akiakiaki

kobold @ 3:23am: The Ustream Q&A is done for this week - thanks to everyone who showed up!

ksleet @ 2:11am: where doing it man. where MAKING THIS HAPEN
I acquired a cheap Wacom Bamboo tablet a little while ago on the general principle that I need to find an entirely new and better way of doing webcomics, my current methodology having pretty much hit a cul-de-sac of both efficiency and quality -- and the next comic Jon and I will be doing requires steps forward in those areas. Having acquired it I promptly didn't get around to using it. On an impulse I started giving it a shot today.

And yeah, I'm just barely at the level of being able to draw characters from MS Paint Adventures. (Which is not a slam on Andrew Hussie's artistic ability, by the way. A simple character design is far from -- in fact, usually the opposite of -- a bad character design.) A problem with the Wacom I hadn't realized is that it doesn't fit well with the way I normally hold a pen. Though I'm right handed, I have a peculiar sort of left-handed pen holding pose in which part of my hand rests on the paper. And you can't have anything else resting on the tablet or it'll get confused. So in addition to learning a new method of drawing, I have to hold the pen in this weird way I'm not used to.

I'm wondering if there are any decent online tutorials on how to use a drawing tablet, anyway? I'm also curious if anyone out there knows how to remap the controls on the Bamboo tablet or pen (on the Macintosh with Photoshop, that is.) I'd love it if I could map a button on the pen or the tablet to "Undo" considering the colossal number of mistakes I make, but the documentation is frustratingly vague on the subject and so far my net searches have brought up no useful information.

kobold @ 1:00am: Watch me on Ustream !
I'm working on scripts for the coming year and answering reader questions.

sslaxx @ 3:01am: From Twitter 12-26-2009

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sslaxx @ 3:01am: From Twitter 12-25-2009

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cuprohastes @ 9:07pm: Christmas

Got a woolly hat, some soap and a mousemat. Had Christmas dinner. Mo was still pretending I don’t exist. The new dog noticed that Mo wouldn’t look me in the eye, talk to me or spend much time in the room, went “Ohhh so he’s the the alpha!” and spent the afternoon snuggling up to me. Mo was gibbering.

kobold @ 10:13pm: The last two strips of S*P Year Eight....
Are UP on the sight... finally. And I even answered the currently most asked question.

Kind of.

sslaxx @ 3:01am: From Twitter 12-24-2009

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cngsoft @ 1:02am: ¡Feliz Navidad! - Merry Christmas!
Llevo varios días constantemente llamando por teléfono y enviando mensajes electrónicos a familiares y amigos en un intento desesperado de poder desearles a todos unas felices fiestas... pero es imposible, porque hablo de centenares de personas que no siempre están disponibles, unas por estar trabajando, otras por haber partido de vacaciones y otras simplemente por no estar. Así que ahora que el día 25 de Diciembre ha comenzado oficialmente según el observatorio astronómico de Greenwich (el que marca las horas internacionales) quiero desear públicamente una feliz Navidad a todos quienes leéis estas líneas.

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I've spent the past days calling by phone and sending instant messages non-stop to relatives and friends in a desperate attempt at managing to wish them all happy holidays... but it's impossible, because I mean hundreds of people who aren't always available, some of them because they're at work, other times because they're already gone on vacation and others simply because they weren't there. So now that December 25th has officially begun according to the Greenwich astronomical observatory (the one that sets the international times) I want to publicly wish a merry Christmas to everyone who reads these lines.

sslaxx @ 3:42pm: Blue kitty!


He's sleeping right now. Such a cute kitty!

sslaxx @ 3:01am: From Twitter 12-23-2009

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sslaxx @ 8:19pm: Gypsy!

Hope this works!

sslaxx @ 3:01am: From Twitter 12-22-2009

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cuprohastes @ 9:54am: Firefox?

Firefox surpasses IE as most popular browser!

… but only if you split IE into IE 6, 7 and 8 and count them as separate…

… and count all versions of Firefox as one version…

… and make the chart a bit hard to read…

… basically Firefox has 28% of the market and IE has 60%. For some reason someone at Download Squad thought this made sense and wasn’t an amazingly dumb way to prove that bloggers still aren’t the same thing as real journalists

ksleet @ 1:30am: Afterlife Blues update.
Usual place.

In conclusion, I give you No Signal.

qcjeph @ 10:22pm: oh god
The week between Christmas and New Year's is traditionally the lowest-traffic week of the year for my site, and I'm gonna be out of town anyway, so I thought I might try something a little different this year. Here's a teaser for my idea:



I've already got the basic idea for the story and will hopefully start working on it before we drive down to Maryland (one advantage of driving down is I can actually bring my big Cintiq with me) for the holiday. Of course, going over my outline and idea list, this might end up being MORE work than the usual QC strips >.<

So uh I no promises yet I guess, but hopefully I won't puss out and will actually get this done.

smuu @ 4:17pm: Almost Merry Christmas!
Hey, it's Christmas in five days or something! Merry Christmas everybody!

(This is a card I made for Strange Adventures, but we'll just pretend it's for everybody, since I don't have time to do a Christmas card for the internets.)
Man, was this whole month a giant failure in terms of work... freelance and other things distracting me away from my comic-making, and to make matters worse, pretty much all my friends are up and leaving Halifax due to the general awfulness of the animation industry here, so what little extra time I had was spent with them. Sad, sad, sad times. Sucks when people leave.

