Or more specifically, as it relates to The Dualist, as both are under the ATC umbrella. Another "when DCR is coming back" musing.

I started DCR during the production of Chapter Four of The Dualist because I wanted to keep pushing forward with comics work and couldn't - I was hamstrung by render limitations at the time. Limitations I've long since overcome, if the pace of the current Mastering effort is any metric. I've been able to keep up on The Dualist at an acceptable pace and as such I haven't had time for DCR in a long, long time.

Hell, the last story strip is over a year old.

However, I'm more or less "done" with The Dualist - I'm currently Mastering the comic, doing a final runthrough in which I'm fixing renders, rewriting dialogue, rewriting entire scenes, fixing continuity, de-ham-handeding the foreshadowing, strengthening the cohesion between DCR and the rest of the universe, and pulling out or reworking anything that comes across as grossly pretentious. It is A Kind Of Hell, but it's work that's rapidly paying dividends, and I should be done with my repair work at some point in August. I hope to have hardcopy by October. When I have hardcopy, The Dualist will be Done and I won't be touching the story again, beyond re-uploading it into the CMS.

That leads to What's Next, which impacts both DCR and Transitional Voices, the continuation of The Dualist.

After The Dualist is actually really honest-to-gid finished (by which I mean I'm signing hardcopy, shipping books, etc), it'll be time to dive back into modelling and design work - there's a font I need for both DCR and TV, a couple of space vehicles for DCR that will make useful additions to scenes of TV and later books, and there's a bunch of electronics modelling I need to do for either Whitehouse's rig or the bridge of the Daedalus which will then be reused in whichever environment they weren't tailored to. I'll be modelling the interior and exterior of Allegheny Center Building 7 so I can get shots I won't be able to get any other way. I'll be modelling tchotchkeys that will be reuseable across the entire series. In short, I'll be busting out polygons like a fucking madman. I have a basic list of everything I need in order to get moving with TV.1 and DCR.2 and will be tackling those bits first.

While I'm doing that, I'll be finishing DCR.1, then editing and tweaking DCR.1 for presentation (possibly doing extensive edits to decopyright Whitehouse's apartment - I don't know yet), then uploading it to the ATC site and possibly doing a limited run hardcopy. The first chapter will run longer than the rest - the idea was to do DCR as seven or eight 22 page chunks, but I'm currently on around page 17 and still have a good eight to ten pages of material to cover. The rest of the chapter is outlined and was scripted, somewhere - but I can easily do a better job of it from scratch at this point. The remaining chapters are all outlined and need to be fully written, expanded, revised and cut back down to run in the space I'd like them to run.

Given the projected page count, if all resources are available (which they won't be), DCR can be busted out in two years at the rate of one strip a day. This doesn't factor in my desire to shift formats from single strip to "sunday strip" (or "double stacked" format so I can fit a hell of a lot more dialogue into a page, but it's a reasonable figure and it can be hit. It can be hit in less time if I throw myself into it full tilt, but that means putting TV in cold storage, and I don't want to do that - what I want to do is to take the rest of this year to finish DCR.1, prep for TV and DCR.2, get rolling on DCR.2 and then - hopefully - get rolling on TV at some point in Q1 2008.

So, regardless of what happens with any of the above scheduling mutterings, I'll be back on DCR in a matter of weeks and should hopefully be able to finish the first chapter before pumpcon rolls around.

Maybe I'll be able to start up again before the second anniversary.

Regardless, more comic as soon as I can fit my head around something that isn't the Mastering of The Dualist.

Seriously. Mucking around with mt-close and the (vastly superior) mt-close2 and somehow mt-close diddled the db (and mt-close2 either does the same thing or failed to fix it) and now an entry with comments closed by the script can't have commenting reopened. Turn comments back to Open in the entry field, save, and when the cgi spits back the editing window comments are reset to close... but the comment markup is written out.... and fails to execute.

Or whatever the proper webmastering verbage is.

Silly shit, that. I should probably upgrade.

The primary blog - which I haven't been doing much with on account of being busy - has been more or less cleaned up re: comments. I'll fix the rest of it later - probably when I start gearing back up for DCR (comic) production.

Mascots which will eventually adorn one of ejp's domains. This piece took a lot longer than it should have, thanks to a multi-week break between flat colors and final shading, during which all kinds of ATC happened.

03:45 * vai puts the tmbo down.
03:46 < solios> :o
03:46 < solios> I hope that's real.
03:46 < vai> [ it is ]
03:47 < solios> I hate web 2.0
03:47 < solios> (pancakes & sausage on a stick)++
03:47 < vai> upgrade to 2.1, more smarm per inch.
03:47 < vai> solios: WITH CLOCOLATE CHIPS
03:48 < vai> fagbot: doot cloacal chips.
03:48 < solios> does it have the blogospheres and the social and the livetubes?
03:48 < fagbot> THE GOLDEN RULE: SHUT UP
03:49 < vai> livetubes core duo, blogododecagons and so social that you're guaranteed to catch a disease.
03:49 < solios> I'd like to downgrade back to 1.0, plz.
03:49 < solios> 1997 would be fine.
03:49 < solios> only with modern stable non-shitty web browsers.
03:52 < vai> when there where 40 websites and half of them thought their java menus were the BEST
03:54 < solios> and the whole intertube crashed every US holiday weekend!

Life On Mars is fantastic. Go watch it. And wish along with me that there were more than sixteen episodes. Gene Hunt is my new hero.

If you liked the first three quarters of season 2 of Twin Peaks, you're going to love Meadowlands. All of the repulsively dysfunctional soap opera without even a ghost of the {mystical|initiatic} undercurrent that made the middle of Twin Peaks worth slogging through. A young cross-dressing special needs Robert Smith wannabe beating off to a hambeast with a superiority complex the size of Rhode Island might scream OMG TEH KEWL to some people, but to me it feels like the writers overdosed on David Lynch and managed to miss the point entirely.

Maybe I'm missing the point - the show seems to be equal parts influenced by The Prisoner, so there might be something more to it... but three episodes in and it feels like someone threw an X-Files production team at an arc of Guiding Light and then edited out the monsters. It's got enough bleh to irk me, but it also has Ralph Brown. Ralph Brown is awesome, so I'll keep watching for him and hope that the soap opera dies down and the drama ratchets up.*

The "doing something other than sitting on my ass staring at a monitor" I alluded to in the previous ATC post involved lots of sitting on my ass staring at a screen, actually - I took my sister out to see the Transformers movie. It was everything I expected - it was Big, it was Loud, it was Gorgeous, it was camp and it was shallow. Fuck, all porn - be it naked girls porn, naked boys porn, guns-and-explosions porn or giant stompy robots porn - is shallow. You're going to this movie to see big honkin' robots pounding the crap out of other big honkin' robots, and the story does what it can to accommodate. It ain't Shakespeare, but it is entertaining. Especially if you like the "find the continuity flaw" easter egg hunt - there's a bunch, and a couple of them are huge. Like, Death Star huge.

There's more to report on, but this started off as an ATC page post and I still have to upload that. So.

* Which it did, about ten minutes later.