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08.08.09 Finally got a new comic done. Sorry about the missed week. I went home to visit family last weekend, and ended up with absolutely no free time at all. The visit wasn't bad. I have three brothers that I never see, and hadn't talked to my sister in at least four months. My nieces and nephews (there are 12?!) seem to get a foot taller every time I see them. I got to play guitar with my grandfather. Which, isn't really true. I got to have my grandfather make fun of me while I tried to play guitar with him. He plays his chords differently from me, and can't udnerstand why he can't throw a 10-note riff at me, and have me play it back. I guess people were just much, much, faster learners when he was a kid. I'm still making headway with the MUD, and learning a lot about blues guitar. I bought a slide today, so maybe I'll learn how to play rythm with that. Right now, when I play blues rythm, it just comes off sounding like a parody of what you'd hear from an old movie or something. 07.25.09 New comic. I'm down to one comic a week, but I'm having fun working on the MUD, playing guitar, riding motorcycle, and doing all the good summer stuff. Maybe once it's too cold to do anything else, I'll get back on schedule. 07.18.09 Finally posted a new comic. I find that being so tired my eyes burn is a poor condition to write comics in. I'm reasonably happy with this one, though. I think I'll try to use this technique more in the future. I need to find a way to use the frame where it's not so obvious. I've been talking over a new comic project with Danielle. The idea is to take lots of research photos and lay everything out that way before starting to draw. I never draw with research photos, so I'm curious what that would lead to. I have no idea how long laying something like that out would take, or what kind of story I could tell with that technique, but it's been fun to talk about. Maybe I'll swing this whole thing in that direction next year. I have been working on guitar and the MUD a lot lately. The comic is accurate, so far as the new fighting system goes. It never occurred to me that making something a little like Final Fantasy was the easiest way to get people interested. For the first time, I have genuine hope that people will actually play this thing when I'm done with it. As for the guitar, I've been doing nothing but the blues. I'm actually afraid my ability to play open chords is going to atrophy while I'm practicing scales. It takes a certain kind of insanity to worry that practicing one technique naturally comes at the expense of another. I am afflicted with exactly that kind of insanity. 06.27.09 New comic! I can't believe it's Saturday! I've had this comic all drawn except for one arm since last Friday. I seriously don't know what's going on with my life. I've tried to spend some time, when I've got little breaks, coming up with a work list for the MUD. So, when I do have a whole hour, I can be productive. Also, I thought I could get this comic done for last Friday. I went to lunch with coworkers on Thursday instead of finishing the comic, and seriously don't know what's happened since then. I really hope this phase of my life is over soon. I can't imagine being this busy for much longer. 06.17.09 I've posted a new comic. It's a little late, but yesterday was my birthday. So, I took the day off to practice guitar. There's been a little more testing on the MUD, but I've been too tired for the past few weeks to work on it. I'm going to work on it tomorrow, though, no matter what. Everything here is going fine. It's taken me about 20 minutes to type the above paragraph, so I think I'm exhausted to the point of retardation. With that, I think I'll get a snack and go to bed. 06.11.09 There's a new comic. I can't believe it's the 11th. I lost track of days entirely there for a while. I've been so busy with just taking care of my daughter, and doing father/husband stuff lately that I haven't had any time to myself at all. I had this comic drawn mostly on Monday. I'd been looking for an hour to finish it since then, and even now I should have been in bed an hour ago, but I don't know if I'll find another chance to do it this week. One fun thing about this week, though, was the NIN/Jane's addiction concert in Pittsburgh I went to with Krev. Driving there and back in one day was a real pain, but the show was worth it. I'd always wanted to see NIN live, and now I just regret not having done it in the past. Both bands were incredible. Usually I'm disappointed when a show is that large, because people just hang out in their seats, trying to get a look at the performer who's a quarter mile away. We got lucky with our seats, though, and the performers did a great job of getting everyone involved. I was really impressed. It's too bad it was a farewell tour for both bands. If you never got the chance, you missed out on something special. 