VENUSIAN RADIO

Maybe tonight I’ll get to work on this. Ugh, I hate how...

Wed, 19 Jun 2013 11:55:15 -0500

Maybe tonight I’ll get to work on this.
Ugh, I hate how far behind I’m falling in my projects. My to-do list went from being a good idea to being a grim reminder of failure.

Going to be experimenting with abstract perspective tonight. May...

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 11:58:59 -0500

Going to be experimenting with abstract perspective tonight. May not work, but ah, well.

Sadly, this is the best shot I could get of this little...

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 11:43:57 -0500

Sadly, this is the best shot I could get of this little wall-crawler or his (her?) two other little buddies hopping around on my patio last night, absolutely adoring the rain. Not sure where they came from; the nearest pond is miles off. They must have only lost their tails recently for how small they were, not to mention how translucent they seemed, as though you could have seen their cute little respiratory systems if you held them over a flashlight.

Not Sure Right Now

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 18:12:02 -0500

WARNING: The following post contains a discussion of TRIGGER warnings. If you are sensitive to TRIGGERS themselves or the results of said TRIGGERS or if you consider the very word TRIGGER itself to be a TRIGGER, please take precautions against TRIGGERING any further TRIGGERS that may or may not have already been TRIGGERED. Due to the TRIGGERING nature of the following TRIGGER-centric material, this program has been rated T for TRIGGERS by the American Association of Abso-fricking-lutely nobody.

And if you clicked on this because you saw the word TRIGGER and were allured by what it may hold, well you’re just TRIGGER happy, aren’t you?

I’ve been really, really frustrated with Tumblr lately. By extension, the internet has been bugging me lately, but Tumblr stands as a kind of distilled vertical slice of the pop culture conversation, so I freely admit to potentially picking on it.

A few weeks ago, I was ranting about how I hated the term “viral” because, for all intents and purposes, it simply means popular. To be fair, it was very kindly explained to me by a friend that it refers to a phase of popularity where it moves from being spoken of in forums, social sites, and the like to being featured in mainstream media venues. The “All Your Base Are Belong To Us” meme is a rather perfect object lesson in how the process works. It still irks me a little bit to hear it because it makes it sound like the internet is still somehow not as legitimate as terrestrial television, print, and radio. It’s that whole “medium is the message” phenomenon that McLuhan spoke of all those years ago. Seriously, the internet as we know it has been around over 20 years and we’re still regarding ABC News doing a story on Keyboard Cat as some sort of validation. I get it, sure, and I’m not condemning anyone as “part of the problem” because I don’t think it’s a problem, it simply makes me wonder if either I’m missing something, or everyone else is, with both being terrifyingly equal in likelihood.

On Top Gear, Jeremy Clarkson made a joke about Lancia’s R&D department being more than a little behind the times in terms of their engineering. He said, “Guys, we’ve this brand new invention. It’s a clock that you wear on your wrist!” This is basically how I feel when I see a term used for something that already has a perfectly fitting one. Trigger warnings are the wristwatch du jour.

I never heard the term “Trigger Warning” until a few weeks ago when a friend on DeviantART posted an image of a woman with her mouth stitched shut. To put this in context, horror themes were nothing new for this artist, it had a maturity warning on it, and a special note was made in the description of its theme. None of these things stopped someone from flipping out (or acting like it) in the comments about “triggers” because the needle was visible. I didn’t think anything of it because, like I said, it already had a disclaimer among other measures that would have stopped people from being startled or alarmed.

Later on, someone else I follow posted an <b>Instagram</b> snap to their Tumblr of a spider they found. Given the reaction this got from a certain reader, you’d swear it was a woman with her mouth stitched shut. “THIS NEEDS A TRIGGER WARNING! I DO NOT NEED TO SEE THIS IN MY TUMBLR AT 7 IN THE AM!” my friend responded very apologetically, and even found a way to put a banner over the image’s preview thumbnail. As for the person who vehemently insisted on the trigger warning:

“I’m not mad or anything… arachnophobia is a weird thing to warn for… that picture wasn’t all that bad. Just, y’know, future reference.”

