Since I quit drinking, time has stopped being slippery. It’s upgraded. It’s lubed itself up in KY and gone skinny dipping in a vat of WD-40. I woke up at around eleven thirty, I’ve started writing this at 2150, and the intervening ten hours had a “real-feel” of maybe twenty minutes. Thirty tops.
I ran a couple of missions in EVE Online (Only a couple, which is a bit of a surprise – I was off the crack pipe by three at the latest), got some mail from the IRS and did the initial dealing with that, went to the mini mart, and shaded the page. I did illustration and linework prep yesterday, which was also a slippery day. Not as bad as usual, mind you. I left the house. I bought pens. Tried to have a coffee shop experience outside of the exclusion zone* and was unsurprisingly unable to tune out or otherwise filter the house “music.”
My net connection has been giving me tons of shit this week – that’s where some of the time slipperiness is coming from. Twenty to thirty minutes of voodoo rites every time the DSL modumb craps out is starting to get old. It’s costing me time and more importantly, it’s starting to cost me money. The seems-to-work solution – flipping over to a more modern piece of hardware – works for diagnostic purposes but isn’t going to be a viable drop-in replacement until I do a ton of reading and research and figure out how to keep my linux box available to the rest of the world… or make the painful decision to retire it. Having certain capabilities most of the day trumps having internet-only working 24/7, or has for the past several years. The performance issue does give me something other than a stale social life, an unending workload and slippery time to be cross about. I suppose that’s a good thing.
So. Sober, somewhat stir crazy, and not getting nearly as much done as I’d like, especially today. Today I’m running a few hours behind schedule, and that’s factoring in running a couple of EVE missions while I woke up.
Enough of my joy. Here’s some technical bits!
Thad and Whitehouse are talking in panel one. This should be obvious from the previous page, as the details are character-relevant and already established to some extent. I tried wiring the first panel dialogue up with the usual dialogue tails a few different ways and couldn’t get anything that fit cleanly, so I ditched ’em.
This scene uses photographs for backgrounds. There’s precedent for this early in the story – it’s one of the “mixed media” elements, it makes Pittsburgh Pittsburgh without having to model it or render it, and it is unsurprisingly a hell of a lot more photoshop work than I’d expected. Trademark scrubbing, date scrubbing, crowd and (most) vehicle scrubbing, silhouetting, and/or insertion. Camera “matching” (in quotes for a reason) the environment to get dummy perspective to match as closely as possible is the only new thing for me here. I shot with this in mind, so I should get a handle on it in short order.
The background shoot went surprisingly well – I synced the “workbook” script scan to my phone and did the whole thing on one whack, sorting the shot list in my head and shooting in order-of-walking, which is slightly different than order-of-script. Sorting the shots took awhile – I’ve collated the bulk of the scene, having left the last leg of it for later. While I’m pleased with the straight megapixelage of the SD1400, the image quality is a step or six down from my old A95. It’s faster, physically smaller, shoots bigger images, holds a hell of a lot more of them, snapped almost six hundred pictures without the battery even noticing… and zoomed in tight the max-quality results look like a low quality jpeg hit with a photoshop filter.
Fortunately, the results look Fine at print size and web scale. At the end of the day that’s what matters… and thanks to time being all slippery, it is the end of the day.
Or the post.
Possibly both!
The next page has been background-scrubbed and needs CG prep before I start drawing. Work resumes Saturday afternoon!
* Due to some social weirdness awhile back, the Beehive - useful as it is - is now totally off limits. Time to expand my horizons a little! :D
