The Creative Project

Way back here and here I mentioned a webcomic project I was working on. While mrlich got busy doing other things and isn't involved anymore, my current arteest and I have been working like crazy on it for a long time. Almost 4 years, actually! While I didn't exactly spend all my spare time working on it through these last four years, I have kept a steady pace of creative energy pointed towards it, and now, we have a substantial world, magic system, plot, and character base. 

Sadly, because of the craziness two-job work schedule, I've not been able to hardly touch it in over a month (aside from a few isolated phone calls here and there with my arteest), but our web guy convinced us to switch to ComicPress (WordPress's webcomic engine), so we have a new website. It's not formally up yet, but we're working on some splash screens to rotate through while we keep hammering on it. You can go to the url, but there's nothing to look at.

The webcomic is entitled The King's Left Hand, and I frankly think it is pretty awesome. While I will admit to some bias, I also will admit that everyone I have given some details to has agreed that it sounds cool. Naturally, until we have, you know, an actual comic to show, those are just words, but it's exciting to see how much closer we are coming. 

I haven't seen a plot anything like what we are doing anywhere else, and I think the path these characters will traverse will strike a chord in a lot of people. I mean, how many main characters in a fantasy story, let alone a webcomic, have {redacted text}, with one of them even being {more redaction}? They are usually {yup, you know}, which makes the level of {I bet you're really curious now} with other characters even more unusual. I know, it's really unique. If I can pull it off without any hamfisted storytelling, this will be something to write home about.

Obviously, this kind of story requires a lot more depth to the world than you would normally find, since the details of {you want a hint?} become important to the deeper storylines moving through the narrative. But throw in the mix of {I'll think about it}, {I might let y'all in on something here}, and {maybe}, and suddenly, aspects of culture that are typically ignored in nearly all fantasy epics need to be explored. 

I'm frankly pretty excited about it all. 

Also? We are totally creating a board game (wargame type) based on the Cultist Wars, which occurred about 20-30 years prior to the start of the comic itself, but is still having a lasting impact on the characters. It's a blast. :)

OK, fine, here's some actual info, in the form of some splash screens:

Wyrm here is a villain who appears in the Prologue. He's brilliant, twisted, manipulative, and a very dangerous enemy.



Wyverns are super dangerous critters who can be trained, but sometimes will turn and eat their riders with no warning (making them only semi-useful). 1500 years ago, during the Age of the Mind Mage, Mind Mages could mentally enslave them, and so they were common mounts for powerful wizards. Now that the DeathMind spell has brought Mind Magic (and by extension, Necromancy) to a screeching halt, wyverns are rarely used, but when they are, they tend to install fear into opponents, plus they are useful scouts. There are no other flying mounts, and airships are incredibly expensive, slow, and vulnerable, so wyverns are the only option for air scouting.

When they are young, they are land bound, but as they get a little older, their "arms" grow wings, and they become flight-capable for a time. As they get older and bigger, they get too heavy to fly, and so the joints on the wings split off and become two more pairs of legs. Older wyverns are massive, six-legged carnivores, and the remnants of their wings can be seen for a time as ragged flaps of flesh between the fore legs. They spray a nasty poison out of their mouths - it attacks the nervous system and causes paralyzation and death to whatever gets hit by it. They can be used to strafe enemy troops from above, though riders have to be cautious to keep the wind from carrying the poison back in their faces as they fly.

Background is stolen from a Magic:The Gathering card, so don't think my arteest did that himself. :)

Rider is a member of the Phoenix Guard, the all-female branch of the military.



More to follow as I decide to throw more tidbits out!

Current mood: creative

Rejuvenated and House!

I had a great three day weekend. Well, I still had a couple of clients on Saturday, but I was done by noon. There were a bunch of errands to run, but overall, I feel much better. 

For about the last month, I've been pushing myself really hard, to the point that I could have easily gone to sleep at 7 or 7:30 each night, but I haven't been able to pull that off until this weekend. I think I crashed out at 7:30pm on Saturday night and woke up around 6am. Yay! And then yesterday, we just sat around, did a little cleaning, and otherwise took it easy all day long. So nice! I feel ready to jump back into the crazy schedule. I really enjoyed this downtime and hope to have more soon.

