spacehamster

I think it was about seven years ago when I decided to finally upgrade from my trusty 15" LCD that had cost a fortune and was about twice the size of its actual display to a 20". Dells were already all the rage back then and not all that expensive, so that's what I bought. That damn thing has lasted until today, and the only real hitch I've ever had was the USB hub crapping out - the display still worked like on day one. That's, you know, pretty damn cool.

But the USB hub having died was a bit of a problem for me, and given that a 27" monitor would now cost a little over half of what I paid for the 15" (make unknown, by the way - I still have it, but I can't remember and the company had such faith in their future that they didn't put a logo anywhere on the device), it was getting hard to justify keeping the old warhorse around. So this week I finally splurged on a Dell U2711 27", and I've basically been sitting at my desk with a boner ever since. I guess it's just this thing where if you skip over three generations of technology, buying a new gadget feels like you've travelled to the future.

In all honesty, the new monitor is the reason why I finally got up off my butt and colored that Juri piece I posted today - I really just wanted to see what working on it would be like. Turns out it's exactly what I was hoping for. I think I've literally sliced my coloring time in half because I'm not spending half an eternity zooming in and out anymore. Set to 50%, color most of it, zoom in to 100-150%, take care of details, done.

I just might actually start posting fully colored stuff on a semi-regular basis here again. But I've said that before, so wait and see, huh?

In other news, you should all be reading Storm Dogs. Really. Now. Go and buy it.

Just something I've noticed - my inbox is inundated lately with messages about people changing their handles here to their real names. Anyone else notice this? It seems to be mostly the pros and semi-pros, so I guess it has something to do with people wanting to be easy to find and using dA as a proper portfolio.

Sadly, my real name is so generic, I'm actually better off using "spacehamster" if people want to find me. Seriously, go on FB and see how many you find. On there, it's great because I don'twant to be found, but here... yeah. It's kind of made me think about doing it, though. Opinions? What do you use? Why?

Today I finally got fed up with the general brokenness of Drunkduck. Seriously, the site has been in some form of "we'll fix this soon, pwomise" limbo for almost as long as I've been posting on there, and when I couldn't post on the forums (broken as they are to begin with), quickly followed by the site going dead altogether, I really had enough. Long story short, Bulletproof will now also be hosted on Comic Fury with their usual array of URLs:

bulletproof.thecomicseries.com
bulletproof.the-comic.org
bulletproof.thecomicstrip.org
bulletproof.webcomic.ws
bulletproof.cfw.me

Take your pick. I'm also going to throw it on Smack Jeeves, but the name is currently taken by a page that has one strip uploaded in 2007 of a stickman jacking off in front of his computer, so I'm still waiting to see if they'll let me have the name. Otherwise I'll just host it as, I dunno, JunctionCityBulletproof or somesuch.

For the time being, I only have the currently running issue on CF, but I'll toss up the previous 110 pages soon too.

And in case you're wondering, no, this doesn't mean I'm leaving Drunkduck, and I actually kind of hate to do this because I always liked it on there, and there's no way BP would have survived past issue 1 if it hadn't been for DD, but the fucking site is broken, and I spend too much time working on this stuff to have it hosted on a site that doesn't work and that seems to get maybe 10% of the visitors anymore that it used to have.

Yeah, the Bulletproof hype machine is firing on all cylinders, eh?

I uploaded page 1 here, and I'm updating this journal because the previous one still announced the conclusion of #5, but what you really want to do is go here to read and preferably sign up to DD and post a comment because man is that community dead.

Anyway, I've already yapped how I hated #5 and how "the next one will be better", so I'll just leave it at this for today.

Also, the coloring on this journalheader kinda stinks. Methinks I need to take another look at it.

...and not a single deadline blown. *cough*

If you're just tuning in, my webcomic Bulletproof resumed regular updates five weeks ago, after a burnout-induced downtime of almost two years. Today's page concludes the current chapter, so what I'd recommend is you go read it now. Much as I like running BP as a webcomic, the way it's written, it really reads a lot better a whole chapter at a time, and not a page a week.

As I've mentioned before, I finished the script for issue 6 weeks ago and I'm actually pretty excited to start working on it, but at the moment I've got certain, um, real life obligations to take care of... you know, the kind that has to do with whether or not I'll eat and have a roof over my head. It's funny how that seems to have a habit of getting in the way of more fun things like drawing people punching each other in the face.

Anyway, go read the friggin' thing and post some comments - either nobody cares about Bulletproof anymore or the community on Drunkduck really is dead because of the site's problems, but the comic's been getting less action than Gob Bluth at spring break, it's depressing.