2004 – 2014
[10/29/2007]
This comic was another rally run, basically drawn in 1 hour of sketching yesterday and then 2~3 hours of inking and shading today. I’m not sure how come I keep doing this now. Probably it’s not intentional. More like me waiting till the last minute.
Just had to go fix a typo in Derek’s comic. There’s a typo in his rant too, but I can’t be bothred to fix it now. Ah well.
[071026]
Drawn up through 459 now. Experimental “features” for 454 and 455 also complete. Looks pretty “sharp” according to a friend of mine.
So I’m actually writing this one up a bit early. During my friday CME session for that matter. This room is very stuffy and I fear I’ll fall asleep if I’m only paying attention. Paying attention can be quite the difficult task, as I’m sure we’ve all found out the hard way. Professor’s talking about fitting lines to scatter plots…
Ok so I hate like adhering to someone else’s eating schedule cuz I get hungry at rather arbitrary times. Eating on a cafeteria system can get annoying at times as I can’t just go and get snacks throughout the day as I usually would at home. So I bought snacks industrial quantities and set them in my room. This consists of lage amounts of goldfish and gatorade.
Now I can’t drink Gatorade unless I have ice and this still requires me to get out to the cafeteria, but the ice machine is open at more hours than the cafeteria itself. So that was great, but sometimes they turn off that ice machine. Only happened a few times now, but it’s annoying.
So I thought ok. I need to get my own ice somehow. Problem is, unlike dry foods like goldfish and power drinks like gatorade, ice doesn’t keep so well at room temperature. So what doo I need? A fridge. Duh. Where am I going to get that? Well, it’s no fun unless I build one.
Well, I haven’t actually build a fridge, but I’ve got a good idea as to how to go about it. There’s a thing called a thermoelectric cooler that works off something else called the Peltier effect. I don’t really have more than a broad idea of how it works, but what this thing does is move heat.
So we know that, given sufficient insulation around a given space, moving heat out of that space will lower the temperature. So we place our TEC in the walls of something like a foam box, add a few fatty heatsinks and a power source… and voila. Instant fridge.
And it shouldn’t be that much harder in practice than in theory; most components are premade for you. e TEC itself is widely available and many should be compatible with PC heatsinks. At the same time an old PC power supply should provide juice and the foam box is a joke.
Ok, well sometime when I’m not too lazy I’ll take a look at this. That’s all for now.
PS: I wanted to add that I usually update a bit earlier than J, but you’ll need to scroll up in the drop-down menu to see an early update on my half. So you can check that on a sunday or occasionally a saturday or friday and possibly expect to see an early update.
[10/23/2007]
Happy Mole Day again, everyone. (I hadn’t realized this before I started writing this rant.)
So, on the topic of random junk that’s happened: I’ve built an “ion motor” in my room. Sort of. Basically, it’s an S-shaped paperclip balanced on another paper clip. When you
WARNING: SCIENCE CONTENT!
connect the “motor” to a high-voltage power source, charge gathers, collecting at the sharp points at the ends of the “S” (this is how charge behaves). The gathered charge creates a strong electric field at the ends of the “S”, charging the air nearby, which then expands (charged air particles repel other similarly charged air particles), spinning the spinner.
Where did you get a high-voltage power source, you ask?
Why, almost every house these days has one.
END SCIENCE CONTENT
I also participated in a cardboard boat race. This is not as dumb as it sounds. We were allowed to use waterproofing lacquer/paint and caulk, so you could actually make your boat waterproof. Our team took first …
In vertical speed. We left with the “Titanic Award”. Ah well, such is life. Picture of boat here (with (obscure) meme!).
I hope it’s clear that “J” is putting on his vest in the last panel. (Like I said last time, the characters aren’t actually named; “J” is a convenient way of referring to him, though.)
EDIT: LOL @ Derek spoofing panels from some of my older comics. GG, dude.
[071020]
456 in process of being drawn.
I’m really liking some of the art up here past 454. It’s unshaded due to laziness and a miscalculation concerning the heavy shading of pages of past, but the lineart is coming together quite well. Essentially I’m trying to put together the cleaness of pages in the 410 and 420 series with the – for lack of a better word – “substance” of the upper 430 and lower 440 series.
Both are kind of experiments in the extremes so I’m poking around the middle ground for now. Though I really like the last panel on 455, 454 and 456 are probably some of the pages for a while. Hopefully this keeps up into 457 when I reintroduce shading XD.
Anyways I realized a while ago that somewhere along the line I stopped trying to immitate the Akamatsu style. Conference with J confirms the fact that the Akamatsu influence has largely left my drawing. I don’t really know when this started to happen, but my best guess is that it started way back in the 410’s.
Anyways that’s all I’ve gotta say. Have yourselves a nice day.
[10/16/2007]
Originally, I was going to post something else. But then I thought, “Hey, if I hustle, then I can get a page of Sandstorm done, and then I can keep up a chain of Sandstorm updates again.” So today’s comic was done in less than two days’ time. Whee.
Recently, one of my textbooks fell off my shelf, hitting my poor computer and dislodging the “delete” key. Now it doesn’t really stay on, so it’s kind of a bummer when I go over there to hit it and wind up pushing this random rubber point instead. I guess I’ll either have to fix it or get used to it.
I finally caved in and bought a 4H pencil, as discussed back in this update. There were no 6H pencils in the store, so I setteled for 4H. This was probably a good idea as the 4H is pretty darn hard already, and I don’t want my art to be too invisible.
Read Derek’s “entry” for today before continuing.
Another alternative would be to use “J” and “D” as initails for something else. I’m still not sure what’s wrong with keeping the original names, but whatever.
Or he could do what I’m doing for Sandstorm, which is basically to avoid mentioning the character names at all. (How many of you noticed?)
