dcomic 445

[071130]

So here’s 445. In other news, though:

So my parents bought me my D830 this summer for roughly 2k when all expenses are considered. For the most part, I have no qualms about this laptop, specially when you consider I’m moving over from 14 inch laptops. I do, however, have a qualm with this shitty little auditorium swing-out desks that don’t give you enough room to do anything. So while my D830 sees heavy use on my desk in my dorm, my 500m is getting a new lease on life due to those shitty desks. Can you believe they make us TEST on those desks? It’s ridiculous.

Anyways, I realized recently this wasn’t the best plan for laptop purchase. Here I bought ONE $2k laptop for college, meaning it’s supposed to last about four years. But this is the wrong approach. What I should have done was bought TWO $1k laptops, once every 2 years. At the end of four years not only do you have TWO laptops, but the second laptop will have better specs than the $2k laptop you bought at the beginning of four years in the first scenario. This is also a more flexible solution: now that I consider those shitty auditorium desks, I’d go back to a 14 inch laptop in two years.

Speaking of computers, the D-san collection of computers has grown to ten units with the acquisition of a Dell Optiplex at the beginning of Thanksgiving break. For great justice.

Speaking of justice, compare C071126 to C061106 from just over a year ago. The latter image reigned as my signature work for a few months before being superceded by 070211. Anyways, it’s a good comparison because they’re both ToTA fanarts. It’s nice (for me at least) to see that progress is still there, despite being imperceptible (to me at least) for much of the year. I can only hope for the best in the coming year…

Anyways, the general idea behind the current method (my colored work can apparently be grouped by the “methods” they use: if you look at my DA gallery http://bradlycolin.deviantart.com/gallery/, 071120 and 071126 are done approximately the same way; 070928 through 070703 share a different method; 070612 and 070522 are the same, etc, etc) is to use OpenCanvas’ inking tool to imitate my hacks on pencil lineart. I’m making use of a quantum principle that noise on a microscopic level does not translate into noise at a macroscopic level. A “noisy” piece of art, when “noisy” at a low enough level will not translate into a “noisy” piece. The other piece of the puzzle is that perfection is the wrong direction to go. Don’t even try to make anything perfect, it’s not worth the trouble.

The methods are somewhat cyclical; the next thing I try will probably once again be using a pencil lineart…

Oh yeah, I think NWars traffic has actually risen by a miniscule amount since the beginning of the year. At this point I’m tempted to reset the counter and take a look. What amazes me is how this comic is actually in the top 10% for “the webcomic list”‘s ranking system. Maybe it’s just a bug in their system and we should actually be in the bottom ten percent, but if that top 10% is actually true, it means we aren’t too bad despite my worst fears. Anyways I’m tempted to reset the counter and take a look. Total traffic for the past two years has been like 17k including reloads.

Ok, that’s it I think. Have yourself a nice day.

J171 – Of; Agenda

[11/26/2007]

Moé.

Hey, look, today’s comic is jcomic123 ! Of course, in hexadecimal that’s 7B, so I guess there’s nothing really special about that number. It is divisible by 3, though.

Anyway, I suppose I have to say this, because no matter how hard you try someone always takes something the wrong way. I’m not making fun of anyone or anything here (at least not intentionally), except perhaps for J-san’s zaniness. I simply found the idea amusing.

Now that that’s over with, onto the technical aspects of the comic. I used a lot more references for today’s comic than I’ve ever used before. This is due to having things in the comic such as the White House, the Oval Office, or maids, things that I have no idea how to draw correctly, as much as I like to think I know what they look like. Also, you may have noticed that the backgrounds in panels 1, 2, and 3 of the comic on the right were left uninked. This is a sort of convention I’ve adopted (see some of the later Sandstorm comics, for example) to help the characters stand out from what’s behind them and draw more attention to themselves. At least, that’s what I’m aiming for. I’m hoping it works.

