jinxtigger

Suddenly a mad fan of Raving Rabbids- after a day working like a nut and missing breakfast, lunch and dinner, I can so totally relate to DAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH

:)

So tired, trying to force myself to still work more

Also it's the second day in a row www.tallyroad.com has got 1000 hits- the second time, with 250 unique visitors. It seems like the new page design and the added navigation stuff is working for people. I'm still frustrated that I'll be missing (or late) a day sometime over Xmas, but I'll chill out. It seems I want to do that Howard Taylor (Schlock Mercenary) "never missed a day in X many years" thing. But you know, how many people do that to that extreme? I'll do what I can but it's possible I'll miss a day, and if I do I'll give advance warning.

I'm trying a new thing- instead of fussing over pencils for hours, I'm trying out the idea of just inking directly. I did that this morning and was done HOURS earlier than usual, which was a real eye-opener. I might need to work a little looser and just wing it a bit more...

Just got a fan mail for my Airwindows AU plugin work from Nick Jameson.

Who?

Turns out it's the guy who produced some of Foghat's biggest hits. You know- "slow riiide! take it easy!" that stuff.

There is nothing like getting fanmail from a guy who has produced/mixed/whatever music that is part of the soundtrack of your head...

Admittedly when I was growing up I was all about the progrock and didn't know from Foghat, but still...

I've just gone live with a site redesign at http://www.tallyroad.com which removes the text story updates (which nobody was reading, at least nobody who had email and was willing to use it) and puts up a shoutbox and a place to make daily remarks.

I don't know if it's going to get use, but I do have some daily readers (around 20 or so) and maybe I can get to know them a little more now :) I have met two elsewhere on the internet who actually liked what I was doing, so I'll do more of that.

Anyone who isn't aware of it- my friends list is extensively furry, so you're exactly the people to tell that I am running a furry webcomic called Tally Road at http://www.tallyroad.com DAILY. All the drawing is quickly helping my art grow up, and that seems to be working for people. The story is basically a more comedic treatment of what the original big dramatic story was, and that suits me fine :)

Since my friends list is so extensively furry, I'll mention here what I'm not going to mention directly on the comic page- I am also running a FurAffinity page at http://www.furaffinity.net/user/jinxtigr/ , also DAILY but more flexible and hit-or-miss maybe, which contains artwork also in my style but too adult-themed for a WebMA comic (at least the way I define it). And that stuff is watercolor-and-pigma, in full color. It's getting favorited by people and hopefully will develop into a way that I can not starve through cold winters, because everything there exists as a traditional-media artwork (but tiny- 4x3"!) that could be put on FurBid if I needed extra money, which could end up happening what with this crazy economy and all :)

Investing in artists beats investing in stocks at this point. Sexier use of paper ;)

So this is me checking in even though I'm keeping real busy-

http://www.tallyroad.com for a daily furry comic that hopefully is good to other furries (screw anybody else, frankly),
http://www.furaffinity.net/user/jinxtigr/ ONLY if you desperately seek outright furry porn (of various varieties) because life is too short not to have lusty vixens in it, and comics are not such serious business that you can't corrupt them yourself for fun.

Rather depressed by bad people today. I had a look at Something Awful again, nervously, after a long period of staying away since a guy I respect, Kris Straub, told me I shouldn't really be there since they're not my audience.

I'd turned up with my web comic, www.tallyroad.com and got in a lot of trouble since people couldn't follow the story and were extremely offended at me for trying to make one, and then got in worse trouble when I took some of the criticisms constructively and changed everything around. I kidded around a little like "Hey, I even want to learn from bad people!" and got my ass banned for trolling, as my whole not-flipping-out attitude was taken for a manipulative evil scheme. Then once I'd been placed on probation, a guy  was seen talking about my 'meltdown' as if I'd properly had one.

All admittedly depressing, but now I'm struggling with a related concept.

I wasn't sure if anybody was still dissing on me, so I was nervous, but there was none of that- instead it was the usual routine of some things being considered good, some terrible, various complaints, various effusions of knob-slobbering praise, and I was trying to figure out how that worked. What was the distinguishing factor? I think it's detachment. That place likes art where something is shut off. Either characters and stories that are so cool that they're Tom Clancied out, arrogantly stone-cold and scorning you, or stuff that's so crude and awful that it's ironically cool and doesn't care what you think, or stuff where the characters are bad, damaged people harming each other, or stuff that's quite well done but so obviously detached from any personal committment that it's like the creator isn't there, has no agenda of any sort with regard to the art.

It's all cool, it's all detachment, and I really don't think I can allow myself to even have a paw in that camp. It's not okay for me as a person to be living there. I need to be diving into whatever it is I do with the glee of an otter in a mudpuddle, and then I need to be able to handle whatever my needs are around that- because I don't have the option of playing it cool and pretending not to care. If I'm hurt, I'll need to be hurt. If I seek approval and people enjoying art I do, I'll have to seek that... and I have to hang in there somehow during this time (which will surely keep returning) where I feel extremely unwanted and unloved. I have to ride out the feelings and watch for anything I can find- a new friend, a brief compliment, etc- that will keep me going. Gotta let myself feel it.

While I am stil doing daily comics at www.tallyroad.com and daily novel updates, I've also taken on another thing that's working really well.

