Martes' Journal

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Stupid Cat tricks

Earl's newest discovery-- if he bites me on the feet while I'm in bed, that will wake me up. He was actually sticking his head under the covers to get at me. I miss my geriatric Charlie who would just sleep until I was ready to get up. But Earl has lizards to kill and neighborhood cats to get into fights with, and doesn't want to wait for the lazy human to finally get out of bed on her own.

Current Mood: working
Current Music: something on KROQ

More Tech questions
Thanks to the people who helped with my FA query, and to those who viewed and/or commented on the YouTube films. I'm still trying to get the newest version of Watcher exported from Flash into a YouTube compatible format. An AVI file ended up humongous in size and came out really grainy and pixelated. I'm going to try exporting it as a MOV. file next and see if that works, but I can't find a screen size (pixel x pixel) on YouTube. Also, is there any way to change the preview image on my existing videos? Joe and Don Gato look ok, but you can't really tell what the hell the preview pic for Border is, and Turnabout is kind of odd too.

Still trying to find a decent fiction book. I'm currently reading a contriversial nonfiction book, which is good, but some of the more esoteric science is a bit over my head. (Yes, it is surprizing that theoretical physics isn't my area of expertise!) I also picked up a copy of this. Not a book for hypocondriacs, although parts of it have some droll humor (such where the author suggests that the norovirus could be used for 'spreading mild terror and great inconvience' presumably by humanitarian terrorists who want to make people uncomfortable but not kill them. The norovirus is what causes epidemics of 'intestinal problems' on cruise ships.)

Current Mood: tired
Current Music: radio commercials

CalArts films (finally) up
X-posted to my FA journal

Films here. For various reasons I didn't want to get my own YouTube account, so I actually used

titanic's account to post to.

Yeah, it took me forever, but I finally managed to get them online. My sophmore and junior year films, and Tracy Kazaleh's sophmore and junior year films. I apologize in advance for the poor image quality-- they were digitized from 20 year old VHS tapes. I hope to (eventually) go to the school and see if they have master tapes i can make better copies from. Many many thanks to

iisawand RJ for their digitizing efforts.

Unfortunately the copy of my senior year film was so bad i couldn't use it (too dark), but I hope to eventually get a better dupe of that from the school as well.

Both of my films are pretty strange, although Across the Border is much more like my comics than Say its Alright, Joe, which is this very angsty mood-peice. (I was an extremely angsty college student at the time) But Across the Border is probably the stranger of the two, because it has this super-cheerful ELO song with these characters getting shot, cursing and being run over by a train. Since I was at an art school, I could only find gay male art students to do the voices, so these tough characters end up speaking with voices that sound a little less tough-guy than they probably should have. Try not to laugh! I did the best I could with what I had.

Current Mood: tired

No Survivor
Well, at least I won't need to set aside time to watch the Survivor finale Sunday night. The last person I was rooting for did something really, really (really) stupid and got voted off. The remaining people I don't care about.

Speed Racer got a pretty crappy review in the Times today (they said it was too talkly and the action scenes were hard to follow.) Yet another one of my cherished childhood shows sodomized by Hollywood. While they did a good job of getting characters who look like the cartoon, in all the previews I've seen the actual look of the racetracks and the races are nothing like the show. The review decribed it as trying to follow a race inside a pinball machine.

It took 4 days to letter the 45 pages of the comic. Why o why are some of my characters so verbose?! I also use the 'Marvel style" of lettering, where the dialogue is broken up into fragments, which adds to the time it takes to letter. In the Will Eisner book (Comics & Sequential Art) he specificly said not to do this and keep each character's dialogue in a single balloon per panel, but I think the Marvel style is more like how natural conversations flow.

Now I'm in the middle of the toning. That's not particularly hard (I've gotten the system pretty streamlined by this point), but it takes constant vigilence not to over do it. I've seen so many grayscale comics killed by over-toning. On the other hand, I like the versitility and depth I can get using grayscale, so I don't want to completely eliminate it like in some B&W comics (Bone, Finder). I have a Letraset CD with some of their tone patterns, which I've used quite a bit. I also bought a copy of MangaStudio to see how that works. There's a handful of Mangatones I want to have access to, but so far I've not found an online site that offers them in the digital format I need. I'll post later about how that goes.