06.02.09 New comic! I guess I was foolish to think that I could watch a newborn all day, and still get something done. I ended up spending all my free time on the MUD, and I didn't get much done on that. She's really great about sleeping through the night, but once she's up for the day, she has trouble taking naps. It's really still very good for a newborn, but no afternoon naps means no free time for dad, and I'm afraid the comic has suffered for it. I'll try to get back on track, and we'll just have to see how it goes. 05.23.09 New comic! I've always thought the 'luck of the Irish' must be some kind of joke. The history of the place is one big let down after another. You'd think, eventually, Ireland could catch a break. Between the potato famine and the 'troubles', you start to understand why so many came to America in the first place. The worst if it is that it seems like it's just good people getting screwed. I mean, the church didn't have to jump in and fuck everything up, and the English really didn't have to take all the good land and let the locals starve. After a while, you wish they'd just close their borders entirely and stop letting people mess with them. I think I could be happy as a stay at home dad. I'm not really getting all that much more work done on things than when I work all day, because taking care of a baby is a lot more work than I thought it would be. However, my blood pressure has probably been at an all time low. I'm really enjoying my time with my daughter, and I'm getting a lot done through her naps. I could be perfectly happy doing this full time. 05.20.09 New comic posted! I'm hoping this week works out pretty well for me. I'll be staying home from today until the end of next week, watching my daughter. Since she's only four months old, a lot of that seems to be a matter of watching her sleep. That means I'll have some more time to do comic and MUD stuff, as well as catching up on sleep in a big way. Right now I feel pretty great. I worked on learning drums and Bass last night, and I can finally play all the parts of 'Under the Bridge'. Now, I just have to figure out how to string those parts together into a whole song. It's all coming together, though. It looks like this is going to be a pretty good summer. 05.15.09 Finally got another comic up! Sorry I've only done a single update per week the past two weeks. Sometimes my life just gets ahead of me, and I really don't know how to recover. I would have posted this last week on Friday, except that I lost my Wacom pen until the following Monday. Then, every time I sat down to do work on the comic something would come up. All my free time has been in 10 minute intervals, separated by an hour of putting out fires. I've got a list of changes for the MUD that I'm really going to try to finish this weekend, so that project is actually still moving along. Also, I got a drum set and a bass guitar, and I've tried to use my free 10-minute blocks to learn how to use them. The Bass isn't really that different from a regular 6-string guitar, so I didn't have any trouble picking up a few songs for that. The drums, well, we've discussed my drumming abilities on this site before. Let's just say I'm progressing, and leave it at that. My goal is to have a list of songs me and my friends can play in my garage for fun. I have some weird hang-ups about joining a band, but making music with your friends is something I think everyone has locked away in their DNA somewhere. Sometimes I wish we still lived in a time where people didn't have MP3s. If they wanted to listen to music at a party, someone had to sit down at the Piano, or pick up a guitar, and MAKE IT. I've always felt the world would be a much cooler place if everyone knew how to play at least one instrument. 05.06.09 New comic! With this comic I really just wanted to practice making a character show an emotion through body language. I threw together the script five minutes ago, after the art was all done. I actually had to swap the second and third frame to make the art work. I would love to do every comic more like this one, where I draw the character specifically to fit into the emotion I need them to be displaying. I didn't even have time to do that with both characters this time, but I still think it's work practicing. Hopefully I can get more than an hour to do a comic start to finish someday here. Things are still good with everything on the home front. As stated in the comic Danielle and Steve are coming back to town, so it'll be nice to have more people around. We're thinking about getting together regularly to 'jam' with, like guitars and stuff. The idea still feels very foreign to me, but there's a lot I can't do with just me and a guitar that I'd really like to try. Maybe we'll even really like something and post an MP3 or something, who knows? I'll keep everyone posted. 05.03.09 New comic! This would have been on time, but I forgot to post it. We do argue about the thermostat. I had to make a comic about it because I just think it's such a stupid thing to fight about. I don't know how it happened, either. We had a thermostat in our apartment and I clearly remember setting it exactly once. Things are going great with Ellie. She's been gaining weight and getting better with babbling and making noises. It's funny how these things are somehow considered progress, but when you have a newborn you realize what an accomplishment just moving your eyes together is. I'm still getting some work done on the MUD. I've been keeping up with weekly meetings with a friend who's very big into the table-top RPG scene. He even has a podcast called TrapCast. If you listen to the show, the guy I'm working with is 'George', and our weekly meetings sound a lot like the show, where he's drifting off on a tangent, and I'm trying desperately to reel him back in. It's a good time, though, and we're making good progress. 04.28.09 New comic, and it's even on the right day! I got to stay at home with my daughter yesterday while my wife went to work. This role reversal made me realize how I've been getting the short end of the stick for three months. At least I had time to draw this comic about another way my wife benefits at my expense. Danielle was talking about doing a 'Fancy Hat' night when she moves back, so I'd been trying on dress hats. Thinking they all looked silly, I was relieved when my wife encouraged me to buy the one I was trying on but, of course, she had other motives. 