Ponder-a-Joe

Trainz

2009-04-04T23:17:00.001-05:00

Test about the stuffs!

Might as well

2008-07-01T08:17:00.003-05:00

Well it's been a while since I posted in the blog - there were a lot of reasons for this - The biggest being the disaster that printing the books turned out to be with Chapter 2. Most people know the story by now - but the nutshell version is that the printers did a good job, but the binders screwed up the binding and it had to be redone. That meant that they had to crop the book down slightly and hand replace 6 or 7 pages and the covers. This was on all 5000 books. Then they weren't careful and screwed up a lot of them, then we got screwed out of the discount we were supposed to get for screwed up books, THEN to top it all off now that the books were smaller when I actually sent them out in the envelopes that I used to mail out Chapter 1 the books would shift in the package, and the covers would get snagged on an internal seam. I had to send out a lot of replacement books... Anyway... I couldn't bring myself to write about it until I knew everything was okay. After that the plan was to integrate the blog into the new website design, which hasn't happened yet. Since November of 2006 I've been doing quite a lot of Contract work. It pays really well, and sometimes it's even fun, but it doesn't leave a lot of time for Alpha Shade... I still try to get a couple pages out a month, but it's been hard lately.

So, I've been thinking of restarting up the Blog, it's something I can do somewhat regularly even if I am fairly busy. Maybe I can even post some snippits of things I'm working on from time to time ;)

Back from ComicCon

2006-07-25T23:39:00.000-05:00

Well I'm back from the San Diego ComicCon -I detailed it pretty well in the latest Rant, but I thought I'd post some pictures for your viewing enjoyment - I didn't get a chance to take many pictures actually since the only time I really got out and about I forgot my camera at the booth O_o oh well! I got to meet a bunch of people I've been wanting to meet for a while, the Penny Arcade guys, the Apple Geeks guys the producers of Last Exile ( who confirmed that we are NOT in fact copying their anime ) I couldn't hook up with Fred this time, but I talked to Sarah and got a copy of Megatokyo 4. I talked to Brion from Flipside as well, he and his girlfriend from Mystic Revolution got upgraded out of the small press alley and I was extremely jealous! As you can see in the pictures below the small press area was sort of a shanty town this year.

I was in the booth a lot by myself at this con - my sister-in-law was there but I let her go do stuff with her friends who live in the area most of the days of the con so I didn't get around as much as I would have liked. Still I did pick up a copy of Flight 3 and the first two Red Star Graphic novels - everyone keeps comparing Alpha Shade to Red star so I thought I should find out why.

Diamond distributors stopped by the booth and told me to send me one of our books - we'll see how that turns out ;) a bunch of TV producers wanted to pitch Alpha Shade to TV stations - one said, and I quote "Well we'll have to take the guns and violence out, but other than that! Pure Gold!" I think I'll pass on that offer! LOL

The French want to translate our comic into French and distribute our comic there and EVERYBODY wants me to work for them, of course they "can't pay much." I love these guys!

Cosplay madness! My sister-in-law as Laura and a fan as a Soldier

To the right of me - These guys made some pretty cool homemade action figures!

to the left of me - These guys had some stories printed in some anthologies - AND they sold t-shirts with their logo on it.. Not really small press, but whatever! ;D

across from me - to the left - mmm sandwiches + sketches = no sales. To the right - Screen savers prints + nice printing but no display or attempt to sell your work = no sales. It was actually kind of sad to see the people around me not selling anything - but you need to try to sell stuff to sell it.
People don't seem to get that.

Behind me - Hippies! WOOOO + Bags on head but nothing to sell = no sales.

Back from Anime Expo

2006-07-05T16:41:00.000-05:00

Well I'm Back from LA, Here are some pictures for you to enjoy ;) The convention center was pretty impressive, and apparently open 24 hours a day. It looked like everyone was having a pretty good time.
Our Booth, it was only a 6 foot table so it was my first chance to test out my modular table cloth.
The new display and the completed Destroyer model. Also notice the Emily Handout, they only lasted the first 2 days with extreme rationing. They were way to expensive for that so those of you who got signed copies now have colectors items! :P
A cute Alpha Shade fan! YAY ^_^b
Ron and Cindy my helpful In-Laws! It was their first Anime convention. Cindy's favorite cosplay were the guys dressed up like the Happa-tai guys?! What the!
Going home - we lucked out on the way home and got transferred from our crappy flight with a transfer in Vegas ( bleck - hideous terminal ) to a direct flight on Northwest that got in several hours early. I was disappointed that I didn't get to perform my exit seat duties, but I guess there is always NEXT time!

Destoryer Update

2006-06-21T16:19:00.000-05:00

Even More destroyer Progress Pics

2006-05-26T07:44:00.000-05:00

It's getting close to being complete, The decks need to be painted and there are a bunch of little things left but it's getting there.

You know Blogger REALLY needs to let you upload more than 5 images at a time, it takes way to much time to upload this many images , It also doesn't upload them in order, maybe they are trying to discourage people from uploading images? Who knows? Anyway enjoy the pics!

Further AS- Destroyer Progress!

2006-05-17T15:57:00.000-05:00

It's coming along!

Back From ACen

2006-05-10T13:41:00.000-05:00

Well we're back from ACen.

It went pretty well despite some early hickups, such as someone setting up in our booth spot >:I Unloading and set up was a breeze we got to take the car right up into the hall and then it was just a short half block with our bags on the carts we brought. A HUGE improvement over last year where carried all of our stuff by hand for about a mile. It only takes once doing that to come up with better solutions. I can't stress the importance of luggage carts enough!

It was great to see a lot of web comic artists again and some for the first time such as:

All the artist from Studio Antithesis
www.studioantithesis.com/

Caroline Curtis of 9th Elsewhere
www.9thelsewhere.com/

Michael Dean of Slither and Friends
www.slitherandfriends.com/

Michael, Barb, and a $3 Pepsi

Brion Foukle of Flipside
www.flipsidecomics.com/

Fred Gallagher of Megatokyo
www.megatokyo.com/

Barb Jacobs of Return of the Exile
talismen.spiderforest.com/

Barb, Joe and a $3 Pepsi

Jerry of Secret of Mana Theater
www.manatheater.com/

Jerry sez hi!

