Every so often, I think “oh hey, my mother is dead” and I'm sad again.
But on the whole, I'm a little less sad each time.
Eventually I won't feel much of anything when I think it, most of the time. It'll just be a fact of my life. And that feels kind of sad, too.
Sooo
The past week I’ve been attempting to figure out Blender. Goddamn its UI is hostile as fuck. Especially with crazy choices like “use the right mouse button for selecting stuff”, which they claim makes ergonomic sense because it spreads the load out from your index finger, but if you’re using a stylus 24/7 like I am then it’s just utter hell.
Luckily you can tell it to use the left mouse button for selecting like every other program on this planet. And you can configure its keys. In a pretty user-hostile dialogue, but it’s doable – I’ve set it up so that holding space and using the Wacom pen, or the two buttons on its barrel, moves the view around in a way that doesn’t conflict with fourteen years of using space+drag to move around my Illustrator canvas. Though I still haven’t managed to make it stop asking “are you sure” when I try to delete a part of something, or when I tell it to save the file. All I can find if I google for solutions for that is people long-windedly explaining why they had that option, and removed it, because someone made a mistake once and so everyone has to suffer for that, ughhhh.
My test for doing this has been Peganthyrus, also known as “that cartoon dragon I’ve been drawing myself as for twenty years”. I figure I have a pretty solid mental model of her in my head, it should be a lot easier to put that in an unfamiliar program than anything else, right?
I started out by making an attempt to sketch a rough directly in Blender using its “grease pencil” function, which is a pain in the ass to edit. I went ahead trying to model that and eventually ran up against the fact that my side and front views were kind of out of alignment, and were not great drawings anyway. I put the tutorial I was following, and my file, away, and did other things.
A couple days later, I drew a nicely-aligned pair of reference drawings, put those into Blender, and started trying to do “box modeling”, which is called this because you start with a cube and extrude/chop stuff until you have something like your desired character, then refine it. Pretty soon I’d said “fuck it” to trying to model a low-poly version, and had added a subdivision surface to make it all nice and smooth and rounded, as if the polygons I was making were a bunch of control points in Illustrator. About halfway through, I realized that all my instincts were telling me that I was using entirely too many points by starting with a box aligned to the world’s axes; I felt like I kept on wanting to add edge loops doing down the middle of every side. But I didn’t want to do that because if there’s one thing that twenty years of Illustrator has taught me, it’s that defining an oval with more than four points is a waste of your time… and when you slice a cartoon character in half, what do you get? A bunch of ovals. Well, at least if you cut them perpendicular to their longest axis.
So I scrapped what I had again, and started fresh, with a cube that I rotated 45º, so that I could easily line stuff up with my front and side view drawings.
Yeah this was so much easier to do, why the hell do you 3D jockeys tell everyone to do it from axis-aligned boxes. What is wrong with you people. Why are you making yourselves pull around twice the points you have to. (Or what problems do I not know this is going to cause further down the line.)
I haven’t bothered doing more than the most basic extrusion and placement of the legs yet, and the head needs a lot of work – but I think I’m beginning to see potential here. My next step may be to keep working on this, or it may be to try making it from scratch again in spline patches. Blender’s spline tools look really terrible and awkward compared to what I’m used to, so maybe not. We’ll see.
Ultimately, my goal is to get far enough along that I can have an animatable 3D version of my dragon-self, who I will of course then play with non-photorealistic rendering styles on. And maybe do other things like wear it via realtime animation toys. I feel like this is a skillset I need to begin to pick up if I’m gonna be serious about my plans to pitch Parallax as a 3D show with tons of non-photoreal rendering to make it look like I drew every frame in AI. Will I get there? Hell if I know.
Right now I just need some food.
I’m out in Shoreline, in the northern part of Seattle’s sprawl. I feel like I’m in an alien place.
I grew up near the edge of where New Orleans shades into suburbs, a short bus or bicycle ride away from downtown. As I grew older I moved to one of the coastal cities that LA has enveloped, then in the center of the suburbiest suburbs in the world: Burbank.
I always felt stranded in Burbank. Suburbs aren’t made for people who don’t drive. And I’ve never learnt how.
When my exes and I moved from Boston to Seattle, we ended up in its suburbs. After the breakup I ended up in the University District, a resolutely urban area. Not quite the high rises of downtown, but a place full of streets with sidewalks, tightly-packed apartments, and parks. A place you can walk to most of your needs.
Now I’m walking down the side of a busy road full of cars. I just don’t feel like I belong out here. This place isn’t built for humans to move through; it’s built for cars.
Im sure I’ll enjoy the party I’m here for. But I’ll be glad to be back home in a place I can get around.