04.24.09 This comic is late. It was supposed to be Tuesday's comic, and I had it all done but the third frame by then, but just couldn't seem to finish it. I tried adding words several times, and they all seemed forced and superfluous. I originally wanted to do four panels, but had no idea how to draw what I wanted. In short, really, this comic is late because I couldn't pull off what I wanted to do. So, I finally decided it's time to finish it, post it, and move on. Sometimes you just have to accept failure. Things in general life have been all right. Ellie is sleeping really well, and she continues to amuse us with her babbling. She likes to try to say things in response to what you tell her, so we have lots of mock conversations where I ask her questions and then just pretend that she's answered them. I'm sure there's a comic in there somewhere. I'm still not sure how much baby the comic can withstand before it's pegged as one of those terrible news-print comics that no one reads, but makes it into press because everyone feels like a dick talking bad about them. Family Circus, I'm looking directly at you. I'm still trying to weigh the pros and cons of my current work situation. I know I should just be glad to have a job, but is dying of a hate-induced heart-attack really worth it? I guess we'll just have to wait and see how that works out. I'm still amazed at how my relationship with this job has soured over the past three years. It reminds me a lot of a relationship I once had with a woman. When we met, she told me she loved camping and painting and seeing concerts. After a few months, we went camping, where she admitted she'd never been camping before, and it turns out that bugs really freak her out. Also, she couldn't paint, and hated going to concerts. The job is much the same thing. I started there, and everyone talked a big game about the kind of work we do, and the how we go about it. After a few years I've come to the conclusion that they were lying. The worst part of it that it has the potential to be the best job ever. Our network guy WANTS to run servers, our applications programmers WANT to design software in a professional manner. The people *WANT* to work hard, and make things happen. On top of that, we've got more work to do than we could possibly ever finish! We provide the students with the on line capability to sign up for courses, check their schedule, and anything else they might want to do. If we had Googgle's workforce, we would never get bored of adding features and re-inventing the way students interact with the university. But we don't. A few weeks ago, in one of those management decisions that makes people quit a job, they decided to appoint a team to figure out how to make the office a more 'fun' place to be. The Registrar's Office now has a fucking 'fun-gineering(like Disney!)' team. People are miserable and frustrated because we never do any work to be proud of, and every project is like getting kicked in the balls over and over, and they want us to go bowling at lunch to improve moral. My personal theory is that we're purposely running the whole place into the ground so we can justify outsourcing the whole office. 04.17.09 Finally posting a comic! I think it's safe to say that any kind of family holiday that includes Friday, and the weekend, is going to kill the Friday update, and probably the Tuesday update as well. I usually do most of the Friday comic on Friday night, because I have that night pretty much to myself, and I can stay up late after the wife and daughter have gone to sleep to finish. So, I guess I'll just have to plan a few holiday breaks into the comic schedule until I can get ahead with the strip so I've got something to post when I don't have time to work. This year's Easter was pretty normal for a visit home. My sister is pregnant AGAIN, making this baby number five that she can't possibly hope to support. My brother brought a bottle of Vodka to mom's Easter gathering, and spent the time we shared hurling insults at me. I gave my mother the guitar I brought with me, because someone destroyed the one I gave her for Christmas. All in all, a pretty normal event. One thing that has been bothering me since, though, is the idea of adulthood and what it really means. I've tried to come up with my own definition of adulthood ever since I admitted to myself that I'm no longer a kid. I'm still working on my own definition, but I'm pretty sure it includes some sense of self reliance. My mother is getting older, and she's got her life pretty well figured out. She makes more money than she needs, and her kids are all grown. You would think she would live a relaxing life, relatively free of worry. However, my siblings are still, by my definition, kids. My brother, it seems, will never figure out that it's just not cool to call your mother and worry her because at age 30, you still can't hold your liquor or navigate NYC streets on your own. My sister seems more than content to keep producing children she has no intentions of supporting, while skimming any extra money off my mother's income. Seriously, if you're over 18, you're an adult. Leave your parents alone, and figure out how to live your own life without mommy and daddy. If they didn't do enough for you, fine, stop talking to them. If they were good to you, then go to their holiday parties and try to enrich their lives. Either way, they're done being a 'parent' to you, so grow up and get a life of your own.
