music thoughts

Peggy
April 17, 2014

So I was in Trader Joe’s getting some stuff and this piece of pablum came on the speakers. As it percolated up through my consciousness to recognition, I found myself with one thought: I could have happily gone my entire life without hearing this song ever again. I grew up in the 70s and 80s, when music was largely a thing provided by DJs at a half-dozen or so FM radio stations in any large town, and if something made it to #6 on Billboard (as this did), it would be pretty inescapable for months on end.

People are always expected to be all nostalgiac for the top hits of their teen years, but I’m not. Maybe it’s because my teen years were a big pile of grey depression after my father died. But maybe it’s also because stuff like this was still lingering?

Folks tend to say punk was a reaction to the technical excesses of prog-rock, but honestly I find myself wondering if it was as much a reaction to this. On the other hand I went from the technical wankery of soft-rock prog into the even more technical wankery of electronic music, and occasionally love listening to music that is so technical and intricate that it cannot be played in realtime by human hands, so what do I know.

I’m rambling, my ex-with-benefits is here, and I’m not stoned. Let me fix that last. Have a good night.

touching the puppet head

Peggy
April 16, 2014

Things I did today:

had more of my crotch hair destroyed with a laser
had a tasty sammich
took some books back to the library (where I am sitting right now)
wrote a script to help avoid repeating the $6000 mistake I made with Rita book 2
finally wrote some scripts to automatically switch Illustrator’s workspace when I connect/disconnect my big monitor
fixed the spine width on the cover to Rita 1 for reprint purposes

I can probably get more stuff done but these are all a bunch of little things that needed doing. Right now I think it’s probably time to leave the library and either go home or to a cafe.

Things up for doing later today:

rf2014 flier (and probably style guide too)
work on rita p.128 or 129 (still not sure if 128 is done or not)
rita book 2 fixes
kick back and read some of the comics I’m taking out of the library today, or some of the comics scored at ECCC
assemble the shelves that came this morning so I have space to store my growing inventory

There’s probably some other crap I’d like to do but who knows. This is the stuff at the top of my mind.

automation is good

Peggy
April 16, 2014

So I was thinking about my mistake with missing a page out of the Rita 2 book and how to NEVER MAKE THE SAME MISTAKE AGAIN. I mean obviously I am now going to make sure to do multiple passes over my proofs, and get at least one set of eyes on them to make sanity checks for things like “there seems to be a page missing”. But the actual mistake was that I was manually editing a long list of files by hand:

Teczetherca Thur Uenu Chousun:Users:egypt:Documents:gfx:working: rita:books:2:working files:With Spot:105.ai,
Teczetherca Thur Uenu Chousun:Users:egypt:Documents:gfx:working: rita:books:2:working files:With Spot:106.ai,
Teczetherca Thur Uenu Chousun:Users:egypt:Documents:gfx:working: rita:books:2:working files:With Spot:107.ai,
Teczetherca Thur Uenu Chousun:Users:egypt:Documents:gfx:working: rita:books:2:working files:With Spot:108.ai,
Teczetherca Thur Uenu Chousun:Users:egypt:Documents:gfx:working: rita:books:2:working files:With Spot:110.ai,
Teczetherca Thur Uenu Chousun:Users:egypt:Documents:gfx:working: rita:books:2:working files:With Spot:111.ai,
Teczetherca Thur Uenu Chousun:Users:egypt:Documents:gfx:working: rita:books:2:working files:With Spot:112.ai,

I mean, can you tell at a glance that 109.ai is missing? Would you even bother to check? Making this list is a tedious thing that requires executing the same simple steps over and over without error. In other words, it’s the kind of thing that humans are really terrible at, and that computers are really good at.

Or in pictures and words…

99 of Cups: Recursion
Singing “99 Bottles Of Beer On The Wall” is a long and tedious task. Maybe it’d be better to automate it!

So I took my own advice and wrote a little Applescript to do this for the next book, then bundled it up into a tiny application and stuck it in the directory where all my working files for the books live. NEVER AGAIN WILL I MAKE THIS FILE BY HAND.

I mean it’s still possible for me to put the wrong files in there, but that’s a part of the process where I actually have my brain online, you know?

Here it is if you happen to want it. It pops up a file requestor to choose a directory, then outputs a CSV file with the full path to each file – exactly what InDesign wants when you use the Data Merge panel to build a book from a template.

not sure if~~

Peggy
April 15, 2014

I just took the Sun card from my Tarot deck and drew arrows all over it labeling all the knees of the various bees on it as “me”.

Why? Well, I was poking at my Patreon campaign and came across this text: Patreon is an alternate way to support my work; you’re free to do this if you’re not interested in a physical book from the Kickstarter, or to do both Patreon and Kickstarter if you think I’m totally the bee’s knees of an entire hive full of happy comics-making bees. Do I need to draw that? I should totally draw that before I officially launch this campaign.

And I was like, yes, I do need to draw that, and I think I will do so right now. Or, rather, grab a hive full of bees I drew a few years ago and label it accordingly. I also grabbed another old image, changed it up a little more than that, and added it to the “thanks for pledging!” page.

Anyway. Looking at that image makes me want to go out and get some sun now.

popping the stack

Peggy
April 14, 2014

emptying the dishwasher
so i can put the dirty hair catcher in the dishwasher
so i can put the clean hair catcher in the tub
so I can finish resetting the bathroom after my shower
so I can go out and get some sunshine and draw.

exciting new mistakes

Peggy
April 13, 2014

So over the course of the past few months, I made a $6000 mistake.