Juno of Star Crossed Destiny
starcrossd.net/

Gearóid Molloy of Neko The Kitty
www.nekothekitty.net/

It's Pizza time!

Michael Poe of Errant Story
www.errantstory.com/

Dirk Tiede of Paradigm Shift
www.dynamanga.net/

And of course our friends over at Wizzywig, Greg and Kathie Borders
www.wizzywig.com/xcart/catalog/index.html

Greg and Kathie

Our first Framed and Painted Fan art!

Our Aunt with her homemade AS Jean Jacket

These fans want to make their friend Jelious!

Mmmm Tasty Ginos Pizza!

So many nerds at the hotel that we had to get a single bed room and take turns sleeping on the floor :P

Take note nerds! Pitch IN!

Alpha Shade Destroyer Model

2006-05-04T16:03:00.000-05:00

Our Father is making us an Alpha Shade Destroyer model that we can take to conventions as a display element. We've been having him take pictures of the progress so that we can share them with you.

Since we will both be gone at Anime Central this weekend and I probably wont get a chance to work on the page we thought we would post these images of it's progress up for your viewing pleasure!

Enjoy!

Just what I needed :P

2006-04-25T15:23:00.000-05:00

Apparently not everyone can get to the Alpha Shade site. Not sure WHY, but my server guys are looking into it. It's extremely difficult to troubleshoot because most people, including myself, can see it just fine.

This happened before early last year, hopefully we'll be able to fix it in a few days.

No Nintendogs for Boris!

2006-04-21T05:32:00.000-05:00

So I got a Nintendo DS for my Birthday. I only have one game for it right now; Nintendogs.
If you don't know about Nintendogs, it's basically a puppy simulator, but it's very interactive. The DS has a touch pad and a mic input that is used extensively to train and play with your puppy. You teach it tricks using voice commands , you call it to you using the name you taught it, you call it a good dog etc. Almost immediately you are using encouraging "pet speak", "Sit!" "Good DOG!" "Come here!" etc. My Cats HATE this game, almost as soon as I turn it on they are crying and giving me these hurt looks. It's really kind of sad. I really haven't had the time to play it much anyway because of Alpha Shade, but I think I'll have to get a game that is less disturbing to my flesh and blood pets and maybe just play this one when I'm on the road or something.

Chris Trip Pics

2006-04-01T01:59:00.000-06:00

As most of you know Chris is an engineer on the railroad ( he drives the trains.) He's taken a lot of pictures with his digital camera and he's always sending them to me, so I figured I'd put some up for your viewing pleasure!

Studio B

2006-02-28T08:54:00.000-06:00

I was looking through a pile of old CDs and I came across a documentary that I did back in 1998 called Studio B.

Studio B documented the TV show and Movies that my friends and I did starting in 1990. It's narrated by yours truly and includes a bunch of small samples from the show and two full movies that we did. Of course because I was limited in what I could reproduce on cd back then the movies are about 2 x 2" wide.

Actually now that I think back on it Studio B is a big reason I got hired at the job where I learned most of the skills I use to produce Alpha Shade. I showed it to my future bosses sort of as a side note, and they got all excited about it because it was similar to what they were doing in courseware at the time.

A lot has happened in my life since I made that Documentary, at that point I was at the beginning of my career looking forward, now I own my own business and am doing what I had set out to do all those years ago. Working in Multimedia.

Thaw Damn You!

2006-02-20T23:54:00.000-06:00

Delicious yes.. but waiting for it to thaw? Some cats can't wait.

ugh Crunchy Peanut butter!

WonderCon Pics

2006-02-20T06:44:00.000-06:00

I finally got Chris to send me some of the pictures from WonderCon so here they are!

Our Very First Alpha Shade CosPlay! Thanks Chris!

It's like she walked off the page ;)

Chris and Chris at our booth

A dedicated Fourm Fan!

Our Booth after one of the Banners Failed (boo)

JQ playing while we worked! O_o

Convention Season! I'm huntin' Baggage

2006-02-05T20:07:00.000-06:00

Alpha Shade's first convention of the year is fast approaching And I've been busy getting things ready. I redesigned the Display for 06'. Last years was a pain to transport so for this year I bought pop up banner displays and made the tabletop in two pieces that I'll just hinge together. It will all fit in a "bat bag" ( for baseball bats ) that comes in below the 62 linear inch restriction that all the airlines have for Check-in baggage. I should be getting the printed pieces back tomorrow.

One of the challenges of going to any convention is getting your stuff there. Because we don't have a truckload of merchandise to take I've opted to pack it all up in suitcases. We did this last season as well and for the most part it went great, but there were some busted suitcases, rifling through the books by luggage inspectors, awkward bags that were hard to transport etc. There isn't too much I can do about the inspectors, but I forked out for a couple baggage dollies and I bought some more small wheeled guys. That coupled with the consolidation of the Display elements should make it much easier to handle all the stuff I need to bring to the cons. My hope is to make it so that two people can handle it by themselves. Last year I needed three. Since I may not be able to have three people at every convention I'm going to this year (10 to 12!) it would be nice if the new two person plan works!

Nutty!

2006-02-01T22:58:00.000-06:00

Oh Yeah! Aspirin!

2006-01-19T02:50:00.000-06:00

It's been such a long time since I've taken aspirin for something as mundane as a headache that I forgot that it actually works! My head was killing me about half an hour ago and now it's down to a dull ache. Thanks aspirin!

PAID for sketchy

2006-01-13T03:45:00.000-06:00

I love working for 20 hours straight on the comic while being called lazy! YAY!

