Six weeks is hardly a record for not updating - though it feels more like six years, honestly. So that counts for something. At least when I was previously not updating DCR I was updating other stuff - six weeks of no art at all is crazy shit, man.

Perishable skill, drawing.

More strips later this week, I hope. I can bang out a few more before I'll need to model the building exterior, parking lot, and Whitehouse's apartment. Much like the most recent chapter of ATC, it's one of those funky plot situations where I'll need to model a large amount of what I need to do the book just to finish a single plot thread.

Something to do with all of the vacation time I have yet to use. Exciting!

High Fructose Corn Syrup : Anal leakage, running the entire scale from "misting" up to "hurricane," depending on volume and duration of exposure. During peak saturation (approximately 2001), I was changing underwear (and outer-wear) twice a day. Like you needed to hear that.

Aspartame : Headache, joint-ache, and a general mental "wooziness" accompanied by the total obliteration of short term memory. Symptoms equivalent to a finger of whiskey and the non-puking aspects of the flu, simultaneously. The last time I exposed myself to this vile TURNS INTO FORMALDEHYDE FUCK YOU RUMSFELD shite was during a pepsi/iTunes promotion. The work water fountains are even more disgusting, and I wasn't about to give Apple my credit card information. To this day, aspartame-induced buys remain my only iTMS purchases.

Sucralose : Anxiety. Symptoms vary depending on intake - a sugar free Sobe Adrenaline Rush will induce anxiety to such a minimal degree that it mixes in with the rest of the "buzz" whereas a No Fear (whatever they call it, that's the brand name) sugar free rents my brain out to Baikonur for rocket testing. I swear, the top of my head's going to blow clean off. As the side effects of aspartame are disgusting and the side effects of sugar deeply diminish my work capacity, this has been my "artificial sweetener" of choice for the past two or three years. Which explains a lot, really. The local minimart regularly runs out of sugar free sobe and has yet - EVER - to run out of the No Fear variety. Now I know why. Odds are pretty fucking fantastic that a sucralose reaction is a big factor in recent mental difficulties. The question is : what to replace it with?

Sugar (specifically sugar-based energy drinks - Red Bull, Sobe, etc) : Feels like my teeth have been dunked in sandy acid; a sludgy, rickety "high" of tunnel vision followed by a rapid plummeting crash into synaptic molasses. Energy drinks like the Mountain Dew branded "Amp" or the sugar-friendly version of Sobe Adrenaline Rush* taste gritty, leaving an "unclean" feeling in my mouth, followed by the aforementioned rickety pep. For Emergency Use Only.

Caffeine : Focus and a degree of pep, until it wears off.

Ritalin, Adderall, other prescription amphetamine salts** : Same as caffeine. Lasts about twice as long and after awhile I start to feel like the nerves in my thighs are starting to itch.

Starbuck's Doubleshot Espresso : Yes, it's a Starbuck's product. Fact is it's the only drink that provides Awake and Go without Grit, Drip, or Rocket Brain. The fact it's a pain in the ass to get my hands on whereas the rest are legion... well, that's medical america for you. As that google-proofed philospher dude said back before they put the dead guy on the stick - consider diet.

Regular Coffee : Makes my sphincter sneeze and drizzle like it's got hay fever. Yeah, you needed THAT visual. If I liked spray-painting the walls with my ass I'd still be drinking the stuff.

I'm sure Chuck Palahniuk would dunk your brains in an orgy of anal and neurological delights. Burroughs would get hung up about the rectal mucous and obsess about that and venusian invaders for an entire book.

I'm neither. I am, in fact, impeded. Diet informs and this here is a question of extent. Deprived of my SAUCE would I be Mister Rogers, Dave Lister, or Dick Cheney? How much of who I "am" is a result of chemical stimuli or more relevantly my "improper" reaction to said stimuli?

Prinny, dood.

