A little update

I still haven't been doing much for a while - mostly playing online games, watching videos, and so forth. Oh, and running a quirky Mafia variant on an internet forum - you can check it out over here on the XKCD forums if you're into that sort of thing. My inactivity has a lot to do with the fact that it's late in the summer, it's hot all the time, and I haven't been talking to other people too much. (Getting at least a little interaction with other people helps me, because it stimulates my mind and gives me new ideas.) I'm going to be going back to college relatively soon, too, and that's discouraging me from getting into projects a bit, even though I still have about three weeks left.

That said, I've still got a couple of projects running. I'm working on them occasionally, it's just that they're not taking the majority of my time.

One of them is that I'm learning more Javascript, so that I can make cool online games and utilities. Check out this extremely-unfinished game for an example of what I'm messing with.

The other is this: Since I'm blocked on the graphics editing software project, I've started just drawing stuff in an existing graphics program (namely GIMP). Here's something I randomly sketched a few days ago:

Image [see below for a transcript]
Transcript: (show)(hide)

Text: What shall I draw? thought I.

Picture: A cartoon of myself, with an excessively cheerful expression, thinking: Maybe something DARK & DISTURBING?

Picture: A gaunt face drawn in white on a black background, surrounded by orange streaks. Its thoughts are written messily: “I DON'T KNOW WHY I'VE BECOME LIKE THIS. I AM SO COLD, COLD!! I DON'T NEED ANY HELP!!

Text: What sex is our friend the pyromaniac? I find it easier to read zem as male, but is the face actually characteristically male or is it just that I'm more familiar with that exaggerated gauntness on male characters, while our society makes people draw female people in pristine condition always?

I've also started sketching characters for a fairly absurd short comic (3-4 pages, probably). I might end up drawing that in the next week or two.

Speaking of posting comics here on this website, that's yet another thing that I'm going to need to do programming work for. It's not a problem if I just stick them in blog posts for the moment, but it'd be nice to have a more formal way of presenting them. I'm still planning to post that novella, too – I've edited it as much as I need to, and now the only thing stopping me from posting it is that I haven't been feeling like doing the technical end of things (and, again, I want it to be presented more nicely than just sticking it in a blog post).

Anyway, there's an update for you. Things will probably get more interesting when I head back to college – I'll try not to get so busy that I don't have time to blog, heh heh.

– Eli

Approximate readability: 8.62 (2183 characters, 506 words, 26 sentences, 4.31 characters per word, 19.46 words per sentence)