if you thought that the fans blew....

Yesterday started with a safety meeting about tornado awareness. Which was timely because minutes later everyone spent a hour in the basement as a real life tornado skipped through Omaha and the Bluffs. After that there was a hectic amount of babying to get the machines up and running and a ton of repairs after that. Including a nasty bearing and belt replacement on AFCS #2.

Did have a bit of good luck. I found a 6V wall-wart in a junk shop a few days ago for just 98¢. It works with my iSpeakers as is. The correct tip and polarity and everything.

Not so much good luck in finding a replacement speaker for a different set of computer speakers. Radio Shack doesn't sell them anymore. Will check the junk pile went I'm up at the farm.

Here's a photo about the old school meeting the new school. And oddly I have a foot in each one.

this really blows....

The windy weather (my anemometer recorded up to 37.5 mph gusts) put me off doing anything with model rockery yesterday, even indoor activities like paint. Hence my "21 fan salute" to how much that blows....

Back in Omaha, going back into the working week, with on and off thunder boomers.

bouncing and pouncing

I'm up in Soldier, running errands and wrapping up a few odd jobs. Discovering that a certain phone company still haven't fixed dial-up issues nearly eight years after their buyout. It gets even better because their server with the Holverson Designs site seems to have been down for a few hours.

Here's a rough sketch that's a spin-off or yesterday's work in progress. You don't see lion-girls and model rockets together often. May do a 400 pound chunkier version in "Sink-O-Vision"!

roarin' good time at the movies

Saw Chicken Little and Narnia at the dollar matinees today. Still digesting the spectacle.

Anyway, here's an in-progress pin-up of a lion girl and friend(s) for Tube Punk. Either a late Elsa or a very early Flexia. So what year does this take place? 1976? 1980? The mythical Year 2000? The actual Y2K? The Summer of '06? And what should I title it? "10538 Overture"? "South Central Midnight Lady"? "Venus and Mars Reprise"?

don't sue me!

Found yet another modestly amusing UTI assignment from 1991-2. That was an actual name in the 1991 Omaha Yellow Pages.

Although, I could have done the offices of Over & Over & Over which is/was located in Council Bluffs.

Scanned the various sheets of a couple of hand-cut key-lines this morning. Will composite them together on computer at my leisure. Will burn and send a CD-R of Captain Saucer art to Karl Dabney and Pat Moriarity. Will try to catch dollar matinees of Narnia and Chicken Little tomorrow.

not bad for back then....

In between scanning some old stuff and starting to ink on a couple of new pages. Found some wayward Captain Saucer, InterStellar OverDrive, and Timber Ridge pages in with the UTI stuff. Here's some 1989 art intended to be the inside cover of the Leonine ISOD #3. Featuring Xania and Ilza, a couple of mock elfmimi from Cseworld. Not bad for back then but I could draw them a whole lot better now. Kind of predicted the overly stylized comic art that followed after the hot Image style, but I'm still trying to cure myself of those tendencies anyway. Softening up their faces and making them more naturalistic (at least as naturalistic as a cyclops elf is going to get) alone would have done some wonders. Still scanning a lot of UTI stuff although. Like the juvenilia, most of it is probably going to be pruned got of Tube Punk. Got some rubylith key-lines, done as UTI assignments, that I'm going to piece together in Photoshop and tweak to the correct spot colors.

you think you're so smart...

Getting down to the last of the stuff in unsorted the juvenilia and UTI box, including this assignment from 1991. Also found some alternate version of the "Flex'n'Pex" pin-up that appeared in the 1992 issue of the Amazing Heroes Swimsuit special. Soon I'll be dipping into the main box of mostly sorted Captain Saucer, InterStellar OverDrive stuff.

The Chicago Bar and Grill in Omaha is long gone, paved over for Mutual of Omaha yuppie parking.

So was there ever an Omaha Bar and Grill in Chicago?

out standing in the field even at this early age

Did find another small mother-lode of old stuff this morning, including the missing Elsa page, Lumpy and Clan (and others!), a semi-good xerox of the missing Studebaker strip (leaning into the white point correction should fix that!), and some stuff that I forgotten about and some stuff that I thought I've never see again.

Even found this funky baby picture of me.

Found the handwritten outline and first draft of "Nelson A. Jessip and the Studebakers of the Gods". The typed version still eludes me. Also a lot of fantasy pickups and the original art of the above mentioned Studebaker page are still missing.

baby got slacks

Made that errand up and back to Soldier. Got a way late start because data backup took three hours longer than planned. Next time I will start backup the night before!

Had two bad experiences with mail-in rebates getting rejected on technicalities. And one more that I'm going to send in for an underwhelming wireless mouse. Will not do this ever again. It's either going to be a in-store rebate or a plain ol' regular heavily discounted sale price!

