J250 – Important Announcement

[8/31/2009] That’s right, folks! Tomorrow, September 1, 2009, marks 5 years since Nonsense Wars started running (observed). Of course, we started (well, D started) working on the site before then, and we may have launched a few days before, but we’ve traditionally celebrated it on the 1st of September each year.

Unfortunately, there will be no booze (D and I are both underage; we’re also not in the same state at the current time). However, there will be THREE updates this week, on Monday (this one), Wednesday, and Friday, as we used to do when the comic first launched (gasp! I know, right?). This will probably not be a permanent new feature, but enjoy it for this week at least!

Until next week Wednesday, ciao~!

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[090829]

So apparently the idea is to commemorate the 5th anniversary of NWars by putting up three 4komas in a week like we did back in the old days (really for less than a year in the grand scheme of things). My comic doesn’t really have anything to do with NWars, but they’ll be 4komas, hopefully funny, and “fit the spirit of fail”.

So who are these people? Well, you will find out on the next update on Wednesday. Maybe it’s just the next comic. I’m not sure if we’re actually making whole new updates or just ammending this post. Whatever J feels like doing.

Anyway, that’s pretty much it for now. Wednesday and Friday should be longer.

J249 – When Things Were More Hardcore

[8/25/2009] Hello, one day late again. orz.

Anyway, I’ve decided to end the plotline sooner. It was dragging on, and wasn’t really that interesting anymore (nor was it that funny). So, here we are. Wrapping it up, heading back towards funneh (hopefully?)

We haven’t seen Em in the comics before, but we have seen her here. Wow, hard to believe it’s been over a year already. In another case of “designed really complicated so it looks cool but is too hard to draw again later” (The first case being this clock tower), Em took me a while to render properly. It was fun though. Her right arm … er, it’s detachable! Yeah, that!

Alright, that’s all for this week. Heading back to MIT soon … if any of you are there, you can come find me at any of the Anime Club’s events during Freshmen Orientation.

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[090825]

So it looks like the icons for my html files changed after I updated FireFox to 3.5. Interesting.

Apparently I had a Eureka moment whilst talking to J this weekend about what I was going to write for this update. Unfortunately, Eureka moments don’t stick in my memory as well as they should, so I don’t know what it was that I was going to write about anymore. This same pattern has actually been going on for the past couple of weeks, save that we’ve actually remembered the Eureka ideaa in the past.

Anyway, having not used it for more than a year now, I sold the monstrous Wacom Intuos3 that I bought way back in 2005 (almost exactly four years ago, actually). This is the picture that was originally in the aforelinked entry; you can see my super awesome Inspiron 500m and my super awesome Dell mousepad in the background. The kicker is that I got almost 85% of the original retail value for the thing; I’m amazed at how well this thing retained its value, being an electronic device and all. Has table technology really not gotten any better?

Though my TC4200 isn’t as accurate or sensitive as the true tablet, it’s way easier to work with on the whole. I figure that if I was ready to go back to a tablet, I could get a much smaller Intuos3 as I was only using like 30% of the space on the 9 x 12 tablet. The next time I need something that big, I’d hope that I’d have the money to get a small Cintiq or something along those lines. So yeah, no more USB tablet for me right now.

Speaking of the tablet, I’m working on the fourth all-tablet page right now and it’s taking FOREVER. It’s getting a little bit ridiculous and the worst part is that I don’t know why it’s taking so long. I don’t think I’m pushing too hard on the quality, and I don’t think I’m drawing an excessive amount of guidelines or anything, so I just don’t know. J says it’s prolly just a matter of pracitce, but it’s just a tad bit frustrating when I can hash out the pages in a couple of hours on paper with fairly good quality to boot.

Alright, gotta work on this damn page. That’s it for now.

Live Action Paintchat

[8/20/2009] Sorry for the delay, everyone. My laptop’s hard disk decided to go funny on me, so I’m typing this on another computer while I’m trying to fix it.

Anyway, today’s update is a “Live-Action Paintchat” that Derek and I did a few weekends ago while taking a break from watching Higurashi no Naku Koro ni Kai. We took a large sheet of paper (27″ x 34″) and went at it with nothing more than #2 pencils and Cray*la markers! Of course, the markers hadn’t been used in several years, so most of them had gone bad — note the scribbles near the bottom of the image as we tried to figure out which markers were still usable. It was a lot of (immature) fun getting those “kiddie” markers to work for our purposes, but it seems like something good to try again (this time with a set of more functional markers, hopefully).

Desktop-size resolution of today’s update here!

P.S.: This past weekend I was in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. While I was there, I spotted the following bench:

Not too far away was this:

Nice … Bench?