Expulsion has been covered. Real proper-like. More production info in the page metadata.

The Earth renders took longer than expected – four hours a pass, and I wound up redoing them thanks to the clouds being more at-issue than usual. Aeon was originally facing the other way – flipping it resulted in better lighting. It also matches the Expulsion intro scene and continues to obscure the ligature on the starboard side of the boat.

Usually, longass renders means time spent doing paperwork, surfing, and otherwise being fabulously unproductive. It used to mean drawing panels, but the CG backlog still needs to be knocked down before production is ready to resume. Sunday, thanks to my friend Martin, I was watching Avatar in 3d (in a high-end-but-not-IMAX theater) while one of those passes cranked out.

Avatar is the first movie of my adult life that’s lived up to the hype. Exceeded it, possibly – the 2d trailer, the 2d stills… 2d anything really doesn’t do this movie justice. After the years of hype leading up to the steaming turd that was The Phantom Menace, my heart hardened and my bullshit detector started spidering the upgrade tree like the Starcraft “AI.” That orgasm of hyper-hype made it easy to ignore The Matrix, its sequels, Lord of the Rings (and its relentless over-commercialization in DVD), and everything else that’s made lots of noise over the past decade.

That Star Trek was muddled fun, that District 9 was the best social satire since Robocop, that The Road puts the “bleak” in bleak… I could have watched any of those on a 19″ display and enjoyed them just as much. Not as big, and stereo-only, but ultimately… the same experience. The biggest home theater I’ve seen (Hi Greg!) isn’t big enough for Avatar.

I don’t know if Avatar is a “game-changer” or not – I don’t care. I’m more interested in the world. I want the Director’s Cut. I want to see it again.

This week, if possible.

In that respect, I suppose it is a game changer.

Incursion has been re-covered. Happy holiday, etc.

Also, perhaps more importantly, I have very solid ideas for the Expulsion and The Dualist covers. Lots of rendering, a good-sized chunk of line art… they’ll both look AWESUM and that leaves four more cover puzzles to solve.

Finishing work remains either ahead of schedule or has fallen far behind schedule, depending on how you look at it. I’ve drawn three covers this week, but I’ve only shopped one… and that cover had only one piece of art to go with it. A piece I had to draw twice, so I’m going to count it twice. Dammit.

The Expulsion set should have either no drawings, or integrated drawings – it’ll depend on the cover. The first of these should roll out at some point in the next couple of days.

Clarity has been re-covered. I’m now out of my stock of pre-canned backgrounds – I busted out the first four in May (or thereabouts) and have been busy with other stuff since then.

The Beef, he’s Beefy.

Four down, seven left… I’d say I’d have the cover for chapter five started, but the fact is that my initial flailings have been quite unproductive. Frustrating, even. Back to the drawing board and so forth – hopefully this weekend. Or sooner.

In an effort to stem the steadily rising levels of comment spam, I’ve changed blog comment settings for Immediately approve comments from : from Anyone to NO ONE. While I’m not happy with this, it’s only temporary*. Turning comments off completely breaks existing templates (sloppy design on my part), and CAPTCHA or some other form of authentication just isn’t going to be hacked into the current design. Period. When the time for Work comes, it’ll be Work on a New Site, not patches to this one.

So for the time being, you can still comment – comments will be held and screened prior to publication. Any further spam won’t have the opportunity to stink up the public side of the site – I hope this has the desired effect!

* For the moment. If it works super-awesome, I may stick with it.

Reentry is re-covered.

Clarity soon; Motion in the early stages of rendering.

Yay!

Type fixes to details -21-, priorities -1-, reflex -2- and friction -7-. Friction -7- also received a minor art correction. Thanks to xeno for all catches and recommendations.

Covers – TV.1 is re-covered. Jacket design now matches The Dualist – third version of that cover and it finally looks good and has a logo. That last bit didn’t exist until late last week and wasn’t shooped until yesterday. Talk about lag!

Also talking about lag, the Been Done For Awhile covers for signal and convergence are now in place, with spreads in the metadata and for the time being, wee thumbnails in the book index. Those will be replaced by the full strips with the next version of the website – my layout ideas for New And Improved Indexes would be why the new site is on hold until these bits are done.

xeno’s read over the first half (for the second or eighth time) and caught a few more-

Commitment -4-, Commitment -6-, Convergence -2- and Light -9-. There’s probably some more. Lurking.

Base cover bits are down for the chapters of The Dualist and TV.1. The TV.1 cover render is grinding away; backs have been done for TD1-TD4 for awhile. TD5-TD8 have been sketched and I’ll get rolling on those after the TV.1 render is done – I’ve been busy supervising that instead of drawing. Drawing is hard.

You have found this post informative.

For a few days (closer to two weeks, actually), the first seven pages of chapter two had been overwritten by the first seven pages of chapter six. Whoops.

I’ve temporarily fixed this by changing the basenames of the first seven pages of chapter six. The best permanent fix will be to re-change those names back to normal while changing the name of the first scene of chapter two.

