I had gotten some kind of Flash gig. I was looking at the file I needed to work with; it was some kind of interactive front end for playing a bunch of videos. Lots of things were subtly broken about it.

To make matters worse, the hotkeys were all COMPLETELY wrong and the menus had been changed around since the last time I tried to use it, so I couldn’t even find the keyboard shortcuts panel and fix things. Why was the keys I expected for “save and quit” coming up as “end and end”, which then played the animation full-screen, for instance?

I am sooooo glad I don’t have to use that program any more.

My plans for today: Go downtown, retrieve hat, have lunch, bring books to library, draw for a while, do aikido.

My actual accomplishments today: go downtown, retrieve hat, have lunch, aikido.

I left the books I need to bring to the library at home. Durf. Good thing they’re not overdue yet. I really need to find a good cafe or three downtown for sitting around with a glass of something and drawing. If anyone’s got favorite downtown Seattle cafes, let me know.

Stuff I did today: went to yoga class at the Y, spent a few hours squinting grumpily at my website turning plugins on and off in search of why the LJ crosspost plugin was deleting and recreating changed posts on LJ instead of editing them. This took much longer than it ought to have, as my database quit responding a few times. Everything seems to be working now but I’m kind of… leery.

Then I turned off my net for three hours and spent that time drawing one panel of the next page of Rita. That, too, had its setbacks – I lost a chunk of work on the figures when Illustrator crashed at one point, then I got lost in playing with pattern fills for a carpet. I decided I needed a break a few minutes before the net turned back on, and ended up sitting in the chair for a few hours with the iPad.

Ever since ECCC I’ve kinda been wanting to kick back during the evening with a video game. Except I find my interest in actually playing one is nil. Too much work or something. Maybe I should try watching some video on it. Probably not gonna watch the second half of “Holy Mountain” though. (Last week when Nick came over, we went to Scarecrow and rented that. It’s… an experience. Chock full of Jodorowsky’s obvious Catholic Issues, and of Serious Mystickawockal Rituals. I have never seen a man’s poop turned into gold before. We gave up halfway through because I was just full of surreal visuals; we crawled into bed and did NOT do anything, because the lingering taste of that movie made sex pretty much impossible. The DVD is still in the 360.)

I’ve been feeling a strong urge for the horrible frosting-covered cookies at Safeway for two nights in a row now. I think I’m going to give in tonight. Must not eat them all in one sitting – I’ve also been noticing the texture of my belly starting to change. I think because yoga is starting to slowly build some core strength. I’ve also been having aches travel up and down my spine, as the muscles there start getting more of a workout.

I also poked at the timeline for Rita a little more. I think I’m going to take a decade or so off of Rita1’s age when I make a second printing of book 1, and if I put that anatomical diagram of her into the final collection; some things need to happen SLIGHTLY faster.

Also today did not contain me abruptly dropping dead. Huzzah! No, I’m not planning to make a habit of noting that down.

test post for retaining lj comments, this may vanish

edited

okay it seems to be a plugin conflict, YAY. Only plugins on right now are BetterWPSecurity and the LJ plugin…

Enabled some stuff. Oh wait no I didn’t. Actually enabled some stuff now – Askimet, Bulk Change Attachment Parent, Comicpress Manager, Enable Media Replace, Jetpack. And it’s not any of those.

Enabled Paginated Gallery, Plugin Wonderful, RSS Manager. And maybe WP Super Cache. And my site kinda fell over, fuck me.

Weird. I now have EVERYTHING turned on again and editing this post does not delete the comments. WTF?

More edit test. Well it all seems to be working? What the heck. Let’s see if it still works right via MarsEdit too. Yep. Looks like it does.

I’m glad this issue went away but really kind of uneasy about the fact that all I did was turn some plugins off and on again. Didn’t get rid of any. It just decided to start working. I don’t feel confident that it won’t pop up again somewhere down the line…

Lying in bed, thinking about getting up and really not feeling it on a cloudy Seattle morning. My phone goes off: Yoga at 12:20, just down the block at the Y.

