I’m pecking this out on an iPhone 4s. Man, I’m gonna miss widgets.

What are some must-have apps for this thing? Especially stuff I would have ignored for my always-at-home iPad.

Especially important: what’s good for bus route planning, now that that’s gone from Maps?

Ugh. My Nexus One seems to have stopped working tonight. Quite suddenly, too – I was using it on the way home from aikido, then when I pulled it out to plan routes for going downtown to cheer the first gay couples getting marriage licenses, it wasn’t working and wouldn’t boot properly. It’s slightly less than three years old and this makes me pretty unhappy.

There is a possibility it’s just the SD card; it kindasorta works with it out. Or it could be the card socket, or who knows? I may try to troubleshoot this but honestly I’m tempted to just throw money at the problem to make it go away.

The big temptation, if I’m going to get a new phone ANYWAY, is to ditch Android and go to iOS. I’ve been threatening to do this for a while because I’m really sick of dealing with Android’s quirks. Although on the other hand iOS is now lacking a crucial piece of functionality since I really rely on my phone for bus routing, and that got thoroughly broken when Apple ditched Google Maps. (Looks like I want the “HopStop” app to plug that hole.)

My current plan with T-Mobile is $60/mo plus tax. Which I think is for 500 minutes, no text, and unlimited data. If I got an iPhone with a plan, the best I can get (of what’s listed on Apple’s site) is AT&T: $70/mo plus tax for 450 minutes, no text, and 3Gb data. (I could maybe get away with $60/mo for 300M – it looks like I used about 150M this past month – but T-Mobile’s site refuses to show me any data on previous months, and I want to be sure.)

I probably also want to run the numbers on buying an unlocked one outright, and going with a non-iPhone plan.

I will also need to figure out how much it’ll cost me to break my contract. Which may suck because I recently started a new one.

(The Internet also points out that, though Apple doesn’t have a deal with T-Mobile, you can get an AT&T-compatible unlocked iPhone and get a micro-sim from T-mo to use it, albiet at slower “2G” speeds. 16G iP5: $650, 16G iP4s: $550, 8G iP4: $450 – also apparently they’re upgrading to iPhone-compatible 4g, and Seattle already has it.)

And then there’s getting a new Android. I asked /r/android what I should get, since I really don’t keep track of the panopoly of phones out there, and we’ll see if there are any suggestions besides “get a [sold out since about 30min after the initial release] Nexus 4!” Which is gonna be kind of a problem when I’m going on a trip a week from now and tend to rely on my phone a lot when doing that…

If anyone in the Seattle area happens to have an old unloved T-mo compatible Android phone I could borrow until around Christmas I would be very thankful, as it’ll let me put off dealing with this until I’m back from my trip home!

edit. yeah um if nobody in the area has a spare T-mo Android phone I think I may have just talked myself into a iPhone 4s. I can go solve this problem tomorrow and get on with my life, modulo a couple hours setting up a new phone, minus Android wrangling forever. (But plus some Google Voice hassle until the 4s is jailbroken. You win some, you lose some.)

I think I mentioned here and there that I’d lost my hat last month, and bought a new one. What I did not mention is that I have upgraded it with a home-made bit of flair.

Said flair is extremely powerful. It has made people stop their cars in the street, park without paying the meter, and get out to pay homage to my beauty. I am not making this up, that actually happened yesterday while I was waiting for a bus. Admittedly I was also wearing my awesome coat with skin-tight stuff beneath it, with one leg propped up on the side of the bus shelter so I could use it as a table for my computer. But still!

It is also dirt cheap; I think I spent like $5 on the components and have enough to make another one. The eye comes from a pair of comedy “always awake” glasses with holographic eyes on them; it’s hot-glued to a glossy piece of black cardboard, and the feathers and a pin are glued to the back of that.

So in summation: I have Hat Powers again, and I think this is like a +3 hat as opposed to my old hat, which was probably like a +1.

