Got up this morning, showered, had breakfast, came downstairs, and still felt tired. Saw last night’s WIDT was still waiting to be published even after I pressed the button when I went to bed. Apparently that only highlighted the button instead of activating it. Why it would ever do that, your guess is as good as mine.
Decided to nap for awhile and then dad wanted me to come visit. I’m trying to get more rest lately but it’s been something of a challenge. I really need to give myself downtime where I can relax. I tend to feel guilty if I’m not working but working when I’m worn out isn’t any good, either. When I do allow myself downtime I’ll fill it with busywork that’s not actually relaxing and be in the same hole. It’s been frustrating trying to sort things out.
Ultimately I think I need to get better at saying no when I’d rather be alone in my studio. It’s just hard to do when you’re trying to be more sociable.
Spent the morning coloring and shading comics. Scheduled page 19 and finished the preview images for 20 and 21. Spent the evening setting up a vanilla Minecraft server since Frank’s machine chugs on the modded one and mine started giving me graphics glitches. We started a base on my single player world but when I loaded it onto the server it wasn’t there. Started a new one that looks pretty promising. Now that it’s a proper server I’ll be inviting more people on.
Didn’t want to go to bed so I made a late night doodle of Rebecca Parham from Let Me Explain Studios, trying to remember what brushes I liked for shading. I worry sometimes I focus too much on line so I like to practice with tone now and then.
In the morning I finished coloring page 19 and got most of the first pass of shading done (I’ve been doing the gradients on a different layer lately so they’re easier to tweak) before my dad called and we went for lunch. Took a nap when I got home, ended up doing the podcast instead of waiting for Saturday, then Frank wanted to craft some mines until around 2:30 when his internet acted up. And that is why this blog post is up late.
Weekends have a habit of getting away from me. I need to finish up Monday’s comic, schedule the podcast, and somehow not screw my sleep schedule up any further. Now’s the time to hedge your bets on my success.
Woke up tired this morning. Not usually a good sign when I hear my backup alarm go off. After playing with the cat in bed for awhile I decided I’d just be tired in the studio so I tried sleeping it off. Started getting a sinus headache second time I got up. It’s this cold rainy weather. Dad called for lunch, hung out at his place for awhile and came home. Phone reminded me I had a haircut this afternoon and then we picked up some produce.
Spent most of this evening looking for a more customizable slider for the home page. Realized at some point the current slider disappeared so I had to re-add it. I want something I can pin promotional stuff to the first few slides and then let the rest get filled in by recent posts. The problem with fixing site stuff is the research time involved tracking down a solution. It always starts with, “Let me just tweak this thing here…” Then I find I need a new plugin or I have to edit code or some feature’s missing or plugins are conflicting. Sometimes I’ll find a solution and it’ll just not work because some cache won’t refresh or I don’t have everything else configured right. If something breaks it never speaks up and tells you. It just stops showing up and you have to look like, “Hey didn’t I have a thing here?”
I should really pull everything on the site back to the basics. Or hire a web person. There’s a lot of people I’d hire if I had the scratch.
Spent the morning doing office stuff. Started a new planning journal for 2016, put together a Pinterest board for potential comic topics because links were getting hard to manage, (picked subjects for the next month of strips, just need to write them now) and split my task manager boards up between art and office stuff. Helped my dad dump more apples by his trail cams and had lunch. Finished word/thought balloons and started flat fill coloring pages. Mom came home and reminded me it was grocery night.
Feel like powering down this evening and diving back into those pages tomorrow. Didn’t have time to fiddle with that tutorial I was working on yet. I’d like to retool my YouTube channel a bit, customizing the art and getting some videos done before posting more. Right now I’m going to say job one is getting as far ahead on the webcomic as I can.
Went to bed early last night but listened to a podcast against my better judgement. It was a good episode but then I couldn’t fall asleep afterwards. Was slow to get up this morning. The cold, rainy day didn’t help. Managed to record for that tutorial but haven’t edited it yet. Felt like I rambled. I’ll look over the footage tomorrow and see if it’s better to chop it up or re-record. I had bullet points but I should probably script better defined sections. I can see doing that in the morning and recording/editing in the afternoon once I get some art done.
Saw the Peanuts Movie tonight. Found it very charming and adorable. I avoided reviews before going even though I’d heard decent things from people. It’s put me in a pleasant mood for the evening. 🙂
Went to bed about 7:30 last night, got up at 5 this morning. Spent the first hour or so in the studio sorting things out. Added tasks to my KanbanFlow board, went through previous WIDTs so I could cross the days off on my calendar with proper job-related colors, and put together some sizing template images for the next webcomic I’m starting.
