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

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.

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.

Like most non-comic viz, it seemed like a good idea at the time. The time being one of those magical fun fluffy happy times in which your options have tunneled down to (a) Find Something To Do or (b) lapse into unconsciousness. I need the consciousness thing in a bit. So.

[im]perfect definitely sums things up.

... DCR Chapter Two is actually In Production. The first page (four strips) is completely finished, and the next two are almost completely laid out.

The goal is to get the first four pages (16 strips, from the beginning through to the title card) completely finished before posting any of them. I want the first five strips at least, so I have a week-long buffer to crank out the remainder. Once that's done I can start leaking strips onto the site on at a time while I grind away on the Daedalus rec area for ATC.

I'll need to do some 3d work to proceed after strip 140, so I figure this will work well with the production pipeline. Model ATC while the non-3d DCR pages creep out, then go back into ATC production while I also work on the modeling for DCR. Then when ATC 3.1 is complete I can take a huge chunk out of DCR chapter 2 modeling and strips while I take a "breather" from color comics production.

It all fits, somehow.

1. 7.5 pages of Transitional Voices until I need to start modeling again. Six pages out of the next environment, then another environment which I'll get a page out of (and as such should be designed for reuse in DCR).

2. While said modeling is going on, script for DCR.2 will be prepped. The existing outline is amazingly complete - a final script is almost a formality and is necessary more for page/strip flow and to nail down what I'll need for photography and modeling.

3. After TV.1 is complete, modeling and principal photography for DCR.2 will proceed while the script for TV.2 is worked out. TV.1 may be cleaned up - I have some issues with page flow that may or may not be correctable, and I may redo a couple of panels or pages. The idea being to save TV from an Edit similar to the one performed on the first half of The Dualist (including cover rework of TV.1 and DCR.1). The TV.2 script is currently in outline/event form with only one subsection detailed - it needs a hell of a lot more work than the DCR.2 script does.

4. Between prep for Chapters 2 and production of Chapters 2, the ATC and DCR sites will be tweaked and overhauled. Or burned down to the foundations and rebuilt from scratch. In the case of DCR this would be replacing older crappier graphics with newer prettier graphics (already under way). In the case of ATC the big emphasis will be on making it easier to navigate quickly between books, more support material (shipyard, reworked cast, rewritten lexicon, etc).

5. In theory, DCR.2 and TV.2 will be produced in parallel. It's far more likely that DCR.2 will be produced during the course of TV.2 and TV.3.

6. As per previous, the motivating factor for DCR production is the fact that ATC rendering takes forever. The issue now is that DCR will be requiring its own modeling and rendering. Workarounds will likely need to be found, else the alternative is to either stagger production or delay production of DCR until after TV is complete. In any event, DCR needs to be done before the book that takes place after TV can proceed.

The aforementioned gaps have been filled in. Copyrights have been removed (with one or two possible exceptions in photographs), the Skinny Puppy album Whitehouse swaps Sean is now a Foreplay Unit album, the wording of a couple of earlier scenes have been changed, the dialogue font has been changed and the size has been standardized throughout, and the art has been tweaked a smidge (literally - a wee bit). The cover is done, and the comic is now undergoing proofreading. After it passes that, it'll be posted to ATC.

I ran the numbers, and the first issue can be output into hardcopy for cheap. Seriously cheap. More on that after I've had time to think on it.

In the meantime, Chapter Two is shaping up, and should be rolling into a draft script over the next couple of weeks.

Scraggling blocks indicate what's missing from the layout, which will be filled in as I parse through the edit. While I'm not entirely thrilled with where a couple of the gaps are, it does beat the crap out of filling in entire pages. Or cutting strips out entirely.

Doesn't look like much from this vantage, does it?

 

  

Cleaned up, tweaked a bit, and generally spiffier than it was when it was sitting in silo yesterday.

I usually prefer to sit on "work in progress" CG until it actually appears in the comic, but in terms of what's available, the Hemera has already been out of commission for five years... and it'll be at least six months to a year before it shows up in DCR - and if I'm lucky, the same amount of time until it shows up as an "extra" in ATC.

Or rather, lack thereof. Scheduling brutality deprives me of Cyberwars VI and the opportunity to finalize (read : draft) the script for the next DCR scene in its native environment.

