Radiant Comics

I made three playlists this week in iTunes. They were made remarkably fast compare to other playlists I’ve made. Playlist is a pretty generic term but what I’m talking about is along the lines of a mix tape. I pick a bunch of songs out of my vast library of music and put them in an order which is pleasing to me. I’m programing my own virtual radio station we me as the only listener. I’ll tell you how I make a playlist. Not the physical part, which is choosing “New Playlist” from the iTunes menu and dragging and dropping songs, nor the creative part, which is figuring out which songs go best together, but the methodology. How to go about putting together a playlist so it’s an easy task.

The first thing I do is put together a master playlist of tracks that I want to use for playlists of the future. This is the most time consuming part. You have to go through your whole music library and pick out a few hundred songs. Pick songs where you only like a couple of songs on an album. Pick songs you don’t get tired off. Don’t just pick you “greatest hits” pick some deep tracks. If you don’t remember all the songs in your reservoir play a few seconds of them. Make some snap decisions. It’s not life or death. You can always drop a song off of your playlist later.

I put all of these songs in a playlist named “Songs for Playlists”. Make a copy of that playlist. I can’t emphasize that enough. You see, in iTunes, you highlight a playlist and then highlight a song in that playlist in order to interact with that song. The problem comes if that interaction is to delete the song. If you highlight the playlist, highlight a song, and then highlight the playlist again the song remains grayed out. Low-lighted for lack of a better word. This happens all the time when I’m adding and subtracting songs from that playlist. The problem happens when I think the song is highlighted but it’s really low-lighted and the master playlist is highlighted. Hit deleted then and the whole master playlist is deleted. Gone. And there is no command Z or any other way to get it back. You’d have to have saved your entire ITunes library in order to get it back. Usually that’s not done in the middle of collecting songs for a playlist.

I learned this the hard way once. I went through my whole library, picked out a bunch of songs, made a couple of playlists, went to delete a song from the master playlist, and deleted the whole master playlist. Ouch. I couldn’t look at the thing for a week. I had to gather all those songs again. I made a duplicate master playlist after I gathered up the songs and next time I made the same mistake I was ready for it. I just copied my copy. So I had two again.

I also added another back up plan to that one which works well. I use iTunes rating system that allows you to add one to five stars next to each song. I certainly don’t go through all my music and rate each song as I don’t have the time or inclination for that. So the iTunes rating system was lying there fallow. Now any song that I put into my master playlist gets three stars. That way if I somehow delete both my master playlist and the copy of it I can find the songs that were on it quickly. They’re the three starred ones. Any song that makes it onto one of my programed playlists gets five stars. Then I just delete the five star ones from the master playlist leaving the unused three star ones. It also helps when I periodically add more songs to the playlist master. I know not to add the three and five star songs.

The next thing you have to do is decide how long the playlist should be. I usually go under an hour and twenty minutes. That is about the length of a music CD and it seems a comfortable length. I find an hour too short and I always found a ninety minute mix tape being a little too long. Plus I can always burn a copy onto CD to give out as mix CDs to those that are still into such things.

What songs you put onto your playlist is up to you. I usually like variety. My attempt at an early Eighties “Forgotten Rock” mix ended up with too many songs that sounded similar. I nixed the playlist and added the songs back to the master playlist. My “Dance Fool Dance” playlist is successful because of the wide variety of dance music on it. Just be sure to give the mix a good listen. Drop songs out that don’t work and replace them with other ones. It’s all drag and drop goodness.

I like to come up with strange names for my mix playlists. Some are descriptive like “Old School Goodness” and “Mash-up and Remix Mania”. Some have weird but they came from somewhere names like “One Wolf”. That is a varied collection of songs about loneliness and the title refers to a ‘Laverne and Shirley” episode. Extra credit to anyone who knows that obscure reference. I’m not sure why I know it. But most of the playlists have names that I just kinda liked the sound of. Like “Glorious Fortification”, “Blond and Bleary”, and “Shadow Grain”.

So there you have it. Make a big master list, protect it, and the rest is easy. Whenever you feel like it or an idea pops into your head you can make a new playlist. It’ll save you from the tyranny of the album and the tedium of randomness. Sure both have their place but sometimes I want someone to have thought about the mix. No one in the radio business cares about me so I’ll have to do it myself. “Dance Fool Dance”.

