Yesterday I was feeling kind of crappy; after I finished up the page of Rita that I posted, I ended up sprawling on the couch reading most of Gantz. Which is really not something I’d recommend doing, as it’s kinda dumb.
Here are some things my brain had to say about the giant holes in the whole setup while I was in the shower. Spoilers ahead, if you actually want to read the comic. I don’t really recommend this.
Got some characters looking for a story? If they work in fantasy realms, your search is over: hit up Project Gutenberg for a complete set of the Andrew Lang [COLOR] Fairy Books. Read at random until a story catches your fancy. Replace the main characters – or supporting ones! – with your characters, and see what kind of a delightful mess they make of it.
Bonus points: mix in some bits of other stories. Hey presto, people will start praising your “originality”
This is weird. I figured the long blue strips that are the latest addition to my wings would be itching like hell once the top layer of skin started to come off, judging by my experience with the initial lines and the black/brown. But the only sensation I’m feeling now is a slight achiness when I flex my elbow. Initially there was a fair amount of ache on the shoulder, especially near to the half-inch-wide bit of redness around the very top of my deltoids.
Not that I’m complaining. I just wonder if this is because my body has kind of given up being itchy there, due to this repeated abuse. It could also be because of the very different nature of this session; it’s mostly a couple of very long, very solid strips of color, done with one of the wider needles, instead of a lot of little fiddly stuff done with a small needle. There’s also the possibility that this color is simply less itch-inducing; there’s some fiddly stuff to be added in the same color, so I guess I’ll find out when that happens.
There’s another session planned for this Friday, then two weeks off due to my con schedule. Dunno what color we’ll be doing.
Anyway, I guess I should get to work on the next page of Rita now.
edit: Speaking of Rita, I just checked my email: I’ll have a proof in my hands by Friday, and if it looks good then I should be able to have ~30 copies in hand for Rainfurrest! WOO.
Things I managed to get done today:
– pondered making my website Retina-friendly by either adding in some twice-sized copies of images or by switching some of them to svg (both have their problems, I think it’d probably be a mix of both)
– wrote rough script for the next page of Rita
– went to the library and dropped off the overdue collection of Zelazny short stories I forgot to bring in last time
– took some more stuff out of their graphic novel holdings
I’ve been intermittently going to the central library and browsing stuff. Mostly graphic novels. And mostly manga. I’ve stayed away from it for years but having a bunch of it available on the shelves without me having to pay anything makes me go “well, why not”? I’ve been reading various series.
* “Pluto“, by Naoki Urusawa. This is based on “The Greatest Robot On Earth”, an Astro Boy story arc. Eight volumes, pretty worth reading. It made me cry a couple of times. It’s about robots and people and what is the nature of humanity and all that kind of stuff. Also there are occasional fights.
yeah, this spread is in French, sorry. It’s the only image I could find online of one of the sequences I found really affecting, in which a burnt-out military robot becomes the servant of a cranky old blind robot-hating composer because he wants to become a great musician himself.
* “Gantz“, by Hiroya Oku. I’m not sure why I keep reading this, it’s super slow-moving. And Oku has this super-annoying habit of starting chapters with drawings of girls with big titties falling out of skimpy versions of the powersuits used in the story. The premise is interesting – there’s this mysterious black sphere that makes duplicates of people who die, and sends them out to fight weird aliens, then lets them go about their normal lives – but oh god the juvenile teenage boobfrenzy. There’s about a zillion volumes and an animated adaptation.
* “Gunsmith Cats” by Kenichi Sonoda. Several teenage girls in suits are somehow arms dealers and master shots. Also there are seventies muscle cars. I think this one’s pretty popular, I’ve heard the name before, but honestly it did next to nothing for me – I took out one thick volume that was probably about the size of three ordinary manga collections, and haven’t had any desire to get more.
* “Suppli” , by Mariki Okazaki. holy crap. I snagged this today because I wanted to read some romance manga as opposed to the adventure I’d been reading, and I’m blown away. It’s a terribly normal situation – a woman who works in advertising breaks up with her boyfriend, and has to rediscover how to connect with people and maybe find romance – but the art! Okazaki shifts styles, she has incredibly free-form panel compositions, and everything is just so damn pretty. And despite this all her characters have very individual faces.
I could only find images from chapter 1 online. Which is a shame because there are some really nice spreads in chapter 4 that show metaphors for the lead character’s emotions just sprawling across the page. I stopped after that chapter and just closed the book, because I need to process what I’ve just read. I dunno if it’ll affect Rita, but I’m pretty sure reading this series is going to do something to my work somewhere down the line. Drowning City would certainly be enhanced by this kind of attitude, if nothing else. I think I need to read more stuff like this. I’ve heard about the things more emotion-focused manga do but I haven’t really SEEN them until now.
I still fuckin’ hate reading right-to-left, though. It’s a constant struggle to parse the balloons and panels in the proper order.
I was on my way to aikido class. I had a bag strapped across my back, I was running intermittently because I’ve decided I’m going to see if I can use the eminently walkable trip as a way to get some extra exercise in.
