pandemic

Weekly Upload 05/22/22

/ jkjones2185 / Leave a comment

I missed updating yesterday because we had some friends over for an evening hangout (been a while since we did that), and the day just sort of slipped away in all the prep that we had to do ahead of time. It was a lot of fun, and we’re looking forward to the end of the school year because we’ll feel a lot better about doing in-person visits with people once we’re in our off season and much less higher risk to be around in terms of potential COVID exposure.

Art

I don’t have anything new to show off this week because I spent my drawing time working on a new page for my fan comic Krakoan Counseling. I’m up to five completed pages now, which is pretty cool given my goal at the start of the year was to finish, like, one. I’m currently two pages into a story, and I’d really rather keep them to myself until I have the whole arc finished, which might take some time given I literally took two months off from comics creating between this page and the last one. I hope I don’t take so long before I get to the next page since the shift in art is pretty noticable, but there’s not much I can do about that short of redrawing the first page of the story, and that seems like a very silly idea given this is a project I’m doing to amuse myself. On the art front, I do have an idea for a piece for Mermay, a drawing event that I typically skip because I don’t really care about drawing merpeople, but this one tickles me, and it will probably only take like a day to execute.

Comics

There were a lot of good X-Men comics out this week, and I honestly felt a little exhausted scrambling to read all of them on Wednesday. It’s a thing that I’ve been thinking about lately with the shipping delays that have been happening in general, but what started out a couple years ago as a thing that was fun and breezy reading on a weekly basis with two or three titles a week has turned into this real feast or famine situation where there will be weeks with pretty much nothing new coming out that I care to read and others where I have a stack of nearly ten books to catch up on. I know that it’s largely about my own relationship wtih the hobby, and I don’t actually have to read everything the day it publishes, but participating in X-Twitter creates a lot of pressure to be up on stuff so that I can just use social media casually during my work day. On the other hand, I tend to stay away from Twitter if I’m not caught up on comics, so maybe that’s a plus? I don’t know. Everyone’s relationship with social media in general is a little screwed up, so who can say?

Setting all that metacommentary aside, the books this week were really good with the standout for me being New Mutants #25. I’ve been looking forward to a Magik-centered story for a couple years now, and I think the one that Vita Ayala and Rod Reis are putting together is going to be really good. I honestly want to re-read the issue and put together some longer thoughts on it outside the context of an update, because I feel like it’s doing some really smart things as a direct sequel to the Magik miniseries and the original Inferno event.

Video Games

I gave up on replaying Arkham Asylum and decided to instead play Spider-Man: Miles Morales. I’m about halfway through the game right now, and it’s a really fun follow up to the first Spider-Man game from Insomniac. All in all I’d say it’s very much more of the same, but the first game was so polished that I really don’t mind that.

Media

Rachael and I got into the Amazon Prime series The Wilds this week, and we’re nearly finished watching the two seasons that are out. It’s remarkably good for a mid-budget streaming drama.

Pandemic

At work this week I recieved an email from my school district saying that the COVID risk level for our county has been upgraded to medium, which means that masks are recommended but not required indoors. I’m hoping there will be an uptick in masking behavior at school, but I’m doubtful. It’s weird seeing stuff like that and realizing that I never really relaxed in the first place.

Coffee Shops

I have not been to any coffee shops this week.

Weekly Upload 04/30/22

/ jkjones2185 / Leave a comment

It was a deeply weird week, so I suppose it’s probably best to just go in chronological order. Also, today’s my dad’s birthday, so I’m trying to get this done and posted early so I can call him to chat later.

Okay, here’s the rundown for the week:

  • Elon Musk is apparently buying Twitter. Everyone feels some ways about it. I don’t like the man, and after only a week of people talking about this I am tired of constantly hearing about his tomfoolery. I blocked him on Twitter, and now I find myself getting irritated when other folks discuss or quote tweet him. My most salient observation about the whole thing right now is that he’s doing what Donald Trump did up until he was kicked off Twitter following the January 6 coup attempt: sucking all the air out of the room and doing his level best to make us only pay attention to him. I lived through that once already, and I’m done with fawning over the mouth droppings of an internet troll with a literally obscene amount of wealth. I’ll spend more time fretting over what’s going to happen to Twitter when the buyout actually happens and we get official policy announcements from the platform.
  • One of my coworkers got COVID this week, and I had a mini-panic over it because my spring allergies are kicking into high gear for the season. I spent a couple days home from work while I waited to get the results of a test back to make sure I hadn’t also caught it. Losing days at work is always annoying, but at least I was able to kick back and enjoy some leisure time while reminding myself that the responsible thing to do if you think you’re getting sick is to stay home. I definitely had an abundance of manic energy on Thursday when I got my negative test result back from the clinic.
  • It took me most of the week, but I finished the piece I started last weekend, and I think it’s pretty good. I’m sure I would have been more productive if I’d not been afraid I was getting sick, but productivity is overrated, especially in a society where a person’s value is predicated on their ability to create wealth.

Art

I have spent the last few weeks pushing myself to economize my workflow in Procreate to see just how complex an image I can make on my print-ready canvas settings. If I had any independent business sense I might start thinking about what I could make that would look good as a print, but I don’t really, and it’s always nice to do art for the fun of it. My piece this week involved three figures with multiple points of contact and overlap, and just because I haven’t done it in a while, a return to the colored outlining I played around with a few months ago. I actually really like the way this week’s work has turned out, although I suspect I’m going to retreat to some simpler compositions for a little bit. I find that any piece I do which takes more than about 8 hours of work tends to leave me pretty drained before I’m ready to tackle something else. Maybe it’s time I actually finish drafting the next couple pages of my fan comic.

The most annoying this about the process on this piece is that my autocorrect typed “Bridgestone” instead of “Bridgerton” in the above tweet, like I ever discuss tires at all. More seriously, I think my favorite parts of this work are the distinctly different textures I managed to make for Kate and Illyana’s dresses. I didn’t want it to feel like their skirts were made out of the same material, and I think I did a pretty good job making the gray fabric look much stiffer than the blue fabric. While I’m bragging, I’m also proud of the design on Rachel’s coat and vest that evokes the Phoenix logo.

Comics

I know that comics came out this week and that some of them were reportedly very good, but with the COVID scare, I haven’t had the bandwidth to sit down and catch up on my reading. Maybe I’ll get to it this weekend.

