resuming the Great Work

[egypturnash]

I haven't had a chance to work on Absinthe these past few weeks.

I was looking through back LJ entries and realized the initial story discussions were held in the beginning of February. The project's visual scope sprawled past my initial intentions, but honestly, I feel like the launch should have happened already. I've been moving in fits and starts at best.

18 more pages to pencil before Chapter 1 is all pencilled, and there's still the AI phase to go. About 10 more pages to run through Illustrator and I'll feel like I'm ready to fill up the queue and set it loose. If I can pencil two pages a day I'll have the pencils done next Sunday. Only five more pages to pencil that I have to fill with Wormwood's wild detail. Pencilling the last of those will be an event; Illustratoring the last will pretty much mean it's time to launch.

I dug out the 2007 Hello Kitty calendar that's been lying around and got diverted by looking for a suitable nail to hang it over my drawing board. Wrote that off when it became obvious we haven't any suitable small nails in the apartment; I don't want to get caught yak-shaving by going to the hardware store. So I grabbed some post-its and put them up in a fragment of a grid. With numbers written on them.

If I draw two pages of Absinthe, I get to put a big black X on that day's post-it. If I don't... I dunno. A red zero? Let's not have to decide, huh?

Comments

[cryptodragon.livejournal.com]

Just don't put anything on the calendar. Because putting in the zero will make you feel you've "completed" something.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the empty box is probably enough. I was thinking of pulling them down but that's not right either.

[kinkyturtle.livejournal.com]

Qu'est-ce que c'est "yak shaving" in this context?

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Getting stuck in an endlessly recursive series of subtask. Like so.

Most console adventure games are giant festivals of yak-shaving. I must save the world by killing the FInal Boss! The only thing that can kill the Final Boss is the Hoobler Sword. The Hoobler Sword was shattered into five pieces a thousand years ago! There is a man in Guncho Village who can re-forge it! But first I have to get all the pieces. I got three of them. The legends say the fourth one was thrown into the sun fifty years ago! But there is a girl in Blarptown who has made a time machine! She won't run it until I bring her back her lost kitten! I asked everyone in the town where it is, and the woman who saw it last won't tell me unless I give her some chocolate from the master chocolatier in Hacklemurff Junction! The zeppelin to Hacklemurf Junction only flies once a year, and the tickets were all sold out, so I had to waylay a rotor-polisher and take his place in the crew. So here I am, polishing this zeppelin rotor because only I can save the world from the Final Boss!

In that case, the yak-shaving is kinda what you paid your forty bucks for. But usually it's something bad, like, say, putting off working on a comic by having to find a nail to hang a calendar to use as a motivational tool to stop putting off working on said comic.

[xyzzysqrl]

I just took it as a synonym for "Wool gathering", and frankly I think that suits it better.

[krinndnz.livejournal.com]

• Absinthe news, yay.
• The explanation of "yak-shaving" is amusing in form.
• B'vek, who does an a cappella version of a Daft Punk song? Admittedly, HBFS I guess could swing it, but still. Is it any good?

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Daft Punk did it. Wikipedia, of course, has all the details. (And I didn't know until now that they made a physical release of those mixes.)

The a cappella and instrumental versions of HBFS are, of course, exactly the same sequences and data as the album track, except for flicking a bunch of track mute buttons. There are big gaps in them that are quite amusing if you know the original.

ibtp

[krinndnz.livejournal.com]

Astonishing and amusing and new must-to-acquire.

[circuit-four.livejournal.com]

Hmm. Just a random stab in the dark, but maybe on days you don't finish any Absinthe, you have to doodle something in the calendar box that you really don't like to draw? And you have to do it off the top of your head, all perfection and artistic quality aside. Then, it's aversive enough that you'll want to avoid it and it won't become fun in its own right... but you'll still get some kind of artistic exercise regardless? Something you'll want to avoid doing. And if you don't even do that... hmm... five minutes of foot-tickling? A spoonful of my signature rosemary-banana-artichoke tofutti cream? Five random books in the library deliberately taken out of alphabetical order? :)