I felt like paying someone to draw my black dragon self, and didn’t like the old model sheet any more. So I pulled up a rough for a drawing I did in the back of a copy of Rita, colored it, and added some bits from that sticker set and the old model sheet.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/52397119/decrypting-rita-volume-3-and-omnibus
“Decrypting Rita is that rarest and most refreshing of things: a science–fiction story that feels like it comes from the future.” – Phil Foglio
“Deliriously confusing and addictive… It’s kind of wonderful.” – Peter Watts
“Seriously folks, if you haven’t looked at Decrypting Rita yet you really ought to. Innovative, fresh, interesting, and it does my head in.” – Charlie Stross
The comic I spent four and half years on is finally ready to go to print. You know what that means in this day and age: KICKSTARTER. And you know what to do with a Kickstarter for stuff you like: reblog, post to social media, tell your favorite news aggregators about it, whatever. Or back it, that’s great too. <3
“Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome”, Kenneth Anger, 1954.
What a strange series of occurrences. There is a magical ritual happening in this film, and its participants will not deign to explain it to us. If you know, then you know. Me? I know enough to know there’s something going on, but not to be able to parse the whole thing.
Includes an appearance by Jack Parsons’ wife.
In this interview, the film’s editor pretends to not know what it’s about, but then reveals that his next project after restoring the version designed to be projected on three screen at once will be a performance titled “Chronozon Working” or “A Shortcut to Illumination”. I am pretty sure he is just not interested in explaining what’s going on to the muggles.
I keep on thinking “I should do a short little comic about being depressed, it would probably get tons of reblogs”. But every time I sit down to work I end up poking at ongoing projects instead. In part because I’d rather work on things that I’d enjoy reading, in part because really examining those feelings in sufficient detail to say something about them feels really un-fun.
It’s been a bit more than a year since my mom died and I still feel pretty useless and shitty. I’m not sure if it feels any better than a month or two after.
I’ll turn 45 next week. It kinda snuck up on me. Don’t have any plans; I’m tempted to just hop on a train going south and spend a week in a cheap hotel in another state. I’ll probably just sit here and mope. Or play video games and get stoned. Which has kinda been a lot of my life this past year; it’s easy to escape to worlds where I get to look at gorgeous environments and kill monsters.
I haven’t dyed my hair in what feels like months. Maybe I’ll pay an expert to do it for my birthday.
Current status of various projects:
* Rita 3/omnibus Kickstarter: video is finally done, need to write text pitch and finalize schedule with printer. I’ve been reluctant to fool with this because drawing the ending is all tied up with Mom dying. But having it unfinished makes it really hard to work on other comics.
* Parallax pitch. We have about a full season’s worth of story outlines. Gonna be able to package it up and send it off soon. And we’ll see what comes of that.
* Absinthe ch 2: I draw a panel every month or so.
* Drowning City: same.
Well, that’s it for this experiment. Once the Surface is done resetting itself I’m taking it back to the Microsoft store.
Ultimately, it was not the tendency to occasionally crash upon waking, or to occasionally wake with the Bluetooth drivers in a state that could only be recovered from by a reset, that made me decide I was done.
It was this.
Apparently this is an issue unique to Illustrator; there is some interaction between it and the drivers for the NTrig stylus Microsoft is using that causes the first half-second or so of a pen stroke to be lost. Pretty much every other art program works fine with it. Except for Flash, which I hear is completely unresponsive to the stylus.
Whose fault this is, I honestly don’t care. The whole point of this exercise was to get the art program I’ve been using for the past sixteen years into a package with the convenience of a tablet.
The problems with the Surface’s default power settings making it wake up in my bag and waste half its charge idling, the crash-on-wake and Bluetooth disconnects that appeared after the firmware update, and all the myriad other little issues of just Being Windows? Those were just distractions. I took it out into the park yesterday and really looked critically at what I was doing on it, and these stylus tracking issues were the real deal-breaker. Especially given that this week saw updates for both the Surface firmware and for Illustrator, with no change to this problem. Will the next update fix it? Who knows? I’m not gonna hold my breath.
I’ll probably be trying out another machine in this class sometime soon. I really liked being able to whip it and a keypad out and draw in much smaller spaces than I can with the Air/Wacom combination. Maybe the Surface 5 or 6 when that happens. Maybe the Asus Transformer 3. Maybe a Cintiq Companion 3 if that ever happens. Maybe something else. Maybe Apple will finally deign to stuff a Mac’s guts behind a portable screen, though I feel like that won’t be until sometime in 2017 or 2018, if ever. I would be such an early adopter of that.
So. Mac girl gets a Surface 4 Pro because she wants to run Adobe Illustrator on a tablet. How’s that working out?
Pros: Gorgeous device, powerful. It’s really great to be able to pull it out of my bag and be in Illustrator within seconds, on a print-res screen. I can draw in a single seat on the train with no worries about taking up a ton of space and packing a lot of stuff back into my bag for my stop; I could do the same on a plane. I’ve drawn at the counter of the crowded breakfast joint just down the block. It is super nice, I really feel like I have something that makes drawing as casual and easy an act as when I carried around a sketchbook all the time.
When it works.