Video Games

Seeing as I’ve had extra time at home this week, I played a lot of the metroidvania Blasphemous. This morning I finished getting to the two standard endings then confirmed that I’d need to do a complete replay to get the third ending that was added with the DLC expansion, so I’m calling myself done with this game for now. These kinds of games really scratch a very particular itch for me, so I’m sure I will eventually go back and do another playthrough. Having finished the game, I still can’t tell you very much of what it’s about, although I do get that it’s a world where there’s this vicious cycle of heretics trying to overthrow the fictional Pope only to find themselves being made into the next Pope when they succeed. It’s all very Catholic without being explicitly Catholic, but the important thing is that there are a bunch of rad boss fights and map exploration.

I’m now contemplating whether I should go back to Persona 5 Royal, which has lain abandoned for a couple months, or if I should look at playing something else in my backlog. It’s a tricky decision, because I can easily sink thirty hours into a game if I’m into it enough, but knowing it might be a time investment of over a hundred hours upfront always makes me feel a bit uneasy. The days of joyful over investment in games have passed, and now I have to think about how much free time I want to commit to an experience.

Media

I feel like we’ve finished a few things in the last week, though most of them don’t leave a really strong impression. Russian Doll Season 2 was quite good but suffers by comparison to the first season, which is such an extraordinary piece of TV all by itself. I’m curious to see where the show would go with Nadia in a third season, since she’s such a compelling and complex character even separate from the absurdity of the spacetime shenanigans that happen in the series. We’ve also begun watching Our Flag Means Death, and it’s simply delightful. I can see its value as a comedy series that consists primarily of textually queer characters just going about their lives. The love it’s getting from its fandom is well deserved, and I hope the show continues.

Rachael and I also watched Turning Red the other night, and it was a really charming Pixar movie. I don’t have any really deep thoughts about it right now other than to quietly groan that the early 2000s are now far enough in the past that we can do nostalgic stories about that time period. I did love the animation though, particularly the way the characters’ eyes are rendered so that they really pop against everything else that’s on screen.

Pandemic

Like I said at the top, I had a COVID scare this week because of an ill coworker coinciding with the return of allergy season for me. It all worked out (for me, anyway) in the end, but this was definitely a week filled with thoughts about the pandemic and the failures of public health policy to get more people on board with taking precautions against infection. I wear an N95 mask at work at all times except when I’m completely by myself in a room with a closed door, and it was maddening to be worrying that I might be sick and an infection vector while most folks around me were going about their days without any masks at all. I think taking some time off work to sit at home away from everyone else, even though I ended up not being sick, was good for my mental health.

Coffee Shops

I have not been to any coffee shops this week.

Weekly Upload 04/03/22

/ jkjones2185 / Leave a comment

I’m a day late with my blog because Rachael heard about a big drop of Playstation 5s scheduled to hit GameStop yesterday morning, and we decided on a whim to go do the camping out thing to snag one. We were successful, but it did take most of the morning because there’s not really much you can do while you’re waiting for a store to open.

Art

I had a very productive art week with three new pieces finished. I’ve been playing around with my canvas settings in Procreate since I’ve gotten pretty comfortable with the number of layers I typically need to finish a piece. Procreate limits the number of layers you can use in a canvas based on your resolution and dimension settings so the tablet memory doesn’t get overwhelmed by really complex pieces. Up to this point I’ve mostly been using a default canvas that’s set to the size of my screen with a relatively low resolution (I think it’s been somewhere around 120 dpi). These settings afford me about 120 layers to work with on a piece, but most of what I do is single figure illustrations with minimal backgrounds and relatively simple rendering techniques, so I’m more commonly finishing work with about thirty layers, including the ones I hide, like my paint palettes and my roughs. After I looked at options for prints last week, I decided that I should try working on a larger canvas with a higher resolution, so I’m currently getting used to working on an 11″x14″ canvas at 300 dpi. There are only about 40 layers available, but that’s not presented any problems on the pieces I’ve finished this week. I am in the middle of doing a more complex piece with two figures and (I hope) a rich background, so we’ll see how I have to adjust my workflow to accommodate having only about a third of my usual breathing room. I’m hoping that the benefits of the higher resolution (specifically allowing me to do finer line work) will help offset the new restrictions.

One element I’ve been interested in trying to refine in my work is how I render texture. I’m trying a thing out right now where I actually use a modified copy of my roughs to give some texture to hair and clothing that I’ve not been able to achieve in my finishes before. It mostly has to do with the type of brush I use when I’m sketching versus the one I use for inking, but I’ve been pleased with the results so far this week. We’ll see if it turns into a regular part of my process or if I discard it before too long.

One issue that I do find myself running into with the new canvases is that problems I don’t fix in my figures during roughs are much more readily apparent by the time I get to coloring. There’s a lot about the Emma Frost piece that I really dislike, mostly with regard to the general anatomy. I find torsos endlessly vexing. The whole apparatus of the chest and shoulders plus the pelvis still mystifies me sometimes. I’m convinced it’s something to do with the way that I measure when I draw the initial line for the spine, but I still haven’t cracked how to keep myself from making these absurdly elongated bodies. The rest of my work this week is okay, although there are a few things that bug me about the Lucifer and Laura Wilson pieces as well.

Comics

Immortal X-Men #1 came out, and it’s a lot of fun. I’ve been looking forward to this book starting up for months, and now it’s here, and I’m waiting to have the bandwidth to re-read and process what’s going on with it. The reveal that Sinister is keeping clones of Moira to kill and reset the timeline at will raises so many questions.

In a bid to apparently never finish the prose book I’m trying to read right now, I’ve started re-reading The Wicked + The Divine this week. My tentative plan is to do a piece of fan art focused on a character or characters who feature in each issue. It’s an ambitious plan, but I really enjoy this series, and I’m hoping to spend some time pondering the art of it in more depth. I probably can’t overstate how much I want to be able to emulate McKelvie and Wilson’s style. I expect this will be a relatively slow moving re-read, which works fine with me.

Video Games

We bought a PS5. There’s now a stack of games sitting in our living room that we probably won’t actually play until we hit summertime, but it’s nice to now be in a space of enjoying the thing when we can instead of wanting one and never being able to find it. As a side note, the packaged 3D platformer that comes pre-installed on the console, Astro’s Playroom, is a really charming Mario 64 clone that’s also a hilarious ad for Sony’s entire gaming hardware line from the last twenty-five years. The point is supposed to be showing off the functionality of the PS5 controller, but it’s a fun game in its own right.