Anyway, you may have noticed that there is a small “” in the upper-right-hand corner of the webpage. I’m not sure what causes it, other than that it’s caused by the first block of PHP code executing. This problem seems to afflict other pages as well, up to and including a “check the weather” widget on an iPhone. Go figure. (The irony here is that, to get “” to show up here in the rant, I had to type in special character sequences.)

Oh, I finally caved in and got a deviantART account. Yay! There’s (almost) nothing on it~! Also, the site’s code hates me. It wants me to put all my art in the category “Fan Art”, which it most certainly is not. Come to think of it, I don’t think we actually have *any* Nonsense Wars fan art. (Okay, there is this picture of π-tan, but I don’t really count her as a Nonsense Wars character.)

Anyway, that’s basically all for today. Ciao~!

J170 – Discrepancy; References

[11/19/2007]

The first of these two 4koma was inspired by a trip I took to IHOP one day to have breakfast for dinner. It was fun. I will be repeating the stunt on Wednesday. I like the waiter guy, but, like the police chief in Sandstorm, he has that difficult-to-replicate-correctly non-inkable hair. Why do I torture myself so~~

The second one started out as a two-line exchange I thought of on my own. (The exact lines are not represented in the comic.) The final form and dialogue were inspired by a conversation I had with Derek while trying to figure out the lines for another 4koma, which has not yet been drawn.

A separate and completely unrelated, but amusing, conversation follows below. Some background: There is currently an anime airing in Japan called Clannad. It’s based off of a visual novel of the same name, produced by a company called Key, which has also produced several other visual novels. Most of them follow similar plots, which have been summarized as “Guy moves into new town, meets an improbably large number of girls who all have issues”. That said, the ending animation for the Clannad anime features animated dango, a type of Japanese “dumpling”. (animation). These have been described as “moeblobs” (moé), and represented with the emoticon ( ” )  . Alright, with that out of the way, you can now read and make sense of the following IM conversation. (kenocolin is me and c0mmander w0lf is Derek.)

