fredart : blogbits

I was doing a lot of creative spelunking yesterday on tshirts and other dye-sub related product ideas. I’ve been trying to loosen up creatively recently, stop being so damn stiff about what i produce, and its helping.

I’ve been doing some COPIC coloring here and there (nothing worth posting yet) when i ran across my first problem marker yesterday. I was coloring with it when suddenly ink started to pool up on the nib. This is the first time i’ve had this problem with any of these markers, and unfortunately i wasnt watching for it so i got a huge bleed on the drawing i was coloring which ruined it. Not really sure why it pooled on the nib like that, i assume that it was a marker i had not used yet and it might have been overful of ink - i am going to try to keep an eye out on the problem and see if it crops up again. This is, of course, one of the problems with analogue media, there are no undo buttons.

Spent a little time this morning going over various podcasts looking for something to listen to. I’m a big listener of audiobooks (i get good mileage out of my Audible.com account :P) but i really haven’t delved into podcasts too much. There are the standard ones to poke at, like NPR’s Science Friday and stuff like that, but i also was looking for some more specific ones to some of my newer hobbies. There doesn’t seem to be a decent sea/touring kayak podcast of any note (the ones there are are all whitewater kayaking and thats like a totally different sport, imho) but there are a few good mountain biking ones. I’m giving Gear Noise a listen right now, and it’s pretty laid back… just what i was looking for.

oh, and in case you are wondering what could possibly be interesting about kayaking, here’s an interesting site to poke at. It will be a while before i’ll be doing any actual sea kayaking (there’s plenty of lakes and rivers here in michigan to keep us occupied) but there is some alure to costal waters that fascinates me…

Recently Bare Bones Software released an really nice upgrade to their workhorse text editing software BBEdit. Ever since i switched to the mac, i’ve been using BBEdit for most of my text editing needs. Some of the changes in the new version, version 8.5 are really, really nice - in particular a ‘check spelling as you type’ and other small things that just make the interface that much nicer. I also got tired of looking at the Monoco font, and wanted a nice, new, monospaced san serif font that would be pleasant to look at and read, so i purchased Avant Garde Mono EF (before you get on my case about paying for fonts when you can find so many out there that are free, i believe that you get what you pay for, and sometimes buying fonts that you rely on is a smart thing.)

Over the years, i’ve bounced across many programs trying to find the right balance of usability and transparency (in other words, where the program itself doesn’t get in the way of what you are trying to do) and i keep coming back to text based lists and writing tools. Of course, there are tasks that require a little more robustness when it come to working with larger amounts of writing data, and for that Omni Outliner Pro is like, the best program there is for that. This new version of BBEdit, however, really seems to work better for me in little ways that are almost hard to quantify. It’s nice when a program does that.

My only issue with it is printing. For some reason, when i print, the text on the page gets word wrapped at about the half way mark on the page, sort of like the right margin is 4.5 inches or something. This is really irritating when it comes to printing lists or text. After doing some digging and playing with a lot of settings, i decided to email support and see of they can help me figure this out.

Hawk got himself a nice new Mac Pro the other day, and while there is a part of me that wants to strangle him and take the thing, my old G4 tower is still puttering along. I do need to do a rebuild of it one of these days just to clean up the system. I’ve gotten out of the habit of rebuilding my computer ever six months since i switched to mac. Bad fred.

If you poke back far enough in the history of industrial music, or was privy to the scene back in the day, you probably remember Controlled Bleeding. Hard to believe that these guys, who are more well known for their agressive industrial style, would produce a dark moody ambient disk like ‘the poisoner‘ which was released on Soleilmoon recordings of all labels :P. I had heard parts of this disk on a number of ambient net radio stations (most likely on Drone Zone) and decided a while back that i needed to find this CD.