My chief consideration, as always - there's never enough daylight. If I could subsist on four hours of sleep I damned well would. I will be on some kind of upper until I either spontaneously combust or calcify. Or both. Picture that.

* Both the "amp" and the sobe probably use hideous amounts of HFCS - I don't have empties here to check. Not the point. Point is they taste gritty, not yummy. And they impact accordingly.

** Last actual exposure to prescription-grade amphetamine (or amphetamine of any kind, actually) was in 2006. Example provided for context.

William Anders (Lunar Module Pilot)

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.
And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.

Jim Lovell (Command Module Pilot, Commander Apollo 13, pilot of Gemini 7)

"And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.
And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.
And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.

"And God said, Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.
And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good.

And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas – and God bless all of you, all of you on the good Earth."

Theology is one thing.

This - Apollo 8 - surpasses theology. If you're of a more established tradition, the above transcript isn't a new thing. If you believe that there is no God but Man, however, then at this moment - December 24, 1968 - god SAW the light.

And it was good.

(The relevant portion, 1.2 meg .WAV)

23 February 1932 – 18 December 2008.

Man must be in space - that is what we are destined for. There is nothing else that we can do.

-- Majel Barrett (Wikiquote, unsourced)

13:48 * solios just extracted approximately 1000 comment spam from DCR*
13:48 <@ejp> \o/
13:55 <@_Lasar> I invented an awesome method for warding of automatic spam. (At least I haven't seen this method mentioned anywhere else).
13:55 <@xeno> unplugging the modem?
13:55 <@solios> _Lasar: ?
13:55 <@_Lasar> I just do this: Enter your first name: <input type="text" name="email">
13:56 <@_Lasar> Then I check if the "user" entered an email address.
13:56 <@_Lasar> If so, spam.
13:56 <@_Lasar> The end.
13:56 <@_Lasar> Works like a fucking charm.
13:56 <@solios> :O
13:56 <@ejp> huh
13:56 <@_Lasar> I should probably copyright that or something.
13:56 <@solios> JEENYUS

* 470+ of which had attached themselves to a single DCR strip. The unfortunate downside of The Great Thursday Spam Purge is that I accidentally deleted the only comment my sister's ever left on my blog. Burn, spambots, burn.

From The Orlando Sentinel :

CAPE CANAVERAL – NASA administrator Mike Griffin is not cooperating with President-elect Barack Obama’s transition team, is obstructing its efforts to get information and has told its leader that she is “not qualified” to judge his rocket program, the Orlando Sentinel has learned.

Griffin’s resistance is part of a no-holds-barred effort to preserve the Constellation program, the delayed and over-budget moon rocket that is his signature project.

From Nature :

When one member of the team, who are meant to smooth the transition from Bush-rule to Obama-rule, told Griffin they were “just trying to look under the hood” Griffin replied:

If you are looking under the hood, then you are calling me a liar. Because it means you don’t trust what I say is under the hood.

We don't want to look under the hood, Mike. We want your head on a pike as a warning to future pork-happy ego-ejaculating administrators that pride is only acceptable when your project works.

At a glance, the best thing that could happen is that Obama fires Griffin, cancels Constellation, and replaces it with DIRECT - an on-paper system that reuses a large amount of the STS technologies without the need to develop a second booster.

We need to get off this rock, in a meaningful way - and Mike Griffin has proven he's not the man for the job.