kenocolin:   uh oh: [ EDIT: long link removed. ]
c0mmander w0lf:   AH HA HA HA
c0mmander w0lf:   OH DUDE
c0mmander w0lf:   they had
c0mmander w0lf:    like clannad canned bread
c0mmander w0lf:   or something
c0mmander w0lf:   like that
kenocolin:   oh dear
c0mmander w0lf:   yeah
c0mmander w0lf:   OH
c0mmander w0lf:   they had
kenocolin:   they might make a fortune if they start selling dango
c0mmander w0lf:   Kanon jam
kenocolin:   ( ‘ )
kenocolin:   er
c0mmander w0lf:   lol
kenocolin:   that one was one-eyed
c0mmander w0lf:   ( ” )
kenocolin:   ( ” )
kenocolin:   (- -)
c0mmander w0lf:   lol
kenocolin:   (‘ )
kenocolin:   looking left
c0mmander w0lf:   ( )
c0mmander w0lf:   back side
kenocolin:   ( ” );
kenocolin:   lol
c0mmander w0lf:   _____
c0mmander w0lf:   roadkill
c0mmander w0lf:   ok
kenocolin:   (‘ x)
kenocolin:   kenshin
c0mmander w0lf:   lol
c0mmander w0lf:   ( ” ” )
c0mmander w0lf:   siamese twins
kenocolin:   lololol
kenocolin:   / ”
kenocolin:   armor-plated
c0mmander w0lf:   lol
kenocolin:   // ” \
kenocolin:   further plated
c0mmander w0lf:   ”
c0mmander w0lf:   white dango
c0mmander w0lf:   in a
c0mmander w0lf:   snow storm
kenocolin:   good one
kenocolin:   oh man
kenocolin:   this could so be a post
c0mmander w0lf:   this could be so retarded
kenocolin:   [ ” ]
c0mmander w0lf:   (which it is)
kenocolin:   cubist dango
c0mmander w0lf:   lol
kenocolin:   (= )
kenocolin:   american-style
c0mmander w0lf:   I dun get it
kenocolin:   like
kenocolin:   an “american” smiley
kenocolin:   is horizontal
c0mmander w0lf:   oh
kenocolin:   a “japanese/asian” smiley
c0mmander w0lf:   ehhh
kenocolin:   is vertical
c0mmander w0lf:   I don’t know if you can
kenocolin:   okay, fine
c0mmander w0lf:   generalize
c0mmander w0lf:   like that
c0mmander w0lf:   but
kenocolin:   horizontal dango
c0mmander w0lf:   I get it
c0mmander w0lf:   lol
kenocolin:   _____(= )___( ” )___( =)___
kenocolin:   rolling dango
c0mmander w0lf:   ah ha
c0mmander w0lf:   ( .. )
c0mmander w0lf:   top view
kenocolin:   >=={}===( ” )
kenocolin:   missile dango
c0mmander w0lf:   might as well have
kenocolin:   ah, good top view
c0mmander w0lf:   >-( xx )->
c0mmander w0lf:   speared
kenocolin:   oof
kenocolin:   ( ‘ ° )
kenocolin:   monocle
c0mmander w0lf:   ) ” )
c0mmander w0lf:   with a bite
c0mmander w0lf:   taken out
kenocolin:   more like
kenocolin:   erm
c0mmander w0lf:   oh oh oh
c0mmander w0lf:
c0mmander w0lf:   lack thereof
kenocolin:   ) O O )
kenocolin:   er
kenocolin:   hmm
c0mmander w0lf:   (      ”     )
c0mmander w0lf:   obese
kenocolin:   lololol
kenocolin:   er
kenocolin:   no
c0mmander w0lf:   and
c0mmander w0lf:   (“)
kenocolin:   be politicially correct
c0mmander w0lf:   anorexic
kenocolin:   “horizontally challenged”
c0mmander w0lf:   LOL
c0mmander w0lf:   ok copypasta this into your rant
c0mmander w0lf:   when you write it
kenocolin:   sure, let me save
c0mmander w0lf:   ok
c0mmander w0lf:   my own
c0mmander w0lf:   shower
c0mmander w0lf:   tiem
kenocolin:   ^( ” )^
kenocolin:   dango with Haruhi ribbon

C071120

[071116]

“… so this … this is what having a p***s feels like …”

Anyways, before I begin, that’s not my caption. Just fyi.

So today we’ve got some doodles instead of 445. J and I were talking about… er… what the crap were we talking about? Whatever it was it got me doing these re-interpretations of old characters and J’s characters. Oh yeah, we were talking about doing a BKS related one-shot. A one-shot like Sandstorm. But better. Hopefully.

Anyways, the first scan mainly depicts Keno Colin and on the right, Bradly Colin. These two are (my and J)’s original original characters dating back to July of 1998. This rehash is based off the version of Keno I used for Reflection, though it fixes his hueg chin and hueg hair. I tried to give him somewhat of a bishie appearance and I think it turned out pretty well. Mentally I think of Keno as the cool and composed older brother, something of a Ryosuke from Initial D. At the same rate, I imagine Bradly to be like Keisuke.

Second picture is of Senator Kaska, leader of the senatorial forces against Bradly and Keno. He should be an internal ugly character, but Reflection seems to suggest that he and Keno were amicable at some point in time. Of all the redrawn characters, Kaska is one of my favorites here. He looks a bit younger than he does in Reflection, though I feel like I corrected it a bit in some of the iterations.

Then comes the Lesser Demon and her Co-Worker. Somehow Lesser Demon seemed to come across as an irritated white collar worker whereas her co-worker seemd to be more of the onee-chan type. I think these impressions come across rather well in the sketches. J was mentioning how her cap was backwards because it was hard to draw forwards… I completely agree. It’s a Pokemon League cap if you didn’t notice. Because Pokemon is the devil. Her sunglasses were a bit annoying too. The way they’re shaded isn’t very happy’ it looks better if they’re left unshaded. But then you can’t tell that they’re sunglasses. It just doesn’t work well with the open-rim hack.