Also last night I stepped on the scale and it read 173 for a brief moment. Which was high enough that this morning I was all fuck it, time to do something: I’ve put exercise into my calendar on a thrice-weekly basis. Hopefully this will make it happen where more ambient reminders couldn’t. Sitting on my ass playing a lot of XBox definitely had something to do with this weight increase, and I’m kinda glad I did it, because that pushed me out of the “ugh I should get some regular exercise, aikido ain’t quite doing that but I don’t want to go find something else to add on or replace it” zone into the “fuck you miss fatty-pants* you are going to fucking exercise, bitch” zone.

* The only fat-shaming intended to be going on here is my own personal shame, if you weigh more than that and are happy and healthy then that’s awesome. I know where I’m happy and it’s around 155.

Man, if it wasn’t an hour away on the bus, I’d be tempted to enroll in the School of Acrobatics and New Circus Arts as a different way to build my body up and learn some amusing performance skills. Anyone in town with a car wanna go be my CIRCUS BUDDY?

Holy crap a dude just parked illegally for the express purpose of coming to the bus stop I was waiting at and telling my I have awesome hair.

Anyway! I actually had the blog client open to talk about video games.

Lately I played through Saint’s Row 3. It’s yet another sandbox crime game set in a parody of NYC. But this one embraces the silliness that the Grand Theft Auto series has lost; the whole game is gleefully absurd. Your first mission is played out wearing a mascot costume that turns you into a cartoon version of one of your gang mates (so they can put off character creation until after you’ve played a mission), you get to drive around with a tiger in your car, you have a brief diversion through cyberspace, you compete in a wrestling match with chainsaws – it’s just one damn crazy thing after another.

What with being about criminal groups fighting each other, there are a lot of proclamations from the various characters that “I own this town!” and “This town is mine!“. After a few of these, I started giggling whenever someone said this. Because the game had done such a good job of being a toybox that that’s what I saw it as. And as such, I knew that every single thing in the game was, at a fundamental level, mine. Oh, sure, maybe I wasn’t driving that hot car at the moment, maybe I didn’t own that sweet criminal stronghold. But all I have to do to claim a car is to get near it and push the “carjack” button. All I have to do for the stronghold is to go through a few more crazy missions.

I feel like this is not the attitude I bring to a video game. Which is kinda sad. Because it’s one I really, really like. The story doesn’t matter, the artificial constraints on what I can play with due to story don’t matter. The game is my toybox, and any time I want to go WHEE while driving my toy cars around my toy city, I can.

People bitch about modern games having a lack of challenge to them, and SR3 was anything but challenging on “normal” difficulty. But this is the flip side: you spent $40 or whatever, here’s your big box of toys and playsets, have fun! I would love to see more games take that attitude rather than trying to be “a challenge”. Sometimes you just wanna fuck around.

also there is a part of me that was endlessly amused by the sequence of walking up to a random opposing gang member or cop and doing my ‘praise/celebration’ motion, which consisted of doing a little sinuous pirouette and saying “I’ll show you a secret“… and then hitting the ‘punch in testicles’ button. Thoroughly juvenile but oh my god it makes me grin just thinking about it.

Something I posted in a ‘what cons are you doing?’ thread in a new webcomics creation board. I figured I should put it here too, for my edification and for yours.

My current con schedule for this coming year:

January – Further Confusion, down in San Francisco. Because I am still a goddamn furry after all these years. And furries know how to party. I did a bunch of art for the con this year, too, including the website. Definitely dealing there.

February – Foolscap, a little sf/fantasy con here in Seattle. I did some art for this con too because a friend is this year’s con chair. Might artist’s alley, or I might not – it’s not really a Buyin’ Stuff kind of con. I probably need to get some new art printed for the show there though.

March – Emerald City Comic-Con, for the first time. I’m sharing a booth with a friend who’s also doing it for the first time. And oh god it’s in March I need to start getting my banners and suchlike together oh fuck me harder. This’ll be my first time dealing outside of the familiar little pond of furry; I’m really trying to expand out of that scene this year.