Williams-Sonoma moves into the sex toy market:

12:20 < mdxi> i really want to write a subversive review for the tenderizer plug
12:21 < mdxi> see if it makes it onto teh site
12:37 < mdxi> how's this?
12:37 < mdxi> Specialized tools of this sort are so hard to come by in mainstream stores, and boutiques are notoriously overpriced, so I was thrilled to find this excellent specimen in my local W-S.
12:37 < mdxi> The polished haft is cool, refreshing, and thick enough for comfort, while the tapered base provides a secure grip - always important! As you'd expect, it's heavy, so extended use can become tiring, but if you're after this bad boy then you're a pro who can take it, right?
12:37 < mdxi> Pick one up and you'll be pounding away in no time!

mdxi++

A comment on this kotaku article, which became long-winded enough to merit preservation:

The internet-as-a-newspaper has several major advantages - not just adblocking. :)

I live in Pittsburgh (a drinking town with a football problem) and if the local media isn't ejaculating Steelers or Penguins coverage all over the top front then it's Doom And Gloom about the airport or public transit. There's far too much sports coverage and the comics page hasn't been worth looking forward to since Calvin & Hobbes ended.

Enter the internet. I can get my news from sites and services that actually report on issues I'm interested in (I don't give a FLAMING SHIT about what Ben Rothenberger had for lunch - I'm more interested in Al Franken's fight for the Senate, and you're going to have to dig deep in a Pittsburgh paper to get any indication that there's a stated named Minnesota anywhere on the map), I can read comics I find amusing, articles on subjects I'm interested in written by writers whose prose is digestible... and most importantly, I can elect to NOT consume anything somebody else thinks I ought to be reading.

While there's been some praise of Gawker/Kotaku in this thread, I think the company is suffering from the same form of USA Today-itis - too many low-content gossip-blithering articles shot up for quotas, paychecks, ad revenue, trying to get the commenting base incited so the sales people have better figures to flash at potential advertisers. Not enough BBC or Guardian grade articles, by a long shot.... but the beeb and the guardian are more broad-ranging with more employees and far less targeted at highly specific demographics. They're also Old Media news services with an old media attitude and an old media attention span.

I like the Old Media attention span, and I hope they keep it - and that New Media (Gawker et al) eventually learn what this "attention span" thing is and learn to embrace it - which is possible, as this article indicates. Until that happens, Gawker continues to be a jumble of bubblegum sound bites with the occasional bit of thought-provoking prose sticking out... just like USA Today, only with comments. Just like Slashdot, only without comment moderation.

One day the news media will evolve to a point where we the reader can have what we want in the way that we want it. For those of us who need something to do in between adderall doses, the future is now. For those of us who want All Articles All The Time - those of us who'd love to declare the Death Of The Sound Bite... that time is still a ways out.

07:25 <@eniac> "...with home prices falling over 30%, about 40% of all households with a mortgage (or 21 million out of 50 million who have a mortgage) will be under water (negative equity in their homes) with a huge incentive to walk away from their homes."
07:25 <@eniac> rough
07:44 <@solios> eniac: so the housing crisis is going to get WORSE?! :D
07:44 <@solios> awesome.
07:44 <@solios> who would have thought the apocalypse would be so god damned boring. :|
07:45 * solios was hoping for zombies or nukes or an asteroid or a plague or something.
07:45 <@proudestS> solios: give it another year and we'll all be dying of drug-resistant TB
07:45 <@proudestS> that enough of a plague for you?
07:45 <@solios> proudestS: it's got promise.

05:26 <@solios> Those crazy red states.
05:29 <@_Lasar> "Again, they will call me and they will tell me that he's not a Muslim because he is a Christian. That's not the point. The point is he's not a Christian."
05:29 <@_Lasar> ...what?
05:31 <@xeno> fagbot: doot
05:31 <@fagbot> HOLY COCKS
05:31 <@xeno> _Lasar: do not try to make sense of it
05:32 <@xeno> Religion is where all reason breaks down.
05:33 <@_Lasar> Yeah, I'm aware of that

A halfassed but whole-hearted attempt to articulate what's been bugging me lately.

If I could put my finger on it, it wouldn't be such a problem now would it?

Post-script (pre-script, really) : This is less emo whinging for an audience and more an attempt to lay out recent mental malaise in a "concise" fashion. Fact is that this is one of those funky life problems that you'd have to have experienced - and conquered - yourself in order to armchair quarterback it.

