What’s a domovoi?

Think of them as Russian house spirits.  I guess Mama did some baking before she left.

I’d like to extend thanks to all the Russians who played along with our jokes.  Cross-cultural humor is difficult by itself, and Russia is a massive country with a rich history and culture on top of that.  Perhaps someday we will be able to visit.

I hope that everyone had a nice laugh and I’m sure we’ll see Treiss’s parents again!

This weekend we’re out of town at the MFM convention, so there’s no voter incentive.  Please have a great week and we’ll start a new story when we return.

Sorry this entry is short, but I have to pack! 

Have a great one!

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Annie’s a little late to the party.

Later in the week we’ll be headed to MFM with our friends “Razz” and “Stoker”.  Razz is guest of honor this year so we thought we’d go with her and have some fun.  If you happen to be at that convention, we’ll be wandering around looking lost.   Feel free to say “Hi.”  We won’t have a set schedule, a specific table, or anything to sell, so if you want to meet up, make sure to e-mail ahead of time.  Next week’s comic will be the last comic in this story line, which means I’m due to write the next one.  I hope you guys like anime.  :3

On the programming front, I managed to find a scrolling tile map example that made sense to me, so maybe I’ll make some progress when I get back.  I’m shooting for an Ultima-esque sort of look, but with minor updates for modern hardware.  Now that I’ve seen what is involved, I’m estimating a release date well into 2012.  I’ll call this my “hobby project”.

While we’re in Tennessee we’re going to meet up with Scott Sava, author (and artist) of The Dreamland Chronicles.  If you haven’t checked his comic out before, do so.  It’s got over a thousand pages and the content is safe to read at work (whether or not your boss wants you reading comics at work is another matter).

This week’s voting incentive involves Belle and the Spy from Team Fortress 2.  I love that backstabbing so-n-so.

Click and enjoy!

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This sort of thing demands a home movie, but Hank had to settle for the story version.

Perhaps it ended better for him after all.

A few people have asked when the comic updates, so I figured I should mention it.  Catena updates every Monday.  I need to put that in the title graphic sometime so it doesn’t disappear whenever I make a new post.  Derp.

This week I’m supposed to be editing a new comic and getting that to Tracy so that she can start drawing it.  It has got dragons and space ships and people with no hair.  It’ll also have a continuous story line and is meant to be more “dramatic” than Catena, although I know it’ll have a good chunk of humor too.  My influences in writing this comic were, well that kinds of sucks the fun out of it – so I’ll let you guys ponder it as the story goes on.  Look for it to come up towards September unless something bad happens.  I’ll probably post it on Wednesdays.  If Tracy twists my arms enough I’ll end up drawing parts of it too.  Ow.  She shouldn’t twist my arms like that.

Remember that down time I talked about?  I’m going to try and avoid that by automating the updates and making a bunch of comics ahead of time.  We’re heading to a convention next month with some friends, but if all goes properly the website will update itself while we’re gone.

Oh yes!  Product.  We have product.

This is Wonderdog, a project Tracy finished the coloring for a while back.  It’s up for pre-order now, so please go and check it out.  The comic is an Indiana Jones style adventure with some cool art and a lot of fun.  Scott Zirkel is a really neat guy too.

As a matter of fact, he’s such a neat guy that we did the coloring for one of his other projects, He-Guy and the Guys of the Universe.  Check that one out as well.  It’s hilarious.

To top the cake off, we also DO have a voting incentive this week.  My, haven’t we been busy?

It’s Patches chasing a butterfly.  Give us a vote and the image is yours to see. 

Have a great one!

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I think Hank needs to update his glasses.

My dental appointment went okay last week.  They took new x-rays and there weren’t any cavities.  I really can’t argue with that.  Of course, by the time I got in I’d already convinced myself that I had bubonic enamel cancer.  I really shouldn’t self-diagnose via the internet.

A lot of colleges are starting this week, so if this is your first day, hang tight and stay calm.  Everybody else is new too and you’ll have the hang of things in a couple of weeks.  I went to college forever, then worked at a college forever, and now I’m watching my nephew head off to college for his go at it.  It’s fun, it’s hard, it’s crazy, and it’s a different experience for everyone.  Good luck freshmen!

As for me, I’m currently trying to “graduate” out of Starcraft 2.  Every time I see a Zerg I want to take a Sham-Wow and wipe up all the mess.  Yuck.  Seriously, is that your face, or did you wake up inside-out this morning?  Gross!

And yet I play them in multiplayer all the time.

I like the game overall and the campaign has been pretty cool.  None of the missions have made me want to ragequit so far, but I’m playing it on “normal” mode to keep frustration to a minimum.  Maybe next go-around I’ll try “hard”.

