fredart : blogbits

Well, im sure by now lots of people have read my ‘rant’ from yesterday over on Megatokyo. Not at all what i was planning on posting. At least, not till i read Scott’s little jab at me over on PVP. Honestly, if it was just a random poke and i’d never heard something like that before, i would have let it slide, but after years of hearing this roumor and accusation over and over again, and then having tossed at me like that, i decided it was time to set the history record straight.

I think i did a decent job of being objective and and honest about what happened. I talked to rod last night, and everything is cool (i had no doubts, in fact i was able to wish him congratulations over the phone) Anyways, I hope it doesn’t cause any kinda ruckus, i don’t think it has. Just an interesting read if nothing else.

Yesterday was a bit of a flop for me, i hooked up with some friends i hadn’t seen in a while for lunch, then sarah and i went apartment shopping (yes, we’re gonna move again (sigh)) and then i did the whole rant thing yesterday, and i kinda felt drained for the rest of the evening. Not a bad kinda drained, just… drained. Now i need to get on the stick and get going on mondays comic. whee

- pirotunes: Bad Loop - 50Mikrog -

Wagh. Ok, what a week. I don’t think i really hit my goals, but i could have done worse. Last nights comic was late because of poor planning and mucking about with drawing too much detail into some of the panels (thats not a mistake i really get mad at myself for). Now i have a 2 day gap to try to do what i really want to do - have the comic done 24hrs before i post it.

The real killer this week is that all i’ve really been able to do is the comic and start other things. Ever notice how sometimes you’ll work on several things here and there, put a lot of effort into them, but because there is no final result, it looks like (and often feels like) you got nowhere? Thats what my email situation feels like. It’s better, but it was such a disaster that it’ll take some time to dig out of. I wonder how many people get really pissed off when they don’t get an answer from me. I still have some emails from Dark Horse i need to answer…. iyaaaa….

Got store stuff to do today, gotta work on email, gotta finish that damn MT rant. I’ve been managing to keep my fredart blog going (so far so good i think. It’s a random format that i can don’t have to be as concise as i feel i need to be with MT rants. Shows you how concise i’ve been feeling for the past, er, year. :P)

off to work.

- pirotunes: Rage Against The Machine - Killing In The Name -

Bleah.

I haven’t stated it yet, but one of my goals this year is to finish comics on time (i’m getting good at the 3 per week, and planning them out so they are decent and i can keep control of the story, etc) For a while, i seemed to really be stuck in this loop where i never even got started with the comic till almost 5pm the night they were due. When i did start earlier, the time it took to finish it just filled up and took longer. I couldn’t win.

My original plan was to work on wednesday’s comic on monday, but i was sick monday. Even so, i got an early start yesterday and finished the art around 10:30. The comic was DONE around 11:30, but something felt very very wrong. The art really came out good. that level of the story worked, and worked well. But the dialogue actually weakened the drawings, diffused the whole comic. I struggled with it till 4am till i realized that i was just lashing about in frustration… most of which having missed my self imposed 1am goal.

After getting some sleep, i reworked it this morning, and it came out ok. I really wasn’t prepared for it to be a problem yesterday, but it was. It’s kinda thrown me for a loop, and i honestly don’t really think i’m feeling as better as i thought i was. Might have something to do with it. I think i need to regroup myself today, i dunno.

- pirotunes: Wieland Samolak - (Untitled) 2 -

Feeling better today, thankfully. Yesterday i had to lay down — twice. Luckily we have a couch here at t3h factory i can do that on. Much clearer head today, which is good, because i didn’t get squat done yesterday. Even the new AIR anime wasn’t enough to get my writing (and i tried, but when i tried to type, my head felt like it was gonna bulge).

I did get my ilap laptdop thing yesterday (tho i’ve never had so many problems ordering something and then getting it delivered - not raindesign’s fault, all of them mine and Fed Ex’s fault) but i did eventually get it. After zoning last night using it to keep the 12″ fireball off my lap, i have to say it’s very comfortable to use. I got the 15″ widescreen version of the laptop desk because i felt that the extra width would make it more comfortable to use (that’s the only prob with the 12″ powerbook, it’s a little narrow to really sit comfortably on your lap, nevermind the fact that it gets hotter than hell.

Comic idea is pretty solid, just need to finish writing out the script. With luck i can once again finish early today and maybe even finish my MT rant. yay.

