Ranting and Raving

Character Meme

Ganked from kevinjdog and others.

Choose twelve of your original characters in any particular order (NO PEEKING AT THE QUESTIONS AT THIS STAGE!). Then, answer the questions that follow.


1. Grendel
2. Willie
3. Cujo
4. Brian
5. Cleo
6. Sybil
7. Bartle
8. Scotus
9. Jack
10. Roger
11. Eartha
12. Monty

(  The questions. )

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.

Too many long nights catching up to me. Filler gets to stay another day.

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.

I have set up a Forum on Nightstar Zoo for Cat-Tharsis. They have one of the best run PHPbb systems I have ever seen, with less downtime than Keen* or even the lightly used Open Source Judaism forums.

I've made this move because it seems that people on line seem more motivated to discuss things in a public space than to engage in direct contact with a creator, and I would like to see what people are thinking (the artist's most dangerous impulse, perhaps). My web log is showing considerable growth in hits per day since I first put the strip on line, and I even note that there are some returning visitors. But numbers don't disclose the way people are actually responding to the strip.

Well hopefully the strip is engaging enough that people will want to talk about it. I shall wait and see.

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.

Well, I finally got around to fixing the calendaring bug on Cat-Tharsis where the next month/previous month links pointed to nothing at all. I was able to recycle a code snippet from another function to do most of that work. Also fixed a problem with months that begin on Sunday having their final day not fit on the calendar. So, a pat on the back to myself for actually getting that done. Not only that, but I freshened the catboxes, took out the trash, and fixed dinner for morgan1 and myself for tonight and tomorrow.

It makes me feel like a natural nerd-boy.

And productive too!

Saturday, I built a notebook I had lying around into a new web development/staging server.

The gory details:

IBM Thinkpad 380z, 233Mhz, 64M Ram, 4G HDD.
Redhat 9.0 running Apache, MySQL, PHP, and various and sundry other goodies.
Since I want the processing power for the good stuff, it does not boot to X.

It is Waaay quicker than its predecessor, and getting it going was easier than I'd planned. The only snag I ran into was with the PHP parser. It's a later version than what had been on the RH 7.2 box, and had globals turned off by default, so it wasn't parsing my code. Turned globals on (which is also the way my ISP has their PHP Parser set up) and everything was hunky dory.

Sunday, I pencilled AND inked Tuesday's strip. So much nicer than the past two weeks when I ended up inking hastily Monday night. I was able to use the dip-pen rather than the fountain pen (though I lettered with the fountain pen). It was more relaxed and deliberate than inking with the fountain pen. Inking with a dip pen has some of the characteristics of meditation. And tonight was the first time I inked without music. It was very refreshing.