04.08.09 This comic would have been completed on Tuesday but, the Gimp crashed destroying over an hour worth of work. Also, I'm typing this with one hand and feeding Ellie with the other. It turns out that more sleeping at night means more active in the day. Things here have been good as usual. I finally got to take the bike out for a proper spring ride, We have a beach near a dam that I like to ride to. You go up one side of a mountain, and down the other. At the top, there's a scenic overlook with walking trails. The damn is down the winding mountain, after a straight stretch with no traffic either way. I've also managed to get tickets to see NIN this summer. I've been wanting to see them since I was in high school, and now they're reuniting with Jane's Addiction for their last tour. It sort of makes me feel old that I'm going to a farewell tour for a band I've been a fan of for 15 years. I think it will be a show to remember, though, and a good way to kick off the concert season. The MUD is progressing nicely. We've been working on character creation, classes, and wielding weapons with both hands. I'm going to try to set up a test area where everyone gets builder privileges and gets to experiment with making their own little worlds. I really want to get it to the point where I'm not considering deleting and redesigning core elements, so I can start removing some of the really bad prototype code and replacing it with production code. 04.03.09 I got a comic done in one day! I seriously didn't think I'd get this done, but then work stepped in and delivered me some inspiration. Things have been moving on the MUD today. I asked a friend for some notes, and we're coming up with some really interesting ideas. If nothing else, it'll give me a lot of new stuff to do for a while. Unfortunately, the comic tells you exactly what's going on at work. Just the usual case of having a line of people standing in my way before I can get anything done. I completely understand how contracting works now. Management actually hires someone that they don't manage. Then, magically, work gets done! If they would just apply this thinking to the people below them, and stop managing us, we could all get as much done as contractors! Ellie has been sleeping a little better, which is really cool. She's sleeping from the time I go to bed until almost 5am on a good night. She's growing ridiculously fast, and had her first laugh this week. She's just started to smile in response to things too. I'm still waiting to feel like I can really interact with her. Right now you have to try pretty hard just to get her attention. 04.02.09 This comic is either late for Tuesday, or early for Friday. I'm not sure yet. I would hate to have the first week where I didn't get two comics posted, but honestly, it's been a terrible week for getting anything done. my wife and I both got sick early in the week, and a bunch of other things have happened to conspire against our free time. I think, in my case, the illness was just something I ate. I was sick to my stomach for a few days, and then it went away. My wife seems to have gotten a head cold, probably from the late-night pool session that inspired this week's comic. We had some friends over, and had a really great time, though. So, no regrets. 03.27.09 Here is today's comic. Things have been pretty good around here. I have been playing with the MUD again. Every time I start working with it again, I'm surprised at how much I miss it. Things with Ellie are going well. We've almost got her on a normal sleep schedule that allows for Christy and I to get a whole night of sleep. 03.25.09 Here's your comic. I am going to start shooting for Tuesday-Friday updates. My weekends are much harder than my week days. I still can't account for how that is, but I'm learning from experience here. I NEVER get to work on the comic on weekends.
03.20.09 I finished this comic on time! I have Monday's comic written, and I'm hoping to have enough time this weekend to get it done. Rob logged into the MUD unexpectedly, and just started testing it. It was nice, because I'd just switched to a new client and really needed some help look it over. He suggested that we start playing every Wednesday at 9pm, and I agreed. The idea is to run a game, sort of like D&D but, with a MUD. I'll try to write a new area, with new monsters and puzzles, every week. Then we'll play through it together on Wednesday nights. It's still a very rough alpha-version, but the only way to move ahead is to actually use it. Ellie had her 8-week checkup today. They gave her four different shots that contained several different vaccinations. Then, after they do the shots, they give you a sheet that tells you that there's a 1 in 100,000 chance of brain damage from one of them and there's a laundry list of other things that could go wrong with the rest of them. I guess it's probably for the best that these things get done, but I don't like staying up all night checking a newborn for fever. So far she looks fever-free...keep your fingers crossed.