I’ve toyed with the idea of doing an animated webcomic. Something I can cut my teeth on before doing longer videos. Something I can experiment and play with. I’d made a template file and scribbled some ideas before but today I started working on one in earnest. I’m not sure when it’ll launch but I do know it’ll be awhile as I build up a significant buffer first.
Tomorrow’s Tuesday and I usually post a YouTube vid on Tuesdays. I’m thinking I might record and upload a tutorial on Toon Boom Harmony. More folks are picking it up these days and I’d like to show people why. We’ll see how the day actually goes.
Ended up playing Minecraft with Frank until about 11:30 last night. Alarms went off but I stayed in bed until noon when my dad wanted me to help him dump apples near his trail cams. Ian’s got plans for tomorrow so we’re recording the podcast tonight at 8.
I really wish I could pack up my studio and go somewhere isolated for awhile. As it is I think I’m going to have to better communicate to others, (friends, family, even my cat) that I need more alone time.
Set my alarm for 9 this morning and listened to some podcasts before I went to sleep. I got some breakfast with my dad and then went to a thrift store to find a cheap VGA monitor. Once I got home I set the little computer up to see what shape it was in. After some fussing with my network connection I installed some modern browsers on it. Added a VNC server and removed the keyboard, mouse, and monitor. Loaded it in a window on my Mac and I’ve been tinkering with it most of the evening. I’ve been trying to install a Minecraft server to test how smoothly it runs. It’s a nice little machine given it’s age. I might update the RAM and plug in some external drives once I get all the software set up.
As for work, I’m going to try setting my alarm for 7 tomorrow. I’ll add some time to my timers so breaks are a bit longer. I’m also only going to focus on one or two things. I’ve still got comics to color/shade though I really want to get back to animating. I’ll try balancing those two, see how I feel. I need to start feeling like I’m allowed the break time as long as I work during the work time.
I wrote a long, thought out post and WordPress ate it. Spent like 10 minutes trying to enable revisions and it never saved the full post.
I’ll probably write all that out again later but for now I’m going to bed. I’m going to try to get more rest and I may end up putting projects on hiatus or taking a break from posting until I’m ready to return to them.
EDIT: Take Two
Tuesday I helped my dad haul some things out of a storage rental the previous user had left behind. One of those things was a computer I intend to tinker with. I had parts for it except my monitor only did DVI and it needed a VGA. Walmart, Best Buy, and Meijer didn’t have an adapter. Frank and Ian wanted to do a hangout and Frank wanted to play some Minecraft so I broadcast it and saved it to YouTube. Ian also let me know the feeds on the site weren’t working properly and apparently we’re not in the iTunes store anymore. (It’s be nice if they would maybe email you to say something’s wrong but then again I wish you could tell iTunes to not stop downloading podcast episodes just because I haven’t listened to any in awhile. But that’s a whole other blog post.) We finished up around midnight and I wasn’t going to fuss with my NaNoWriMo project or anything but I tried writing a WIDT. I decided to try blogging the video, too, and after making a thumbnail realized it was still processing so I couldn’t customize it. Then the site failed to connect and I got an email saying they’d moved my server. I’d had enough and went to bed.
Wednesday my dad needed me to follow him to put his car away in the storage lot. I was feeling very tired and went for dinner with my mom. I mentioned in the previous version of this post that I’d been irritable and tired, probably owing to a number of things. Lack of sleep, dealing with the time change and the underlying stress everybody carries around this time of year. I’d taken some personality tests and came back with INTJ. I don’t take too much stock in online quizzes but it can be a good way to look at how I respond to things. I know I’m introverted and I’m working on being more social. I know I need quiet time alone to recharge after seeing people and to clear my head. I also know people think I don’t have emotions sometimes but I prefer to say I’m more like Mr. Spock. When I feel things they can be overwhelming so I tend to process things in a logical way I can understand. WordPress wasn’t formatting the video in the post correctly as I wrote it and when it posted it just showed the video over and over. I spent time trying to load a previous version only to find it hadn’t saved.
Basically I’ve been trying to think more about my well being. That means getting more rest and either scaling back projects or putting them on hiatus. I could probably use some time away from trying to post things regularly online and just working on projects to build up buffers.