I must say, it's been a good experience staying with our friends, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't excited to close on our house soon. It looks like we may be able to close next week! I'm super tempted to pay professional movers to pull our stuff out of storage while I'm at work, so I can come home to a house with all furniture ready to go. :) My wife may be less enthused at that idea since she's the one that would have to watch Jackson and supervise the process, but I still may be able to pull off something like it just so we can get in faster.

One big advantage of this whole fiasco is that we will go two full months without paying rent/mortgage! That will allow us to get financially ahead of where we need to be by the end of the year when the new baby comes. We think it might be a girl, and are considering the name Sarah. We shall see. :)


Current mood: good

Busy and exhausted

We are officially moved in, and during a very busy month to boot. For the last three weeks, I have either been out of town for most of the week, or I have been working day and night, Mon-Thurs, and Fri & Sat day.

This schedule amped this week up since I am both doing New Hire training and also delivering my Train the Trainer class twice, beginning at 7am, which means I have to be to work at 6:30, and from our new living space, that means I have to leave the house at 5:45. Makes for good OT, but I am about wore out.

In just a few weeks, this schedule should calm down since my Monday obligation will be over come June 18, and as long as I am not working at the office on Monday, I won't have to make up my counseling supervision meeting on Wed night. 

I have never been one to take a nap during the day - I have too much energy, so I just go go go all day until I drop at about 9pm. However, this week, I could easily take a long nap every day. I am very glad Memorial Day is next week so I get a brief break, but when June hits, we're having to do the closing on the new house and then move again.

Luckily, my folks are coming down to help us settle and unpack, so that takes a little pressure off, but I'll have to keep pushing hard until middle of June. Little breaks here and there, but no major schedule changes yet.

OK, that's not entirely true - my client load is dropping off (thank heavens!), so I am recovering most of my Saturdays. I may even be able to pull off a Game Day sometime very soon! Double yay! I don't mind the lower income right now while I recover from a year+ of serious pushing. It'll pick back up again, so I'm not worried.

But all said and done, I will be so glad​ when this next 4 weeks is done. Not to mention that Jenny is really morning sick, and with me gone all the time, it's turning into a huge blessing to be living with our friends briefly. Rachael has been an angel of service. I am so grateful for a church community that is willing to sacrifice.

I noted to an atheist friend that the strength of a community is directly related to the willingness of its members to sacrifice time and effort for each other. In our case, people we don't even know very well helped to pack and clean our apartment since neither Jenny nor I were able to do so. I don't know many folks who have that kind of community ready and waiting to sacrifice serious time, energy, and personal space when dire needs arise. I am a very fortunate guy.


Current mood: exhausted

Geeky Disney connections

Jackson has suddenly found a love for Mickey Mouse. I'm really not sure what it is about Mickey that kids love so much. It's not like he's had a ton of exposure or seen commercials or anything - he just saw Mickey and adored him instantly.

Anyhoo, as he was watching Mickey House Clubhouse, I was half listening from the other room when I heard Stinky Pete come on, and his voice just sounded really familiar. I couldn't quite place it, but I knew I had heard it before, so I looked the voice actor up on IMDB to discover just where I felt the audio connection.

His name is Jim Cummings, and he has done a lot of voice acting, including Stinky Pete for over a decade, Winnie the Pooh for a while, etc, but none of those jumped out at me.

However, I saw one role he did the voice for and my jaw dropped - that was where I knew him from.

Stinky Pete's voice sounded familiar because it was the voice of Minsc, the miniature giant space hamster (named Boo) carrying berserker ranger from Baldur's Gate 1& 2, some of my favorite games of all time, rivaled only by Batman: Arkham Asylum and Planescape:Torment.

Minsc was hilarious! He offered such gems as:

What? Boo is outraged! See his fury! It's small, so look close. Trust me, it's there.

I trust those who prey on children no farther than they can be thrown, even if I manage to throw them pretty far!

And even those quotes fall short of the hilarity that Minsc offered.

But as I dug around, I found a couple more interesting connections, both through the Syfy show Eureka:

Senator Wen is played by Ming-Na Wen, who was the voice of Mulan.

Taggart is played by Matt Frewer, who voiced the imp Panic in Hercules.


One more cool one, though not Disney related. I was watching an ep of Batman Beyond with Mr Freeze, and his voice sounded really familiar as well, so I looked him up and found that Michael Ansara who voiced him also played Elric the technomage from Babylon 5, one of the greatest stories of all time.

Good stuff!