I think seriously about blowing it off. But I’d blown it off last Tuesday. I had an excuse that time – I was completely wiped out from ECCC. And then I remembered a graphic I’d seen online yesterday morning, comparing MRI scans of brain activity between someone who’d been sedentary and someone who’d just exercised. And I was like, fuck it, let me wake my brain up a little by moving. I was glad I did; some of the stretches were quite hard still, others that had been hard when I started attending class last month were… well, not necessarily easy yet, but they were no longer impossible. So that’s good.

I’m nowhere near the shape I was around this point last year, after a solid year of burlesque dance twice a week. But I’m crawling back out of the pit I was in. Feels good.

And now I guess it’s time to get to drawing.

I am now older than my father was when he died.

On my twelfth birthday, he would have been forty-one years, eight months, and four days old. That was this past SaturdayFriday, for me. My rough calculations were a day off – I thought Monday would have been the day I passed that mark.

I’ve been dreading this day for a long time. The cosmic irony of him dying abruptly on his son’s birthday feels like the kind of bad joke that comes back when the kid’s old enough to have kids. There’s a part of me that wonders if the transition wasn’t spurred in part by a desperate desire to get myself as far from that path as I could, though honestly I know the transition was lurking when I was eleven. It just got pushed way down when I sunk into depression for two decades after he died.

I’m kind of glad I miscalculated. I thought my rough guess was a few days too EARLY. But instead I passed through that point without a single care; I drew some stuff, went to do some weekend aikido practice and read some comics and generally had a good time instead of being paranoid. I’ve been lying awake worrying about it tonight, and finally dug a date calculator up on the net and got it right.

Russell Louis Trauth. November 1, 1941 – July 5, 1983.

I can’t say I ever really knew him. I was a kid for the quarter of my life he was around. He was witty and sarcastic; I certainly inherited that. He was also an artsy nerd; he played clarinet – though I never heard him do it – and mucked about with electronics. For most of the time our lives intersected, he was an audio engineer at WWL’s radio side; he had a studio attached to their main offices where people would record commercials. I’m told he was regarded as one of the better people for doing that. Before that, he worked at WWNO, the NPR affiliate housed at the University of New Orleans. He was involved in getting it up and running during my mother’s pregnancy, to the point where they joked about who would deliver first. I’m not sure offhand which one did, but it was a close race. I still sometimes refer to the station as my half-sister.

He was a tall, skinny man with curly salt-and-pepper hair and a moustache that looks pretty seventies from here. Like him, I started going slightly grey around puberty.

I got my second computer not too long before he died. He’d had a chance to fiddle about with it some. Any discs with his BASIC noodlings are long gone. An entire technology has reached maturity since he died, and that’s kind of amazing. And kind of depressing – I’m pretty sure he’d still be regularly playing with new gadgets if he hadn’t died so young.

I’m sure there would have been arguments and conflicts during my teenage years. But I really wish I’d had a chance to get to know him as one adult to another, instead of adult and child. I’m pretty sure he was a cool guy.

I guess that’s it. Now I can get on with my life. Maybe I’ll die tomorrow. Maybe I’ll live long enough to see computer technology integrate into the brain and let the pattern that’s “me” survive the death of the cells it started running on. Maybe somewhere in between those two extremes. But… it’s a big mystery now, instead of me looking forwards to an end that made all too much narrative sense, for all that I could never get away with it in anything but a black comedy. I’ve been living in the shadow of his death for almost three fourths of my life; I wonder what it’ll be like without that?

Time to go to sleep. I got comics to draw tomorrow. And probably a little more crying to do tonight.

edit. also apologies to people reading on LJ, I edited the post on my blog and due to an issue in the wo->lj crossposter all your comments were lost. I really gotta try to fix that sometime. Maybe today.

I saw a POST YOUR WORKSPACE PHOTO thing going around on Tumblr and was all, sure, why not.

