a productive walk in the park

Peggy
August 30, 2012

Well. That was moderately productive.

I’d decided that today I was going to finally hash out the plot for my contribution to that anthology I’m putting together. A couple weeks ago I’d decided my original idea just wasn’t working – it kept on wanting to be too adult – so I decided to revisit the characters from “The Eurydice Variations”. I knew when I finished that that these two felt too full of potential to not come back to.

I stared out the window of a bus, and came up with the beginnings of something involving them running a scam at a casino run by Hermes, to buy the freedom of a person who’d been turned into a tree in lieu of settling their debts. There was also going to be something about a crow who worked at said casino. This morning I did some brief research that ended in me buying a copy of a book about confidence men of the early 1900s. I put that on my iPad and headed out to Ravenna Park with the sketchbook that had all my initial notes for this story.

But what developed after reading about half of that book was also too adult for the anthology. So I put it aside, and wandered through the park some more, pondering what other stories I could riff on.

Ultimately I ended up thinking of one of the stories in the Foglios’ “Xxxenophile”, taking its setup, and going somewhere G-rated. Well, probably more PG. But not the R that the first two stories I was playing with were insisting on being. This one came together pretty quickly, and will probably be like 8-12 pages.

And then on the way home I came up with yet ANOTHER story, because I wanted to know just how this pair of wandering magical rogues got together. Looks like I’ve got fodder for anthologies for a while – these two are pretty good at writing themselves!

plus they give me an excuse to draw a sexy monster babe AND a bishi dude who goes around with his shirt off all the time.

Also I am now thinking that an interesting storycrafting exercise might be “take a book of mythology, come up with five crazy riffs on these stories”. I’m pretty sure I’ll go strange places.

extreme bouncing

Peggy
August 29, 2012

There was an article in this month’s Smithsonian about modern pogo sticks.

These are not the spring-based creaky contraptions of the past. These things are powered by compressed air or thick chunks of rubber. And you can get some serious air on these things, if you’re young enough to think you’re immortal. And if you feel like shelling out $200-400 for a pogo stick.

Jake’s Flippin’ & Fallin’ Video Extraordinaire from zackvideo on Vimeo.

I mean, you’ve got to be seriously convinced of your invulnerability to do any extreme sport. Or seriously invested in showing off. Or both.

Not that the spring-based sticks are totally dead; here’s a guy doing some really fascinating stuff without ever getting more than about a foot off the ground. 

Also here is some SERIOUS WTF VIDEO that popped up in the “related videos” for the second one. I want some of these outfits. Woohoo, nineties French pop culture!

All these pogo videos were found on xpogo.

And I think I might dig into the music heard here, too. Specifically Asura, Co.Fee, and Zouk Machine. Culture flows in strange ways now.

the dream of a different kitchen

Peggy
August 29, 2012

Ugh, I had another one of the “I’m awake but my eyes aren’t” dreams (which are actually the reverse). It’s always the same, I wake up and my eyes just seem to be stuck on one image, I feel my way out of bed, and then it resets.

Today, I got as far as the kitchen, with intermittent new views of my apartment. Which I think seemed to be about 20% bigger than it actually is. All these new views were kinda grey and grainy and a little… off: there was SOMETHING in the living room that I really couldn’t parse.

Then it reset and I had to do it AGAIN. There was a glimpse of something not quite right in the living room again – some kind of mass of webbing, it looked like though all the grey fuzz – then as I felt my way along the studio wall I could see my hands probing along it – in grainy greyscale, out of my left eye, from a viewpoint a couple feet ahead and right of where my head actually is. When I got to the kitchen, my eyes started working normally; it was a very different, much larger kitchen. There were like three extra refrigerators/freezers. One was empty, one was filled with plastic containers that mostly seemed to be full of small berries? Seed pods? All labeled in the same hand, in thin black pen on masking tape stuck to the container. I wasn’t sure what to do with these; my brain told me that they’d been there since I moved in and I’d never worked out what to do with them. Maybe, I thought, I should empty a few out and use them. I’ve been wanting to get some small plastic containers for the fridge iRL The last fridge thing was also empty, and had a strange structure to it – it was shallow, about the depth of a CD rack, and had what I want to say was a bunch of cup holders in it, but that’s not right. What would be right, I’m not sure.

All of these fridges were sweating, too. Something might have been wrong with them.

And hanging out of reach was some kind of squat box. It had about six buttons on it, and seemed to be playing music. I wanted to poke at it but even if I’d climbed up on the counter I would have been barely able to reach it, if at all.

The other odd feature of this dream of my kitchen was that where there should have been the outside wall and the ceiling, there was nothing. There were a couple of beams, and a dimly-sensed expanse. I have an impression of it as being inside with polished wood floors, but no details are forthcoming – I didn’t really look at it, as it felt totally normal in the dream for it to be like that.

My vision went wonky again, and I had to feel my way back to my bedroom. As I did I started sobbing, and trying to say “I don’t want to be blind!”. It took four or five tries for the whole sentence to get out, as I kept on being choked up by misery; when I finally said it, I woke up.

* my “living room” is what most people would allocate as a second bedroom, and my “studio” is what most people would turn into a living room. You have to go through the latter to get to the former, or to my bedroom.

the human batch processor rides again

Peggy
August 28, 2012

I was originally intending to get some work done on the next page of Rita today, but I ended up doing book prep work instead. I muttered under my breath a lot as I tried to work out a way to get the images into the final InDesign file without either having a printer-chokingly huge file or all the spot gloss screwed up. I think I’m probably gonna end up going with the ugly manual method that was used for the Silcon Dawn.

