Year's End: Exodus

Ah the new year! Merry New Year Auld Lang Syne, you festive 'ol lush! Well I myself will probably be asleep by 10, and when I awake I will be one year in the future! All the way to 2008. I'm hard at work with my personal robot apprentice keeping me in fresh supply of sharpened pencils. Back to the grindstone!



















Happy New Year Everyone!

Briefs and Boxers

I'll be honest, it's hard to write a blog about the comic without giving too much away. I know Jack will agree that we really want the comic to speak for itself when it's all ready to go, and not to divulge too much before then. Making headway on the first few pages though. Just putting finishing touches on pages 1,2, and 3 while drawing up some roughs for 4 and 5. Other than that just on wind down mode from all the holiday excitement.

The elusive White Elephant Man

A couple of weeks ago Megan and I hosted a "White Elephant" party. All participants bring their gift to "the pile." Gifts are wrapped, but are not labeled. Gifts are inexpensive, humorous items, that should ultimately be pretty useless. All participants draw a number. The participant with #1 unwraps any gift from the pile and then shows it to everyone. Each successive participant, in the order determined from the drawing, can either 1) "steal" an already opened gift (if there's one they really like) or 2) be adventurous and go for a wrapped gift from the pile. If the participant chooses to steal, the person whose gift is stolen now repeats their turn and either 1) steals another person's gift or 2) unwraps a new gift.

Since items can be stolen, the item in your possession is not yours until the game is over (i.e. a food item cannot be eaten until the game is over). However, this is often amended with a rule declaring a gift "dead" or "safe" after it has been stolen a certain number of times (usually two or three). This helps the process go more smoothly (avoiding, for example, the hypothetical scenario of the same gift being stolen by every successive participant) and limits the disadvantage of being among the first to choose gifts.This was our second "White Elephant" party, and last year the gift that stood out above all others, was a lone can of Celery Soda. The gift that was never stolen. What should appear again this year? that same can of Celery Soda. Oh how the Gods have smiled down on our festivus. I really couldn't have asked for a better Christmas.

Now let's see if 08 can live up to it.

Konamicast #1

TJ got a new camera for Christmas, so we decided to make some videos.

I just added my twitter box to the page, which means I need to start twitting some more (I'm pretty sure that's the verb form. Perhaps I can persuade TJ to start one as well, we'll see. Now I'm gonna dive back into my coding studies.

Oh, and there'll be another beard pic soon

Man, css is HARD when you don't have much of a coding background. I understand how it works decently well, but I realized I don't know enough xhtml to fully use it, so now I'm relearning all that.

If anybody wants to code the site for me, I will pay you in awkward conversation. That is a thing I am exceptionally good at.

This is Raymond. Everybody loves him.

So, for the past week or so I've been working on a Mac, and so far, I like it. I can't say much as far as Leopard or core duo and all that, as this is a 550mhz G4 powerbook running 10.2 that unfortunately doesn't even belong to me (it's TJ's, I brought it over to move some files off a mac-formated external drive). The number one thing I can say about it is that the text is incredibly crisp. I don't know if it's better anti-aliasing or what, but words just seem to pop off the screen in an extremely good way, and it makes writing somehow more enjoyable. Once I get my main computer fixed, I'm gonna have to start saving up to get one of these of my own.

It's a couple days late, but here's the progress after the first week of growing:

We're getting there

I just found out that my Mom reads this blog. That's... awesome?

I really need to start carrying a small notepad around so I can write ideas down when I get them. It's not that I forget them later, it's the opposite: they bounce around in my head forever and ever, intermingling with everything other idea until I can't completely focus on what I'm actually working on now. If I'm not careful, I'm going to end up writing 5 different adventures at once, and each and every one of them is going to suffer for it.

testing of comicpress future posting is now complete: success! This seals the deal on using it for the site, now we just need to get a design together that we can both be happy with. Unlike some of our previous designs for the comic that will not be named, I definitely want something a bit more modular, so we can add and take away buttons without destroying the look.