The Art of Tim

So I got into the beta for Everquest 2 yesterday. Was quite a hefty download (over 2GB) and took about 10 hours. It finished a bit after 1am, at which point I fired it up.

Ugh.

This game is just ugly. The mechanics are sound, the gameplay seems pretty decent, but the game itself is just gross. It looks alright when you’re standing still (so screenshots aren’t bad) but actually playing the game is a whole different matter. In order to accomplish those spiffy graphics that you’ve seen, they had to have the graphics and animations scale at a distance. Which means that any characters more than 40ft away from yours will look like shiny, featureless mannequins. And if they happen to move, you get maybe 10FPS on their animations. This goes for NPC’s too.

And the character creation… grrr. Anyone who knows my history with MMORPG’s knows that character customization is a HUGE selling point with me for any MMORPG. As good as Lineage 2 looked graphically, every single dark elf looked like every other single dark elf on the planet. I hate that.

That’s not the case with Everquest 2. You can customize your appearance quite extensively. However, the characters are just plain ugly. I tried to make a dark elf, wood elf or high elf, and I could not, for the life of me, make a male character that didn’t look female. And I’m not talking about an elf male that looked effeminate, in that “pretty boy” sort of way. That I’m ok with because that’s the whole point; they’re elves. But no, these guys look like girls. These are the Boy Georges of Everquest.

Anyway, I’ve got the beta, so I’ll probably give it another few tries, but I honestly don’t expect EQ2 to surpass World of Warcraft in my book. WoW just hits all of the right chords with me.

I did start playing Knights of the Old Republic again yesterday. I have a bit of a confession to make. I never beat KOTOR. It fell prey to a syndrome that is all too common with me. I played the game extensively, and then at some point another game, or perhaps just work, caused me to be away from it for more than a couple of days. And then I just never went back to it. It happens quite often. I play the shit out of games, but I rarely ever beat them.

But something sparked my interest again, and so I sat down to play KOTOR, determined to beat the game. I was almost going to make a new character, but then I decided to pick up my old character rather than play through the first half of the game again. My love for this game has been renewed, and so help me, I’m going to find out what this incredible “twist ending” everyone has raved about is.

Not having a car is a bit irritating… I’m starting to consider renting one. Last night I jogged to the gym and back, since it’s so close, but that’s about all I can do. Going to call the mechanic in a minute to find out when they think I’ll have my car back. It might be worth it to rent one for a couple of days, just to get things done.

Toby ended up having to leave around midnight last night. We have a mutual friend that was diagnosed with cancer last year, and we got word that they thought he was finally slipping away. He’s been having some pretty bad days, and he usually bounces back, but last night apparently he was doing pretty poorly. Toby left in the middle of the night so that he could be there with him first thing in the morning. I’m still waiting to hear about how he is.

Car will probably be in the shop all week, so this should be pretty interesting, trying to function without transportation.

This week is entirely dedicated to preparation for my vacation. First order of business: start drawing comics in advance.

We went to see Napoleon Dynamite last night. My friend Madsen had been urging me to see this movie since Otakon, and it finally showed up in a theater nearby. It was fucking hilarious.

It wasn’t funny in a sense that the jokes were good, because I don’t think there was a single actual joke in the movie. The entire point of the movie was just to laugh at the characters being themselves. It’s basically a movie about going to laugh at that kid that everyone used to pick on in high school, which in that sense is sort of bad… but I couldn’t help myself. We were cracking up.

We were originally going to theater hop to Collateral, but we decided we didn’t feel like sitting in a theater for 4+ hours, so instead after Napoleon Dynamite was over, we drove over to the gamestop to find a game to play all evening.

We ended up with Brute Force, for the Xbox, primarily because it offered co-op action. Toby and I crave games that offer co-op play. Deathrow, DnD Heroes, Halo, etc. We both feel that game companies don’t focus enough on co-op features (something I’ll be making a very public statement on soon enough). Deathmatch is fun, but it gets pretty old after a while.

I’d heard good things about Brute Force, but I’d never played it (not a game I’d grab to play by myself), so we picked it up for $20. The guy at the counter also pitched me the Fable pre-order, which I wasn’t going to bother with until he told me how many pre-orders he was getting. So I put the money down to reserve a copy, because I don’t want to take any chances with not having that game on release day.