That's webcomic reviews, and I've done some neat ones. I'm getting some stumbleupons and very impressed comments. It all started with the comic of a guy who's doing reviews himself, and went from there. I'm hoping to get some good marquee comics asking for reviews, as I'm not interested in doing unwelcome critiques when there are people who are asking for them, but I'm also not interested in doing anything which I can't talk insightfully about- I don't do flamey and am not 'John Solomon'.

www.tallyroad.com/tldr/Review-SlaughterUDarkZoey.html - Slaughter U: Dark Zoey
www.tallyroad.com/tldr/Review-EandMu.html - E and Mu
www.tallyroad.com/tldr/Review-OddFish.html - Nobby Nobody's Odd-Fish
www.tallyroad.com/tldr/Review-GilbertandGrim.html - Gilbert and the Grim Rabbit

There should be more coming, I do have a backlog of requests some of which i fully intend to do.

www.tallyroad.com/library.html

Back on the internet for good, years later.

Tally Road now has numerous WHOLE OTHER BOOKS up on the site to read. These books got rave reviews from Miavir's Furry Literary page years ago.

Hope you like them, and they're there for good, so feel free to tell anybody.

I've just weathered a moderate to severe Gooning, about my strip Tally Road.

Namely, fierce and intelligent critique from Goons on the Something Awful forums. In response to this, I've had to admit that I just wasn't conveying story information enough, especially since I was doing that on purpose- laying a lot of scattered groundwork that would start to make sense as more information came in. But I wasn't able to do it, so I went back and added a 'narrator panel' to strips 1,5,8,12 and 18. (I'm at 24 and 25 comes out Monday)

This sucked emotionally, and I wish I was able to address it more effectively, but on the bright side I discovered that I can do narration and allow a certain Krazy Kat floweriness to the language and actually enjoy it, so it's not like I'm just wedging stuff in to please others.

I was wedging stuff in because I wasn't able to CONVEY to others what I intended to convey, and I'm just lucky that I found a way to do it that I kinda enjoy the look and feel of.

So if anyone ELSE politely gave up on Tally Road because they couldn't follow it, the original idea was that it would become more clear as further story unfolded, but I've given up on that and put in additional information in hopes it would be SOME help for the time being.

This is the new Page One.

I'm trying to work out how I can get a looser process going while keeping the grayscale cel-shaded. I'm drawing destructively over the background. Horribly wasteful. Manga Studio can't fill with opaque greys at all. Will try workaround- B/W layer w. black lines and white fill, greyscale layer over that using the same selection outlines. Faster? Also w. that I can fill specific grey values. Right now all Tally Road greys are ENTIRELY pressure sensitivity. All black or white 'pencil'. This is understandably stressful and time consuming. I am drawing everything while balancing on one foot on a chair of knives :D

On the bright side, I've developed better stylus control than I would have had if I hadn't done a bunch of comics in the hardest way imaginable :)

Updating the Tally Road daily strip, Daily Kitten. Not with a kitten, however- a self-portrait of the artist as a young tiger having a meltdown over preparing for an upcoming con.

I can imagine shocking revelations of exactly why Magarce the little siamese got promised a starring role- though Tally Road is WebMA rated, I am still strangely resistant to doing outright pr0n (as much as I like it) for Daily Kitten. However, if I can turn it into a gag I seem much happier with it...

Beginning to post to LJ again simply because some of the Tally Road pageviews are coming from the one post I made. Hey, if there's a furry audience who's enjoying the comic and they like hearing about it here, more power to you- also this is technically the only place so far that would work like a forum (the comic is NOT big enough to justify its own forum right now).

Trolls perfectly welcome- I am aware of all internet traditions and am not upset that being an obvious furry invites teasing and HAET. More than a year ago I lost my family in a tragic event that won't be discussed further, so I have nothing more to lose, and every reason to not bother ever struggling for 'normal cred' again. Hi, welcome back to my life such as it is, hope you like the various Tally Road comics or at least have fun making fun of them :)

Got airtabs for the car! Also, still working on Tally Road, which is where I've been.

So I didn't get to actually animate anything, but I did manage to bring ToonFace to the next stage-


I didn't eat because the program was staying broken for hour after hour- I suppose I'll try to deal with that now. I needed to do something because I'm going to go hang out with the local cable-access video producer guy tomorrow and wanted things to show. It's still all so primitive- but that comes with me trying to do absolutely everything.

If I can do my how-to-use-plugins videos in that TV studio, I'll get a bit more in the way of hardware (lights, scrims and stuff) and in that case I won't have to handle absolutely everything. Could happen. So tired, so much to do...

I think maybe I'll give up on the idea of sleeping normal hours and just take some time to eat a late dinner and finish up my stuff and then sleep in like crazy tomorrow. I hate not being awake for the day, but this is out of control. I hope at some point it starts to translate into making animations- the amount of programming work I've had to do on this little program is obscene, it only just tonight got to where I could save files with the full keyframe data, load character data separately, blank the key data etc. So much time working on file saving that I have no energy left for timing, pose actions, the actual animating. :P another day.

No animation work today- I dug my car out of a bunch of ice pits, and then got hopelessly distracted making notes on how to design aircraft and ground vehicles for my sci-fi world. I came upon some websites that were INCREDIBLY good about that stuff, explaining things about how at supersonic speeds air can flow around corners by getting refracted by shockwaves- things I never knew, sometimes things that would affect my design of stuff for the movie :) so, not totally wasted time, and I've been due for a day off since last week- it's been all day every day since before I can remember.

In lieu of animated vixens, I give you the most outrageous toy in the world- the homemade pulse jet go-kart. I laughed until tears came to my eyes at how awesome and horrible this is. Quite zippy! About 200 db! Apparently made out of stove pipes and baling wire! Irresistible!