Shifting books at the library the other day, I found a used condom (not a fresh one, either) stashed behind a shelf of J.D. Salinger, so that’s how my week is going!

(Honestly disappointed. If it had been a few bays earlier it would’ve been with the Ayn Rand, which would make a much better joke.)

(This is all in service of a big shifting/condensing project I’m doing with a bunch of 20th century authors. Books on 21st-century authors have been crammed into just one aisle, it keeps filling up and needing to be pared down — all the while there’s space on the aisles downwind, where nobody feels pressured to weed those, even though we definitely don’t need to still have 3 copies of a Salinger biography from 1992.)

Nobly resisting the urge to download + start wasting time with a new stupid phone game.

Not sure if I’ve written about this before — my laundry place has an app, and the app has Sponsor Tie-In Offers, where if you reach (let’s say) levels 20, 50, and 100 of Ball Sort Puzzle, you get 5 cents, 13 cents, and 32 cents of credit in your laundry account. I haven’t added IRL cash to the account since this program started.

All this wouldn’t be worth doing if the games were a chore, but they’re engineered to be tiny little dopamine factories. You get a never-ending succession of Tasks, complicated enough to keep your attention, short enough that you’re getting steady hits to the Task Completed! part of your brain. The whole laundry tie-in is really useful for me, because “there is no more laundry credit to be earned from this game” is a built-in threshold for “okay, time to stop playing and delete the app now.”

So I’m currently between games, and missing those dopamine hits. But I know from experience that “oh, I’ll just play five levels, then go back to focusing on comics for a few hours” is a no-go. Like Odysseus needing to be tied to the mast to keep himself from following the Sirens, I need to not have a game app installed to keep myself from opening it.

You gotta set yourself up for success.

Had to bail on Yuletide this year. I gave myself too many end-of-year deadlines to hit, something had to go. (The others are mostly Leif & Thorn stuff — today’s goal is to knock out another round of Volume 7 editing + bonus art.)

At least I did it at the start of the month, instead of denying the problem until the last minute, so my recip won’t be stuck with “a pinch hit that somebody only had a week to write”!

I do have the prompt set open in another tab, in the hopes that I’ll have time/energy to write somebody a quick treat before the collection goes live. It…does not seem likely. But, again, setting up for success, just in case.

The Leif & Thorn Volume 7 campaign is almost funded! As in "we are literally $20 under the main goal."

So, hey, tell your friends. Got a stretch goal to shoot for, and a week left to go.

--

As part of the "30 Days of Leif & Thorn" project, I started making semi-regular posts on Instagram for the first time since the end of 2021...and just got a "We suspect automatic activity on your account" warning.

I quit posting there in the first place because the site felt actively hostile to small-audience artists! They sure are making an effort not to win me back, huh?

Just finished Shadow Man (Goodreads link, though their summary is very weird), the 1995 novel by Melissa Scott.

I have no idea how or when this got on my reading list? But I'm glad it did!

It's about a spacefaring future where the unobtanium that lets humans survive FTL travel also racheted up the amount of intersex births, to the point where there are now 5 roughly-equally-distributed sexes. Most populations have adjusted, the main interplanetary language has five sets of pronouns (no overlap with the neopronouns that are popular IRL these days), but weird backwater planet Hara is trying to stick to "there are only two genders, dammit, mems are just men, fems are just women, and herms can pick either side, but they've gotta pick one."

We flip between the POVs of two protagonists: Warreven, a local Hara lawyer who specializes in representing the queer + intersex community, and Tatian, an offworlder who works for a pharmaceutical company. (Their main motivation to work with the weird backwater planet is, it's where The Good Drugs grow.)

Warreven's a herm, legally identifies as a man, has some ambivalence about it but is very sure about not being a woman. Tatian is a cis man, has always considered himself exclusively into women + fems, and spends a good chunk of the book low-key realizing "help, ze's hot."

The negative GoodReads reviews keep saying things like "nothing happened in this book," and...that's kinda fair? A lot of it is just...meandering around with these two characters, getting immersed in the world. You know the genre of Youtuber who lives in a weird place or has an exotic job, and vlogs about their day-to-day life? Long stretches of this book are just the sci-fi version of that.