Numbers. I’ve been into numbers lately. Numbers of paintings that is. You always have to remember that numbers impress. I had been working on my web comic for a while but I re-drew the first page so many times that I burnt out on the whole affair. I did finally finish the first page. At least I think so. After all I was so tired of looking at it that I never printed it out to give it a good once over on paper. That’s when I’ll know it’s done for sure. When it looks good on paper. I went on to the second page and worked that pretty far along before I decided to put the thing down for a while and paint. There is a more immediate reality to painting than to digital art.

Doing a web comic involves a large amount of computer work. Since that is also how I earn my living I was tired of looking at a computer screen. There is much less of that when painting. There is still some since I do all of my basic color sketches on the computer but that’s only about ten percent of my process. Counting the time spent coloring, lettering, writing, and laying out my web comic I’d say at least fifty percent of the process is on the computer. That’s a fair amount of time. I’m working on methods of speeding things up but the time payoff on that isn’t for a while. I’m in the “doing extra work now to save work down the line” period. No wonder I’m tired of looking at the thing.

So I started doing some small paintings. I like to paint big but that also takes a lot of time and I am tired of things taking a lot of time. Sometimes more immediate gratification is needed. I dug into one of my books of small drawings that are the basis for most of my art and picked out five drawings to work up into eight inch by ten inch paintings. That’s my small acrylic painting size.

I usually do four of these small paintings at a time. Since I paint them in water based acrylic paint I can wait for one to dry as I work up another. With four going at once I can concentrate easier and keep things moving. Otherwise the waiting would destroy my concentration. I work up five images and after I do color sketches I pick four of them to work on. One in the batch is usually a clunker. The law of averages says so. That’s why I work up an extra. Always work up more images than you need. It saves time in the long run because trying to work the weakest image in a bunch (there always is one) into a strong image can be a colossal waste of time. Drop the weak one and move on. Come back to it some other day if you want but leave it alone for now.

It takes about three eight hour days to make four eight by ten paintings and that is a bit of time but it is still less time than it takes to make a large one. Or the time it takes to make my web comic. So starting last weekend I finished four such paintings as I alternated my paying graphics work with my painting. When I finished the four of them didn’t seem like much. That number wasn’t high enough. I needed to finish more. So by the end of the week I painted four more. The days have been long but still that number wasn’t big enough. I put four more on my easel that I worked on all weekend.

The thing I like about the small paintings is the variety of images that I can make. I love to make images far out and colorful. Images from the back of my brain somewhere that live on their own and I’m not even sure where they came from. I do an Impressionist stacking thing (hang them close beside and atop one and other) when I’m done with them so I can see them all at a glance and look how they all play off of one and other. That’s where the numbers come in. Four all together is okay, eight is more impressive, and with twelve it gets to be a lot. I’ve never painted twelve paintings in such a short time before. I hope its enough to satisfy my restlessness with not having finished my endlessly time consuming and maybe never to be finalized web comic. Time will tell.

I’ve used up the dozen pre-streched eight by ten canvases that I had on my shelf. If twelve isn’t enough and I want to do more of these painting I’ll have to order some more canvases real soon. Maybe. They sure are fun. But I sure am tired. Maybe twelve is enough.

Ahhh… watching old football games. That’s what I’m doing right now. I’m digitizing an old New York Giants game. It’s the Giants/Bears playoff game from January 1991. I was lucky enough to be at this game so this is the first time I’m seeing the TV broadcast. A friend of mine (or his Mom) used to tape almost all of the Giants games in the late 80’s to early 90’s. He used to have a whole room full of taped games from all sports. Alas, at one point in time his wife made him get rid of them all. I managed to rescue about thirty games from the trash but I wish I had known they were being tossed because I would have grabbed more. At one time he had every game from the Giants 1986 championship season but I only got three of them. Ouch.

I’ve had the tapes sitting on my shelf for half a decade now and I’ve been meaning to digitizing them for years but haven’t. Digitally captured video takes up a lot of hard drive space. Even if it’s only going to be there temporarily. But the years have passed and hard drive space has gotten cheaper so I finally have enough space not to worry about it.

A couple of weeks ago I finally got tired of deciding which game to start with so I grabbed a random tape of of my shelf to see how long it would take to digitize and compress. I have a video capture box that my VCR is hooked up to. I just have to play the tape and software on my computer video captures it in real time. The video is captured in the digital video format (.dv) and the game took up about 30 gigs worth of space.

This tape also still had commercials in it that I wanted to cut out so I had to video capture it in pieces and them put the pieces together. I did this in Quicktime easily enough but I had to save it as a .mov and that took my old computer over an hour. And the new file was 60 gigs. Let’s hear it for cheap hard drives.