Fourth picture shows Checkout Robot Cachiera and Zan. I imagined CRC as perpetually having a neutral expression (Similar to what’s her face Evangeline’s mech in Negima, emphasis on similar). Her cooling fans reminded me of oversized headphones, so I thought she’d look good with a hairband. However, J claims she looks like Haruhi with the hairband. Anyways, the upper left drawing is my second favorite of the lot. As for Zan… well, it’s Zan. J can elaborate, I don’t know what the hell is going on with that guy XD.

Finally, we have a painting of Chikara. Good grief she’s come a long way since her Introduction three years ago. It’s less comprehensive, but I think this illustration is going to replace C070211 as my “Featured Deviation” on my DeviantART account.

Alright, that’s it. Will probably have 445 and 446 in the next two weeks. And then it’s done with Part 4.

dcomic 444

[071116]

Recently, before I write an update these days, I usually go to J and ask him whether or not he has an entry idea… aka something to write aboout. Usually he gives me something lame that I don’t use, but this time around he thought of something reasonable. He tells me to write about uncompleted projects and/or the process of creating a so called project.

No unlike I don’t have many uncompleted projects. I was even telling him that I didn’t have any, but that isn’t true because I have ONE uncompleted project. Just one. But then again, I don’t have as many so called projects to start with so maybe that’s a factor. You may recall an entry I wrote concerning a short story called There Is an I in Spaceship, aka TIAIIS, in particular the entries for episodes 77 and 79. TIAIIS can be downloaded in pdf format from here when the server, Colette, is online [100613: Dead link]. Which she isn’t at the time of writing.

So about the unfinished project, it was supposed to be called “Back to Square One”. I got that from the Yugioh card of the same name. There were some concept doodles done, some pages written, but nothing came of it and I stopped writing it and did TIAIIS. There is one piece of BtSO art floating around and it’s a redraw from last year [100613: Dead link]. They’re not terribly good drawings but the real thing was even worse, though art that I didn’t really like wasn’t the only reason I stopped.

For the most part, I avoid these short story type things because I can’t really think of anything good to write about. In general. Same goes for this entry, that’s why it’s J’s idea. I can never think of anything that I feel will have some sort of “punch” to it, something that’ll actually come across in twenty pages. Of course I have trouble thinking of original stories in general; I’m just not that original of a person. That’s why I just work on this NWars storyline. It has a rather overused idea, but I just fuck with it a bit and pretend it’s original.

To sum it up: No idea = No project.

The BtSO story was supposed to be something like Reflection where it’s a small bit of a bigger picture. but in general I just felt that it was even worse. The few pages that are drawn are among the many psd’s in the above link, though I don’t remember the exact numbers. Prolly near the psd’s for TIAIIS.

Errr. Nothing really to say on this, I don’t do enough project-ing to have anything to say.

J169 – Sandstorm: “Director’s Cut”

Deep within the recesses of the Nonsense Wars archive was discovered a script for the “director’s cut” edition of Sandstorm. Besides a few minor cosmetic and theatrical differences here and there, it turned out that this edition had an entirely new ending, which is presented here as an edited production comic:

Wait a minute, what the heck?

[11/13/2007]

So, lately, my computer’s been making this irritating buzzing noise I suspect it’s somehow related to the fan. Looks like it’s time to take it in for an investigation…

Just to be clear, today’s update is not a director’s cut. It’s just some silly self-parody. As I said last time, I had planned out the lines of the last few pages on paper (okay, in notepad.exe) before starting. One of the iterations of the dialogue was:

J:	Well, I guess I was expecting something to happen.
D:	Like what?
J:	I don’t know. Something different.

And of course, all of a sudden the images you see above came unbidden into my head. Hence the update.

