New Copper Road! 12/20

UPDATE:  It apparently showed up at midnight west coast time! That also happened the last time this glitch appeared. Interesting! Especially since the TWC people claim they don't use the west coast time anymore! Woop woop!  Anyway, I'll leave the original post as it was, below:

Hey, folks! Apparently TopWebComics is still glitching on me, so my new incentive isn't actually appearing yet. Still, I'm going to post this and ask you try voting anyway.  (Vote here to MAYBE see the new comic.) Every time the site has glitched on me, the incentive did eventually appear. I'm curious about WHEN it actually shows up. (Is it only after a certain time zone passes over to midnight?) If you vote and see the comic, post a comment under today's comic to let me know!  ("It's still not there!" comments are only useful once an hour.)

For the record, I uploaded the new Copper Road at 8pm eastern US time. It works from my TWC incentive control panel, so I know it's there. Somewhere the code isn't making a connection correctly. I've sent another email to TWC about the issue, and I'm hoping this time I'll get a reply more helpful than, "Tech support says nothing is wrong." Because all the complaints are just us having a mass hallucinations? (It's hard to be optimistic about a support staff when sending messages to their email address returns an automated error message.)

I guess a tech support nightmare is a proper way to end my little "nightmares turned reality" series of Copper Roads.  I hope you've had fun watching lives be ruined!  (By the way, my wake-up jolt this morning was a wasp flying into my face... in my bathroom. That's a good summary of my 2014, the year when my nightmares became my everyday reality!)

New Copper Road! 7/17/13

First off, make sure to scroll down and see the book news if you haven't yet. We had a server outage recently and the result has been some coding weirdness. One bug prevented recent news posts from appearing on the front page properly, and another is messing with my FTP and preventing me from updating the front page Copper Road promo image. (It may be fixed by the time you read this, which would be great!) If you find any other oddness on the site, let me know and I will forward it to the almighty tech guy.

And now for Copper Road! After two weeks of pure conventioneering, I'm doing my best to catch up with everything. I owe you five Copper Roads, and I'm going for it! Vote here to see the first, a delightful tale of fence buddies. It shall be followed up... whenever I manage to draw the next one. Could be tomorrow, could be in a massive comic burst on the 31st. Point is, vote now or risk falling behind!

ANOTHER Copper Road + Tech issues

Why another Copper Road so soon? Read on...

(UPDATE: I guess it was just a glitch? The comment section finally appeared at midnight, when the next strip appeared. Ok, whatever. Now you guys can go back and share all those comments that would have been so good yesterday and are now useless today. Darn it.)

Obviously, something has gone wrong with the comments for today's comic. I don't know why it's not showing up, while all other comments pages are active. Tech guy doesn't know. IntenseDebate is being more helpful than usual in this regard by CLOSING THEIR HELP FORM. I won't even be able to submit a report for a few more hours, and once I do it'll probably be a while before I hear back from them. And, since it's tech support for a free service, I'm not holding my breath. Their utter incompetence with past issues is mind blowing. (I know I should be polite, and I have been with them, but after what I went through with the last help ticket...)

Man, why did this have to happen during a storyline where half the joke was the reaction in the comments section? I am so upset!

Anyway, I decided to test to see if another new comic would also have the missing comments issue, so I threw the new Copper Road into the archive. That page has a comments section, so maybe this was some stupid random glitch.

With that Copper Road archived, I had to quickly draw up a new one, so I did! Vote to see it! Why, yes, you can say it was inspired by events of the last 10 hours.

I don't know what's going to happen with comments yet. There's a chance I may be abandoning IntenseDebate after this, although it would require tech guy to figure out a code that lets the old comments stick around. There's a chance it was a random glitch and things will click back into working order at midnight. There's even a chance IntenseDebate support will come through for me! You know, once they allow me to contact them. I want to give them their say in this matter, but sheesh.

Sorry about the error messages

If you follow Precocious' RSS feed, you got a lot of error messages in your reader today. I apologize for that. Tech guy has attempted to put in a fix, so let's hope it works. Otherwise, let's all hate on Blogger/Blogspot for being really, really unreliable as of late. I don't normally check the RSS feed, so if something goes weird there, be sure to let me know!

WE CAN DO IT!