Here's some hand coloring on the '88 incarnation of yesterday's picture. This includes some metallic ink for a Gustav Klimt effect on Flexia's slacks.

science with practice....

Waiting for things to thaw out and Spring to actually act like Spring. Did get a troublesome drawing of Flexia tweaked to look as good as it's ever going to get. Also started a pin-up of a cat-girl (technically a lion-girl that looks too much like a cat-girl) and a Studebaker. Will force myself to start a couple InterStellar OverDrive pages after this gets posted. Found and scanned in those Studebaker cartoons from 1980 including a couple of unfinished ones, plus three out of four pages of the Elsa comic from 1981, and I have a good guess where the fourth page is hiding. Also scanned in a bunch of placeholder pages from xeroxes until the originals surface.

One of the Stude pages, "The Incredible Hawk" has been posted at Deviant Art. The link is in the side-bar.

The Studes and Elsa were tongue-in-cheekily stuffed in an Iowa State University College of Science and Technology ring binder. After spending all of public school being picked on by teachers for being the type of guy who can take a car, projector, or computer apart and put it back together and have it running better than ever while those teachers were barely smart enough to turn the things on, let's pay good tuition money for more of the same in an engineering program that is supposed to be recognizing and encouraging those skills!

Earlier, little fatty cat ran off with one of my brushes in his mouth. Fortunately, I found it again. There's one or two that I haven't found again.

Going up to Soldier after a supper at Runza.

winter equinox

Yesterday's posting happened to be in the lull between two back to back blizzards. So the first day of Spring looks more like the dead of Winter.

Still scanning in some first series Captain Saucer stuff. Mainly "place holder" stuff unless the originals can be found. Some pages had their toner sticking to each other and sticking to a plastic binder. Here's an inner panel that articulates an obscured joke from yesterday's cover. Now a little instrument drawing would really improve that! Let alone enough badly faked perspective to embarrass Kirby, Liebfield, or Frank Paul.

There's a 1980 vintage drawing of Clan the Dragonman and Lumpy the Amazon that I'd like to find but still haven't turned up. Same with some spaceship drawings from around '80 and some clunky attempts at fantasy pickups from the late '70s.

more of the same....

Still scanning and sorting. The snow has mostly blown over. Looking forward to my next two days off even though it's going to be too cold to do anything outside. Maybe finally overcome momentum and kick InterStellar OverDrive into gear.

Scanning through some mysterious unmarked old manilla envelopes and came across the first series Captain Saucer #2 with my ratty old art in it. Sort of like a weird case of somebody going through artistic development in their 20s that many go through in their teens. Being creatively insular, isolated, and estranged from the rest of the world didn't help me much then.

OTOH, first series Captain Saucer #2 did predict the "killer semi" episode of Knight Rider by about a year and "The Honking" episode of Futurama by about two decades. CS and the Futurama were both heavily influenced by '70s drive-in fodder The Car. I just happened to pick up on the fun kitsch value of that flick long before "That Cyclops Show" gave it any Fan Cred. So I do wonder about Panter showing these old Captain Saucer issues to Groening way back when and he's sucking up the influence.

Maybe, it's karma for cribbing material from the Rocky Horror Picture Show, the very un-Punk Roger Dean, and even the Sunday funnies version of Sesame Street....

Up next, a manilla envelope of the masters for some of my key-lined xeroxes of the '80s.

Also been posting a lot of stuff at Deviant Art in the past few days. See link in sidebar.

snowing, scanning, and sorting

The snow finally hit, covering everything in its blanket of white. I've been scanning in even more old art and starting to sort the redundant files out. Made a couple of computer wallpapers out of that bullet-nose scanning.

Some of my old art is so frustrating. I can lather on the hatching, and boiler-plating, and "deep texture retro" in my "I wanna grow up and be an artist for Heavy Metal" mode, but still get tripped up with some roughness poking through the figures and inking.

ready for take-off!

A picture of a 1950 Studebaker that I took way back in 1981. Is it any wonder why I like them?

This is from some scanning that I did today. Had a minor set-back because the Frankenscanner settings were messed up. A couple of little pussies probably danced on the keyboard.

Hunkering in for a big late season snow storm that's supposed to be closing in. Haven't seen as much as a flake yet. I will be glad when Spring finally gets here and stays.

totally tubular

Almost toasted my widdle brain photographing an old radio tube then making this avatar in Photoshop and GifBuilder for the chat rooms and BBSes that I frequent.

An animated version can be seen here and even better here!

Less involving was playing musical drives and files and upgrading the The Brute (Dual G5) to dual 320GB drives last night and this morning.