The trick is finding an applicable scene title that isn’t used somewhere else in the story. Commitment works, at least for the time being. It happens to have the same number of letters as convergence, which is a bit visually confusing.

For purposes of hardcopy, unless I go all Delany – adding scene names and chapter names above as well as page numbers below – the only function that chapter scene names provide is an indication to web readers that they’re coming up on a shift in plot focus.

Also, fun (unrelated) fact : Counting all covers, counting all posted pages of all projects, not counting the small number of reasonably ready-to-go DCR.2 strips, ATC presently stands at 438 pages (424 actual).

Subversion is up, and so is Interstitial. The second edition is content complete. For now, the only things likely to change are typos and – possibly – nixing that Fridge Logic pointed out in the TVTropes entry.

TD2E is functionally complete. Start here and read till you hit the end – if your nick isn’t xeno and you find a typo, feel free to email me or comment on this blog post, pasting a link to the relevant page with your comment.

Done for words (I hope), but not aesthetics – I still have to implement my ideas for the reworked covers for TD2E and TV and implement the TV.1 rewrite. Then comes the website re-work, which will (FINALLY!) bring the last of the missing bits back, hopefully in a more navigable format. Think cast, lexicon, shipyard, etceteras.

Far from finished, but the visual re-working should be complete. I’ll know for sure when I get around to re-reading DCR, and I don’t plan on doing that until TV.1 is brought up to plot spec. There’s no way in hell 28 (closer to 32-34 counting the bits of DCR.2 that are done) pages could possibly take as long as the 350+ of TD2E. That was over a year in the doing – a year and a bit of change after the covers are completed and wired in.

I’m still meditating on which project is going to resume first – DCR or Transitional Voices. I’ll have a better idea after I’ve knocked the to-do list down to “pick one.” That’s still a few weeks away, at the earliest.

Starting with two new pages here and here, the rest of TD2E Chapter Seven has been uploaded.

I’d plow straight into the once-over and upload of Eight and Interstitial, but I have a social event tonight to get ready for, followed by lunch tomorrow and (hopefully!) a trip to Ralph’s. While I’ll be able to proof the pages, I may not have time to put together a mass upload until Saturday. Before then, with any luck.

42 pages remaining – 43 counting the C8 cover. All processed, all documented, all pretty much ready to go.

Also. Holy crap, ATC’s made it into TVTropes! SQUEEE!!!!

Side note – many years ago, a fan contacted me about creating a wikipedia article for ATC. I gave enthusiastic permission; the article was written and promptly deleted by the site editors due to a lack of “notability.” That article later surfaced on Comixpedia (which is offline or no longer extant as of this writing). Fortunately, TVTropes has a much more admirable stance on notability, so with any luck this entry will stick around. Hopefully other tropers read the article and build on Puffenstuff’s work! :)

As for me… after the SQUEEE!! wears off, I gotta figure out what (if anything) to do about that Fridge Logic.

…38 pages of impact were uploaded. 37 if you don’t count the chapter cover.

13:20 <solios> massive amounts of ATC uploaded.
13:20 <xeno> yeah, i saw
13:20 <solios> no point in a final typornograph until it’s ALL done, though.
13:20 <xeno> it shat all over my reader :P
13:20 <solios> :>
13:20 <solios> FLORP!
13:21 <xeno> more like bllloOROROODOPPOIPPPPPIIPUPUIPUP[PODGPAIU
ADRPRPRRRPOROPROROROPORIIRTUPIROURIRORPOROPRROPROPRPROPR
ORORPERRPOOM
13:21 <solios> :D

As with the previous Big Big Uploads of chapters five and six, all of these pages were Done months ago, and are expanding onto the website following the completion of Expulsion.

The upload stops here for one reason – there are two more NEW pages to create. The last new pages of the book. When those are done, all remaining pages will be uploaded.

This particular chapter is more than just a reformat and re-write. Several pages have new panels, adding a sub-arc that fleshes out part of the story. The plot hasn’t changed – it’s more like an Obvious Gap has finally been filled in.

The pages with new panels are:

friction -1-
friction -2-
friction -3-
friction -4-
impact -1-
impact -2-

All told it’s roughly a page of new content, spread across six. While new pages have been added here and there, some artwork cleaned up, the entire story rewritten… these are the only “invasive” edits of the Second Edition – the only time new line art is injected into the same page as old, the only time the pacing has been tinkered with.

A breather, then I figure out how I’ll be going about rendering the next two pages. I expect to have them completed within a week – which means The Dualist should be finished within a week.

For the record, the two-day upload total is 117 pages.

Happy holidays!

All of Expulsion was uploaded yesterday afternoon. After that, I once-overed Motion, caught a few typos, and left the house for a bit.

Then came my first proper Thanksgiving dinner in approximately 13 years (thanks, Chris and Laura!). Then an attempted phone home followed by a four hour “nap.”

Then Motion was uploaded in its entirety. Following that, Descent was given a once-over. One error that I’m aware of, followed by upload.