THese days, of course, you can find just about anything if you look hard enough, and i was able to locate a copy via Amazon.com, which finally came in the mail about a month ago. I believe that the premise of the two elongated tracks is that it is wandering through a dying forest, and that we are ‘the poisoners’ so to speak… but delving too deep into metaphors in ambient tracks tends to dilute the emotive impact the music can have. To me, it’s better to leave these things vague.

I suppose one of the reasons i was so keen to get the disk was that there are runs on each of these thirty minute tracks that remind me somehow of the world and the collapsing enviroment Largo and Pirogoeth are dealing with in the Endgames story. The intensity of this overwhelming impending sense of collapse is not something that i’ve really successfully been able to convey in the bits of the story i’ve produced so far. The humor and the play between Largo, Pirogoeth and ‘the other’ guy have created more of a sense of fantasy world comfort than anything else so far (plus the retelling of the story in the last chapter was by Largo, so we don’t have Piro’s particular bent on it yet).

Music for me is often like soundtracks. While there are times i have to turn off all the music around me because it is distracting and prevents me from getting the feel and mood i want. Often i use musical selections to try to zero in and tune into a particular emotive subset, like background music to a scene. Of course, there are times i’m listing music that is almost paradoxical in contrast to the kind of scene i’m drawing (for instance, an amusing scene with Kimiko and Piro while listening to VAC) but contrast can also be an effective means to get where you are going. I wonder why things work that way.

There was a time when you could almost be a part of most of the networking things on the net that made sense. All you had to do was focus in on whatever your hobby happened to be, follow a few websites, subscribe to a few Mailing Lists (remember those?) and follow the appropriate newsgroups (again, remember those?). These days, the ways that information and the way people who access that information are connected (usually creating more content in the process) is a little mind boggling. I myself have really just been sitting here quietly creating content, in my own small way, for the past six years, and have not spent a lot of time interacting with the exponential growth of net content the way the rest of the internet has. Blogging, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, Podcasts… it’s enough to make your head hurt.

For me, i often take a look at some of the social networking stuff thats comes across my screen and try to determine if there is anything there that i can really use to make my life easier. Usually, i just see something that if i spent tons of time using and devoted myself to it might be interesting, but casual unfocused use would be more of a headache and a waste of time more than any actual use. It doesn’t mean i’m not tempted to try sometimes.

This morning i created a del.icio.us account to give it a try. I have a pretty static set of bookmarks, but i do often find myself hitting sites and things that i’d like to save but not really sure where to put them (one of the best firefox ad-ons is ’save bookmark here’ btw) With the extension plug in, del.icio.us looks pretty easy to use, and after some poking i am getting some sense of ways it can be used. Not sure if it’ll be something i’ll continue to use or not, but what the heck, i’m willing to give it a try.

Nothing seems to mess up your energy flow than major changes in plans. It’s almost like i didn’t know what to do with myself yesterday. Ugh.

One of the things that has been bothering me is that the drawings that i had already done for this comic were really… not very good. You can tell i was rushing when i did them, in the hope of finishing it before i went to Germany. Now that i’m here, and even a DPD has gone up (which itself looks rushed, doesn’t it?) i’m thinking i need to redo these frames. I gotta maintain some kind of quality level with this thing.

Anyways, not too much else to report on. Just going to quietly sit here and start drawing. Sometimes that can be a challenge, but this bowl of oatmeal seems be helping a little. Now for some coffee…

Gotta say, one of the most annoying things about about Apple is this rather theatric approach they have to introducing new products and services. Apple nutters eat the stuff up — i get msgs from a certain friend like “tomorrow’s the big day!” and i have no idea what he is talking about. Still, being plugged into the kinder, gentler grand overlord that is Apple (as opposed to Microsoft or those bloody anarchists that use that “open source” stuff :P) i do find myself having to deal with both the good and the bad of updates, upgrades and new stuff that i’m supposed to want.

