(pauses for applause)

… uhh, the ideas for blogs and comics started flowing. I opened a giant can on wyrms with this comic site. Yes, “WYRMS.” Not “WORMS.” Wyrms are a form of giant dragon for all you non-nerds out there. Thus the giant beasts were released from a ridiculously huge aluminum can upon the launch. You can’t tell by looking at it but I feel the effects already. I’m gonna grow that sumbitch like a weed.

"Wanna make out?"

Surprisingly, the biggest response started hailing from the only two blogs posted thus far. The first one, “Why Playing Trombone Sucks,” is a comical autobiographical tale of the obnoxiousness and overall crappy experience that Marching/Symphonic band was. The second, “9 Ways to Create a Website that Fails,” is based on the lessons I’ve learned from the school of electronic hard-knocks.

Based on reading reactions of the blogs as opposed to the comics, I think the real “hit” of the site will be the blogs. I’ll keep on truckin’ to see what happens, but the blogs seem to be snagging more attention. Hmm.

(Don’t worry you three Rawrb.com followers, I’ll keep posting stuff here as often as I remember to)

To me, Alfredo Afro is kind-of an “all-or-nothing” attempt at running a singular website with consistent and quality content. Yeah, my drawings kind of suck compared to, oh I don’t know, MARVEL COMICS, but I don’t care. I think they’re funny. I write and draw stuff that makes me laugh. If I don’t laugh, I don’t post it. Quite a simple formula, huh?

I feel that this site will succeed in some form; not really “financially” but just as a way for me to finally put my abilities to use that AREN’T for some large corporation or a client. This one is for ME, and it’s about time I get to be a little selfish.

This makes me giggle. That means you should too.

Speaking of “being selfish,” I’ve also been systematically unfollowing/hiding posts on twitter and facebook that are “downers” for me. If you have multiple posts talking about how your life sucks you constantly experience a torrent of overly dramatic crap, I probably unfollowed/hid you. Nothing personal… no, wait – yeah – it’s personal. I don’t wanna read your sob-story. The internet is not your therapist.

I don’t mean to sound like a self-help goody-two-shoes new-agey tool monkey, but your life is a GIFT and you only get ONE. After billions of years of evolution we’ve been given these huge, awesome, complex brains that have the ability to achieve absolutely anything we set our efforts to. Why would you WASTE it on whining about how the world doesn’t hold your hand through life?

If you’re miserable and hate yourself, that’s your problem and ONLY  your problem and it’s up to YOU to fix it. Nobody is going to swoop in and save you from yourself.

Ever.

Period.

WAAAAAH!

Yeah, something like that.

Seriously, if you’re still using it, upgrade.

So that Alfredo Afro thing I’ve been raving about is finally done. It’s launching on March 1st as some of you already know. Since our last “meeting” I’ve managed to create a really funny blog for it which equates to about NINE comics, and now I’m at the point where I can crank a decent looking comic in a couple of hours or less, depending on the complexity.

Yeah. Here’s a stack of prints that’ll be ready to sell once March 1st hits. That’s right. I’m actually going through with this. Oh, and to the left of those prints are some stickers that’ll be going out to the lucky folks who buy stuff.

11 x 17 and 8.5 x 11. Aren't I just generous?

Am I excited? Yes. Yes I am. I don’t even care if it fails miserably, I’m just happy to be doing this.

How about a couple of game reviews? No? Too bad.

Dead Space 2 (PC, 360, PS3)
What a freakin’ experience this game is. Some of you electronic stalkers of mine might already know that I’m a huge Dead Space fan, and this sequel did not disappoint. It basically took all the great aspects of Dead Space and turned ‘em up. Prior to me purchasing this game I was playing it’s prequel on the hardest difficulty to get warmed up.

This game is TENSE. From the very first scene to the last battle I was rather “white-knuckled.” The only con to Dead Space is that there’s no quick spin-around controls like in Resident Evil 4 and 5, thus the controls get clunky at times. But at least you can WALK AND AIM at the same time, Capcom. Take cue from this game and make us proud, mmkay? Good Capcom.

9.3/10 Severed Limbs

Dragon Quest VI (NDS)
I’m right at the end of this game; far enough to review it.