Oh well.. I really want to keep working but my eyes are burning so it's time to call it for a night. Still I should be done with the page by Saturday morning. I thought I'd be done THIS morning, but there was more detail work on this page than I thought, those goofy machine guns take a couple hours each to draw. I wish I could just draw a box with a lopsided hole in the front like everyone else, but the gun nuts in the forum would kill me.

Sigh.. I miss the old days when I could get away with sketchy.. I got PAID for sketchy :P

The Napkin of Truth

2006-01-08T22:03:00.000-06:00

Rants are finished

2005-12-21T10:07:00.000-06:00

Chris and I finished up the rants last night, I was up for 24 hours took a 5 hour sleep break then worked for another 40 to get everything ready to go and shipped out. I'm going to be putting up a demo on the site later today.. I need to get more sleep first though.

Printing the CDs

Assembling the boxes
There were a lot to assemble

Chris holds the first completed rant to come off the assembly line
The package!

Finishing up the rants

2005-12-15T21:53:00.000-06:00

We've been working really hard on the Rant animations for the last couple of weeks. I'm trying to get them ready in the next couple of days so I can get the preorders to people before Christmas. Needless to say everything else has been taking a back seat to this project until we get them out. As usual I always underestimate how long things will take by x3. I would factor that into my calculations, but I'm afraid that if I did things would take three times longer than THAT! Still I think with a lot of hard work we should be able to meet our deadline. The Cd packages are going to be a little different than I originally planned. Instead of two cds per season there is now one, this is because we will be putting all of the animations on a separate disk. So the Box set will be 3 CDs with mp3s and a Flash player interface, and the Rant animation disk.. I may make it into an actual DVD. That would be cool, but I may not have time to figure out the details on that one. Either way there is over an hour of animated Alpha Rants. I think they are pretty funny and I can't wait to share them with you guys. I'm pretty excited about getting this out the door. I'm sorry that it took so long, but I think in the end it will be worth the wait! Once the preorders are done I will be raising the price on the Package deal. We will be offering the Animations separately after the preorders.

Here are some more preview images from the rants for you to enjoy!

Fun Fun Code Time

2005-12-04T08:03:00.000-06:00

Well this week has been full of irritating coding problems. I've been trying to code up a mp3 player for the alpha Rant CDs using the new Flash components. Unfortunately that mean having to learn how to link up xml in Flash the new way, learning all the new annoying things they have done with Actionscript 2 and a whole slew of annoying and needlessly complicated programming tasks.

After getting everything talking to eveything else I realized that when the playhead of the MediaPlayback component reached the end of the track it just stopped. It didn't go to the next track.. "That's odd" I thought. And after two days of searching for the new way to program it to go to the next track, ( the old way only half worked, interestingly enough it would go to the next item in the list, but nothing would happen?!?!) I gave up, and had my programming friends look at it, only to discover, though much digging, that there really isn't a way to do it, they didn't include any way to handle that information in their component. :P

So tonight the Forum was hacked.. yay, more idiotic programming problems. So I'm working on restoring THAT... Oh well I guess it was bound to happen eventually.

I remember the old days, when all I had to do was draw little pictures of bikes and trains and ducks for courseware. It was great, at the end of the day I could go home and leave it all behind. Cook super for the wife, watch a movie, maybe go out with the friends.. Sigh.

Happy Thanksgiving

2005-11-23T22:32:00.000-06:00

Boris sez HAPPY THANKSGIVING!

Alpha-Pod

2005-11-05T01:55:00.000-06:00

Yay! Alpha Rant on my new Video iPod!

Nietchie + Nietchie

Good 'ol Home Cookin

Chris appraises the situation

Rant update

2005-10-24T22:34:00.000-05:00

Still working on the rant animations. It's frustrating how long it's taking, I guess I didn't realize when I said 12 rant animations that that would be an hour of animation! Still we are working on it as fast as we can, and it will be totally worth it in the end!

One of the problems I had was that the Chris and Joe animations are all code driven, so there really isn't anyway to see what you have animated until after you publish the swf format (flash file output). Since these animations are about 5 minutes long each if you animate something at the end of the rant you have to wait until you get to that point to check it properly. So I made these code guides that animate each section of the code that I will be using. You can't really do it effectively with stills since you need to know what the animation looks like, how long it takes and how it interacts with each other piece of code you are calling at the same time. With this I can tell what the animation I am coding up looks like while I code it. I still have to check it. But it's a lot easier now. I was trying to keep it all in my head before. Anyway, Try it out! Click on the Chris and Joe images below.

Here are some more Chris animation screenshots for your enjoyment

And a close-up of "the Nietch" sleeping.

Boring!

2005-10-20T16:33:00.000-05:00

FallCon & Anniversary

2005-10-13T17:10:00.000-05:00

FallCon went really well for us last weekend. It was a smaller convention than we usually go to, but it was local and they give free tables to comic creators. This was also the first convention that we've gone too that they provided soda and food. A+ on that ;) It's nice when the organizers take care of you.
I finally broke down and made my own backdrop to take with us. At Otakon I had to rent a backdrop and it really wasn't cost effective. It needs a little bit of tweaking but it collapses into a suitcase and that was what I was looking for.

The competition was fierce!

We met some other webcomic creators.

And bought a bunch of comics.

This weekend I'll be heading up north to my friend's cabin for my 7th year anniversary with JQ. Jackie has
never been there so it should be pretty exciting for her.

The cabin is just south of the Minnesota-Canadian boarder.

On a fairly large lake called White Birch.

Angels 2200 Guest Page

2005-10-05T06:07:00.000-05:00

We were asked to do a guest page for an old Angels 2200 comic a couple weeks ago. I finally got around to doing it this weekend and I think it turned out pretty well. Even though it meant one less Alpha Shade page this week it was fun to draw something else for a change.

So with that out of the way it's time to get back to work on A-S related things. I'm going to have a table at FallCon this year and I need to make some sort of backdrop for my area. What I would like to do is make one that I could fit into a suitcase for when I got to conventions I can't drive too. I have some good ideas for how to do that. Hopefully I'll get to work on that tomorrow.