It’s that last sentence that downright ticks me off in the worst way. I’ve dealt with this so much in my life, even from people in my family, where they overreact to something, apologize and admit to how irrational they were being, then effectively put the blame back on you for causing that reaction or not being sensitive enough in the first place. If you tell someone, “Don’t mind me when I get carried away.” you don’t get to be mad at them for not minding you when you get carried away. Say what you mean, mean what you say, and stand the Hell by it. Otherwise, either don’t say it, or give a real apology that puts the blame exactly where it belongs. If you’re going to accuse people of not reading between the lines, make sure that you can actually read what you’ve written between said lines.

Later on, I come across a photo of a girl who looks about thirteen with a bit of back hair. Apparently, it’s a phenomenon in some eating disorders. There’s also the increasingly present discussion about standards of beauty and body hair. I’m not entirely sure what the context of this photo was meant to be, but what had my attention most was one of the comments:

“I hate my lanugo. I wish I could shave it off without being triggered as hell by the razor.”

Let’s ignore the fact that lanugo (a word I only learned today) is present in newborn babies and typically shed after 3 or 4 moths or is replaced by what is called terminal hair (in other words, unless you’re a baby genius, you don’t have lanugo, you just have body hair in an unusual place) and focus on the part where this person explains why they can’t do anything about it. The razor will trigger them.

A safety razor? Not a straight razor or the razors you get for box cutters or the razors you get for really old shavers that I’ve only ever seen in movies where people are cutting lines of cocaine for snorting, but a damn Schick Quattro? Now, I’m not saying they’re harmless; it’s very easy to cut yourself with those so-called safety razors if you’re not careful. Hell, I nicked the crap out of my legs a few weeks ago while shaving for… You know what, it’s not important. Here’s what is:

I do not suffer from PTSD. I have certain phobias and even a few irrational fears, but none of them entail especially severe reactions or cause any debilitating emotional stress. I am not suicidal. I have on occasion had suicidal thoughts at various points in my life, but none have been more than passing thoughts in times of stress. I have never been diagnosed with depression. I have been depressed and I do get depressed (in fact, I have a rule where I don’t have so much as a sip of wine if I’m feeling depressed), but that’s not the same as having manic depression. The point I’m making with all this is that my heart goes out to people who have these conditions, it really does. However, there’s a fine line between being sensitive or even accommodating to someone’s disability and walking on eggshells or just being a doormat.

The fact is that you have absolutely no idea what may well set someone off and send them into a raving panic. You really have no clue. You can make some educated guesses, but they’re still guesses, not guarantees. I would argue there are maybe a total of three, possibly four or five subjects that should carry warnings, things I believe most people would agree on as being particularly loaded or charged. This should especially be kept in mind if it clashes with your normal content or typical output. I don’t expect everydaysexism.com to have a warning about rape or abuse, because the damn site is called “Everyday Sexism.” Some people are terrified of blood, but does my recent short story, The River of Blood, need a disclaimer?

I want to be sensitive. I do not want to upset anybody to the point of uncontrollable panic attacks. I do not want anyone’s repressed memories to resurface and hit them all at once like a ton of bricks. I do not want to set off anyone’s suicidal tendencies. I come across as a cynical and condescending dickhole at times, I admit, and it probably sounds like a convenient excuse for me to say it comes from a place of good intentions, of wanting to be proven wrong, and wanting people to do better because I earnestly believe they can, but I mean it. All that said, the fact remains I am not a therapist. I am not a life coach. Hell, Stuart Smalley has more qualifications than me, and he’s not even real. I can help you in addressing your concerns. I’m willing to listen, but I can’t live your life for you.