And then the political unrest heats up, there are increasingly-violent protests in the streets, Warreven is briefly put in the hospital, and we get some quality hurt-comfort with Tatian. Sadly, they don't kiss (they really should've kissed), but we get scenes like "Warreven is too injured to have a full range of motion, so Tatian helps them bathe and tenderly washes their hair." The good stuff.

The gender worldbuilding is fascinating, for its weird gaps as much as its progressive ideals. Intersex Harans are fighting for their rights in a strikingly modern way -- Warreven has a fellow herm co-worker who insists on being recognized and addressed with the matching pronouns, Tatian pulls strings to get them treated in an offworld-run hospital out of fear the local doctors will try to "fix" them. But even offworld, gender stereotypes are still a thing! Three new mainstream sexes just means interplanetary society came up with three new sets of stereotypes!

And even though Harans have ways to indicate their legal gender (conventions of clothing, jewelry, etc), Tatian keeps trying to clock everyone's biological sex. Okay, so he's not wrong to think "it's oppressive and wrong that all Harans are pressured to present as male or female, whether they identify that way or not." But also -- dude, don't you have trans people in the interplanetary space future? If someone is presenting as male, maybe it's not cool to over-analyze their breast size?

Sigh. We can maybe cut him a little slack, because he does it most noticeably with Warreven, and he's having a mild sexuality crisis over being hot for Warreven.

It's a shame there's no sequel. (There's also no fic -- there's an AO3 tag for it, I'm guessing the book got nominated for Yuletide at some point, but it hasn't been canonized because nobody wrote any fills.) A lot of points got set up during the "meandering around daily life" chapters that were never followed through on, and I'd like to see where they went. Wouldn't mind spending more time with these characters in general.

And, you know, it's never a bad time for more tender hair-washing.

Share your OC boundaries:

Is fanart ok: Yes! Tag me to get reshared
Is shipping ok: Yes, encouraged
Is kinning ok: In your own head, sure, but don’t tell me about it
Is fanfiction/writing ok: Yes
Can others draw their OC’s with yours: Yes
Is NSFW stuff ok: Yes, but only tag me if you’re sure I’d be into it

(I’m ErinPtah on Bluesky now, if you want to give me a follow! So far I’m mostly crossposting from Mastodon, but there’s new and different content to reblog.)

Trying something new:

On Tumblr, I’m queuing a set of 30 past Leif & Thorn strips, with a bit of director’s commentary for each. No particular order, and I’m not trying to find my Favorite Strips of All Time, just “hey, I have something to say about this one.”

And then I’m crossposting them on Facebook, Instagram, Xitter, Mastodon, and Bluesky. (That’s right, I’m seizing the moment to experiment with Bluesky. If you’re there too, give me a follow.)

Which site gets the best response? Which posts get the most traction? Which platform(s) will I keep posting on after this project is complete? TBD!

(I’m not crossposting on Dreamwidth, or WordPress, because neither of those is a great “get your work in front of people who don’t already follow you” platform. Will stick to using those for, you know, regular old-fashioned blogging.)

I followed the instructions on this post to Fediverse-enable my longtime WordPress blog. Unlike with the ActivityPub integration on the BICP site, this has no customizable settings at all, so I have no idea how this is going to look. But it’ll be out there!

Here’s the incredibly-clunky username to search for from your own Fediverse account: erinptah.wordpress.com@erinptah.wordpress.com

~*~

Welsh photographer runs a shot of a waterfall through Google’s “Magic Editor”, shows us the side-by-side. Well worth checking out.

It’s absolutely fascinating, taking a close look at which changes the “AI” makes. It puts a decent Rock Texture on the rocks, but, does it not have data on Moss Textures? Or has it been trained to detect and erase moss as not “aesthetic”?

Similar with the trees — it replaces them with something you’d describe as “trees” in its data set, but not the species from the original. Zooming in on the real forest reveals a whole variety of branches and leaves, even. The bot’s forest all looks the same.

…The big ferns in the foreground just got turned into rocks. And, at the lowest level of waterfall, half of the water is now a grey rock too.

If someone’s goal was to make generic Pretty Nature Images that would look nice as a wallpaper, this is great! If their goal was anything like “sharing the beauty of a specific location” or “capturing a special experience to remember it later” or “getting a reference you can use to realistically draw this kind of tree,” it’s amazingly useless.

