Think of Your Own Witty Title!

 Carja's Corner  No Responses »
Mar 242014
 

Hey folks! It’s Sunday and I’m here writing my blog post for Monday. It’s not too often that I get around to doing this, but I had a three-day weekend this week and I got all my drawing done early so here I am.

I’m actually halfway done on my last Krull mash-up. That would give me a three-week cushion for the Wednesday installment which would put me on par with the three-week cushion I give myself for strips and flashbacks. I’m digging it!

It’s time to switch programs over at work. I’m still waiting on the process I applied for to be finalized, but I’ve got an interim contract that has me set up as a technical adviser through September. I’ll be starting with finishing up correcting the macro codes I’ve been working on. I wasn’t able to work on them at all for the last few weeks as we’ve been pushing towards the end of the program.

I’m switching desks for the first time in like four years. I had to clean out my stuff on Thursday before leaving so that the person who’ll be moving in to my old desk could move in on Friday. My new desk is bigger…for now. The whole building is moving towards saving office space so I expect new desks sometime this year or next.

Major plot twist in Thursday’s strip last week. It wasn’t in my original plan for this storyline it just sort of fell into place as I was fleshing things out. I can see the finish line for this arc now. I’ve still got a ways to go before I get there, but I know where I’m going for the most part. This is going to be pretty much Cyran’s show for a while.

You know, I was sure I had something else I wanted to talk about earlier this week. Wouldn’t you know it though? I’ve plum forgotten what it was. This is what happens when I don’t keep notes. Next time, I’ll have to write my subjects down as they come to me and then edit them together into a single post. For now though, I’m going to wrap this up. Have a good week everybody!

Everything’s Back to Normal

 Carja's Corner  No Responses »
Mar 172014
 

I mentioned last week that I was having a lot of trouble updating the site. I’m happy to report that after a lot of frustration, things are back to normal. After discussion with the Bluehost tech support folk, I think the problem was related to an update of the Jetpack plugin for WordPress that went awry. They were able to remove the plugin completely and the site ran smooth after that though I wasn’t able to reinstall Jetpack. Two days later, even that problem had gone away, so everything’s good!

I stumbled upon an episode from season 2 of Young Justice a couple of weeks ago. I programmed my DVR to record any upcoming episodes. Just my luck, there was a season 2 marathon on Thursday so I was able to watch the whole season this weekend. Good stuff. It’s a shame that they cancelled the show  because the finale was clearly setting things up for a third season.

I’ve been having new ideas for a game lately (AGAIN). I’ve been thinking that perhaps a Mice and Mystics-style game might be the way to go. It would combine my desire to make an Age of Animus game and to share the “real” (i.e. non-Funnies) adventures of Cyran, Red Rich, Sass and Todrick. I don’t know that I’d ever manage to do both separately, so combining the two makes a lot of sense. Now I have to act on these thoughts (always the most difficult part of any idea).

Sixteen flashback pieces have gone up so far. It’s been nice to revisit the themes and put in the effort to produce some drawings that I’m proud of. Including the three I have in the queue, I have 42 weeks of flashbacks to go. Who knows though? Maybe by then I’ll be itching to revisit some of the later themes too.

That’s all for this week! More bloggifying next Monday!

 

It’s a New Week!

 Carja's Corner  No Responses »
Mar 102014
 

Welcome to the new week everybody! I’m having a bit of a problem with connecting to WordPress today, so I’m going to keep this short.

Last week started out rough for me. My upcoming interview had me all kinds of worried and I was emotionally drained for much of the week because of it.

For better or worse, the interview is behind me now. I think it went about as well as could be expected given that I was less than confident in what I had to present. The last of the interviews went down today, so I should get my grade within the next couple of days.

I ran out of comic scripts this weekend and I was too tired to write any new ones so I only managed to produce one strip. I made up for it by drawing the next Krull mash-up (the last couple were drawn mid-week) so I should be good to draw a strip during the week…assuming I get some scripts written. The words, they’re not flowing today.

I finally got to try out the tabletop version of Krosmaster Arena this weekend! It was pretty sweet. We played a 4-player Free-for-All. I finished fourth. Out of four. I lost. But I had fun, so that makes me a winner right? Right?!! Yeah baby, I’m a winner…just not in any way that actually counts. 🙂
I’m looking forward to receiving the expansion so I’ll have two boards and we’ll be able to play two traditional 1 on 1 games at the same time.