03.16.09 This comic is late as well. I still haven't recovered from the last comic. I did get out to see Watchmen, and this comic is really exactly what I was thinking as I left the theater. I've been doing things...but I'm too tired to talk about them. Maybe for Friday's update. 03.14.09 I'm really happy with this comic. It's late, but I liked the sketches so much that I really didn't want to rush it. I changed the way my wife looks quite a bit, but I think this is the best comic representation of her that I've ever done. Things with Ellie have been good. She's keeping me very busy, but overall, she's still being really well behaved. She's an easy baby, and I'm thankful for that. She's been steadily gaining weight since we brought her home, and I think she's up to about 9lbs now. We have a doctor appointment on Friday, and for some reason I'm a little concerned. I think it's because, really, I just had no idea what to expect. She's almost two months old now, and still doesn't really interact at all. She hasn't started laughing, and he doesn't really grab on to objects as though she knows what she'd doing. Most of her movements still seem very random. I'm sure this is all very normal, though, so we'll see when we talk to the doctor. Everything else is still moving along. I'm still learning barre chords on the guitar, which makes me feel like a complete beginner again. I'd almost forgotten how completely awkward you can feel trying to make a chord shape for the first time. I'm hoping to post some bug fixes for the MUD tonight. After that, I think the built-in Telnet client will work about as well as I can make it. I hope to find some time to try some MUD clients, and link them off the help page. I made a post about getting the music project going. I tried this before, but didn't get enough of a response. I talked to some people who said they'd be interested, and decided to give it another shot. I've posted everything someone would need to play Tetris on a few different instruments, and I'm working on making the guitar part work directly with the stylaphone part. Once I get that done, I should be able to convert those to piano. Hopefully, I can get enough information for people to play the same exact three bars of the Tetris theme. My book on Blender 3D game programming is pretty good. I've been trying to read it when I get a few minutes to myself. It's pretty detailed, and I think once I get modeling down, I'll be able to make some interesting 3D games. It also shows how to connect the game engine to the Internet. Hopefully that means I'll be able to pull of some 3D online games as well. I'm sure it'll be a while before I get that far with it, but I believe it's a worthwhile goal. When I finally get the time for grad-school, I'll be able to use games as projects for classes. I've set up two Twitter accounts. One is coredumpproject and the other is GM_Bishop. I'm planning to use the coredump one to notify people of updates. I'm not sure if I'll even really use the GM_Bishop account. Danielle and I talked over some different ways to get the comic(s) noticed, and having myspace and twitter were two of the ideas we decided to try. She is still working on her comic, and assures me she's got about a month's worth almost done. 03.10.09 This is the closest to just not posting a comic that I've come all year. The whole idea of a Monday-Friday post cycle is that you've got all week to work on one comic, and all weekend to work on the other. That goes to hell as soon as your in laws want to hang out for a weekend. Also, Ellie is going through an exciting new phase where she cries every time you put her down. So, getting work done while she's sleeping, or sleeping at all yourself, is completely out of the picture. I'm really hoping this is a short-lived phase and things start getting better soon. Most people say you can expect a newborn to be sleeping through the night by 6 weeks. Well, Ellie was born a month early, so tack another 4-6 weeks on that, and you can see where we are right now. She's at about 8.5 lbs now, though, and the doctor said between 10lbs and 12lbs is when you can expect your baby to start having a sleep schedule. Right now she just naps for an hour or two between seemingly constant feedings. 03.07.09 This comic really just beats my friends to the punch. I know no one wants to play some hokey old Text game, but they still remind me any time I start to get excited about it. Still, I'm glad to have the MUD back online. It's still just the little Zombie game I threw together to test the engine. I think you could make a fairly sophisticated game with it, but we'll never know until I get around to writing a world with it. Ellie has been really unpredictable with her sleeping lately. At best, she sleeps from 8-12:30, eats, and then sleeps until somewhere around 4. Lately, it seems like I can't even get her to lay down until 12:00. Still, she's sleeping better overall, and we can see the light at the end of the tunnel. I've spent some time working on 'Under The Bridge' on guitar. I'm still just learning my Barre Chords, so I think that song will really stretch my limits and help me progress. I got some more audio equipment, so hopefully I can post some recordings soon. I think I like recording as much as playing. I've never been any kind of performer...I don't really like being around people all that much. But when I'm recording something, I feel like I'm making something, like painting a portrait or building a program. I just love to make something in pieces, and then put it all together. My book on Blender 3D Game creation came in this week too. I've got too much going on!! I hope to get a simple game made this month, though. So, I'll keep people up to date on that as well. 03.03.09 This comic would have been on time, but Ellie wouldn't have it. I had it done yesterday, but didn't have the speech bubbles done and didn't have time to post it. So, it's a day late. I'm still producing two comics a week, so I don't feel too bad. If I can get a day to myself, I'll try to get one or two ahead, so that it won't be such a rush every Monday and Friday. 02.27.09 I like this comic. When I did the first comic with Danielle in it, it was just a drawing of her as a cartoon character, with the text of the conversation we had while drawing it. Almost everyone tells me that's their favorite comic, because they can relate to the real situation in the comic. Things with the site are moving along better than I expected. Danielle is still working on her comic, and we should have something to show people before long. I'm planning on getting the MUD back online this weekend. Also, I built a 3D screensaver of the coredump symbol. I'm working on learning Blender, which is a 3D modeling system and game engine, and I decided that would be a reasonable first project. I'm hoping to have some little games and proof-of-concept stuff done before too long. We have plans...oh, we have plans... 02.23.09 This comic is just a continuation of the last one, and the last in this series. The one part I felt like I couldn't get right was the speech bubbles. It's funny that something you take completely for granted can actually be a really difficult thing to master. Everything thing at home is still going pretty well, and I'm still mostly keeping up with projects. 02.20.09 This comic reuses a lot of art from the previous one. If you pay attention, you'll notice that the storyline as well as the art are broken into 3 comics. When I start a comic, I have a template with nine panels, and I try to make three comics at a time. I've made myself the promise that I won't copy and paste from series to series, but since most of the comics are just people talking to one another, it's hard to force myself to redraw the exact same picture over and over. When I have more time, I hope to play with drawing each part of the conversation from a different angle, or maybe change the background so it looks like they're walking down a street. Right now, I'm just happy to be doing anything at all.
