Today's Jerkcity has Pants singing Public Image Limited. Even better, it's the same song that's extensively abused in Mark 13 : Hardware.

Verily, I am amused.

The aforementioned gaps have been filled in. Copyrights have been removed (with one or two possible exceptions in photographs), the Skinny Puppy album Whitehouse swaps Sean is now a Foreplay Unit album, the wording of a couple of earlier scenes have been changed, the dialogue font has been changed and the size has been standardized throughout, and the art has been tweaked a smidge (literally - a wee bit). The cover is done, and the comic is now undergoing proofreading. After it passes that, it'll be posted to ATC.

I ran the numbers, and the first issue can be output into hardcopy for cheap. Seriously cheap. More on that after I've had time to think on it.

In the meantime, Chapter Two is shaping up, and should be rolling into a draft script over the next couple of weeks.

Scraggling blocks indicate what's missing from the layout, which will be filled in as I parse through the edit. While I'm not entirely thrilled with where a couple of the gaps are, it does beat the crap out of filling in entire pages. Or cutting strips out entirely.

Doesn't look like much from this vantage, does it?

    

Fact : The gravicon "logo" (which was never actually used on a public site build) is at least five years old. Maybe six.

#loccon 07 summary here.

Shoot 'Em Up : Awesome. Ninety minutes of bullets, carrots, and explosions. Sweet stunts, some fairly unconventional use of traditional action movie tropes, and minimal exposition. Verily, I enjoyed it.

Dellamorte Dellamore : Still awesome, though not quite as mind-blowing as I remember it being when I first watched it way back in '97. Easily the best surreal/zombie film out there.

The Jan-Michael Vincent's Hair & Earnest Borgnine Hour : Season 2 was tactically deployed as "filler" before during and after other video. The modified Bell 222 is still awesome, the theme music is still awesome, and the writing, effects work, and most of the acting are still balls-to-the-wall stupid. Borgnine is awesome (he's fucking Earnest Borgnine for fuck's sake!), but Jan-Michael Vincent looks like an Evil Universe version of Don Johnson. I think it's the hair. All of the hair, actually - Airwolf represents a broad spectrum of the worst of 80s fashion.

The Hudsucker Proxy : Xeno somehow made it through the last thirteen years without even hearing about this movie, so something had to be done about that. You know, for kids.

The Big Lebowski. This isn't 'nam. This is #loccon '07. There are rules.

Die Hard 4 (aka Hackers 2) : Sticking in Kevin Smith still doesn't save the steaming pile of bullshit that is HollywoodOS or the rest of the so-called "script," though it seems that it was the producer's intent to use Smith as some kind of nerd-shield to stave off any richly-deserved technical criticism. There's some sweet stuntwork - McClane knocks a guy out of a helicopter with a fire hydrant, then kills the helicopter with a fucking policecar , and that was pretty sweet. The bit with the F-35 was also sweet from the violence perspective but doesn't say much about the JSF - a couple of missiles, a shitload of machinegun rounds and you still can't kill the target, but you've wrecked huge chunks of freeway? Great violence, but still. Xeno and I plodded through this turkey just for Bruce Willis and the stuntwork. The rest of it is trope-heavy disposable bullshit that drags down what used to be one of the finer action franchises.

Various Team Fortress 2 trailers : The "meet the ______" bits are fantastic. Nice to see an FPS go for the cartoon/stylized look and pull it off.

First Blood : Still the best Rambo movie. Best story, best message, best direction, most believable stunts and action. If you want your First Blood with a bit more of a Spaghetti Western kick to it, be sure to check out Seraphim Falls.

Snagged an 800mhz/768 ram Fujitsu st4110 on ebay for cheap. Cheap for a reason - the digitizer is a drunk moose at worst and a drunk bee at best. Calibration dies every time the aspect is changed, calibration drifts on a whim, Wacom drivers fight with Fujitsu drivers, Photoshop 5.5 doesn't launch and Photoshops CS2 and CS3 can't be used in Portrait mode (half the tools in that damned top bar are offscreen), and no Adobe apps actually work with the digitizer. Alias Sketchbook (what the above doodle was sketched out in) listens to the Fujitsu drivers just fine, however. And it runs in portrait mode. If I can get the pen to actually calibrate with any degree of accuracy (hah, hah- the "calibration" utility asks you to point at a section of screen the size of a dime), I might actually have something here.

I still have to try running the kit with Wacom drivers installed and Fujitsu drivers removed, but ultimately it looks like this thing will be a cheap, ultra-portable rendering node, if nothing else. Makes me wish Apple would get off their fucking ass and haul the Newton - the original "tablet pc" - into the modern age.

