Waffle

Have a pretty good set of entries so far, and I'm hard at work getting everything prepared. It's supposed to go up on Thursday - may, in fact, go up in a couple parts starting on Friday: You'll understand why when you see it.

The cutoff's going to have to be Wednesday, 9pm GMT.   That's 4pm EST, 3 pm Central, and so on and so forth.

I'd like a bit more on science, if possible - as a biology major, evolution is something near and dear to my heart.

As before, you can reach us weither by commenting in this post, or by sending an e-mail to waffleblog@gmail.com

Vote for Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan on Topwebcomics today to see ... actually this was the first sketch done for the Kangra character portrait, only I drew both Kangra and her mother Maghreid, shown on the thumbnail. One of my plans for the spin-off comic I've been talking about is to have some kind of family reunion story. I have decided, though, that that will have to wait until the universe and its inhabitants have had a proper introduction.

This sketch was done on a sketchbook that I bought for portability while traveling but that ended up not working very well for me. As a result, I've done a bit more cleanup than on earlier vote incentive sketches. It may actually turn out to be a good candidate for practicing my digital inking on too.

To vote, click on the link. You will be asked to click a button twice to confirm that you are voting for this comic and that you're not a bot or script that automates voting (you will be shocked and scandalized to hear that people have apparently done that in the past). The final page in the process has the vote incentive image. Vote incentive images will only be available until they are replaced, so you will have to vote today to see these sketches; there will be new incentive art up tomorrow.

(Or if you've come to this post via a web search, why not simply visit the comic this post is promoting, Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan?)

It's half past nine on Saturday evening, and I haven't even started on the Feral update that's due on Monday. The odds of there being an update on Monday are not zero, but they are slim.

Yesterday after work, I made a conscious decision to tackle my to-do list in the order of easiest-to-hardest rather than starting with the most urgent or most important thing. This strategy has worked well in the past (except in situations where the most important thing is critical, which completing a Feral update is not). It eliminates the distraction of having little nagging tasks at the back of my head, and assures that the doable tasks actually get done even if the harder tasks end up taking more time than expected. So on Friday evening I took out the trash, did grocery shopping, washed dishes, and so on; I got the household chores out of the way so I'd have more time to work on the comics-related stuff in the morning.

Then I went to bed early, with the alarm still set to my regular workday wake-up time of seven AM. When the alarm went off, I turned it off and slept until noon.

Oops.

I guess I needed the sleep, but it did eliminate all the time savings I made by doing my chores the evening before. Still, I went on as planned:

My first task was setting up a load of voting incentives (Vote for ROCR on Topwebcomics and get rewarded with a behind-the scenes look at preliminary sketches for ROCR and related comics) and blog posts to remind readers to vote, all scheduled in advance. They are buffered until April 28, so I won't have to do any more until then. This took more time than planned; in all, I spent over five hours on the process. I will need to bring that amount down in the future.

My second task was a little more involved: I wanted to prepare a single episode of the old storyline The Corby Tribe for republication on the Drunk Duck mirror. To do that, I needed to reassemble the images and add two columns of text in a PNG file, and to do that properly, that is in a way that would allow me to reuse the result later, I needed to work with the DTP program I have, Scribus. This turned out to be less than intuitive (and wasn't helped by Scribus's Dutch localization, which like many open-source projects is of very poor quality). Also, it turned out that the master image needed a lot of extra work, so this, too, took several hours. I've got the hang of the basics now, though, and I expect that the next attempt will take less than half an hour.

The thing I've uploaded to Drunk Duck looks like this:

By the time I was done with those things, with cooking dinner and the occasional break into the equasion, it was well into the evening and too late to get started on Feral. I may still do the work tomorrow, and maybe go back to pencil-only for a while. That's a fast process and one that I could do outdoors if the weather is nice enough.

I am, however, very concerned about my ability to get Feral updates done on a weekly schedule. It looks to me like the weekly schedule is dependent on me not having any other things to do during the weekend, and not oversleeping. If I had not lost five hours to oversleeping, I would have had five hours more today to work on it and would have been mostly done with the art. But i don't like cutting the schedule even further, and not having an update on Monday would leave me with 10 days worth of voter incentives without giving my audience anything to come back for that would entice them to vote. Bit of a waste, that.

I may need to make an unpleasant decision about Feral soon.

Vote for Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan on Topwebcomics today to see sketches for an as yet unnamed boy character who will be Batracho's gullible young apprentice. The boy is talented at sorcery but, as yet, not evil. Will he go down that path? Anyway, suggestions for names will be welcomed... I still haven't settled on anything. Names is hard!

To vote, click on the link. You will be asked to click a button twice to confirm that you are voting for this comic and that you're not a bot or script that automates voting (you will be absolutely outraged, outraged to hear that people have apparently done that in the past. What is this world coming to?). The final page in the process has the vote incentive image. Vote incentive images will only be available until they are replaced, so you will have to vote today to see these sketches; there will be new incentive art up tomorrow.

(Or if you've come to this post via a web search, why not simply visit the comic this post is promoting, Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan?)