I'd say I'm in a better spot right now than I was 20 hours ago when I wrote this (then unpublished it, then noticed someone had commented on a cached version, republished it and added this pre-script post-script). That's arguable. The fact is that by-and-large, 2008 has been a difficult year and until I can get at least some of this seemingly insurmountable pile of STUFF taken care of, I'm going to be a real piss-ass.

I've wiped the emo - it's safe in a text file. Mission accomplished.

16:54 <@solios> fagbot: spooks?
16:54 <@fagbot> solios: no clue
16:54 <@solios> fagbot: spooks is Fox News incarnated as a UK version of The Bourne Franchise
16:54 <@fagbot> OK, solios.
16:55 <@xeno> o_O
16:59 <@solios> I'm so not kidding.
16:59 <@xeno> that sounds pretty horrible.*
16:59 <@xeno> why are you watching it?
16:59 <@solios> bored
16:59 <@solios> and the dude from Life Force is in it.
17:03 <@xeno> ...

* He hasn't seen Spooks : Code 9.

The National Service Act as previously proposed is a plan to reinstate the draft. About which the president-elect has said We cannot continue to rely on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives we've set. We've got to have a civilian national security force that's just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded.

Gays in the military, it ain't.

Fortunately, two previous attempts at this have tanked horribly and the third (which came right on the heels of the second) has spent the past year floundering with only a couple of democrats backing it.

If there's ever a time to slip an NSA in under the radar, it's now.

My take? It's one thing to encourage National Service. It's another thing to mandate it - though it's been around in countries such as Germany and what used to be Yugoslavia (among other places) for so long that the concept has become integrated into their respective societies.

Personally, I'm deeply opposed to the idea and I don't think it's necessary. Several people I know enlisted for one of two reasons - they either had fuckall for options or they were up to their ass in (education-related) debt. So they walked into the welcoming arms of Uncle Sam to do some "character building." If there were other options for the economically fucked, then maybe - maybe - some kind of NSP would be viable.

As it stands now, for the people that really need the help, the military is the only game in town. Reinstating conscription (be it filling potholes or digging foxholes) at this point would be a formality - and an insult to those who've made the choice.

The vague summary on the change.gov site that went up shortly after I took the above screenshot is aimed in a different direction, more of an "encouraged community service" direction. All the new administration has to do for the next 75 days is talk a good game.

Talking a good game is easy - you need charisma and pretty words to talk a good game.

Details... not so much.

This victory alone is not the change we seek.

--President-Elect Barack Obama, 2008.11.04

Reservations - deep, The Economy could be Vita Severin-grade reservations - throttle my politics. I'm not the only one who won't drink the kool-aid, and I think that's a good thing. The cult of personality scares me about as much as the man's support for the patriot act, and the sooner the new government gets down to business and shows its true colors, the better.

I am not Herbert.

I am, however, giggling like a schoolgirl at Alaska's re-election of Ted "Corruption is a series of tubes" Stevens.

Hah. Hah-hah. HAH!

Hah.

Update, two weeks later - turns out that after an extensive taxpayer dollar-burning recount, Stevens actually lost.

On the one hand, I'm kinda bummed - Stevens was one of my favorite regulars on Republican Party Reservation. On the other, juuuuuust enough of this country is sick of the Order Of Things, and that's cause for celebration.

On the gripping hand, we have yet to see what this "change" we've voted for actually is.

Still holding off on the partying. Till February, at least.

So it turns out Pumpcon is this weekend. Not next. It's always been this way, and I've always had it in my head otherwise.

Still do, in fact.

If I just had ATC to beat on I'd pick up and go. But I don't - I have an enormous pile of commission work that can't wait and can't be done on my dangerously old powerbook.

So. No Philly for me. :(

Silver lining : the liver gets to play a home game this weekend, and the funds I would have used for Activities Dangerously Close To New Jersey can now go to other things, like pants. Pants and ram.