Cons: Wakes from sleep in my bag far too easily and burns through its limited battery on the stock sleep settings. Sometimes when I take it out it works for about five seconds, then completely freezes and needs a hard restart (so far this hasn’t lost any work but it’s just a matter of time); sometimes when it wakes up it refuses to reconnect to my Bluetooth keyboard or keypad, and needs to be rebooted. The first half second or so of a stroke of the stylus gets ignored by Illustrator; short quick strokes get totally dropped. The stylus’ side button is too high up for my thumb to easily click it like I do on a Wacom stylus, and takes a lot of pressure to click. And the stylus in general feels a little… loose… in Illustrator.
I was able to solve the “wakes up in my bag” problem by setting it to always hibernate instead of sleep. That’s an acceptable compromise, I can live with it taking about 4s to wake up instead of 1. But the “freezes sometimes on wake and needs a hard restart” and “won’t talk to my external keyboard sometimes without a reboot”? These are starting to feel more and more like dealbreakers.
As is the “Illustrator drops the beginning of a stroke” problem. I don’t know if that’s an Adobe problem, a Microsoft problem, or both – apparently this only happens in AI, other art programs do fine. Which would be fine if I was willing to switch art programs, but honestly if I was willing to do that I’d just be using Procreate on an iPad Pro instead of subjecting myself to Windows – the whole reason I got this thing was to have a Magic Sketchbook that runs the same program I’ve spent the last fourteen years mastering.
(Also the screen is incredibly reflective. I was able to easily solve this by adding a matte screen protector. Out of the box, it’s absurdly shiny and pretty hard to use when sitting out under a tree.)
I get “freezes on wake” or “won’t reconnect to keyboards on wake” about once every day, now that I’ve gotten it configured to the point where I can take it out and use it without wrestling with an unfamiliar OS. “Won’t reconnect to keyboards” is a daily occurrence; “freezes on wake” has been more like every other day or so since the latest system update.
People have told me that this kind of hibernation/sleep behavior is business as usual for Windows devices, and usually cite the fact that Windows has to work with a zillion different hardware configurations with drivers of variable quality. Apple’s devices can sleep with no problems because they control the system from top to bottom. Great, sure, I might accept that for a no-name Chinese device I paid $400 for. But this is a premium $1600 device that Microsoft is building itself as a showcase for their OS. They designed this from the ground up and it still does this. There’s no excuse, not when I’ve had my cheaper Mac Airs seamlessly waking from sleep and reconnecting to bluetooth keyboards for the past four or five years. Not when this is the fourth iteration of the Surface.
I want to love this thing. I really, really want to love this thing. But “sometimes it shits the bed when I wake it up and I have to wait for the whole OS to restart, and for Illustrator to relaunch, before I can draw” is maddening. And I’m torn between “I’m returning this trash” and “maybe if I keep it around just a little longer I’ll find a workaround, or get used to it”. Which starts to sound like an abusive relationship and makes me want to return it right now. But instead I’m googling around and trying ONE MORE DAMNED THING to try and fix this shit.
Would I recommend this thing? If you’re used to having to reboot your Windows laptop at least once a day when it fails to wake from sleep properly, and if you’re not using Illustrator, then go for it, I guess. For me it’s been an endless source of hassle, though.
I would eagerly give a couple thousand bucks to Apple for their version of this. I really hope that’s sitting in their labs, getting the kinks shaken out for a release in a year or two. Because “using Illustrator in an airplane seat” has been a bit of a Holy Grail for me for years.
So. Yesterday Nick came by. We lounged around the living room getting really stoned, then went out to buy some more weed for him to take home, then to a cafe to work. And a weird thing happened.
We got to the cafe and started to settle down: ordered our drinks, took out our computers. As I was waking up the Surface and deciding what to work on, Nick plugged his power brick in and suddenly I heard this pop and saw a brief flash of light filling the place, followed by an equally brief flash of darkness – about 1/24 of a second for both of them together. And then the Surface had locked up. Wasn't responding to stylus, touch, or the Bluetooth keyboard. Pointer was sitting on the Illustrator icon, which I was about to switch to. Didn't respond to the power button after I tried turning it off, until Nick googled how to force-reset it (hold down power for 30s).
It came back up fine and I got a nice chunk of drawing done, while listening to an ambient spaceship noise generator. But damn that was weird. I have no idea of the actual reality of any of this; I mentioned the flash to Nick once I had the Surface running again, and he hadn't experienced it. So it was probably something internal to my still-pretty-stoned brain.
Worth mentioning: earlier in the morning I'd installed a system update that promised better Bluetooth reliability for the Surface, which has definitely been one of the flies in the ointment about the thing. And on the way from American Mary to Tea Republik, we passed a couple of guys who were arguing, and I'd swear that their voices were overlaid with static for a moment as they came into hearing. Nick was talking at the time so he wouldn't have noticed anything, even if it was something outside my skull.
Also probably unrelated but maybe worth mentioning: I'd taken out my navel piercing and was thinking of letting it heal up. And just now before writing this post, the back of my head rather emphatically told me I wasn't doing that, and made me put it back in.
Anyway. That is a weird thing that happened that may have just been stoned imagination and coincidence, might have been a warning sign of something breaking in my brain, might have been reality falling apart around me for an instant. Who the fuck knows.