[10/12/2009] As I said last week, I participated in 24-hour comic day. Today’s image was the result of passing around a sheet of paper and asking everyone present to draw a self-portrait and sign their name.

So, the target was 24 pages in 24 hours … I planned out a 12-page comic (plot wouldn’t stretch any farther), and was able to pencil in 8 pages before time ran out. I’m going to finish pencilling them in at some point, and then probably ink and letter them. I also have the original plan for the comic, which was laid out on 3″x5″ index cards. I’ll probably post those at some point too.

Of course, when you stay awake for 24 hours straight, you start getting a little wonky. One of the things produced as a result of this wonkiness was this:

The expression here is based off of a well-known face made by the character Konata from the show “Lucky Star”, as seen here.

Another product of our sleep-deprived minds: Manga on BREAD!!

One of my friends said she had a “nightmare” in which I told her to draw manga on bread because the India ink would stay better (or something like that), but that was crazy because drawing it on bread obviously wouldn’t work … cue another friend and I whipping out our pens and drawing on of of the endpieces of a loaf a bread we had bought as food for 24HCD. I used a thin felt-tip lineart pen (the same type I use to ink my comics) to draw on the “crust” side of the bread. However, the softness of the actual bread made it impossible to ink on the other side of the slice, so I borrowed a brush-tip pen and was able to draw. I suspect it’ll be easier if you let the bread dry out first…

Until next week, when hopefully I can post the finished version of my 24HCD comic…

[10/9/2009] Finally, here I am again! Late orz.

An interesting thought: It’s harder to draw people talking to each other on the phone than it is to draw a pair of heads talking to each other face-to-face. Yet I feel like for most people it’s easier to talk to someone face-to-face than over the phone. What does this mean? It means I suck at drawing people talking on phones.

So yeah, I’m going to try to go back to the old format. I don’t really think out plots ahead of time, which usually results in the type of meadering not-really-making-much-sense type of plot seen in “Nonsense Wars Season 2″ and some other things I’ve drawn *cough*SANDSTORM*cough*. We’ll see if my life is still funny enough to draw about.

Anyway, tomorrow I will be participating in a 24-hour comicking event. This year’s official “24-hour comics day” landed last week, but we (the MIT Anime Club + the MIT Student Art Association) decided it would be more prudent to hold it on a 3-day weekend so we could have some time to catch up on problem sets. Ah, the joys of being a student…

Anyway, I’ll be staying up for 24 hours straight from 11am on Saturday to 11am on Sunday, drawing! Whoo~! The goal is 24 pages in 24 hours. There are no restrictions on, and hence no guarantees of, quality, so it might actually be possible for me…

[091004]

My friend was supposed to be making some silly webpage about himself for a class at UCSC, and that inspired me to take a hack at a really less important backburner project I’ve had on my mind for a while.

So as you may know, I upload ost of my miscellaneous pictures to Colette now since the site doesn’t let me browse directories. Well, Colette lets me browse directories, but that’s about it. If I’m actually looking for a particular picture, it can be mighty hard to find, especially when I split uploaded pictures by month (probably a dumb thing to do; I might start doing it by quarters). At any rate, some times ago, I thought it’d be real nice to have some sort of gallery to make my searching for pictures easier.

I think maybe three or four months ago – probably when summer started – I tried installing a gallery onto Colette, but because I don’t really know much about this stuff, it was an epic fail. Or just a regular fail. Really, I just didn’t get anything to work.

It occurred to me that despite the insistence of someone – my sister maybe? – the apache server running on Colette wasn’t php capable when I tried to figure out that gallery stuff at the beginning of summer. Since all the gallery stuff required php in some way or another, that could explain the fail. I was fairly scared of messing stuff up, so I was hesistant to try to install php, but it turned out to be a simple process and I got that done. That php installed properly suggests that it indeed wasn’t there in the first place.

I wasn’t quite sure what to search, so it took me a while to find some sort of free gallery software that wasn’t complete crap and didn’t need something complicated like mySQL (although in retrospect, it might actually be really easy to get that going to; I’m just scared of messing stuff up. The Colette Windows install has been around for a year a half now, and I don’t quite remember how to set everything up again D:). At any rate, I found phpGallery.

I don’t think it actually took me that long to figure out how to install the thing. I remember doing a test run and being really, really surprised that it was working. It did take me a while to figure out that the script would accept a “../” for “up folder” (way to standardize the “..” computer industry!) in the configuration file, and thereby letme tidy up the entire setup a bit, but I ultimately got it configured and working more or less the way I wanted:

http://colette.trianglesoft.net/phpgraphy/

Ya, so it’s not quite polished per se, but it works and makes my life easier. BUT IT WORKS! I still can’t effin believe it. At this point you can start to see how Colette is a bit slow compared to some real enterprise servers. Clicking through some folders and you can see how some bigger pages are taking almost half a second to get generated; other phpgraphy galleries around the Internets are doing it in like 0.010 seconds…

But wait, there’s more!

I’d thought I’d written about this before, but a Google site search says no, so I’ll elaborate. About a year and a half ago (maybe more), I made a silly little splash page for Colette from a CPU-Z spec dump with some links to you know, the usual DA, brickshelf, etc. As you can see from the URL of this page, it isn’t quite being used anymore. That’s because I made a new one just for the lulz.

This story really goes back to the splash I made for a blog that me and a guy I know online were going to do. I taught myself a smattering of css in like a night and hacked this out at the same time. I still think it’s actually pretty stylish (though i bet the coding is awful), but it doesn’t work in IE (if I had something that could make your IE open this up and show you the fail, I’d link it here).

Anyway, I made a new splash for Colette based on the OrangePlanet splash. It’s not really a splash, I guess, just a small collection of links like the old one. For visual interest, there’s a little excerpt from the “My Computer > Properties” tab in the Windows XP installation. There was going to be a little header and footer as well, but I couldn’t get them to work in IE. BUT THIS WORKS IN IE! Almost perfectly.

I actually wrote up one version with an index and css file separate, which didn’t work in IE because it was based off of the OrangePlanet thing, but it bothered me and I basically re-wrote the whole thing until it worked in IE. Which, considering how bad I am at this kind of thing, took a considerable amount of time. At any rate, I’m done with this entry.