The final step was to compress it and for that I used my Elgato Turbo which is a little USB hardware device that does nothing but compress video into the mpeg-4 format. It does it a lot faster than my old computer and doesn’t tie up my processor. It’s a nice little add on. It took the thing about five hours to compress the 60 gigs down to around three gigs in the Apple TV format. Not bad since I could still use my computer during that time without a performance hit.

Funny thing is, since I grabbed a game randomly, it was a game I didn’t even remember. I’m sure I saw it back then but I don’t remember every game. It was game two of the 1988 season when the Giants played the 49ers at Giants stadium. Steve Young was playing for an injured Joe Montana and Lawrence Taylor wasn’t playing at all because he was suspended for the first four games of the season. It was a defensive struggle most of the game. Montana relived Young after halftime but didn’t get much going either. Late in the fourth quarter the Giants scored and went ahead. It looked like they were going to win. Then on third and long with about 40 seconds left Montana hooked up with Rice for a 78 yard TD catch. Twenty years later I got pissed off and couldn’t believe they lost that game. They had it nearly all wrapped up! Rice had done nothing all game until that point. Still it was fun to watch.

Though I cut the commercials out I left in the halftime show in. I wanted a little glimpse of what was going on in the league all those years ago. Plus it’s funny to see how primitive halftime looked in 1988. Just three guys giving you the scores with a few highlights. No talking over beds of music, only a few graphics, and no one was screaming. It looked like a million years ago.

No commercials and no halftime show in this playoff game. I don’t have to start and stop the tape. There is nothing for me to do but watch. That makes things a lot easier. I’m still not sure how quickly I’ll get all the others done but the Giants winning the Super Bowl this year has motivated me to revisit some of these old games. Time sure flies.

I’ll leave you with this in game observation: Lawrence Taylor was playing on the field goal team. I don’t remember that.

I’m tired of hard drives already! That’s my exclamation for the evening. I got backups and backups and backups. Yet I bought another backup drive. Staples had a 500 gig USB drive on sale for 120 dollars. I really didn’t want to spend the money (when do I ever) but I wanted all of my backup data in one place.

I’ve got two 250 gig internal drives. The first is the one I boot from and that has most off my applications and, more importantly, a folder called “Work”. This is where all of my own artwork goes. All of my digital prints, scans of my drawings, scans and photos of my paintings, and my web site graphics. Needless to say this is important information that I want to back up. It runs 50 gigs or so. I thinned it out some a couple of years ago when backup wasn’t as cheap as it is now. I put a bunch of stuff on DVD. Nothing too important but now I have to track it down and add it back to the main folder. I like everything in one place. Backup info that you can’t find does no good.

The second internal drive has plenty of room on it. I back up the “Work” folder there and have some applications and random things that ended up there. I dump video I’m digitizing on to this second drive so I need lots of room. Then I compress the video and get rid of the huge files. Plus it’s a second boot drive.

I have Mac OS 10.4 installed on the second drive but I run 10.5 on the main drive. Believe it or not I need 10.4 installed because of one program that I still run in the Mac Classic environment: Adobe Streamline. It’s a program that hasn’t been updated since before Mac OSX was released but I still need it. It converts bitmap drawings into vector drawings. Adobe programed Illustrator to perform this task a couple of versions ago but it doesn’t do it to my liking. Illustrator knocks out shapes where Streamline layers them. This isn’t a big deal unless you actually want to edit your drawings in which case knocking shapes out of their background shapes creates holes if you want to edit the top shape. Confusing stuff if you’ve never done it before. I think I’ve just discovered a way around it so maybe I can get rid of 10.4 and the classic environment once and for all.

My third drive is a 320 gig external drive that I got from a job when they needed to give me about 80 gigs worth of images and things. I keep all of the work I do for them (I’ve added another 50 gigs worth) and some other clients on that drive. The problem is that I don’t trust the wacky drive it’s on. It’s a Maxtor drive and it is the loudest drive I have ever heard. I read up on it online and lots of people note how absurdly loud it is. It sounds like a drive with its fan off kilter but this drive has no fan. When I turn it on in the morning it makes this terrible sound but with some experimentation (I got tired of whacking it on its top – that can’t be good for it) I discovered that if I change the drive from the horizontal to the vertical position and back a couple of times it will quiet down and remain that way until I turn my computer of and on again. I’m glad it quiets down because I couldn’t work with it on otherwise. It’s that loud.