Current mood: geeky

Acupressure given "empirically validated status" by APA

Ok, so it's not strictly acupressure, but it's quite similar. I've been using EFT personally and with clients for years with fantastic success, and so it was nice to get the note today that said EFT qualifies to be labeled empirically proven by the American Psychological Association.

Read that again, all you skeptics: A form of acupressure was proven through careful research to have significant success rates with a number of emotional traumas, beyond that of a placebo effect.

The implications of this research are enormous. Fun times we live in!


Current mood: validated

Big Announcement (and Moving)

This is the week that we are moving out of our apt. One of our good friends is putting us up for the month it will take to get us into our new place, so I'm quite grateful. Sadly, we have to put almost all of our stuff into storage, but hey, it's only a month. :)

The hard part is that Jenny is in the middle of morning sickness, plus I'm working literally almost every day and night this week and the next two weeks, not to mention that I was out of town almost all of last week, so she's had to do most of the packing herself. Luckily, some of our friends in the church are putting in some serious time and effort to help us get packed up since she's largely incapable and I'm just not there at all.

Wait, what's that, you say? Repeat what again? Morning sickness?

Oh yeah, we're PREGNANT! :D

After two years of trying and one miscarriage a couple of months ago, we have an official due date of Dec 29 and a very strong heartbeat. We think it's going to be a girl, though we thought that last time. Names are an issue - I like the name Yvaine (from Stardust), and she doesn't. We may compromise and use it as a middle name, but I think she's still iffy. I just love the thought of having a little girl I can call Evie, especially when I attach her last initial - Evie V (say it out loud). Jenny does not love that thought very much, and I have a strong suspicion about who will win that argument.

It's been odd for us - most everyone our age either has much older children or no children, so we tend to hang out with the younger parents. Here we are just starting our new family close to age 40, while others are nearly done.

Anyhoo, the house will be ready for us mid-June, so we are looking forward to having our family in our new place where we can STAY for a while...


Current mood: excited

AVENGERS ASSEMBLE!

Such a good movie. The Hulk had some of the best scenes.

And for those who haven't seen it yet, plan to stay all the way through the credits - there are two easter egg scenes, not just one.

For those who have seen it (and saw the first easter egg scene in the credits): (Spoiler in white, highlight to see it)

Holy crap Thanos! I so did not see that coming, but I am now super excited for the second Avengers movie. Here's hoping the script stays as awesome as this one did. I never followed the Infinity Gauntlet storyline, but I am aware of it and the kind of power Thanos was throwing around. This promises to be really really excellent.

After the phenomenal success of this movie, I hope DC picks up the gauntlet (ha!) and tries to do something similar with the Justice League: separate movies with each of the main heroes leading up to the big showdown in a Justice League mashup. Even if people call copycat, it could be really great if the scripts and acting are well done. We all win!

And if Ryan Reynolds reprises his Green Lantern role, he could also do a cameo as Deadpool in the Avengers movie, making him a double-winner. As far as I know, he's the only Marvel/DC cross actor. Am I wrong?

Analysis: GO SEE THIS MOVIE TODAY. You should have seen it opening weekend, but you can keep your nerd card if you see it post-haste. Unless, of course, you are reading this a month or longer after release and you still haven't seen it, in which case, find the closest nerd and hand in your card. Be prepared to endure shame.


Current mood: Heroic!

House drama

A lot of people had invisible friends growing up. I don't recall having one, but I think I've had something following me around for many years now. He's a llama named Bob, but he's not a normal llama. He's a Drama Llama. Bob the Drama Llama. I can't seem to take two steps without this fellow spitting drama into my life. So he's definitely invisible, but I would hesitate to call him a friend.

We started our loan process at the beginning of March. We had a loan guy that has helped us try to get two houses in the past: one in Austin that got killed a week before closing due to Jenny losing her job, and one here in SA that got killed at the beginning because I hadn't been at my job long enough. We stuck with him because he has done so much work for us, and he had good rates. We liked him and really wanted to see him get paid for all the hard work he has done in the past. He's had periods of time where he went incommunicado, but they didn't last long and he always came through for us in the end.

Because we have dumped all our extra cash into paying off debt (we have slightly more than $10k left, including our student loan - we even own both cars outright at this point), we haven't kept a ton of money in the bank for backup. This means that the only loan we could get was a USDA loan, which allowed for no money down. Our credit is in the mid 700s, our income to debt ratio is amazing, job history is solid - aside from the lack of liquid funds, we are an ideal borrower.