Media

We finished watching Sex Education, which has steadily increased in quality since its first season. Nothing’s really grabbed our attention yet as the next plot-heavy series to watch, but we are taken with a new anime on Netflix called Kotaro Lives Alone. It’s about a precocious 4-year-old who’s mysteriously living alone in an apartment building and the ways that his neighbors find themselves helping to take care of him.

Pandemic

I think the most prevalent thought I have about the pandemic these days is gratefulness that folks seem to have internalized the idea that it’s okay some people prefer to wear a mask in public spaces. There’s always a small subconscious bracing that happens ahead of going out in public with a mask on these days. It’s an odd thing to feel self conscious about.

Coffee Shops

I have not been to a coffee shop this week. I did read that the creator of Coffee Talk, the visual novel I played and adored at the beginning of the pandemic, died unexpectedly. That’s a real bummer. We have his last game installed on our Switch at the moment, and might play it sometime soon.

Weekly Upload 03/26/22

/ jkjones2185 / Leave a comment

I had Spring Break! It was great! We took a trip to Seaside for a couple nights, and while our timing was very poor (it rained the entire time we were on the coast), we still had a lot of fun walking the beach and curling up in our ocean view hotel room. It’s always super wild to realize that pretty much the sole source of stress and anxiety in my life seems to be work. Go figure, education’s a stressful field.

Art

I don’t have any new art to showcase this week because I only did one piece over vacation, and it was intended as a gift for a friend. I’ve spent some time thinking about the nature of working digitally, what with the fact that my work only exists in a virtual space and there are barriers to making a thing, if not unique, meaningful as a piece of work for an intended recipient. I’ve never been commissioned to do art for someone, so I don’t know what all the norms are around presentation of a piece. Given the current hoopla around NFTs (may they die a quick and violent death), I think this question of how we assign value to nonphysical works is interesting stuff. Because the piece that I did was intended as a gift, I figured that it would be best not to publish it myself until I had a proper chance to present it to its recipient. Consequently, I spent some time this week exploring print on demand options (there are a lot of them), and ordered a print of my piece for my friend. That’s an unusual thing in itself, since I’ve not bothered to get prints of any of my work before now. I still think of myself as a student, so much of the work I do is ephemeral by virtue of being stuff I don’t want to look at again once my style and technique have grown into something different. It doesn’t make sense to spend money on a print of a thing I’m going to cringe when I see after another few months of practice. For a gift that, if it gets displayed at all, will be put somewhere that I don’t have to look at it on the regular, the ordering of a print feels like a nice way to invest value into the work. “I made this thing, and I also paid to have a physical copy made” suddenly creates a sense of weight about the endeavor that doodles on my iPad typically don’t.

That’s all a long winded way to say that I’m not posting any new art this week because I’m waiting on the gift to be delivered. It’s a fun piece, and I’ll probably talk more about it when I do post it because I played around with some layering stuff that I’ve considered but never actually tried before. It’s all very technical and probably not interesting to anyone but me.

Comics

I already shared my thoughts on X Lives/Deaths of Wolverine on Twitter this week. To sum up, I thought it was an event that was perfectly missable if you don’t generally care about Logan stories (I don’t, and I have read enough of them to be very confident in that assessment of my own taste). The moments with Logan’s kids were great because they never get enough spotlight time, and Moira’s transition to full villain was fun with a fair bit of dread sprinkled through. It felt a bit like the X-Office knew they had to get Moira to her new status quo before the launch of the Destiny of X phase and they had a Logan event on the schedule, so they just decided to mash the two together instead of running a separate miniseries for Moira.

Saga #57 came out this week, and after reading it I got this absurd idea in my head that Bombazine, Alana’s new employee in her drug smuggling business, might have appeared somewhere briefly earlier in the series. I’ve spent the last three days re-reading the first 54 issues to see if he pops up anywhere. He doesn’t, and now I’ve stuffed my head with all the pathos of this kitchen sink universe again. The good news, if you want to call it that, is that the series holds up! I’m all torn up about the Phang arc again though. That whole story is just awful from beginning to end.

Media

We watched Luca this week, which catches us up on Pixar’s most recent noteworthy movies aside from Turning Red, which at present is still a Disney+ exclusive. I’m not sure what there is to say about Luca as a movie other than the recent context of Disney’s aggressive heteronormativity in its storytelling decisions makes it easier to look at the movie in a kind light despite the queer relationship between Luca and Alberto being left entirely subtextual.

Spending time at the beach in a hotel meant that Rachael and I got to indulge in one of our favorite vacation pastimes: watching terrible cable TV. We decided to branch out from HGTV, which is a channel that seems designed to induce rage, and instead spend some time with the Food Network. We discovered the massive, byzantine world of the Fieriverse, and I honestly can’t say that it wasn’t a nice place to park the brain. The food looked tasty, and the bullpen of repeating personalities all seemed very pleasant in a way that’s not always guaranteed when you’re talking about food reality TV. If you’re job’s going to be on a cooking show, Rachael and I feel pretty strongly that it must be obvious you enjoy the food you’re working with (this is typically more a problem with judges than with contestants, but the Fieriverse apparently blurs that line as a matter of course).

In the more conventional television landscape, we watched Is It Cake? on Netflix, which is a delightfully stupid show based on an out-of-date meme in the same vein as Nailed It! but with contestants who actually know what they’re doing. The show’s decision to cast a pool of contestants and have them all be present throughout the season regardless of whether they’re competing in a given episode is actually a very refreshing formula. I’m sure it was a pandemic innovation to give the impression of a studio audience without actually having a bunch of people present, but the dynamics it creates among the contestants as they take turns cheering for each other is really sweet. It’s nice to see competition shows where everyone seems to genuinely like each other.

The last big thing we watched this week (Spring Break is TV time, okay?) was the rest of Sex Education Season Two. It sticks the landing pretty well, and Rachael and I have jumped into Season Three now. We’re hoping the quality increase continues, because it’s very fun and the writers did a solid job of giving space for Eric and Adam’s romance to grow believably out of some bad history.

