 Luk |
Sorry it's late; I got called over to my parents' house to look after their dogs while they gallivanted around London for the evening, and I carelessly didn't take my tablet.
 |
I'm sure there was something meaningful I meant to put here, but I can't remember what it was. So I'll leave you with a page of more-or-less-on-time comic!
 |
I kind of didn't finish in time, but it's been replaced with a nice colourful version now, so anyone who saw it yesterdy - it's better now!
I'm particularly fond of panel 2. I don't like painting hair still, but I think it's possibly my favourite panel so far! Li has terrible hair in the morning, don't you think?
Also: if any of you lot are Americans, remember to go vote, hmm? Whoever you want to, so long as it's not Ron Paul. He totally isn't going to win on write-in votes, really. Sorry, guys.
Hooray! I feel like crap. Like, dizzy and upset-stomach and wishing-I-hadn't-gone-to-work-after-all kind of crap. After I got back from work this evening I fell asleep on the sofa for a bit and had a weird dream in which I deduced that there must have been a 'Kythera Device', which was probably a horrible weapon of untold power that needed to be sealed away from fickle humankind.
So it turns out that when I'm feeling less well, I draw really badly. Like, even more badly than normal. So I'm not going to try and draw a page of Precession, particularly since it's a convenient chapter gap, instead I'm going to curl up with some grapes and a huge mug of hot chocolate and hope that I can put something together between now and next Monday and leave you with a reminder in case you'd forgotten that there's a ton of art in the art directory of this site that used to be hidden away from everyone and that I'd kind of forgotten to link from anywhere. Half of it's from so long ago that it really shows up how much I've improved over the last couple of years, some of it's pretty nice anyway. But I like these bits:
Li | Autumn | Tina | Sachiko | Marisa | [Autumn] War
I'm totally blaming this on the fact that it's horrible-deadline period at work and I'm getting increasingly sick/worried at the state of several things there. We're not so much "up against" the deadline as one might be a wall, as we are "being pushed inexorably through" the deadline by inertia.
Sorry, and all that. :/
 Käfer |
Man, two hundred pages. And eight chapters. That's quite a few - nearly four years' worth. If I were going to celebrate the milestone, though, I'd celebrate the four-years-worth-of-pages mark at page 208. This will be sometime in December, at which point I'd be tempted to take the following three months off, since I'm sure I started drawing Precession in March and I'm ahead on pages. ;-)
Anyway. What else did I do this last week? I took part (eventually) in one of Shmup-Dev's development/design sessions, this one on the theme 'Land and Air'. You can see a part of a screenshot to the left there; my prototype is called 'Käfer', and is described in a Shmup-Dev forum post here and can be downloaded from here if you're interested in trying it out [1]. It's only one stage, it has a silly difficulty gradient, but it's quite playable in my opinion all the same. I'm seriously considering building it out into a proper full game.
 Global! |
But! Instead, have a 40-minute speedpaint of one of my all-time anime heroes, Captain Bruno J Global, from the original Macross series. Captain Global is, without doubt, the most awesome and most space-captainiest space captain ever to grace celluloid, with barely any competition. Also he has a kick-arse moustache and looks a bit like Frank Zappa.
Frank Zappa is also awesome.
(Years ago, I started sculpting a Global bust - I got this far before moving house interrupted and I never finished. I should totally go back and finish that...)
 |
Sorry it's a bit late; I've been ill for the last week, and I've spent the last few evenings totally exhausted. :/
It's not so good as I imagined this page being... but I take solace in the fact that at the very least it's still much better than the stuff I was putting out a couple of years ago. I also take solace in the fact that I have enough hot water for a nice relaxing bath which I'll hopefully not fall asleep in and drown.
 Baja |
Warning: Flaky physics ahead. This is one of the places I've had to embellish the facts a little [1] and make up hazy hand-wavy crap to make the whole premise remotely plausible. Try and ignore it, eh?
The name 'dark reactor' is kind of suggestive, and I was seriously considering fleshing it out with more waffle, but then I figured that the LHC gets turned on again in a few months, and one of the first things it would do would be blow my waffle right out of the water, so I didn't bother. Historically speaking, it's a misnomer that held over from a previous found-to-be-incorrect theory... ;-)
Anyway. On a totally unrelated note, I've been reading a lot of Jasper Fforde lately. I was given one of his books for my birthday a year ago, but it took me until relatively recently to start it, for a couple of reasons. Firstly I was told it was similar to Robert Rankin[2], who I'm not such a big fan of. Secondly, because it turned out that it was the sixth book that the guy had written, and the preceeding five were set chronologically before it in [broadly] the same world.
Anyway; rather than Robert Rankin, I would describe Jasper Fforde as "Like Terry Pratchett, for people who read books."
I used to presume Terry Pratchett was like Terry Pratchett for people who read books, but recently I've come across a significant number of people who say things like "Oh, I don't read books. No, not at all. Well, except for Pratchett."
You know who you are. Yes, you.
Why do I mention this? Well, firstly in case any of the rest of you were labouring under the unfortunate impression that Fforde's books are like Rankin's, but secondly because that's the reason Precession was a little later than it used to be this week - because I stayed up late Friday and Saturday and Sunday night reading some of his books.
I wouldn't bother to apologise, since I tend to think that - compared to the rest of the webcomics world - getting a page up before I go to sleep on the day it's supposed to be up is near enough, but I heard that webcomic authors are supposed to apologise for being late all the time.
 Baja |
Almost to the 200-page mark! More importantly, almost to the 204-page mark, which is four years' worth of Precession at a page a week. Which means I'm insane and I should have finished it by now and be working on something which I wrote properly right from the beginning...
Oh! And Dan sent me this picture of Baja and Burgundy for my birthday. Bur has been practicing his menacing loom. Thanks, Dan!
In other, unrelated, news: Max Barry is one of the main reasons Australia will be allowed to remain above sea level when the world is finally under my thumb.
Apologies for the page being a day late. It's my birthday tomorrow, and in accordance with ancient lore (and not-so-ancient tradition) I spent too much of the evening making cakes to take to work tomorrow.
Which isn't a great excuse, since I meant to have the page up yesterday, but it's all I have!
Anyway. A little while ago, Google - presumably suitably impressed by my occasional use of their Analytics service [1] - sent me a promotional code to get AdWords credit. I don't have anything to sell, and I don't run a business, but I'm kind of interested in how these things work, so I figured I'd try setting up the account and running a Precession ad.
I've been kind of opposed to the idea of paying for advertising a comic that I don't derive any direct financial profit from, to be honest; it seems like obvious vanity, trying to get more readers for no reason other than to feel better about myself. I mean, I already have enough readers to motivate me to draw the comic on a regular basis... but hey, Google are giving them away for free and I want to play with the application, so I'm going to decide for the moment it doesn't count. ;-)
Also, if you've not seen MS Paint Adventures before, you should totally give it a look. Especially if you ever enjoyed a point-and-click adventure game.
If you didn't ever enjoy a point-and-click adventure game, go right this minute and download ScummVM and Beneath A Steel Sky (scroll down to the 'Extras, game downloads' section) or go buy Sam and Max Hit the Road (which MSPA references a little) and enjoy a point-and-click adventure game. Seriously, right now. I don't care if you're at work or whatever.