This offends pretty much all of my sensibilities, and resulted in a bug report sent to Adobe. So did a couple changes I had to make to every single page by hand because Illustrator only records a certain subset of things you do when you record an action. After I did that I was surprisingly tired, and ended up taking a break for a while because I am a slacker.

With all this finicky stuff done, now it’s time for pretty much the last bit of prep: going through all the pages and finding things that Need To Be Changed Before I Go To Print. Mostly for reasons of me forgetting that I can never, ever, ever put anything important to the story down the middle of the page, but also (as you can see in the notes here) fixing a few drawings that have always bugged me every time I look at them, and catching a few details I forgot. I suspect there will probably be one of these passes for every book, and maybe even an extra one when I make the deluxe omnibus at the end of the whole project.

Tomorrow: fix Carol’s hair throughout, do something about those four unchecked boxes for book 1. Then either generate the TIFFs or work on Something Else for a couple of hours, I’ll want a break from Rita by then!

Oh wait also I’m scheduled to go to a meeting about some Foolscap graphics stuff tomorrow. I am juggling way too many things. Plus I need to get some travel/hotel plans for APE together.

tweak tweak tweak

Peggy
August 28, 2012

I’m going through all the pages of Rita, modifying the safe areas, crop, and bleed to fit what’s gonna need to happen for printing. This would, in general, go a lot faster if Illustrator actually let you record events like “select a particular layer” and “manipulate it’s visibility/lock status” when making macros.

So I gotta do it all myself. Teeeeeediuuuuuuum.

Also I am seriously thinking that the deluxe omnibus edition of Rita needs to be printed on 8.5×11″ pages, there are some things that I am just unavoidably going to lose in the gutter between pages no matter what I do. I’m tweaking where I can, but some stuff would require a complete recompose and that’s just not gonna happen. Sigh.

Ah well, I’m experimenting a lot while making this comic, and that’s the nature of experiments – not all of them succeed, and you lear from them. I think overall most of the risks I’m taking work out. It’s just a few here and there that don’t.

edit, 11:30. Well that’s all 78 pages so far with new text-safe areas, and with the dialogue nudged around to fit. Next: crop/bleed. I wonder if Illustrator will fail on letting me macro that as well? I think I’m gonna take a shower first.

dreaming of spherical men

Peggy
August 28, 2012

I dreamed I was chasing one of Phil Foglio’s giant guinea pigs after it escaped from Steve Worth’s care. WHY SO MANY SPHERICAL MEN LAST NIGHT.

celebrate backups

Peggy
August 28, 2012

that brief moment of horror when you realized you deleted what you thought were copies of several important files but were actually the only instance due to you just moving them instead of copying

followed by intense relief when you remember that not only are your files automatically backed up every hour or so, but that you explicitly told Time Machine to make sure your backups were up to date before making that mistake

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. If you’ve got a Mac then get a big external drive, plug it in, and tell the system to use it for Time Machine. If you hate plugging stuff into your laptop then get a Time Capsule. If you’ve got a Windows box then… um… does Windows have built-in backup yet? I hope so. Because at some point you will make some stupid little mistake that wipes out a ton of hard work, and be delighted that you can recover in seconds.

And then sign up for a cloud backup service, so that if theft/fire/etc happens to your computer and the external drive, you’re only out the cost of a new machine, and not all the stuff on it.

fanmail from some flounder?

Peggy
August 27, 2012

I woke up to e-mail from a dude who saw my Tarot deck last night when his girlfriend and her husband were showing it to him. He’s a maker, and wanted a print of the Six of Swords to hang in his office, and in the space at home where he passes his love of making stuff to his daughter Eleanor.

I hopped out of bed, woke up my computer, rendered out a big bitmap of the image in question and uploaded it to DA so I could reply with a purchase link. How could I not? My full name is Margaret Eleanor Trauth.

There’s a part of me that’s continually amazed whenever I get an enthusiastic response. I guess it turns out that there are a lot more cartoon-loving polyamorous nerds who grew up with their heads full of SF out there than anyone really thought there would be. And I have made a Tarot deck that speaks to them like no other can.

(Also I really need to put something about general print prices on my site. Honestly I could probably do fulfillment by using DA or some other internet printing service (any suggestions, folks?) and having it shipped to the buyer’s address.)

a test

Peggy
August 27, 2012

This is a quick test of MarsEdit because I really hate writing blog posts in the web UI. The big question is not so much “will MarsEdit work” but “will the LJ cross-post plugin catch this post and do its thing”.

edit. Huzzah! It did. I HAVE A SYSTEM NOW.

soundtracks

Peggy
August 27, 2012

I spent a couple hours tonight playing “Limbo”, which I’d gotten in one Humble Bundle or another. It’s a fabulously depressing game, where you’re a little boy in a grey silhouette world where pretty much everyone and everything wants to kill you. After a while it abandons all pretense of reasons for things to want to kill you and just sticks you in a giant deathtrap.

This is incredibly dire, and after a bit I really stopped sympathizing with the kid and started laughing. It started feeling like a videogame adaptation of Gorey’s “Ghaslycrumb Tinies”.

Especially after I got tired of its soundtrack of creepy atmospheric noises and started making iTunes play the HAPPIEST MUSIC I HAVE. New Pornographers! CAB CALLOWAY! Going through an immense deathtrap of spinning gears and buzzsaws felt a lot funnier when it was accompanied by bouncy jazz that I’d hear in a Betty Boop cartoon.

So that’s my evening, then.