Emily

2005-09-28T06:52:00.000-05:00

The morning after I got Emily I called the vet to see if I could get her in for a vet checkup after the disaster of the night that I got her. They said they could get her in at 2:30. The Fleas weren't the only thing she had, she also had leukemia, herpes, upper respiratory infections ear mites and worms. The vet recommended that I put her down. With the leukemia plus all the other issues she had going on with her she wasn't going to make it much longer. So I did.

I can't believe that I had to make that decision. I can't believe that she is gone. I was all set to have her live with us for the next 20 years and now it's all over. I feel horrible and empty inside like there should be some way to fix it all but I can't.

Luckily My cats would have nothing to do with her and I isolated her in my office with me, leukemia is a communicable disease and my cats could have caught it as well. I could have lost Boris and Nietchie too.

I know I only had her for less than a day, but I was already so attached to her. I miss her terribly. :(

Emily

2005-09-15T05:42:00.000-05:00

Last week I got a call from my mother saying that her friends boyfriend bought a Maine coon kitten and was having it brought up from Iowa at the end of the week. The problem was that Her Friends daughter is SUPER allergic to cats so they couldn't keep it. So mom wanted to know if either Chris or I could take it. I wasn't so sure because I already have two cats and they wouldn't be all that happy if I brought in another one, but I agreed to see it. So they said they would bring it over on Saturday... Then it wasn't coming up till Sunday then Sunday night, then they picked it up on Monday, but wanted to spend some time with it, so I didn't get to meet it until Wednesday, and by then I had talked myself into taking it at least for a while.

So they brought it over and it was a little 6 week old Female Maine Coon named Emily.

My Cats were really angry and they have been sulking and hissing all night. So I confined it to my office. She was sleeping on my lap when I looked down at her and a bug ran across her nose. Horrified I started looking through her fur and all the signs of fleas were there.. Including of course-- fleas. So I gave her a quick bath which did nothing but make her cry. So I put her back in her carrying box and ran off to the store for some flea treatment. I came back and sprayed it on her and worked it in. According to the bottle in 5 to 10 minutes all the fleas would be dead. I put her back in the box and waited. I took her out and started combing her with the flea comb. I got some fleas out of her, but they weren't dead. In fact they seemed to have enjoyed their little bath. So I combed her pretty good and got a bunch of fleas out which I drowned in Windex. The I set about vacuuming the house, taking showers myself and washing all of my clothes I was wearing Emily's cat bed, I woke JQ up and made her shower and I washed all of our pillow cases and covers. In the meantime I was also combing Emily and I got more and more fleas off of her and drowned them in Windex. I also cleaned out her ears which were very dirty, it took about 20 Q-tips. I think I've gotten all the fleas now. I'm hoping that the damage was minimal, I only had her for a couple hours before I saw the fleas and set to work getting rid of them. As soon as sane people are up I'll call the Vet and see if I can't get her in today.

What a crappy night :( Needless to say I didn't get much work done tonight.

AR update + Welcome Canada!

2005-09-08T02:09:00.000-05:00

Chris has been making some pretty good progress on the Alpha Rant CD animations, I guess it was a little mean on me to make him do so much of it considering that he really doesn't have any experience with animation or flash beyond what I taught him to draw the storyboards, but his rant doodles are just too damn funny ;D

In other news I took the night off from the page last night to redesign the Alpha-Store. The design was fine when we only had two or three products but when we got over a dozen of them it was gangly and awkward. I'm not the biggest fan of how it looks now, but at least it's functional! ;)

I also made the decision to add Canada to domestic shipping, so to all my Canadian brothers and sisters to the north welcome to cheaper shipping!

What the?

2005-09-03T06:31:00.000-05:00

The power in my house keeps browning out and crashing my computer while I'm working. I noticed that the power went out yesterday while I was sleeping too.. my clocks were all binking.

Ugg. oh well I've had enough experience with Crashing computers that I automatically hit crtl-s every couple minutes. Still sometimes I get caught not saving for 10-15 minutes if I really get into the details of a drawing. I've only lost a couple minutes of work tonight, but still you have to restart everything and get resituated.

Otakon

2005-08-23T19:40:00.000-05:00

Well I made it back from Otakon 2005! ; D

My father and my wife came along to help out, which was good because we had 7 suitcases full of merchandise and my display, plus my brothers laptop, and I never could have done it without them. We ended up getting a hotel about a mile and a half from the convention center, and between lugging suitcases back and forth ( we didn't have to lug them ALL after the first day but still! ) and standing the whole con we were exhausted at the end of each night. I really didn't get a chance to meet up with anyone who didn't stop by to see me this time. I tried to go to the Artist alley after the dealers room closed on Saturday, but all the kids from the dealers room ran over there after it closed and it was nuts! I meet the guys from Frontbeat at their table then gave up. :( Fred stopped by at the end of the con on Sunday and I talked to Greg and the crew from Wizzywig a lot, but that was about it for mingling. Sorry guys! I promise next time I'll do more!

I did take the time to go to the webcomics 101 panel, which I thought had some pretty good information in it. Particularly about copyright and copyright infingement since there were some things in there that I had assumed but hadn't actually taken the time to find out for sure. Sounds like bad news for those who make sprite comics O_o Thanks for the info Chris. T Campbell's section was interesting as well. The guy from Keenspace didn't really have time to get to his point and I'm not sure what the heck the other guy was there for, other then to be obnoxious, but he wasn't as distracting as he was trying to be so there you go. I did feel bad for them when they didn't get AV cords for their presentation, but the presentation was more about information and not so much about visuals so it turned out okay.

Dad with cracker teeth!

Jackie with her new (temporary) tattoo!

It was great to meet so many fans this time out, the other two conventions we went to only a few people had heard of us, this time about 1/3 knew about Alpha Shade! It was also gratifying that so many people who had never heard of us were intrigued enough about our stuff to pick up books shirts and posters based solely on my description of the story and my artwork. We ended up selling almost everything we came with. I guess the next con I go to I'll have to ship the merchandise. I think we are outgrowing suitcases.