(The other day I had my first encounter with one of those in the wild. Was looking for information on what happens to rose bushes when you over-water them! Got a long-winded SEO-bait article that was interspersed with MidJourney-esque rose paintings. Even as art pieces, they were pretty muddy and underwhelming. As visuals to help you evaluate whether your IRL roses show signs of over-watering, they’re garbage.)

-*-

Leif & Thorn hit its 8th anniversary yesterday!

And just this afternoon, the campaign to print Volume 6 smashed through its goal.

Speaking of the Fediverse, the BackerKit campaign data says I got over 800 visits through Mastodon back on the 16th. No extra backers out of it (those are mostly coming from my website, my mailing list, and BK’s own promos), but most days I don’t get that many visits from every source put together. And there’s no way my own posts on Mastodon are getting that many views.

Some kind of glitch? A shoutout from somebody else in the Fediverse? A fan copying the Mastodon referral link onto a whole other platform?

It’s very possible this is just…not find-out-able. But I wish I knew!

1) Redid the BICP-in-name-only Tumblr, now it’s my general-purpose Art Tumblr for real.

Lifesaving code to redirect all the old URLs! Unlike more user-friendly sites Dreamwidth and Deviantart, Tumblr doesn’t have an option to do this automatically. But customizable layouts mean you can put in the JavaScript on your own…assuming you can even find that post that explains how.

2) The campaign for Leif & Thorn Volume 6 is live!

I planned to launch this on the usual Sunday night…instead, I helped the BackerKit support team discover a bug. So we finally went live on late Wednesday. Even with that bumpy start, we’re over 50% funded on Day 1 – and we’re the #8 trending project on all of BackerKit.

Check it out! Grab a copy! Tell your friends!

Recently had my “20 years of making webcomics” anniversary. These strips were posted about 2 decades apart!

And Shine Heaven Now, June 9, 2003:

First strip of And Shine Heaven Now, building up to a third panel where a character from another dimension crashes ominously into frame

Leif & Thorn, July 30, 2023:

First strip of the current Leif & Thorn storyline, building up to a third panel where a character from another dimension crashes ominously into frame

The art style has gone through a ton of development…but sometimes a good opening is a good opening, you know?

I’m in one of those states where you feel overwhelmed by a bunch of different tasks, none of which should be all that daunting on its own, but then if you start working on one, you feel the crushing weight of how much you’re not working on all the others.

A partial list:

Yuletide 2021 letter/offers
Last-minute Kickstarter promotion
Finishing the next Leif & Thorn arc (currently 40+ strips, for most storylines that would already be finished)
Various blog updates + link roundups
Researching kidney donation (there’s a lot of extensive screening and recovery involved, none of which I have even started, and yet my brain has decided to feel pre-emptively exhausted just learning about it)
Reading a stack of library books
Reading a backlog of subscribed fic updates
Updated Leif & Thorn book cover art (was supposed to be just changing the scale, then I was like “but what if I also fixed this minor annoyance, and that other one, and redid a thing that’s always bothered me, and”)
Prodding for BICP printing-related status updates
Drawing some art I’ve owed people for months
Figure out TikTok?
I should actually clean this living room at some point, huh

…well, I was kinda hoping it would help to write that all down, but so far, not much.

Here’s a nice relaxing Marshmallow Fluff photo instead. A true role model for how to be chill.

Speaking of that last-minute promotion: I have a Kickstarter!

It’s the fourth volume of Leif & Thorn, and it’s doing great. Passed the funding goal earlier this week. Now on track to set a new funding record for the series, and a new all-time record for the number of backers I’ve gotten on a project.

Deadline is Friday at midnight. Pass it on.

I gave New Computer another update — this time making a point of backing up a bunch of stuff, just in case I had to do another reinstall from scratch.

Not only did the process go fine, the camera works again!

(This update was only released a couple weeks ago, and the camera-breaking update was a couple months ago, so it’s not like I could’ve just done that from the start. Someone on the development end had to fix what they broke.)

…so, ah, fingers crossed that it’ll fix the other weird problem, where the computer spontaneously decides it wants to reboot into a diagnostic scan. Which always finds no problems, just like all the previous scans.

Plot twist: I paid more attention to when these happen, and the last 3 times were on Thursday afternoon. So this past Thursday morning, I shut down the computer completely, then headed out to work.

I get home, and it’s on this screen again. Something in here didn’t just reboot the OS, it autonomously powered the machine on.

I mean. What even does that?