There’s a chance that we might be “out of pocket” for a little bit, but I won’t know for sure until later in the week.  If that happens and it affects the comic, I’ll update you on the situation.

There is no voting incentive this week.  Have a great one!

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That smile. That scary smile.  It’s like Belle channeled Azula.  Poor Harry.   D:

Whew.

We’ve got potentially good news coming up, so keep your fingers crossed for us.   We probably won’t know anything until next week.   *HOPE*HOPE*HOPE*

I have to go to the dentist this week.  BOO.  Ugh.  I’d rather go to the doctor than the dentist any day.

To cheer myself up, I watch Team Fortress 2 videos.

I like to play as the Engineer.  If you’re not familiar with Engineer, watch this video.  Neat huh?

We do stuff like this.

That’s me.

Usin’ more gun. 

Have a good one folks! There’s no voting incentive this week.

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Papa gets into all kinds of trouble.

If you’re not familiar with Jarate, here – have a go.

I hope you’ve enjoyed the Team Fortress 2 references. They’ll be coming to an end this month.  Next up is something worse – so much worse. Try and guess what it is.

Plowing on, I finally beat Mass Effect 2.  I ended up a level 30 sentinel and did pretty much everything there was to do.  The ending was pretty cool and I’ll probably go through the game again and play as a “renegade”.   Everyone survived except for the mercenary.  I did his special quest, but I didn’t do it the way he wanted me to.  Alas!

As far as the game itself goes, the combat model improved over Mass Effect, but there were less side quests to do.  The mineral gathering mini-game still wasn’t fun, but it was somewhat better than the first game where you had to drive the rover around.  Weapons could have used more configuration options and well, just more overall.  Some parts of the story felt more like a movie than an RPG.  I wish Bioware would wander closer to “sandbox” and farther away from “game on a rail”.  I guess it’s hard to have a really tight story line and let the player do whatever he wants to do.  The Citadel needed to be expanded.  The end game was still too easy.  I played on “veteran” and am thinking about going through the second time on “insane”.  Maybe I’m just really good, but I sort of doubt it.  If you only like RPGs with a lot of stats and numbers, this one won’t keep you satisfied.   I, however, like all kinds of RPGS, so I thought ME2 was a good game overall and am looking forward to the next installment (despite my nitpicks).

The rest of the week was a blur.  Time flew past me and I’m not sure where it went – probably into some Steam game.  Next week should be a pretty normal week, so I’ll get back to my programming.  Currently I can make an @ symbol run around the screen.  I guess I could think of it as the world’s easiest rogue-like. It’s a start, right?

There’s no voting incentive this week.  Thanks everyone!

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Bear and Hank went on a trip.  Hank came back and Bear’s mind will be back eventually.

If you don’t get the reference, you can check out what we’re riffing from here and here.

Have you ever met “that guy” who is just oblivious enough to know that he probably missed something, only by the time he figures it out, 3 days have passed?  No?  Well, now you have and his name is Hank.

A close relative wanted a new PC built from parts.  He wants to do a lot of gaming, so I set him up with an SSD, 6 Gigs of RAM, a quad core, an Nvidia 470, and a terabyte drive.  I’ll put it all together next week.  If I’m nice, I’ll even let him take it home.  I think I’m jealous.  Perhaps I’ll build a new PC for myself a few months from now.

This week also marks the week that we finished the illustrious book project.  That’s right!  The 140 page book project we’ve been working on for something around a year now has finally been completed.  We’re very, very excited to have the book project done.  I’m not sure what we’ll do now, but I hope it’ll be fun and make use of our strange collection of talents.

I spent most of the weekend playing Mass Effect 2.  I have all of the crew members but one.  The Salarian sings.  ;__;  Jack seems like a problem child and I wish she weren’t living in my basement.   On the plus side, my assistant is feeding my fish.  I still have not gone through the “locked” relay, so please continue to not spoil anything for me.  The last planet I was checking out featured a chlorine atmosphere and I was doing pretty well until the map glitched and my character went up into the air.  She wouldn’t hop back down and there wasn’t anything I could do but reload.  Oh well.  That did make me stop and realize that it was a little past time to update the comic. 

There’s no voting incentive this week.  Have a great week, folks!

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Okay, hair are the answers from the last strip!

From left to right we did:  Lady Gaga, Wonder Woman, Marge Simpson, Tank Girl, Sailor Chibi Moon / Sailor Moon (we sort of mashed a couple characters together), Aeon Flux, and finally Belle (uh oh).

We have some new fan art in the gallery thanks to J. Farrell.  Thanks!

The next thing I’d like to mention is this neat freeware platformer I found (via a neat artist) called Knytt Stories.  The music is soothing, the game-play is fun, and it has a lot of save points.  That adds up to “nifty” in my book.   Check it out.