Crap!

12:19 <@xeno> [io9 continues to beat their cocks raw over JJ Abrams, this time under the heading "Is JJ Abrams the New Joss Whedon?"]
12:20 <@xeno> if i had been the first to comment, i would have just wrote Fuck you.
12:23 <@ejp> is abrams the new whedon? well, no. see whedon made good tv/movies, abrams doesn't.
12:23 <@ejp> that's the major difference.
12:24 <@ejp> also, whedon looks like a huggable geek, abrams looks like a metrosexual cocktard.
12:24 <@solios> whedon writes great characters across a broad spectrum. Abrams writes whiners.
12:24 <@ejp> "Write what you know"
12:25 <@solios> I rest my case.

Bottom line : Whedon brings compelling characters and The Funny. Abrams has yet to achieve either.

12:23 <@esch> MOTHER FUCK.
12:24 <@mdxi> not a heinlein fan, thanks

Went to goth night. Listened to a beautiful curvy girl gripe about how she didn't have an "industrial" figure. Her backstory was almost identical to Jolie's. Jolie has almost the same figure and does industrial just fine, thank you. Maybe it's the hair. Maybe it's the fact that she's Frank Frazetta's wet dream. Assuming she had an enormous tiger and enormouser broadsword, accessorized. Jolie is Ab-Fab in camo with combat boots and a leopard print martini glass.

I miss her.

Raspberried a kid who seems convinced that a freshly minted friday night all ages in the ashes of Metropol can take on ten years of mostly positive inertia. Wake me up when your voice drops, spiky.

Staring thirty in the face, this morning I stayed my vitriol at a Jehovah's Witness trailing tiny chilren-shaped shields - kids don't deserve Adult Rage, period - and promptly THBBBBBBTed it all over the aforementioned Hot Topic overdose less than twelve hours later.

Boundaries. Mores. I'm older than you, bigger than you, drunker than you, and Nemesis was a Shriekback song long before some ego-laden "dj" appropriated it for a club night. It was a Gameboy port of Gradius when you were in diapers. Your blank stare says everything I need to know about your night, you uneducated twat.

Bumped into Kevin on the bus ride back to south side. He doesn't look like his DCR appearance - he looks like a baby-faced Ben Sisko, and he's seriously thinking about going back to school to get an "adult job," whatever that is. Kevin's an ex-marine audiophile turned comics artist whose been paying the bills doing things well below his talent level for a long time now. His definition of "adult job" has been informed accordingly.

Mike repatriated, but I haven't talked to him in awhile. Context would be reading his blog today and bumping into Kevin tonight.

For one hot second, the three of us were roommates. Farscape, Season Two. Whenever that was.

I've figured out more of ATC in the last six weeks than I have in the last six years. It remains unlike anything, aggressively.

I have no time to work on it, as I'm doing commission work for money. Money that's being shat straight into the gaping maw of bills unpaid.

Unpaid, escalating.

Maybe I'll throw up before passing out.

Hopefully I won't.

This snip of Warren Ellis's Transmetropolitan has been floating around the intertub for awhile now. A few centuries in internet years. This particular instance googled from here.

