Ranting and Raving

Updating is still a bit irregular, but the story moves forward. I played with a different inking technique in this strip, mostly out of an envy of the variations in line thickness I see in kevinjdog's and rain_luong's work. I'm kinda pleased with it.

Heavens! It's been a long time between updates. I apologize for that, but my hands have been full to the extreme, and I have not really had the mental space to live in the Cat-Tharsis universe as much as I would like.

morgan1 and I replaced our dead and much maligned Inkjet today. We found a pretty cheap Laer Printer, A Konica/Minolta 3500W. My feelings about it are mixed - I totally shopped price on this one, because this was in many ways a needful purchase, and while I would have preferred the cheapest OKI PagePrinter, this was about 70 bucks cheaper.

It looks to be a good printer, with a small footprint, and setup was trivial, at least for WIN2K. It is, alas, a bit married to Windows, and although someone cared enough to develop a printer driver for it for Linux, it looks to be very raw, and I expect that getting CUPS printing working with it will be like pushing a dead elephant uphill with a teaspoon. Simplest solution might just be to save to PDF on the Linux box and then print on the Windows box from Acrobad Reader.

In the meantime, it's a relief to have a Laser again - the toner is both waterproof and Copic-proof, which is a very good thing for when I want to hand color scanned artwork. It also means that if I should be taken with a desire to do Gocco prints, I have something that will lay enough carbon down for that to work.

I tried printing some Cat-Tharsis strips from it, sized down to what they would be in a Plan9 book. The printer's 1200 X 1200 mode fared quite well with my line-art. Lines were crisp and all details present. I've heard that Grayscale presents challenges to this beastie, but I very rarely use grayscale, so that will mostly be a non-issue.

My strips, on the other hand, scaled down to Plan9 book size are very busy. I really need to learn to get control of my composition - I tend to include far too much non-essential stuff in my panels. Mostly I need to learn to crop more tightly.

Well, I suppose I should return to wresting some creativity from my muse. More Pencil to Paper combat.

The veterinary clinic where we take our cats has been doing some absolutely wonderful stuff with murals. Here is a mural that they've comissioned for their parking lot:



( Here is a detail of the Squirrel: )

( Here is a detail of the Pirate: )

They were taken with a super-duper-cheapo-crappo digital camera I got for free. But I figure we could all use a little whimsy this weekend.

Basically a piece of Zodiac fan art.

( There's art behind this cut )

His name always intrigued me, so I've placed him in the center of a wheel bearing the glyphs for the signs of the Zodiac, because it seemed a fun visual pun to make. I decided to present this wheel as the Wheel of Fortune from the Rider-Waite tarot. Anubis has been replaced with Randy, because it felt right. Alistair is in the place of the Sphinx because, well, he's a cat. The sphinx's sword has been replaced with a flag topped by a cup, because Alistair seems more likely to belong to the suit of cups than swords. The flag itself is a horrible, horrible pun that morgan1 makes whenever we listen to the Carmina Burana or when she wants Sushi. The Evangelists have all been replaced by Newshounds cast members who have met Zodiac. Like the evangelists, each is recording the scene. Della illuminates it with a Radio Shack flashlight so that Kevin can film it. Above, Renata writes copy while Rochelle reports.

What Waite might say it means
Upright:
Chance favors the querant. You will break a major story, and possibly mediate peace between warring factions. At the very least, you can look forward to tuna sashimi.

Reversed:
Chance is aligned against the querant. You will be manacled by your followers, alpha-rolled by someone's pet, and banished to the wilderness where you will be intimidated by squirrels. At the very least, the tuna salad at your favorite sandwich shop has been sitting out too long; if you order it you will get botulism.

NOTE: I made that stuff up. Newshounds Fan Art should not be used for divination. In fact divination is a bad idea generally: just look at US Foreign Policy!

The line art is Technical Pen on Bristol. This was scanned and printed on to Copic Marker Paper and then colored with Copic markers.

First things first. The New York Times On The Web has dropped Ted Rall from its line up of political cartoons. Primarily because they were tired of dealing with flack from dittoheads, but I've also noticed a bit of a shift to the right in their editorial policy generally. It was apparent in the debate I excoriated in a previous post, Lisa Bumiller being one of theirs. It is apparent with the addition of David Brooks to the line up of commentators, and it is apparent with the move striking Rall (whose work they were able to present for free; they paid him nothing) from the lineup of cartoons on their web edition.

This is disturbing to me because Rall's voice is a voice from the left, from the far left, that has been one of the strongest voices of dissent under this administration. And I cannot help but think that that may be one of the reasons he is being struck. He says unpleasant things that a lot of Americans don't want to hear but need to. He asks us to entertain the possibility of the unthinkable, so that the fact that an action is unthinkable does not become a cloak behind which the person who takes that action can hide. His art sucks, but it's no less pleasant to look at than McCoy's, and he knows his art sucks. He also gave me a much needed belly laugh after the extended episode of hate speech that was the State of the Union address.

For that reason encourage you, all of you, yes, even the conservatives, libertarians, and libertines among you, to appeal to the New York Times to keep his feed on their website. Not because you agree with him, but because the moment we start silencing certain views while privileging others, democracy, which depends upon an informed electorate becomes a sham.