Oops.

It's one of those bits that was drafted the first time this thing was on deck, so the events exist in my head with some degree of clarity. Dialogue is another matter. Last year I would have invented any number of excuses to delay production in favor of getting the writing done in a public place, but this is the future and I am old and I'd rather spend the weekend working on the comic than playing civ3 waiting to work on the comic.

Two scenes left of the first chapter. Technically three, but the third is ridiculously short so it doesn't really count. Then it's tweaks, formatting and so on and so forth - at which point, the plot will have advanced to the point it had developed to back when production started.

Ph34r.

ATC TDL for the remainder of 2007:
(posted 20070805.03:36, bumped 20070808.11:34)

[*] Finish applying proofreader fixes to The Dualist. Complete 20070805 so far as I know. That or people are just looking at the boobs instead of the words.
[*] Apply cast/lexicon bits generated for hardcopy to ATC website.
[*] Submit The Dualist to comiXpress for hardcopy. See here for the initial nailbiting.
[_] If comiXpress doesn't print The Dualist, make whatever required adjustments to ensure hardcopy by 2007.12.
[_] Finish initial production of "Whitehouse" (DCR Chapter 1, ATC 1.1).
[_] Post-production of "Whitehouse" - extensive copyright removal, some dialogue tweaks, etc. All the hell I've gone through with The Dualist, only on a much much smaller scale.
[_] Collate DCR 1 for print, submit to comiXpress and post in its "final" form to ATC site.
[_] Tweak ATC website (specificially /comic/) for display of all three projects (DCR, Dualist, Transitional Voices)
[_] ??????????????
[_] Profit!

The happy bit re: production of ATC 1.1 is that DCR 1 already has approximately 17 pages done, with 3.5 scenelets remaining. Issue one (of an estimated 7) should be 24-28pp, give or take).

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.

So. If - and only if - the last part of Chapter Seven of The Dualist takes forever to render, I've decided I'll be getting back to DCR this summer. It's the Circle Of Life, or something - DCR got started when it did because Chapter Four was such a bitch in the rendering department.

I'll be getting back to DCR after The Dualist is done, regardless - it's just a question of the comic beginning to update this summer, or this fall. It would be totally awesomely super spiffy if I was somehow able to finish chapter one of DCR at the same time as The Dualist, but I doubt this is going to happen.

The plan at present is to slightly tweak the ATC site after The Dualist is finished, after which I'll start mirroring DCR to ATC in a "compiled" format - strips chunked together into comic-sized pages. Doing so will put the unfolding Book One on the same site as the completed Book Two, and will allow me to coallate all of the ATC cast into one ATC cast page. You'd think it a non-issue now, but come DCR chapters Two, Three and Four, there's going to be a hell of a lot of redundancy. And redundancy is bad, mm-kay?

At this point I'm still undecided on rather or not to dive into Book Three after I've finished The Dualist, but that's a matter for contemplation and discussion over there, not over here. If I do, I'll be getting all of the modelling done first. And there's a lot of modelling.

As mentioned in the most recent ATC News post, DCR is inching back on deck. A Chapter framework - somewhat similar to ATC's - is beginning to evolve. Like ATC, I won't be implementing it in the archives until I'm into the second segment, which is where the ATC crossover/prequel elements begin.

For the record, the first chapter is "Whitehouse" (after the band and the character) and the second is most likely going to be "The Operative" (after a Cabaret Voltaire song). I'd like to get the first chapter closed before the year is out, which means cleaning up the writing, the role of one of the characters, and determining a delivery schedule that works inside of ATC production pacing.

It should be possible to juggle ATC and DCR in parallel with other types of work, as opposed to the historical "ATC and $project" juggling.

As usual, DCR production will be announced with a new strip.

Another irritating holiday, another !dead city radio to commemorate. I think this one's better than the last... but I've started giving a shit about DCR quality lately, so it's a given that it would suck a bit less.

The real yay for this holiday is not only is it a day off, it also falls on a short work week - since I worked the weekend I've got Friday off. Given the non-event that was Monday, that makes it a two day week, with a good chunk of the staff on vacation. Win!