Alpha Rant Progress

2005-08-11T02:00:00.000-05:00

My cat (Nietchie) is sitting on my arm... So we'll see how much I can type.
I got a chance to work on the animation for the Rants yesterday, The base section is coming along nicely, Now I just have to work on the embellishments so it's not just two talking heads.

Chris gesturing while I listen

Boris walks by

"A comic? What does THAT mean?"

Poster Proofs

2005-08-07T03:15:00.000-05:00

I finally took some time out of my schedule to make up some Alpha Shade posters. I just got the proofs yesterday, so they should printed and in my hands sometime next week ;).

Molly Maple Poster ( 24 in x 36 in )

Biplane Attack ( 24 in x 36 in )

Of course I thought I would add them to the store. But after looking at the store I decided that I need to redesign it. It was great when I only had a couple items in there, but when you have to scroll down the page for 2 minutes to see all the products it's time for a change!

Unfortunatly while I was redesigning the store, one thing lead to another and pretty soon I was knee deep in redesigning the whole site :P not really something I have the time for right now with the Alpha Rant CD Animations coming up and getting ready for Otakon and trying to get pages and rants out... So it's about half redesigned right now, as much as it pained me to do it, I had to tear myself away from it and work on getting the next page out.

Boris checks out the poster proofs

Coming around

and flop. This is mine. He wasn't happy when I moved him!

Working on Rant Animation

2005-07-25T09:30:00.000-05:00

Here are some screen shots of Chris from the character animation that I am doing for the Alpha-Rant shorts that will be included on the CDs. It's looking pretty slick so far and the animation tests are going well. I'm hoping to have a demo preview up early next week.

Chris tells it like it is

Alpha Rant CD preview

2005-07-13T03:04:00.000-05:00

I've been working on the jacket and CD designs for the Alpha Rant CD's that we are going to be putting out soon. There are over 150 hours of rants so far so the files will be in mp3 format(no way am I making 113 audio CD's per package O_o ), and I'll probably include a menu system on the CD - html or flash, I'm looking into it.

Below is a first look preview of what the package will look like. Each season will have 2-3 CD's included.

the first three seasons

Cat Grapes

2005-07-02T04:56:00.000-05:00

My cat Boris likes to lick the condensation off of things, Cans, water bottles, windows etc. but I'm getting ahead of myself ... I had a bunch of grapes that didn't have a lot of flavor, they were getting kind of old, so I thought I better eat them anyway, especally since I got tricked into buying them because they were in special packaging..I washed them off and put them in a bowl and was about to eat them when I remembered a health food cooking show I used to watch on occasion back in the 80's. IT was an asian woman who would always do things like freeze bannas and grapes or fry them up wioth eggplants or something. So I said, huh.. you know a light freezing for 20 minutes or so might make these worth eating. So I put them in the freezer, and promptly forgot about them. So tonight They are hard as rocks. I wasn't so keen on eating them anyway, because according to Alton Brown freeing things like fruit creates large crysatals that can puncture cell walls, basically turning the fruit into mush ( this can be avoided by flash freezing, but that's another show ) after a few minutes they started thawing a bit and I started eating them.. Freezing hadn't improved much of anything. Boris on the other had, went NUTS over them. And that is a really long explanation for the two pictures below.

Frozen grapes are a great Lowfat Cat treat!

Condensation delight!

Korean Ginseng Drink With Root

2005-06-30T05:29:00.000-05:00

Who would drink something like this? It looks like the facehugger from Aliens in a jar without the top part. Well Apparently I would, because after 3 trips to the store I couldn't resist buying it. Unfortunately It tasted pretty much like you would think it would... like someone stuck a houseplant in your flat ginger ale and let it sit for a couple days.

What was I thinking?

It's too late now.

Ah! All the flavor of dirt, none of the grit

Storm!

2005-06-30T05:19:00.000-05:00

So I had my drapes closed all night that night and about 5 in the morning I decided to open them and BAM this is what I saw, it was much more impressive in real life, it had lightning in it and everything. It ended up producing quite the storm.

Opened my drapes..What did I SEE?

Molly

2005-06-20T05:43:00.000-05:00

This is the new Molly design. She's gone through quite a few, but I think this is the best one so far.

Molly Head

Molly

With the next page update all of the "6 Friends" will have finally been introduced. Which, interestingly enough just happens to be page 100! Yay to me!

Like Diet Coke from the Tap Only Without the Ice

2005-06-08T22:27:00.000-05:00

New Coke Zero

Like a good restaurant diet coke without the ice, but with the same effect as if it had ice in it, only without the cubes.

I have to say that although I think it's funny that Coke has three versions of essentially the same product out right now; Diet Coke, Diet Coke with Splenda, and Coca-Cola Zero, That this version might be the best. It's hard to say after half a bottle, but I'm liking it so far. While Diet Coke with Splenda tastes like Diet Coke with splenda in it, and Diet Coke tastes like itself, Zero is like a less harsh version of Diet Coke. It is sweetened with a blend of aspartame and acesulfame potassium which I guess cuts down on the Aspartame after taste you usually get with Diet Coke.

I have noticed a slight metallic taste on my tongue now though. Still, as someone who will sit and drink 3 to 6 cans of Diet Coke in a row, I can see this one being able to hold up to the cumulative effect. DC with Splenda does NOT.

A-Kon

2005-06-07T00:37:00.000-05:00

Well we just got back from A-Kon. We had a table in the Artists Alley and participated in 8 webcomic related panels with other webcomic artists.

Getting all of our stuff to Dallas was kind of crazy, we took 6 suitcases full of books, our display stuff etc. We barely had room for clothes! After Acen we learned that wheeled suitcases are a godsend and I bought a whole bunch from Target right before we left, they were cheap, and some of the handles broke off, (we were really pushing the limit of weight the things could stand up to) but in the end we wouldn't have been able to do it without them.
Here are some pictures:

JQ behind our table, we had to improvise our set up.