I came to what may or may not have been the first turn I needed to take. I wasn’t quite sure, so I reached into my bag for my phone. It wasn’t there.
I swung the bag off my shoulder and dug through both external pockets. Nothing. It must have fallen out. I kicked myself mentally; as I was putting the phone in the bag I thought “I should really put this somewhere else, it’ll probably fall out if I sling this across my back”, and ignored this very sensible advice. So I started walking back with my eyes on the ground, hoping to find it. A couple blocks on, I took the bag off again and double-checked, running my hands through both outside pockets, taking out everything in there. Nothing.
Two blocks away from home, just as I’d resigned myself to the hassle of acquiring a new phone, and smirked at the irony of this happening right after I grumbled about T-Mobile signing me up for phone insurance, my bag chimed and buzzed. My phone was in there. It was casually nestled in my bag, in plain sight. Exactly where I remembered putting it, and had checked twice. Visually and tactilely.
I guess it’s possible that it was somehow nestled against the profile of the bulky stuff in my bag, such that I didn’t feel it. I guess? Maybe? The location history says it went to that turn and came back with me. This certainly makes more sense than “it fell out, then was suddenly, magically in my bag again the instant I quit worrying about it”. But that is one heck of a narrative coincidence.
All I know is that next time I head out for class, I’m sticking my phone behind a zipper.
I just ran into my building’s manager and remembered that I wanted to ask him if pets are allowed in the building. Specifically cats. And it turns out they are.
So now I just need to decide if I actually want to get one, where to get it from (probably the pound!), and other details like “does cat go outside” (which will probably be yes given that I like to hang out with the window wide open all summer long). It’d be nice to have something warm and moderately snuggly, and something to talk to besides myself and my imaginary friends, but on the other hand oh god then I’ll be RESPONSIBLE for another LIFE.
Tonight in my dreams I was running. A lot. And when I ran… everything slowed down. I could feel all my muscles moving. Think about how to deal with my next step. Contemplate the biomechanics of every step for maximum speed. I experimented with how I moved my legs, and never really found what felt like the RIGHT way to move them for the speeds I was casually attaining.
I would have been able to run faster if I’d been wearing shoes, or barefoot; I had to keep worrying about pulling up my socks. At one point I pulled them up mid-stride, it was awesome.
Every step seemed to take ten seconds or so. And I wasn’t getting tired at all. I felt like I could do this forever. “This is what it’s like to be Rita”, I thought as I soared down a street in slow-mo.
At one point I found myself on a raised platform, partially in a tree. I could leap up, hang on a limb, and swing to the next, still on slow-mo. I could start to swing to another one, decide it looked too weak, and divert to a different one. I only did this a bit before going back to running. I also ran up a slanted wall, then casually leapt off the top; I caught myself for a moment on a protruding decoration on the wall, but it felt unstable so I let go, and slowly drifted to the ground, where I easily absorbed the shock of landing with my knees.
Then I dreamed I woke up. I wanted to reach for my iPad and record this dream. My bedroom was a mess; there was a half-disassembled bike in my bed, there was a multicolored construction of balloons on the floor, there were a couple little flying robots of some kind flittering around silently. I ignored all this and picked up the iPad, then plopped it into my bed. I pushed the bike out of the way; as I did, I heard a sputtering, buzzing noise from the iPad. I pulled it from under the covers to discover that it was plugged in – but the cord was blackened and almost melted in some places, and hooked to a janky-looking little power adaptor that felt way too warm. I unplugged that right away.
Then I woke up for real. Well, assuming this is real.
As I wrote this, I could hear fire engines rushing out (I live on the same block as a firehouse). I decided to go check on the extension cord my iPad is plugged into. Just in case.
The running in the dream was amazing. It felt perfectly normal for time to slow down around me as I ran. I was just noticing it for the first time, is all. I was trying to decide if things looked darker when I was in this sped-up personal time; sometimes they did, sometimes they didn’t. I am really hoping to have this dream ability return at some point! At the very least, I hope I can recall how it felt a couple chapters of Rita down the line; there’s going to be a sequence with her running for the pure joy of it.
The iPad not working is a common theme in my dreams. Sort of. This is the first time I’ve tried to use the iPad in my dreams; usually it’s my phone that I pull out and fail to use. Often this is because it’s not actually my smartphone; I’ve had an assortment of attempts at building one with 1970s and 1980s tech show up instead of my Nexus One. And for all the time I spend in front of my computer, I almost never dream about it. I’ve dreamt about mucking once or twice, when I was doing that a lot, and that’s it.
There was also something about my mother, my friends back home Jennie and Jason, and an outfit I was wearing for a while whose bra matched the dress. I changed clothes a couple times in this dream, which I don’t think I’ve ever done before.
This was not quite a nightmare but it had this foreboding feeling, as of at any moment something might jump out and turn it into horror.
There was this complex/mine on an alien planet. Made by unknown hands and found abandoned, it looked like nothing more than endless institutional corridors – say, those found in a college – with occasional elevators. Why people were exploring this was never mentioned, but they were. Enough that there seemed to be some kind of company set up to deal with this exploration.