I haven't been able to work on Ice much lately. I have a few pages pencilled, but wasn't able to finish them... so much for a year end update. Sorry! :( I'm still plugging away, though. SLG and I have spoken about them publishing it, and it's something I'd like to do, with some changes and updates to the story, which has been going on for far too long. Anyway, I hope that the Small Press Publishing Gods are kind to both SLG and me, and we'll be able to make that happen next year. I feel uncomfortable with the idea of my older work being passed around in book form, but I think that with the changes I want to make, Ice could possibly be a nice little graphic novel. I won't mess with the online content, and it will remain up, so I'm planning for there to be two different versions of Ice, one online and one offline. That's the plan. We'll see what happens.

I feel kind of in flux lately regarding comics and the internet. It's really weird. During my time doing Demonology 101, I never told anyone in Real Life that I drew an online comic, mostly because I felt kind of like I wasn't a REAL comic book artist. Now that I'm working full-time doing a book for a "real" publisher (whatever that word means) I miss the internet, and the interaction with readers, and I feel like I should be doing more art/comics/whatever online ('cause, y'know, if I don't, people might forget about me oh nooooo!). Sometimes I draw a panel in Friends With Boys, and feel pretty bummed about the fact that no one will see this panel for another two years. It's hard to be patient.

Unfortunately, I have never made money off my online comics, so it's hard to try and make anything online a priority when you have paying work demanding your attention. I'd really like to finish Ice (God, when??? wheeennn???) and move on to some kind of comic that actually works online, rather than a long-form story. Which doesn't work. And doesn't sell t-shirts or any of the stuff that makes online comics sustainable. Anyway, these thoughts are probably more of a result of me being a horrible worrier more than anything (must have many revenue streams to pay bills! Can't hitch only wagon to shaky print industry! What if everything fails? What if??? AHHHH! Dogs and cats living in sin together!). Even if I have nothing to worry about, I worry about cosmic death rays or something. Bah, humbug.

On the days that I don't let the publication date for the book bug me, working on Friends With Boys is awesome. I love drawing it. Sometimes the story weirds me out, like how there's little bits of things I went through in high school, and I get nervous over it, because it's like picking at a scab you didn't realize was still there. People who are honest, honest, honest to God memoirists are masochists, I think. But man, I love drawing comics. Please, Comic Gods, let me do this forever and ever.

kobold @ 12:25am: Today S*P is Eight Years Old.
Whee!

ksleet @ 3:36pm: Afterlife Blues update.
Updated last night, etc., etc.

In conclusion, I give you a highly educational video from the Spitzer Science Center.

kobold @ 11:02am: [WTF] I think this goes past Santa's "naughty" list.
Four year old boy found drinking a beer, wearing a girl's dress, and having just stolen presents from under his neighbor's tree.

Know how "Law & Order" takes news stories and jostles them a little to make episodes? I'm really, really hoping....

qcjeph @ 12:43am: Fart-chan Mark II


Tubgirl staggered and finally collapsed. "You...you have defeated me," she gasped.

"No," Fart-chan replied. "It was you who defeated yourself."

cuprohastes @ 1:23am: Orl Rite
 You probably saw this video before. It's a 1972 song written by an Italian chap. It's "What Wnglish sounds like to foreigners". The first time I played this I just hit play and left it running while I was doing something and didn't really know what the point was.  It turns out pretty much everything sounds like this to me to some extent. Which may explain why I spent most of my college and university career going "What?"  - Most of everything people said to me was half comprehensible gibberish the first time around. </div>

cuprohastes @ 9:00pm: Dear Brits

We are currently experiencing “Snow”.

 

I know this fascinating phenomenon has never been documented before in the history of the world. We have therefore compiled the following guide. The panel consisted of top scientists, some general scientists, a guy we found walking his dog, the three sober politicians we could find and a group of guys who all claim to be representatives of at least four different One True Faiths, who spent the entire panel debating whether “snow” is a sign from the Magic Invisible Friend, or a warning, and if so, what about.

Snow

• Contrary to what you may have heard and indeed, be putting into practice, the occurrence of “snow” does not:
• Suspend all traffic laws.
• Drive faster
• mean you should rush to the supermarket to buy fifteen loaves of bread.
  Snow is probably not the first sign of the zombie apocalypse.
• The presence of a half inch of “snow” on the ground is not prima fascia evidence that:
• You should immediately leave work and go home
• You should stay home instead of going to work
• You will be snowed in and die.

cngsoft @ 12:30am: Noticia urgente - This just in
Roy E. Disney, de 79 años de edad, acaba de fallecer.

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Roy E. Disney passed away at the age of 79.

http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2009/12/16/obit-disney-roy.html

kobold @ 6:56pm: I know a lot of people are making wishes about what happens to Oral Roberts in the after life - some considerably more forgiving than others.

I admit it - I hate faith healers. I hate people who prey on the weak (probably why I look at all politicians with contempt) - whether that weakness is physical, mental, or emotional.

I have no interest in what happens to Oral Roberts's alleged soul. Whether he ends up in a spiritual rave where he's sucking on countless pills and body parts with no fear of consequences or he's in the depths of hell performing mutual colonoscopies with Jim Jones - doesn't matter.

I'm more interested in what can be done to curb the actions of the faith healers who are still out there making a profit. Like Benny Hinn.