If you’re that sensitive to something that the very mention of it can hurl you into a state of blurry, inconsolable hysteria, you need counseling. If you’re already in counseling, get more. If you’re already getting more counseling, try another counselor because that one’s clearly not doing you that much good. I know it can take years, practically the rest of one’s life, to overcome some of these issues. I don’t expect you cured in a week and unshakable in the face of danger any more than you should expect me to read your mind and know what gets under your skin. I’m not blaming you, but I don’t want you blaming others. Is that fair?

Further reading from differing points of view:

http://privilege101.tumblr.com/triggers.html

http://eighthlifecrisis.blogspot.com/2013/02/trigger-warnings-are-stupid.html

Blood Wings & Evil Priest OR: Fire & Earth (my...

Fri, 07 Jun 2013 23:11:52 -0500

Blood Wings & Evil Priest

OR: Fire & Earth (my roommate’s suggestion)

Kind of a crummy night. Tried making something, but these were all that resulted, simply more brush marker stuff. Blood Wings was especially a disaster as the legs were originally going to be crystalline (had an old Dreamcast game on the mind that made me think of it). They ended up looking horrible, hence the distinctly more demonic appendages. The tail… well, let’s just say sometimes it’s better to leave things unfinished.

Actually didn’t use brush pens for the whole thing. In fact, Evil Priest’s horns were simply a normal tip Sharpie, only using the brushes on the wider strokes.

OR: Vent-ish Art of Sorts Fun fact before I...

Sat, 01 Jun 2013 22:48:33 -0500

OR:

Vent-ish Art of Sorts

Fun fact before I drone on in a “woe-is-me” fashion: this was originally upside-down, the red veins meant to convey “branches and trunks” of sorts. When I looked at it again, after applying the horizontal lines, I realized they looked more like roots hanging over an underground river, so I flipped it around. Good thing I didn’t sign it ;P

It’s been a rather rotten day, the sort where this is the best thing to come out of it, and it was merely practice before the main shoot.

I’d planned to shoot three videos today. They weren’t anything special, little more than, “Hey, look at these ridiculous things” plus a trailer for the ePub edition of The River of Blood going live on Smashwords, as well as possibly some reader stores like Kindle, Kobo, and Sony. However, the first ridiculous thing video this morning simply fell apart. I had one of those epiphanies best summed up as, “The Hell am I doing?” It didn’t help that for all the talking points I had worked out, they didn’t fit together as well as I thought once I started rolling. It’s like those behind-the-scenes docs where the team is putting together a monster costume, making sketches, forming molds, shooting test footage in the lot with a camcorder, and it’s all looking real good… then they get it on set and everyone realizes how utterly ROFLMAO stupid it looks.

So, I figure, “Brush it off, I haven’t made a video in a while.” and write the whole thing off as practice. I decide to hold off on the second one, which is just showing off something funny about a notebook I bought (don’t pretend there aren’t worse things on YouTube with a thousand times the hits my whole channel gets), and double-down on the third, the trailer. It involved a lot of fairly complex editing of very tight shots of me painting the cover illustration (or rather, an approximate likeness thereof). In the meantime, it was a very frustrating day out with my roommate, whose recovery from abdominal surgery has her in a fair amount of pain; pain’s she’s somehow convinced (like far too many problems in her life) can be alleviated by whining about it endlessly whilst carrying on doing things to aggravate it. It didn’t stop there, suffice it to say: Not a great day on that front.

Managed to wind down after that, get a bit relaxed so I could work on the trailer video, making the practice image above to nail down a brush technique, which can be a bit hard to do with Sharpie brushes as they tend to dry out fairly easily mid-stroke. I’ve got some calligraphy markers from them that may fair a bit better if I make anything like this again, though the fading does have a nice effect in their own way (like my sumi-e pieces). The video frankly looked ridiculous, totally unfitting with the tone of the story, and I realized I was simply not in the mood to edit the damn thing. Like post for my drawings, editing for videos is the step I like to minimize as much as possible. If I were a Hollywood director, I’d be very much in the Kubrick vein of the long take.