Calamity struck today as my printer went whacko and prevented me from successfully printing out the Max commission for finishing, so I had to move on. Another commission was suggested with Suzette as Rosie the Riveter, and I am all for that! It was fun, if difficult, to draw!

And then I forgot to post it for two hours, missing my midnight deadline. DAMMIT! I can't do it after all.

Family gets in the way of everything

So I'm back in DC again, on short notice and for a short visit, and I am once again shocked at how much time family eats up! I had sketches to do, dammit!

OK so it was good fun and nice bonding. STILL! I was counting on some down time to catch up. If I owe you an email or some sketches, I apologize. Email will have to wait until tomorrow, and the best I could sketch in the small window I had is seen above. (I will do better tomorrow.)

Today has been full of dark omens and miscues. For one, I have been trying to get in contact with my admissions counselor at SCAD. She called me and the message on the machine was simply "call me back." WHAT DOES THAT MEAN!? Freaking out, I call her back. Get her voice mail. I leave a message and try again a few hours later. Voice mail. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. I cannot reach this woman who is tormenting me with her elusiveness. AM I IN OR NOT!? Argh, gotta get on the road.

When I tried to shut down my computer so I could get on the road, Microsoft decided that would be the time to do 15 farking updates! While it did its thing, I went to talk to my mother (who was there recovering from a major medical miscue that ruined HER day) to kill time. After a while, I went back to find my computer powered off. Ok, so it's done! I pack up and drive to DC, encountering MAJOR ROADWORK - followed by MORE MAJOR ROADWORK with a chaser of MAJOR ROADWORK! One lane roads 4evah!

I get to my grandparents place and the first thing I see is a pot of dead basil. It seems my bro was trying to care for his girlfriend's plants while she was out of the country. He failed. So dead plants. What a welcome!

I get inside and no one seems to be around. This is a house of elders, so I assumed they were taking naps. I head upstairs to see my grandmother and aunt are no where to be seen. I decide to check on my Alzheimer's grandfather only to walk in on him getting a sponge bath from his nurse. Awesome. You know what, I'm going to skip the introduction and go set up my computer.

Power on. Booting up. KABLAMMO! There is gibberish on my screen instead of the welcome screen. AWW FUDGE! I power it down and start it again. "Windows did not start properly, would you like to run the diagnostic?" Sure. By this time, my grandmother and aunt are back from the store, so I go up and visit for a bit with them. I come back down a few minutes later to see a new error message telling me I am completely screwed and the only solution is to do a system restore. I say no. It again says the error cannot be fixed by Microsoft and my computer is ruined forever. GODDAMMITSOMUCH! Those updates blew up my computer!

So I do what any rational person would do. I refuse to listen to Microsoft and try to reboot again. The screen goes black. I wait. It flickers. I wait. It flickers some more. I get worried.

"Now configuring updates 1 of 3"

*facepalm* So either I mistakenly unplugged and packed up my computer before it was done updating, or Microsoft decided to fail miserably and pile on. At least my computer works now, NO THANKS TO THE DAMN UPDATES!

Relieved my computer actually works, I go back upstairs to listen to my aunt talk about her magical trip to Australia. (Jealousy!) Grandma calls down that a friend of the family is coming over. Yay! Then she comes down to announce another friend of the family is coming. Double yay! Also, overwhelming! We socialize for a while. Bro comes home and replaces one of the friends who had to leave. We party well into the evening before breaking up.

Now I have only two hours and change to get everything done by midnight. Bro then extends the invitation to watch Battlestar Galactica with him. Oh hell, I am not turning that down! I love BSG, and bro bonding is nice. (Here is where I learn that my arrival was very inconvenient for him as he's hosting an all-weekend geekfest in my room. Whoops.) I try to sketch during BSG, but nothing I get is great. It's time for his bed, I break away, and here I am.

I am exhausted!

Awww!

Here's the line work for the Yvette sketch. As you can see, we went with her hugging the stuffed animal. The ear and tail markings will be done in colored pencil, so that is why they are missing from this drawing. I ended up making this drawing on a full page of paper instead of the half-page as planned, so my tiniest character is nice and big for me. In the future, I may want to do a card-sized drawing for a donation incentive.

If approved, I will get to coloring - provided my printer behaves. My printer is old and surly. Don't make me replace you with the young hotshot printer/scanner combo upstairs, old man!

