Happy Walpurgis Night

So hard to believe that this is the last night of April, that this is the night where the winter demons are laid to rest, that another year has gone by in a blur of tears, disorientation, and regeneration.

So it's appropriate that tonight I'll celebrate with a new (to me) Doctor in a brand-new Doctor Who adventure. My initial reaction to Matt Smith as the 11th Doctor is overwhelmingly positive. Though the youngest actor ever to play the role, he captures the characters combination of youth and age, wisdom and play. I like him better than what I saw of David Tennant, and I like the scripts that he's been given to work with better than anything that Tennant had.

Someday, my old Who website, "The Prydonian Order" will reappear as part of the new www.ducksoup.me, and I have a feeling I'll have something new to add when that day comes.

Earlier in the week, I took the time to sit through a couple of '50's SF monster movies, not really ideal Walpurgis Night fare, but the things that came to hand. The Monster That Challenged the World at least had a good and genuinely repellant monster in the form of a giant caterpillary-earwiggy kind of thing with creepy bulbous eyes that lays eggs that hatch a bunch of other giant caterpillary-earwiggy kind of things with creepy bulbous eyes. Yuck! It's too bad the rest of the movie is so lame, strictly by the genre numbers, with Hans Conried being the only real actor on hand to hold the thing down. He fails.

It! The Terror from Beyond Space was just the opposite. Oh, the actors were still bottom of the barrel, and the script was typed by someone with a lead ear, but the concept has possibilities for claustrophobic horror that were not realized until Dan O'Bannon stole the idea brazenly for Alien.

But that monster! Ye gods! Poor Ray "Crash" Corrigan, reduced to lumbering around in a pathetic rubber suit, waving his arms like there's no tomorrow. Perhaps, for him, there wasn't. . .

Before the Doctor comes to call, I'll re-visit Beetlejuice, which I have not seen since its original theatrical release, all those years ago.

'K, I've got to run and get my dinner going so that I can get the "celebration" started. I'm sure at least three of my quats will sit on me, and that's relaxing for all of us. The regenerating me will raise a glass to the regenerated Doctor -- an old friend with a new face, who always brings monsters.

Happy Walpugis Night!

-- Freder.

Big Change in the Weather

Unfortunately, the Weather Weenies and Wenches were right about this one! The last (one can only hope) snowstorm of the season is a doozy. You're looking at a picture snapped 45 minutes ago from my porch, and it's gotten worse since then. As you can see, the snow is so wet and heavy that it's weighing down the branches of my pine trees to the extent that they actually obstruct the driveway! When I was out shoveling the steps a little after ten, I heard the distinct crack of a branch snapping. Mainers who weren't born yesterday know what this means: there are going to be power outages, perhaps significant and lengthy ones.

In the big Ice Storm of, I think, '89, we were without power at the old house for fourteen days. Today is another day that I'm glad I'm not out there!

I have some Juicy Gossip to report. Tiger Whitestockings seems to have found herself a beau!

When I took her food out this morning I was surprised when she crawled out from under the deck and struggled up the stairs through three plus inches of snow to meet me. I was even more surprised when another cat came after her.

He was Big. He was Yellow. And when he saw me, he got a Stupid look on his face.

That's right: Whitestockings's taste in Men hasn't changed! This guy looks like he could be Big Stupid Yellow Cat's younger brother and Junior's pampered uncle. My jaw dropped. So we were both crouched there, staring at each other with stupid looks on our faces.

He turned and ran back under the deck, and instead of staying and eating her breakfast, Tiger Whitestockings went after him. When she couldn't find him, she stood below the deck, looking around anxiously.

So, it's serious! She's found herself a New Junior. Sort of tells you something about Human Nature.

One of my tasks for this day off is to continue, at a pace, working on the new site. This will give you an idea of how small I'm starting and how much I have ahead of me. I decided that the earliest chapters of Tinsel*Town, my graphic novel in progress, should appear under the original logo. But there were a couple of things I didn't like about the original logo, and even the revised logo that replaced it had legibility problems and was smaller than what I wanted for the new site.

So I re-made it, from scratch. in Adobe Illustrator. The original was hand drawn, many years ago; this version is all CGI, although I tried to preserve some of the hand-drawn look. The possibility exists to import it into Flash and animate it ever so slightly. I'm going to think on that one a bit. It's probably better to get the basic site designed and uploaded, then work on dressing it up as time allows.

Many, but not all, of the other graphics found around the old site are going to get the same treatment, some more dramatically than others. Before I put together a single page of the new site, I'm going to get the bulk of the graphics in place.