I may still resurrect the trailer later, possibly tomorrow, on the off-chance I wake up in better spirits. It’s not likely, which is why I’m posting this here.

A Quick Summation Of Events It’s a perfectly natural...

Wed, 29 May 2013 22:35:51 -0500

A Quick Summation Of Events

It’s a perfectly natural instinct to find yourself hating something you want when you can’t have it. You talk yourself out of something so you don’t feel bad about being denied. It’s actually a rather healthy mindset, to think critically about something and be able to see and weigh the pros and cons of any given choice. Of course, some people really, really suck at it. This abomination masquerading as a man is one of them.

The River of Blood

Tue, 28 May 2013 23:12:02 -0500

The River of Blood

by Roland M.J. Ziemke

A webbing of red lace poured out from every slit in the black skirt, swaying to and fro with each of the queen’s strides. Everything she did seemed to carry such an elegance, even the way her littlest finger toyed with the length of chain she held over her shoulder. Her prisoner in tow on the other end of the chain was less than taken with the queen’s poise and grace.

She was a thief of notorious repute despite her age. This had bolstered her hubris into making an attempt on the queen’s jewels, kept on her person at all times, even to bed. The risk would bear no reward. The hand that clamped down on the thief’s wrist seemed almost to have a mind of its own, the queen only opening her eyes at the thief’s startled gasp. Her majesty did not scream, instead tightening her grip as a grin crept across her face, bringing with it an amused chuckle. Fear pierced the thief to her very core, leaving her frozen in place. It was only an instant before she snapped out of it and remembered her knife, only to glance down to see it twirling in the queen’s fingers. The chuckle had become a hysterical laugh. This alerted the guards, who promptly stormed into the room, surrounding the bed. The queen sighed, slackening her grip as she fell back against the pillows in mock disappointment.

The thief found herself scrambling into the arms of a guard. The guard was startled by this and found himself putting a hand on her shoulder, as he might have for a lost child. By the time the thief came to her senses, she felt her arms pulled behind her, secured with heavy chain by another of the queen’s men. The hand on her shoulder tightened, forcing her back round to see the queen slide off the other side of the bed and make her way to an armoire. A guard opened it as she approached, revealing an accumulation of knives buried in the wood, their points only just breaking the surface of the door. With a sweeping gesture of the queen’s arm and nary a break in her stride, the thief’s knife was added to the collection. A snap of fingers sent the guard holding the door out of the room with two other men following right behind. This was all so surreal for the thief. Everything from scaling of the wall to the sound of her own knife embedding itself in an armoire was running through her mind over and over again. She had been so careful, so meticulous, considered every possible failure, but all for naught. The thief stared daggers into the queen’s back as she took her time slipping on a black robe over her red, lacy evening gown, reaching down to pull parts of the gown through slits in the robe, turning the whole ensemble into a performance. The queen glanced over her shoulder to smile at the thief before resuming her fitting, unphased by the stare. The thief looked on in silence.

She expected to get some sort of lecture from her royal highness before being carted off to the dungeon, or at least some gloating. What she did not expect was for the queen to turn away from the armoire dangling a heavy, iron collar from a length of chain.

“Shall we go for a walk?”

The spikes that lined the inside of the collar were not sharp enough to draw blood. Rather, they were to give incentive against not keeping pace or speaking out of turn by way of a firm pull. Still, she couldn’t help but wonder if what she felt rolling down her back was merely a bead of sweat. The party walked at a leisurely pace set by the queen, the last two guards from the bedchamber marching in silence behind the thief the entirety of the seemingly endless trek from the high tower into the depths of the castle.