The camera-fixing update was later that evening, so I guess we’ll find out “did it also fix the spontaneous diagnostics?” next Thursday.

Had an extensive dream that was an AU of The Secret Garden, but Mary Lennox was a tween necromancer, Gideon the Ninth style.

…and now that I think about it, the parallels are there? Not to Harrow, I mean to Gideon’s backstory of “was a small child when a fatal affliction swept through the whole group around her, later retrieved after being discovered surrounded by bodies.”

Maybe I’ll request it for Yuletide, or something.

It’s that magical time of year when I put Kickstarter logos in all my social-media icons, re-re-proofread all my ad copy, and anxiously look up how much it costs to ship a 5-pound box to Germany.

(Just over US $70.)

That’s right, it’s the final-week prep for Leif & Thorn volume 4.

Please click that link and hit the “Notify me on launch” button, if you haven’t already!

And folks, I am so close to the weight where, if someone wants All The Leif & Thorn Books, the cheapest method is to pack them in a Flat Rate box. 4 books isn’t quite there — but at 5 books the flat rate is cheaper, and at 6 it’ll be much cheaper, and once we get up to 9 it’ll be astronomically cheaper.

…when we get to 10, they won’t all fit in a single box. But that’s a future problem.

(Not that I’m going to do this, but: there would be something really satisfying about drawing enough to fill 9 books, and then stopping the comic, just so it’s a perfect fit for the boxes.)

First, a PSA:

8tracks is shutting down. In 3 days. They did install an automatic "save playlist to Spotify" button to back up everything before they go...so I guess I'm finally getting a Spotify account, huh.

* * *

I got a delightful Yuletide fic!

It looks like this:

curiosity and candy (makes the world go round) (3481 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Pet Shop of Horrors
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Count D/Leon Orcot
Characters: Count D (Pet Shop of Horrors), Leon Orcot
Additional Tags: Swearing, Canon Era, Canon-Typical Behavior, Canon-Typical Levels Of BDSM References, yes this is a tag now, Yuletide, Supernatural Elements
Summary:
Word has gotten out that Leon is D's new chosen mate, and the supernatural is pretty eager to test out his worthiness for the role.

Shame that Leon hasn't been informed of any of this.

I also gave one, in a niche-enough fandom that it's barely gotten any attention -- but, listen, the recipient liked it, so it's a win.

Slowly working my way through the rest of the archive, but I have a bunch of pre-Yuletide fic recs that I haven't even queued yet...so the rec posts of not-for-me Yulefics may take a while in coming.

* * *

I subscribed to Hulu With Live TV for the month, purely so I can watch the new Steven Universe episodes before the internet has a chance to spoil them.

Seriously, the speed at which people can draw fanart of totally-new character designs is unreal.

And during the rest of the eek, I'm trying to make the most of the subscription by bingeing as much other Hulu-exclusive content as possible. Caught up on Archer and a smorgasbord of superhero movies, still working through Family Guy and The Resident, got an apprehensive eye on Stargate Universe.

Surprisingly entertained by Gary And His Demons. (Satirical commentary on Chosen One narratives, Rick-and-Morty-type dysfunction-based humor, our hero has a magical-girl-style transformation sequence for which he sings his own theme song...it's a lot.)

...they have over 300 episodes of ER. And it's excellent background-watching-while-making-comics TV. I may or may not end up going another month with this.

* * *

Speaking of avoiding spoilers: I saw Frozen 2!

It was enjoyable, don't get me wrong, but also awfully weird. Go watch Jenny Nicholson's review for a good, thoughtful, funny breakdown of a lot of the reasons why.

Haven't been any other movies since Endgame that I was really determined to see in theaters. Considered it for Star Wars: The Final Movie For Real This Time Really, but at this point I've been spoiled for enough of the reveals that, eh. Might as well wait until it's out on streaming, and pick that time to do a free Disney+ trial period.

* * *

Decided to bake cookies for Christmas at the last minute, which had me trawling the internet for "recipes that can be made using the ingredients currently in my cupboards" on Christmas Eve.

Sidenote: I have seen so many retail outlets this year advertising "our stores are open on Christmas Eve! and will even have limited hours on Christmas Day!", and, guys, that is not something to brag about. Go watch one of the thousands of adaptations of A Christmas Carol, then swallow your profit motive for a couple days and give your people the time off, already.