I might also exhibit some art at Norwescon at the end of March (Seattle SF con), it’s not really a place to deal or alley IMHO.

July – Anthrocon, where I’ll be dealing. I get a few people asking if I’ll be there every year, I figure I’ll see if there’s enough of my fans and potential new fans there to make it worth the trip across the country to Pittsburgh.

September – Rainfurrest, the local Seattle furry con. Wait didn’t I say I was hoping to expand out of the furry scene? That’s three furry cons in one year. Whatever, I still have friends I only see at the furry cons, and furries know how to party. Ain’t many other places you can dress up in a costume that sketches a cartoon animal in EL wire and dance until 3AM.

I’m also maybe thinking of doing APE down in SF in October, I was planning to do it this year but Shit Happened. Also maybe thinking of trying the local indy comics festival – Short Run, also in October. Depends on how it schedules against APE and if my buddy Gabe does APE again and is willing to share a room. I should also maybe see if he’s doing Wondercon again and maybe hit that at the end of March. Which probably obliviates doing Norwes’ art show unless I persuade someone to be my agent.

Holy fuck that’s a lot of cons. How did this happen. Oh right I’m trying to go “pro” or some shit like that.

Total words written for Nanowrimo this year: 10115.

Well I suppose that is “a failure”. Shit got in the way, especially that little voice in the back of my head that made me buy an Xbox. But on the other hand, that roughly-10k words involved digging through all my old notes on the story, putting them together in one place, getting two chapters to usable first draft script stage, realizing what the real relationship between the main character and another one is, and writing a bunch of dialogue snippets involving yet another character who’d been hanging around saying “I belong in this story” without me quite knowing how they fit – now the Jet Grind Sigilizer has more specific things to do than run into Alecto in the non-existant subways of New Orleans.

And given that my main goal was “actually fucking poke at Drowning City”, I think I am pretty happy with what I achieved. I was hoping to write about 30k words and have a completed rough draft of the whole saga, but I kinda got hung up on thinking of Unpleasant Tests to run on Alecto when she’s in the hands of human scientists, and drifted away. The whole thing is a little more defined than it was in October, a little closer to being something I can actually start drawing; really, if I wanted to start drawing it and working things out along the way, it’s probably only a few days of poking at the outline away from being ready for that – but I want to experiment with having the whole damn script written first, and taking it through a second, even third, draft, because there’s a kind of inevitableness to the whole story that needs to be there, and that I think can only be there if I’ve got a lot of carefully-planned foreshadowing woven throughout it.

Currently it looks like it’ll be 12 chapters of about 14 pages each, for around 170 pages of comics. Plus a few more pages for chapter titles and whatnot. It also still wants to be in pre-internet “standard” comics sizes, so that’ll be a fair amount of stuff. It’ll probably end up getting a little longer as the script comes into focus when I pick it up again. (Which I just did, in a tiny way – I think I added about 400 words here and there while looking over it, contemplating what has changed in this story since the beginning of November. Maybe I’ll fiddle with it some more over the next few days now than I remember I have it.)

Hatquest was a success, and took less time than I’d feared it might! Hooray.

It needs some decorating with various ribbons and whatnot depending on my mood, of course. But this is a damn fine base hat that will quite adequately perform the duties of “keeping rain off my head” and “looking stylish”.

Meanwhile, Nick came over last night. We went out to see this absolutely insane French film called “Holy Motors”.

This trailer really just can’t even begin to capture the bizareness of this film; it concerns a man who is driven around Paris to a variety of “appointments”, where he dresses up in strange costumes and does inexplicable things. I really can’t tell you what it was trying to say, if it was trying to say anything, but I am really, really glad I saw it. It’s not really an experience I feel like I can talk about in words; the whole thing was immensely visual and filmic. You should go see it if you have a chance. I kinda want to do something influenced by it but I can’t even begin to know where to start.

(I am utterly spoilt by having TWO small artsy film theatres in walking distance of me, and on my regular routes so I see what’s coming up.)