Context : I thought fireworks were cool until I moved here in 1997. In 1997 and 1998 there were displays for the Regatta (if memory serves), the Fourth, and every. Single. Pirates. Home game. Win or lose. Shitloads of fireworks- in such volume that they got old, got boring, and became background noise. Too much of a good thing, or something.

First strip since The Unspeakable (which isn't canon). Yikes.

It's been a given for some number of years that I can juggle two things at a time - ATC and DCR, ATC and 3d modelling (for ATC), ATC and pr0n, ATC and a social life, ATC and PISSPOWERASSCHRIST, half of any one of these and a girlfriend, ATC and _____________. "Fortunately" ATC is currently in Rendering Hell and I don't feel like drawing pr0n or plonking around in Garageband, so.

DCR hasn't been updated due to writers block or any sort of creative constipation - it's been put on hold in order to use that time for other projects, sitting on the back burner as sort of a contingency plan, a "this is what I'll do if I ever get fired, or take a vacation, or whatever."

{Insert a shitload of sentences beginning with or otherwise featuring 'because,' all of which are some form of dodge or avoidance}.

ATC is priority one, everything else is priority two. When The Dualist is done, Dead City Radio becomes ATC (it's a prequel to The Dualist). Until then it gets to take part in The Great Juggling Act that is all non-ATC projects.

Zing.

The strip has been Squelching since November. At the time, I was modelling the bits that were to be used in Priorities, the second scene of Chapter Four of The Dualist.

Since then, I've produced Scene Two, then gone on to model almost all of the necessary components for Scene Three. Once that was taken care of, I started on Scene Three proper, and have been more-or-less hauling ass on it. It's not a short scene, and it's going to take at least another six weeks or so to chunk out.

I still need to get Chapter Five in order. While the script is still in a primordial state, I have a short list of high-detail models that I need to produce. This time around, I intend to take my time with them, and try to balance modelling and DCR production.

To cut a long story short, the idea is to finish Chapter Four, then finish the current DCR sub-story, then in all likelihood start work on the next one. Story-wise, that will put me in a good position this spring, and hopefully I'll be able to balance DCR and ATC production throughout the summer, so that both comics update on a fairly regular basis.

That's the plan, anyway.

A "!dead city radio*" strip - assuming there's another one- features DCR characters and situations as applied to modern day events. Since the story happens in 1997-98, !dead city radio strips are totally non-Canonical. They're also whatever aspect ratio happens to work with the subject, and they're filed here, to make things less confusing to the reader.

Quality's a bit lower than usual, but I have an ATC page to work on today, and the idea of exerting more than the most minimal effort to tackle the fearsome testosterone-belching fountain of ignorance that is Pittsburgh Sports is pretty unappetizing.

Panel one was swiped from the Pittsburgh Post Gazette (go go google image search for Pittsburgh Fireworks). I doubt there'll be a display regardless of the outcome of today's game - it's winter and fireworks were very much a "Pirates Won / Pirates Lost / There's No Pirates Game This Weekend" thing in the late 90s, so it's in keeping with the "feel" of DCR more than it is with the current state of city affairs.

* The bang in !dead city radio plays on the technological angle. I could just as easily have made it "Not Dead City Radio," but that would invite comparisons to Ninja High School. And DCR:NHS::Crash:Project A-Ko. One of the many things I won't be referencing in the strip - unless I do a bit about the amazing disaster that was every other student in my Cartooning And Dynamic Anatomy class. I turned in eight pages of ATC while one guy did a bad NHS parody (!) and another freely copied "anatomy" out of a spiral-bound wad of Wildcats back issues.... and those are the good parts.

Pittsburgh is choking on testosterone. The locals are practically drowning in the shit. I hate them. I hate their disease. Millions of years of evolution and they regress to shit-flinging apes at a moment's notice. Their selective provincial patriotism is just as annoying as their sudden insistance on thrusting it in the face of anyone who needs to leave their house.

It's some kind of aggro-retard leper colony.

The best part? The collective testosterone-orgasm has made me physically ill. It's not the guns-and-fireworks-and-running-around-shirtless or the screaming or the bathroom-accessory waving or even the opportunistic lifesuckers. It's the fact that there's going to be at least two more weeks of it.

