fredart : blogbits

Actually, i don’t, i just was blaming the wrong device. After fishing my poor ipod out of the trash, i changed which firewire port it was plugged into. Amazingly, it seems to now be working without a hitch. In fact, i was even able to reup all 12 gig of music files to it without a hitch. I do believe the problem is the top firewire port, not my ipod.

Why did this crop up all of a sudden? Once again, my fault. I had pulled the cord out to take it with me to charge it at home, and upon return plugged it into the top port. I think the differences, now that i look back, between big problems with the ipod and it working fine are all due to which port i had it in. Of course, this means that there is a problem with my G4, which is another thing, but its not something that interferes with anything else right now.

- pirotunes: Proton Radio - Particles (12-05-2004) Jay Epoch - Nokos

Wow, yesterday sure was an odd day. Quite literally, sarah and I took a day off. There were some minimal things we did, of course (we do have a store to run you know) but overall, there was very little MT stuff done on my end. Of course, i should have jumped back into chapter 6 dev and writing yesterday, but there was some part of me that really wanted to take a break, so that’s what i did.

Of course, a break for us usually requires a lot of work in other areas The cats have wrought unbelievable havoc on the apartment in the last month, and we dove in and did some cleaning up and straightening up. We also dumped off an amazing amount of cardboard at the local recycle center (Seraphim and I are recycle freaks, its a pain but i hate the idea of landfilling things that don’t need to go there). The balance of our day was spent christmas shopping - a rather frustrating activity, really. By the end of that exercise, i was ready to collapse, so i puddled myself in my chair and did just that.

I’ve picked up a few new things to read, and i wanna MT rant about them, but i’ll mention em here. First off is Serenity Rose #5 which FINALLY came out. I love the Aaron A’s stuff. Its quiet, but its got depth to it, and the nature of his art amazes me. Good stuff. I also snagged Fruits Basket #6 and World of Narue #3. I love Narue, if nothing else for its haphazard nature. To quote the creator, Marukawa Tomohiro, “This manga isn’t strictly planned. The story is created from my delusions while it is still fresh on my mind every day. Please forgive any inconsistencies in the story.” I swear, i could write the same exact thing about MT.

Another rather evil manga that Cortana has me reading (shakes fist in general direction of California) is NHK. There are levels of wrongness with this manga that make me feel pretty sure that it wont ever find its way to these shores (yes, there are some things morally wrong with this comic :P) but it’s still fun in a twisted kinda way.

Okies, enough of that for now. Time to do some inconsistent writing for Megatokyo now. Gotta at least try to get a comic done in a timely manner for tomorrow.

Oh yeah, i still need to deal with my ipod when i get back to the office. Bleah.

- pirotunes: Taproot - Smile {{RIP Dimebag Darrell}} -

When i head back to the factory today, i have to dig my ipod out of the trash.

what is it doing in the trash? Well, lets just say im not too happy with apple right now. I’ve had problems with this ipod for months. It has a tendency to crash itunes and itself on a regular basis, and will often ‘freeze’ when i plug it in, the hard drive whirring endlessly. Yesterday i forgot to check it when i plugged it in and went off to break down boxes for four hours and when i came back, the damn thing was hot as hell and had frozen both the computer and the ipod. After messing with it for a while, itunes just would not recognize it. I reset things, i reinstalled the software, did a hard drive check on the thing, and tried to reupload my music… and it just wont do it. it does about a gig then stops, and wont finish. I was so frustrated last night that i finally gave up and whucked it into the trash bin and went home.

It irks me that something that cost $250 bucks, that they push a big applecare plan on you (what is it, 50 bucks? 100?) for a MP3 player that is supposed to synch with your mac. I have a mac. If i was trying to synch this with a pc, i could understand, but there is no excuse for this thing to be so problematic. I don’t use it as much as many people do (i dont travel far to work, i have all my stuff right on my own computer, etc), whats the deal?

Anyways, i’ll try again, maybe see if i can refresh it better from my laptop. Hawk has me wondering if its a problem with my firewire port on my g4. I dunno, we’ll see.