Yesterday was the 40th anniversary of the last Studebaker off the assembly line.

Need to get busting on InterStellar OverDrive so that the ol' Stude can fly again!

DGH

down with this faucet regime

Made it up to the farm just in time for the weather and the plumbing to go south. It's cold and dreary and windy. The farm has a device that meters bleach into the water from the well and since Mom and Jimbo are on vacation, the water just gets all stagnant and saturated until I think I bleached my insides of my gizzard all white with that first glass of water. Ick! I let the faucet run to clear out the bleachy and rusty water while I ran an errand to town. When I came back the water had slowed to barely a drip and I had to figure out why. It turned out that a twine-like filter as thoroughly plugged and I had to change it.

Made a token attempt to find that buried Model-T with a metal detecter and came up dry. But then I realized that I really don't know how to effectively operate a metal detecter yet.

Bought two 320 GB SATA hard drives on sale for $129 each. It made me think about back in 1990 when buying an used 40MB exernal SCSI drive for my Mac Plus was such a big deal and bargain. One drive as been installed and data is being transferred to it. The other will be swapped in next.

see reclining pussies right on your monitor!

Did get Captain Saucer wrapped up last night. Probably set a personal record in cleaning up scanned comic pages. Things go faster with Wacom.... "Le Big Guy" did cycle onto Deviant Art after the good part of a couple of hours. Will somebdoy please go there and post some friendly comments? Please? Please? Please? Will get busting on InterStellar OverDrive after supper if not sooner. Need to gas up and run to Soldier first. Maybe by way of King Kong Gyros and Best Buy.

Anyway, Neko and the other one, aka: Jasper and the other one.

screwing around....

Been screwing around scanning and correcting old stuff for Tube Punk, plus posting at my Deviant Art site (see link in sidebar), trying to get psyched up to do that last sprint on Captain Saucer. Whack me if I don't get started after coffee, right after this posting.

So far DA server hasn't updated with my uploaded stipled rendering of Raymond Lowey and the clay mock up of what became the '53 Studebaker. Maybe in a few minutes. I hope.

sorting and scanning....

I'm redoing some scans after sorting out and reconstructing two versions of the middle '90s InterStellar OverDrive #1 from a pile of old Xeroxes. Also tripped over some other funky and nearly forgotten old stuff while doing so. Feeding them through Frankenscanner as I speak.

Cold and blowing today. Hope to get caught up on my emails really kick the next InterStellar OverDrive on the next two days off.

big tubes

Frankenscanner made batch scanning so easy that I have a backlog of about 200 scans to sort through and possibly correct. There's probably a lot of double, triple and even quadruple redundants in there. And that's before doing even more scans!

May have been dug down deep enough have possibly found those old Studebaker and "Elsa" strips. The trouble with this the Tube Punk project is that I'm piecing together a history that's never been archived or documented, just pack-ratted. And being through several moves and three different basement floods in two different basements isn't helping.

It's drippy and rainy outside today.

Here's some of my goofy retro-skiffy art from '87. Tain't called "Tube Punk" for nothing....

frankenscanner

A lot of art guys keep old Macs around to run a legacy scanner. Here's mine which I call "Hoopty", which is also its network name. It's a second revision 266MHz Beige G3 that I had since late '98, bought on the eve of the Blue & Whites. It has since been upgraded to 288 MB of RAM, 40GB hard drive, and USB, 100Base-T Ethernet, and SCSI PCI cards. It dual boots OS 9.2.2 or OS 10.2.8. I prefer that later. The Microtek A3-sized scanner runs off the the PCI SCSI and "Frankenscanner" runs off the mobo SCSI.

Nothing but the best in trailing edge technology here!

I got the Frankenscanner set up and running yesterday. The bottom is an old HP 4C scanner that I've had since late '95. The document feeder is from an HP 3C that I picked up at a junk shop last year for $15. The rest of the 3c got made into a light box. I lugged the two together and broke down and bought Vuescan third party software to run it. That document feeder is quite nice. Just stick a 1 cm stack of papers in there and then walk away and let the scanner do all the shuffling and work for as long as it takes. I should have cobbled the thing together much earlier!

My Mom is selling a chunk of the family farm to a renter. It is the chunk that would have been where I would have put the model rocket factory and maybe the Mable clones if Fun Rockets would have worked out.

party like it's 1995!

Scanned in the late 1995 InterStellar OverDrive ashcan this morning. This thing existed after the Rip Off Press cancellation but before changing the Dragonman's dialog from a bit thick to a bit purplish. That idea came to me in a dream.

