Like the “new” layout? I totally ganked that 1024x WordPress theme and did some minor modifying. Not that you… care. Wait, do you care? DO YOU ACTUALLY CARE? No? Awh.

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.

I’ve just finished my final preliminary comic for Alfredo Afro. DONE.

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

Happy Again Year! Somehow time keeps on moving and we continue to celebrate that fact.

Speaking of New Year, there really needs to be an alternative to Dick Clarks New Year’s Poppin’ Eve. If you like pop music, that’s great, but guys like myself do not and would like to do something else other than watch the uber-family safe and cool-when-we-were-younger-but-now-it-is-boring-but-there’s-nothing-else-on-so-I-guess-we’ll-watch-the-gender-confused-Keshia.

Would someone, like Comedy Central, grow some balls and have a New Year’s Metal-as-Fuck Celebration? The mere fact that you’re offering competition will have other folks look for alternative.

I can rest at ease though; the internet has almost destroyed the evil music industry. Radio is far less relevant than ever before. YES. Television is next thanks to Google TV, Apple TV, and other mediums. Untargeted annoying commercials are almost a thing of the past; companies are going to have to get more clever with subliminal advertising rather than obnoxious rape-your-eyes-and-ears advertising. So glad things are going this direction.

Moving on…

Gonna do some quickie reviews on a couple of games I’ve tinkered with lately.

Castlevania: Lords of Shadow (PS3, 360)
Outsourcing can be a good thing. The studio they sourced to (can’t recall the name right now), plus Kojima Productions, gave Castlevania a new twist. It plays  more like a God of War/Devil May Cry/Ninja Gaiden game with a nice Castlevania feel to it. Superb voice acting, awesome music, incredible graphics, and a compelling twisty ending make this one a win/win. Plus Patrick Stewart is in it.

If you like fun, play this game.

Final Fantasy XIII (PS3, 360, my rectum)
I love Gamefly. They let me try games that I might otherwise hate myself for buying. FF XIII is one of those games. What happened to Final Fantasy? Remember when those games were not only great stories, but were also highly addictive and (gasp) FUN?! The last Final Fantasy game that blew my frickin’ mind was Final Fantasy VII. That’s the one with Cloud, Tifa, and Sephiroth in case you don’t remember.

SEVEN SEQUELS LATER, they still haven’t recaptured me.

For starters, the character designer is trying too hard. Tetsuya Nomura did better than he did in FF X, but it’s still just too much pizzazz or whatever. The obnoxious overly giddy character is there (the Rikku equivalent) AGAIN, and the dialogue is so awkward that I cringe every time there is a cutscene.

And there are TONS upon TONS of cutscenes.

The Japanese to English translation is too direct. The conversations just don’t sound natural; they should’ve hired an experienced writer to keep the translation in the ballpark but still make the character interactions believable. Not once did I laugh, not once did I get attached to a character, not ONCE did I want to keep playing. I gave it a chance but they lost me when the Shiva Sisters suddenly emerged from Snow’s arm and you had to “prove  yourself” by attacking and defending.

Final Fantasy has died. I hope they don’t remake VII now because they’ll add awkward dialogue and completely fuck it up. However no Final Fantasy game could ever become as low and as shitty as Final Fantasy X-2.

The rerelease of Secret of Mana for the iPhone was well done. Sometimes they can get something right.

Anyway, gonna go work on comics. Hooray.

So apparently the science behind blogging is to, “Post relevant, interesting, entertaining stuff often without clutter.” Well, that’s MY summarization of what I think blogging is after researching other blogs and whatnot.

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.

Webgeek alert: The more browsers, the more compatibility testing you have to endure. The more operating systems, the more testing you have to somehow engage in. I don’t have a Linux or BeOS setup so I have to go with what’s generally used; Windows and OSX.

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.

Been busy.

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?

Thank you Bill Corbett. You made my day.

I’ve also experienced near completion of Psychostick’s store. More… eventually.

WordPress has 6,430 updates every time I log into it. So strange.

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.

I’ve been developing websites for over 10 years now. I can design, program, blah blah blah. Successfully LAUNCHING a website? Never actually done it.

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.

Oh yeah. I’m “back.” Well technically I didn’t go anywhere, but then again I did go somewhere. Wait, so I wasn’t anywhere, but I was? *scratches head*

I’m gonna skip that whole “I’m gonna try and update more” nonsense. I am gonna try and update more though. I think it’s be— awwh hell.

June 30th was my last internet e-web blog. Now I have to recall of things to talk about. I did some stuff. There was also some stuff I didn’t do. For instance, I did not battle a mutant octopus, but I did go to North Dakota for the first time. Guess which is funner and/or more interesting? Awh hell, you know which. North Dakota.

So I’m going to “review” a few video games. You probably don’t care, but this is my internet text!