When I was putting book 2 of Rita together, I somehow managed to completely leave out one page in the middle of chapter 10. Which is the one where the timelines involved are constantly weaving up and down, creating a strong rhythm; there’s no way I could get away with a page missing in the middle of that, even if the story still made sense without it. See where the red/orange/yellow stream turns up over the blue? That page. That page was missing.

When I realized this, I was aghast. This was a serious fuckup that basically meant I would have to throw this first print run away unless I wanted to have an errata sheet inserted into it or something, which would also be ugly. And I take pride in the fact that these books are really pretty objects that I think are worth instantiating into atoms instead of endlessly duplicating as data.

I went to the first place this could have happened, and it was entirely my fault.

I dithered about it over the weekend, and decided, yeah, I’m gonna eat this cost. I have the savings to do it; I’m basically not going to make a profit off of book 2 until I make the second print run. I’m going to have them dispose of most of the first run and only ship one box of them with the second run, which I will keep around as a reminder of this super dumb-ass thing I did.

And for the rest of my publishing career, I will hopefully remember this weekend and always check over my proofs both for making sure all the weird printing tricks come out correctly, and making sure I haven’t put half the damn book together upside down and out of sequence or something moronic like that.

Nick was visiting while this happened, and he kinda gave me shit for this. Justifiably so, it’s a pretty bonehead mistake, and for an amount of money that would have been really scary a few years ago. But he did allow that he’s never seen me make the same mistake twice – and volunteer to be a pair of eyes looking for this kind of dumbassery on the next book, as well.

Anyway. I’ll be spending the next week dealing with this, I think. Rita book 2 has taken too long already, even without this fuckup, and I just want to get it in everyone’s hands ASAP.

self-image

Peggy
April 13, 2014

There’s this mental change that happens when I dance regularly, I’m discovering. It happened when I started doing burlesque, and it’s happening again now that I’m starting to do pole dance regularly.

Basically, my self-image starts to incorporate “dancer”. And I start dressing appropriately:out come outfits that show off my midriff, even if it’s not quite toned and flat yet. How little can I get away with and not worry about OH NO COCKBULGE? I’ll go out in that.

I mean, it also helps that spring is here, and I can dress like this without freezing my ass off. But still.

Oh! And in other fitness/body-image news… remember that pull-up bar I’ve installed on my bathroom door, with the intent of trying to do a couple pull-ups every time I pass by? Today I gave it a shot, and before I realized it, I found myself looking through the space between the bar and the top of the doorframe for the first time. I tried it a couple more times and was able to repeat it. Woo! I don’t want to overdo it, what with having pole class tonight, but I’m really delighted at how well this program of ‘a couple attempts most times I pass the bathroom door’ has been working out. Now if I can just reinforce the programming to try a few situps and other ab exercises after doing that on the way out of the bathroom more often than not, I’ll be set. I’d do a few right now while I’m thinking about it, except my hair’s full of dye and I’d leave a mark on the carpet!

shower thoughts

Peggy
April 10, 2014

I’ve been slowly working on the next page of Rita, which is a huge complicated cityscape. It’s taking a while. Maybe I should also start working on a few pages near the climax, that are… even crazier. Because otherwise the comic will just grind to a total halt for a month.

I mean not like it isn’t slow and sporadic anyway. But it’d be nice to have that like half done by the time I get to it.

some old art going into storage

Peggy
April 9, 2014

While I was at the store grabbing those little notebooks, I also got a cheap portfolio to finally put a loose pile of old art into the closet instead of having it kicking around the living room.

College stuff. Cut paper on the left, ink and colored film on the right. I feel like the Thoth poster (assignment: ‘do a cut paper poster for a Mardi Gras krewe’, I chose the one that let me get away with TEH FURREH) may have been one of my first attempts at my current Illustrator style, perpetrated in the unforgiving medium of cut paper. And oh man I was such a Matt Howarth fanboy when I did the one on the right.

Text: “Miss July, 1990 Paul Trauth”. I think it was not insignificant that I allocated this ‘centerfold’ to my birth month. I was still a guy at this point – but the gender stuff was definitely an undercurrent, I think.

There’s like three more pages of this but they really look like I was sick of the story and just wanted to finish it. I really love the way I was so consistent with the Cubist nature of that treasure chest.

Guess what? I didn’t quit drawing her. Didn’t get a sex life, either. From a college-era sketchbook in the same pile. Which is completely full of hesitant pencils and overly-precious inking like this. I stuck this sketchbook on the shelf where all the sketchbooks go – mostly the ones I’ve filled since Katrina, but there’s a few early ones in there as well that I chose as representative of a giant box of the things my mom still had.

There was some other stuff in this pile too – a scratchboard drawing of a lamia in front of a full moon, an ad layout pasted up for an already-obsolete-as-I-was-taking-it graphic design class, other college stuff. Maybe I’ll photograph some of it the next time this portfolio surfaces.

I stuck all the flat stuff in the portfolio, then grabbed a marker and drew this on the outside, and stuffed it into the deepest recesses of my living room closet. I’ll find it in another few years when I move out, giggle at it, possibly post some of it again (I know I’ve posted some of this shit before), then stuff it in the new place’s closet until the next move.