Current Mood: hungry
Current Music: KFI radio

More annoyances of life
Dear stupid bitch in the brand-new Lexus:

I like to leave a decent amount of space between me and the car ahead of me for a reason. Because you are obviously too moronic to understand this, that does not give you the OK to zip in that space with about two inches to spare , for no good reason other than my lane might be going a tiny bit faster. Be also aware that when you're obviously in such a hurry it makes your driving behavior extremely predictable, and traffic is heavy as it is during the morning commute, and that a saavy driver with nearly 20 years experience commuteing the same route, who knows it's traffic flow patterns intimately, can use that knowledge to totally fuck with you. Even someone driving a sedan with fairly wimpy excelleration can block you, and go really, really slow while you're hemmed in by a truck, or speed up to keep you from getting around a knot of traffic. As a matter of fact, you are damn lucky I don't work down by LAX any more, or I would have kept fucking with you the entire drive down there. And next time you cut someone off like that, you better make sure it's not a Mexican gangbanger or a pissed-off white guy with a gun, or you'll wind up a Darwin statistic. Because unless someone is giving birth or dying, you don't need to be in such a goddamn hurry, and driving like that in a brand-new Lexus shows you are fucking stupid, in addition to being an asshole.

sincerely yours-- the angry bitch in the Saturn that you cut off who was driving really, really slow to keep you hemmed in by a truck.

The fact that I've had to do the monkey-suit dress up at work for the past two days because some Important People were visiting the office has left me in a particularly foul mood. Having to dress up is on the same level of nastiness as dental work or having my fingernail pulled off.

Current Mood: angry

Weekend Wrap-up
Am I the only one who finds it incredibly annoying/irritating when someone you did an art trade with, and you finished your part literally years ago, posts tons of gift art for people but has done nothing on your trade? Yes, I realize I'm not a hot chickie like the ones you keep doing the gift art for, but geeze, try to show SOME courtesy. At least don't keep posting the stuff so I can see you're being quite prolific, but just not with your obligations.

Saturday me and

titanicwent into Glendale to visit one of my school friends who was fostering some kittens. They're about 4 or 5 weeks old at this point and still being mostly bottle fed, but when they're fully weaned we'll be taking two of them home. Pictures and such will be posted when we have the kittens in-hand.

Most of Sunday was spent at home finishing up the inking on the comic and tutoring Tracy K. in Photoshop. It's taking her a while to get some of her B&W art colored, but hopefully next Sunday I'll finally be able to get it posted on FA. Now I'm working on the absolute final step of the art, which is lettering/toning.

I managed to print out and mail the submission-ready manuscript for part 2 of the novel, so that should be out of my hands until when/if a potential publisher wants any more changes (please please not too many. I am sooo sick of rewriting/editing that thing.) When I got the proofed manuscript back from my mom every single page had at least a few corrections (mainly dialogue punctuation and capitalization, but a fair number of other corrections.) that took me weeks to get through. It's amazing how any mistakes turns up when a fresh set of eyes looks at it.

Current Mood: annoyed

Is that a lizard in your pants--?
Or are you just happy to see me?

Earl came into the kitchen this morning while i was eating breakfast with a lizard jammed in his mouth. He dropped it by my feet, and it promptly ran up my leg. Whoo! I managed to grab it before it reached anywhere critical, and tossed it outside. Earl ran after it, and I don't know the lizard's ultimate fate.

I printed out the entire 1000+ page submission-quaility manuscript last night, only to discover I had fucked up the page numbering. I'll need to reprint most of it. Thank God I decided to check the pages before I sent it out. I'm still really pissed that I screwed this up, though. I was hoping to get it mailed today, but no chance of that now.