Dragon Quest IX (Nintendo DS)

I went and picked me up one of those funky Nintendo DSi XL thingies. This would be the *ahem* third DS I’ve bought. First was that clunky grey DS. Then a nice DS Lite. Why did I buy another one? I don’t rightly know… my impulses kicked in when I saw ‘em on display. “OOoOh, a bigger screen!” Yeah, goddamn Nintendo. Why must they make everything so awesome?

In any case, I also picked up Dragon Quest IX with this newfangled DSi XL. Now if you know me beyond “BEER IS GOOD!” you might know that I’m a huge Dragon Quest (Dragon Warrior for a while here in the states) fan. I heard there was dumb multiplayer crap in this one, and the odd-shaped characters looked too kiddie for my taste, but what the hell; let’s see how this one is.

I’m STILL playing it.

If anything, this might be the single best Dragon Quest game to date. If part VIII was the best looking and sounding, IX is the most expansive sequel. The main quest isn’t super long, but all the extra content will take you two to three times as long as the main quest to complete. Matter of fact, once you character reaches level 99, you can… reset him/her to level one again to earn more points.

The side quests are what make this game near perfection for a handheld device. They remind me of quests in Oblivion actually; you run into someone who needs you to perform a task, you go and perform the task, then you return for a reward. Some are easy, some are insane. The sheer magnitude of these quests is pure craziness.

AND let’s not forget the treasure maps. There are something like 4 million possible combinations for treasure maps that lead you down dungeons that can be larger than the last level of the game. I’ve clocked over 140 hours so far and… I still want to keep playing. Perfect for a touring jerk like me or anyone who likes a game with substance. I only don’t like the big-headed character design; everything else is gold and/or Orichulcum.

9.5/10 Questing Tacos.

Metroid: Other M (Wii)

I would consider myself a Metroid guy. The only entry in the Metroid series that I didn’t like was Metroid Prime: Hunters for the DS. Yes – I even liked Metroid II on the Game Boy! What’s wrong with me?

Other M drops that whole silent protagonist thing with a very vocal Samus played by… um… Jessica Martin? Here’s her IMDB. As of this writing, Other M looks to be her first vocal performance. She didn’t do BAD, but there are times when it just sounds like she’s just reading her lines. The same goes for the rest of the cast. I’m going to blame the lazy translation of the game; the dialogue isn’t believable. Yeah yeah, I know – this is a game about a blonde chick in blue spandex that dons on alien armor, shoots plasma, and turns into a ball. How believable can you get? Still though; the dialogue sounds forced and I never once believe that they’re real people.

The actual gameplay, however, is lotsa fun. It feels like a healthy cross between Super Metroid and Metroid Prime. Sure the first person modes feel a little awkward at first, but not long after playing it’ll feel just fine. The method of unlocking abilities is kindof… weird, and 90% of the stuff you come across for the first couple hours you can’t get yet. I do remember that in Metroid games, but they really REALLY make sure you can’t get ‘em ’till Adam goes, “Okay Samus, it’s safe for you to jump higher!”

Uhh yeah, I really enjoyed the game and Team Ninja (who made the Ninja Gaiden games on Xbox; some of my favorite games of all time) did a great job. Nowhere near as good as the best of the Metroid series, but it’s a fun game and I’ll be returning to it again fer sure.

7.8/10 Ridley Sandwiches

Halo: Reach (Xbox 360)

Arguably the most important game of 2010, right? Right?! Well except for those jerks who hate Xbox and Microsoft for no real legitimate reason… heh. *cough* NICK *cough*

There isn’t a Halo in this Halo. There is a Reach though, and you aren’t Chief, Master. You are Noble Six in a team of super soldier Spartans in defense of the planet Reach, and yes, you will lose. It’s a prequel to the first Halo game and isn’t quite based on the Fall of Reach book.

The Deliver Hope trailer for this game had a lot more emotion than the actual game, strangely. The character development in this game isn’t quite up to par, but I’m not exactly sure that’s a BAD thing. These are super soldiers and their emotions are just right for how they handle their extraordinary situations. I did end up liking a couple of the characters, although I think a few more hours of gameplay with them would have made a world of difference.

Single player is really fun like all the previous games, although it doesn’t really diversify. They do introduce new weapons and a new space-flight mission, which is all welcome. After I did finish the single player campaign, I did something I don’t normally do with games: PLAY MULTIPLAYER.

Holy balls. They have a point system similar to Call of Duty where you go up in rank the more you play. Very addictive. When I first hopped in I got my ass handed to me, but I eventually started to suck less. The various modes of gameplay and huge following makes multiplayer all the more fun.

So yes, if you like fun, reach for Halo: Reach. Yes, applaud my pun.

9.8/10 Covenant Cornmuffins

Yes. Games.

Eat.