Video Games

I’m still plugging away at NEO The World Ends With You, although I’ve realized that the button mashing I praised the last time I mentioned this game is also causing discomfort in my hand. I don’t know that I’m having complicated feelings about this development, but it’s a weird topic to discuss in general. Video games are such a couch activity, and one that I’ve had since I was a kid, that it’s kind of baffling to recognize my body doesn’t like certain kinds of stress so much anymore. Like, that’s a thing I’m sure athletes go through (I’ve had these same kinds of thoughts about my knees and running), but it almost feels farcical to say that I should move away from certain kinds of games because they make my hands hurt.

Music

Because we went on vacation this week, I took the opportunity to throw together a road trip playlist. I haven’t done that in a few years, and it was a lot of fun to comb over new music I’ve found and curate something for the drive. I was listening to my playlist while doing some yard work the other day and I realized that I apparently have a taste for songs about anxiety. It’s an interesting observation because I see enough actual anxiety at work and among various friends to get that the real experience of it is relatively prosaic and aggravating for the person going through it. Still when songwriters find a good hook for expressing their own insecurities I apparently sidle up and whisper, “Tell me more, please.”

Pandemic

That thing’s still going on. It’s nice that for the most part, folks in my area seem to be pretty nonjudgmental about people who are still masking in public. It’s nice to reflect back to the early days of the pandemic and remember that one of the long-term hopes Rachael and I discussed was a normalization of people wearing masks for health concerns regardless of the potential presence of a debilitating/life-threatening virus. It’s a nice thought to hold on to as people not masking in public is going to become more and more normal going forward.

Coffee Shops

I went to a coffee shop and got a to-go order of chai lattes while Rachael and I were on vacation. We sipped our drinks in our hotel room, enjoying the view and pretending we were actually at a cafe noodling around on our computers. It was nice.

Weekly Upload 03/19/22

/ jkjones2185 / Leave a comment

I’m on Spring Break this week! We’re going to the beach! Much fun, so excite!

That’s looking forward though. Looking back on the week, things were aggressively fine. The mask mandate ended, and there was not massive social upheaval at work as kids and staff quietly divided themselves up into the done-with-maskers and the nope-not-yet crowd (as well as a smaller third group I think of as the contextuals who let the present moment dictate whether they were masked up or not). Apparently the messaging about witholding judgment of other peoples’ decisions worked well enough. Hooray. We’ll see how things look after a couple weeks and there’s been time to track whether we see a rise in infections coinciding with dropping indoor mask requirements. Otherwise, work was fine, I did some fanart that I like pretty well, and we’re finally opening up into spring time after the long winter.

Art

I finished a comic page, and it looks pretty good, but I haven’t shared it yet because I haven’t written the rest of the story that it goes with. Given how slowly I produce pages, I’d rather not put out an unfinished thing when there’s still a lot of planning and writing left to do (let alone actually drawing the thing). The stuff I have shared this week is all fanart based on the new Hellfire Gala looks that dropped in anticipation of the big one shot they’re doing at the end of June. Wolverine’s look is the obvious banger of the set, and I rushed to get a piece together based on the main cover preview before Marvel revealed the piece with a full look at her outfit. There are some front details that I missed because they just weren’t visible in the reference I worked from, but I think I did a strong piece. I’m doing my best to remain proud of my work without despairing over it only making a small splash on Twitter. The algorithm hates everyone, so I’m keeping in mind that it’s not personal. Also, I’m very much not a professional artist, so I constantly have to temper my expectations against the reality that I can’t produce stuff as flashy as what other folks who get paid for their work do. I also did a portrait of Magik that was fun (I got a specific compliment on the eyes, which was satisfying since that’s an element I tried to do better than normal), although as I’ve complained on Twitter, I’m just not super into the all-black Alien bodysuit thing. Anyway, here’s my work on Twitter.

Comics

Setting aside anticipation for a thing that happens in three months, I felt like it was a pretty fun comics week. I read the two latest issues of Eternals, which continues to do exactly what I want Kieron Gillen books to do, and I’m slowly getting excited about the “Judgment Day” event that’s going to happen over the summer. I don’t usually care one way or another about events, but it’s Gillen doing his thing with X-Men and Eternals, so I’m sure it’ll be a blast. Also probably upsetting. Never get too attached to anyone in a Kieron Gillen story; they will probably suffer horribly and then you will have to deal with the psychic damage.

My primary reading for the week was to finish the Amanda Conner & Jimmy Palmiotti run on Harley Quinn. I had heard for a while that it was a good run that does a lot of rehabilitate the character into a lovable anti-hero, and I’d say that overall it hits those beats pretty well. Having finished it now, I’m not sure if it was entirely my thing, but it was a fun diversion from the usual superhero melodrama I typically enjoy. It was a shame that their last arc is collected in a trade with the beginning of Frank Tieri’s run, so I ended my reading with some stories by him that are significantly less good. He seems to get the emotional core of Conner & Palmiotti’s version of Harley, but he’s also the kind of straight male writer who clearly has no problem throwing in casual homophobic jokes and hiding behind the fact that he’s writing a book that’s supposed to feel grimy as a defense. Final takeaways for me are that it was a fun detour into material for a character whose mainstream presentation has been kind of shallow in recent years (aside from the animated series, which is truly a gem), but there’s not enough there to keep me coming back.

Books

I’m still plugging away through The Somebody People, and I finally got through the first part the other night. It was kind of rough doing about two hundred pages of “so this is where we are now” with the characters that survived from The Nobody People. I was surprised by how refreshing it felt to reach an interlude about Kevin Bishop and Raymond Glover; it honestly felt like a completely different story for about fifteen pages before the casual existential horror set back in. On the bright side, it’s Spring Break, and I need a beach book, so I think I’ll make some good progress on this one.

Media

Rachael and I watched Soul last weekend as the latest in our ongoing Pixar catch up project. It was good! I’d say its primary appeal is visual, although the story was sweet, and probably a little more memorable than Onward was.

We finished watching the second season of Space Force, which was definitely better overall than the first season. I think pivoting into a more Parks & Recreation vibe where everyone is generally competent and likes working together was a good choice. If it gets a third season, I’d enjoy spending more time with these characters now.