Current Mood: annoyed

Facebook & websites
I got an invite to Facebook today. I've not gotten a Facebook, or Myspace, or any other account because I don't want yet more user names and password to keep track of, not to mention yet more sites to have to visit and keep up with.
Facebook, Skype, Myspace, Artspots, YouTube, Deviant Art, FurBuy, AIM, various comic creator sites, and on and on. What's really weird is that I keep getting lots of hits to my website off of Myspace, and i don't have an account! If I do a search on my name nothing comes up. To this day I don't have a clue about why I'm getting hits from there.

Now I know another person, who shall remain nameless, who signs up for every single site, usually with multiple accounts, and then promptly abandons all of them and never visits the sites ever again. I don't want to be like that, leaving a pile of orphaned accounts in my wake. If I go to the trouble of making an account, it has to be a site I actually visit and will use.

I also have a lot of trouble remembering passwords. I have three high-security passwords I use for critical sites like EBay, PayPal and LJ. I have a 'standard' password I use for low-priority sites, and a few mid-level ones for semi-important sites. I have so much trouble memorizing some things that I still don't know the names of most of the people I work with, even after two years (I can remember faces, but not match names to faces) Adding more user names to attach more passwords to is straining my already meger mental capacity.

Password-protected sites I use daily:
LJ, Gmail, FurAffinity, Sirius Radio online

Weekly or frequently: EBay, PayPal, FurBid, Something Awful (I only lurk, so don't look for any posts from me)

Sometimes: Amazon, a couple other mail-order sites.

I have a VCL account, but it's currently inactive because I got zero feedback on anything I posted, and it's too much of a hassle to cross-post with FA. Yerf is dead too, of course.

Current Mood: contemplative
Current Music: radio commercials

Exporting
How do I export my Watcher flash file into a YouTube-ready AVI file? I tried exporting it as an AVI, but it was horribly large, and not of very good quality. The SWF file exported from Flash looks tons better and is much smaller, but I don't know if that can be posted to YouTube.

Not counting Watcher, I have 4 things ready to post on YouTube-- 2 of my CalArts films and 2 of Tracy K.'s. Unfortunately both versions of my senior year film that I got were too dark to use. Since both people who did the transfers had the same problem, I assume the darkness is a problem of the source tape. At some point I may go directly to the school and see if they have a way of getting me a copy of my senior film off the school's master tapes. Tracy's films look much better than mine in the YouTube format-- her animation linework is much cleaner and the backgrounds not as complex.

The car's issues turned out to be the battery, so all is running okay now.

Not posting much because nothing of much interest is happening. I finished the edits on part 2 of the novel, so I'm in the process of printing that out in manuscript format. A 400 page novel in single-space = nearly 1000 pages in double-space mansucript format, which = a whole lotta paper.

On the last few pages of inking Ice #5, so hopefully next week I can start on the lettering and toning.

For some unknown reason the juvenile praying mantises are doing very badly, and I've lost most of them to sheds gone wrong (they cannot completely shed, and end up dying.) I'm making sure to mist them daily, so I have no idea what is causing the problem.

I have some sort of golden algea-eater/loach thing I got a while ago that has turned bully, and is relentlessly attacking my cory cats. I'm thinking of either feeding it to the cat, or sticking it outside in the tadpole tank.

Not currently reading any book. Nothing interesting in the bookstores, and I don't feel like tackling anything unread on my shelves. An artist/author I like has some new stuff available for purchase online, but only as Acrobat files, and I really, really hate reading long text stories on the computer. I suppose I could get them and then print them out, but that's also a pain in the ass. So instead of fiction I've been re-reading some graphic novels I like and some nonfiction books.

Inside joke to

iisaw: Zezozese Zadfrack

Current Mood: bored
Current Music: something on KROQ

Weekend wrap-up
The week is already off to a smashing start-- my car broke down. Luckily

titanicdiscovered this when he tried to use the car to go get coffee this morning. I would've been up the proverbial shit creek if today had been one of the days he had to leave early and I'd be stuck with a non-functional car. It looks like the battery is dead, but we managed to jump it and get it to the dealer just to make sure nothing else was wrong. Now I need to see if I can scare up a ride home from work.