What can I say? It’s Dragon Quest. Fast, simple, and fun. Utilizing the same engine as the remakes of IV and V, part VI takes the already great visuals from the SNES and overhauls ‘em, adding a ton more personality to the characters and enemies. I absolutely love the animation in these NDS remakes. The musical score is very much improved. I’m glad to be playing an official translation of this game; the fan translation of the Super Famicom game didn’t have a ton of personality, although I am NOT complaining. I was very glad to play it.

My preorder bonus. All of my dreams finally came true now that I have a Plush Slime from Dragon Quest.

Gameplay is great, story is decent (nothing amazing or original), and the class system is highly addictive. Makes me wanna break out Dragon Quest VII for the PSOne and go nuts, but that’s just crazy talk. I don’t have 70 spare hours laying around.

Can’t wait to see what Squeenix does for the 3DS and the PSP2 or whatever the hell it’s called.

9.1/10 Stupid Plush Slimes

Those new Macbook Pros were announced today. To my delight they’ve finally allowed for QUAD-CORE! It’s kind of my Hardcore or Metalcore, but… FOUR! I guess four-core sounds stupid. That’s ONLY if you have the wrong attitude, though.

I’m going to attempt to raise enough cash to get one of these. I told myself, “Mr. Rawrb, sir, if they announce quad-core Macbook Pros, it’ll be time to upgrade.” Not that my computer is dead or anything, bit it’s showing some age. I might have to sell my body to raise enough cash.

Pssh, none of  you could afford me.

This is essentially a huge amount of content for the launch of Alfredo Afro. When the launch date hits you’ll see what I’ve been working on for so long and WHY it took so long.

The “preliminary” part of this site allows for folks to really get a grasp on the humor, style, and general feel of what I’m going for. I wanted to create as much content as possible before this thing hit. It needed to be a REASONABLE amount, but not a skimpy amount either. I can’t launch this thing without substantial content because, according to Jesus, “Content is king, bitch.”

What I have left is the rest of the programming, the ordering of some merch, and other little things to tie up. Once I hit a working beta I’ll post a release date. There’s still quite a bit to do, but the extremely difficult part is over, and I’m all excited ‘n stuff.

More to follow as it develops. For now I smell the yummiest of dinner prepped by m’lady. I WILL EAT THEM ALL THE FOOD

I’ve got quite a bit to cover here so I’ll make ‘er good.

The new Psychostick design is finished. It’s not active as of this writing since I’ve fixed a few more bugs (the last post ended up being irrelevant after I simplified some CSS), but I’m going to go on record and say that it’s once of the best designs I’ve ever come up with. I took a different approach this time and put everything aside (and I do mean EVERYTHING) and focused on it fully. I didn’t even play video games. After about a month and a week, it’s finished.

I’m launching it Tuesday morning and waiting for any bugs to creep up.

I’ve decided not to be afraid of PNGs anymore. Apparently Internet Explorer 6 and 7 doesn’t render PNG alpha transparency properly, thus many designers are weary of using them. The filesize is larger too.

The advantages of PNGs?

• The awesomeness that is alpha transparency
• It supports millions of colors like JPEGs.
• They just look better than GIFs and JPEGs.

Hopefully within the next year or two fear of PNGs will be completely gone and those who use old versions of IE are banned from the internet somehow.

The new Psychostick design uses PNG files where necessary, and parts of the page take longer to download with slow connections. At this point it’s so much less of an issue; most people have broadband nowadays and don’t use older IE browsers. Those that DO are usually older, less savvy folk who still churn butter by hand.

Anyway, blah blah blah internet blah blah blah graphics blah blah blah cake.

I’m also able to work on the new album again, plus I can continue my work on Alfredo Afro. I haven’t even touched my yet-to-be-released web comic since I started on Psychostick’s design, and my involvement with the new record had been reduced since then. This is no longer the case. I’m all, back and stuff. It’s time to get these projects DONE so I can get paid. I need a new Mac. :]

I also just snagged one of these. Wacom Intuos 4 Medium. This thing doesn’t just rock, it METALS.

Awesome Wacom.

For a productivity tool, I’ve switched to Omnifocus from Things. In the Mac world, there’s a huge debate going on between these two programs. Often times they’ll be a large drawn-out article comparing the two in extreme detail. In contrast, I can easily deduce for you which one would be better for you.