This is the first late comic of the new year. I guess it was bound to happen, since I burned through my extra comics while I was in the hospital. She came a month early, and I thought I'd have another two weeks of spare comics ready before she showed up. Right now I'm just trying to do what I can until she starts sleeping through the night. The content of the comic goes back to what I said early this year about re-introducing characters. The grue was one of my favorite characters from last year, but I never got a chance to use him. It's great to have a character that embodies everything you find revolting, but for some reason, still thinks you're his friend. Hopefully I can find more good uses for him. I would love to go off on a rant about the current economy, but I'm not sure I have the time or energy. I just know that almost everyone I know who's a 'professional' comes home complaining that the company really just wants them to put a suit and tie on and sit at a desk looking professional. I'm starting to believe that any company that wants you to wear dress cloths at work, really just wants to use you as a prop in some sick play, where they feel they need to promote people who've been there a long time, but for that to happen they need clean-cut young workers to be placed under them. So, we're hired to give the middle-management some sense of purpose. I've even seen a few situations where one person is managing one other person. How can that be effective? I sit, every day, watching my parent's generation running our department into the ground, while my generations is kicking and screaming about getting work done. People are quitting, looking for jobs where they can be productive, and finally resigning themselves to being decorations in the American corporate facade. You want to know why our economy sucks? It's because almost no one in America MAKES anything. It's because our business model focuses on how you dress, and if you're at your desk on time, while losing sight of professional goals and responsibilities. If someone has worked somewhere long enough, we feel obligated to move them to management. Even if they're ill suited to that position, or even if that position serves no purpose at all. The IT management structure where I work does nothing to promote or facilitate work, but rather serves only to impede it. Today I was informed that we're not going to use JAVA on a certain project because there aren't authentication modules written for it. We knew about this problem over a year ago, and as recently as two weeks ago, management was still in meetings trying to decide what to do about it. Here's a little hint, if you can't figure out the answer to that question in ONE meeting, then you're doing something wrong. In a desperate attempt to move things along, I offered to just write the classes we need. It would probably take less than two weeks. Somehow, they decided that 12 months of meetings was a better use of their time. There's another project just waiting for me on our work-list. We've spent probably four hours in meetings discussing 20 minutes worth of work. I've been writing on status reports for a month now: 'I'm just waiting for someone to say I can go ahead with this'. Today I was told that it was being held up, because I'm expected to get a big project soon. It took my manager longer to tell me that, than it would have taken me to do the project. I'm honestly thinking of just doing it over my lunch break tomorrow, so they can stop working so hard trying to figure out how to spend more time on it. I already know how this is going to play out. They've had me do the research into what needs to be changed. The next step in obviously ineffective management is to wait until they're ABSOLUTELY SURE that I've forgotten everything about the project, and that it's due the next day, to assign it. Even if I just do it, and don't tell them I did it, I'm saving myself a massive headache six months from now.