I need to move. Preferably to a city that's had its shots. Philadelphia doesn't seem to be anywhere near this degree of rabid, narrow-minded or neanderthalish about the Eagles... but Philadelphia actually has a lot of other things going for it. Pittsburgh doesn't. The locals know it and they're clinging to the one thing they do have with the sick desparation of a junky who needs something - anything - to live for.

Now they've been thrown a bone and rather than act like adults, the city has, as a whole, decided to drop its pants and do the potty dance.

Kids these days.

Update (through Daily Rotten) : My low opinion of these primates is justified.

54c graffiti (unretouched).

noun.

An electric circuit that cuts off a radio receiver when the signal is too weak for reception of anything but noise.

There are other definitions, but DCR has something of a radio/telecommunications vibe to it. So.

Obviously I need to make some decisions about what I'm doing with DCR-the-comic. Fucking weekends aren't nearly long enough to jam in all of the other stuff that needs doing and time seems to compress when the days get shorter. Right now I'm thinking along the lines of at least a week off - of ATC AND DCR - while I work on other stuff. Stuff that needs doing (commissions, etc).

If anything, I need enough null time to get bored enough to do some serious long-range planning- this seat-of-the-hangover thing just ain't cuttin' it.

Vaguely amused that one hell of a burn turned into one hell of a slump, doing so with a deceptively liquid ease. I haven't drawn Whitehouse since I got back from Philly, and my usual production haunts - bars - have been camped, and not in a good way. Bald bearded assholes rubbing their egomaniacal opinions all over Birmingham like a bad case of genital warts, hormones striving for hookup through the verbal equivalent of interpretive dance in Oakland and the coffee houses are hipster wastelands that leave me thirsting for grenades or thicker goggles and better headphones. I've been drinking so much that I've developed a string of embarassing memory holes the way a thirteen year old acquires zits - unsightly and without even trying. I'm thinking it's these gaps - ranging in size from a few minutes to several hours - that keep me coming back for more, even though I know it's a bad idea.

That or the fact that people are petty, blatant, transparent and intolerable when I'm sober, and are fairly enjoyable after I've had a few drinks. Unfortunately the gap between "social" and "memory hole" is a short one, and I've heard through third parties that I've a nasty habit of being a creepy bastard when I'm on the event horizon of cognition. What little I remember of these bits makes me all the more interested in forgetting them, more out of embarassment than anything else. Playing back memories of trying to hit on girls is strangely worse than the act itself.

The Beehive was a great "office" until too many bipedal leeches latched on, trying to suck me dry with their bullshit and their selfish need. The various bars have gone that route as well - that magical balance of knowing just enough people just well enough to guarantee that little of anything is going to get done.

Long story short - Out is where I do the planning for DCR. Usually on Friday or Saturday nights, but I worked this Saturday so I didn't go Out Friday. And I had approximately five minutes Saturday night before I had to get the defense screens up, which was enough time to warm up with some sketchwork of the next ATC set, but not enough time to do anything useful.

I need a breather, and not from comics - from everything else, since it's everything else that's stridently insisting that it is, once again, One or The Other- a vast and empty desert of production, or the steaming manure pit that any attempt to be social on my own terms invariably devolves into.

14:35 <@_Lasar> What I'd love with strip-ish webcomis is an archive page that displays several comics at once. The clicking drives me mad, especially since all webcomics seem to be hosted on a gameboy.
14:36 <@solios> yes.
14:36 <@solios> DCR takes care of that.
14:36 <@_Lasar> Good.
14:36 <@solios> or will when there's enough story arcs to do useful data modelling.
14:37 <@_Lasar> ...
14:37 <@solios> what?
14:37 <@_Lasar> I think you are the first person evar (and probably the last) to combine the realms of webcomic and data modeling.
14:37 <@solios> hey, you remember how long it took to get ATC's interface !shitty.
14:37 <@solios> uh.
14:37 <@solios> dude.
14:37 <@solios> I'm an artist who goes to hacker conventions.
14:37 <@solios> I care about these things.
14:37 <@solios> :)
14:37 <@_Lasar> Yes.
14:37 <@_Lasar> Yeah.
14:37 <@_Lasar> I didn't object.
14:37 <@solios> :D
14:38 <@_Lasar> I just said nobody else does.