That’s 77 pages in less than 24 hours. Months of No Updates exploding like some kind of Big Bang With Boobs.

I’m going to take another nap (or loaf around for a bit and then take one, I haven’t decided yet), then upload 38 more TD2E pages when I wake up. The Adult Stuff I’d planned to deal with today (and should have dealt with two weeks ago) can wait till Monday. Today, I am Ahab.

Expulsion is done. Unlike incursion, this is All New Material. Lots of firsts, the biggest of which is a clear glimpse at The Overplot. Unlike (most) of the other actors in this drama, Yang and Aeon are in possession of most of the facts. Unlike previous posts, I’m comfortable divulging this information.

Seven new pages worked over the past couple of weeks, uploaded in one swat. You’d think being laid off from my day job 12 days ago would have been a big kick in the ass, and it was – just not necessarily in the way I’d expected. I’m still just as Deeply Unmotivated as I have been for the past two years – the difference now is I’ve got plenty of paperwork and other stuff to keep me busy. I’m also FINALLY catching up on sleep. Eighteen months of five to six hours a night (eight, rarely) has left me Truly, Madly, Deeply burned out. Finally having a PC that can run games and do ATC renders in 1/10th the time of previous setups has turned out to mean hours of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. : Shadow of Chernobyl, finding out what the big deal with The Orange Box was,* and Team Fortress 2. So much Team Fortress 2. Production has suffered accordingly. As of the 13th, I’m out of excuses, and I’m out of real-world roadblocks – for a couple of weeks, anyway.

If I felt any less motivated – if I had any less energy – I’d be violating a few laws of physics. More than a few. That doesn’t change what needs doing, where things are, how much has been done, and the massive amount of uploading I’ll be doing over the next few days. Chapters Five and Six have been done for awhile – my next task will be Once Over-ing both of them while setting up renders for the two remaining pages of Chapter Seven.

Then seven and eight go up. Then it’s on to a wealth of other Things That Need Doing – some of it’s is ATC related, some of it’s Finding A Job related. There is some overlap. There is potentially a lot of overlap. The lack of energy is most likely a combination of seasonal and layoff factors, as well as all the fear and uncertainty that comes with the latter. Part of my slate has been cleared for me – I figure it’s on me to clear the rest of it as quickly as possible, making the beginning of 2010 the start of Life 2.0.

This is, perhaps, one of the most critical scenes in The Dualist. It’s also Yang’s first color appearance, the first appearance of Aeon’s “avatar” (given the present Definite Shape of the pre-Dualist outline), my first animal, the first bit of Non-Crazy Astral Space** in the book, the first instance of the ligature to appear inside the story… and the whole thing’s orange enough to counteract the overabundance of blue elsewhere.

Forty Orange.

Forty Orange and the first blatant statement of what this whole damned thing – what these years of effort – might actually be leading to. It’s… unnerving. Like you’re in the middle of a meeting and you suddenly realize your zipper might be down.

Motion in a couple of days – and hopefully some motivation to go with it. Inertia will carry this thing through – I’d prefer some ZIP! and some ZING! and preferably some :D and some ^_^ to go with it. If they show up for the party, awesome. If they don’t… well, so be it.

* Portal? Five hours of awesome. Half-Life 2 and episodes? There’s quite a bit of goodness there, but it’s ultimately A Shooter With An Interesting Story. Emphasis on A Shooter. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is the kind of FPS single-player I’ve always wanted to play, and as such my opinion of HL2 boils down to “It’s the best Doom since Doom 3.” One of these days FPS games that aren’t Halo will implement per-weapon melee attacks and – holy of holies – bayonets. Optional breakable bayonets if my trusty AKM/74 with optional scope and grenade launcher (and in Clear Sky, silencer and accuracy mod) in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. are anything to go by. Did Bungee patent pistol whipping? Is that why every FPS I’ve played since hasn’t implemented it?

Rounding out the “review,” TF2 is the most online fun I’ve had since Wolfenstein : Enemy Territory. It’s basically WET (or Counter Strike or Team Fortress or Quake 3 or, yanno… whatever) with a hell of a lot more fine-tuning, beautiful art direction, a great sense of humor, and the same problem every online multiplayer game has – finding a good server can be a real pain in the trigger finger. You get over that hurdle, and the fun… the fun rolls on for hours. If you’re wondering why this scene wasn’t up sooner, don’t blame my former employer and the last week of craziness – blame Valve. Or if I do an ATC-themed game model (like I’ve been not-very-seriously considering on occasion), thank them.

** Strictly speaking, this isn’t quite Astral. The Aeon’s AI has organic components – it’s technically a sentient life form and as such, it has an astral form. That said form happens to be a dog is in keeping with the ship’s present mental state – it’s been lost, sniffing around the galaxy for its masters for the past forever-and-a-half. While this is technically some kind of Super Holodeck, there’s no actual interface hardware – this entire scene occurs as a psychic communication between Aeon and Yang.