While we’re in the process of giving old shows another chance, we’ve also begun watching the second season of Sex Education. This show’s deeply strange because it does a lot of really good work presenting the current state of what good sex ed looks like in charming ways, but it also seems to have a big problem with not going to the queer tragedy well for Eric’s subplots. We’re only about halfway through the second season right now, and both Rachael and I are not thrilled with Eric getting romantically involved with the boy who bullied and assaulted him in the first season. I’m hoping the show understands that we shouldn’t feel good about this development, but we’ll see where it goes.

Pandemic

I think I actually put most of my thoughts about this in the intro this week. Hard not to think about it when much of the meat space trend seems to revolve around trying very hard not to think about it. Don’t think about pink polar bears, yeah?

Coffee Shops

I have not been to a coffee shop this week.

Weekly Upload 03/12/22

/ jkjones2185 / Leave a comment

I think this was mostly a sanguine week of work, if you set aside the sense of impending doom everyone has about the mask mandate ending this weekend and the potential anxiety explosion we could face come Monday. I saw two shows this week (like, the in-person theater kind), one socially with some friends and the other as support for my work bestie who has run herself ragged trying to prepare a student musical under pandemic conditions this year. Both were fun! Both involved late nights! I’m very tired this morning as I write all this.

Art

I think I mentioned last week that my copy of the Morpho book on clothing folds came in, so I’ve taken a sudden interest in observing how real life clothing works and thinking through how to recreate those looks in my drawing. I did a couple of pieces this week that were meant to give me chances to practice folds on slightly looser fitting clothes (superheroes tend towards the form-fitting side of clothing), and I’m mostly pleased with the results. I’ll probably keep doing weird clothing stuff for a little bit while I’m focused on this element. I’ve also started playing around with the settings on my sketching brushes a little bit. My rough drawings tend to look kind of blobby because I’ve gotten in the habit of using a brush that has a pretty dynamic size range, and I’m starting to feel the limitations of that, particularly when I’m working on comics pages and have to work in a much smaller space than what I’ve gotten used to with my other art. I’m hoping that moving towards a finer tip brush will help me develop some more refined habits around detailing, though I’m absolutely certain it’s going to slow me down in the short term. I think the more interesting question will be whether I adopt a similarly fine tipped brush for inking. It’s a largely open question at this point, but an interesting one for my brain to noodle over while I’m drawing.

As for the fancomic, I have a decent idea for a new sequence, though I haven’t figured out how long it’s going to be yet. I’m working on the first page right now (which is all I’ve scripted so far), and then I’ll see if I want to post it before I move on to the next part or not. I think at the very least, giving myself permission to take breaks in between pages to do standalone pieces will help a lot with the grindy aspects of production. The two week period where I only worked on two pages back-to-back was really difficult.

Comics

Somehow I managed to have ten new comics to pick up on Wednesday this week, and I still have a few that I’ve not read yet since I’ve been deep in drawing land. The highlights for the week were the conclusion of the Life is Strange series that’s been going on for a couple years. I’ve been into that book since it started back at the beginning of 2019, and the final issue provided a really lovely coda to Max and Chloe’s story. The conclusion to Christopher Sebela’s Comixology Unlimited series .Self dropped, and it was perfectly satisfying. I find Sebela’s story concepts to be deeply fun because he loves a near-future dystopian moment. Also in the Sebela column for this week was volume 3 of Crowded, which I jumped on after the first arc concluded, adored through the second arc, and then spent a year patiently waiting for the series to conclude all at once. In terms of creator-owned work, it might be one of my favorites of the last year. I’m absolutely certain that it’s due to the art team’s work; Ro Stein and Ted Brandt deliver a visual style that leans just enough into exaggeration to make for some really fun characters who still feel grounded. I look at their stuff and want to be able to draw people who look like that. Now that the whole series is done, I think I will plan to reread it all at a go some time soon.

Media

Like a lot of people, we watched season 2 of Love Is Blind and were baffled by the motivations of the people on the show. Unlike a lot of folks, we finished that and thought, “Is there a better version of this?” Enter Love Is Blind: Japan! If you’re looking for a bit of trash television that actually follows people who seem to be taking the whole dating and romance thing seriously, you can do a lot worse than this show. The structure of the series feels much less like a bunch of people pretending to date for the sake of being on TV than folks who are serious about trying a novel way to find a long-term romantic partner. I found myself liking most of the couples, even as it became apparent who was likely to get married and who was just incompatible. In slightly less trashy television, Rachael and I decided to give Space Force a second chance since we’d heard it gets much better in the second season. The first season is deeply uneven, with a few episodes that really work and many that are just bizarre. We just wrapped the first season up last night, so we’re looking forward to getting into the good material now.

Pandemic

The statewide mask mandate has ended, and we’re all just waiting to see what kind of chaos might erupt at work after the weekend. I hope that it all ends up being a big nothing in terms of impact on case numbers, but I think the optimism of last summer before Delta and Omicron hit has left me feeling like declaring things over in terms of community mitigation is premature. I wonder (probably idly) if this is just going to be a cyclical pattern for the foreseeable future.

Coffee Shops

I have not been to any coffee shops this week. I did eat a burrito from a taqueria before I went to one of the shows I saw this week, so that was nice, even if it wasn’t the same as hanging out for a couple hours.

Weekly Upload 03/05/22

/ jkjones2185 / Leave a comment

Despite being a very meeting heavy week at work, I think things were generally okay. While I have a lot of stuff going on with my to-do list, it feels like the most obnoxious part of the post-holiday season is passing now. I got past my art block from last week (somewhat spectacularly, if I can brag for a moment), and the weather’s feeling more and more spring-like every day. I’m sure my mood has been helped considerably by Friday being an in-service day, which meant no students, which also meant I was free to work from home. Working from home is pretty great, and I sincerely hope it continues to be an option for in-service days going forward.

Art

I produced three pieces this week, which is pretty great given the amount of work that went into them. One was a riff on the classic cover of Lord of the Flies with the close up of the character Ralph with leaves and brush tangled up in his hair while he stares straight out at the reader. Because X-Men stuff is what I thrive on, I used Doug Ramsey in the place of Ralph, increased the amount of foliage obscuring the face, and decided to give it a creepy twist with elements of Krakoan vegetation and techno-organic material growing over Doug’s face. I’m not totally pleased with the finish on the painting, but I think I generally hit the vibe I was going for. Probably won’t do intentionally creepy stuff a whole lot, but this was a fun experiment, and I think the framing I did with the foreground elements is pretty strong. My other two pieces this week were a little more straightforward; one is a simple illustration of two characters in my fancomic meeting (I’m currently hashing out a story for them), and the other is an illustration of Magik and Mirage (good old standbys that they are when I just need to pick a subject to do some work) in variations on their “graduation costumes,” a set of looks that I have never thought were particularly interesting or engaging, even when Art Adams drew them. I mostly like the changes I made, but I think I whiffed a little on Illyana’s feet; her legs look spindly at the ankles.

