comic | episodes & e-books | store | about
< previous post | next post > | all news from Apr. 2011 News archive | News search | RSS
 
  Episode 13 launches despite the oddsApr 08, 2011 3:29 AM PDT | url
 
Added 2 new A* pages:Phew! I think I'm sort of getting closer to what I want space in this part of the galactic core to look like, but, hm... As I was making the stars and nebulae in the background, I was thinking "man, next time I should just paint this part" because...that was a heck of a lot of layers, and I'm still not quite sure how I feel about the hard look of it back there. So maybe I'll try painting the next spacey background in GIMP or something, just to see how that goes.
 
It's late and I continued to be plagued by various technical problems today--some new ones, even!--so I'll just run through those and some self-serving links quickly before calling it a night, dear reader:

  • A big "gosh, thanks!" to the guys at Mannie Marine for adding an A* link banner to their site, which hosts their neato black and white animated webcomic set in a grim, militarized future. Also, the banner needed to be at a size I didn't have one for yet--150x30--so I made one at that size:
     
    Image
     
    which you can always find along with a lot of larger ones on the icons and banners page, which is always linked off of the big list of links on this site's about page.
     
  • Speaking of the about page, I updated the A* development list at the bottom with notes on stuff I started doing in the last episode--12--like gray for the primary skin tone (instead of white), and semi-transparent skin highlights. Oh and notes about when I started using the Intuos4 tablet, which was basically halfway through the last page of episode 12, when I broke my Intuos3. :P
     
  • Speaking of the Intuos4, although I said yesterday that I got it to be cooperative with the lit button labels showing in wireless mode, it decided to stop doing that today, at least on a regular basis, and even sort of to go into a pretty crippled mode when switching to wireless where it loses all its tablet settings and behaves like a very sluggish, generic mouse. Hrrrhh. Uninstalling and reinstalling my Bluetooth and Wacom drivers didn't have any effect. I can get it to make a good connection--but still not with lit buttons--by redoing the connection manually. It would be *nice* if it did it right automatically, but currently it's deciding not to. Not sure what else I can try for that, and Wacom has pretty much zero Intuos4 Wireless troubleshooting documentation on their site--two articles as far as my search found: one about a wireless version of their old Graphire tablet, and one actually for the Intuos4, basically saying yeah if it doesn't work go check with Apple or Microsoft--but I'm pretty sure this clumsy auto-handshake I'm having a problem with is run by the Wacom tablet drivers, so, blug.
     
  • Technical issue with the post office! Do not fold, spindle, or mutilate! I'm pretty sure that's carved in stone over like the capital post office, right? >_> Come on, guys! =P
     
  • On the plus side, the rest of my computer virus scanning procedure came up clean, so yay, cured! :D
     
  • On the briefly incredibly depressing although it shouldn't really have been side, while juggling my tablet and keyboard during testing the wireless pairing by using the programmed function buttons I've got for it to work with Pandora, the Pandora station I've been carefully training since like mid-January suddenly...disappeared. Like I'd deleted it, but with a single stray keypress or something--not going through the menu and "are you sure you want to delete" dialogue in their stand-alone desktop player. It was gone! Checked the web player too at pandora.com, but it wasn't showing there, either. Noooo! I'd have to listen to at least the first parts of all the 500+ songs I've weeded out over the past months, re-tag the (what's 65*5? that many) I'd said I liked...
     
    But then for some reason I thought maybe I'd see if I could at least find its old info page, and that might help me re-create it if Pandora tech support couldn't magically restore it. I thought I'd posted its name as a link to its info page at some point -- Trippity Hoppity -- either here or on Facebook or something, so I googled for it, but Google just came up with the direct info page link in the top results. So that was handy! And I clicked through and it was all there, along with a "Listen" button, so I clicked that, and...it was back! And it showed up in their desktop player too, and played as if it had been there all along. So... I don't know what happened. :P Fixed with Google magic, maybe! :o
     
    (What's funny too is that when I use pandora's own station search, it comes up with three other "Trippity Hoppity" stations, none of them mine. I guess I'm so unoriginal it doesn't even want to know about me. ;_; Also I have no idea why on the station info page it says it was created in 2009--more like beginning of this year!)
     
  • While waiting for the new tablet to arrive I was catching up on various non-drawing things, like posting some of the more successful pages from episode 12 on my deviantART, along with sort of way too much information about what went into them, what I thought about it, etc. I still have some to go from episode 12, and who knows when I'll get myself some spare time to do that, but hey you know what would really encourage me to do that? If you headed over there and Followed my dA page (you need a free and easily-signed-up-for dA account to do that), because when people do that it makes me inexplicably happy--like, way more than it should. :D Anyway, if you can't get enough of my babbling about how conflicted I am about my latest drawings, that's a pretty good place to get extra helpings of that bitter medicine! (I'm pretty good at talking this thing up, aren't I?)
     
  • Speaking of non-drawing things, thanks to the relative mess that has been my working life this week, I made no further headway on the 165 thumbnails I'll need for this episode; I have ten that I managed to squeak out yesterday...and none of those are particularly presentable...eh, maybe one is. But I don't think it's "let's stay up at the top of the front page of the site in the top news article all weekend long"-presentable, sooo maybe I'll just put that off 'til Monday.
     
  • See you then!
     
  • Oh wait, also since this weekend I *have* a working tablet, I'll have a new page of my Sunday comic, The Princess and the Giant, done up for you on that day this weekend, unless some *other* technical issue comes along and-- Well, I'm not even going to think about it. Positive thinking! Comics! Yar!
     
  • Geez, apparently I'm so ready for this week to be done that I optimistically converted this Thursday update into a Friday update in my head. Garrrrrr! So no I *will* have another A* update for Friday, and another A* page, and maybe I'll get some kind of leaked storyboard scribble to head up the news for the weekend after all. And I should probably go get some sleep now.
 
 
 
 
·····
 
 
 
 
 
< previous post | next post > | all news from Apr. 2011 News archive | News search | RSS
 
© Copyright 2024 Ben Chamberlain. All rights reserved. | Privacy Policy