Month: May 2008

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.

dcomic 465

[080512]

Well, I have a final in 45 minutes, and it’s only now that I’ve given up on studying and am therefore writing this update.

Despite the imminent test, I actually finished drawing 482 and texting 465 (today’s update) through 469 (update in five weeks). 483 and a bit further seems likely, since my week will kinda be going downhill (as in easier, not worse) after this test.

So I wasn’t really intending to draw a comic between yesterday and this test, but it just so happened that ran out of uploaded, texted comics and I needed to make another batch. My initial attempts at text (meaning the shit I actually scrawl on the comic when it’s drawn) for these past few comics have been pretty good,s making batches of texted comics has been a pretty quick task. Thus, I was making this next batch of comics and I inspired myseslf to draw the next page.

Yeah, wtf, I agree. I dunno, just after reading the particular part of the comic I was texting, I had an urge to draw. So it happened.

That being said, it wasn’t on tablet or anything, though I’ve been saying the next comic would be in tablet for a while now. Just not fuckin good enough to do it on tablet. That being said now, 482 was nonetheless experimental despite being in pencil. Two experimental methods of shading, both intended to do a better job of covering large areas consistently (or at least giving a better illusion of covering large areas consistently).

I actually think it’s good having this massive lag between the comic draw date and the comic post date; I think it gives me a better sense of whether something I tried was really better or worse. We’re actually real close to my next two experimental pages now at 468 and 469. Part five ends at 475; that’s a whopping 27 pages for the part.

It’s also “supposed” to be the real turning point in the story. We’re finally getting out here…

dcomic 464

[080504]

I’ve been unusually tired these days despite getting a bit more sleep than usual (I’d venture up to 8 as opposed to 6 to 7) so I haven’t really felt like doing anything drawing wise. The panels for 482 have been put down for at least a week and nothing has come of it. I actually wasn’t even going to write anything today, but I’ve got a bit of free time here between classes.

… not that there’s really anything to say. Since I haven’t really felt like doing anything terribly productive, I’ve figured that I might as well put the downtime to good use by spamming some anime; I went through the rest of Justin’s Binchotan and all of Magical Pokan and I’m going to get cracking on Canvas. This is of course assuming that I continue to feel like not doing anything, which is actually looking unlikely seeing that I’ve started writing this damn paper that’s due in two weeks and am writing this update here and now.

Binchotan was weak. I didn’t like it. Magical Pokan, on the other hand, was quite entertaining. I think part of the reason I don’t watch completed series anymore is that I have a tendency to spam them (or maybe it’s the other way around: when I want to spam a series I tend to watch complete series). This season I’m also following Allison to Lillia, Code Geass 2, Druaga, Kurenai, and Nabari no Ou. Not too much going on recently.

Interesting point with Magical Pokan was that I actually got a true full-screen viewing on my TC4200, meaning it just happened to have a 4:3 aspect ratio. Apparently we don’t get much of that these days; even widescreen seems to be less than the 8:5 ratio on my D830. I dunno why nobody decided to standardize TV and notebook screen aspect ratios; my general sentiment is that the industry is generally stupid that way.

Either Tokyopop is being an ass with their releases or Borders is being an ass with their updates, but not seeing any sort of manga turnover at my local Borders after about a month is somewhat annoying. Sunnyvale Border’s doesn’t seem to have too much of a larger selection these days either. Blah.

I went to the “local” Micro Center and I was surprised to what I found: 3.5 inch to 2.5 inch drive bay adapters for only four dollars a piece! Previously I haven’t seen such a thing for less than fourteen, which is absolutely ridiculous considering it’s just a piece of metal with some holes in it. Yes I could make my own, no I wouldn’t want to and I’d still need a 3.5 inch to 2.5 ATA adapter which is like three dollars on its own.

I’ve been looking to move Colette to notebook hard drives for a while now largely due to noise. Both desktop and notebook drives seem to vary a lot with respect to noise output, but on average notebook drives are a lot quieter. With a modern notebook drive I’d even be getting a speed boost compared to my old Maxtor drive. The problem is that nobody seems to sell 7200rpm 2.5″ ATA drives anymore, which is downright annoying. And it’s not just retailers, it’s ebay as well. I don’t really mind the lower transfer speeds of 5400rpm drives, but I’d like some better seek times which are already the worse of HDD bottlenecks.

Wish there was a Micro Center near me. Fry’s has a smaller selection and they’re more expensive. Newegg has tax in California which is the most annoying thing ever, specially when you have to pay that tax ontop of shipping. Buying small items is totally not worthwhile.

Anyways, I was going to comment that it might be J’s record for missing an update, but that’s actually in the two years between 64 and 155. My record is actually a lot flakier; it might actually be the current run between 158 and now. Actually, just did some counting, it’s actually the gap between 76 and 145.

Ok that’s it.