- pirotunes: Natukage from “Natukage/Nostalgia” by Key+Lia-

Wow, i don’t feel good today. Something is making my head swim. Luckily today is a fairly low pressure day, tho i still have a lot to do. I came into t3h factory today and actually plopped down and watched something i’ve been dying to watch ever since i heard they were gonna produce it - AIR TV episode one. Wow, awesome stuff. It really is. They did a fantastic job with it, and i wonder if watching it with a swimming head that really made it sink in for me, or if its as good as i think it is I’m gonna write my feelings about the series in a MT rant today (gonna spend some time working on that next) and try to take it easy for a while, hope this headache goes away.

- pirotunes: 夜想 from “AIR ORIGINAL SOUNDTRACK (DISC-1)” -

feeling kinda down today, can’t really put my finger on why, but i know what im doing for monday’s comic, maybe getting to work on that will cheer me up a bit. It’s kinda gloomy around here, weather wise. Somber might be a better word…

Saturday was really the first day off sarah and I have had in two months. Well, day off isn’t the right word, i spent a large chunk of time trying to deal with making changes to the way i deal with emails (not an easy task when you have 18,000 emails sitting around that need to be sorted and dealt with). I’m not fully up to speed yet, obviously, but in a few weeks i hope to have a better handle on my email situation.

One of the surprising things i did yesterday (and a little bit this morning) was do some story development work on warmth. Maybe it was my sombre mood, but some thoughts came to me that made me wonder about a few things in the story, and rethink a few things. It’s odd, but all of this helped give me a better overview of it, and the problems and development tasks i still have ahead of me.

There will be some action on ‘warmth’ in 2005, and i’ll let everyone know what my plans are for it when i finish my ‘goals and wants for 2005′ rant (that was supposed to be done last week). I know people really wish ‘warmth’ was under way and out the door so they could read it, but the deeper issues of ‘finding’ saeko is even a deeper problem… but i did find some edges of here yesterday, which made me feel better.

- pirotunes: SNOW -Album Mix- from “Lament” -

While we are actually, like, seven days into 2005, this is the first day i’ve actually been able to catch up and have a little slack for over two months. I’m not counting the holiday days because even though i didn’t do any MT related work on those days, there was still a lot of running around doing family stuff, so i hardly call that a ‘break’. Getting behind with story development put a lot of pressure on me this week, but after finishing last nights comic i can say that i’m caught up… at least with the big big things. Lots and lots of little things to deal with (email, for one, that’s a big goal this weekend to overhaul how i deal with it… my current approach is completely ineffective).

I’ve already spent some time this morning getting worked up over some of the reactions and claims that i’m making ‘mistakes’ with the MT story over on the forums (i can’t complain, these kinda critiques that deal with specific things in the story are far better than the ‘i dont read MT anymore because…” stuff, a lot better, but i still feel depressed about it) Heheh, pretty normal day for me, i guess.

I had a little disaster yesterday that had me really worked up. Our biggest cat, Muff, jumped up on my lap yesterday morning and planted a hind food squarely on the keyboard of my laptop. At first i didn’t see it, but he had damaged my 12″ powerbook’s keyboard — the “N” key was tilted at an alarming angle and when you pressed it, it clicked badly with some pressure and took a lot to get a ‘n’ to register. Now, i don’t have applecare on this laptop (the only thing i paid the ridiculous $280 per year price on applecare for was my main machine, just in case) so i was balking at the idea of having to take it to the apple store in Novi to see about getting it fixed. I accepted the fact it was just gonna cost me, but worse than that i’d be without my laptop for a few weeks.

The good news is that after talking with Hawk’s brother BatmanX (who, surprise surprise, knows a lot about fixing macs) gave me some insight into how the powerbook keyboards worked, and what might be wrong. He said i should pop the key off and see if the scissor mechanism is broken or just askew. After finishing the comic last night, i did this, and one part of the scissor assembly did come off with the key. The good news seemed that the little plastic pins that were the hinges for the assembly seemed to not be snapped off, it had just popped out. Now, popping this assembly back together was NOT easy, but somehow i managed it, and ohmygod, it actually worked. Like nothing ever happened. Yes, this made me very happy

Anyways, pointless, perhaps, but nothing sucks more than when something you rely on breaks. When they break in major ways, you can always consider getting a new one and upgrading (even if it is expensive, a broken thing is at least an excuse to upgrade) but something as dumb as a broken key does not warrant pitching a proposal to Seraphim about getting a new laptop… damn cat shoulda popped off a dozen keys, that might have been impressive enough to land me a nice new top of the line 15″… damn cat.