In the meantime, I broke down and bought a copy of Adobe Creative Suite 5 Design Premium All-in-One for Dummies. I just needed some real, printed-on-paper documentation that I could sit down and read, and the official books from Adobe appear to be little more than tutorials in book form. I have no patience whatever  with tutorials -- can't see the point in spending time playing with imaginary projects when I have a real one right in front of me that needs my attention. 

Although I'm only 50+ pages into an almost 1,000 page book, I've already picked up some useful knowledge -- and confirmed my suspicions about the "Bridge" program -- that it's completely extraneous. I've been doing this long enough that I can manage my own files, thank you very much, and unless Bridge can pull out a little electronic chair and whip and make those files climb up on their hind legs and jump through hoops I don't have a use for it!

So, today is for staying indoors, fixing my lamp, working a bit in the Halloween bedroom, poking some site graphics into shape, and reading some more about the software. Oh, I still have my taxes to do as well, but that ought not to take long. 

I'll keep you posted on Whitestockings's newfound Love!

-- Freder

Bits 'n' Bytes

Tonight I started working on the new site in earnest. Until now, everything I'd done had been in the area of just trying to clarify my thoughts, and in researching the software that I would be using to create the thing.

It's deeply frustrating to me that unlike the "old" days, the software doesn't come with manuals anymore. At best, there's access to online documentation and tutorials, but I never knew a tutorial that was worth a damn to me, and the online documentation is so loosely organized that I find it difficult to get the information that I'm looking for.

For instance, Flash now comes as three separate products. Which product would I use to accomplish specific functions? It was hard to get answers even to those basic questions, and the answers that I did find were written in corporate geek jargon, certainly not in English; like an archeologist looking at hieroglyphs I had to puzzle out the meaning of what I was looking at.

Tonight I simply organized some graphics files and started to create new graphics for the site in Illustrator and Photoshop, and it was all the more dismaying to find that even these programs that I formerly considered myself proficient in have changed so much since the versions that I used that even simple tasks required frequent trips to the HELP menu. Very little of the functionality is organized the way that it used to be, especially in Illustrator. The learning curve just got steeper.

But that's OK. I'm going to come out of this with an expanded skill set. I think.

I'd had an idea for the new main page, and all of the reading and research I've done in the past couple of weeks has caused me to realize that I have to scale it back. Not ruling anything out for the future, but I have to start with a simpler design. Once I learn the basics I can modify and build from there.

To put the frosting on the cake, I'm also going to be learning Dreamweaver and Cascading Style Sheets, and tonight I realized that I couldn't start with the home page at all -- it was better for several reasons to begin with some simpler content pages, and then work my way back through the hierarchy to the more complicated and fiddly home page. Baby steps!

In other news. . . maybe getting another step closer to being Done with the move has had some impact on my emotions. Tonight for the first time in a while I could not stop thinking about Mom, and while I was doing the dishes I suddenly found that I couldn't see anything that I was doing because my eyes were full of tears.

Yesterday I had a regressive, anxiety-ridden morning the like of which I hadn't experienced in a long while. I started out all right, but kept on getting more and more panicky and full of dread. It got worse and worse. At one point I even started to hyperventilate. I don't know what brings these things on, but I hate 'em! Thankfully, these kind of mornings are growing fewer, and today I was fine.

So that's all the blah-blah-blah I can muster up for you today, Dear Diary. One foot in front of the other, and maybe I'll get somewhere eventually, to coin a cliche.

-- Freder.

Update on the new site: the placeholder page has been customized with my own graphic, and some functionality has been added, including a link to the old website and a contact form. Surf on over to www.ducksoup.me!

Announcing www.ducksoup.me !

It's official! I will have an all-new website, bigger and better than before, and this time it will have its own domain name: www.ducksoup.me !!

That's easy to remember! Just think of Duck Soup and Maine!

I'm already brimming with ideas and I haven't even started. The site will contain a complete archive of all my online comics, it will be the new home for the my literary e-zine EPOCH (formerly MILLENNIUM, and every issue of that will be archived there as well), and a heckova lot more, all with a spanking new look and interactivity.

This blog will be incorporated into the new family of sites, and will be accessed through www.ducksoup.me, but it will still contain all the world-class wingeing and whining, suffering and misery that you have all come to expect!

It won't happen all at once, of course. Baby steps is still my motto! There will be a steep learning curve as I take on the power of Dreamweaver and Flash, but I've been there before, and this self-taught graphic artist is about to grow his abilities once again.

Right now there is a placeholder up announcing my arrival. The official launch will happen. . . when it happens. The important thing is, I now have something to shoot for.

I'm excited! I have a new house in real life, and now I have a new house on the web, and it will do me a world of good to bring them both to life. I hope that y'all will come and see me in my new diggs! I'll let you know when it starts to come together.