I’ve seen a number of itunes upgrades since i converted to the Apple religion. Honestly, itunes is a horribly boring application. For years i used to use Winamp and one of the most enjoyable things about winamp was all of the different skins you could apply to it. In fact, my first exposure to Kanon was via a beautiful winamp skin of Ayu. I had all the plug ins like SexyFont and whatnot, and was always on the lookout for new and interesting skins. With itunes, the only skin changes you get are subtle ones and they come from Apple.

With the new version we once again get all sorts of little tweaks to the itunes interface. Personally, i see no value in the ability to play movies or games on an ipod (after owning one, i will never purchase another one - it barely lasted a year and in that time was very touchy and never really worked right.) but i do use the itunes store from time to time, and they have added some features that let you browse your collection with more tools. THis is useful, of course, only if your tags are all correct. Most of mine are pretty messed up. That happens when you have a lot of .jp stuff in your queue.

I still haven’t finished rebuilding my itunes library from when my playlist got thoroughly corrupted. I have enough stuff loaded and in order to keep me going of course, but i still have a lot of older stuff i need to put in the playlists so i can access it. One of the nice things about Winamp was you just played the files as they existed on your hard drive or CDs. With Itunes, you have to have them somewhere on your playlists. This is actually a lot more convenient, but at the same time i find that my use of my collection is driven by the way itunes works more than by the collection itself. I guess there are worse things.

I am so not ready for my trip to Germany. Who travels to to Europe without doing tons of planning? Actually, it’s a pretty simple trip, and its not really going to take a ton of planning, i seriously plan to just pack lightly (not even bringing my laptop) and head to the airport. It’s simply a long flight to go to a convention We’re only going to be there for two days (Friday and Saturday) and we really wont be seeing much of Germany (any of it, really). Hopefully someday in the future Sarah and I can take a longer and more exploratory trip to Europe, spend some time actually seeing the place. If you live in Germany or Europe in general, i believe you can still head to Connichi and find us there Friday or Saturday.

The weather has been really crappy for the past few days, it definitely feels like winter is coming. Won’t be long before the leaves start changing and the air starts getting that brisk feeling of fall. Often this is a rather creative time of year for me - i tend to really slow down in the summer for some reason, and feel more inspired in the fall. This year, August was not so bad, from a creative standpoint, so i’m curious to see how the fall pans out.

Sat down last night and watched the first two episodes of Saumrai 7, part of the Funimation box set that a friend sent me as a gift, and it was an interesting watch. There’s something appealing about Kirara’s design and personality that i’ve talked about before (in an old Megatokyo rant). Funi did a nice job with the box set, they really did.

Sarah and I busted our butts on Thursday to get enough done at the store so that we could take a pseudo 4-day weekend (what with Monday being labor day). It’s not really a full four days off for us, because i’m still doing a comic for Monday, but it freed some time for us to range and do some other stuff this weekend.

Yesterday we went on a slightly longer kayak trip down the Huron river, about 8 miles, and it was a lot of fun. It was nice not having to paddle upstream and back (the Livery drove us upstream and loaded us into the rental kayaks up there) I was rather surprised by how low the river is in most areas (i’d get stuck in areas and sarah would just float on by and wave at me), but it’s still a beautiful and pleasant run. It also gave me a solid sense of what 8 miles feels like in a kayak. The biggest problem with the trip is the fact that the rental kayaks are really not the greatest boats in the world (they were older Old Towne Loon 100s) and as a result my back is killing me today (mostly because there were no foot pegs to keep me sitting upright in the thing, and i could not really sit up straight). I’m sure a lot of that is also the fact that my back isn’t used to, like, physical activity, but i think the kayak can take some of the blame.

It’s been an interesting summer for us. Being in better shape than we’ve been in ages has resulted in us playing around with two new outdoor hobbies (biking and kayaking). I’ve been doing a lot of reading and research into the proper way to do things (for instance, my complete and total lack of paddling technique is probably amusing to watch) but learning to do things more or less right is part of the fun.