In other art-related things, I just got in the new Morpho reference book for clothing folds, and I’m excited to do some experimentation. I feel like folds are something that I sort of understand, and I have some guides in other books that explain the concepts, but they never go very deep beyond showing the basic ideas behind the folds on simplified shapes. I spent some time flipping through the Morpho book today, and it still has those core shapes at the center of its method, but then there’s like a hundred pages of sketches showing how they work in conjunction with different parts of the body. I’m hoping I will one day perfect the chunky jacket.

Comics

I know that I read some good comics this week, but I feel very much like there’s not much to say about them besides “They were good!”

I did read the second issue of the Cowboy Bebop series that Titan’s putting out (pretty unfortunate to be running a tie-in series for a show that was already canceled), and I’m really into it. Dan Watters is writing, and what he’s been doing in Home Sick Pilots was strong enough to get me to check this series out. The second issue is an extended riff on the Lotus Eaters myth, but it ends with everyone on the Bebop deciding they’d rather be bounty hunters because it’s just too boring being that happy all the time. The whole thing’s a very energetic take on the things that made the original Cowboy Bebop so much fun. I’m going to guess this is only going to be a miniseries in the end, but I’m enjoying the ride.

I also received my monthly grab bag of physical comics from my local shop, which included the conclusion of Dirtbag Rapture, a Chris Sebela-written series that I found delightful from the start, and the last issue of Volume 1 of a John Wick parody that imagines a world where John was killed instead of the dog, and now the dog’s out to get revenge for the death of his human. It’s called Good Boy, and while it’s probably not something I would normally choose for myself, there is a fun tongue-in-cheek feel to the hyperviolence of the thing. The set also included #4 of What’s the Furthest Place From Here, which I feel sort of ambivalent about, although I admit I find the weird post-apocalyptic setting compelling in a fun, creepy way. I genuinely wish the cast of characters were smaller because I can’t remember who anyone is from issue to issue. Last in the set was #6 of Sweet Paprika. That one’s a big shoulder shrug; it’s fun to read in the moment as a bit of fluffy romance, but I feel like the constant reminder that Paprika is just horny all the time kind of detracts from the things I enjoy in romance books.

Video Games

Rachael’s playing Ghost of Tsushima which is beautiful and a delight to watch. I’m picking at Neo: The World Ends With You, which is a great button masher action RPG with lots of collections to accrue. If I have one complaint about the game, it’s probably that the collecting element is so comprehensive that it’s really slowed down my story progression. I don’t especially mind at the moment, although the fact that I have a different, hundred hour long RPG playthrough that’s been sitting on hiatus for a couple months now waiting on the backburner makes me feel like I may have chosen poorly in my game palette cleanser.

Media

Severance is a great show. I’m into the absurd workplace comedy vibe of the interior parts of the show that rub up against the ongoing outside plot that reminds you just how horrible it is what these people and their employers have done to themselves. Rachael and I finished the utter train wreck that was Love is Blind season 2, and we agreed the best episode of the season is the reunion, because everyone, including the hosts, reads Shake for filth. While watching the thing we were convinced that Shayne was the worst person on the show, and he’s still pretty bad, but it was fascinating to see the cast confirm that the producers actually edited the show to make Shake look better than he was. Weirdest part of the episode was the compulsory trailer for a completely different reality show at the end that looks way trashier than Love is Blind.

Pandemic

The indoor mask mandate in Oregon is going to expire on March 14. All teachers are bracing for impact. Seems like an excellent recipe for ruining some spring breaks (scheduled to begin exactly one week later). On a more positive note, it feels good to spend time outdoors and relax a little bit about masks. We customarily go to the a local park for walks when it’s nice out, and we bring masks for politeness when passing folks on the trails, but it is genuinely nice to have just one less thing to think about when getting ready to go out for a bit of exercise.

Coffee Shops

I have not been to a coffee shop this week.

Weekly Upload 02/26/22

/ jkjones2185 / Leave a comment

It was the final week of the Eight Weeks of Doom (the time from New Year’s to the end of February that crushes the souls of every educator in the country), and this year they went out with a bang. It’s probably not worth commenting on national and global news of the week, what with it all being so awful. I’ve tried to focus mostly on the local stuff that I can control, like helping my students who are impacted by the news manage their anxiety. It’s all anxiety management all the time these days.

The local stuff, the things that I do have control over, are also in disarray at the moment. It was a week spent stressing over demands on my time that are unreasonable while trying to find the time and energy to do stuff that is actually important to the welfare of my students. I think things started to improve on Friday, but for a short week, it felt really long.

Art

I didn’t complete any major art pieces this week. I toyed with continuing to work on my fancomic a little bit, but every time I thought about starting work on a new set of pages, I couldn’t find anything to excite me about the project. I took some suggestions for random stuff to draw from online friends, which was fun, but nothing caught my interest enough to really develop. I did stumble across one thing that inspired me the other day, so I’m currently working on a new piece that feels different from my previous work. I’ll probably share progress pictures on Twitter once I finish the roughs. I’m trying to be more deliberate about composition, and it takes a lot of time to consider how to fill a space in relation to the rest of the image.

Comics

I definitely read some new stuff this week, and I remember what I read mostly being good, but I think the general malaise from work kind of flattened my impressions of what I’m reading. I picked up the #1 for the new Si Spurrier & Matias Bergara book Step by Bloody Step, and I’m looking forward to seeing where it goes. I recently read their series Coda and quite enjoyed it; Bergara’s very cartoony style pairs really nicely with the slightly gonzo world building Spurrier likes to produce for his creator-owned stories, so I was excited to see what they were going to do together next. This new series is a “silent” comic with almost no word balloons or sound effects. Essentially, Spurrier wrote a plot, and Bergara gets to go wild illustrating it. If the whole miniseries ends up being as compelling as the first issue, it’s going to be something special. The only thing marring the experience for me is that the digital version splits each two page spread into single pages so you can’t view them simultaneously.