So I wasn't going to go buy late-night groceries, because I am not a monster, and here's the recipe I was able to make. It's just flour, butter/margarine, brown sugar, and vanilla. Plus a bag of butterscotch chips, because I do what I want.

They were a hit at the family dinner! Then a hit again when I brought the leftovers to work. Go make 'em some time. Mix up the base with your own (premeditated or improvised) favorite add-ins.

* * *

Wordpress was offering a deal on paid blogging plans, and it was cheap enough that I sprung for it.

...only to find out it doesn't include any customization that wasn't already in the free version. You have to pay twice as much to control your own CSS.

Oh well. I've gotten enough value out of WP over the years that they've probably earned the donation.

Prompted me to finally look for a new theme, too. Took way too long to find something that was (a) 2 columns, (b) didn't collapse to 1 column when you weren't practically fullscreen on desktop, (c) had spaces to keep all my widgets and menus, and (d) didn't have clashing colors in places that non-paying users weren't allowed to customize.

Came out pretty nice, I think.

The theme is Bouquet. The header image and the purple background are customizable. All the pink is one of two pre-set options (the others are blue and orange), which thankfully coordinates with the header pretty well.

Apparently it's also infinite-scroll and I don't know how to turn that off, but oh well, you can't have everything.

* * *

Bumped up to the next-higher dose of Wellbutrin a couple months ago, and it's been a smashing success.

Before the switch, it had gotten to the point where I was sleeping 10+ hours a day, and could feel the not-getting-anything-done. (Doesn't help that I have a longer Day Job workweek these days -- it's great in most ways, but having it eat up all my awake time was a bit of a drawback.)

First week on the new dose, I felt refreshed, could focus way better, and was able to draw more than I got to do in probably the whole month before.

Turns out taking the higher dose too many days in a row leaves me not sleeping enough...but by now I've got the hang of swapping in the lower dose before I start to feel too wired, and it's balancing out really well.

* * *

The last Leif & Thorn Kickstarter alternately feels like it happened forever ago, and like it just ended last week.

The first unbound proof arrived a whole month ago, in November:

I ended up tweaking both files, and asking for a new proof of just-the-cover. (There was some tricky color correction involved -- you don't know exactly how it'll come out in CMYK until you see it in person.)

So the new one arrived...and somewhere between the file I sent and the paper coming out of the printer, the colors got changed in ways I didn't do. Not in a way they would notice when quality-checking, either -- it looked perfectly-balanced, which is the problem, it's supposed to have a purple tint.

(Volume 1 was pink-tinted. Volume 3 -- the one with the magic vine attack -- will be green. Volume 4 is shaping up to be red.)

The company blamed an equipment failure, apologized, and sent a free replacement. I now have 3 separate copies of this cover, and the books themselves are gonna be in production...any day now. Depends on when people come back from vacation.

* * *

I drew 2 full pages ahead in BICP!

Then decided the events of those pages should be bumped back to happen after other events. Which leaves me in the fascinating position of "two pages of scanned and fully-polished lineart, still hasn't gotten me ahead re: the page I'm supposed to post on Monday."

...One of my New Year's resolutions is to actually finish the series in 2020. Fingers crossed.

* * *

Marshmallow Fluff continues fluffin' along.

I did a family visit that left him alone for the weekend, and he seems to have coped just fine:

No special Christmas dinner for Fluff, because he started turning up his nose at canned food a while back. I figure it's a good thing -- he's no longer afraid of imminent starvation, so he feels secure enough to be picky -- but it really cuts down on my "treats to provide for special occasions" options.

He also sometimes sits on one end of the couch while I'm sitting on the other! And almost relaxes. I get the joy of having a judgmental mop staring at me.

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humanist + humorist

THOR'S INSPIRATIONAL SPEECHES ARE NOT ADMISSIBLE IN COURT

Entries tagged with leif & thorn

three things make a post: Salinger, Ball Sort Puzzle, and Yuletide

three things make a post: BackerKit + Instagram + Shadow Man

OC meme for writers, nabbed from Bluesky

30 Days of Leif & Thorn: the social-media cage match

Thorniverse, meet Fediverse

Tumblr redirect + Leif & Thorn live

The More Things Change, webcomicversary edition

Feeling a lot of whelmed

Who’s got two thumbs and can do Zoom calls normally again?

Post-Yule retrospective on the past few months

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