JQ again, That's the Altermeta table behind us ;)

A fan! Buying the Sampler Lite! = 0

Another fan buying the book!

These two cuties bought the book later

Omi from Counter Culture keeping us company on the late shift

Best Merle Ever!

It was fun to put faces(And to give the business) to a whole lot of web comic creators that we have known about for a long time. Such as:
Juno from Star Cross'd Destiny
Xero from Konsekai Swordwaltzer
Casey from Altermeta
Eirik and co from Chisuji
Shivae from Shivae Studios Webcomics
Omi from Counter Culture
Josh from Girly
Trish from Mine's Bigger

The Business guys:
Greg from Wizzywig
Antarctic Press

And we met some new comic guys as well such as:
Drew from Halloween Man
J. Grant and Mel Hynes from Two Lumps
Trunks and Soto And many more.

We will be expanding upon our experiences in our Alpha Rant, be sure to listen ;)

A-Kon was my last big trip for the summer so I'm looking forward to getting back to my regular schedule!

37 wedding

2005-05-31T01:59:00.000-05:00

This last weekend I flew out to California for my friend Brian's wedding. It was a mix of Jewish and Indian Christain wedding traditions that amazingly mixed quite well. It was one of the better weddings I've been to, and I've been to hundreds of weddings (my quartet used to play wedding gigs all the time). Still it was sort of sad in a way, not because of the day, but because it made me feel old, like the closing of another chapter. But never mind that, here's to the next!

Brian waits

Karen arrives

Jess Speaks

They listen

Brian ties the Thali

Karen and the Sari

And as always, it ends with cake

JQ on the left

Jess on the right

Pickled Garlic

2005-05-23T23:26:00.000-05:00

Whoa! Crazy Page 96 storyboard preview! (zoomed in)

Chris just finished the storyboard for page 96, so the race is on to see if I can finish it before I go to California for my friends Wedding this Friday. It sure would be nice because we are heading over to Dallas for A-Kon on the 3rd of June. It will be interesting to see how that goes in comparison to Anime Central. We only have an Artist table this time, and since they are setting it up in a giant square, I'm going to be hard pressed to figure out a way to set up our booth properly, especially since we have to take everything on the plane with us.. O_o I have a half formed idea in my head about how to get the back drop up.. But we'll see.

Anime Central a Success

2005-05-16T17:39:00.000-05:00

Despite some early programming issues, Anime Central went off pretty well for us. Parking was not so great and we didn't know about the loading dock area, so we ended up having to park in a parking garage and transport all of our merchandise and display elements about half a mile to our booth. Luckily I had just bought a little suitcase with wheels that would just hold one 50lb box of our books or we would have been hurting!

The Convention Center from our room.

When we got there someone had swiped our table, but that was quickly sorted out and we got set up with time to spare. We didn't have any power, so I didn't get to work on the page at all, but to tell the truth, it would have been hard anyway, we were pretty busy with sales and answering questions.

Our Booth! ( it was more impressive in real life )

On Friday night Chris and I gave our "Creating Webcomics" Panel. It was a pretty full room and we got applause at the end. Some of the audience came by our booth later and told us it was the best panel they had ever been to, That's always nice to hear!

The next night we got together with Carrie from 9th Elsewhere, Jerry from Secret of Mana Theater and Brion from Flipside and recorded a three hour three hour Alpha Rant Webcomic interview special. I will be posting that as a podcast after I get done editing it. We also talked to some other people about doing some remote interviews, so hopefully those will happen in the coming months as well.

Anyway, sales of Chapter one went really well, and I'm feeling inspired to work harder on Chapter 2. The cool thing is that most of the people who bought the book have never heard of us before, so we reached a whole new audience. It was nice to finally get to meet a lot of our favorite webcomic creators like Michael Poe from Errant Story, FAUB's John Fortman, Christopher Snowdon from Steampowered, Dirk Tiede from Paradigm Shift, the guys from Studio Antithesis and many more. We also made some great contacts. We'll defenatly be back next year!

Pic of JQ, Me and Chris, thanks to Stacie from Studio Anti Thesis

Me and an Actual Fan! Her Favorite page was 74.

Fred and Sarah from Megatokyo stopped by to say hello.

No Con is complete without a cute girl in a Pikachu outfit

Back to the Grind

2005-05-08T20:13:00.000-05:00

Now that the books have all been sent out it's time to get back to the grindstone and crank out some pages. It really is time to update the website as well though. It's starting to feel kind of pieced together, which isn't my intention. What I'd like to do it get it more unified, change the navigation etc. I finally got around to buying the new Version of Macromedia Studio 2004, so I have a lot more freedom to design the site..

Speaking of Macromedia I was shocked to hear that Adobe is trying to acquire Macromedia! I have no idea what that means for my favorite program - Flash. I'm slightly concerned because I really hate the Illustrator version of vector illustration, Flash kicks it's ass. I know there are a lot of designers out there who don't use Flash like I do however and they have been clamoring for Macromedia to change it's drawing tools to be more like Illustrators for years. Very Scrary! On the other hand, I am NOT impressed with the changes Macromedia made to the drawing tools in the latest version of Flash. It also seems to be a huge memory hog, I have 2 gigs of Memory in my computer and Flash 2004 still runs slow when the illustrations start to get complicated. So we'll see. It could either be a really good thing or a really bad thing. I guess the only way to know is to wait and see.

Everything's Shipped

2005-05-07T14:08:00.000-05:00

All of the preorders are now out the door and on their way. What a relief!

I can't wait for people to satrt getting them!

International Packages Packed

2005-05-07T05:00:00.000-05:00

I just finished packing up the international orders this morning. Filling out the custom forms and matching all the little pieces together, labels, customs forms, packing slips etc. was a huge pain in the butt. I'm not sure how this is going to work at the post office. I'd like to use the self serve kiosk again, but I may have to use a teller, I shudder at how long THAT will take :P I'll let you know how it goes. Hopefully it will be easy?

But probably not.

