one of those ideas

How about a computer keyboard designed with an open bottom? So that all the crud that falls into it falls through and can be easily swept off of your desk, instead of becoming a horrible layer of hair, dust, crumbs, and who-knows-what sitting on the flat plane beneath the keys?

You wouldn't be able to have a printed circuit board beneath it all, unless you could also punch a bunch of holes through it - I envision a sort of grid of plastic, with the corners beneath the center of each key.

Maybe I should dig up one of the discarded keyboards around here and experiment. Chop off the useless number pad while I'm at it, too; I almost never use it and it makes me put the Wacom tablet way too far to the right.

progress resumes

After a few days of no headway on the last few cards, Rik poked me last night and asked why. It turns out this was because I still didn't believe in these last three roughs - they were technically fine, but just not there, symbolically. With his help I came up with a new take on the Chevalier of Cups that blends some of what worked about both of the previous versions; later that night, I finally got a King of Wands that makes me happy.

So there's just the High Priest to stare at in a sketch I'm still not completely happy with.

Of course, I didn't completely waste this time; one of the things I did while my subconscious refused to let me work on the bad sketches in Illustrator was to go out and price some of the frame bits I'll need, decide on a final size, process the number cards for printing, and get them off to tugrik. I really need to go out and figure out where I'm going to source all the pieces I need for framing and get them on their way. Or maybe I need to browbeat one of my boyfriends into doing that while I get these last three cards done...

Also, I think my Wacom tablet is now officially Very Old: when I was out at the cafe working on the CoC (she's about 1/3 done right now), I realized that all four of the rubber feet have come detached from its bottom, leaving it free to skid on the table if I lean on it too hard. Does this mean it's time to think about getting a new one soon? I dunno; it still works perfectly fine. I wouldn't be surprised if I kept using it until USB becomes a completely depreciated interface.

an interview

A little email interview I did last week hit a couple of websites today: Gaywired.com, National Gay News, and the San Francisco Bay Times. (Same content, different choices of imagery and amounts of editing down.)

I think I need to learn to give better interviews. Which I'll be doing, as I have two more interviews lined up next week about the upcoming show; maybe more. This one came thanks to read_alicia hooking me up; it just happened to synch up with the show pretty well.

In completely unrelated news, I would like to note that I feel that 'smellsfunny.net' is an ironically-named web service just waiting to happen.