• If you are a business owner with many, many tasks and can’t afford a secretary to keep track of everything, go with Omnifocus.
• If you are a normal Joe with a day job and are just trying to keep things in order at work and at home, Things is more up you alley.

These two programs are both modeled around the “Getting Things Done” methodology, which is (in my opinion) the most robust way to make yourself productive. So if you feel as if your life, both professional and personal, is cluttered, you should definitely check out Getting Things Done. Read the book and decide for yourself how you prefer to keep organized.

Alrighty, gonna hop back to it. Maybe I’ll try and finish a comic today to snap into the queue.

So I had the pleasure of discovering a nice little bug when testing a new design in Safari for Mac. I had two floating DIVs with negative margins floating on the right and left side of the main content area of my design. These divs are being stretched to reach 100% height on the page so that the repeating background is always there no matter how tall the page gets.

There’s a bug with Safari for Mac and Chrome for Windows. If you HAPPEN to have negative margin divs that float left or right with a 100% stretched background, they’ll just not appear at all. I scoured and searched the ‘net for answers on this bug with little to no real answer until I made a discovery.

These bugs are dependent on the doctype declaration. Of ALL things to cause this, it’s a DOCTYPE issue. I would have never guessed this as I’ve never had this creep up in all my years of being a web geek.

So, I found some code that sniffs out browsers and OS types to resolve this. Goes a little something like this.

include("Browser.php");
$browser = new Browser();
if( $browser->getBrowser() == Browser::BROWSER_SAFARI) {
	echo "<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC \"-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN\">";
} else {
	if (($browser->getBrowser() == Browser::BROWSER_CHROME) && $browser->getPlatform() == Browser::PLATFORM_WINDOWS) {
		// That's right - NO DOCTYPE DECLARATION. At least for now.
		echo "";
	} else {
		echo "<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC \"-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN\"
\"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd\">";

}
}

Yep. It’s utterly ridiculous that the doctype affects whether or not a 100% vertical background div with negative margins. (Note: The above is based on a class that is very efficient at sniffing browsers and OS types. It’s by Chris Schuld)

For those who struggle with this bug, I hope this helps. I’m also posting this for Google and other engines to absorb.

Not that “gotta-collect-everything-in-Oblivion” busy, but actual busy!

For starters, let’s talk Alfredo Afro. I had to put it on hold last week due to a little Psychostick store launch, but I picked back up on it yesterday and things are moving along. 46% as of this writing, which at 60% means I’m done with the website and it’s ready for beta testing. The remaining 40% are the actual comics themselves. That part will probably take me the longest. Some I can crank out in an hour, and some are far more complicated and take several hours.

Investing time and money into this is becoming more a reality for me. Not in a bad way, but in a “woah, this might actually work” direction. Here’s a little clutter on my desk right now:

Yep. Paper, pencil, rulers - old school. You can see my little Wacom tablet where the blue circle light is.

Of course, many of you are asking, “Can you actually draw worth a damn?” My answer is, “I can draw well enough to get away with LOOKING like I can draw worth a damn.” Does that make sense? It will hopefully before the end of the year. Heh heh.

As of right now I have to finish more of the programming and work on polishing the site. I try to hop from web development to drawing so I don’t burn myself out. So far so good, but the real test lies when I’m cranking out two comics a week consistently. The mid-term lies in actually completing the initial batch of comics. I’ve got something like 30 comic concepts sitting in the queue. More are added regularly.

I try not to get ahead of myself either; usually at this stage with a project I’ve given up. This is definitely a sign that I should see this through to the end. I’ve got a few people genuinely interested in what this is going to turn into. By the time it launches, if all the pieces are in place (and they should be), it should spread like a viral wildfire STD. Hmm… trying to picture that… ouch, eww, and uhh, *barf*

Anyway.

Tomorrow, my stupid band and I will be hashing out some new songs. There’s a ton for us to do there, plus I’ve got to redesign and optimize Psychostick.com as well as a few other things. Oh, let’s not forget the artwork for the new record too.

Busy? Naawhhh…

Oh, I sold my iPad. Crazy, huh? iRawrb selling an Apple product. What’s wrong with me?

So I launched a little “under construction” page for my newest potentially awesome project. I have no idea how it’s going to go, but in my last entry I indicated that I DO indeed have a plan to launch. There’s quite the extensive checklist for me to uh, check down ’till I can actually launch the site for Alfredo Afro. It’s another web comic in a sea of web comics, but I have a pretty good feeling it’ll work fairly well.