I’m gonna try to tackle email today - a daunting task, but there really are a lot of emails i need to deal with. Even tho deadlines and stuff are behind me, if im not careful i could end up in another bind tomorrow on the comic and other stuff, and i dont want that.

Guu. I wish my ipod worked… If it really is borked, im gonna trash the hell out of this thing on the MT site. Probably shouldn’t, but grr…

- pirotunes: Returning Of The Purity Of Current from “Force & Form” by Surgeon -

ahhh…

Now, most people would not consider it relaxing to dive into several hours of packing and shipping after finishing some of the deadline stuff that had been hanging over their heads for the past month, but thats what i did last night, and will end up doing a lot today too. I really don’t mind being ‘busy’, it’s when you get to ’swamped’ to ‘Armageddoned’ that i start to mind a little.

Anyways, having book 3 done, and done in time to make all the deadlines (at least on my part :P) is a huge weight off my shoulders. I missed far more comics that i wanted to to get it done, and it took two days to get going again from a dead stop on chapter 6, but once i did it felt good. It should be just the normal hurdles from here on out, which is fine with me. No, there won’t be a week of kicking back and watching tv or playing games or anything like that, but i can stop and take a breath from time to time, which will be nice.

Today i have tons of errands to run, gotta help ship out packages, gotta do some work on the store (we had a problem with the store yesterday that had both sarah and i scrambling to make sure that the orders were correct. We check things pretty carefully, and have a good system, but it has some flaws that i’m really not gonna miss when we get the new software online at the end of the month.

I’ll probably sit down and write a MT rant today too, but we’ll see. Best case senario will be that i can go home later tonight and crash. That’d be nice. I haven’t done that in weeks. I wonder if i can remember how my TV works…

- pirotunes: 10 Trial of Silver - Futaboshi - pine mix. from “Airness - Best Sound of Game Music Library Special - Blue Disc” -

I really think i should take the idea of scheduling recovery from things more seriously. The past couple of weeks knocked the crap out of me more than i think i’m willing to admit, and I found that creating coherent work out of the creative fog yesterday was not in the real schedule of my subconscious brain, no matter how much the conscious brain forced the idea.

Another problem yesterday really came down to the simple fact that writing and creating are not conducive to multi-tasking. Drawing, and especially writing, really requires uninterrupted stretches of time to do effectively. You can’t be jumping up to deal with things every half hour and get comics done. Usually, there is a kind of momentum you have that can help, but right now i’m trying to bring chapter 6 back online from a dead stop and all the distractions of running a busy online store during the holiday season just was not helping this happen. Ironic, because its important to do the comics or else why the hell would anyone want to buy anything?

I won’t list the distractions yesterday, nor the minor (and some major) disasters, some of which i still need to follow up on today, but i do know i had to admit defeat when Momo decided at 2am that the freshly cleaned kitty box wasn’t clean enough for him, and that other places in the living area were more appropriate to releive himself. After dealing with that, i just went to bed. I feel a bit more together today, not quite so bone tired, so i think i’ll just plod along here and do my best to get this comic done.

- pirotunes: Free Sound Collective - Foldback Return -

One of the problems with winter around here is that having the heat on all the time dries the air pretty bad, which can make your skin like super dry. Who cares about dry skin, right? Well, it makes you more susceptible to cuts and whatnot (and we’re working with lots of boxes and stuff - cardboard paper cuts are no fun) so i went and bought this big humidifier thing. Bringing it in thru the front door, the damn door closed so fast that it scraped my left hand against the edge of the aluminum door… chunked the hell out of the back of my hand. Luckily its my left hand, so its not too big of a deal, but da~~amn.

Switching gears to work on chapter 6 again has really been difficult. My brain is in ‘wind down’ mode, and its not responding well to ‘crank up’ mode. This is pretty normal, i think. It has to do with momentum, i’m trying to pick up the threads and momentum for Chapter 6, and it’s never easy to pull stuff up from a dead stop. After a lot of wheel spinning, some things are starting to click back into place, so i think i definitely have the content ideas almost in place, its just a question of getting it down into words and scriptage.

