I drew and shaded this page in parallel with the previous one, so it should’ve been up early on Sunday, right? Right? Wrong! Thanks to internal clock wonkiness and the Latrobe Air Show and the Sunburn From Hell… well… the meat was operational but on auto-pilot. I was up for about 24 hours straight from 9pm Friday to 9pm Saturday – about 10.5 of that was getting deep fried through ineffective sun screen by Sol and another three and a half hours total sitting in sun-lit traffic in a car with a sun roof. I passed out shortly after I got home, woke up around 3am, just kind of existed for a few hours, fell asleep again I don’t know when and slept until around nine or ten at night, kinda woke up and proceeded to aggressively sit there (only with Fallout 3*) until around 9am, when my brain finally woke up and started asking questions. The first of which was YOU ARE DEEP FRIED WHY HAVEN’T YOU SHOWERED YET.

I saw the Weinermobile and Navy Band Northeast AND the Blue Angels in the SAME DAY IT WAS TOO MUCH I NEEDED SOME TIME.

Naturally showering lead to chores so now that all the survival requirements have been met I’m on to the business of POSTING THE PAGE. A DAY LATE. And after it goes up it’s on to figuring out how I’m going to get caught up on a fully loaded work week I’ve already lost a slice of – a work week that includes next weeks page. I’m not starting from zero with that, fortunately – I rendered it during a manic burst of productivity Saturday morning, so I just have to draw it. And shade it. And do some effects work. And set up for the next one.

Hey maybe I should talk about this page. There’s an idea. I could say something like:

Those circumstances sure were excruciating. Fading SLAP! A couple of dramatic shots of Thad! Ornix laughs at Inga ‘cuz Inga has no idea how overly dramatic Thad can be! CONTINUED OMINOUS SYMBOLISM AND FORESHADOWING WITH THE SHUTTLEPOD!

And now the blind and the lynx userbase are just as up to speed as the rest of us. As are those crazy search engine crawlers and bots HI CRAWLERS AND BOTS.

Oh, and Ornix is looking at an exoskeleton schematic, drawn in June of 2000 and considered useable at the present resolution, which is illegible at any size – even before my handwriting is taken into consideration. In the original script the contents of the magazine (it’s an annual digest but it’s still an annual digest of a magazine) were never visible to the camera. This changed when panel two was re-cut from something that would have worked in bizarroland to a shot that works with the established production values and character positioning. I could have drawn something to specifically fit the bill but those days are long past. He’s looking at a hardcopy of thirty year old content it may as well be old content.

That’s it for this week. Next week: Will it look like more work than it is? Or will it be more work than it looks? One thing’s for sure, there’s gonna be some work involved somewhere!

After I make some progress on client work. They’re paying me, they get to go first!

* F3 hates Windows 7. Long story short if you're trying to get Fallout 3 to run for longer than a few minutes on Win7 you need to run it in XPsp3 compatibility mode. You also need to pull up the task manager while its running and tell the system that F3 is only allowed to use one core. That seems to have stuck for subsequent launches, as the game is now roughly about as stable as New Vegas was before NVAC belt-sanded out very nearly all of the freezes, lockups, BSODs and hangs. F3 Stutter Remover may or may not be helping. After the aforementioned tweaks and the addition of that mod the game is as stable as it was on XP64, which is to say it's playable for 1d6*10 minute stretches but occasionally hits areas where "forward" is a shortcut to the desktop. CASM is essential.