For the three days of LTUE I got up at 6am, made it to the symposium by 8am, and didn’t make it home again in the evening until around 8pm or later. I never got a nap, and went to bed each night with my brain spinning, threatening me with insomnia. A little melatonin ensured that I actually SLEPT between midnight and 6am the next day, and a little diet Dr. Pepper ensured that I stayed awake while at the symposium.

I was going to whine about this, until I realized that this is what some people do every day of their lives, only without the accolades and the whole “I’m enjoying my work” bit. This is why I need to be able to remain a cartoonist for the rest of my life. A little three-day taste of actual WORK, with the long hours, the fast food, and the commute is all I think I can take. Force me back into the traditional workplace where there are meetings and office politics on top of it all, plus the “no-end-in-sight” bit and I think I would wither and die.

Monday I’ve got piles of cartooning and book prep to do. And I’ve got about a month before I tackle my next 12- to 18-hour-per-day convention, which sounds about right. I can do this again, as long as I’ve got a month’s worth of daily naps and home-cooked food to shore me up.

–Howard

Per sandratayler‘s most recent post, I’ve just learned that my 8-year-old wants to make a movie. The easiest way I can think of for him to make something that doesn’t look like a corny home video is for him to stop-motion-animate some of our very, very many toys.

(I did this when I was a kid. My movies all sucked. Stupid 8mm camera…)

We have a digital camera capable of taking video, but not single frames of video. It can, however, take single pictures, and can hold lots and lots at a low resolution (640×480 — twice what we’d be getting in video mode). So… what I need is a way to drop pictures into a video editor one at a time, and have it output an AVI or an MPEG.

I’m also on a budget. I need to be able to do this without spending money.

I’ve Googled this little project, and determined that I don’t know enough terminology to ask the right questions. There seems to be no shortage of software out there, but I’d rather not have to install a dozen different packages in order to find one that actually does what I need.

So… do any of you have recommendations?

I’ve been playing Thief: Deadly Shadows, and this evening’s session had me breaking into a haunted asylum. I played for about an hour, sneaking around while listening to creepy noises, the voice of a ghost-child I’m supposed to save, and the chilling strains of “mood music” from the game’s soundtrack. I kept waiting for the cat to jump out, or the zombies to materialize, and boy was I on edge.

And then I said “screw it.” I play to have fun, not to be startled or terrified. So I saved, quit, and looked up a walkthrough on this “internet” thing I’ve heard so much about.

Sure enough, the level gets creepier. But now I know what’s coming. I also know that I’m about 80% of the way through the game, which is nice information to have. I didn’t read any further ahead — I just counted “milestones” in the walkthrough. I mean, it may be even scarier further along, but I’ll take that chance.

–Howard

There are four basic steps to each Schlock Mercenary strip: Script, Pencil, Ink, and Color.

Oh, and “Repeat,” which is the process of getting down off the “I did it again!” pedestal and getting back to work.

Of these, I think inking is physically the hardest. Scripting and pencilling, though… those take THINKING. Yesterday at the Keep I tackled inking, and realized that I was physically exhausted going INTO the process… so I took a page from Chalain.

Chalain once told me that in the mornings there’s a smart guy who sits at his desk, looks at the pile of work, and attacks it. In the afternoons there’s a dumb guy who can’t do much beyond chopping wood and carrying water. So he arrived at a strategy in which Smart Guy does very little coding in the morning — he solves problems and leaves instructions on how to execute on those solutions in simple, easily reducible steps. Chop wood, carry water. The result is that by noon he has nothing to show for his work except pages of notes. By 5:00pm (or 10:00 pm, depending on how long Dumb Guy is required to stay at the office) he has piles upon piles of working code, most of which Dumb Guy can hardly believe he wrote.

For me the scripting and the pencilling is the smart guy work. Sometimes he’s home, sometimes he’s not. Ofttimes he gets distracted by blogging or Live Journaling (he will have to answer to Dumb Guy for spending cycles on THIS post, I’m sure). On Monday he handed Dumb Guy a big pile of scripts — some were blank, some had been pencilled. Dumb Guy looked at them and decided that trying HIS hand at pencilling would be disastrous, so he opted to ink instead.

Chop wood, carry water. It’s not thought-provoking, and it’s not EASY. Make no mistake — it’s WORK. But it’s work I can do when I’m having an off-day. Yesterday was an off-day, and I got a full week of comics inked. It’s nice when I can get piles of work done on an off-day. I feel like the king of the world.

My goal this week is to finish the Book I footnotes and Marginalia, and by Saturday have one more week pencilled and inked, two weeks colored and uploaded, and a fresh week or two of scripts. Inking and Coloring is chop-wood-carry-water. I figure with two on-days and two off-days I can make it… provided Smart Guy remembers to leave Dumb Guy some notes.