This comic was even more of a rush-job than the last one. Not really because it HAD to be, I've just been splitting my time between lots of different things. Ellie is sleeping a little better, so I get a few hours to myself each night again, which is nice. I got to work out, work on the comic, and go through about half a Blender tutorial yesterday. 02.09.09 This comic was a bit of a rush-job. There are whole days where I don't get a single hour to myself now. I don't know what to say except that there is no way to exaggerate how much time a new baby will consume. I'm still sticking with the comic, and trying to keep the ball rolling on all my other projects. Realism is settling in, though, and I don't know how productive I'll be for a while. 02.05.09 I'm very happy with this comic. I think it's my best black/white effort to date. I don't have time for a big post right now, because the baby takes up pretty much every free second except lunch breaks. It's 12:54 now, so I'm going to post this now. Hopefully I can write some more later. 02.02.09 I'm keeping up with comics, so that's good. Today was my first day at work after the birth, and it went pretty well. I came home, played some guitar to my daughter, had dinner, fed her and then she and my wife went off for a nap together. All in all, I'd say we're settling into a good routine. My friend Danielle is still working on material for a new comic 'Brown Dog'. Hopefully I'll have a link for you soon. She's using inkScape, so it's all vector graphics instead of my hand-drawn style. I'm pretty sure Greg Dean used the same technique for 'Real Life'. I've seen some early tries, and it takes me back. It's funny how hard it is to move from drawing people in art class, which is to say drawing them well, and then try to make them into cartoon characters. It's a whole different skill set, because you can't fall back on just drawing it the way it looks. All my side projects are still progressing at their normal slow-but-steady pace. I don't think the new baby is going to put an end to it at all. Actually, I'm not sure being a father has 'hit' me the way some people describe it. Maybe I was just over prepared, but honestly, I was just relieved to finally have her there, and start getting to know her. I hope things continue as smoothly as they've been so far. 01.30.09 New comic today. I think I've related the story about the carnival in the past, but couldn't remember where. Things with the baby are going pretty well. I don't feel like I've had much time to work on things, except for guitar. I just leave the guitar next to me, and pick it up whenever both my hands are free, which usually lasts for 2 minutes or less. I can now (poorly) play the intro to 'Under the Bridge'. I'm hoping to have the whole song down before spring. 01.27.09 Finally got the comic posted for today. I can't believe it's late, since all I had to do was fix the word bubbles and post it. Having a baby is pretty crazy. She uses 10 times more dishes and cloths than Christy and I put together. She wants to eat every two hours, and it takes a half hour to an hour to feed her still. We had the doctors appointment today, and she's already gaining weight. Hopefully in a few weeks, we'll get more in the swing of things. 01.23.09 New comic posted. Christy (my wife) went into labor at 1:30AM on the 21st, and gave birth to my first child, a baby girl named Eleanor Katherine Bishop. She was 5lbs 8oz and a month early. I almost went into shock when she told me her water broke, but everything worked out really well. We're in the hospital for an extra night because Christy's milk hasn't come in and Eleanor hasn't quite caught on to feeding. She's healthy, though, and getting better each time. I posted a gallery for people who know to me to see baby pictures taken the first day. I 'm sure we'll add to it as things progress, right now we're both staying in the hospital and trying to feed her every 2 hours. It takes about an hour to do a feeding, and that's if I'm working the bottle, while Christy works the pump. Needless to say, we're not getting any sleep and hardly enough time to eat. Still, I would rate this week a solid 10. She's healthy, so we're happy. 01.19.09 Here's another comic. This one is mostly about how all this week I picked on Danielle. I'm still not happy with the whole process I'm using for these comics. I've got another two weeks completed so far, but I tried something new and I'm not sure how I feel about it. I'm just going to have to finish them and really compare the two. I hope people will bear with me while I look for a good way make the comics. I think a lot of my problem is picturing things that will look good in this format. I don't have enough room for large scenes, but I still typically draw the characters from the waist up. I think if I worked more with just faces, I could get more definition. Also, I'm working on ideas that won't be just one character on the right, and another character on the left. Now that I'm drawing new art for each 3-comic series I really should be experimenting with more physical stuff. 01.15.09 Another comic posted on time. Things have been going well with the comics and the other stuff I've been working on. For the first time since I started messing with comics, I really feel like I can keep up with things. It's funny to say that, since I'm in one of the busiest times of my life. I've put a lot of thought into how to use this style to tell a story, and what I want that story to be. I really hope I can pull it off. Things at work have been normal, for what that job is. On Monday they sat me down and asked me to modify a JAVA program, so that it wouldn't use JAVA...oh, and they LOST the source code. They don't want to use JAVA because they don't want to run a 24/hour server, and they apparently don't know the difference between JAVA and a Java Application Server. I think my boss got it in her head that everything in JAVA has to be a web application, like coldfusion. It'll be an uncomfortable conversation, but I'm going to have to explain what JAVA is, and then we're going to decompile the objects to get at what needs to be changed. It should be a 15 minute job. It'll take at least two weeks. So, in Big U time, 1 minute = 1 week. This week has been especially busy for baby stuff. You would think with all the time I've put in, I would have something to say about it, but I'm struggling to really think of anything interesting to relate. The baby dropped this morning, so we're down to the last three weeks. We did the hospital tour today, and we saw the birth video on Tuesday. I honestly think I'll have more spare time after the birth.
01.12.09 Here's a comic! So, I'm almost done with next week's first comic. I'm going to shoot for two updates a week for the time being. I know they're still a little rough, but bear with me, I'm just trying to get back on the horse here. I want to do a few comics with each main character for a while, so I can re-establish some character traits. Then I want to move into a story, but I have no idea how to really tell a story in three panels, twice a week. It's going to take some getting used to, at the very least.