Domestic Orders Shipped

2005-05-06T05:50:00.000-05:00

Well I just finished shipping off all of the US orders this morning. I started to do them yesterday afternoon using the self serve kiosk but it broke. So I took the remainder of the box I was doing ( about 15 packages, stood in line and had the postal guy do them for me, after 20 minutes and feeling like the rest of the customers were going to kill me for taking so long I decided to come back this morning when no one would be there and the self serve kiosk would be fixed.

I have to say, The self serve mailing system is awesome! (when it works) you can do a package in about 20 seconds from start to finish, which kicks the pants off the systems the post office employees have to use, they take about a minute and a half per package. AND it's open 24 hours, so I went at 4am this morning, no one but me and 4 boxes of packages ;)

I did learn some interesting things:
You can't use self serve to ship to military bases
It takes 35 days to send a package to Hawaii by parcel post
It takes 35 days to send a package to Alaska by parcel post

So next time I'll have to use the Priority mail envelopes to send stuff to Hawaii or Alaska.

US orders packed

2005-05-05T01:31:00.000-05:00

Well it was a choice between getting the page out on Wednesday or packing up the book orders. I went for the orders.

Half of the preorders are packed!

I packed up the domestic orders tonight, I'll be doing international tomorrow. I think I have to include customs forms with them :P luckily I can download those from the web so I can cut and paste in the addresses. I'm wondering how awful this is going to be when I get them to the post office. I should probably go when no one else will be around!

We have the books

2005-05-03T12:36:00.000-05:00

Well My friend Aaron and I picked up the books from the printers and took them to my brothers house yesterday. There are 113 boxes that each weigh about 50 lbs. It took three trips even with the gigantic truck his girlfriend let us borrow!

108 boxes of comics (I took 5 to my house so I can send them out)

I also made a promotional video of the book so people can get an idea of what it looks like.
Of course nothing can really give you the idea of how nice it is until you see it in person and hold the thing in your hand. It's really a heavy book, (because we used 100lb glossy paper) and the print quality is supurb!

I will start sending these out probably tomorrow, I want to finish the current page first. It's going to be a big project, we've had about 150 peorders so far, that's alot of envelope stuffing!

Snow?

2005-05-01T17:53:00.000-05:00

Should it be snowing in May?

It looks like rain here, but it's actually fluries

The Books are IN! But I can't get them yet.

2005-04-30T23:22:00.000-05:00

Well the books are IN! It's very exciting I have one here, and even though I had seen all the proof and I went to the press checks and even have the actual uncut and bound version of the book I wasn't really prepared for how incredibly awesome it is! Not just the art, the quality of the printing is amazing! You can actually see all the little details I put in the comic that I thought would only be visible in the Flash version. Like on page 89 you can read the computer monitor ;D I can't wait to send these babies out.

I'll be picking them up Monday morning and I'll be working on sending them out over the next week.

The Book!

The Back of the Book!

Next to a can to show scale

Here it is open

Out of focus, but next to Boris

Not a good picture but Boris has the face I had when I saw it

Convention Display

2005-04-28T23:11:00.000-05:00

We are going to Anime Central this May 13th and for the last month or so we have been scrambling to get everything in place for when we go. We will have a merchants table there, It was important to have something to sell (we needed to get the book done, which it is, I'll be picking them up Monday), but It is also important to have a halfway decent booth. So I made up some display elements last night and delivered them to the printer today.

8' table cover

Crappy 10 minute mock up

I probably could have held off on the three four foot posters, I'm not even sure if we will have a backdrop or not at the Anime Central booth (I hope so.) I'm having pages 77, 90 and 92 printed out because I think they represent a nice cross-section of settings and styles from our Alpha Shade.

I told the printers that I need them by the 10th, it's a little closer than I'm comfortable with, but I wanted to give them time to get it done right.

We will also be presenting at a couple panels while we are there, I'm not sure when that will be, I think they are going to post the final schedule on the 30th of April.

Movin' the Server

2005-04-28T00:15:00.000-05:00

Supposedly we will be moving the Alpha Shade server tonight, well this morning, the server guy was supposed to call me at midnight, they like to move them at low traffic times, of course it's 12:17 now. I figure I'll give him until I finish this entry then I'm calling him up.

I really hope that this fixes the problems we've been having with random people mysteriously not being able to access our site. I'm also adding a new DNS with a different ISP attached to it. It would be REALLY nice if this fixed the problems. We've had people not able to get to our site since February and it's really not good for PR, our numbers or, lets face it, book sales!

Page 92 - the nib wear

2005-04-27T16:39:00.000-05:00

When I bought my Intuos 3 tablet last Christmas, it came with a couple new kinds of nibs for the pen. Previously the nibs came in white and were relatively hard, which meant that they would slide on the tablet surface in a way that made it hard to draw slow lines. The way to get around this was to place a piece of paper over the surface of the tablet and that would give you pretty much the same drawing resistance as you would get drawing on an actual piece of paper. One of the new nibs is the felt tip nib, which ups the nib resistance on the tablet giving much the same effect as using a piece of paper without having to actually use a piece of paper.


Nib wear after page 92

I really like these new nibs, however, as you can see in the picture above they don't last long. That nib was new when I started page 92! Unfortunately, the tablet only came with one felt nib which I had rendered useless within a week. When I went to the Wacom store to order more they were out of stock. ( apparently I wasn't the only one who was excited about the new nibs )They finally got them back in stock at the beginning of this month so I ordered up about 35 of them. It's about $5 for a 5 pack.

It would probably be more economical to just use the paper, but I think that it kind of messes up the eraser on the pen when you do.

Is Alpha Shade Manga?

2005-04-24T19:51:00.000-05:00

Well yes and no..I would defanitly say that manga and Anime have strong influences on my style. I was never all that interested in Superhero type comics, the muscle bound hero in tights formula seemed just that.. a formula. But I enjoyed many western style graphic stories as a kid: Elfquest, the short stories in Heavy Metal, some collections of SciFi comics, and a bunch more that I can't really remember the names of right now. It's true that most of the comics Chris and I collected were Manga: Area 88, Naussica, Akira, Crying Freeman, Mai the Psychic Girl, Grey, Outlanders etc. The point I'm trying to make is that I've had plently of exposure to all sorts of comics.