Okay, so that’s it for today. Have a great week folks!

Learning to Adapt

 Carja's Corner  No Responses »
Mar 032014
 

I have an interview to do tomorrow at work. I’m applying for a higher position in my department and part of the process is an interview. One of the subjects I’ll have to discuss is my capacity to adapt, citing a recent example which demonstrates said capacity. Oh boy.

Is it cheating to say I’d be able to adapt doing the job I’m applying for because I’ve always adapted when I did the job I’m applying for on an interim basis?

What can you do to help yourself adapt at work?

Have a firm grasp of the basics. If you don’t understand how the job works at its core, how will you be able to handle things when they change? The more you know how things are supposed to work, the easier it is to anticipate the impacts of changes and to prepare for them.

Keep yourself open to the idea of change. This one is hard. People like it when things run smooth. When things change, things don’t always run smooth. The important thing is not to decide something is bad simply because it’s different from the way things were before, especially when a final decision has been made that things are going to change. That means…

Let go of the past. Whinging about how things used to be better won’t help you get the job done now. It’s okay to complain to get it out of your system, but once you’ve done so, move on!

Take time to prepare for upcoming changes if you can. You know changes are coming and there’s information available on the changes? Read up on them. Anticipate what impacts a particular change can have and have a plan in place to handle them if they occur.

Don’t take TOO much time to prepare for upcoming changes. Don’t get lost in all the “What ifs?” It’s good to be prepared for any situation, but you have to be able to analyze how likely it is for a situation to occur. Spending hours preparing for something that never happens isn’t a great use of time. Especially if it’s something that you can deal with on the spot using good ol’ common sense. This is easier when you’re able to…

Be confident in your abilities. You were able to do the job before. Why wouldn’t you be able to do the job now?

Don’t be TOO confident in your abilities. That is to say, don’t assume you know better than the person who designed the changes you’re implementing.That can lead to closing yourself off to the possibility that there’s a better way of doing things. You ultimately may be right, but butting heads won’t help. Telling everybody you know better won’t help. Accept things the way they are now and make suggestions later.

DIVE IN. You can’t succeed if you don’t try. After trying something new once, you’ll have a better understanding of how it works and can better prepare for it in the future.

Don’t be afraid to ask questions. The person you’re asking may not know the answer any more than you do, but together maybe you can make sense of things.

Okay, so these are the things I think help me adapt. Am I any more ready for my interview? No…I still have no clue what example to give that shows I do these things. I need to think some more. Take it easy y’all!

Thinking About Red Rich

 Carja's Corner  No Responses »
Feb 242014
 

Finally I can get the Add New Post page to load! I’ve only been trying for 15 minute.

I was so concerned with just trying to get this thing to load that I wasn’t able to think of anything I wanted to talk about. I’m just going to pick a character and go with it.

Red Rich.

I like writing Red Rich. He has a very particular voice. It’s a mix of pompousness and silliness. I missed writing lines for him while he was out of the strip. It’s great having him back and an active participant in a storyline. He’s one of the few characters who translates almost exactly the same from the original Animus stories to the Funnies.

For a while I had trouble drawing Red Rich. My hand is shaky if I draw slowly and it really shows when I draw ellipses. What shape is Red Rich’s head? That’s right. An ellipse. I try to use a quicker, smoother stroke of the pen now so he looks a lot better than say a year ago. The biggest improvement I’d say is his ears. I have a consistent shape for them now. He has a slightly more round face than Todrick and his ears are a little shorter. I still need to count the lines in his tail to make sure he has the right number of stripes.

I find that Red Rich doesn’t look right if his eyes are fully opened. I like him best with his eyes half open. It’s just the right attitude for him.

As you may know, I someday would like to write a series of adventures starring Todrick, Cyran, Sass and Red Rich. There are key scenes that I’ve already imagined and in particular, one that features Red Rich where we get to see that he’s a lot more observant and self-aware than he lets on. He knows that the others think he’s weird, but he likes and is comfortable with who he is so he doesn’t let it get to him. I wish I was a little more like him in that respect. Maybe I should start referring to my friends as Citizens to get in the right mindset?

Anyway, that’s what I have to say about Red Rich today.

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