20130908, 10:28 – Space porn, words, and more about FTL and FTL comms than you’ll ever need or want to know. Xand is referring specifically to the loop between the relay and earth, not the relay and civilization. I have no idea how long that lag is, and since an inaccurate assessment now could have major plot repercussions later I’m not even going to guess.

Here Endeth The Lesson. While the rest of this scene is talk, it isn’t the love child of Popular Science and a Speak-n-Spell. It’s straight up non-technical chatter. There’s two (or three) more “technical” scenes planned for Transitional Voices – unlike this one they’re all in the context of Applied Technology, so there’ll be more going on than spiffy space porn and talking heads.

I’ll keep the rest of this blurb brief, as there’s no sense in getting the soul-sucking depression I stubbed my toe on this morning all over the metadata. This page went together easily and looks pretty good. Visually it feels more balanced than the previous page, which is a good thing. I have fewer issues with the line art and am only a little irritated at the issues the Daedalus bridge poses as a set. There was originally more dialogue in panel seven but it felt clunky, had more than the usual convergence issues, and ultimately the page feels a lot cleaner with a single well-placed line than the panel did with two never-gonna-look-rights jockeying for a proper uncluttered LTR line of “action.”

There are four pages left of the chapter – another month of guaranteed updates. I’ve done some writing on ATC, though it’s not TV.3 I’ve been working on – it’s some possible extensions to Dead City Radio. Specifically an addition to Leitmotif that would complete that chapter as a concept, and a Dead City Radio Six that would serve as a testbed for production techniques likely to be used in ATC4 while filling in some absolutely critical plot details. I don’t know when or if these bits will be produced and in what order with respect to TV.3. I do know that writing is the one part of comic production that I haven’t industrialized into a rain-or-shine, mood-or-no-mood, On Command skill the way I have everything else. It’s the part of the process that I enjoy, so fuck if I’m going to force a grey joyless framework of I MUST WRITE THIS NEXT onto it when it’s extremely clear that Bits Of DCR are where my head is at right now.

I know why that’s where my head is – I’ve been sober since April. I haven’t gone out since April. I’ve effectively given The Scene the finger and fucked off for awhile – and the fact that on some level I actually kind of miss it is coming out in Plot. It seems appropriate for DCR and should actually add a lot to the story if produced, so I’m not fighting it – but I don’t plan to give in to it, either – as much as I may miss going to goth night, I know that I’m missing the idea of goth night and quite specifically the clockwork Every Saturday Night regularity of Laga/Upstage/Pegasus Ceremony, the DJs, and the Upstage staff. I’m not the only one – there are Facebook nostalgia groups dedicated to that stuff. Like it or not the club scene seems to be past its sell-by – but that doesn’t mean I can’t pour what was onto the page to score a few points for Thad and Jason. It just means I have to be careful not to get lost in it.

So much for keeping it brief!

This is the first comic post from Chrome. Firefox is finally too bloated, slow, and useless to keep using on my 2007 Mac Mini. Chrome is a welcome performance boost. Importantly, there’s no delayed draw of page elements when changing tab focus and the presentation of downloads is good as opposed to completely skullfucked – a direction the Firefox UI has been lurching in over the course of the last several releases. I’m glad I got out before whoever’s microsofting the hell out of the UI hit something that can’t be easily undone with extensions. My key reasons for switching are Chrome’s lack of delayed draw between tabs and sane presentation of downloads – FF would drop and then take several seconds to re-draw large graphic elements of a tab – mostly backgrounds, but including comic jpegs – and a release or two back the combination of the new and unimproved “downloads” and the horrible performance of the built-in PDF viewer made getting a years worth of statements out of my bank website unthinkable without a trip into about:config. While FF still runs Fine on my quad-core whatever-gigglehertz PC and on my i7 macbook, Chrome is faster than FF on both platforms and is presently the only viable option on my ancient-ass workstation. I will replace it whenever I can afford a new one, but given the fact that my average monthly income puts me in a qualifying bracket for state assistance it’s probably going to be awhile. I had to get lucky with freelance on top of a Real Job to be able to afford this thing in 2008, and that’s when my income was three times what it is now.

The only Known Unknown with Chrome at this point is the built-in Inspector. It handles almost but not quite entirely like Firebug. I switched to Chrome right after finishing work on a client website and switched largely because of that website, but I have yet to actually do anything more than really quick-and-simple debugging with it. Basic quirks could turn out to be a non-issue, or they could send me screaming back to Firefox for work purposes – I’ll find out later in the week when I dig in on the sleep-for-contract-fulfillment trade-in program that I’ve been avoiding all summer.

Mastering notes, 2016.12.07 – Removed the logo from Thad’s shirt, tweaked dialogue in panel three.