Articles Written By: Ben

Remember summer when you were a kid? Come relive some memories at Billy Badass!

Check out the third episode of Crafting Mines: A Minecraft Adventure.

Today was spent tightening pencils on two pages. I inked most of the first one and added panel borders.

I think right now I need to get my sleep schedule straightened up. Last night I couldn’t fall asleep and last week I woke up way too early. Some of it is due to adjusting to my meds but I also know I’m spending too much time online waiting to chat with people in other time zones. If I want to get to work early in the morning, which I do, then I’m just going to have to be a grownup.

It’s somebody’s birthday in Billy Badass! Come help us blow out the candles!

Check out the third episode of Crafting Mines: A Minecraft Adventure.

Today was spent editing videos and fixing things. The format I’d been rendering them to was too large and they were taking like two days to upload. I fiddled with Final Cut Pro X’s settings and decided to just use the YouTube sharing option, which I’m still a little suspicious of, personally. Making sure a project renders correctly is a pretty important step and relegating it to a background task is just asking for things to go wrong. Not to mention the share settings are obfuscated by presets.

“Share to Apple Devices looks promising, I’ll try that. Oh, it’s done – where the hell is it? I bet it stuck it in iTunes, oh let me just find my way through the various screens and ways it displays things in iTunes, ok, yeah, there it is…”

I like Final Cut, it just assumes it can run smoother than it does so glitches happen. Like I bumped my mic in the recording and wanted to section off that part of the audio to lower. I click the little razor icon in the place I want to mark and… nothing. I try the other side of the bump and… nothing. Apparently it was wanting me to select along snap points in the time line or something like that? I honestly couldn’t tell. I just did the best I could with the bugs it was throwing at me. Then I tried to do it again in the next project and it worked fine.  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Today was my first day on the prescription the doc gave me. I was up late so I slept in and woke up feeling better than most mornings when I do that. I’m not sure how much is the meds vs me wanting them to work along with getting rest after a stressful day but I’m going to say they’re helping. The constant hum of anxiety was quieted and I could decide to not think about things if I didn’t want to.

It’s somebody’s birthday in Billy Badass! Come help us blow out the candles!

Check out the third episode of Crafting Mines: A Minecraft Adventure.

Today was spent writing/rough penciling comic pages. I got three done but the fourth one is going to require a little research to fit all together properly. If I was doing more than one a week I could probably spread it out but I think it’s best to get way ahead before adding update days.

I had a doctor’s appointment today for a physical and to check into anything ongoing. I described my anxiety issues and they gave me a prescription to try. I’m hoping it makes things more manageable.

It’s somebody’s birthday in Billy Badass! Come help us blow out the candles!

Check out the third episode of Crafting Mines: A Minecraft Adventure.

Today was spent editing videos. Luckily I made everything pretty straight forward when I shot them. I don’t mind getting creative with editing and adding/removing things but it’s best to streamline for regular production. I like working in batches with projects so I can post them periodically in a series while I work on other things.

I’m glad I got that Newsletter business taken care of yesterday so I can try and spend what’s left of the week working on art. I’ve been thinking about getting back to my older comics lately. I’m getting better at staggering my workflow and I’d really like to have something new going up each day. Of course I don’t want to promise anything right now as I’m trying to get on top of things. It just feels so very nice to front load and schedule posts in advance.

It’s somebody’s birthday in Billy Badass! Come help us blow out the candles!

Check out the third episode of Crafting Mines: A Minecraft Adventure.

Gradually trying to get back into a regular sleep cycle. Today was full of lots of little bits of things that needed fixing. Most of my evening has been spent configuring the Newsletter integration for the site. It’s live but still not 100% how I want. My goal was to add a clickable banner on the homepage. That would trigger a popup form to fill out. It’s important to me that this form be triggered by clicking the banner because Tab Closed; Didn’t Read. The theme I use has Features I use on the home page to point to my various projects. These are meant to be in a grid at a certain size. Above that it has Slides that are wider and scroll through. I wanted the banner to be the most notable thing so I made it a slide. Unfortunately I couldn’t use this tutorial to make the link trigger the popup because slides require a URL, not an onclick. For now I’m pointing the banner to a page with the popup on it. I also put a sign up form on the sidebar, after fiddling with a bug that caused widgets to collapse when I tried to edit them.

So yeah, been adjusting the duct tape and bubble gum that holds the site together. Please sign up for the NoRights Newsletter, I’d really appreciate it.

It’s somebody’s birthday in Billy Badass! Come help us blow out the candles!

Check out the second episode of Crafting Mines: A Minecraft Adventure.