Wow, I beat Derek to the update. Amazin’.

dcomic 443

[071110]

So I don’t have a terribly large room (at home; my dorm is miniscule compared to my native abode), it’s somewhat larger than J’s (But J’s room is still spacious compared to my dorm), but J gets to keep his stuff around his house. Luckily or not, I don’t have that luxury. And as you may or may not have deduced, I’m quite the kleptomaniac and have built up quite the collection of… stuff over my 18 years in the world. A very large portion of this stuff is Lego (Probably even 50% by volume), but large things like old computers and electronics are starting to take up significant space.

So it’s a never ending battle to keep making more space out of a set amount of space and I do routine re-organizations of my… stuff in the name of opening up space for more… stuff. Currently I have about 5-6 file boxes worth of “raw” space (one file box is maybe 2-3 cubic feet of space) and maybe another 10 file boxes worth of “dead” space (space that’s impractically shaped [for now] for general storage, or filled by empty boxes). Raw space is just empty space that’s practical to use. On the other hand, a good example of dead space is a tower of space about 6 file boxes high where you don’t really want to put heavy file boxes as it’s hard to get one out and there’s a good chance of killing the ones on the bottom under a heavy load. Hence, most of the “dead” space in my room is filled with empty boxes. And of course there’s like unaccounted for space which is just the odd cracks here and there that I can’t fill. Like the space under the celing but above my height. That kinda thing.

Now I bring this up because I actually won a major victory in the battle for space today, freeing up approximately 4-5 file boxes of space (generally by filling up “unaccounted” space and moving “dead space” around; this is why I’m good at Tetris).

I have an old PC monitor, a ViewSonic CRT (frankly the best CRT I’ve ever used; it might not have a terribly large screen, but it’s relatively compact… and the screen is FLAT!), and it takes up about one and a half file boxes of space (from now I’m going to abbreviate file box as fb. So that CRT is about 1.5fb) and prior to today, it’s been sitting on the ground. My original intent was to simply make room such that I could put this thing on a shelf, but I ended up freeing up more space than I originally intended.

The big breakthrough came when I replaced a beam being used to hang clothes with one half the length, as more than 4/5 of that length was not being used at all. That gave me about 2.5 fd of space, to which I relocated 2 actual boxes of stuff. (Here you can see the dowel that was taking up unnecessary space; this is an old picture, though [100613: Dead link]). In the space at the very top of my closet which had originally been filled with a mix of boxes I dedicated solely to file boxes of stuff, which used up the space more effectively. Finally, a similar consolidation was done with Lego boxes elsewhere. I would have consolidated the Lego much earlier, but I was worried about stacking older boxes more than 4-5 high. Oh well.

Anyways, here are some pictures before and after today’s reorganization [100613: Two dead links].

PS. Today’s comic is not retexted. I am not happy with the text of the comic but I do not know how I want to go about fixing it. That’s why it’s later than usual and un-retexted.

J168 – Sandstorm 15

[11/5/2007]

Today, there were a whole bunch of Guy Fawkes masks (the type from “V for Vendetta” pasted over various pictures and posters in the hallway (example). Figures.

nNyway, the final installment of “Sandstorm” has arrived. Sorry about the weirdness of it all. Let me try to explain:

“Sandstorm” was intially going to be a parody-type thing of those “alternate universe” mini-stories, like those RPG-based ones from Megat*kyo. Hence, the first installment was titled “Alternate Universe Rodeo: Sandstorm”. But then, for some reason I don’t remember, I decided to take it in a more serious direction, with only a vague idea of where I really wanted to go with it. (Actually, it seems that normal N-wars works that way too. Hmm.) So, bascially, we get incoherent elements such as “Sandstorm J” ‘s knife. (For why I’m referring to the character this way, see this entry and this entry.) It was supposed to be somewhat important originally. Spreading it out over 6 months wasn’t particularly helpful either.

