It’s 4:30AMish and I’m up to feed a cat that’s been dead for a couple of days now. Patterns are hard to change, though the kittens (we have 7 since no one wants kittens right now) were awake and waiting for me to bring their food when I opened the door to their room.
They’re between 4 and 4 1/2 months old now and were born from two moms who were living on our front porch (one is inside now, the other escaped back to living on the porch). They bring the total lifetime cats we’ve had up to 26 or 27 if you include all the strays.
They’ve taken over my old bedroom/office and we spend about 45 minutes a day playing and beating up “fat daddy” as they’re oblivious to how much damage they can do when they’re running full speed into a fat man trying to play with cat toys.
That’s a change. There’s been a lot of them.
I’m no longer working at the place I was working before. I can’t say too much as I’m still doing contract work for them now and then. There were layoffs, a lot of us were hit and I was among the bunch they decided to part ways with. I will hopefully have announcements soon about what I’m going to do with my life.
I’m also listening to Spotify. Me, Mr. MP3, is streaming music. I haven’t quite archived my mp3s and put them away yet, but I’m close to it. The fact is that Spotify can be used to replace background music on my Xbox One and MP3s can’t. It’s crappy because the O.G. Xbox could use MP3s for anything (my WWE RAW and WWE RAW 2 were legendary for the music I put on for create a wrestler), but more and more there are no options for customizing things like music for any of the console based systems.
My hair is white and I’m sporting a beard now more often than not. That came about last year. I had usually shaved once a week since I work at home and no one particularly cares what I look like. I had never been able to grow more than stubble before, but something changed in my body and ta-da, I can now grow full Santa Claus beards.
This site changed yesterday. The announcement was brief and based on the fact that Adobe decided to discontinue their all-in-one website solution. While I can still code, I gave up on doing sites “by hand” a long time ago. This site features content from me dating back to 1986. While I realize that there are years where I’ve gone silent, there’s still a crap load of content from me and trying to manage it is all but impossible when you hand edit everything.
Adobe Muse was a nice solution as it offered drop and drag assets from your Adobe libraries and made changes easy. Sadly, the hosting of my comic books was something Adobe sucked at. Comics took forever to load on their servers and never displayed properly. While I loved Muse, the solution Adobe provided for hosting the actual comics (the only reason people come to this site any more), kind of sucked rocks.
It saddened me. Adobe has come along so far with their software suite. If you’ve seen the Test Post, I decided to change the format for my comics to make them easier to load on mobile devices. I’m using a smaller size (something I experimented with years ago), and I’m thrown out the traditional “set up page templates” for a modular design that uses Adobe’s content libraries to store panel shapes and other assets to make my life a lot easier.
In the past I’d have to go through mountains of files to find art and logos and styles that I had used over the decade now of writing web comics using Adobe (the TechTV stuff was html based). Now I can put everything I’d ever want into an adobe library and have those assets (backed up on their servers) on hand instantly. I no longer have to have separate files open to access my templates of word balloons, tails and font styles, they’re all in libraries and everything is now drop and drag.
Are the comics “better” for it? That, I don’t know, but I do know that it’s easier. I should be able to produce more often and I’m redoing the first few issues to take out plot elements that I don’t like. Thankfully, since none of you could get the Adobe files to load, no one will notice what’s changed.
The site itself is back to WordPress. WordPress had been used for the Ring Report, Poetry and RatFarts! sites but weren’t really set up for easy access. That was mainly due to constraints from my old job. Now that I’m not there and now that WordPress finally has free templates to do things that I attempted to do a decade ago (don’t ask), we’re proudly sporting the WordPress banner.
We’ll see how long that lasts.
For now, I’m producing. I’m throwing myself into things and we’ll see where this goes.
— Jim