Time out

As hinted at in the last post, I'm going to spend this week in DC focusing on spending time with my family. Precocious will keep going, but I am going to take a break from blogging and skip this week's Copper Road. The next Copper Road should be up next Monday and I'll start blogging again once I have enough free time to work on something to post!

For those not in the know: My grandmother's heart just gave her a hospital trip. My grandfather has advanced Alzheimer's and requires full care, most of which has been handled by my grandmother. My mother is here to help for a few days. My brother gets back tomorrow. On Thursday, my aunt and her partner are coming to visit. There's going to be no free time! I'll barely be able to keep up with the comic. (Tonight and tomorrow are for working ahead!)

Family always comes first.

I can haz iPhone?

Oh lawds, what have I done? I now have a phone that is smarter that me! It's so shiny and new and INTIMIDATING! (Doesn't stop me from taking the token smug photo, though!)

Now I've gotta figure out how to USE this darn thing. As I type, I am syncing the phone with iTunes. My speaker station will now have its desired compliment - and it SHOULD charge this one! If that works, then it's on to playing with other features. Hey, I might even look into the phone part of this iPhone sometime too!

Anyone with an iPhone who has ap recommendations or general tutorial stuff, please share in the comments area. I am a complete n00b, so guidance would be appreciated.

I am not a techie

On paper, I'm a genius. I'm, like, super smart. REALLY! That being said, I'm a complete idiot when it comes to techie things. It doesn't interest me either, so that means I'll probably never learn. I can try and do the research when I am forced to look up techie stuff, but research doesn't always replace know-how.

You've seen my fail when it came to the DVD player. Witness the ultra-fail of my new monitor! Do I actually need a second monitor? Not really. I wanted it so I could split my photoshopping and webdesign duties between settings - or have a second screen for movie watching while I work. When I found a wonderfully-priced monitor on Costco.com, I decided to give dual monitors a shot!

But problems exist. My laptop doesn't have a HDMI port, which means I have to go VGA. That's not a problem with me. I can take some fuzzy letters. It's really dumb of this model to not have HDMI, but that's my ignorance at work. When I ordered it, I didn't even know what HDMI was. (As I said: Not a techie.)

The other problem is *how* to hook up dual monitors. I did some research and I read that a splitter was needed. I looked 'em up, found a cheap one and bought it. I did not think my cunning plan through. What does a splitter do? It does not split one VGA port into two. It splits one VGA *signal* into two. I've mirrored my display! All techies can laugh now, because this should have been obvious. I was misled by the internet, OK?

Now I'm at a loss. Can this bugger even *do* multiple monitors? The other port I have on this laptop is svideo, so maybe I can use that. (Y'know, if I *had* a svideo cable...) I fear I am royally boned due to my technical ignorance. (Reading through some Dell forums, some got the svideo thing to work, others claim it's impossible. I'm more confused than ever.)

Just to make this a total disaster, the new monitor has a HORRIBLE flicker. It wouldn't have been the end of the world if I couldn't have two monitors - There's always a use for an extra HDTV - but if I can't use this monitor as my main monitor, what good is it? Research online says, "oh, just set it to 75hz!" Um, the only option is 60. What can I do?

I fear it's about time to see how good Costco is about handling returns....

Fear and Loathing in the Basement

I couldn't figure out what to share today, so I stared at this blog in despair. Then I started sketching my face. Do I do the ego and cartoonify the Chrispy? (That's right, THE Chrispy!) I don't exactly sit around doodling myself that often, so my Chrispy drawing is primative and raw.

Anyway, this is not a story about doodle Chrispy, this is a story about a near disaster that would have wrecked my life and destroyed my faith in the universe. My DVD player went on the fritz!

This might not seem like a disaster to you, but I only work in two ways: With sports in the background, and while playing DVDs. I need stuff in my TV to distract the stupid part of my brain so the productive part can get things done! Without it, I am lost. Music puts me into a trance, where I sit for hours doing one thing. Stuff on the TV has a finite lifespan, and the constant shifting keeps me moving along. DVDs with me: Serious business. My DVD player is the only one that can satisfy me: A 5-disc darling that was built to sync with my Sony Bravia HDTV! It was perfect for me. During a productive streak, I can burn through TV on DVD discs like no one's business, and it's much more preferrable to do it with a few clicks of a remote than constant disc shuffling.

