dcomic 468

[080530]

468. Yay.

At this point I was actually going to say something like “no real comment on this one”, but then I decided to check what the page actually looked like. And I do have a comment to make, but not much. I probably intended to write way more when I first drew up this page, but most of the things I wanted to say have been lost to the… y’know depths of memory or something.

This page and the following page are done completely digitally. No pencil drafts or anything. I took my big tablet (not the TC4200; that was still three months off in January) and just started drawing. It took maybe twice as long just to do the lineart as it would for me to do a complete comic page on paper at the time. That’s seriously like 5-6 hrs and then some for the digital toning.

It’s not bad I guess, but after two comics I obviously decided to stick with paper as paper is what I’m using right now at 485. Honestly I just can’t do digitally what I can do on paper yet. I tried again at 479 (maybe I’ll have more things to say when that one comes up) and it still failed hard. And I didn’t even tone 479. I dunno, the paintchats always seem to come out beyond my expecations, but when it’s time to get down to business, it just doesn’t go as well.

Anyways, I don’t really like the text for the next few pages, so it’s subject to change with the compilation of part 5. Which reminds me: I should prolly print hard copies of these two pages sometime… I dunno how the toning will show up on paper. It was really hard to scale it properly so it didn’t do queer shit when I resized the image. I guess in general it was just hard to create a toning policy – like when to change the tone size or when to change the color, etc.

OpenCanvas 4 is real nice though. I like how it lets me use the legacy brushes to paint and stuff… and then give you some added features and all.

Colette is back up after a week of downtime following that multiple installation meltdown I had last week. I’ve taken the time to finally swap out the CPU fan and the HDD to quieter alternatives. Still not silent, but there’s a lot of fans and my fan controller just doesn’t go that low. I think most of the remaining noise is just that of air running through the thing, not any of the fans. I mean it’s like a subdued version of what my AC sounds like.

A bunch of backend changes too: SP3, new printer driver, new http server, in theory I should be able to do complicated stuff like mysql databases and all, but hell if I have any use for that. I was talking to a friend online and somewhere along the line made an simple splash page as well. Basically just a modded variant of the CPUZ dump for this machine. Gonna be my new homepage from now. Or something.

Have a good one folks.

J194 – Jolt

[5/27/2008] Late, but not gone! An improvement! It’s an improvement, right?

*crickets*

It’s been a long time between drinks for Chris, who appears on the right edge of this comic. (He hasn’t been seen since this comic. Anyway, the point of the first “panel” (…) was to have D in front of people he knew in the comic. Turns out, going through the archives, he is only shown interacting directly with J, the Lesser Demon, and Chris. Go figure.

Also, new character! Yay~! And no weird arm this time! Yay! Although, other things are weird… I don’t think Nonsense Wars has ever had a constant “normal” female character…

dcomic 467

[080524]

Wow damn, we’re here already. When you’re putting out one comic a week the story really seems to crawl, but at the same time there are times like this where you think… well, “wow damn, we’re here already”. So yeah. This is actually getting towards the end of part 5. The story should be going over the top within the first few pages of part 6. And yes, I’m actually there.

So I actually pushed out a few comic pages in the last weekish or so; we’re up to 484 now and I’ve got some of 485 done. There’s this dead zone between like class-work ending and studying for finals, so I’ll try to work on the comic some then. This weekend is actually particularly filled for me; for one thing I’m going to Fanime (as of now) on Sunday. Memorial Day is actually my only vacation day this entire quarter. It’s a relatively short quarter, but it still sucks balls.

This week I crippled three windows installations for great justice. Along the way I discovered that my D830 actually gets hella battery life. On Wedsday I ran it down to 40% battery whilst getting about 30 minutes for every 11% battery. That adds up to something like somewhat under 5 hrs which is on par, if not better than my TC4200. I venture I could get like 7 with the extended battery o_O.

Well that’s that. Don’t really have anything exciting to say. Can’t wait ’til school’s out.

J193 – BAD END

[5/20/2008] Man, 2 updates missed in the past 3 weeks. On the ball, J, on the ball…

That being said, it’s finals week! That also being said, I only have two finals, one of which wrapped up today. With that said, I still have to pack…

Anyway, on to the comic itself! As I said in an earlier update, I often feel that webcomics aren’t taking advantage of the web format other than for its ease of use and ability to reach lots of people at once. Hence, as the universe collapses in this comic, we have html code in the background. If this were in an actual book, of course, I’d probably have the publisher cut the page into a funny shape.

You’ve got to take advantage of your medium sometimes, right?

dcomic 466

[080516]

So I’m actually writing this one in a car en route to Shoreline. Air conditioning is like a godsend; I cannot believe like no one has a dorm with air conditioning (a survey of two friends on the east coast and myself). Like I seriously don’t need to crappy little heater in the winter, but the heat these past few days has been ridiculous.

So I’m writing this a day later and I just wanted to say that I watched Ironman last night, hence being en route to Shoreline and all. My general sentiment is that it wasn’t too bad, but I’m not missing anything amazing by sticking to my anime. And that’s after watching both Harold and Kumars in the past two weeks too.

That’s it for now. May amend during the week.