiring level, as you're constantly at risk of drowning. Well, in the Hydrocity Zone, you can still drown if you're really working at it by trying to collect every single ring or something – but it's really more about tasting that familiar fear and overcoming it. And the game really emphasizes that, too; halfway through the level, you get funneled onto a series of ramps and loops and curves that accelerate Sonic to ludicrous speeds. Speeds so fast that he just casually runs across the surface of the water without breaking surface tension. And because the first time it happened you might have blinked, and were certainly going “wait did I just…?”, it then proceeds to do it again after some more general underwatery platforming. And the designers are so confident in themselves that they throw a moment like that away in the second level.

I guess in some ways you could say this was a turning point in the downfall of video games as a “test of skill”. But really, the Sonic games were never about hardcore skill at their hearts – anyone with a decent grounding in the language of platformers and a few hours to burn can probably make it to the bad ending of the previous games in a day or two. Sonic was always more about the feeling of being a cocky young god who cannot be harmed, and who looks wicked cool, and this is where they really started to realize this and put in lots of brief moments that existed solely to make you feel awesome.

It also tells its story very subtly. Just these little in-engine cutscenes, seamlessly integrated into the levels. No words, just pantomime and music and the occasional sound effect. But you very quickly know what's going on between Sonic and Knuckles.

And then every now and then it still says “hey screw you” and gives you a pain-in-the-butt boss. Like the level 2 boss. Man I hated that guy back when I was in my twenties and I still hate him in my forties, because he's just such a drawn-out, finicky fight.

It ain't perfect – its main flaw, IMHO, is that it's a little bit too long, due to its weird release as two interlinked games. It really would've fared better at about one and a half times the size of the previous Sonic games. But it's chock full of really delightful music and art, and level design that largely beckons you and says “hey let's go be totally awesome together”.

(It is also possible that I am simply an aging GenXer wallowing in nostalgia for her vanished youth. But I feel like most modern platformers I play aren't really saying much that S3&K hasn't already said, except with more words.)

I’ve been under the weather for the past week, due to catching a cold or something at Furlandia. Last night I had trouble getting to sleep; every time I’d get into my usual array of positions for slumber, phlegm would start oozing down my windpipe and I’d cough. A lot. It was most unpleasant.

When I finally did get to sleep, I slept dreamlessly for several hours. And then I woke up with a head absolutely full of thick, gooey, yellowish phlegm. So much of it that it was oozing out of the corners of my eyes; my right eyelashes were glued shut by it. I felt like at any moment I could just stand up, open my mouth, and start horking up a thick goo that would ooze down my body, sealing me into a chrysalis from which I would emerge a week later as something all reproductive organs and pretty wings and next to no digestive system.

But instead, I crawled out of bed and took a shower. It was the best shower ever. I got all that phlegm full of dead invaders and white blood cells out of my head, and now maybe I can face drawing things again!

Yesterday, Nick came over. We were both pretty wiped out so the evening ended up being one of lounging in the living room and cuddling while I played Skyrim and he puttered on the net. Yeah, I’m playing it again – this time with a lizard-girl assassin named 47. Who refuses to kill anyone for free, and has a weakness for snowberries.

Said weakness led to a moment that made us both laugh: I’d just interrupted a high society wedding by killing the bride, and was wandering through the audience as they emitted their various lines of shock and disbelief. And then my cursor passed over some decorative foliage in a planter: “Ooh! Snowberries!” *pluck* *eat*

We also kicked around ideas for a story involving 47 and a twelve-year-old swamp wallaby assassin Nick had been playing with ideas for. Whether or not it’ll ever come to anything, who knows? But we had fun.

Today, I did less work on page 92 of Rita than I was hoping to. It’s about, I dunno, half to 2/3 done. I won’t have it done before midnight tonight, which means my buffer will be briefly empty, but I should be able to finish it on the train down to Portland tomorrow for Furlandia. If you’re hitting that con, then be sure to come by and say hi!

Stuff I did today:

– Biked out to Gasworks Park and drew. Did the first draft script and rough layout for page 91 of Rita. Then on the way home I thought of an extra bit I wanted to add and accidentally closed the unsaved file while pulling something from another page. Oops. So I reconstructed the dialogue (which was mostly straight from other notes anyway) and did a super-crude rough of the body language I intended.
– Hooked up with Nick to go to a game get-together at a nearby cafe.
– Drew about 1/5 of the finished art for that page.

90 is in the queue and will be coming up on Tuesday; I think I’m very definitely on track to have 91 in the queue before it’s anywhere near time for it to go up. Who knows, I might even have a decent start on 92 before 90’s up – 91 is a fairly sparse page, with a couple of close shots to show Carol and Rita’s body language.

I’d like to work on 91 tonight before bed but honestly it’s nine in the evening, I’m on schedule, I’m kinda pooped, I think I might just kick back and read. But damn it feels really good to be getting myself on schedule again and maybe even ahead of it at some point in the foreseeable future.