Brute Force turned out to be a really fun game, and we played until probably 3am.

Got a call this morning from Briana. Apparantly the people currently in the apartment we’re moving into have found a house and put a down-payment on it. This means they’ll be moving out soon, which means we’ll be moving in soon. She called me to tell me to start packing.

Today I put up the 400th CAD strip I’ve drawn. It’s hard to believe that I’ve drawn that many of these buggers. My two-year anniversary is coming up in October too.

Toby is here, and we’re hanging out, relaxing a bit. We’re considering catching a movie tonight… Napoleon Dynamite followed by a sneaky theater hop to Collateral. We’ll see. Right now we’re just hanging out watching Futurama and playing vidja-ma-games.

Also as of this morning, every Canadian book order has been shipped. Next week, the end of this fiasco!

Well, I dropped off my car this morning. They’re going to pull the engine today, and then next week they’ll put the new one in. I am officially without transportation. On the bright side, Toby is coming down tonight, so at least for the weekend I can make him chauffeur me around. I’m really excited to get my car back next week and drive it for the first time with the new transmission and engine.

As Toby will be here this weekend, I assume most of it will be spent playing video games (primarily Metal Warriors), watching movies, going to bars, etc. As this is the case, I need to make sure I get as much work set up to auto-pilot as possible.

He won’t be here until this evening, so I’ve got time to draw Saturday’s and Monday’s comics. I’ll do that, and then get shipping stuff ready.

I won’t accomplish my goal of getting everything shipped by this weekend, but I got close enough that I’ll easily be done by next week. This means that next week will be spent in preparation to take my vacation the following week. Now that I have an estimated date for my vacation, I have something I can look forward to, and count the days until.

I’m excited about starting my daily sketches. I have a few nifty ideas I want to get down on paper, but don’t currently have time for. I think this daily sketch routine will be really good for my state of mind, and also really good for me artistically.

I got a kick out of today’s Little Gamers. I had totally forgotten I had said that. I don’t remember what we were talking about… probably something to do with the guy that was running around the party with no pants. I dunno… I was too drunk anyway. But I made a comment along the lines of “I see your pantslessness, and raise you nakedness”. We laughed and Madsen said he was going to put it into a comic. I had totally forgotten until he actually went and did it today. Good stuff.

My new engine arrived safe and sound yesterday, and I’ll be bringing my car in tomorrow. I probably won’t have it back until late next week sometime, but Toby is coming down tomorrow evening, so that works out rather well; I won’t be as screwed for transportation.

Getting all of these orders shipped by this weekend is going to be close. I may not be able to pull it off. It’ll be close though, so even if I don’t manage to do it, they’ll definitely be done by early next week. Time to start gearing up for my vacation.

I have quite a few things I need to finish before I take a week off, and quite a few things I’ll need to do as soon as I get back, so I have to prepare for all of that as well. It’s going to be quite a busy fall.

I know when I put the books back up for sale I’m going to get slammed, so I have to get ready for that. I’ll be doing a second printing soon, which I hope will last me for a good while. I’ve got the new T-shirt designs to finish and run, I have to get the limited edition prints ready for Ubercon and Nekocon, and in the middle of it all, a proposed move to Connecticut at an undetermined time. Should be a fun end-of-year.

Following Rich’s business model, I’m going to start offering shirts on a limited edition basis. Meaning I’ll offer a new design, make it available to order for a couple of weeks, and then remove it. If there is enough demand, maybe bring the design back six months down the road or so. This will help me out a lot as far as not having to keep so much damned stock around the house, and keep track of so many designs at once, and also allow me to try out many different design ideas without feeling committed to stock them for long periods of time.

Brian says Collateral was pretty good, so maybe Toby and I will go see that this weekend. You know, inbetween playing Metal Warriors all day.

World of Warcraft servers are down at the moment. Figures. I told myself I’d play for an just an hour before I start working, as a treat, and of course the servers would be down for maintenance. Oh well. Risa told me last night that she may be able to get her hands on a beta account, so perhaps I’ll be hanging out with her in-game soon.

Man, I couldn’t sleep at all last night. I don’t think I finally got to sleep until like 5am. So naturally I woke up late. Grrr.