My fourth drive is a 500 gig external drive. It’s my media drive and I have about 350 gigs worth of photos, music, and video on it. I bought that drive so I could consolidate my media on one drive. It used to be spread across three drives. That got really cumbersome. Consolidation is your friend. At least after it’s done. Doing it is a pain.

My fifth drive is a 250 gig external. This was my first backup drive and it used to have my media and such on it too but it developed some bad blocks and I lost a little data. Now it’s strictly a redundant backup drive and I keep it unplugged and powered down. It can’t die on me if it’s not turned on I say!

Then come my two 80 gig external drives that used to be internal drives. I had them hooked up but now they are powered down backups. One has yet another copy of my “Work” folder (I am careful) and the other some of my photos. At only 160 gigs combined they weren’t enough to back up all the stuff I wanted to. Hence the new 500 gig big backup drive.

I have copied about 300 gigs worth of data copied to the new drive. I have about 100 more gigs to copy over and then all of my backing up will be done. Good. I’m really sick of thinking about data and hard drives.

I really am living in the age of the internet. The convenience of it has spoiled me when it comes to shopping. Making a phone call to order something is now such a bother. And ordering from a catalogue? I remember when I used to do that. Seems like a million years ago. I’m not even sure what I used to order from catalogues. I suspect it was never a lot. I did place a few orders of comics that when I was a teenager. That’s how I acquired some back issues. I also ordered my duster from a catalogue too. That I remember. It’s falling apart these days but I’ve patched it and still continue to wear it.

Nowadays I get my mylar comic book bags and protective sleeves for my original comic art collection from a company that has a website but you have to phone them to place your order. Phone them during business hours from nine to five that is. I’ve been putting off doing it, not only because of the expense (these bags are not cheap), but because I have to make a phone call to order. Imagine that, a phone call is what I consider a hassle these days.

Most of my shopping is done at a local store or on the internet. I’m big on Amazon but I buy from a variety of sites. I just ordered a few really obscure comics from a site a friend recommended. I signed up with the site, logged on, found the comics I wanted, and then paid for them. No muss no fuss. Of course now the comics have to show up in my mailbox. I’ve ordered obscure comics before that have never showed up. Sometimes a site shows that they have the comics but they really don’t. But they don’t take your money when that happens so it’s disappointing but not robbery. Nobody likes to be robbed.

Recently I’ve had a bad consumer phone experience. In the last month and a half I’ve had to get on the phone a four times to try and get a part for my stationary bike. A V-Belt. Boy was that a waste of time. The belt broke on my stationary bike.That belt does what a chain does on a regular bike. But no problem, right? There is a sticker on the bike that gives me a number to call for parts. How convenient.

I called it. They charged me thirty five bucks for the wrong belt. I need a 46 inch V-Belt and they sent me a 50 inch flat belt. I called again. No problem they said they’ll send a new one as soon as they get it in. In two weeks. They even said that they’ll e-mail me when they send it. Two weeks later and no belt. I call a third time. Whoops, their bad, no problem they’ll second day air me the right one. Two days later I get the same 50 inch flat belt. I call a fourth time. The guy I get this time doesn’t get what the problem is. His manager says “Don’t worry. It turns into a V-Belt when you put it on”. What? It’s a magic transforming belt? According to the manager it is. He had no answer for how it was going to shrink 4 inches but the manager insisted they had no V-Belts as parts. I asked for my money back. I’m still going through that process. Let’s hope they don’t rob me.

I certainly don’t expect that level of nonsense when I order my comic bags. I’ve ordered from them many times before with no trouble but it still it takes a little preparation. I have to figure out which bags I need, what their order numbers are, how many I want, and I have to order during business hours. Even though I work from home that is usually when I’m working. I have to get business done during business hours.

It was actually easier to make a call during the day when I was working in an office. Then any excuse to take a few minutes break was a good one. And there are plenty of people to make sure you get back to work. Working alone at home you have to be self motivated and that is a spell that’s easily broken. Making calls to order stuff is more of an annoyance at home. It’s a weird thing. I got better things to do when taking a break at home. In the office there are never better things to do.

Most of my internet ordering gets done at night. After hours. Just like everyone else that’s when I have time to look around and see what’s there. Shuffle from page to page in search of some hard to find old thing that’s interesting in some way. You get pictures, descriptions, fast service (well, mostly) and all on my schedule. This whole phone thing is so 1990’s.