As they went further, the plastered masonry gave way to earthen clay with tiles of red marble arranged in a flowing mosaic. It was a simple beauty the thief had never given much thought to, always too transfixed on the opulent. The queen explained that the castle was built upon a spring which served as irrigation for the garden. The flowing warmth allowed roses to stave off withering well past the first snowfall, a spectacle beheld by only a select few. Unfortunately, her highness sighed, the spring dried up years ago. The fountain atop the source was knocked down, the entire chamber altered to serve a different purpose, one the queen insisted would be as spectacular as before. As if on cue, the end of the hallway was in sight. The thief leaned to one side to see over the queen’s shoulder a fairly small door in front of which were the three guards the queen had dismissed earlier. One held out an ornate key to the queen, asking quietly if she needed them further. Her majesty held up her hand and took the key. The guards passed, the two escorts following. The thief looked back over her shoulder at them walking away, immediately regretting it, not just for the spikes scraping along her neck, but the thought of the queen pulling on the chain. She winced in anticipation, turning slowly back toward the door to find the queen patiently standing beside the open door, politely gesturing the thief to enter. It was hard to find relief in any of her majesty’s shifts in manner, each act of courtesy carrying the scent of a trap. After a brief hesitation, testing to see if the queen would tighten her grip on the chain, the thief cautiously walked through the door, the queen closing it behind them.

The chamber resembled a place of worship with its domed ceiling and columns along the walls. However, there were no statues or icons, doubtless removed in favor of the queen’s machinations. The columns had been methodically chiseled in places to remove their engravings. All had been adorned with iron rings through which were strewn lengths of chain. In the center was the culmination of the queen’s master plan, the ultimate defacing. It was the base of the fountain that once channeled the spring. A pair of grated spouts along the edge fed into small canals that ran parallel toward the door, leading out to the garden. If there had been a statue in its center, there was no sign of it. Instead, the base had been filled in to serve as a platform for a monstrosity of engineering, a guillotine built for eight, same as the number of columns encircling the room. The thief suddenly felt sick to her stomach with the revelation of the queen’s grand spectacle.

She recalled seeing one in the town square as a child, though not as elaborate as this one. It was eventually taken down, having never been used so far as she could recall, replaced with a statue of the queen. Her highness led her guest up a short flight of crude, wooden stairs. She stopped in the center and spun round on the thief, directing her attention to the array of stocks, four on each side, all occupied. Man and woman, boy and girl, young and old, it was an eclectic assortment of prisoners. The queen explained that after the spring dried up, tourism to the town declined, and stricter laws were needed to keep the rising crime rate in check. Of course, the queen chuckled, strict laws were nothing without severe punishments behind them. For a time, there was no shortage of criminals to maintain the steady flow. Prisoners from neighboring countries looking to save face were brought in under the guise of exile for a price. Still, it was never enough to match the flow of the spring, and eventually the laws worked too well. Fewer and fewer were brought to justice, slowing the new spring down to a trickle.

The thief looked around at the device, trying to work out what her part in all this was meant to be, or if this was simply the lecture and gloating she’d been anticipating from the start.The crimes of the eight were rattled off with an air of ambiguity, one a murderer, others thieves, another an artist who tried to incite a revolt, two that refused to pay taxes on their businesses, and another who merely stood in the way of the guards’ pursuit of a child caught swiping apples from a cart in the market. As the queen read off these convictions, none of them said so much as a word or tried to look up. No doubt they’d been tortured, starved, or otherwise rendered broken in light of their impending fate. Rather than supporting themselves on hands and knees, the prisoners were laid on benches, wrapped in canvas and secured with straps tight enough to squeeze the life out of them. There were no baskets to catch the severed heads, only a pair of deep grooves chiseled into the brickwork that ended in rusty grates before spilling over the edge of the old fountain and out of the room. The ceiling was a mess of pulleys and gears, most of it hardly appearing necessary for a device regarded so highly for its simplicity. Even the blades themselves were atypical, perforated with several small holes instead of a clean, metallic shine.

A tug on the leash brought the thief back to attention.