Yesterday

iisawtook me and

ruggelssailing on the Castaic Lagoon in his boat. That was fun. Got to see lots of western Grebes, an eared grebe, a lone common merganser, and some ducks tenatively identified as lesser scaups. There were also tons of swallows over the lake. Mostly cliff swallows, but I think there were some tree or violet-greeen swallows mixed up there. While were were on the lake there was some kind of police emergency on the opposite shore, with a helicopter and several sherriff's cars. When we asked the local ranger he said there had been a missing kid, but they found him.

Saturday me,

titanic, JK and Fluffy went to the EFBC Twilight Tour. Got to see the jaguarundis, which were out and very active. Aslo saw the margays, the European lynx, and most of the other kitties. The Pallas cats were all sleeping, but we could see their little faces in their concrete tubes. They also gave the caracal a large box to play in, and he hid inside and we could see his facew peeking out. Very cute. They gave the European lynx some strong-smelling lavender and it was rolling around in it like catnip. Theres a bunch of wild peacocks up there that would begin screaming every time someone used the michrophone (for various announcements and the raffle). The EFBC people said they were very close to feeding the peacocks to the cats.

Earl was a very bad kitty this weekend. He managed to lose his collar, including the custom name tag and magnetic key. He got into a bad fight with the neighbor's cat, and killed a couple of lizards. He really needs to graduate to gophers.

Current Mood: tired
Current Music: Howard Stern

AC and SDCC Plans set
Got my plane tickets to Cleveland (I'll be driving from Cleveland to Pittsburg) and the time off work approved, so everything for AnthroCon is a go. I'm still holding out a vague hope that

dustmeat's job situation will change and she'll be able to come-- otherwise I'm looking at covering all the hotel cost myself and covering the table alone, which I'm not thrilled with. Well, at least I won't have to drag around a bunch of art for the art show this year. The airlines are also charging $25 extra for a second bag. With that in mind, I may very well ship most of my comics stock to Cleveland ahead of time. If the postage is less than $25 that will save me money.

I'm slightly better off for ComiCon-- I'll be sharing a room with Tracy K. and can just drive to that con. The hotel + parking, even split, is still hideously expensive, so I will be at ComiCon only Thursday-Saturday, leaving Saturday afternoon/evening. At least I managed to get my pro registration in on time this year, so I won't have to wait 3 hours in the general reg. line like I did last year :P

I will probably also open up for a handful of commissions after AC, so if anyone wanted to get a commission from me this year that would be the time.

Current Mood: working
Current Music: radio commercials

Still haven't found what I'm looking for
Spent an hour + tonight looking for the originals of a particular comic I did. I found every single other original of every single other comic I've done, except, of course, the one i wanted to find. It is really, really fucking annoying. That means I'm going to have to do the scans off the printed copy, which I DON'T want to do, but i needed to get this scanned asap, and I've run out of places it could be hiding. Of course, it would probably help if I had my art in some sort of order, rather than mixed up and scattered in a dozen places around the house.

Current Mood: angry

Reshuffling priorities
I'm going to have to blow off the AC artshow completely, because there's no way in hell I can get any new peices done in time. I did manage to get a couple drawings done, but I won't have time to color them. This is mostly due to the inks for City of Ice #5 taking much longer than I'd anticipated, and getting the comic done before AC is the first priority. I've also had a secondary project come up that I need to get done within a few weeks, and that will eat up whatever time I could've spent doing art for the show. I won't be posting about the specifics of the secondary project until I've delivered the files and the person who wanted them OKs the work and says they'll be used. (this is a non-furry commercial project)

The one spot of good news is that I managed to get the front and back cover for the comic done, as well as the three art trades I'd commited to.

And honestly, I usually don't make that much money at the art shows. I do them mainly because I like doing the art. I have a few older peices I could put in, but I think I'll send those to Eurofurence instead. With the weak dollar I think I can get a decent price for them, and the European market is not as saturated with my art as the American one is.

In other nooz, Earl has recovered from his stomach flu. He killed a lizard yesterday, but I'm really hoping he'll start getting gophers.