Last night, put in Tropic Thunder and got out what I needed to ink some comics. BAD HAPPENED. It would skip a bit, the audio would cut out and at one point it was just static. Um. Next disc? Same thing. I pulled out the discs, turned off the player, let it sit, then tried again. NOTHING. All it would do would shudder and blink helplessly. No inking was done that night. Panic and despair took over instead. I had to watch Tropic Thunder on my computer, and all joy was drained from it.

The player was under warranty, but it would still cost me $33 plus time and effort to get it replaced with a refurbished model. Y'know, a machine that already sucked once enough to fail. I was not pleased.

Today I was resigned to suck it up and try to hook in the Bose speaker/dvd system I "borrowed" from my family. This meant lots of switching out cords, and my brain has no desire to do technical stuff like that. So I gave the player another shot. Nothing but that blinking light. The HDMI light. Hmm. I have a spare HDMI cable lying around, maybe I'll try swapping that...

And the light stayed on! I watched a movie! It was the blasted CABLE! A $4 solution is far greater than a $120 solution.

Anyway, this isn't remotely interesting, but I SHARED, DAMMIT!

The day the music died

In today's "I'M AN IDIOT" moment, we feature Chrispy and his new iPod speaker!

I listen to music constantly. Without it, I get all twitchy and panicky. I had been using my old desktop to play my music through iTunes. It worked fine, until everybody died. The desktop is unreliable, the speakers are aging badly and I knew I couldn't keep relying on the aging system. I decided to go with an ipod speaker system in anticipation of me upgrading to an iPhone soon.

I was a good consumer, doing my research and narrowing down my choices to match my need. I thought I was going for Altec Lansing Inmotion mini player, but I was worried the sounds wouldn't be full enough for my needs. I'm not a music stickler, but fuzziness drives me insane. That's when I spotted the higher-end model on sale for only $10 more! It was the top-rated player on CNET! The reviews made it look perfect, as the features it lacked were ones I'd never use. I bought it!

Oh wait, NO I DIDN'T! I bought a lower model that looks almost exactly like the higher end model. WHOOPS. This one... not so good reviews. For insance, it won't change iPod Nanos. IT WON'T CHARGE IPOD FUCKING NANOS! This was a feature that should be assumed in ALL MODELS OF IPOD PLAYERS.

So, earlier today, the music goes off. The battery is dead. I am confused. I pull out the manual. I look for the product name. I curse. I curse LOUDLY. I'm an idiot.

I can work around this, of course, but it requires me remembering to charge my nano during every moment I'm not listening to it. Aside from that stupidity, it works fine for my needs. Doesn't stop me from stewing over this, though. Can't believe I screwed up like this. I can only hope it charges the iPhone when I get it. If it doesn't, I can't be held responsible for my actions.

Edit: Salt in the wound: It is now on sale, so it cost me an extra $10 to screw up too.

Buddy Christ

He thrives from your sins! Or something like that. I never paid attention in church. Anyway, this Dogma-inspired sketch came about from one of my readers concluding my Sunday strip depicted Bud as Jesus. I am entirely for this interpretation!

(The odd color is a side effect from the new GIANT SCANNER. It does comics great, but has no setting for sketches. Maybe I need to go with two scanners at the same time! Again: Aww, yeah.)

The brain has experienced a problem and needs to shut down

You know, I can't even remember anymore WHAT I've been working on with web design, all I know is that this idea came to me at one point in the process. The thing about web design is that you shouldn't notice it. Good design feels natural. Problem is, every new feature added is another chance to make things clunky. Also, the more you do, the more improvements you see that need to be made. I'm doing the best I can, but it melts the brain.

As of now, I am not suicidally enraged by web design, but that may be due to repressed memories. The biggest annoyance I'm dealing with is that web design is TIME CONSUMING. I have drawing and coloring to do, dammit!

Trapped in Limbo

With the change of schedule, my convenient return home for a dentist appointment became not so much convenient. With the crappy weather and a worried mother, I am not in Winchester for tonight only. With my aunt scheduling several appointments in Delaware *next* because she wasn't aware my schedule had changed to allow her to go up there *this* week, I'll likely be in DC until... hell if I know.