I spent an interesting amount of time sketching out ideas and trying to find my style. I had been doing that for a while now; the web comic idea isn’t a new one really. I drew out a few really, REALLY crappy comics several years ago. They’re funny (I think, heh) but the art is awful.

Yeah. I drew it with a mouse. This was probably 6 years ago for Pluh.com, hah.

I’ve had tons of ideas I never thought I could actually translate to comic because I wasn’t so confident in my drawing abilities. I think I can pull this off now; my sketches are looking so much better and the tracework I’ve been working on are looking pretty slick. I’ve been refining the process of getting it from paper to computer. First I’d trace bitmap a sharpie trace in Flash, then I’d painstakingly assemble it to not suck. It works but I don’t like how long it takes.

Then I started to trace in Illustrator – that went a lot better. I had the ability to really manipulate the vectors to make things extra sharp. Problem was it was very time consuming. I think if I was working on extremely detailed art for some serious print I’d use illustrator.

I’m very concerned about how long the process is, obviously. I don’t have time to spend 5 hours on a single 3 or 4 panel comic. They’re not extremely detailed but I want ‘em to look nice. I plan on selling them in print format too so they can’t look like ass in any possible way.

So now, thanks to the web comic samples of Scott Johnson, I think I’m gonna use a Photoshop tracing setup like he has; import the scan, “ink” the comic, fill in the colors on separate layers, etc. Check this out.

Now he’s WAY faster than I am and far more accurate, but I can do this. I did some test work and it’s looking really good so far, AND it’s about 50% faster than tracing in Illustrator.

Two comics a week… heh. *cracks knuckles* I can do this. I can usually sketch a comic out in about an hour, trace and color it in about two hours – which I might add is still not exactly “refined” yet – and add the dialogue in within 15 minutes or so. Before I’d spend WAY too much time on a simple comic. Gonna nail this down.

That’s my rant. Oh yeah, I’m on tour right now and we’re gonna start recording more music soon.

How can that be?

What I used to do is simply get the site into a functional state. What I mean by functional is, “I can use it.” I’ve struggled with the ability to design stuff where any person can simply load the site up and from just glancing at it, they’d know what to do. My stubborn nature and overall laziness got in the way of that.

I’ve got a huge laundry list of ideas and websites I want to launch, but if I were to try and launch all of them at once using my old methods I’d end up launching several unsuccessful websites and then hate myself for half-assing it. Hence, Pluh.com and other sites that never actually worked like I wanted.

Guess I had to just grow up a bit. “Listen Rawrb; better to have one site that works and is successful than to have several that suck.”

I’m currently approaching a new project with a fresh outlook. I am NOT launching it until the site is more than just functional. I’m NOT launching it until a couple of months worth of content is ready to go right out of the box. I’m NOT launching it until a system is in place to keep content coming. I’m NOT launching it until there is true social network integration.

A lot of this process involves finding the right people who are genuinely interested in working with you, or getting the process put together well enough where you can run things by yourself. I’ve got an added need for this with the amount of touring that I do, so my approach on how to run this is very delicate and very needed.

Any project managers out there that can shed some advice? Please do so in the comments and I’ll pay super close attention.

Big Psychostick stuff coming soon too.

I’ve been messing around with WordPress and I’m very pleased with how it works. Essentially it’s exactly what I’ve been trying to create but it’s just far more robust and feature filled. And it’s free. FREE.

I’m on the verge of deciding to convert Pluh.com to WP. At this point Pluh.com is one simple thing; a goofy online blog/article system. There’s also the potential for actual video and video game production and transitioning over to this system would completely work. Completely.

I’ve got a new design in mind to work with WP’s system, then the conversion shall take place. This shouldn’t be to difficult; I can create an RSS feed specifically to import the articles. From there I should be able to assign categories for all the articles. I might even end up writing custom import queries to get other stuff properly imported.

Then there’s the comments; that’ll take me a while to nail, but that’s another custom import script. Should be painless after some testing.

I’ll probably keep the forums just for those who want forums for some reason. I have to fix them though; problems have been reported. Oh yay. I’ll probably have to completely restore the old database then run yet another upgrade.

Then I gotta tour. Heh.