Most of this weekend was spent inking and doing yard work. (Oh so thrilling, but stuff that needed to be done.) Next Saturday is the EFBC twilight tour, so I'll be doing that. Hopefully there will be kiddens.

Current Mood: bored
Current Music: Howard Stern

Inside joke to Dustmeat

Most people know I read a lot. I don't (and never did) play D&D, but I enjoy getting the Monster Manuals and reading about the various monsters, and looking at the art.

So in a description of a dragon-like creature called a "Dread Linnorn" I came across this passage that very much reminds me of a mutual aquaintence me and

dustmeat have:

Most of its treasure lies forgotten wherever it was dropped after a brief examination. Given....the casual way it leaves valuables strewn abut, it might seem easy to sneak in, scoop up a few bags of gold and silver, and sneak out again unseen. In fact, however, such an act unfailingly brings severe retribution. A dread linnorn doesn't care wether a theif stole a sack of gems, an ancient magic rod, or a bucket of rocks: it cares only that the sancity of its lair was violated and its posessions stolen. Should this occur, it does all in its power to recover the stolen items and punish the thieves. Failing that, it vents its rage on its surroundings, laying waste to the countryside, leveling villages, buring crops and devouring livestock.

Dread linnorns are always surly and uncommunicative.

I was highly amused.

Well, back to inking for me.

Current Mood: amused

How true....

see more crazy cat pics

Current Mood: amused

The Night the Lights went out in Valencia
We had a major power outage last night about 10:30. I was actually out on dogwalk with

furtech, and on the way back he noticed all the houses were dark. When we got back the neighbor said she'd called the power company and found out that power was out to 2,000 people. At this point I don't know what happened. What was funny was that

titanichad fallen asleep watching TV and didn't even know the power was off until we came back and he woke up. We also found out that every flashlight we have doesn't work.

Since it was so late anyways, I decided just to go to bed rather than sit around in the dark. The power came on around 2 AM. Now I have to go reset all the clocks.

Current Mood: sleepy

Not a mainstream book
Readers of this LJ may recall a book I read and commented on last year-- a post-apocalyptic furry book that was notable for it's complete lack of female characters and creepy tortures followed by cuddling.

Apparently the author wants the book to go 'mainstream.' I seriously don't think that's going to happen. It could be marketed as a furry book, as a gay book, as a furry gay fetish book, but not as mainstream SF. Straight male readers will be turned off by the blatant homoeroticism (although there is no explicit sex, it's made abundantly clear all the characters are bisexual or gay.) and most female readers will be bothered by the absense of female characters and the excessive tortures.

Current Mood: puzzled

Have some art
Finished the cover for Ice #5 here: http://www.furaffinity.net/view/1230793/#cid:8516531

Inked the art trades I ned to do, and will be coloring those at work as time permits.

Watched my old CalArts films last night, which was extremely painful. I'm having second thoughts about posting them. :(

Although, after all the trouble two people went to to digitize them for me, i guess I better.

Earl has some sort of intestinal infection, is on medication and doing much better. Well enough to wake me up this morning.

Lastly, have the biggest shrew in the world:

Current Mood: depressed

Ahnts
I watched an Animal Planet story about army ants last night, and then this I had a dream about ants in the house. One of those weird dreams where the house was my old Cleveland house, but was taking place here and now. There were ants all over the upstairs, but I couldn't find the ant spray anywhere because my mother had cleaned and put it somewhere hidden. Then I tried vacumning the ants up, but the vacumn cleaner kept stalling.

Today Earl goes to the vet. While he seems moderadly better than this weekend, he's still not interested in eating, so that need to be taken care of. I will report news as I get it.

Current Mood: blah
Current Music: Aeromith on Howard Stern

AnthroCon dealer's room
http://www.anthrocon.org/dealer/map

I'm next to Brian and Tracy as requested, and none of the people in the area around me look particularly heinous. I am very happy not to be seated next to the "Yiffy Toys" dealer. 0_o

Current Mood: tired
Current Music: Howard Stern