I’m sitting here thinking through just how to tell my story about how each year i plan to go to winter comiket, but how those plans are never really feasible, and how it’s always ‘next year’ that things will settle down enough for me to go. It’s kind of amusing really. I always tentatively try to plan to go to Winter Comike because it’s less intense (and happens at a much cooler time of year) than Summer Comike, but i’m starting to think that there just isn’t going to be a year where the last week of December is going to be a good time to hike my way to japan and try to run a booth and sell small books i had to work hard to create specifically for the show.

(what is comiket? here’s the wikipedia article on it Knowledge is p0w4 )

Recently i’ve been finding myself using Omni Outliner Pro more and more. It’s been pulling me away from text based notes, writing and other things. I used to write in plaintext, but over the past year i’ve been refining the way i work on scripts and general free writing in Omni Outliner, and i’ve been finding that it’s been working quite well for me. The most difficult thing about any application used in the creative workflow is that its really hard to find things that help you and not get in your way and hinder the organized recording of your thoughts. It took a while to develop a setup that worked well with my thought processes, but now that i have, writing has been going a lot smoother. One of my goals this week is to have the rest of chapter 7 laid out and organized to a certain level of detail, and so far things have been going fairly well. To do lists are a pretty obvious use of the program, but i’ve also been using it to keep a record of a lot of the things i come across while doing research and dealing with these annoying little links people have a tendency to send me. (To Heart 2 and Alien Cat Girls. Yes, i think i watched it 10 times.)

The fact that i was able to pull that link back up is a testiment to how nice it works in recording stuff like that (timestamps, url embedding, etc) Nice program — It’s probably the main reason i wont be able to ever leave macs and go back to the PC world

Now if only it can help me get ahead enough so i can go to Comiket next year…

(you should read Shigeo’s awesome articles on How to Comiket, just in case you ever do find yourself able to go )

- pirotunes: Canvas OST – Boring Early Afternoon -

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Posted by fredrin on December 29th, 2005 :: Filed under Daily Blogging

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First off, I hope you had a good holiday weekend and are either enjoying a few days off or having a more or less relaxing week here before the start of the new year. It’s been a busy year for Sarah and I, and it’s always interesting to look back on the year and look at the what you accomplished, rather than my normal mode of operation which is all about the watching unfinished things zoom by and crash to the ground.

We did it to ourselves, of course, but this last week of December is probably always going to be an insane one for Sarah and I. There is Christmas, New Years and our Anniversary. There is also the big push in the weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas for the MegaGear store, and then end of year inventory, accounting, etc… Not exactly a month that is set up for rest and relaxation. Yet, we’ve managed to squeeze a little of that in over the past few days, it’s been a nice holiday. Not that it involved a lot of rest

The other thing that most of us do at the end of the year is not only look back at the current year, but look ahead and try to set goals for the next year. I’ve been thinking a lot recently about what is good about Megatokyo, what is ok about it, and what really needs work. I’ve taken a serious look at some personal goals i’d like to hit for 2006, and i’m going to do my damnedest to reach those goals, if i can. That was part of the impetuous of taking this week between Christmas and New Years off of the comic itself, i wanted some time to regroup, do some planning, tie up some loose ends from 2005… things like that.

I’m not going to list my goals, you can probably guess some of them, but i know how difficult some of them will be for me, and I don’t like disappointing people by not being able to do the things i say i’m going to do. I’ll admit, these are very difficult goals for me, and i am worried that i wont be able to reach all of them, but if i do i think it will improve not only the comic, but the way i connect with readers. I’ve been a little too reclusive over the past two years, i think, and i’m going to try to change that.

I’m going to be around quite a bit more as the week moves on, so please excuse my random ramblings here and there. I’ll be posting some more sketches as the week progresses as well.

- pirotunes: Stars Of The Lid – The Artificial Pine Arch Song -

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Posted by fredrin on December 27th, 2005 :: Filed under Daily Blogging

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