I use some discontinued Ikea desk set up for standing at. I just cleaned it a couple weeks ago so I feel comfortable sharing photos of it! (And I live in Seattle, so I have no qualms about showing my smoking apparatus either.)

In general I like to keep things as minimal as possible. No art on the walls, as little stuff on the desk as I can manage. When I’m at the desk, the computer and extra drives (one’s for backup, the other’s for big projects like the occasional video and putting together books) are completely out of view.

Lighting provided by my 2’ square sun light. I’m completely useless during the winter without it.

Not shown: the drafting table to its left that has become a mess of half-finished electronics projects. That’s next on the list for PROJECT FUSSYSPIDER 2013.

Crap. Someone at ECCC ganked one of the cards from my own personal copy of the Silicon Dawn, which I was using as a demo deck. The 9W is missing.

All through Saturday and Sunday I had people trying to snag cards, thinking they were my business cards. I really need to figure out a way to have the business cards prominently and obviously displayed so that people stop doing that. Because I really want people to be able to shuffle through the deck and go ooh and ah for a while. I tried making a little sign early on Sunday saying “These are my cards. Take one! (arrow) This is my Tarot deck. Wanna buy one? (arrow)” but I dunno if it vanished before or afterwards.

Oh well. I guess my personal copy is now the permanent demo deck, and another one in my closet will become my personal deck.

Anyone got any ideas for how to put the Tarot cards where people can see them and play with them, but make it obvious they’re not taking? I guess it might help if I had some of the little business cards displayed contact info side up. Maybe.

9w: Gain. Material gain, to be precise. This is the one full of stuff like the equation for compound interest. I hope losing it isn’t a bad omen or anything!

I was in the messy bedroom of my childhood, stuff piled up all over and even outside its door. I was worried that there were monsters outside.

I’d woken up in the middle of the night and knew some of my stuff was in the wrong place. I found a couple of huge plushies Brian Harp had loaned me – one was a long serpent, all sparkly, colored red, green, and yellow; the other was similarly sparkly. I’m not sure what it was. Maybe a dragon? A dinosaur? Something lizardy.

I crawled to the foot of my bed to check on the door. It was open and the pile of toys outside was in disarray instead of piled up against it like they should have been. My own little plush dragon and dinosaur hissed, but saw nothing. (Said plush were semi-animate, and vaguely related to ones I own iRL – the dragon was grey, and very sleek, much sleeker than the cute golden plush dragon that sits on top of the dining nook’s lamp, about as sleek as the tiny sculpted black and red dragon that hangs by the door. The dinosaur was oscillating between being Stevie or Zoya, the varicolored stegosaur and T. rex plushies that live in my bed. Zoya gets cuddled a lot as I sleep; it’s her job to eat the nightmares.)

There was a strange little object sitting just inside the door. A plastic tube sloshing with water that also seemed to function as a lighter. I took one part out that covered part of the lighter part, fiddled with it a bit, then put the part together and put it back down just inside the door. Some water poured out as I did this but I wasn’t too worried.

I tried to rearrange the pile outside a little but just gave up after a bit and closed it; I reorganized a few things to cover the cracks and slipped back to the normal position in my bed. As I turned the bed ninety degrees, it got shorter; my toy dragon and dinosaur vanished in the process since they were sitting at the foot of the bed. (There was nothing under the bed but some carpet that needed cleaning – odd for my childhood room, as the floors were actually wood and there was stuff stored under the bed, plus lotsa books that fell down the crack between it and the wall from the giant pile of stuff I’d read that took up half the bed.) I turned the bed back around and they reappeared.

Then I cuddled up between the two huge plushies Brian had sent with my own at the foot of the bed and went to sleep, feeling safe again. The serpent was rough against my naked body despite being a big fuzzy plushie; it felt nice, though. (It was a big one. As long as an adult. The dragon? plush was similarly large. My own plushies were much more normal sizes, maybe about that of a cat at the largest. Scale was a little weird in this dream and I might have sometimes been child-sized, I’m not sure.)

Then I was awake.