926 Awesome.

I took a quarter of an allergy tablet last night. So I had a dream about working retail. It was a strange mish mosh of all the places I’ve ever worked, a phantom layout that no one could ever learn. This amalgam store was owned by a weird lady and there was a weird handyman that fixed things in the baement. Because the store had a creepy, unfinushed, basement like a house would. Nothing worked right, customers sucked, and everyone was annoyingly kooky. Of course I woke up all cloudy headed, and remained that way so far today.

I don’t care for the effect allergy medicine has on me, but I really don’t care for the effect allergies have on me. This is just over the counter stuff too. The good stuff has the same effect, but many times stronger. And none of them really help with the allergies. They just give me different symptoms to worry about. Man, what am I even talking about? I totally want to lay down again.

All that stuff you wrote about Diablo was interesting. Even the parts that deviated wildy from it. I get a kick out of it when things wander far afield, while remaining mostly civil. I also appreciate all the supportive comments. Normally I would respond to them each in kind, but every time I sit down I start falling asleep. I can barely get the pages made in the sweet spot while I’m properly awake. T^T

Photoshop alternates between working fine and randomly crashing now. I thought I had it totally sorted out for a while there, but no. I drew last night’s page twice at least. Well, inked it twice anyway. I’d do a bit, save, do a bit more, use the paint bucket, lose a section, lather, rinse, repeat. Clearly the fault lies with the paint bucket, so I have to remind myself to save before I use it. I kept chancing it last night, and it bit me on the ass. My own fault really. It’s not like the pattern wasn’t there to see.

The error with the flatting plugin is apparently nothing to do with the RAM. Because this PC has a ton of RAM and I still randomly get the ‘there’s not enough’ error. Some pages just will not flat. I have no idea what causes it. Really annoying though, because it makes the lines look muddy. To me at any rate. I hate muddy lines. Of course I understand that if I made the comic in Illustrator I could make it as vector, but vector art looks almost too clean. Kind of depends on how high they set the smoothing thing. Anyway, lots of people thing I do make the comic in vector, but I don’t. I just make a very clean ‘painted’ line. I don’t have Illustrator anyway, so it’s a moot point. I’m lucky I have Photoshop.

It’s kind of a dick move that I never have these guys speak their actual names. It makes it really hard for you guys to talk about them. Snape, Vermin, and Rooster are their nicknames. It should be pretty obvious who is who in that mix. I don’t know if I ever said it on the main site, but since the Drunk Duck page is long gone there may be no record of where these 3 come from. They are a weird amalgam of actual people I used to have to deal with working retail. For whatever reason guys like these tend to come in threes. There were two three man teams that stand out in my mind from back then. I didn’t learn any of their names for ages. Long after I stopped working retail. They existed as the nicknames I made up for them. Rooster, in particular, is a combination of two specific people. Although I was actually friends with one of them. Snape looks like a guy I met a couple of times, but by happenstance more than design. I had the character in a sketchbook and just stuck it to the personality. Later on someone reminded me of the dude and I was like “It does look like him”. That’s about as far as it goes because I basically don’t know the guy.

Assholes are bad enough on their own, but when they are resonating with each other they are insufferable. Which is why I work alone.

17 Comments

I had a dream couple nights ago where i was being interviewed too work at megatainment (i’m pretty sure thats your comics stores name) my dream world layout was really weird though with an apartment in the basement XD.

And, I emerge from the archives into the light of the current page! The end of my journey is fraught with conflict- do I feel joy? sorrow? or anticipation for the future?

I actually know a guy who is commonly called vermin (His last name is Verdin, which is normally pronounced ver-deen, but a sub pronounced it as it would rhyme with vermin, and he’s been stuck with it since). We had a rooster, too, but it was because he worked on a farm. I’m almost a little sad we didn’t have a snape to go with them <__<

It's interesting that you have PShop and not illustrator… I rarely think of PShop as a singular entity, instead of the suite of image manipulation stuff… I mean, I'd never use it anyway, but it's still interesting how things sit in my brain.

And bummer about your dreams… I have terrible nightmares if I sleep too long (More than 2-3 hours at a time), so I kinda sit in the same boat, especially recently. Being beaten up by your brain is the suck.

As far as vector goes, you may want to look into Inkscape. It’s free and open source, and one of the features of the new version (0.49) is *much* more control over how strokes look called “PowerStroke.” You may commence giggling.

I’ll note that I used to use Illustrator for a lot of stuff (I tend to get random ideas for things I’d like to make IRL, sketch them on grid paper, and convert them to vectors later), but I switched to Inkscape several years ago. It was quick to pick up, and it advances rather quickly.

The homepage:
http://inkscape.org/

A good article about some recent improvements:
https://lwn.net/Articles/496375/

The wiki page for PowerStroke:
http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/PowerStroke

Man, reading your comments about life and such. I think you may be cursed. I’m not sure if you have more problems than the average person, or if you’re just more vocal about them. Either way you might want to see about an exorcism. Better safe than spewing vomit while your head is spinning around.

I find most people’s lives to be a never ending series of disappointments, near misses (until that fatal last not-miss), drudgery, and failure. For some reason, however, most choose to call more attention to the vast minority of things that seem anywhere from vaguely to actually pleasant. I call these people optimists. I will never be an optimist due in large part to preferring to be correct.

Then again, I’m not exactly normal.

I had this weird dream where I was sword fighting a dragon(it also hade a sword) for what felt like hours, then it somehow turned into a musical duel, and the darn thing had an Irish accent. After 10 or so minutes of this epically strange duel the floor collapsed and we ended up at a supermarket where Ed was working the counter. But the weirdest part of the whole thing was Reggie was being NICE to everyone, this startled me out of the dream. IT WAS SCARY BRO!

I don’t generally comment on art, and I enjoy your comic and drawing style, but I have to ask. Why did you do the black thing on the guys left eye? Were you going for a certain effect? I find that all that black is a little jarring, at first I thought it was an eye patch.

His eyes are so sunken that when he’s looking to the side it makes the socket muddy because of my thick line quality. I put it in shadow because I couldnt get it to read well enough to suit me.

Out of curiosity is the plugin that you are getting the “insufficient memory” error a 32 bit plugin/program? If so it might have more to do with how much memory the program recognizes vs how much you have available. Since 32 bit programs can only assign values 0 through 4,294,967,295 (around 4Gb) it could be that the program ran out of what it registers as usable memory. Granted this normally affects operating systems as opposed to programs but its just in idea what the problem might be and Photoshop is a memory hog.

Shots might seem like an unusual way to treat allergies, but they’re effective at decreasing sensitivity to triggers. The substances in the shots are chosen according to the allergens identified from a person’s medical history and by the allergist during the initial testing. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) oversees the standards used in preparing the materials for allergy shots given in the United States.

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