Of course, what i really wanna do is plop down and pick up where i left off with Desegea, about three months ago or was that four months ago? I don’t remember… Nippon Ichi has already come out with another game in the time it’s taken me to get into this one. Bleah. Ah well, to work, to work…

- pirotunes: Visit Venus - One Step Beyond -

it’s 8:51pm. It’s been a day. Every time i turned around it was something that needed attention (even the damn printer toner cartridge went and i had to fly out and find another one (can’t ship anything without printing packing slips) It took all of 8 hrs to do the 8 pages in illustrator… but they are done. I have some exporting and uploading to do, but they are ready to go. It looks pretty good too, i think.

and i hit my deadline yay.

Wednesday’s comic… havent even touched it yet. Haven’t thought about it. Need to figure out what to do. I want to do 2 comics at least this week, so i think i’ll pretend thursday us wednesday… so lets say new comic thursday, new comic friday.

that should work. right now, i need food. going out to get food. fooood….

- pirotunes: Yakusoku from “Elfen Lied Original Soundtrack” -

I did not finish yesterday like i had hoped - it took longer to scan and clean up the 64 or so drawings than i figured it would, but that tedious task is done. I managed to assemble two of the pages, and this morning i just need to dive in and finish the rest. Realistically, it will probably be about 4 or 5pm before i am uploading this stuff to Dark Horse.

Yes, i’m making the deadline here, but my original plan was to have today free to work on Wednesday’s comic. It’s been about a week since i really thought about chapter six and what i was doing next, so i’ll have to switch gears in a major way later this afternoon. Ugh.

yay. i actually did manage to get all the artwork done for the Endgames extra for book 3. I didn’t think i would, but somehow i managed it. Now all i have to do is scan everything in, clean it up and assemble the pages. Its 3:51am, I have to go home and go to bed (what sucks is i gotta be here by 10 or so. whee. I’m gonna take a picture of the scattered stack of drawings, its a rather impressive looking batch.

- pirotunes: Svartsinn-DarknessRecreation from “Of Darkness and Re-Creation” -

ok, it’s still possible that i can hit my deadline. I didn’t do too bad yesterday - the artwork for pages 1-6 are done, i just need to draw pages 7 and 8 today. Some of these drawings are kinda complex, but hopefully they will flow pretty well. As usual, i don’t feel that the artwork is up to the standards i’d want to see for something like this, but really, it’s not too bad. Definitely as good as i’d do for the better MT strips.

The plan is pretty simple right now. Today i have to draw two pages worth of artwork. Tomorrow i have to scan everything (eight pages worth) and put the 8 page sequence together, fine tune the script, produce the final pages for upload. I want to be done monday night so that on tuesday i can turn back to Chapter 6 and get that rolling again on wednesday.

I know i’m gonna catch hell about the lack of Megatokyo comikage tomorrow. yeah, yeah, i know most MT readers are cool with it, but it wont stop the flood of nasty emails bitching up a storm about how unprofessional i am, etc etc. Y’know, it’s far more unprofessional to miss a deadline with your publisher, but many people are pretty unforgiving. It’s pretty simple. I had to sacrifice 3 MT comics to get the book done by my deadline. I was able to squeeze in some simple 4 koma strips, but i don’t have time to do anything for monday… in fact, i wasn’t even able to come up with a script for hawk to work on. Well, there isn’t much i can do about it, so i’m just gonna have to deal with it.

There will be something monday, just not by me. Hawk and i knocked a few ideas around, and in the end he started sketching something that he’s going to color up, and we’ll both be using it on on monday. It’s not a comic like we had planned, but that’s my fault.

Bleah. Well, this is long enough. I’ll stop whining now and go to work. I really can’t wait to finish this. I’m really tired, and i need a break, bad.

- pirotunes: Goat & Steel Hook Prostheses - Parasitic Feast of the Megalomaniac - Bloodletting the Altar of Lies -