But it’s big (almost 1Mb total), so I’m not putting it on this page.

Click this link to see the comic.

It’s about making firewood. I tried to make it exactly as engaging as cutting firewood. Enjoy.

So, okay… you can see the difference in quality level that I’m getting out of my laptop just with this comic. I’m using my 4″x5″ graphire tablet (because it’s small enough to be portable) and Photoshop 5.5 (I normally use 7, but I only have that on my iMac, not my Powerbook). And features I’m so used to between the way the software interfaces with the tablet, to the resolution of the tablet, to the more advanced brush tool in PS7, plus my laptop’s slower processor make for a ‘rougher’ comic.

See, the look on my primitive face was supposed to represent me nearly nauseous, but after a couple dozen tries I just gave up and went with … well, whatever that is. The last few times we’ve come down (or gone back up) I had novels to read for MEVBC (reminder: the meeting for MEVBC re: The Catcher in the Rye will be on the first!) that held my attention completely. I expect that that’s what worked for me; having my attention completely off my body and on the story. Today … well, I’ve already read Red Mars and The Catcher in the Rye, plus Green Mars, and we don’t have another book on the list. So I grabbed the Legends of the Ferengi and Asimov’s Robot Visions, but … one is broken into a discrete story per rule and the other is an anthology of short stories… and I didn’t get ‘drawn in’ and kept having mini bouts of near-nausea. Oh well.

Okay, so I didn’t just move hoses and sprinklers around, and I didn’t actually reach out and grab running sprinklers by their heads more than once or twice – I usually walked over to wherever the faucet was and turned the water off first. But between walking back and around and around and forth and around and around and back again to check on and move and adjust the pressure on all the hoses and sprinklers, plus the water siphoning through the three-inch hose, plus walking back to the three water boxes again and again to be sure the pipes that were supposed to be plugged stayed plugged and the doors that were supposed to be open stayed open (or closed just the right amount) so that neighbors’ yards wouldn’t flood and we would get enough water but not too much and then running back and forth across the highway to be sure we aren’t running water out all over the place because something moved or the water flow rate changed or something… plus a little walking up and down a ladder again and again to check on the water level in the tank during that part of the operation, and after about three hours of this I ended up a little tired and a little sore.

So, that’s the most interesting thing I did today, I think…

Okay, yeah, so … I pushed the times on this entry and the last one by about 20 minutes and thirty seconds (respectively) so they’d show up as posted on the right day.

Pthbbt!

Currently listening to: Needle in the Hay, Elliot Smith, The Royal Tenenbaums Soundtrack

Looks like I’m coming in just under the wire on this one. Another half hour plus making this single frame of a comic. And man, does my skin itch in places. Not that that has anything to do with doing online research, but … man.

So, I’ll finish my Matrix research soon, and after I write up a long essay on the nature of The Matrix, it’s sequels, &ct… I will probably get to my essay on The Rules. Gha. If I type any more now, this won’t show up as being posted today!

So, okay, it’s late because it took me half an hour or more to draw it, but here you go. Don’t ask me about the fish. I just draw what I see. If I wanted to spend more than half an hour on it, I could have tried to draw all eight other people there, and the rest of the person whose legs are in the scene, but … This seemed right to me.

Also, I’m going to go to bed without making another post, since I have to get up in a few hours to water… But I want to complain here that no one posted a single fucking thing today (135.0). Come on! Comments about pinatas are not the extent of your daily lives, and I know it! Surely something must be going on with some of you!

I was going to make a long post about The Rules (my copy arrived today), but I only got 2/3 of the way through this afternoon because I got invited to that party thing, so you’ll have to wait to hear my take on the subject. I want to hold comments in reserve until I’ve finished it (and maybe Rules II, which arrived Saturday, and maybe another book on the rules I’ve had for a couple of weeks…), but it certainly is … something.

Of course, me taking the time to write all this has pushed me to 45 minutes after the hour. I seriously set down here at just moments before midnight, and if I could somehow have drawn faster, I might have got this blogcomic posted on the right day. By which I mean, it never would have happened.

I’ve seen one or two of them, but never read them. Comixpedia did and entire month’s morth of columns and articles and interviews on the subject, but I failed to read any of it. Yet I have heard that there are people doing blogcomics, or daily journal-style comics, or comics that mirror their lives closely, or whatever, and thought that without thinking to hard about the pro’s and con’s and what other people are doing with the concept or really what the concept means to anyone else, I’d go ahead and start doing a semi-daily blogcomic.

Probably I’ll play around with it. I may move to just having a drawing with the descriptive/narrative text in the blog entry outside of the image, or I may move to not including typed text outside th eimage, or I may just run out of time and never do another one. Whatever.