I’d planned a busy Monday when I went to bed last night. Then I sat there unable to fall asleep. I’m not sure if it was my frustration over the weekend, the heat, or all the iced tea I’d had but I wasn’t falling asleep. I didn’t beat myself up about it and spent time online chatting with people until I finally did get back to bed.

When I got up this afternoon I did some video editing. Luckily I’ve got blocks of video already recorded I can edit. I still need to record more for some things I’m working on but it’s good to be able to pick things up and work. Downside is I’ve got lots of files to sit through going, “Speak up, idiot! Quit mumbling!”

Dinner, grocery shopping, more editing. Now it’s late and I’m posting the blog. I can really see how hard it is to break out of a routine. Stay up, sleep in too late, suddenly the day’s over already and you have to fight to get back to sleep. The totally wrong mindset would be be to charge into bed, “I’m getting all the sleep I need tonight and waking up early tomorrow refreshed!” That’s way too much pressure to try and sleep on. I’m just going to listen to a podcast and relax.

Go back to 1993 and the ice age in this week’s Billy Badass as we discuss Cro!

Check out the second episode of Crafting Mines: A Minecraft Adventure.

I was woken up entirely too early this morning. (About 3:30) Thought we’d had a power outage over the night but my computer was still on when I got in the studio. Funnily enough I had a system update waiting that required a restart. Once all that nonsense was done I tried working for a bit. I decided Fridays I want to focus on drawing for fun, off project, and maybe some fan art. I also decided to re-read an old book in my library for a later review.

I doodled some poses but by mid-morning decided to go back to bed. I was then woken up by my dad telling me the arduous tale of finding a replacement for that piece of his truck that came off yesterday. He left and I finished reading that book. I’m thinking I’ll probably film a video review for it. It’d probably be a good idea to write some supplemental material for a blog post, too.

Go back to 1993 and the ice age in this week’s Billy Badass as we discuss Cro!

Check out the second episode of Crafting Mines: A Minecraft Adventure.

Today I decided to start a new project I intended to work on alongside that intro animation I was making. I downloaded the intro to a cartoon and I was going to try recreating it in a different style. I spent the early morning googling reference and whatnot. Then I imported the original video into Harmony as a base to work from. (They recommend you work on different shots in different files but I’ll only do that if things get unwieldy.) The audio was going out of sync and I decided it was a frame rate issue since the default file FPS is 24.

Then my dad called and said there were a bunch of yard sales going on, did I want in. So we had some misadventures there, especially when we noticed part of the lining of his truck had come off somewhere. After lunch I was just beat. I’ve been trying to properly import the video with varying degrees of success. It’s only a minute long but when it all comes in as bitmap frames on ones I can understand some struggle. I should probably just import it as greyscale or black and white vectors to make things easier. Once I get things set up properly I’ll figure out how many backgrounds I need to recreate and try drawing the characters in the different style. No idea how long it’ll take me to work on this one but I’m using it as a learning experience and chance to practice mapping out the beats and requirements of a project.

Go back to 1993 and the ice age in this week’s Billy Badass as we discuss Cro!

Check out the second episode of Crafting Mines: A Minecraft Adventure.

I slept in today as I was up late and I’ve been trying to get a better rest. I spent some time in the studio adding drawings and recording. My anxiety has been like the buzz of a fluorescent light lately and it seems like whenever I get to work it gets louder. It probably wasn’t helped by sleeping in as I rarely feel better when I do so. It just makes me feel like I’ve missed a big chunk of the day and things are out of alignment. I just do it because I know I won’t wake up to an early alarm and if I do it’s sleep deprivation headaches so I might as well sleep.

I think tomorrow it might be a good idea to dig out my noise canceling headphones. My cat’s gotten into the habit of mewing at me wanting chased. (Invariably she hides under a desk which makes trying to play with her a waste of time.) It’s also probably a good idea to do some art stuff before trying to record it so I’m more properly ensconced in the zone.

Go back to 1993 and the ice age in this week’s Billy Badass as we discuss Cro!

Check out the second episode of Crafting Mines: A Minecraft Adventure.

Spent this morning working on that intro animation. I moved some keyframes over to lengthen a shot and added some new layers to animate more elements. I recorded myself as I worked again. I seem to be in a habit of working until I find something I forget how to do, stumbling around trying to remember, then I go figure it out later off camera. Since I’m going to speed it up hopefully it doesn’t look that bad. Still trying to get used to working while filming. It’s a little stressful because I’m used to being “on” when taping myself so I don’t want to be boring. I just keep imagining I’ll be into something and suddenly run out of save space. Like my entire compute will be full of video of me messing up.