But is Alpha Shade Manga? If you mean did I find a Manga Artist I liked and copy their style exactly, then no. If you mean I live in Japan and I'm Japanese ( which I don't, and I'm not ) so any comic I produce is Manga, then no. If you mean that my style has Manga influences, then I guess so. Personally, I think that it's not really the right question, my style is my own style, it's got influences from all over the place, but it's all mine. When I first started the comic I was swayed by the idea that I should try to conform to some sort of Mangaish style, but as time goes on I've abandoned that altogether and gone for drawing the way I want to. Things have gone much better art wise since then, it was too limiting and lets face it, what's the point of drawing exactly like someone else, or in a particular style? It's not going to make you famous, it's going to make you a follower.

Interlude

2005-04-23T23:08:00.000-05:00

Well I'm in the middle of drawing page 92 right now, I'm just taking the time to eat some popcorn and as everyone knows, it's hard to eat popcorn and draw at the same time.

Laura and Nicole

I think it's going pretty well, I'm taking a little bit more time on the characters then I normally do, because I'm trying to upgrade my style a bit, and Nicole needs to look good.

Anyway, I'm going to get back to work. I want to get all the people draw in tonight so I make sure I can finish the page Sunday night.

Crazy piles of prints

2005-04-23T00:04:00.000-05:00

So I went to bed about 9 this morning, well yesterday morning now, and got called at 11:30 for the press check for the cover at 12:45. So much for sleep. When I got there they had already finished printing out all the pages for the book, it really brought it home exactly how massive the job I'm having them print is. There were five or six stacks of 2'x 3' printouts about 4 feet tall each.. I'm kind of fudging the exact numbers here, because it was kind of overwhelming. I wish I had remembered to bring my camera, I meant to. Oh well.

Anyway, I approved the cover after we played with the color a little, it was coming out more brown than maroon at first. So we got that all sorted out. A bunch of the people working on other jobs in the shop came over to ask about the comic and tell me what a great job I'm doing. Always a nice feeling.

I also got to take home a sheet from each of the page groupings, so I have uncut sheets of everything but the inside covers. Movin' right along! I thought about assembling an actual book from this, but then if I wait a couple days I've have more of them than I'll know what to do with, So I passed. Besides, there is always the possibility that someone would be interested in buying an item like this..You know.. When we are famous - er.

One whole uncut book, rolled

I need to find a place that sells bulk envelops to send all this stuff out. Once I finish the current page I'll have to get serious about finding a place that does that.

another thing I need to get going on is some signage for our convention tables. That's coming up in a couple weeks. I want to use the guy who did the giant "Cats in Hats" job last year.

happy customers

If I don't hurry up he won't be able to get it done in time. And that would be a shame because they do a good job there and they can print on a variety of materials.

Press Check

2005-04-21T23:37:00.000-05:00

Went to the printers for a press check today. That means that I get to check the colors and quality before they print out 60,000 pages ( there are 8 up on a page ). Anyway, I couldn't be more pleased, it looks completely awesome and I'm very happy.
(large version here)
I'll be going in tomorrow for a press check on the Cover, they are doing that on a different printer.

Nicole

2005-04-20T22:57:00.000-05:00

I'm finally getting to Draw some of the main Characters of Alpha Shade. It's been over two years since I've drawn Nicole, so it's cool to see what she looks like now that I'm better at drawing.

I'm changing how I do somethings like Hair, I don't think I'll be doing black outlines on them anymore, I think it looks much better with colors.

Anyway, I'm prety happy with how the new chapter is going. The Todd Character is on this page too, I never have figured out what he's going to look like.

Happy Birthday to Me

2005-04-19T23:53:00.000-05:00

Well today was my birthday, when it started out I didn't think anyone was going to remember at all, but it turned out everyone did. Still it's kind of depressing to turn 31, somehow it doesn't seem right to be that old yet. The last couple years have been kind of nuts with All the work I've put into Alpha Shade and it's almost like I've been frozen at 28. The time has gone so fast and yet it seems like I've been doing this forever.

Chris says that I have to get at least two pages out a week, and he's right, the story is never going to get anywhere unless I get the pages out quicker. Now that Chapter two has started I really should come up with a better work schedule. Right now I work every day unless I'm obligated to be out of town or something, but I think I get burned out and end up working slower. Or maybe I need to stop thinking of it like a job. I mean, YES it IS a job, but it's more like a lifestyle. MM, I don't know, I don't want to sound like I'm whining, It's great to be able to work on a project like this, and my art has gotten TONS better on the last two years ... I guess it's just that there really isn't any end to it. If I think of it more like something I want to do and less than something I have to do...

Speaking of A-S the preorders for the book are going amazingly well. I was getting pretty apprehensive about the whole thing after the low T-Shirt sales, but I think it's going to be okay ;D
It's only been four days or so and sales have already paid for 1/5th of the printing costs. That doesn't sound like much, but 5000 really high quality books are REALLY expensive to print, so I'm quite pleased with that number. We only need to sell 640 book to pay for the printing costs, which leaves us with 4360 books that sell for pure profit. Not that I expect that we will sell anywhere near that many this year, but since I'll be doing this so many years I can't even think about it, we will have plenty of time to sell them.

I'm going to go back and reread the story tonight. I haven't really read it for more than a year. Since I'm going to have to figure out what most of the main characters need to look like in this chapter, I figure I need to re-acquaint myself with who they are.

I might take a couple days next week to go hang out at the UofM too. I was just there with JQ tonight and it's funny how only a college campus can feel like a college campus. College students too, there is something about them that is so obviously college. Like a slouchy-optimism coupled with a "I just gotta be me just like everyone else" dress code. It would be nice to portray that in the comic.