Trying to get my old HP 4c running again to use the automatic feeder that I picked up at Goodwill. I'm going to get going on Captain Saucer tweaks and the new InterStellar OverDrive for Work Horse before dinner.

it don't come easy

Visited the friend in Ames yesterday and picked up his obsolete computer collection which included a Commodore PET, a Mac SE (no 30), a box of Apple ][ stuff, an '80s IBM PC, an off-brand Win 3.1 vintage box, and an approximately five year-old micro-tower. Also checked out his stash of fannish goodies and the wi-fi at Mayhem Comics.

Also did see those Cambrian critters at the museum. I do wish that I had more time and more caffeine in me to better appreciate them. Most are barely as big as a fingernail. The biggest were twice as big as my thumbnail.

Did a grocery run in record time this morning only to be held up for a hour or so at Radio Shack behind some redneck actually named Ringo who was arguing about his cellular plan. Who the heck names their kid Ringo, anyway? Even Richard Starkly isn't really named Ringo.

I guess that it could have been worse. His redneck mama could have named him "Elvis". =:o

So much for getting back and doing things before work.

The Tube Punk scanning resumes tomorrow. Here's an update on the cover.

badge engineering

It's raining and I'm about ready to travel to Ames, by way of The Durham Western Hertiage Museum and Little King, to see an old acquiance. Just wish the drive wasn't sooooo @#$%&*! long!

Here's the final version of the slight modification of my other favorite over-powered machine.

party like it's 1959!

Just got the Farmer's Cadillac back from the shop today after having some rust bubbles nipped in the bud and some new paint. Went for something wacky and retro influenced by Dodge not only dipping into their nifty '50s past to style this beast but also apparently cribbing from Studebaker.

I guess because Studebaker isn't exactly around anymore to complain.

Had a chuckle at the primer dust fingerprint on my radio dial.

My poor Hawk is still sitting neglected over there.

Also went to the model rocket club auction tonight and picked up four discontinued Estes kits and a couple of items from Arley's Spaced Out Rocketry on low ball bids at a total of $31.

my hero, gyros

Finished the interior pages of this new Captain Saucer this morning. I went out for a gyros for dinner to celebrate.

It's the first Captain Saucer issue in 16 years.

It's all over except for corrections and revisions. But let's not talk or think of that for a while.

Will shift gears and start on InterStellar OverDrive.

Will run up to Soldier tomorrow and pick up the Farmer's Cadillac. Borrowed a metal detector so maybe I'll discover were the Model-T is buried in the creek bank.

a little wingding

Down to just one last partial Captain Saucer page. And a few alterations and corrections after that. A little slowed down because of sleeping late after having a restless night because of Neko and Jasper were having a restless night and some misplaced art.

Here's a chibi Wingding inspired by a little ditty that I whipped up for my calico when she was still around. "I'm a little Wingding, Doing my Wingding thing"....

shuffled and tracking

My hours got shuffled so I'm working today and can't get up to the Farmer's Cadillac until Tuesday. I'm sure its new two-tone looks groovy.

Down to the last three of those four Captain Saucer pages and they're mostly done. Maybe get them finished tomorrow or Sunday.

Scanning through my last box of unsorted old stuff and found a forgotten circa 1995 ash-can from a little after the Rip-Off cancellation.

Was tracking through mp3s this morning did something as silly as initially mistake the box-set live version of the Velvet Underground's Melody laughter for some early Sonic Youth.

bad girls

Starting to cook on those four Captain Saucer pages. Embellishing some initially weak inks and they are starting to look better than they have a right to.

BTW, their names are Viscipui and Milpee.

Hope to get the Farmer's Cadillac out of the paint shop tomorrow.

the banks of the jordan

Last night I dreamed that I was trying to play ball with my Dad. He was throwing them and I was ineffectually trying to bat them.

A few nights ago I had a dream in where he told me the steering wheel of a Model-T, that's buried in a bank of the Jordan Creek running through the farm, is sticking out. I'm going to check it out the next time that I'm up there.

Mom is going to sell off a chunk of the farm. The one that would have had a model rocket factory on the top of the hill if Fishman would have came through on his promises.

Also have pigeons trying to crawl into my air conditioner from the outside. The cats are trying to crawl into the air conditioner from the inside to get to the pigeons.

firing on all eight cylinders, too....

Saw Magnificent Desolation; Walking on the Moon this morning at the Imax. That was an eye popper.

Pushing again on those last few Captain Saucer pages. I should have gotten those done two weeks again.

Thinking about which Mac "upgrade" looks the best. Regular Mac on the left. The final version with have gold paint on the badge.

IIRC, the middle one came from the hood of a '55 Studebaker pickup and the the right most one is from the fender of a late '50s GMC truck.