There were some places you shouldn’t step because unspecified Bad Things would happen.
I met two people in the complex’s rec room who had gotten into one of the elevators (which seemed to have no actual buttons?). One of them, standing on their hands, pushed their nose against the wall where mutations might be, and said they were pressing two – and the elevator started going down, and down, and down, and down. They had to call for an emergency teleport out. Nobody knew what was in the depths of this place, and they weren’t eager to be the ones who found out. People vanished regularly here.
I, personally, was in the edge of this place, just sitting there listening to their stories and drawing the people. Then we poked at the TV and found this Tezuka-era cartoon about giant robots or something, with a name that stared with O, that morphed into a feature done by the Fleischer studios that I was excited to see because I’d only ever read about it. Said feature seemed to involve Bimbo and Betty Boop, and doesn’t actually exist – it was full of the insanity of their shorts, rather than the Disney imitation of their actual features. I wasn’t sure if the carpet here was Safe to step on, so I really didn’t get out of my chair.
Then I was fooling with a complicated air conditioner control panel. Which seemed to have a slightly malign presence hanging over it.
I discussed this with Tobias the Adequate for a bit – he was working at wherever this panel was. It might have been part of the alien hallways from before, I’m not sure. We walked around as we talked; suddenly we rounded a corner and he was gone, replaced by Jason Wodicka on a bicycle, zipping away rapidly and still conversing. I started running after him, through a tunnel that became grassy hills with winding paths. I was able to make some time by cutting straight down the hill across the paths, and catch up to briefly exchange the next couple sentences.
Suddenly I was on a bike myself, following along – but we shortly came to a dead end, a concrete ledge with a long drop-off. Jason situated himself in the middle of a pink square painted on the concrete and pedaled off, landing heavily but unharmed on the ground below and zipping off. I was not so confident; I looked around and found that I’d biked a little further, right to the end of this ledge. Where the concrete was painted red. And a little before the pink area was another red one. I surmised that this meant “safe” vs. “unsafe” – or maybe “barely doable” vs. “impossible” – and wanted to have a look around to confirm my theory. As I did, more people started showing up on their bikes and not taking the jump.
I looked out a window (the architecture of this place was nonsensical, I was clearly outside already) and scoped out some funky jumps that, in retrospect, seemed like they belonged in a platform game. There was color-coding; these were calmer colors like yellow and blue, but were still pretty impossible for me. I had to gingerly hang out the window and stretch to grab an overhanging wooden structure to look at this stuff; it was incredibly precarious and dangerous-feeling. This side path seemed to involve swinging through some holes in structures put up solely to provide a jumping challenge, catching some kind of air current ride or something, going up a level and back, and looping around into the window beside me. I didn’t try it, just turned around and dragged myself back inside. With no help from any of the people waiting for my report. Dicks. They just went en masse to their bikes and started taking the same jumps I was looking at before.
I discovered a sloping path that hadn’t been there before. Some people were going down it to make their bike jumps. I was going to get mine and do that when I woke up.
The striking thing about this dream, overall, was the sense of looming menace. Nothing bad ever happened. But I felt like something was about to go horribly wrong throughout the whole thing.
Today’s accomplishments:
– Read more Homestuck.
– Stared at next page of Rita for a while.
– Roughed out script for parts of the next three pages. Hated everything I did in terms of poses for R4 on the next page.
– Just missed my bus on my way out for tattooing. Worked out much better poses of R4 for the next page and the one after it in my sketchbook, and did rough sketches/dial for R2 over the next few pages. Which was the other thing I was staring at the page and blocking on.
– Had the fifth tattoo session. 1: right wing lines. 2: left wing lines. 3: right wing black/brown. 4: left wing black/brown. 5: leading edge of both wings. (Which was done in robin’s egg blue – we’ll be doing some more blue in that shade later on so I want to not forget.)
Having the leading edge of the wings colored in should clear up any doubt about what’s going on; it’s not a henna tattoo, it’s not the scabbed-over results of a horrible accident. It’s pretty clearly A TATTOO now that there’s this long line of screaming electric blue down my arms. Here is a shitty phonecam shot of the right arm; the left looks pretty much identical except for a slightly different pattern of black/brown at the trailing edge.
And now I think I’m going to lie around a while – ON MY FRONT – and be very low energy while my body works out how to deal with another insult to an entire percent or two of my skin. (Actually it’s probably less than that; a visit to a body surface area calculation suggests that I have around 4154 square inches (2.68m2) and the entire tattoo will be around 88 in2, or 2%ish. Maybe .1% was covered today?)
1. Scrape all of ‘Homestuck’.
2. Number the pages in several ways: order posted, and their position on the timeline of every character involved. So for instance a page might be post #67, John #45, and Rose #16.
3. Display them in parallel the way I’m doing ‘Decrypting Rita’.
3. Bonus: choose different characters as the ‘primary’ timeline, sort everything based on that.
I thought about this in the shower because I seem to have started re-reading the damn thing from the beginning again, help me. I will probably NOT ACTUALLY DO THIS.