In other comics, I’m enjoying the X Lives/Deaths of Wolverine series, although I do think the Deaths half of the book is far more compelling, probably because so far it’s used Logan as a mostly off-panel antagonist to Moira, who’s gone through some stuff over the last three issues. It’s a fun spin on Terminator where you really aren’t sure if you want the Terminator to catch Sarah Connor or not. Saga is a delight to be reading month-to-month now. I really love the little foreshadowing details we get in Hazel’s narration that sort of hint at what a status quo shift will look like, but leave lots of ambiguity about how it gets there. Strange Academy continues to be a fun school hijinks book. I think I might be reading it more for Humberto Ramos’s art than for Skottie Young’s writing at this point, but I still feel like it’s a solid pull. I am, undoubtedly, a sucker for high school drama though.

Books

I finished reading Teaching Artfully and enjoyed it as a meditation on some of the more abstract philosophical questions that serve as a foundation for the decisions we make in education. There are a few pages that I’d like to scan and turn into prints for display in my classroom, though I don’t know what the timeline on actually doing that will be. DIY prints sort of mystify me as something that can vaguely be done with enough savvy of the print shop at an office supply store. Maybe if I figure it out with these, I’ll have an idea of how to make prints for my digital art.

My copy of The Somebody People arrived, so I’ve started reading that. It does a time skip after the end of The Nobody People which is probably narratively necessary for the sake of the story Proehl’s telling, but I continue to be baffled with the way Nobody People ended. I’m sure it’ll be another month before I finish this novel.

Movies

I watched Eternals for my solo movie night this week, and while I was only half paying attention since I was also setting up my new phone, I got enough to understand the thematic gist. I think there’s some interesting stuff being explored here, especially for an MCU movie, so I may rewatch it in the future with my full attention, but I can totally understand how it would have fallen flat with some folks. It’s a movie that really wants to have Important thoughts while also being a summer blockbuster, and those two modes are difficult to reconcile. For date night, Rachael and I watched Onward, which is a perfectly lovely movie about grief and learning to value the people you already have in your life. We’re thinking that we’ll catch up on our Disney and Pixar backlog for a while.

Television

Abbott Elementary is a really good iteration on the mockumentary style sitcom that also appears to have writers who get what it’s like to be a public school teacher. We just watched an episode where the central conflict revolves around whether or not to do a project with materials one of the classroom teachers bought with her own money, and Rachael and I immediately clocked that the lesson was going to happen, because teachers don’t like to give up on projects they’ve personally invested in. Then the show actually named the money issue as one of the key reasons the conflict was so bad in the resolution. It’s good stuff.

We also learned this week that full episodes of Grand Designs can be watched on Youtube for free, so we’ve been enjoying watching the latest season and seeing how every project now has the inevitable “and then COVID happened” plot twist. It’s frustrating to see happen to some subjects and deeply satisfying for others.

Pandemic

The mask mandates are going to be stopping in the next few weeks, and it feels deeply weird to be approaching a point where that feels mostly okay. I’m sure it’s going to be a very odd week when masks become optional at work.

Coffee Shops

I have not been to a coffee shop this week. I did get boba smoothies while I was out running errands on Monday, so that was nice.

Weekly Upload 02/19/22

/ jkjones2185 / Leave a comment

It was mostly a pleasant week. At work we’ve wrapped up the argument and research unit that helped bridge the worst of the drag that is January through February (lots of work days for students to do independent reading and writing), and we’re about to start a short story unit based on some stuff that we designed and used four years ago. It’s nice to revisit old materials, especially since we’re going to combine them with some texts we haven’t used before. I’ve also been dealing with some mild grumps about the Comixology app update that dropped this week, but having a long weekend sitting ahead of me helps to soften the general blow.

Art

I’ve taken a week off from working on my fancomic to do some standalone pieces that have been quite fun. I feel like I’ve played a lot the last couple months with some techniques related to rendering line work that I go back and forth on. I feel like they suit different moods in my pieces, so I’ll probably switch back and forth between them for the time being. I did one portrait this week where I ended up making two versions, and I’m still not sure which one I like better. The blended lines make for a more painterly look overall, but I also love the striking contrast that the black lines give, especially since I tend to gravitate towards really vibrant, high saturation colors in my work.

I’ve also begun reading a graphic thesis on teaching and visual art called Teaching Artfully by Meghan Parker. I’m only about a third of the way through it presently, but I’m enjoying what it proposes in terms of art’s function as a tool for shaping what and how we think. There’s a brief discussion of self portraiture as a way of reflecting on what we see and emphasize in ourselves that I found especially fascinating. I’m sure I’ll have finished the book by next week and will have more thoughts.

Comics

I went into the week feeling apprehensive about the Comixology update. Two days into the new status quo, I’m a little less irritated about my personal experience with the app, but I know that’s because I’ve been reading primarily on my tablet for over a year now, and that’s obviously the experience Amazon wants to push people towards. The biggest loss I’m personally experiencing is with the storefront. For series that I know about, the search functionality works fine, but I feel that I’m going to miss a lot of less prominent stuff that I might pick up on a whim while browsing the weekly releases. More abstractly, my Twitter feed has been full of comics people pointing out ways the update has been absolutely catastrophic for the indie and small press wings of the industry. It’s not great!

In actual comics reading, I thoroughly enjoyed this week’s X-Men issue with MODOK. It’s worth the price just for the panel where MODOK dropkicks a rage zombie while shouting “…for SCIENCE!” I’m also really enjoying the ongoing plot in Home Sick Pilots, a series that I initially felt kind of ambivalent about until the second arc got going. It’s settled into its groove as a punk/creepypasta action-horror story, and I’m finding the whole thing delightful. I think I wrote earlier this year that I need to just re-read the whole series to see how it hangs together, and I still intend to do that at some point.