Just to add to the cheer, I got home to find my mother's laptop all wonky and in need of fixing. After punching in a few times, it rebooted a few times and that seemed to do it. Yay! Then I moved to my computer to burn some CDs for my aunt, thinking I was heading home tonight. My computer decided to crash instead. Instead of restarting, Microsoft thought that would be the perfect time for an update! (Or, more likely, this is why computer crashed in the first place.) It has been flashing, "Installing update 1 of 1, do not reset or pull the plug!" for about four hours now. I'm sure rebooting mid-update can only have good outcomes. Hey, at least I got the other computer working!

So now I am in Winchester, while my working computer and art supplies are in DC. What the heck do I do to justify a blog post?

I FUCK WITH A WEBCAM OF COURSE!

First I capped the sketches I did here, but I can't do any Photoshopping as that program is being held hostage by Microsoft. With the ART out of the way, the only thing I could do was make funny face. It just had to be done.


Ok, I may be pale as a ghost - yet my scary factor leaves much to be desired.

JAZZHANDS!


Check out the BREEZY look! There should be a beach scene behind me.

Uh... I just wanted to see what capping did if I wiggled my fingers.



Just what am I doing to this cat?

Hey, it was either stupid pictures of me or ANOTHER LONG ESSAY! What would you have preferred?

Troubleshooting

So today I finally had time to sit back and do some work. How did I utilize that time? BY SLEEPING THE DAY AWAY! Those who are not morning people should never only set one alarm. Argh.

Another opening came this afternoon. I had a few tasks to do and then some time to sit around a sketch... and play around on the computer... which crashed... and got all wonky afterwards. The crash disabled my bluetooth capabilities, which meant my mouse was useless and Photoshopping was suddenly quite difficult. As I am using Windows, the "help" section did nothing by tell me what a functioning mouse would do. I then encountered the lovely: "If it's not working, you should already know how to fix it." Clearly, the people who write these help guides are libertarians.

After lots of fruitless Googling - most results advertisements or mac forums - I finally got my way into the device manager. To paraphrase the diagnosis: "This isn't working (error 43)." To paraphrase error 43: "It isn't working." So helpful!

So my bluetooth had been disabled due to the crash freaking out my computer. I click the "fix this" button... which appeared to be a placebo as all it did was trigger a status bar that filled up and disappeared even though nothing else was done. So then I did the radical thing: I disabled the supposedly-disabled program and enabled it again. Victory! To summarize: The crash freaked out my bluetooth, which STOPPED the program but didn't DISABLE it. Such semantics meant all help and connection programs only saw it as enabled and therefore said unkind things about my mother instead of actually helping. Day = wasted. Attitude = grumpy.

So, yeah, here's a sketch of Bud composing at a laptop, since the most I've done today is outline some more Maquette stuff. Yeehaw.

PS: My stolen wi-fi signal is fickle. I can browse around the net if I want, but the *second* I try to do something productive it leaves me with internet blue balls. Grr.

The nerdy equivalent of a hangover?

Usually when I try to do a commentary thing, it's an attempt to flex my muscles and see if I can channel my egotism and self-serving ways into essay that's worth read. Last night I had a bunch of ideas that, in a perfect world, would have all folded into each other nicely and make me look like an untapped literary superstar. This didn't happen. As he who cannot dance blames the floor, me who cannot type blames the keyboard. I don't know if I could have pulled it all together, but technical difficulties (everything in this room is dying on me) stopped me from even trying.

Either way, this worries me. My life mostly hinges on me having more natural talent than everyone else. I need to write better than writers, market better than marketers, network better than agents, talk better than orators charm folks better than scumbags.

All I'm trained in is art, and the thing with art is... it's kinda hard to out-art other artists. Those bastards just keep changing the definition! Sustaining oneself as an artist is about becoming a generally skilled (note that I didn't say talented) illustrator or carving out your niche and desperately hoping there's an audience. I can do everything right in presentation, speech and skill-level; but if my "brand" of art isn't what the charge wants, I'm out of a job. Crap artists end up doing ad layout for bad newspapers. Good artists end up unemployed until they find a working balance of niche market and willingness to be a whore - man, I need to paint more chicks - or give up by designating art the side-business or a hobby

All my training is in a field where one's good angle could circumvent another's skill and talent. This is why I must blather here, give lectures to my poor friends, research the creative process behind disciplines and work on my many thousands of potential writing projects. I need to be good at *all* these things to overcome the cold hard fact that I am not remotely trained in any of 'em!

Trained professionals: I am coming to destroy you!

(If I don't die in the gutter first.)