“I am not telling you all this merely so I can throw you in a cell to rot, much less execute you. I am telling you this because you have a decision to make, and it is important you have context.” The last word carried a biting sharpness rivaling the twin blades hanging overhead. The thief straightened up, putting her shoulders back and her head up. Impressed, the queen smiled, continuing her ominous proposal.

“You will receive a full pardon for your trespass, leaving here with a perfectly clean slate. However, if you defy my word within my kingdom or its borders again, however minuscule, you will find yourself in their position, awaiting the fall of a blade.” There was a stifled sob from one of the prisoners. The queen waited patiently for silence, a delighted smile creeping across her face. It remained while she carried on. “If you decide not to do as I ask, your leave of this place becomes more complicated.” With that, the queen pulled the leash taut and began waving her arm left to right, causing the thief to sway gently with it for the sake of the spikes. “So brave of you,” she cooed, “Never before have I had a visitor come calling in the night like that. Despite your intent, I found the whole affair rather amusing.” The thief took a step forward to put some slack in the leash. The queen mockingly pouted at having her fun ruined, only to laugh and shake her head, “A rare gem such as you belongs among my treasures. You will be my servant, my pet, and my personal plaything for whatever whims may come to mind. You shan’t come to any real harm, but your life will be solely for my amusement, so long as I wish it. It could be the rest of your life, or on the morrow.”

The queen reached up and pulled down on a chain, setting a few of the pulleys in motion. There was a mechanical clicking sound of gears locking into place as some of the ropes and chains above tightened.

“Either way, I’ll have no need for this room anymore.” The queen held out the end of the chain to the thief at eye level.

On the end of the chain was a wooden handle wrapped in leather. There were teeth marks on it.

Cover Illustration, easily the most painless part of the writing...

Mon, 27 May 2013 21:30:55 -0500

Cover Illustration, easily the most painless part of the writing process. Now that the narrative is essentially locked, I’ll set it aside for a day or two before revision, and work on some of the artwork in the meantime.
The story will be viewable on my DeviantART page, my Blogger page, and from Lulu as a PDF download. May be an epub edition through Smashwords as I did for Princess Discipline, but that may be a bit. They’ll all be free to download. I mean, it’s only a 2000 word short with a few measly illustrations attached.

Some fun silliness from yesterday that I may try again at with...

Mon, 20 May 2013 11:58:36 -0500

Some fun silliness from yesterday that I may try again at with more than simply my phone (real camera’s battery gave out—phooey!). My roommate has red Xmas lights all around her ceiling.
On the color temperature scale, sunlight tends to look more blue, depending on how you set your white balance. I set mine to incandescent to accentuate the effect. I do have a blue party light I may put in my overhead for the remake.

So, Get This...

Sun, 19 May 2013 17:27:03 -0500

I’ve got these two loungers in my living room, and my cats like to sleep on the backs of the headrests. I’m sitting in one of them, laptop in front of me and trying to write, and Dusk is pushing on the back of my head with his paws. He’s not begging for attention, he’s just stretching and kneading.

I Had an Epiphany

Thu, 16 May 2013 19:58:14 -0500

OR: I’m Very Late to the Party

I was watching Kitchen Nightmares on Hulu. I normally don’t bother with the show, but the caption below the episode preview mentioned two things that caught my attention.

The first was that Ramsey walked out and refused to help the owners, a first for the show.
The second was that the episode was a “viral” sensation.

That was when I had an epiphany and put a whole new perspective on something I’ve always hated when it comes to the web. When someone tries to pass off a piece of slang as anything more than an adjective, my bullshit alarm goes off. I hate sounding like an old man who fears change, but whenever someone tells me that I simply don’t understand something because I’ve known a time before it and often don’t automatically accept “new” as “better,” I feel I have a right to complain.

All viral means is popular.

