experimenting working

Working on a complex piece of art. I was hoping to have it done today but it's taking longer than I'd thought - plus, of course, time lost to stupid damn GTA: San Andreas. Rik brought it in, and I can't not play it, even though everything about its worldview is utterly vile, and it really feels like a huge pile of all the half-baked ideas they ever had during the history of the series - yes, let's have a mission that pretty much exists to teach you to swim that can only be accessed after you've spent a lot of time swimming, and how about having some "real" airplanes in there too, with horribly persnickity flight training missions?

Anyway, enough ranting about this tar baby I've been quietly stuck to this past week: mixing in a lot more fast pencil tool definition of shapes, all in monochrome*, seems to be working. But I need to be damn sure I've spent enough time on my sketches in the real world; having something crisp to work under seems to be essential, and these are kinda loose and sloppily-scanned.

I still need to figure out a few ways to get a more "organic" feel to really have what I want for The Drowning City, or an acceptable compromise. But I'm getting close to something I think will work. And starting to work out the mechanics of my process of moving from page thumbnail to tight pencil rough (printer sharing is involved)...

* the same 'tints of a rich black swatch' trick I did on my last piece

the microsoft tax rears its ugly head once more

My god, I just discovered how horribly and fundamentally broken Microsoft ActiveSync is. By default it doesn't back anything up on your computer. At all. So when you leave your PDA out (we have one, and Rik's been fooling with it) with the power disconnected and it forgets everything, it's all gone! Transparent, automatic backup is the innovation that pretty much made PDAs semi-useful devices; leave it to Microsoft to make a switch for it, turn it off by default, and hide it in a completely obscure place in the sync client's interface!

I'm not touching this thing any more; I'm gonna stay in the world where computers Just Work, by and large. Where if I decided I needed a PDA again (and I've pretty much decided I don't) and recharged mine, every single piece of data that was on it would be restored once I plugged it into my computer, without me having to ever have made a decision to back it up in the first place.

Every damn time I try to fiddle with a Windows machine, it's like this. The defaults are stupid and the really important switches are hidden away. How the hell do you people stand it?

art

In celebration of Vixen Decanting Day. One day late, but that's what happens sometimes.

( art )