If you do end up making that, let me know how it turns out 
I’ve been working through Adulting recently. It’s a handy set of tips for becoming an adult, and while some of them are like “Yep, always do that” and some are “Well I don’t drink, so that doesn’t apply to me”, A few have been really helpful. The one I read today though, was “Accept That You Are Not That Special“. I… *sigh* :/
I’m trying to reorganize priorities at the moment, so much of my life is in flux right now. But Cats in the Kitchen is still really important to me, and getting it back into regular updates, and finishing the current storyline are fairly high on that reorganized priority list.
Contract Work
I’ve been working on the visuals for a fairly huge indie card game. I’m not entirely sure how much I’m allowed to say about the game publicly, but suffice to say it’s going to be amazing.
Got Sick
Not much to say about this one. I had some kind of bug or other, and drew a Crabcat minicomic.
Played Around with Screen Printing
Way back in November I bought some wholesale organic cotton T-shirts and a silk screening kit. I finally opened the kit up last week and printed a few shirts and aprons with Midnight’s face (Felt so freaking punk rock). I plan on setting up an Ebay Store to sell these at some point in the near future, let me know if you’d be interested in buying one.
(Sorry about the quality of the photos beyond this point, my phone makes a horrible camera*)
Attended my first Furry Convention
I found out about Vancoufur too late to get a table or a panel, and though I was able to score a spot in the art gallery, I didn’t actually sell anything. And even though I gave out a big stack of promo cards for Cats in the Kitchen, my traffic didn’t go up at all. So as a promotional endeavour, the weekend kind of sucked.
That said, I had a blast and will definitely be attending next year.
Over the weekend I met a guy who is building a 3D printer using a lower resolution 3D printer, talked for hours with a fellow game designer with a slightly odd passion for inflatable toys, heard the pokemon theme song sung in the context of Nazi Germany, sat sketching at a table with professional animators, watched the Super Mario Bros. 3 show (it was terrible), made friends with a gay masseuse, played board games with total strangers, found out that there’s a tool specifically for peeling the rims of Tim Horton’s cups, got “scritched”, learned the difference between a snow leopard’s and a cheetah’s eye, and got hugged by a girl in a husky costume.
I also got to make some custom badges, and received one as well, which was just, really cool.
It was a weird, weird, surreal experience. I understand some things about the fandom that I didn’t before, and for better or worse, they’re kind of my people.
Fell in love
Over the weekend that I spent in the lower mainland for VancouFur, I met in person (for the first time) a girl I’ve been friends with online for quite some time.
Long story short, things went really well and I have a girlfriend now ^^. (And she has a boyfriend. And that boyfriend is me. In case there was any ambiguity there…)
She’s pretty amazing, but is also kind of shy and modest, and I know she’ll read this, so I’m not going to rave about her too much here. “Pretty Amazing” sums her up nicely.
*Isn’t it amazing? A decade ago, that sentence would have been completely nonsensical
I had a couple of cool excursions across the Wibbly Wobbly Web recently, and, as usual when I’m too tired to produce actual content, I’ll send you in the direction of someone who isn’t.
My brother had a party several days ago (from which we still haven’t really cleaned up. It’s strange how empty cookie bags and pizza stained paper plates strewn across the landscape bother you less when your mother isn’t around, (I’ve taken to calling this “Lost Boys Syndrome”) (I am actually cleaning it up by degrees mom, the house will be tidy for your return)
Any road, one of little brother’s friends was rather proudly showing off an image he’d discovered on Stumble Upon, much in the same way a prize hunter shows off the dismembered parts of a rather large deer. The image was a piece of sheet music, obviously farcical and definitely unplayable. We (Friend, Brother and I) just about disemboweled ourselves laughing as we read through the piece, but we didn’t know anything about its origins, as whoever posted that particular copy also removed the title and copyright notice. (Astard-Bay probably has a Tumblr)
Thankfully, a quick Google search for a few of the distinctive directions in the sheet music, “Release the Penguins”, “Saxaphone moves downstage” and “Like a Dirigible” revealed that the song is called “Faerie’s Aire and Death Waltz”. It was created by a professional Music Engraver With a Taste for Nonsense named John Stump. (You can find more information about the late Stump, as well as high-quality scans of his work at a website run by his nephew: Lost in the Cloud
The next step was finding out if anyone had actually attempted to play this supposedly impossible piece of music. At first we found a video on YouTube claiming to be the same song, and while we were impressed by the skill of the pianist, what was being played was far too melodic to match the sheet music. Eventually we happened upon two different attempts at playing the song, both equally terrible in the self-aware mode of people with too much spare time.