Regardless of your opinion of my drawing skills, it's a real bitch to "ink" when your cursor is constantly an eighth of an inch in any direction from where it ought to be. It's like drawing drunk, only without the pleasant fuzziness about the headmeats.

Salvaged:

Melville : Moby Dick
Crichton : State of Fear
Remarque : All Quiet On The Western Front
Jung : Man And His Symbols
Vonnegut : Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons
Strunk & White : Elements Of Style
Varley : Persistence Of Vision
Doyle : The Original Illustrated Sherlock Holmes (facsimile edition)

All dinged, "annotated," weathered, coverless, or otherwise unuseable as library stock.

 

  

Cleaned up, tweaked a bit, and generally spiffier than it was when it was sitting in silo yesterday.

I usually prefer to sit on "work in progress" CG until it actually appears in the comic, but in terms of what's available, the Hemera has already been out of commission for five years... and it'll be at least six months to a year before it shows up in DCR - and if I'm lucky, the same amount of time until it shows up as an "extra" in ATC.

Detailed commentary at some hypothetical "later date."

07:08 <@xeno> ...
07:08 <@solios_> silo++
07:09 <@xeno> waaaaay too much time on your hands :P
07:09 <@xeno> go read a book or play a game or something.
07:09 <@solios_> only took about 16h total
07:09 <@solios_> and that was LEARNING the app.
07:09 <@xeno> ...
07:09 <@xeno> fagbot: doot solios
07:09 <@fagbot> it's time i started acting more like a MAN and less like a STUPID SHITHEAD
07:09 <@ejp> LOOK MA, NO NURBS!
07:09 <@xeno> asdfjkhasdjklfasdklfj

Points:

1. I don't do organic modelling. Yet. The vehicle looks real purdy all subdivided 'n shit, but "curvy" isn't on the spec sheet. That's for guys who work in the movie or video game industry. I need 3d for environments and vehicles. Spaceships - or this spaceship, at any rate - are supposed to be hard-edged and chunky. Especially this one, which is set to be on scene for a couple of pages of DCR and - stripped down - as an "extra" in Transitional Voices. You don't spend weeks doing a high detail super-awesome film-grade model of a ship that's got less screen time than the commercial break - you save that time and effort for the real star of the show - in this case, the interior of the Daedalus. Which I should be working on but am not.

2. The ship took less than two "days" (read : work periods) to model, with most of the work taking place on the second day. I downloaded Silo late last week and spent more time floundering about trying to think of something appropriate to model (MBO-1? No. Daedalus bridge? No. 'gheny floorplans? Easier in Max, oddly.) than I did actually modelling the Hemera.

3. So. Less than 20 hours combined work in Silo and Max, and it's in max and I have a pipeline worked out and I've already got the thing worked over with smoothing groups. All that's left is texture mapping, and it'll be at least a year before I actually need to get that bit checked off.

4. The base "doughnut" geometry started in max. The rest of it started off as a 3x3x3 faced cube in silo. I'm sure I could have generated the centrifuge in silo, but it's one of those deals where four minutes in max trumped hours plonking around in silo.

 

After the thing at the Moose, I dropped by Chris & Laura's labor day cookout. Contrary to popular opinion, there was no prior wardrobe coordination. Heck, I didn't even know that white came battle pants were available in a shorts form factor until I'd arrived.

A fun night with friends I hadn't seen in years capping off a fun day with friends I hadn't seen in years. W00t, etc.

   

Spikey Mike's new Doom Metal thing, which was filmed by Scary Mike for an upcoming short film. Some stock footage of me doing my usual bar thing may show up in it as well - who knows.

Hadn't seen MikeS since A Tribute To Sanity finished mastering, MikeP in longer, and Chris in even longer than that. Good stuff.

07:07 <@bda> I totally can't envision Gibson listening to Brad Sucks (after having listened to a couple tracks myself).
07:08 < solios> o_o
07:10 < solios> I've long ago given up on anyone I respect having anything approximating similar taste in music.
07:12 < mdxi> everyone has bad taste in music
07:12 < solios> pretty much.
07:13 <@bda> I kinda like it.
07:13 <@bda> But.
07:13 <@bda> I like odd things.
07:14 < solios> lies. you're pop-40 to the bone.
07:15 < solios> sad fact : most of ATC could be summed up with a properly selected Anthrax comp.
07:15 <@bda> I don't think you'd find a lot of the Irish music I listen to on the pop 40.
07:15 <@bda> Jerkface.
07:16 < solios> probably on the irish pop 40. ;p
07:16 <@bda> Knew you'd say that.