01.08.09 I've got another comic done. This one is so much better than the last two. I really felt like I should wait on posting them until I had a better handle on that style. If I'd done that, this would be the first one I would post. It's not great, but I'm shooting for something that looks clean and simple, without being boring. I think, on some level, I've accomplished that. I haven't been working on anything other than the comic for the past few days, but I did sit down and start organizing my MUD/ARG game ideas. I'm getting more and more excited about trying this out. I want it to have online and offline components, so we can arrange weekends around people who play, and have something like a puzzle solving scavenger hunt to do downtown...only not nearly as lame as that sounds. Lately I've been thinking about doing some kind of RPG thing. Anything from a sit-down weekly game of D&D to a Forum game would do. Maybe the MUD would suffice, but I'm open to ideas. The forum is always open if anyone has any ideas or suggestions on anything coredump related.
01.06.09 I posted a new comic today! I sort of like having a little rant just below the comic. I'm not sure if I like that it's 3 panels. I think I need more room. I might try to find a way to get 4 panel into that area. Also, I think I'm going to need to change the comic format from JPG to PNG or something. Once I convert the file, it just gets more jaggedy than I'm comfortable with. This comic took a lot longer than I expected, but I'm pretty rusty with this style, and there's lots of things with it that I'm still trying to figure out how to do well. At least it's the best news-paper style comics I've ever done. I need to work on making the Bishop character look consistent from frame to frame, and I need to get the dialog down to one sentence per speech bubble. All in all, though, I think I'm making progress, and more than that, I'm actually enjoying what I'm doing. I'm already thinking of ideas for the next comic, and I've only got to finish lettering the next 'Frank'. Also, I guess some people think I'm just giving up on the MUD. That's not the case at all. In fact, I'm hoping that once I get this style of comic under control, I can finally do what I've always wanted to do, and make a MUD that's local, and ties into the comic. The idea being that the characters in the story are actually a part of the MUD, and so I can progress both stories at the same time. Also, I would like to make the MUD into something people get together once a week to play through a mini adventure. The idea being that, because there aren't enough people interested in MUDs these days to expect them to keep it populated at all times, it would feel more full if you could get most people to agree to play at the same time. I'd probably leave it up 24/7, but the story would only progress, say, between the hours of 7 and 8 on Wednesday nights. That way it's a tiny time commitment, and feels a little more like the old D&D days. On a personal note, My wife Chirsty is doing well with the pregnancy. We're headed into the third trimester, and she's pretty close to that point where all you want is to have it out of you. We've got everything we could possibly need, so it's just a matter of counting the days off until Feb 17th, and hoping that she's healthy when she gets here. 01.04.09 I'm trying something new with comics. I've tried to do black and white before, but this one worked better. I think with a little practice these will go faster and end up being a lot more fun for everyone. I also dusted off the MUD code and made it so i can remove the AIM part from a config file. After adding it originally, it gave me lots of trouble. I emailed AOL tech support about it, and they basically told me that the problems I was having were common, and that the libraries aren't 'ready for prime time'. Not much of a surprise after looking at the code. It looks like they hire high school students to try to piece it together. It's some of the worst production code I've ever seen, and I work for the Big U, so I'm pretty sure I've seen as bad as it can possible get. Just one quick example: I'm working on a project where someone inherited an ENTIRE APPLICATION. If you're scratching your head, you should be. 01.01.09 I missed December. I had a Christmas comic, but hadn't posted it. My only new year's resolution is to try to get better at keeping up with the stuff I'm already trying to do. I'm pretty excited about being a father, but it's impossible to say how that might change things. I'm going to try to do a different style of comics. I think, now that I have a pressure sensitive Wacom tablet, I want to try to do things in black and white. I always felt like there was something missing when I tried doing that sort of art before, and I think it's because there was no way to control the width of a line. Also, I think that my drawing will improve a lot faster if I concentrate on just that aspect of things. So, for now, I'm going to try to keep it simple, and produce comics on a consistent schedule. I'm still planning on finishing the 'Frank' storyline, but not all at once. I want to get back to making something more autobiographical. Mostly because I'm a lazy writer, and I want to get back to just drawing for fun. I'm sure
that'll be a good laugh in 2010, when I've failed to do things
consistently. I've been toying with the MUD and Comics since high school
and I feel like I've never really found the 'groove' in making them.
Now I'm taking on the responsibility of being a father, and just trying
to hold on. |