First up on my list of things to do today is drop this box of packages off at the post office so they can ship them out. I always feel bad dropping a box of packages in their lap like this, especially international orders, but they’re pretty cool about it and assure me they don’t mind. And dropping off packages in bulk is the only way I’m going to reach my deadline of having the shipping done by this weekend.

I’ve got to call the mechanic at some point today and give him a heads up; the new engine is supposed to arrive from Texas tomorrow. I need to see when he wants my car. With any luck, he’ll ask for it this weekend, while Toby is here, so I’m not shit out of luck for transportation.

After that, today is going to be dedicated to book packaging. I’ve already finished the comics for Wednesday and Friday, so I can concentrate on shipping today. I’ve only got about 300ish left to package, so if I can get them all done today, all I have to do for the rest of the week is bring them to the post office, a bunch at a time.

I’ve been getting a lot of good feedback over the latest storyline I’ve started. The forums exploded into a “who is she?” “what’s her name?” kind of thing. Everyone is really curious about what will happen between her and Lucas, and that’s just the kind of reaction I love to get.

I’ve been talking to Hawk, and we both share a similar problem. Since we started our comics, we never have any time anymore to work on artwork just for the sake of drawing. My projects are always CAD related. The last time I got to sit down and draw something that wasn’t for the comic in some way was months ago. I’ve decided that after my vacation I’m going to start managing my time better.

Starting with my vacation, however, I’m going to start doing daily sketches. Before I do any other work for the day, I’m going to sit down and sketch something. Anything that strikes my fancy. I’ll probably use this journal as a temporary sketch dump, until I set up something more official.

If I’m lucky, I may get to play some World of Warcraft later on tonight.

This was the original news post I was going to make on the front page. After I was done writing it, I cooled off a bit and decided I would just post it here instead. I’m still annoyed about it, but not enough so to make a big deal out of it on the front page.

“I’m starting get a little irritated here. Over the last week I’ve started receiving payments from people who pre-ordered the book, but never paid. Not payments that were sent months ago, when I publicly announced that pre-orders were over, and are only now arriving. No, payments postmarked a few days ago. This is not how it fucking works, people. You don’t get to pre-order, and then a few months down the line, when I’m almost done shipping, decide to get off your lazy ass and pay for the book and then expect me to rush to ship you one. I announced that pre-orders were over. You missed the boat.

You’ll get the book you paid for, but it won’t ship until after I’ve taken my vacation, and after I’ve put the book back up for sale. And if I receive any more payments from anyone for pre-ordered books, postmarked after today, you’re not even going to get a book. I’m just going to return the payment to you.”

It really is fucking rude and inconsiderate of these people, not only to me, but to the many, many people who pre-ordered. People who gave me their money in advance, so that I could afford to have the book printed. People who gave me their money with the knowledge that the book didn’t even exist yet. Gave me their money on faith.

And then these fucksticks come in like “alright, the book is shipping now. I want one. Here’s my payment, give me a signed copy”. Fuck That.

I found the mechanic that’ll do the engine swap, and the engine is on its way from Texas. I’m also going to have the transmission rebuilt while they’re in there. I’m hoping to have them rebuild it with synchros from an Escort ZX2 and a 5th gear from a 4 cylinder 626 for less RPMs on the freeway. She should be running pretty well after this is all over with.

Of course, I’m going to be without transportation for a week or so, which is going to be a huge difficulty for me. I’ll manage.

I talked to Toby this morning. He’s going to be in the area this week, and may come stay with me next weekend. I really miss hanging out with him, which is another benefit of this move to Connecticut. He’ll only be a short train ride away in New York.

Well, I did it. This morning I threw down about $1100 for a nice new 2.5 V6 KLZE JDM engine. This is quite a step up from the 1.8 V6 K8 that’s in my car now. I’ve just gotta settle on a mechanic to do the swap for me, have the engine shipped here, and I’m underway. I’m really excited. I’ve wanted to some of this work to my car since I bought it over a year ago, and this engine swap is an awesome place to start.

I’ve started to slip into vacation mode already, which is a bad thing. I’m not ready to go on vacation. I still have stuff to do, most importantly the City of Heroes strip which is due by tomorrow. Eesh. I just told myself I’d relax for a few hours with some World of Warcraft, and then I slipped into the whole mindframe, and now I don’t feel like working, hehe. Oh well, gotta get it done.

Dedication, determination, and a really cool looking Night Elf Warrior.