You can e-mail the New York Times ombudsman at [email protected]

Probably going to use this for cuisine type stuff. The image is of my character, Grendel Armstrong, eating a "peep in a blanket," baisically a bird in a crepe.

It started out life as a concept sketch for peeps in blankets, a comfort food in the Cat-Tharsis universe (where "bubble and squeak" really does squeak, and "mouse dippers" fill the role occupied by chicken tenders in our world).

Last week it became a filler strip because I didn't have time to draw something new, coupled with a recipe. I made the recipe for dinner sunday night, using Turkey Andouille sausage instead of birds. It was quite good.

So today, it being a slow day, I cropped it in photoeditor, colored it in mspaint, resized it in msword, and exported it from photoeditor. I pined for Paint Shop Pro, but I remained amused.

Today as I was leaving work I cleared my desk of the papers and vessels that accumulated over the past three days, so that I would have a clean desk to come into come Monday. A year ago today I performed a similar task, but for a different reason: It was the last day of my assignment to a food processing company, and it was my final clearing out of my stuff. On December 31 2002 I donned my coat, shut the lights, and stepped off the precipice into an uncertain future. 2003 brought me another six months of unemployment, with a brief stint at a construction design company for flavor. Finally, in July, I landed where I am now - a health insurance loss control company. It's not my ideal place, but cleaning a desk I would be coming back to in 2004 was certainly an improvement over last year's leap at the abyss. So I am grateful to have four days off in which I can relax rather than too many days off filled with anxiety.

2003 was a strange year for that. When morgan1 and I tilled the ground and planted our tomato seedlings, zucchini seedling and leek sprouts in the spring, we had no idea if we would still be on this land in the fall to taste those home-grown tomatoes, Zucchini and full grown leeks. She had been laid off two days before Christmas, 2002. After passing seven anxiety ridden months coming up with all sorts of contingency plans, though, we each stumbled into our current jobs; the home grown tomatoes found their way into salads, appetizers, and Morgan and I. (Mostly Morgan; her love of tomatoes is immoderate, perhaps even a little intemperate). The leeks were roasted, braised and stewed for many a Shabbat dinner, and even put in a curtain call in the stuffing at Thanksgiving. The zucchini met a similar fate, spending much of the summer being grilled and served with vinagrette alongside tuna steaks and cod fillets. It too made an appearance, as zucchini bread, on the Thanksgiving table, having been sliced and frozen expressly for the purpose. That's important to us, having produce from the garden on our table at Thanksgiving. Especially so since this year was so difficult that planting the garden was a tremendous leap of faith. But it doesn't end there, for tonight we will be sipping sparkling cider made from the pitted fruit of our senescent Bartlett pear tree. Our land has been kind to us, and we have escaped being cloven from it.

Cat-Tharsis went from concept to reality this year too. Much of my time unemployed was spent developing the concept, developing my artwork (which still bites, but has been improving) and developing the software that runs the site. I thank kevinjdog and rain_luong for the inspiration, morgan1 for all the help with world building and artistic guidance, and Unit423 of If Then Else for the advice and encouragement. And I further thank kevinjdog for a variety of opportunities to exercise my creative faculties. They've really kept the juices flowing.

What really got Cat-Tharsis out of development and onto the web was the need to celebrate the life and mourn the passing of Morgan's cat Rodent Baby. When I drew this strip I knew I had to display it, so that was the impetus for going live. Rodent was a high strung little cat, bound to hiss, growl, and spit at every tomcat she's met, but very loving and even a bit needy. Morgan had Rodent longer than she's had any other creature currently living with her, myself included, so the loss was, indeed, profound. Rodent herself seemed content to go, and, we think, has even given her blessing to the kitten, Maeve, that came into our lives in October.

All in all this has been a year of want and of bounty, of death and of life, of turning corners, renegotiating old friendships and forging new ones. I can't really say I'm sorry to see it goes, but I'm curious what the new one will bring; I am greeting it with greater hope than I've had in a while.

Mantra and Regime Change were sitting in my mailbox upon my return home last night. Plowed through much of Mantra. It is like reading a graphic novel, and an ambitious one at that. Plot lines run in counterpoint, touching here and there.

I was most struck by Wolfram's strength of character in the bomb-sniffing dog story. He displayed incredible intestinal fortitude, especially when Bully Runyon went off the deep end.

In short, Newshound is even more powerful when you don't have to wait for your browser to time out connecting to gavzad.keenspot.com between strips.

Every once in a while I find laughing out loud at a newspaper strip that normally sucks. Today that happened for my with the insufferable GB Trudeau's Doonesbury. Here is a link to the strip:

Rare funny Doonesbury

The setup runs in the well greased rails of every war movie cliche imaginable. Soldier wishes he could be there for his kid. But in all those war movie cliches, one gets a sense that this is somehow an abstract wish, a wish to be where he isn't. In the fourth panel, Trudeau stands that cliche on its head by jerking the rug of abstraction out from under it. Sam is posing one of those questions that every parent dreads. By having the mother offer to foist this one off on the father inverts another tired cliche, that of the father squirming and palming the kid off on the mother the moment the yicky topic is first raised. This strip had me laughing out loud because of the disconnect between the soldier's abstract wish and the concrete reality of the wish being granted.