The current projects have the following production goals. These are hard-and-fast; points that have evolved out of the projects, rather than being goals laid down at the onset.

The Dualist : Taking place smack in the middle of ATC, The Dualist deals with multiple plotlines, symbolism and theme through color, and attempts to evolve full page and multi-page compositional skills. Production values are the highest that I can set them and the goal is to try to raise the bar with every scene and every chapter. Pages are produced as time allows and everything's planned out the yin-yang. The Dualist is designed for full-color, 7.5x10 print - not cheap.

1. Every scene is The Best It Can Be at the time produced.
2. Pages are produced as time and other factors allow.
3. It'll be done when it's done.

Dead City Radio : Production values for DCR are nothing like production values for ATC - rather than "when it's done" or "when it's doable," the major goal of DCR is to publish like clockwork. Monday through Friday, as close to midnight as possible. The strip format has made it possible to work ahead - as of this writing, a week ahead - and the idea at the moment is that there will be five DCR strips a week until it's Done. This is subject to change if the format evolves. It might, but it won't be until I'm certain of DCR's target output format. DCR can be currently be sensibly output at 2880x2000 or 2880x4000 - 7.2x5 or 7.2x10 @ 400 dpi. DCR is grayscale for several reasons - I can work a hell of a lot faster in black and white; it's a medium I like and can't do with The Dualist; and most importantly: it's a hell of a lot cheaper to print grayscale than it is to print full color. You'll see an issue of DCR well before you'll see a trade paperback of The Dualist.*

1. Five strips a week is five strips a week. Some will suck. Some will be good. Practice makes perfect.
2. Pages are produced as far in advance as possible and are released on a strict schedule.
3. The story is likely going to be roughly Dualist length, hopefully shorter. Strip format gurantees regular production : it is not a shot at a meal ticket.

* If for no other reason than I'm 10 Standard Comic Pages into DCR and about 190 into The Dualist, with The Dualist likely to finish up over the 300 mark. Standard Comics Length is 22-30pp, and DCR's format allows for incremental publication. Given the production difficulties I've encountered with Chapter Four of The Dualist (and the relative lack thereof with DCR), it's safe to say that we're going to see Whitehouse in the discount bin first. As things progress, you'll see why this is a Good Thing™.

A couple of Pepsi products that don't exist any more come up in the course of this week's DCR strips. Turns out I'm not the only one who thought Pepsi Kona - coffee flavored Pepsi - was complete ass.

20:26 <@rjbs> Kona was fucking disgusting
20:27 < solios> 1997 is when I remember Josta.
20:27 < solios> Kona was k-gross.
20:27 < solios> also 1994.
20:27 <@rjbs> I have some Kona t-shirts somewhere.
20:27 < solios> send one to xeno.
20:27 < solios> he LOVED that shit.
20:27 < solios> in fact he's the one that told me about it.
20:28 <@rjbs> xodm
20:28 < solios> was all OMG DOOD DOOD DOOOOOD! THEY HAVE COFFEE FLAVORED PEPSI!!!!!
20:28 < solios> and I was all "you mean coffee-scented asswater." :P
20:28 <@rjbs> One night, coming home from the movie theater, Paul and I stopped at 7-11.
20:28 <@rjbs> I saw "Pepsi Kona." We were a test market.
20:28 < solios> so were we.
20:28 <@rjbs> I don't drink coffee, but I thought, "Hey, I'll try anything once."
20:28 <@rjbs> It was about 0200.
20:28 < solios> bet that cured your habit.
20:29 < solios> (of trying anything once)
20:29 <@rjbs> I went to the counter and paid for it, opened it, and took a swig.
20:29 < solios> :|
20:29 <@rjbs> Paul and the cashier both looked at me expectantly. Paul said, "How is it?"
20:29 <@rjbs> I said, "Actually, it's really not that -- AUGAAHGAUGH!"
20:29 <@rjbs> as the horrible taste sank in
20:29 < solios> The aftertaste?
20:29 <@rjbs> The cashier said, "People been doing that all night. Go get something else, I'll throw that out for you."
20:29 <@bda> ah, shit. I think this is the first Rik-story I've heard twice now.
20:29 <@bda> Fuck. :(
20:29 <@bda> It's all downhill from here.
20:30 < calliope> Aw, poor bda.
20:30 <@rjbs> bda: perhaps you do not know Act II....
20:30 <@rjbs> So, a few weeks later, Pepsi showed up at the theatre with t-shirts and a huge supply of Kona. We were to give samples to customers.
20:30 <@rjbs> Paul and I both said, "No fucking way," because we didn't want that on our consciences.
20:30 < solios> hahah!
20:30 <@rjbs> so Joe said he'd do it
20:30 <@rjbs> so he put on the Pepsi Kona shirt and started giving people little plastic cups of Kona
20:31 <@rjbs> then he decided it was great, and wanted to drink it all the time
20:31 <@rjbs> so when Paul and I refilled the machine, we got a case of Kona and put it in one of the vendo slots
20:31 < solios> he wasn't right in the head, was he?
20:31 < calliope> That's awesome.
20:31 <@rjbs> About two cans later, Joe saw the light and realized that it was fucking horrible.
20:31 <@rjbs> We made him drink most of the rest of the supply, though.
20:31 <@rjbs> A few cans we gave to other employees who had missed the initial drama.