Anyway, I was listening to more of Marasy8‘s work, as he has now topped Ronald Jenkees as my favorite person who plays a keyboard on Youtube, when I got off on a tangent watching people play Taiko no Tatsujin (link-link-link) and then a video (Which I can’t find now) of somebody getting a score of 600 in this game (My best is 73, which should give you a slightly more reasonable mark to beat.)
Later on I was reading Kill Screen Daily which told me that not only was there a new Rayman game out, but it was an ACTUAL Rayman game, (Not a rabbid in sight) forged from the brilliant (deranged?) mind of Rayman’s original creator, Michel Ancel. Sadly, no PC release as of yet. Rayman Creator was one of my absolute favorite dos games, and seeing all those characters coming back for a new game is like dousing my head with a bucket of liquid nostalgia, thank you Ubisoft.
I’m gonna wrap it up now, I could go on, it’s been one of those weeks, but as I’ve been typing this, my brother exposed me to this bit of action from an Indian movie called Magadheera. I don’t think I ever need to watch this movie.
OH! Speaking of movies! Finally got to watch TinTin with my brother at the little theater. I don’t think any film has so perfectly matched the tone and spirit of the source material. Ever. (Possibly Scott Pilgrim) It was so thoroughly TinTin. Go watch it 
So, hey! I’m aware that there wasn’t a new comic yesterday. There will be at some point today, and then things should go on smoothly from there. Before I start drawing though, I wanted to share a couple of things I’ve found recently.
The first one is The Diaspora Project. I’ve wondered a lot about what social networking would look like if it were open source, and this is pretty much it. All the features that I’ve appreciated of Twitter, G+ and Facebook, but with software that you can even run on your own server if you want to. It was started by some folks at Occupy Wall Street, who wanted to be able to have conversations about subverting giant corporations, in a space that wasn’t controlled by giant corporations.
The next two things I’ve discovered on Diaspora:
Home Videos with Commentary by The Ramsey Brothers. Just goes to show how much audio commentary is pulled out of the air on the spot.
Subnormality is a webcomic with a very “Underground Comix” feel to it. Long updates, lots of words. Probably some content warning on this, but it seems to be mostly general most of the time.
Oh! and you can follow me on Diaspora, at MetalSnail@poddery.com (It’s not an email address)
So I haven’t done a “Sharing Post” in a while, and I’ve got a few links saved up for one, so here they are:
This has been out for a while but Ryan Estrada has put up All of His Work Ever in One Giant Zip File. Ryan is one of the biggest names in webcomics, and he got there by putting out an enormous body of work, and offering it for free. So it’s nice to have it all collected here.
So, through genius work like FLCL, I’ve come to appreciate the madcap craziness of Japanese cartoons. Boxer Hockey fills that space well. I’m going to give a huge content warning on this one for violence and swearing. It’s about a sport that involves beating the other team with blunt objects and genetically modified frogs. It’s also got some really awkward dream sequences. You are warned.
Wormworld Sega updated on Christmas! If you haven’t read the First Chapter yet, it is a beautiful infinite canvas style graphic novel about an imaginative little boy spending the summer with his grandma. (This one is okay for everybody!) The creator, Daniel Lieske, is also one of the principle voices in my new favorite podcast, Making Comics.
Recently while listening to WireTap on CBC, I heard about Master Legend, a real-life superhero from Florida. Looking more into that, I discovered Superheroes Anonymous, a not-for profit group dedicated to equipping and training real-life superheroes.
How do I finish off this list? I’ve come to realize that this isn’t really about quality of music, but more, these are the songs that I’m not sick of yet, and when/if they play on the radio or somewhere, they are welcome.
I haven’t been going in any sort of order, so it’s not that big of a deal if I don’t end with “The Best”. But it took some deliberation to decide what to put last.
So here’s all of them:
