Technical Scare

by on February 18, 2013 at 8:25 pm
Posted In: Test

Well I must say that I found another bit of proof that I’m getting more technically literate on File Management and WordPress. I’m the first to admit that I tend to be a bit of a borderline Luddite on most things technical. I think it has something to do with the whole visually artistic right brain not dealing with coding very well. However I’ve been keeping at it to the point I’m pleased to say I now know enough to make small tweaks in the code without having to worry about breaking anything.

That is not to say everything is all fine and dandy things will happen that leave me in a state of panic before I either take a deep breath and figure what’s up or call for help.

This just happened an hour ago. I was in the middle of one of my boring archive maintenance projects that involved moving a lot of files when I suddenly got an error message about updating Comicpress and files not found that I did not understand. The next thing I knew all of the comics were gone from this page. After about ten minutes of panic I found out what the problem was. While moving a handful of files on FileZilla I inadvertently dragged the comics Folder out of the Rhapsodies folder and out of the page. A quick fix once I found out where I had dragged it to.

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I Heard the Birds Sing

by on February 18, 2013 at 9:26 am
Posted In: Test

I’ve been doing a lot of walking the last couple of weeks, an activity that I enjoy as an opportunity to meditate, brainstorm and save on bus fare. So when I was making my way to the University District I noticed something for the first time this year. The birds were really going at it. I’m not talking about the usual generic calls. But this was the first time I had heard them actually singing (or as I like to call it staking their turf) in a long time. Which means the earliest sign of the spring season is upon us.

In another bird related note, I saw a bunch of crows mobbing something in Ravenna park. They were too high up it the trees for me to get any idea who their victim was but I like to think it was that barred owl I saw last year.

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Convention Countdown

by on February 16, 2013 at 8:37 am
Posted In: Test

Well I’m happy to say my progress in getting ready for the Emerald City Comicon is coming along well. I managed to get all of my merchandise orders out before I had to pay more to get everything here on time. So now I am a that stage where I worry about whether everything shall arrive just as I ordered them or will I be getting a lot of expensive crap. (Unfortunately this isn’t just me being paranoid. I have gotten a few printing errors that were all my fault. The worst was last year where I didn’t realize you had to set the resolution when making your PDF and what I had set the printers was the absolutely lowest setting)

But despite all of the worry I’m glad to be done with it. Getting the book was the worst. I thought this year that since I was repackaging earlier material it would be a cakewalk and mostly that was true with one exception. I had too much faith in automatic kerning. This is not a good idea. While most of the fonts have this covered there are lots of exceptions to this rule. Especially when you had it set to bold for when a character was shouting. There were many instances where a lot of words looked more like a short sentence and other instances where letters were nearly merged together they were so close. So I decided to go to the originals and clean them all up. This led me to my second problem. These cartoons were all done back in the day I had a much smaller hard drive and I used to merge most of my layers to save space. While the text was still thankfully a separate layer it had all been rastarzized. This meant I had to select individual letters or words with Photoshop’s lasso tool and nudge them one by one… It took me all day.

But now that that is behind me I can focus on all of the other things I have to get ready for this thing. Making sure I have an assistant to help man my table, have a way to get all of my gear to the convention center… string.

You know… the easy stuff.

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Friday Museum Sketches

by on February 15, 2013 at 9:54 am
Posted In: Art

FatherTimeToday’s sketch is another from the Seattle Art Museum’s Porcelain collection. It is a timepiece representing  Father Time made in 1745 (The idea was that you would rest your pocket watch in the funny bowl thing that the figure is holding) It’s from Germany made in Meissen hard paste by Johann Friedrich Eberlein (1693-1745)

Interesting bit of trivia about why the figure of Father Time was represented with a scythe. For the longest time I assumed that it was a grim reaper reference. Turns out the Titan Cronus  who was represented with the sickle that he used to kill his father Uranus and was marginally an agricultural deity, was mistaken for the god Chronos, the god of time (spelled the same in Greek.) At the same time he was merged with the Roman god Saturn  who represented a past golden age and  also represented time.

They kept the farming implement.

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ECCC Approaches

by on February 14, 2013 at 8:46 am
Posted In: Test

Well my pre-convention panic has truly set  as I try to put the finishing touches on all of my merchandise before before I have to pay extra for a rush order.

The Emerald City Comic City Comiccon is early this year.  had wondered why for a while until a friend pointed out that the normal April slot is on the Easter weekend so I would guess is that it was a scheduling tie up with Sakura-Con that normally happens then. Anyway despite knowing this for a while it has been difficult for me to wrap my head around the change. So here I am at crunch time trying to be ready for the damn thing.

At Last year’s  show I found out more people wanted to start at the beginning than those who wanted to buy the cool new book. Because of this my focus was doing a new collection of the older material. Because of this I spent all morning yesterday cleaning up text in a lot of the strips that I had done back before I understood the importance of kerning.

But despite my normal panic and stressing out I’m sure that I’ll have fun and I look forward to seeing everyone at Artists Alley, table C12!

ECCC-2013-Show-Floor---Exhibits

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Library CDs

by on February 13, 2013 at 6:01 am
Posted In: Test

As I’ve mentioned several times is there’s nothing I like to be introduced to new sounds, I also like to make playlists to listen to when working on my ongoing projects. I described my use of Pandora for this last week one of the things I frequently do whenever Pandora shows me something new that I like I check to see if the Library has it in their collection and If they do I put it on hold. This allows for a steady stream of interesting CDs

Of course there are a few flaws in this system. One of these is that there is enough of a lag on these CDs that when I finally get them I frequently don’t remember why I put any of them on hold. The other problem Is that CDs are kind of small and, despite my best precautions of keeping all of my library material in a special place, can easily fall through the cracks and when they do there’s too many chance that I forgot about it entirely by the time it comes due. To make matters worse it’s very easy for the CDs to fall through the cracks at the Library so there have been a few times I’ve  gotten overdue notices even though I’ve returned the CD. The possibility of the CD getting lost on the Library’s end makes it even easier to forgot whether the CD is still in the house.

This happened to me just the other day. I had checked out something that sounded interesting (this time it was Caravan Palace) and with it due the next day I could not find it anywhere. I was in a bit of a rush so I admitted defeat fairly quickly and did my usual stalling technique of renewing it so I had a few more weeks of looking for it (a word of advice, renewal for this purpose should be on the list last resorts. It gives new meaning to out of sight out of mind.)

Of course I found the disk five minutes later. Which prove once again that the universe is capricious at best.

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