Twenty years of poking at an idea

Peggy
July 22, 2014

I was writing a post on a comics-making board about how Some Ideas Take Time when I realized something.

I usually tag 1995 as when I started coming up with “The Drowning City”.
I’m planning to finally start drawing it next year, after finishing Rita. Which will be in 2015.

Twenty years. It took me twenty fucking years for that thing to gestate. For me to take all the tragedies of my life and use them as raw material for this fucking story that bubbled out of my homesickness and just wouldn’t go away. Ever.

All I can say is that I hope it turns out to be worth it.

And if it isn’t? If it turns out to be a bunch of overwrought, maudlin crap that I abandon halfway through? Well, at least I’ll have finally got it out of my system.

social day

Peggy
July 18, 2014

Stuff I did today:

0. Turned off ads on Rita because the Patreon campaign passed $55/page!

1. Handed off my Genesis to Fluffy. I’d bought one along with a copy of Sonic 3 and Sonic & Knuckles to use as photo-ref for a Further Confusion ad last year, and finally got sick of having it kicking around the living room floor yesterday. I offered it on Twitter and they were the taker; we hung out chatting for a while too.

2. Visited with Liz Meinert, an old friend from New Orleans. She’d been stuck half-dead for the past twenty years due to Mysterious Unspecified Problems, that finally turned out to be heart issues. She had surgery recently, and is bouncing back with a vengeance – something I can really sympathize with, given how I kinda completely shut down for most of twenty years after my father died, and am now running wild doing things like pole dancing! It was pretty great to hang out and talk about nerdy nerdy stuff.

3. Tweaked the Javascript scrolling for Rita. Or rather for Bayeux, the theme I abstracted out of Rita’s style. I improved that a little more in a few other ways; I may try to package it up for submitting to the WordPress theme archive before I go to bed tonight. It works fine for me on Safari and Firefox; I should probably test on Chrome but whatever, and IE? Whatevs. Also I switched Rita over to using Bayeux.

edit. submitted it, here’s the ticket for it. I r open source.

Woo! A Patreon goal!

Peggy
July 18, 2014

Screen Shot 2014-07-18 at 10.11.28AM

I knew I was getting close, but I wasn’t expecting to have it happen for another month or so. Big thanks to the donor who pledged twelve bucks per page and pushed it over!

The next goal is “move to a better-insuated apartment” at $750/page. I… I ain’t gonna hold my breath on that one. *grin*

This is the best video I have ever seen on the Internet.

Peggy
July 15, 2014

<iframe src=”//player.vimeo.com/video/95684075″ width=”500″ height=”281″ frameborder=”0″ webkitallowfullscreen mozallowfullscreen allowfullscreen></iframe>

Seriously. We can turn the net off, people. This will never be surpassed. It is perfection.

Dracula Party, first draft.

Peggy
July 14, 2014

dracula party 0

I’m getting to the point of doing outlines of short stories about that lying vampire lady. All my major projects for the next few years are pretty much plotted out, so it’s nice to spend some time fooling around in stories with more freedom to play around!

If you’re supporting me on Patreon, you can have a look at the entire first draft.

snoo

Peggy
July 13, 2014

I just tweaked the logo I did for the Seattle subreddit so it’s in the average colors of all of the town’s professional sports teams.

seattle-reddit

T-shirts available on redbubble.

Illustrator source file is here.

Also if you’re here from reddit, feel free to check out my ongoing graphic novel.

stats check

Peggy
July 11, 2014

I found a link to this article on Ultima IV and found a sudden desire to use it as a personality test – when you start a game, it asks you a series of questions pitting one of the games Virtues against each other, and chooses your class and stats based on them. It turns out that the game is free on gog.com, complete with a Mac package. I tried to answer as, well, basically me, translating the situations posed in a manner most medieval into modern terms. Some of them were really hard. Interestingly enough I really wanted to choose ‘male’ as the gender at first; I think a screen full of lo-res 8-bit art was temporarily tossing me back to who I was when this was cutting-edge tech. I think when I played Ultima 3 it was with a party of indeterminate-gender “fuzzies”; I have no clue what, if anything, I played in U4.

Screen Shot 2014 07 11 at 11 59 08AM

Gnome (I think that’s what the G means?) bard, high dex. So basically a thief, right?

Or if I take it straight, well hey, guess what I do iRL: I tell stories. So well done, Mr. Garriott.

I don’t think I’m going to actually play the game. I don’t have that kind of attention span any more. Given that I never finished any of the Ultimas back in the 8-bit days, I’m not sure I ever did. Maybe I’ll just read through the first part of this here Ultima IV, V, and VI Let’s Play.

hacking the tool

Peggy
July 9, 2014

Woo. I finally got around to hacking up some keyboard shortcuts to change stroke weights in Illustrator. It is a horrible mess involving having Quicksilver trigger an Applescript when I hit command-option-control-[/] but it works – I mash the modifiers and hit [, and the size of my stroke decreases by 25%; modifier-mash plus ] increases it by a third. Which is close enough to the inverse of the decreasing to make me happy.

For further ugly hackery, I have bound the touch strip on my tablet to trigger those keys when I’m in Illustrator.

At some point in the future I might want to prettify the stroke weights it ends up with – a weight of 1.0002 points is not pretty – but for now I’m just going to enjoy actually being able to control this at small values without typing a number into the stroke palette. Which is a thing I find myself doing a hell of a lot when using art brushes.

Anyway, if you want ’em, download them here and have fun: Illustrator stroke width scripts

vampire doodlin’

Peggy
July 8, 2014

vampire-lady-noir-maybe

I’ve been thinking about that vampire lady who lies a lot, and thinking about the look for her world. Basically it’d be doing the same trick Frank Miller does in the Sin City books – stark B&W noir, plus a key color for one character – except each vampire would have a key color of their own. I’d put more effort into it than this but maybe not necessarily too much more.

It’s got something like three years to simmer, I can afford to dabble for a while.

Peggy
July 7, 2014

I’m sorry, sir. Saying “hey, hey wassup red hair” while grabbing your crotch is not the proper way to greet a lady such as myself. Thank you for trying, though.

Stay classy, Pioneer Square.