16:54 <@solios> it took me THREE HOURS* to go waterfront -> lowes -> home.
16:54 <@solios> :|
16:54 <@ejp> you went to *lowes*.
16:54 <@ejp> that's terrifies me
16:55 <@solios> I started at target.
16:55 <@solios> < me> fans?
16:55 <@solios> < thing> we done sold those.
16:55 <@solios> < me> uh.
16:55 <@solios> < thing2> last week!
16:55 <@solios> < me> ...
16:55 <@solios> so, Lowes.
16:55 <@ejp> fans?
16:55 <+fagbot> fans are even bigger idiots in both cases.
16:55 <@ejp> it's october
16:56 <@solios> fans should not be seasonal.
16:56 <@ejp> gotta put the heaters somewhere.
16:56 <@solios> target had those wee fan+heater things.
16:56 <@solios> which I need about as much as a fourth anus.
17:10 <@xeno> solios: they don't make fans in october
17:11 <@xeno> and why do you need a fan in october?
17:18 <@solios> my fan died.
17:18 <@solios> no white noise, no sleep.
17:18 <@solios> ever.
17:19 <@solios> EVER.
17:19 <@solios> ask bda.**
17:19 <@xeno> they make white noise machines
17:19 <@xeno> and those are available all year long
17:19 <@solios> need a breeze too
17:19 <@solios> or I sweat like an ice cold beer. :P
17:19 <@xeno> open a window :P
17:20 <@solios> fagbot: doot xeno
17:20 <+fagbot> well, that's as low as I've been able to get
17:20 <@solios> xeno: the fans gives me both.
17:37 <@xeno> not anymore.
17:37 <@xeno> now it ain't doin' shit.
17:37 <@xeno> and in the meantime, you're apt to find a white noise machine easier than a fan
17:38 <@xeno> and opening the window is Free
17:38 <@xeno> and come to think of it, there's all kinds of noise out there
17:38 <@solios> I got a fan.
17:38 <@solios> two, actually.
17:38 <@solios> just in case one Prefers Not To.
17:39 <@solios> got it at Lowes.
17:39 <@solios> :|
17:39 <@xeno> then what...
17:39 <@xeno> fagbot: doot solios
17:39 <+fagbot> PARTY!!! LET'S GO LADIES!!! LET'S SEE THOSE TITTIES!!!
17:39 <@solios> I tried target first.
17:39 <@solios> :P
17:39 <@xeno> yeah, you could have said No i got a fan
17:39 <@xeno> instead of letting me ramble on.
17:39 <@xeno> assface.
17:39 <@xeno> you owe me 15 calories.
17:44 <@solios> <3

* My coworker Matt drove me from work (5pm) to the Waterfront (~5:20?). Then a walk from Jahniggle to Target.... Target had sold all of their fans... Call Steve on the walk out; he mentions Lowes as a likely pickup point. Walk from Target (at one end of a ped-hostile "high class" stripmall) to Lowes (at the other end - you could park my sister's boat and one of her sister ships end-to-end with room to spare), parse Lowes, wait forever in line at Lowes, figure FUCK THAT and use the self-checkout; deal with the hilarity that is Lowe's Self Checkout for a good 10-20 minutes. Wonder why both Lowes and Target male staff have PA accents while the girls all sound like they've been squirted out of some kind of back alley Louisiana gang bang. Hump two box fans (plus the rest of my daily kit) to the Jahniggle bus stop. Buy a Lipton Iced Tea. Wait. Whip out the DS. Wait some more. Bus finally shows up. Ride bus from Waterfront through Homestead, Squirrel Hill (late rush hour, so we're on that hill for a Lesser Forever), Oakland, South Side. Walk a couple of blocks and DS some more instead of humping another eight blocks just to see how long it takes for the bus to show up. Home. Stow the spare fan, plug in the real fan, notice the Dead Fan and the New Fan are both Lasko. Check the time. ALMOST EIGHT. WHERE IS MY TIME FOR LIFE?!?!?!. Rush some freelance and head for the bar. Bar. Return. Write a nice big * and lose track of ([]).

Bed prep. Doritos, gatorade, and Dexter. Jennifer Carpenter. Happiness.

** I refer to my first time in Philly, in which the Overwhelming Silence CRUSHED MY SOUL and I wound up sleeping with my head in harb's closet, my ear as close to hyperion (his firewall/server at the time) as I could get it without pressing metal.

Pitt turns 250 and I "celebrate" by tripping over a chunk of concrete, twisting recovery into an attempt at a fucking moon shot. These are the results:

 

The face washed off. My right hand is sandpaper; extent of damage to be figured out when I wake up tomorrow.