There’s probably a great many of you uttering a mighty, “Well, duh!” and that’s fine, but there’s probably more of you out there crying, “Misnomer!” At least, they would if they knew what that word meant, but they don’t because… well, that’s kind of what I’m on about here. It’s something I encounter when I get into it with someone about issues like piracy. There’s this idea that the internet is so incredibly new and novel that it must have its own set of rules, and all those rules amount to is that there are no rules.

The reality is that there’s nothing the internet really does that we haven’t been able to do for years, it’s simply a matter of accessibility. Cars are faster and more affordable than they’ve ever been, yet we still issue speeding tickets, we still drive on the same sides of the road, and you still need a license to drive.

Again, some of you are saying, “Well, duh!” but the Misnomer crowd has traded one word it probably doesn’t know for two other words they probably have equal knowledge of: “False Equivalence!” Comparing physical objects to computer data seems to be this mental block that too many people simply can’t get past. Apparently, copying a DVD you got through Netflix or Redbox is completely different than downloading the same movie through a torrent.

Why?

Why is the junkmail I get in my physical mailbox any different than the spam I get with my e-mail? Is it different because one is a tangible object I can throw in my trash while the other is a string of ones and zeroes I remove from my hard drive by pushing buttons? Do words printed in ink on paper have more meaning than words written on a chalkboard because one’s easier to erase?

Speaking of junkmail, someone on YouTube tried to convince me that those CodeKase things I’d been getting in the mail (basically poker chips with LEDs inside of them) were an evolution of marketing and that I shouldn’t be so critical of them.

I just bet the False Misnomer crowd yelled “Bullshit!” right after reading that.

Anyway, Viral is just a synonym for Popular that people use to avoid sounding like the very gossip hounds they were ostracized by in school. Prove me wrong, please.

A ‘little’ Perspective It always makes me laugh...

Sun, 12 May 2013 16:49:00 -0500

A ‘little’ Perspective

It always makes me laugh whenever someone makes the “singled out” excuse when they get called out for using other people’s stuff or tracing or anything along those lines, because it stands as a testament to how narrow their outlook is. It’s as if they honestly believe the people who gather en masse (by way of sharing, message boards, social sites, all the things used to help spread the word about people’s work) to call them out on their bullshit were completely inert and oblivious until they came along.

GET OVER YOURSELF.

Storyboard to midpoint

Sun, 12 May 2013 15:30:00 -0500

Storyboard to midpoint

Is there a trick to handling pronouns when your story has only 2 unnamed characters, both the same...

Sat, 11 May 2013 21:20:46 -0500

Is there a trick to handling pronouns when your story has only 2 unnamed characters, both the same gender? Feels clunky right now.

TWNLCD: VECTOR Originally, this big lug had a serial number in...

Wed, 08 May 2013 21:08:57 -0500

TWNLCD: VECTOR

Originally, this big lug had a serial number in very dark gray across his head (body?) along the lines of 5NA1TF, an abbreviation for “Sir Not Appearing In This Film” as he will not be part of the TWNL storyline. He’s just a one-off, an experiment in working with vectors.

Made using the vector drawing tool that comes packaged with Google Drive, then composited in GIMP (wherein I learned that if a text layer is too small, the alignment tool will not recognize it, hence the web address being potentially off-kilter).

And done. Stuffed green peppers.

Mon, 06 May 2013 20:08:37 -0500

And done. Stuffed green peppers.

Nearly done

Mon, 06 May 2013 19:34:10 -0500

Nearly done

Need a Little Creative Advice On a Touchy Subject

Mon, 06 May 2013 13:51:36 -0500

So, I got an idea last night for a pair of comics that would be part of my “How Pirates Think” series. They may well be a bit more controversial than the others, though they generally stick to the same formula of “these excuses don’t hold water under any circumstances,” but that’s not my biggest worry. I’m wondering if I should stick to, er… stick figures, or if I should try something different?

The anatomy is a bit on the fail side of things, but it’ll...

Wed, 01 May 2013 22:32:51 -0500

The anatomy is a bit on the fail side of things, but it’ll do as a proof-of-concept.