I haven’t played any Mass Effect 2 this week, but I have played some Team Fortress 2.  For those not in the know, the Engineer update came out a while back, so I sat myself down for some quality time and got all the upgrades.  I have a love/hate affair going with the mini-sentries.  I love them when I can get them shielded with the “Wrangler”, and I hate them when they get killed as soon as they’re deployed.  As far as the rest of the gear goes, the “Southern Comfort” wrench is a lot of fun, the “Gunslinger” has an unusual taunt, and the “Frontier Justice” is brutal after it gets powered up.  Since I had so much extra gear sitting around I decided to craft the sniper’s “Tribalman’s Shiv” and the demoman’s “Scotsman’s Skullcutter” while I was at it.  I should probably quit playing for a while and get some more work done.

Speaking of getting work done, we’re getting a lot of work done. Tracy draws this comic on the weekend, believe it or not. The rest of the time we draw and color stuff for other studios and do whatever else we can to make some cash. One of our big projects is rounding up by the end of July, so we’ll have to sit down and figure out how to spend our new “free” time.

In convention news, we’re not going to San Diego Comic Con this year.  Boo.  I’d actually love to go, but it’s an expensive  trip out there and we don’t really have anything to sell.    We will most likely be attending MFM in  September, however, barring unforeseen events.  I hope it’s okay.  I haven’t been to a convention of that type in a long, long time.

In non-convention news, I ate at Village Inn the other day (they’re not taking Village Inn from us) and had  leftover country potatoes.  Did you know that said potatoes make an excellent Stone Henge if you set them up just right?  I wonder what our waiter thought.  I think I may need therapy, but possibly not as much as this fellow. I’m just kidding of course, those cat armors are awesome.

There’s no voting incentive for this week.  Those are going to be “come and go” for a while, so I’ll always mention what you’ll get (or not get).

Have a great week!

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From left to right, we have, aww – I’ll let you guys figure ‘em out. 

Tracy finished Okami for the Wii last night.  I’m not sure what the last boss was, but it sounded like an epic battle.  I hear that there is going to be another game, only it’s going to be on the DS.  I can see where the drawing interface that game has would work better on the DS than it did on the Wii.  I still wish they’d make another Wii version though.  The Japanese mythology featured in that game made me think of other cultural heritages that don’t get played up very much here in the states – not the least of which is our own.  It’d be pretty cool to have an RPG world based loosely on American tall tales, weird critters, and associated things that go bump in the night.   I guess the closest settings I’ve seen to that are what I’d call civil-war era weird western “steampunk”, but I’ve probably missed a lot.

My part of the book project is finally completed, so I started looking at Allegro to do a tile-based game with.  I bought a used book on the subject and have been playing around with various compilers and IDEs.  I haven’t used C in a while, so I’ll have to brush up.   Hopefully I didn’t forget too much.  I’m going to start with something small – like Pong.

If you visit the Catena Facebook page, you’ll see me talk a little bit about the manga we read in the next day or so.  We’ve got some fun stuff planned for our next Catena story arc.  I’ll let you ponder out how those things are related.

I’m part of the way through Mass Effect 2.  Some of my crew members are asking me to do “special quests” and I feel obliged to do them all.  I am partial to Mordin because I like the way he talks.  I don’t have all the crew members yet, so I think I have a pretty good way to go.  Try not to spoil anything for me in the comments.

There’s a neat comic on our links pages that has cats in it.  The authors seem like nice people, so go check it out.  It’s called DreamKeepers.

There’s no voting incentive this week. I’ll call that a wrap for the week. Have a good one, folks!

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That is Harry Hare. He does hair. He’ll be taking care of Treiss today, although Treiss doesn’t seem so sure. Mama’s off for sweets.

Some days I write things that I probably shouldn’t ought to write. I call those days “weekdays”.

I finally finished Mass Effect last week. I’ve owned it for a couple of years, but I kept putting it down and picking it back up again. It really gets exciting towards the end. I did most every side quest there was to do (except for one that glitched and one that become closed off after an elevator blew up). I kind of skipped some of the “find the mineral” quests too. They were ok for a while, but then got boring. I went ahead and bought Mass Effect 2 over the weekend and then imported my character (female sentinel). She went from level 48 to level 2, but that’s ok. Please don’t write a bunch of spoilers in the comments. I’m not that far into the new game! So far I can tell that ME2 handles combat better. It seems to be a fun action-RPG series overall. The spaceship designs in Mass Effect remind me of work by Stewart Cowley who did some space art books in the late 70s.

It was a holiday weekend in the US so I hope everyone stayed safe. A lot of people probably have Monday off, so if you do – enjoy – and if not hopefully our comic made the day a little better.

There’s no vote incentive this week, but I’ll put the vote button back up anyway because people were asking for it last time.

Have a good one! 

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