 

Left : Actual. Right : Got the width wrong. Built from the fire evacuation map, which is wildly inaccurate.

15:56 <@xeno> [Mark Millar is an idiot.]
15:56 <@solios> fuck that guy. with a goat.
15:57 <@xeno> ah hell i forgot you have a raging hate-on for him
15:57 <@xeno> now *I* do too
15:57 <@xeno> so like, huzzah and stuff
15:58 <@solios> never heard of the asshead before now, iirc
15:59 <@xeno> yes you did, you went off about him raping graphic novels and passing the resulting malformed baby off as a movie*
15:59 <@rez> Wow. That guy's a fucking moron.
15:59 <@solios> science is an awesome.
15:59 <@solios> i mean, where the FUCK would we be without tang?
15:59 <@solios> WHERE?
15:59 <@rez> Indeed.
15:59 <@xeno> without tang, there is no poon.
15:59 <@solios> sshkjlgharrjklherHJBB

* He's thinking about Frank Miller's Sin City-ization of The Spirit. Miller, Millar. Barely closeted bondage nut, complete idiot. I thought he was thinking of the Wachowskis, who've made a career out of assraping Grant Morrison, Alan Moore, etc. But he wasn't.

Posts that should be going to ATC are going into the dcr category for the time being. I should have internet ANY DAY NOW RIGHT COVAD??? and whenever that happens (weeks, years) I'll be able to start busting serious ass on the ATC site rework. The fewer recent links that suddenly Stop Dead, the better.

As I was saying, re: mapping. The Majestic is as done as I can see needing it, ever. It's not like any of the principle characters is an orma host or ever gets near the cockpit of one of the damned things, so I'm spared the hilarity of landing gear, carrier stowability, etc.

Over and done with in less time than it took to blitch* about how OMFGONNADIE long it was going to take. Re-used one of the Sabrosa specularity maps on a whim and it worked so amazingly awesomely sweet that I had all of the basic hull done in, like, an hour.

The tail graphic took a bit longer.

* blog + bitch. If it's not a real word, it is now. Dammit.

Majestic squadron patch for ATC:

The Majestic is (basically) a "psychic" AWACS-style patrol/recon sort of thing. See previous. More like a U2 (sans Bono) or an SR-71 than an Orion. While most mundane hardware of this type has the typical pilot/copilot/engineer/ECO (etc) complement, the Majestic type has a two person crew - pilot/Navigator and copilot/Carbon Computer host. The CC ties into the Majestic's sensor payload, which is - basically - a dolphin-sized pile of "extra" brain. Brain and support equipment. Something very much like a brain, I should think - with all sorts of whiz-bang hoodjits and whajjits plugged into it. The host being one of them. It knows what you had for dinner, can guesstimate how much fuel you have left, and can tell if you're in a killing mood or not. It probably knows your bank account number and PIN.

And Grij, genius that he is, sent one on a cold recon without the typical (vast, prickly, disgustingly overgunned) fighter escort.

Give the man a prize.

Fucking hell, I haven't drawn anything in awhile. Porn sketches, sure. But a man's got needs and needs don't mean shit when it comes to comics. I'm still "settling in" at the new place, and in the process I've been taking care of Old Business.

Said Old Business being a multi-pronged attack on existing comic pages. As the locational shitstorm flared up, I paper-prototyped the Second Edition of The Dualist. At the time I figured there'd be fuckelse doable for a very long time, and planned accordingly. I even announced accordingly.

I then proceeded accordingly, beginning with unfinished or otherwise incomplete CG assets. The unfinished or otherwise incomplete CG assets list is about as long as my leg - this was prioritized as:

1. Assets to be used in The Dualist (Second Edition) and Dead City Radio. Namely the Hemera, which has been geometry-complete for awhile. I finally finished with texturing last night, so the ship is done and ready for use - in The Dualist 2e prelude and in DCR Chapter.... uh. Four.