Kona doesn't come up directly in DCR - not yet, anyway - and neither will Crystal Pepsi (which I liked), as that was over and done with well before the time in which the story takes place.

e2 node (comprehensive), Wikipedia entry (another take), some .wma samples from KGB stations and general "short wave espoionage", plus an 80 meg podcast loaded with plenty of IDM/ambient and Numbers Station samples, and Stephenson's already clued us on the one-time pad.

Blame xeno for the sudden interest, and Whitehouse for context.

I'm pretty sure my dad knows more than he can say about the subject, considering the presence of a bigass low-freq antenna in several of the slides from his USAF tour. I know a stockade-sized low-frequency transmitter is the sort of thing used to talk to subs, but hey - signals is signals.

As with anything creative, the idea is to suck up enough of the concepts and base principles as possible, then let it stew until I figure out exactly why I've been sponging it up in the first place.

Spent about three hours in various parts of the current Art Institute of Pittsburgh (420 Blvd. of the Allies. 420, duhr-huhr-huhr.) with my sister and mother as my sister went through the preliminary paperwork and initial grilling of Admissions and so forth. Looks like (barring difficulties) she'll be starting at AIP in January, majoring in Graphic Design.

This comes as quite a surprise to me. Though I haven't seen my mother or sister since December of 2001 and have only talked to them a handful of times over the past few years, so it's my bad for being anti-social, I guess. I like the AIP offices - they're roomy and airy and light and open, which is a hell of a lot more than I can say for my work office these days.

After quite a bit of catching up, several No Left Turns, dinner at Fuel and Fuddel, talking to mom about Jen and to Jen about mom, I'm finding cel phones to be extremely convenient* and I'm very jazzed about the idea of Jen Versus AIP. I've also received my dad's malfunctioning iMac (for diagnostics, repairs and possible recovery), a late birthday gift from mom, and another surprise - a freelance client remembered they still needed to pay me and has done so. Bonus!

So, today kicked ass. Tonight is backups and Doctor Who; tomorrow is more DCR (and possibly ATC), and at some point this week I'll be doing some long-range planning for hardware maintenance and upgrades - I told my sister I'll give her my "old" G4 (Maniac, 2x450 1g ram, still in use) when she starts class, just so she'll have some sort of home machine.

Today wins. More of the general DCR-vibe goodness that's made the past few months interesting.

*I have a POS pay-as-you-go i215 and Jen has some widget-loaded Verizon thingy, making coordination completely painless. Shock.

DCR is now broadcasting.

For the last month it's been wired to a private audience on a need-to-know basis (see here and here). There's still a few kinks to work out. Regardless of warts or level of finish, there's no way I'm going to get DCR to an ATC level of polish while it's still the last day of September, so here it is.

The choice of date will eventually have some significance.

Until then, enjoy.

One of the goals of DCR is to document what used to be here - the short-lived IDM scene, Metropol, Laga, the Next Generation, Oakland Beehive, Pollinator, etceteras.