Books

I finished reading The Nobody People this week, and while I really enjoyed it, I was definitely irritated that the relationship between it and its sequel is less “duology” and more “one novel that was too long to publish in a single volume.” I would describe this book as hitting its resolution about fifty pages early and then taking the rest of the time to explain to you in excruciating detail how actually that just made everything worse. I already have The Somebody People lined up to read next because a story that pauses at prison camps, impending war, and mass coercive recruitment of child soldiers feels a bit too unresolved for my tastes. Stepping back from that one mild critique, I think what I enjoyed best about the book is that while it’s obviously an X-Men pastiche, there’s very little in the book that’s feels like it belongs on the page of a superhero book. I don’t think I ever reach a point while reading where I thought, “this should have been done as a comic.” No one runs around in colorful costumes, and the application of powers, while occasionally told in a way that would be really appealing if given a visual treatment, is much more focused on their personal significance to their users, which is a kind of internality that I think prose especially excels at doing.

Video Games

I finally finished Going Under, which ended up being about twice as long as I originally anticipated. It was cute! I wonder if the studio that made it is unionized.

Media

Rachael and I started watching In the Heights last night, but we had to stop because it was late and we apparently still had 75 minutes left. What we’ve seen so far is very charming and very much in keeping with Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical style. Ironically, we’re finding that Tick,Tick…Boom! was much more engaging as a film that Miranda directed versus In the Heights as an adaptation of one of his own shows. In stupider fare, we’ve started watching the second batch of Love is Blind season 2 episodes, and we continue to be baffled at just how bonkers the plot lines in this season are. It’s much more palatable as a show when you think of it as a series of contrived stories that the producers cast real people to act out rather than any kind of realistic depiction of developing romantic relationships. I hope that’s the case at least, because no one on the cast seems to be okay.

Pandemic

The dominant thought about the pandemic for me these days is that it’s going to be great when the end of Oregon’s statewide mask mandate coincides with the return to school from spring break at the end of March. Really looking forward to another COVID wave in the early part of April.

Seriously, I hope that I’m wrong and everything will be fine. Doesn’t mean I intend to stop masking myself in public for the rest of the school year.

Coffee Shops

I have not been to a coffee shop this week. The weather’s pretty nice, so maybe we’ll go get lunch from the outdoor food carts this weekend? That would be nice.

Weekly Upload 02/12/22

/ jkjones2185 / Leave a comment

It’s a very full weekend, so I don’t think this update will be too extensive. My work week was rough for reasons I can’t get into on the internet. It’s nothing terrible, just one of those unique aggravations that teachers deal with and which I find myself personally very poorly equipped to handle. It’s been a lot of negative feelings to sift through.

Art

I finished the second page of my second comic story early this week, and that was a big relief. I find that I generally enjoy the process of writing and drawing the comic, but the time investment gets draining when I reach the end, publish the results, and get very little response. I have to constantly coach myself not to expect anyone else to care much about my esoteric pet project, but it’s definitely a little deflating to go, “Here’s the thing!” and get no feedback on social media. That whole mess of feelings plus the work frustration left me wanting to draw my feelings, so I did a portrait of Cyclops being uncharacteristically visibly upset about the way he has to keep himself under control all the time. It is definitely projection on my part. Aside from that therapeutic exercise, I also encountered a comic artist’s work that I found really engaging this week and gave myself permission to just enjoy copying some of his line work. The results are nothing worth sharing because, well, they look like I copied someone else’s work, but it was a really relaxing exercise and fun to spend some time analyzing how another artist uses shapes to build their faces. I’d really like to learn to loosen up in my own composition process so that my finished line work doesn’t look quite so stiff, and this felt like a productive way to practice. I could be entirely wrong; I don’t know.

Comics

New Mutants is a book that comes out slowly enough that I tend to completely forget that it’s an ongoing series, and then a new issue drops and I am emotionally wrecked. First Vita Ayala made me pity Amal Farouk in #23 last month, and now in #24 they give contemplations on trauma and forgiveness and the complicated ways we imperfectly try to be there for our loved ones. Also Danilo Beyruth is the artist I’ve been low key obsessing over for a couple days. The rest of the week’s pulls were fine? I’m having a hard time connecting with the Wolverine event that’s happening right now, even though I do find the Moira plot genuinely interesting. The Secret X-Men one-shot was a lot of fun, which is high praise given my general ambivalence about space nonsense and the centering of Sam and Beto. Their bromance never clicked for me when Hickman wrote them, but Tini Howard actually succeeds in giving Beto a bit of heart inside his relentless braggadocio, so I was down with the silliness. I might even care about further space adventures whenever this subplot pops back up in one of the ongoing series.

Media

We watched Encanto last weekend, and it was a sheer delight. We will probably watch it again this weekend, because it was that good. I was fully prepared for Maribel’s arc to be explicitly related to her talent as a maker, but it ended up being much more subtle than expected. Also, I think the implication of the ending was supposed to be that the grandmother’s Gift was to literally hold up a wall around the community? It’s not that important. We also watched Tick, tick… Boom! last night, and it’s a really delightful musical. I’ve only ever seen the film adaptation of Rent, which is… not great, so I didn’t have much in the way of expectations for a story about the guy who wrote Rent in the first place. I’d been vaguely aware of his story, but I didn’t know about this strange little show he did before he died about feeling like he was running out of time to achieve his dreams. As a story about trying to be an artist in general and being a writer in particular, it was a blast. Rachael couldn’t stop cackling over the scene where Jonathan’s trying to write a song and all he has is the word you’re on his computer screen and then he shortens it to you. It got to some real feelings about the creative process. Other notable things from this week include a docuseries on Netflix about video journalists who chase down incidents that happen in Los Angeles to sell to morning news shows (it was way more compelling than we expected, although there’s an absurd amount of copaganda sprinkled throughout the whole thing), and the second season of Love Is Blind, which we are gleefully hate watching because we love to pick apart the seams of a glossy reality TV show.

Pandemic

People are starting to talk about the fact that the statewide mask mandate in Oregon is set to expire at the end of March, and it continues to feel relentlessly weird as a topic of conversation. I was chatting with one of my co-teachers about it, and we genuinely don’t know if our district will keep a mask policy in place or let it lapse. Either way, we agreed we’re unlikely to go to work without masking for the rest of the school year. I also vaguely heard that there’s been another delay in the approval of the vaccine for 5-and-under kids, which I’m sure is causing lots of anguish for parents of the really little ones.

Coffee Shops

I have not been to a coffee shop this week, although it was very pretty out and I did consider going to the outdoor food pods yesterday afternoon. That ultimately did not happen.