The Hemera carries two Lokis, so they were next up on the list - the ship model has been thoroughly overhauled, updated, textured, and - almost on a whim - animated. It's now carrier stowable. Which will make for a very cool scene in DCR. In a year or two.

2. Assets to be used in The Dualist (Second Edition) and Transitional Voices. Or, where I'm at now. Namely, the Majestic - the Psychic AWACS, the Third Eye In The Sky. Geometry is complete and I've been hammering away at smoothing groups, working out pinches and doing minor tweaks for the past couple of days. It's now at the point where it needs to be texture mapped. I'm not looking forward to that, at all. To get it done Right will take at least a week, and this thing sees maybe eight pages total across two entire books. And I'm itching to rip it apart and animate the sensor pod into a carrier-stowable position, even though the only scene in which this ever would have been feasible (plot-wise) was cut from The Dualist back when I was still getting laid.

I finished texturing the Hemera in order to put off texturing the Majestic. The ship is the last asset needed for The Dualist 2e, as it remains the only airframe in the book that's hand drawn. After that, I need to de-FUCK! the QAR. I'd say that I need to de-fuck it, but trust me - after trying (unsuccessfully) to work with the thing early last week, FUCK! is much more appropriate.

3. Assets to be used in Dead City Radio only. Namely an entire floor of Allegheny Center, which has been base modeled (raw hallway, apartments) and needs a lot of cleanup and whatnot before being finalized. Followed by the elevators, Whitehouse's apartment, and a studio. All necessary for doing the remainder of Chapter Two the way I see it in my head. I can theoretically do the next panel (the last of a page) whenever I feel like it, but to proceed beyond that is going to be a shitton of CG work. CG work I'll use for most of the book.

4. Assets to be used in Transitional Voices (and forward) only. TV suffers from the same problem that's crippling DCR at present - namely, I have to do an enormous amount of "structural" work in order to move the story forward at all. Not just "build a room, do a scene." No. That would be awesome. No, this is "build a room, figure out shower effects, finalize the Banshee fighter (includes : texture mapping, ordnance hardpoints, missiles, etc), build a section of the Sabrosa sick bay, de-FUCK the QAR, and then - maybe - start rolling again." That's just to get up on Water. To do the whole damned thing I'm also going to need a beacon/fueling station and a couple of terran environments for Greymalkin and Tantek's scenes. Then for Fire I'll have to model about the same volume of stuff. Only different stuff. Air? Don't get me started on all of the CG I have to generate for Air. That's the kind of list that causes heart attacks, emphysema, rheumatism and gout. Fuck that list. Fuck it in the ear.

What I'm saying is it's going to be awhile before there's more {new} comics. Of any sort.

13:20 <@bda> omfg
13:22 <@rjbs> wow, there's a word I haven't heard in a while
13:23 <@rjbs> what's the label on the jar?
13:23 <@rjbs> atreides?

12:32 < solios> DARK MATTER SUPERNOVA
12:34 < vai> was that heinlein with the antimatter planet?
12:34 < vai> and the ship, slower-than-infinity?
12:35 < vai> and the single-molecule hull, puppeteers et al?
12:35 < solios> that last one's Niven
12:35 < vai> that was all niven then.
12:35 * solios beowulf's vai's schaeffer.
12:36 < vai> o_o
12:36 * vai whacks solios around a bit with the nibelungenlied
12:37 * solios buttplugs vai with a GP hull
12:38 < mdxi> Dystopia by Midnight Juggernauts is a fantastic modern rock album
12:38 < mdxi> solios++
12:38 < mdxi> puppeteers make the finest anal toys in known space
12:38 <@rjbs> ...
12:39 < vai> folding in and out of spacetime inside your anus, nothing will bring ..
12:39 < vai> oh I can't finish that.
12:39 <@bda> ...