Archeology, after a fashion. Cultrual necrophelia is outside, 'round the back. The line starts behind Rod Stewart and have fun sucking at the Now, fucko.

From the standpoint that these things are not here. Culture slumped and it's on us (resident imports, possibly locals) to build it up and make it Awesome again. We could sit here and whine about how good it used to be, but that's easy and it wasn't, not really. Easy sucks. Life is hard, I've got my spine I've got my orange crush, helmet.

No lead to follow (flailing about).

Things I can't do with The Dualist that can be done easily and appropriately inside of DCR:

Pencils. Think Blade of the Immortal only not nearly as tight. I have a solid idea as to how/where I'll be using this and won't spoil it with further exposition. // flashbacks, anything that needs soft shading, etc.

Pencil-And-Ink ("unfinished" inks) - wondering if it'll look as good on the screen as it does on paper. I don't mean "using pencils for shading", I mean simply not doing the eraser pass. // Could be useful, will certainly require some experimentation.

Ballpoint Ink. Dude you can totally get the entire grey scale out of those cheapass Bics. (offserver example) // motion?? (along these lines // panel one)

Ballpoint Ink (Pilot), Unlike Bics, the Pilot pens I use either squirt out black ink or they're dead/about to die. All by itself, this produces the 'ink sketch' effect (ATC example), which works well if you know what you want. Ink Sketch Whitehouse is quite a bit more bishi than his strip-to-date self (stfu). // hangovers, drugs, potential for Steadman or McKean -esque line fluidity (as if. re: acidwork, etc- single-pass Pilot ink sketch, no doubling-over).

// DCR "style" (main) is as defined in strips to date (reveille), won't be switching to any of the above on a permanent basis and if you want color there's ATC, dig it. // Use above for instances, possibly entire scenes (mostly just to get it down) most likely entire strips or sub-sequences; should be good to mix with Existing Method but don't go nuts (ballpoint panel pencil panel sketch panel == strip == no.).

(a) I'll take down the silly little index.html "plug" a few strips after the reveille micro-arc. Since DCR is a strip as well as a blog, I'd like a bit of strip buffer before it's "opened" to the General Public.

(b) In response to offline observations : Whitehouse isn't a self-insertion. He's the bastard son of William Bennett and Andrew Eldritch, with a mix of other DCR characters that have meatspace analogues.

Realized on walk through Shenley, earlier:

1. DCR (the comic) is about Before The Darkness. // or rather, attempting to capture / isolate specific elements that separate Before from After.

2. DCR is also about The Darkness. I realized a few weeks ago exactly how to say what I need to say and I can't say it in words. Power Of The Image, etc.

3. DCR isn't really about After The Darkness. The Dualist deals with that in certain ways. After The Darkness, focus shifts into something a lot less internalized.

In theory, anyway. This thing's got a mind of its own - all I do is pick up the pieces and put them together in a more accessible fashion. Boiling off the dross in the process.

Still strugging with a FAQ-deployable Mission Statement that sums up the project beyond the somewhat vapid "This is exactly what it needs to be, and I am doing exactly what I need to do exactly the way it needs to be done," since that isn't a hundred percent accurate.

Months on the ladder. Scent memories.

Regardless, it's time I stopped blogging about nothing in particular and started actually blogging about stuff. Right? Right.

To that end I aim to get the last bits I intend to incorporate into the site all cleaned up and socketed before the end of the month. Which means having a few comics in the bag, and at least one or two "writeups" of local subcounteralt cultural refuges.

If The Upstage is either too slow or too lame, I'll still hit Dee's.

Solves the liver destruction thing nicely, I think.

============

0204, 20050901 : The upstage was closed for some reason. Got blitzed at Dee's with 342 instead. No regrets. Clarity of thought mucked up with enough sinus pressure to stall a moose.

Remembered a bit ago that I have loose plans to talk to James about the Next Decade tonight, at The Upstage. At this point, I'm not sure if I'll give it a miss or not - I'm still thinking up what exactly I want to ask him about and I have no idea how sensitive or omniscient he is about the subject matter. Not even really sure if ND applies to DCR (it certainly applies to "Dead City" - but does it fit the altdotgothindustrial vibe I'm trying to nail down?).

Decisions, decisions.