Aggie sent me these sketches of the Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan characters Old Mother Turniproot and Morgan, Old Mother's great-great-granddaughter. She told me she'd looked at the old woman and thought through how her face might work in real life - the way the shape of the skull changes with age and how not having teeth affects the overall look of the face. Me, I just drew a stereotypical Very Old Person—as I will probably never draw her as she was in her younger years, all I needed was a basic awareness of what supercentenarians typically look like, and even that could be heavily cartoonised.

I'm every bit as impressed with her interpretation of Morgan: that right there looks like a real person! Aggie actually had a hand in her initial design: I was going to make her look like her sister Marion, but she suggested a body type for her that I rarely use: tall and willowy, with a small chest and narrow hips. It worked.

Vote for Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan on Topwebcomics today to see a new character sketch of Batracho from yesterday's incentive. His confederate Fabo is going to be dropped from the proposed spin-off for the time being. One evil sorcerer plus apprentice, living in some decrepit cottage in the woods, should be enough to start with and keep things simple.

To vote, click on the link. You will be asked to click a button twice to confirm that you are voting for this comic and that you're not a bot or script that automates voting (you will shake your head and go 'tut-tut-tut' upon hearing that people have apparently done that in the past). The final page in the process has the vote incentive image. Vote incentive images will only be available until they are replaced, so you will have to vote today to see these sketches; there will be new incentive art up tomorrow.

(Or if you've come to this post via a web search, why not simply visit the comic this post is promoting, Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan?)

Vote for Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan on Topwebcomics today to see a character sketch for two new evil wizards, Fabo and Batracho (please leave guesses as to the origins of their names in the comments) created for a possible spin-off comic of Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan.

To vote, click on the link. You will be asked to click a button twice to confirm that you are voting for this comic and that you're not a bot or script that automates voting (you will require immediate administration of smelling salts upon hearing that people have apparently done that in the past). The final page in the process has the vote incentive image. Vote incentive images will only be available until they are replaced, so you will have to vote today to see these sketches; there will be new incentive art up tomorrow.

(Or if you've come to this post via a web search, why not simply visit the comic this post is promoting, Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan?)

Update: Nevermind, I've figured it out.

So, after several months worth of reminders sent by my web host that my old WordPress installation may be vulnerable, I decide to finally update it to version 2.7. I have this vague thought in the back of my head that I will regret it. but hey, I've learned from the last time I tried to update, right? So I back up my SQL database, root through the file structure to find my old templates and back them up, and THAT should make me safe against losing my customisations again, right?

Wrong.

Once the upgrade, performed through my web host's Cpanel, is finished, I have a shiny default-themed WordPress installation, just like I expected, and ... a distinctly UNshiny new Dashboard. God, that thing is ugly and everything is in the wrong place. But I find my Theme editor, cut and paste in my old themes, and... nothing changes. I have lost all my customisations and will have to figure out from scratch how to implement them.

Thankfully, due to the fear of wasted effort that I developed after the last time I upgraded and lost everything, I changed very little. But what I changed, I REALLY, REALLY want to be on the weblog. so I'm not happy

I used to be able to figure it out, but since the early days of Waffle, I got a day job and a life. I do not want to waste hours of my life figuring out how to make stuff work that worked just an hour ago. So this upgrade of WordPress is going to be my last, ever. I will ignore upgrade warnings from now on. Balancing the risk that the blog may get hacked if it falls behind against the CERTAINTY of damage if I upgrade, I can not justify upgrading it ever again. WordPress sucks and is too difficult for normal people to use.

Vote for Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan on Topwebcomics today to see sketches of four faerie characters for a possible Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan spin-off webcomic. These sketches were made a year or so ago. The idea of doing an easy, YAFGC-style spin-off set in the Wodeskog has been on my mind for a long time.

To vote, click on the link. You will be asked to click a button twice to confirm that you are voting for this comic and that you're not a bot or script that automates voting (you will undoubtedly go faint with disgust that people have apparently done that in the past). The final page in the process has the vote incentive image. Vote incentive images will only be available until they are replaced, so you will have to vote today to see these sketches; there will be new incentive art up tomorrow.

(Or if you've come to this post via a web search, why not simply visit the comic this post is promoting, Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan?)

Vote for Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan on Topwebcomics today to see sketches for four stages of the Kangra character portrait. When I do character drawings, I always do a series of quick pose sketches to get a better feel for the face and get a gesture that is more than just the character standing around (which for some reason has become a lot harder for me to do lately). Most of these sketches never get past halfway finished, but in this case, four of them had potential for development - something about the arms or face that made me want to keep them. The fourth of these, of course, became the basis for the full-colour drawing.

To vote, click on the link. You will be asked to click a button twice to confirm that you are voting for this comic and that you're not a bot or script that automates voting (you will be shocked and scandalized to hear that people have apparently done that in the past). The final page in the process has the vote incentive image. Vote incentive images will only be available until they are replaced, so you will have to vote today to see these sketches; there will be new incentive art up tomorrow.