It’s been a busy Spring and Summer so far; but just about all the work I’ve been doing has been on my web sites, so there hasn’t been much to upload here.  Last year I spent about nine months on a very large project – so large that even those months barely scratched the surface of it – and this year I’ve been trying to undo some of the resulting neglect of my commercial ventures.  Since although I may be a shiftless layabout, I’m not a wealthy shiftless layabout.

Late last week I got distracted from what I ought to have been doing by a program that generates height maps, for realistic 3D terrain, and I spent a few days mucking about with it.  Making terrain is a really interesting problem and this is one more tool in my tool box for solving that.  I sort of justified the time I spent with that software by writing it up in my Webomator blog.

Well I haven't updated much here in weeks, and there's a reason for that.  Actually a bunch of reasons.  I think they're all good ones, though.

I've thrown off the yoke of my corporate masters, though as corporate masters go, they weren't so bad.  In other words, I left the Day Job - I don't have any plans for returning to game production at all.   That's a seventeen year long story, and I'd really rather do something else now.

So I am doing something else.  I've moved to a small town in northeastern Ohio - a harbor town on Lake Erie that's practically on the border with Pennsylvania.  I have a house here that's close to 100 years old and which still needs some attention, but it's such a nice, bright, big and open space that I don't mind a bit.  I'm sure I'll be working on it for, well, ever.

This is about as much like a California beach town as I could find (afford) and it's funny how like that it is, though it's on a lake, rather than an ocean, and there is that whole Winter thing, and all.  But I think there's a quality that harbor towns have which is pretty universal.  I like it.  Oh!  Cool lighthouse, too .

And I'm just finishing up the launch of what I think is an interesting venture at [link].



There's a sense in which this new T-shirt venture grew out of the time I've spent at DA, in which I've gotten a chance to see who likes some of the Celtic work I've done, what else they like, and what I might do about that.  So thanks! I might never have wandered over into this idea without you.

I'm still tinkering with that site and I'll have a lot to do on the marketing front; I have a print ad coming out in early August and I'll be doing this and that online for weeks, I'm sure.

Apart from Saga Shirts, I have a couple of freelance gigs and some other ideas for ways to sell my own work online, and, well, I now have the time to do that.  I'm awfully happy overall.

As far as work on DA goes, I've been pretty wrapped up in these knotwork t-shirt designs but I also have a rough beginning for another retro-futuristic piece, and I guess in any way it seems appropriate I might post some of this new work, too - though it's on the commercial side, of course.

Anyway I'm back, or at least more back than I was .  We now return to our scheduled programming.

Leaves.   I've seen them, real ones, not silk, not plastic.  In the wild.  It got a little frosty this morning but all systems appear to be go for the seasons of liquid water and non arctic temperatures.

I've been doing some knotwork designs lately, though I haven't posted anything here yet.  It's all an experiment that's starting to show up here:  [link] though until tonight or later I won't have had a chance to make that page look pretty yet.  Black print on demand t-shirts are pretty much the Holy Grail.

I have stuff cooking on the back burner (that's a metaphor), which I guess is always true, and I'm really looking forward to the day it gets served (which is pushing a metaphor too far).

Has anyone seen what happens if you redline your metaphors too long?

Well, so much for that.  So far, every replacement print image I've submitted has been rejected.

I really don't know what I'm going to do about it.

As far as I can tell the problem may be that in adjusting the print images so that they will print true to the appearance of the originals, I have now made them look different from the original deviations.  Ideally, from the Quallity Assurance standpoint,  the print files should look exactly like the original deviations even if that results in prints whose color balance is wrong.

In theory I could post new deviations that all are too pale and shifted toward green,so that they would then resemble the images I submit for print.  Then you'd never see the images as they are meant to look unless you bought a print.  Honestly, I'm not sure what to do.

Why isn't the print process rejected rather than the images?   And why are we not allowed to adapt our images to that process so that they will look correct?

Okay, I swore I was toiling away at a bunch of new things that would eventually come together into several new pictures and - importantly - I did not lie!

But on the other hand, since I was doing 3D modeling and texturing all day at work, then coming home and doing 3D modeling and texturing all night and in the bits of weekends that were left to me, I was starting to move mooorrre and moooooorrrre slowly.  So one day I got this simple, funny, little sort of idea, and it ended up turning into a whole bunch of Photoshop work and a web site design, and three and a half weeks later, it's here:  [link] and I'm thinking that that was kind of a lot of work for a funny simple little idea, and in view of that, I'm hoping that someone gets a kick out of it.

I'm also hoping that someday the new DA page layouts will work in Netscape so that I can see Deviations and tables that.... well, if you haven't seen it, just picture something that doesn't work too well.  It could be a new form of image compression.  You never can tell.

And in the meantime at the Day Job my team has met the Mother of All Deadlines, only, of course, to reveal her large and threatening female relations, the Great-Aunt and Evil Stepmother of All Deadlines, and, you know, not much has changed.