Also, not planning out the plot led to a 180-degree change in direction right in the middle of drawing this comic. Until I started on the third panel, I had completely been intending for “Sandstorm J” to escape successfully. Why the sudden change? Part of it might have been due to the difficulty I was having in drawing the pose I had originally intended, but I also realized at that point that the ending I had had in mind was not going to work. Given the way this one turned out, though, I’m almost sorry I didn’t. There would have been an actual sandstorm (which, judging by the third panel here, I would have done a bad job on) and sandpunk police cars. (I was toying with the idea of a stirling– or steam-powered motorcycle, too.) The meganekko police girl would have gotten more appearances, too. But I couldn’t figure out how to work it out so that “Sandstorm J” escapes from the police cars on foot. (Granted, he’s dodging a bullet here, but perhaps the police chief is just not a good shot at that range.)

Sometime before drawing this comic, I decided to plan out the rest of the lines in the story, because if I did it wrong, I would give the piece the wrong tone. I’m not even sure how to describe what I was going for here. Part of it was trying to leave the true nature of the reactor’s origin abmiguous — I may have overdone this part a bit. I can say, though, that I had originally (before the part where I pulled a 180 on the plot) been intending for the reactor to have been placed there by someone else. Now, even I’m not really sure exactly what really happened. It’s like the story’s been detached from my influence somehow.

Or perhaps I just didn’t feel like making up my mind?

dcomic 442

[071026]

So at the request… or rather, coercion, of m’verygoodfriend Mr. Tsui, I’m playing Ace Attorney, Pheonix Wright. Hold it. Objection. Good grief. I’m like three hours into it; what’s supposed to be a 10-20 hour game. Fun fun. I imagine this is prolly how visual novels play, but I could be wrong.

But as you may have inferred from last week’s update I’ve setup my own webserver using Windows XP Pro and some free software. Namely the reasonably well known Apache http server and something called “xlight” for the ftp side of things. I couldn’t figure out how to get the default windows server software working. The box is that of my old and noisy Athlon XP (to get a name when I think of a good one XD) which has undergone a few patchy mods over the year. I’ve only had this for about a year and a half, but the mobo and processor are more than four years old. The server’s harddrive is from an old Dell – in the range of about 10 years. The newest component is the oversized CPU fan; DIY’ed to the heatsink with… paperclips.

Don’t expect NWars to be hosted anywhere other than freepages for a while though. My home connection is m’notsogoodfriend Comcast which, as you may know, is being pummelled for restricting bittorrent traffic here and there. I can attest that I’ve had my own download and upload speeds capped, at 750 and 50 kb/s respectively. But then again it’s not like NWars generates a lot of traffic. And the freepages hosting is just that. Free.

You can access the server at http://trianglesoft.net. There’s some old art there and some reference pictures. Nothing too exciting. Occasionally you should be able to find anime there, as I’m trying to avoid using bittorrent on my college network. Not to mention even with it’s 750kb/s cap, my comcast connection is sadly faster.

I’m still trying to figure out how to work this DNS thing such that it will “bind” the trianglesoft url to the IP (like it’ll display “trianglesoft.net” even if you enter the IP and so I can make subdomains… I just think it’d be hella cool to have “server1.trianglesoft.net” or the like XD). The reason that I have a domain at all is that my comcast connection has a somewhat dynamic IP and it may change from time to time. So my links should be written with the trianglesoft url such that I can redirect everything at the same time.

Anyways, comics are done through 459, but it looks like it might be a while before I get onto 460.

PS. The reference from today’s comic is this stupid youtube video featuring a randomass song and a particular secret boss fight in Tales of Destiny. When we (my usual Tales of gaming crew) actually went against this boss we took him out with a 1E6+ hit “infinite combo”, which, I daresay, was quite something. It’s a shame they usually fix these bugs in American releases of games. The line “until they reloaded the game” is not an original line. One of us thought this one up after we lost a particular boss fight… don’t quite recall the details.