N o n s e n s e W a r s • A n A r t b l o g
[110207]
And in today’s comic, Dogma class SHDs. The bridge is actually modeled after that of the Declaration class airships in the older Directorate storyline, though within the context of the story, the reverse is most likely the case. Only a couple more of Pieces to go and I have to think of something else clever…
This week I finally took some pics to supplant my long delayed post about power line networking.
[110114]
It looks like we’re falling into a cycle of like “update every 10 days” or something. As long as it’s consistent, I don’t really consider it that bad a thing… but I haven’t had any time to draw in like forever. School sucks. Page 15 of Pieces. I want to at some point set up an easier way to just view the comics, etc, but I don’t really know how I’m gonna do that…
There’s a Slick Wheels class locomotive in the last panel. Whoo.
Recently we’ve (myself, J, and the one and only generalachoo) have been playing a bit of Yugioh. Yugioh gets revived like every break, though we generally stick to the same antiquated card pool, though it’s chill that way. I do agree that it’s nice being able to use shitty cards and still be “competitive” within our fairly limited metagame. For the first time since I started doing YGO, I’ve gotten card protectors other than my stalwart UltraPro ‘Dragon Red’ sleeves.
They aren’t that good as sleeves… J says it’s more like “character merchandise that doubles as protectors”, or something along those lines.
We’ve also been playing with an old building toy called RokenBok. There was a period when me and my younger brother played with this a lot, but like all toys it got shut away in some bin after a while. J and I have been going through bins and piddling around with old toys (Tomy trains for one), so this naturally got onto our ‘to do’ list. I think the way we build now (for Tomy trains and for RokenBok) is drastically different – well, obviously, I suppose – than the way way I wouldn’t built this stuff when I was kid. I feel like my old mantra was “use any many of the pieces as possible”, but nowadays we just go rando or by theme. Maybe more on this some other time.
Cue our masterpiece, the “Spiral of Doom” (J’s name).
I’d post a picture for Yugioh… but what the heck would I post.
I have a problem set class this quarter for the first time in a while. Back in freshman year, I was throwing away a bunch of scratch paper trying to figure some of the stuff out, and I figured there had to be a better solution. Sometime in sophomore year I started doing problem sets on tablet and printing them out – so you can “throw away” scratch paper without doing anything – though by that time the problem set classes were already declining. I just wanted to say that I feel hella pro when I do problem sets digitally. Just like I feel hella pro when I talk on the phone with a headset.
Next time: powerline networking!
[110102]
The slow updates lately have been somewhat regrettable, but with J updating so rarely these days, I’m not terribly motivated to do my part either. Of all the things we blabbered about at our Fanime panel, I think “doing a webcomic with someone” is probably the advice I’d be most inclined to support given all the crap we’ve been through. It has come down to the point where I need to be a little sick and a little bedridden to update…
Nothing really worth mentioning about today’s comic page, page 14 of [i]Pieces[/i]. It’s been only four months since I wrote this now, but it feels like a damn long time. Going forward with the comics right now, I’m doing kind of a free-flowing, unplanned “continuation” of this story, largely as I feel that that route is a lesser evil than the route of working on the “continuation” of the “main” story arc. Lesser evil in that’s it’s less clunky – and less difficult, I guess – to conduct. All of Pieces was supposed to have been posted by now, as I mentioned in an older post that I couldn’t find, but as with the main story arc, stuff happens, I don’t draw enough, and the posts get delayed. Next week (or next update, really; I intend to post in less than a week to make up for the recent failings) will be a painting again.
The rest of this post was going to be about setup, as a continuation of my last post, but I’m going to throw some other random shit in there. It’s weird typing “2011″ on everything…
[101210]
Well, I suppose it’s time to write another update, eh?
Let’s see… do I have any comments about this page… no, not really. The pin-board thing in panel one turned out better than I’d have thought. In general maybe this page is a little noisy… but I think all of my pages as of late are as such, simply due to the (crappy?) way that I shade at the moment.
Anyway, here’s something relatively old and non-drawing related again. This is a Lego “clock” I built in spring quarter for ART160. It took the majority of the quarter’s weekends to put the damn thing together (really doesn’t help that I can’t really move my Lego shit anywhere), and it may or may not have been worth it. I don’t think I’ve posted it before, and I don’t know why. In retrospect it would’ve been a great way to fill an update.
[101204]
This post was written nearly a month ago, but it didn’t get posted because of the painting stuff.
[101107]
This is kind of the pivotal point in Pieces. This is also where the art kind of bottoms out, though the difference between this and page 1 really isn’t much.
This next thing is a bit interesting. I worked on Radmind (or rather a Windows port of Radmind) this summer, and the code that I wrote has been audited and actually committed to the sourceforge repository. You can see my name in the commit history starting from about nine days ago (when the code was committed; I actually started back in June). If I’d known the commit history was going to be tacked on without any auditing, I would have tried to be tidier…
I didn’t actually make any major changes to the overall function of the Radmind toolset, but I’m pretty sure I put in a couple thousand lines of code largely for reading and writing to the registry and saving registry data using the Windows API. Mostly a bunch of string manipulation including a bunch of conversions between “wide” characters and, well, “narrow” characters. I think I got pretty good at pointer math and the like after a while; the registry data dumps are binary files written and read one character at a time.
And of course, an obligatory shoutout to the best Windows API function call evar, ConvertSecurityDescriptorToStringSecurityDescriptor. I wish I had pictures to show with this part of the post, but I don’t know of what I would have taken pictures. Maybe my desktop with notepad++ and a bunch of command line windows open…
Anyway, the skateboard. We are effectively making a steel model of what should be aluminum skateboard. It’s been kind of diluted in the grand scheme of things, but I think our board is going to be the only ride-able model in the class. Assuming either of us can actually learn how to ride the thing, that is. It’s hard to tell how much of the difficulty is due to our inability to board, and how much of the difficulty is due to the poor performance of the fairly stiff and heavy device itself.
Anyway, before the project deadline was extended, we had ample discussion concerning how we should make the model. Because we wanted to using tubing, we couldn’t really stick a pattern on the laser CAM and have it do the work for us. We couldn’t really use some of the foam-ish modeling material recommended for this type of prototyping either. We considered wood and PVC but concluded that we’d ultimately have to make the same cuts and fishmouths that we’d have to make it metal tubing.
And that was the problem with the metal tubing. We had to make 22 fishmouths at angles between 5 and 45 degrees and weld it all together all within a week (originally half a week!). The fishmouth setup wasn’t as difficult as we had been led to believe, but it was definitely time consuming and came with a high degree of hand-waving. We had to mill the aluminum blocks ourselves (though in hindsight, I think v-blocks would have done the trick just as well) and eyeball where to make each cut (if we were going to not take a day on every pass at least), which really did make for happy welds in the end.
First time the board was completely assembled. I ultimately did most of the cutting and drilling, and my partner did all of the welding, largely because she was far more proficient at using the arc welder. My oxyacetylene welding isn’t that bad, but I’d been on an arc welder like once between today and a year ago. Even then it took me an entire shop session to make the blocks, largely because I hadn’t used a mill for about a year either.
I’m ultimately not sure if painting it has made it better or worse; I think the red we used turned out more industrial than we expected.
That’s probably it for now. I’m going to do another painting before the month is out. Or at least, that’s the goal…