And someone in QA finally translated the French inscription that one of my merry band put on a manhole cover in the game but THAT, as they say, is another story.

Well it's been awhile since I updated my journal and I've worked up some fantastic excuses for that.  I'll try to share them.

But first and most importantly, the Popular Culture Analysis results from my "What Is The Weight Of The Earth?" poll.

Douglas Adams:  33%
Terry Pratchett:  24%
Lewis Carroll:  11%

Unaligned:  the rest.  But I voted for "where you put the scale" myself, since I think that's the right answer.

I know you didn't know, necessarily, that you were voting for Terry Pratchett; some of you were voting for Popular Culture Mythology, which is very nearly the same thing, while others were just concerned about elephants.  As well you should be.

Anyway it's bad news for Lewis Carroll no matter how you look at it.

I've been totally snowed under with work at the Day Job and that's not over yet; our game is scheduled to ship in mid-October and though in theory there will be no new content added after our next deadline I'm pretty sure that theory will have very little to do with it; and anyhow there are some other things to do as well.  I should be able to sit back and take a deep breath just about the time that winter shows up again.

In the meantime I've only been able to do a small amount of my own work – more than you can tell, since what I'm doing is building things that I will use in some new pictures when all the bits are built.  I had hoped to have a set of characters done by the end of winter, and that lasted into the spring, and recently I've been texturing an environment that I modeled back around the holidays when I should have been doing something else. But I can tell that I'll need one more new character to suit the thing I'm working on, and one of these days I've got to do that monorail, and… well, it's just like that.

So there's not much new to see here.  But wait!  Since you are here, you might as well visit these two projects that I admire and enjoy:

Brian Taylor's "Rustboy" at [link]
And Andy Murdock's "Lots of Robots" at  [link]

…each one of them has animation clips, "making of" info, and online diaries about the projects and honestly, after you've seen them you won't even remember who I am any more.  So I won't have to bother with giving you those excuses I mentioned because, honestly, I'm a little miffed about the whole thing.

So I'm soon going to complete the process of moving in at Deviant Art; the boxes are all in the right rooms, and loads of stuff is already unpacked, and there are only a few large bits of furniture that I still want to move three or four times till I've got everything all set.  Oh, and I found the cat.  He was with the towels.

I showed up on your doorstep about a week ago, all because this place offered me something I've really wanted for ages:  a way to produce very high quality archival prints from my digital images.  I have an existing venue for selling merchandise and I've been really happy with it, but the one thing that I'd wanted from the beginning was those archival prints.  So when I'd run a test through Deviantprints and saw the results I started moving all my existing work-for-print over here.

I'd had a look around, and I knew that this site is essentially a community site; I'd seen the journals, the forums, and the commentary and so - while I was heaving those boxes of bytes through the doorway - I said to myself, "Hey, self!  You're going to need to check all this out.  There's a lot more going on in here than printing."  And I meant to take my advice just as soon as I'd found the cat.

But as it happened, you all found me first.  That's all due to the happy accident of me blundering into a Daily Deviation without really having much idea of what that meant.  Though I sure figured it out, believe me.  And I really have appreciated all the welcomes and praise and the hundreds of new names and faces that I've needed to keep straight - it's been amazing.  The things that have worried me most have been that I'd fail to respond enough to any of you, which would seem rude of me, or that I'd lose track of some of the really interesting work that everyone else is doing.  I'm sure trying to keep my bearings.  Please don't forget that I'm awfully new here, and still struggle a bit with what comment showed up where and what's threaded and what's not and where, after all, the cat got to again, because I just unpacked the towels and there's no sign of him anymore.

And I've got to say that one of the things that amazes me at this site is the large number of young artists who have their own pages and their own body of work, and who can connect with other people all over the globe to talk about that work - or anything else.  I can't imagine what it would have been like when I was your age if I'd had an inroad into this sort of community of likeminded people.  I hope you appreciate how great and new a thing that is!

On the other hand, I am pretty pleased to find the occasional person who makes me feel less like an old geezer, even if I am one.  Especially if I am one.

So expect the following, if you're Watching:  I'll be adding a few more designs for a couple of days, and following that I'm going to try to figure out how best to integrate these prints into my online venture.  Then I'll try to implement that, and though from time to time I think I may post some work in progress, there may be a long wait between large, really interesting pieces.  That's because - though you've seen a bunch of them show up over the past week - I really spend a very long time on them!

And as things quiet down a bit I'll be able to backtrack your own work, if I haven't, and get a more thorough look through the things I've found already.  I'm looking forward to that.

So thanks to all!  And if I start calling everybody "Steve", it's just because I've met so many of you in such a short time that I can't contain any more names.  I don't mean anything by it.

This was quite a pleasant surprise with my morning coffee.  I'm not sure how long it'll take me to sift through the feedback and respond, but before I take off to the Day Job I wanted to at least give you a big collective "Thank You" for the very warm welcome.  Thanks!

I'll be adding some more work in the evenings till I get caught up, so I hope you continue to like it .