Three days ago: initial testing of a thing.

Where the next page of Rita was when I got on a plane yesterday.

Airplane seat, my lap, my laptop, and four pairs of squishy arch cushions for high heels.

Add two rubber bands and I’m ready to work.

Three hours of airplane ride later…

I was skeptical about this when I first heard of it, but applied for the beta test anyway. I can now use Illustrator in a single, cramped airline or bus seat. I’d still rather use it with the keyboard and Wacom tablet in front of me, but that may change as the software takes shape.

Pro artist friends: if you have a Mac and an iPad let me know, they may be expanding their beta test in a few weeks.

Stuff I did today:

• Put on a blindfold, got stoned, and was fed tiny little artisan chocolates by my ex-with-benefits.
• Went to the cafe and played a decent little SF-themed deck-building game that actually involves fighting with the other player instead of playing simultaneous solitaire better than them. (edit: Star Realms, if you’re curious. Simple and fast and fun.)
• Bought a TV for my mom. It’s a late birthday gift; I’ll also be helping her set it up when I visit her next week.
• Fiddled with the beta test version of a program that lets you use your iPad as a drawing tablet for your Mac. It worked a lot better than I was expecting it to; I sent ‘em a list of suggestions for improvement. More on that later, when it’s released.

Tomorrow I should work on Rita.

It's the last day of 2014. If I'm going to do this, I'd better do it now.

Mostly I feel like this year was dominated by Rita. The second Kickstarter took forever to fulfil, in no small part due to me fucking up and having to reprint the book. I still haven't dealt with the shirts I promised; I should really make that happen. I may have a fulfillment partner for book 3, which will make life a LOT easier.

And of course I drew lots of pages of the comic. Going by the posted dates on my website, it looks like I drew about 100 pages this year! That's more than I thought; I feel like I could have done a LOT more if I hadn't been weighed down by the printing mistake, shipping, and winter blahs. Still, I actually managed to keep to my aim of two pages a week pretty well on average!

I finally got to be the GOH of a convention. Rainfurrest, with a theme of “cyberpunk”. Sadly our plans for the most wicked awesome con book ever (full color with a unified palette running through a lot of the art, French flaps with a super panoramic cover) fell through at the absolute last second, but I had fun. Made the most money I ever have by finally sitting there and cranking out badges on my computer. I'd be buying a small printer if I was planning on doing more furry cons any time soon, but I'm taking 2015 off from furry cons. (I will probably be social at RF2014 and might be social at Furlandia but I ain't dealing anywhere.)

I started a Patreon in February after one of my fans ASKED me if I had one so they could fund me. I think that says a lot about how that site is doing something right. It has slowly grown over the year into something that is paying half my rent on a productive month; I posted nine pages this December and got about $600 before fees. I am definitely going to be figuring out how to thank those folks in the back of volume 3. I am hopeful that by this time next year, I will be paying all my bills by drawing comics. Unless I decide to move to a more expensive place and cover part of my rent out of my savings or something.

I didn't move; I didn't have any upheavals in my social life that I can remember. I'm sure I had a couple of minor tiffs with Nick but our “ex with benefits” relationship is so low-key that those are easily dealt with.

I upgraded my living room with a new projector near the end of the year, and said “well there goes the deposit” when I drilled holes in the ceiling to mount it. That made me feel like an adult.

At ECCC, I pulled together a group booth for next year. In a much better location than I'd been in before. I'm looking forwards to that. And should take care of a few bits of business related to that, now that I think about it. I might do that when I finish writing this.

A few ideas for future projects appeared. I am just hopelessly in love win unreliable narrators; someday I must attempt to write something that actually has a narrator you can completely trust. I think I could maybe fit that in around… 2019?

I failed to find the time to finish a couple of side projects that could lead to more exposure and a little prestige. Oh well.

My mother's health took something of a hit. She's a lot less mobile than she used to be. She still seems to be interested in life, so I'm not too worried yet, but I'm feeling her mortality more than I used to. I'll be seeing her soon when I go down to New Orleans for Wizard World NO, which is really more of an excuse to see her and get some sun than it is a financial thing for me.

This year's exercise choice was pole dance classes. I would probably still be doing them if the studio hadn't closed down near the end of the year. I'm seriously debating going for circus arts next year; it really depends on how well I can get art stuff done in the two hours of bus and light rail it'd take to get there and back.

So that is the notable events in my life this year.

Looking forward to 2015: group booth at ECCC in a great location, finishing Rita, starting the next project. Not too bad. And possibly getting to the point where I am no longer living off my inheritance, either. That would be really nice. And maybe running off to join the circus.

Today:

Mostly laundry. It had piled up, I had to do two loads. I have tried to organize my life so that I only ever have to do one load (since there is only one machine in the building), and it is nice when it works, but having the machine broken last month plus winter fucked up my schedule of laundry.

I still need to fold the stuff. And I still have like a half a load left. All leggings. I may deal with that tomorrow.

Also I roughed out the next couple pages of Rita, so that's good.

Otherwise I just went for a walk, bought too many snacks at Trader Joe's, and sat in the living room reading critical articles on video games. Not much of a day, really.

Thinking about how the raw gameplay of ‘move your blip to avoid other blips’ always seems to get a ‘kill or be killed’ narrative layered on it. How can this be changed?

Direct inversion: You are given reason to want to Not Kill. Imagine you are playing Pac-Man, but instead of being killed by the ghosts when they touch you, you kill them – and it is seen as a bad thing. Perhaps you may have similar penalties as ‘losing a life’: everyone goes back to their starting point, and you can only do it three times. Perhaps you lose 25% of your score. There would need to be some reason everyone wants to be near you, despite the fact your touch is deadly.

Another inversion: ‘Throw blops to keep other blips from touching your blip’ is pretty much always cast in ‘killing’ terms. How can we change this?

Throw blops to turn other blips into your friends. Slowly the game would change, from throwing the right blops to befriend each particular blip (pink blips love pink blops, horses love apples, seahawks fans love blue/green, cops love donuts…), into moving your immense horde of blips around. Until the camera had pulled back far enough that the individual blips were impossible to make out from the group. I imagine eventually you would fill the entire zone, and to do anything interesting you’d have to zoom down and pick one blip to go through a tiny gateway into the next zone; repeat with variations until the designer runs out of interesting ideas for gameplay and/or scenery.

Saw William Gibson complaining about GamerGate recently and thought how much he’s aged, and how ungracefully, since GG and Operation Disrespectful Nod reminded me of the Panther Moderns.

– this comment on Hacker News

I have never made that connection. Now I kind of want to re-read the Sense/Net infiltration segment of ‘Neuromancer’ with that interpretation in mind. I suspect I will be a hell of a lot less prone to think of the Panther Moderns as totally rad this time.

I mean, angrily depressed thirteen year old boy me me thought the Moderns were pretty rad. But he thought a lot of dumb stuff was pretty rad. Including the word ‘rad’.

And think about it: the Moderns’ part in the raid, if I recall correctly, was to play atrocity videos on all the building’s screens, make a psuchoactive chemical leak, and DDOS the place. Their aesthetic was full-body video camoflaugue suits and total anonymity.  Yeah, in my headcanon, Lupus Yonderboy is now totally sea lioning the Sprawl equivalant of #gamergate when he’s not being a l33t ha><0rr.