- pirotunes: One Of Our Submarines from “The Golden Age Of Wireless” -

Yesterday was a very bizzare mix of good and bad. Most of the day was spent working on the store, finishing up the last problems and getting it launched. I try not to talk too much about the store because it feels like im trying to nudge people into buying crap. The truth is, it’s been occupying most of my time for the past few weeks, so it’s been hard not to gripe. Once it was up, it felt good. Then i turned to work on the next comic. Sometimes the lack of will to struggle thru a writing problem is labeled “writers block” but sometimes the block is scarily, frighteningly, and panic inducingly real — yesterday was real, solid writers block. Absolutely nothing was forming.

After about four hours of struggling and getting absolutely nowhere, i decided that the writing was on the wall, and i needed to do a DPD in service day. Luckily, my drawing ability was at least reasonable yesterday. Unfortunately, i also wanted to do a drawing of Kimiko. I should never draw Kimiko, i haven’t been able to draw her in over a year. I’m embarrassed by the poster i made of her (i admit, the entire project was an attempt to ‘find’ kimiko again, and it was a failure) and todays drawing is also a disaster. I’m not just talking about how off everything is, from her right arm to her chest seemingly being off (after a dozen comments to that effect, i felt i had to do something to fix it, so i tried to add some more shading… it sorta works)… what bugs me most is that i can’t find Kimiko in anything i draw anymore. I have one little pen sketch i did a few weeks ago, and its as close as i’ve been able to capture her recently. Maybe it’s much like the indeterminate nature of what we really know about Kimiko. All of the other girls in megatokyo are loosely tied to various stereotypes (tough girl, spooky girl, etc) that it helps to define the characters and give visual clues as to how to put them together. Kimiko has no such stereotype by design, and this elusiveness of her nature, and the complexity of her inner workings leaves me as flummoxed as piro himself when it comes to putting her together and understanding her.

As we get closer to the parts of the story where focus involves Kimiko more and more, maybe i’ll start to find her. Maybe i never will. Kimiko is the one who will have to tell me, too, at some point, were the story goes. I’m not gonna force her to talk to me, she may pass both piro and me buy, i really don’t know yet.

- pirotunes: Bill Laswell and Tetsu Inoue - Monochrome Existence -

Well, when i say caught up, i’m just talking about the big things, like… we’re almost ready to re-open the store, just two more little things. After that, i can jump on today’s comic. Everything else just sorta doesn’t exist right now, not until i can get my schedule more into shape. I really should have nixed a comic this week, i should have known that there would be more issues with moving to a new store than could be handled in a few afternoons. They haven’t been huge problems, just things that work differently and we’ve had to find workarounds for.

All in all, yesterday was a really productive day. Sunday was awful because i spent most of it working on a single problem that i didn’t even anticipate, giving me a feeling of having completely wasted the entire day (tho it had to be fixed). That put me behind on a comic that i didn’t feel good about at all. By monday morning, i had some fairly decent drawings, and the first part of the comic felt good, but the flow of the rest of it bothered me, so much so that i couldn’t get the drawings to work. I ended up rewriting the script, and changing some things, and then had to re-draw the last few panels. The result was a far better comic, one that i’m pretty happy with (and others seem to think so too). By that time it was almost 5pm, and i hadn’t even started on the remaining store issues.

Well, there’s only one thing to do in those situations, and that’s dive in and see what you can get done. By 3am, Seraphim and I had just about finished. A few small things this morning, and we can open, and i can dive into the next comic.

What i really want is a few days to just sit here and work on email and all the fun little side things that people ask me to do or help them with that relates to megatokyo. I haven’t even checked mail in days, so its getting bad.

- pirotunes: Ambient Otaku - Holy Dance -

Whats the old saying about things never going as planned? I really need to learn how to make bogus plans that will somehow result in getting what i originally wanted to get done finished… i suppose that would never work. We’ve had a few issues with the megagear store changeover that will take me a little more time to sort out. Nothing serious, just lots and lots of little things, each of which is taking far longer to correct and make function properly than it should. There is also the fact that we got an unexpected ‘happy 1st anniversary party’ yesterday that, well, forced us to take most of the evening off Ah well, it is the holidays, i suppose Sarah and I are allowed a few breaks

I’m gonna set the due time for tomorrows comic to 12 noon tomorrow, that will give me some leeway in getting the comic done AND getting some of this store stuff sorted out. It’s looking to be a rather… interesting day. Oh, i have some things i have to tell MT readers about, so i better get that rant done too…

- pirotunes: Kammarheit-AsleepWellHidden from “Asleep and Well Hidden” -