USDA in Texas currently has about a 4 week backup, but that was a non-issue. After all, we were starting the process a full 8 weeks before the scheduled closing date.

The trouble began when we couldn't get our lender to return calls. We'd get little snippets from him along the way, all expressing confidence that we could get closed as promised, but no real communications and full disclosure. because he had gotten us all the way to the end on the first house he helped us with despite some periods of this kind of communication gap, I wasn't too worried. My realtor, the seller, and the seller's realtor were all expressing doubts, but I trusted our guy. He had proven himself.

But the silence went on and on and on. He wouldn't return phone calls, texts, or emails.

A week out from closing, our realtor sent us an email from a lender he knew - enclosed was the number for USDA. I called them to see where our application was, and they had no record of us. Our lender had never submitted us to USDA in the first place. I was stunned and angry - what the heck was our guy doing?

I expressed frustration to Jenny that he was working solo and there was no office number to call anyone else at to see what was going on. She told me that there was an office number in his signature. I went and looked, and sure enough - there was an office number in normal text surrounded by his hyperlinked cell number, fax number, and highlighted email address. I am so used to looking for the hyperlinks or other important information highlighted that I never saw the office number, even after a hundred times looking at his signature.

I may claim XY chromosomes on this one since this seems to be a common occurrence at our house. "Honey, where is [object]? I can't find it anywhere, and I've been looking for 10 minutes." 

"It's right in front of you."

[look for another 2-3 minutes, see nothing]

"I don't see it."

"It's right there."

"Ohhhhhhhhh!"

Like seriously major blind spots somehow.

Anyhoo, I call the office number and that's when things really start to unravel. They had no file for me. There's some mention that our lender was working on a loan for us, but there was no info. He had never gone to his own branch manager for help after hitting some kind of snag at the very beginning regarding my job history, so they had no earthly idea what was going on either. He got a hold of our lender and told me that our guy had hit some kind of major personal life snag that caused him to just fall apart. We happened to catch the brunt of it, because it seemed that he hadn't done hardly a dang thing for us since the very beginning of the process.

Our guy was stepping aside and giving all of his files to his branch manager to finish up, but it was too late for us. We were not closing when we thought we were.

We decided to go with the seller's lender to keep things smooth, but we are looking at another 5-7 weeks before we get to move in. And lucky for us, the sellers are an awesome couple. The four of us get along famously, and they said to me on more than one occasion that if they had been selling to anyone else, they would have backed out and put their house on the market again, but because they like us so much, they really want to sell to us. The feeling is mutual - we all feel like we've gained some good friends through this whole thing.

However, there are some other issues. We had already given our 60 day notice, and when I checked with the complex, they had leased out our place, so come end of May, we have to find a place to live for a month until we can close. 

I had gone out of my way to prevent all of this. I have moved so much, I wanted to move once more into a house and STAY, so this is why we went with someone we knew would do a good job, gave plenty of time for any snags to work themselves, and otherwise be completely smooth. But dang freaking Bob had to go and stick his drama llama head in the middle of all this, leaving spit everywhere.

If he wasn't invisible, I'd break his stupid drama llama legs.

Though I have to admit, at the end of all of it, while I don't like what has happened, I'm actually doing pretty well. I've dealt with much worse and come out on top, so I can handle this. I have a fantastic wife who was been wonderful through the whole thing, helped me keep my head on straight when I got hot (and vice versa), great sellers who are turning into great friends, and we are still getting our awesome house, just not when we had planned on it originally. 

Life is good, I just wish Bob would find someone else to bug for a while.


Current mood: paradoxically chipper

Child hilarity - Time outs

One of the best parts of being a parent is all the funny stuff your kid does/says. Jackson is finally getting to the stage where I start to see more of these, and I'm gonna blog as many as I can. :)

So a few nights ago, I was sitting next to him at the table, helping him eat. I gave him his water bottle, and looked away for a moment to answer a question Jenny asked. I glanced back just in time to see him huck his water bottle full force across the table. Well, throwing things when at the table is a no-no, so I put him in his crib for a 2 minute time out. He was upset, but calmed down by the time I got him out.

A little later that evening, I saw him pick up his animal puzzle (pieces are individual jungle animals) and grab the hippo piece. He threw the hippo piece across the ground, and said "No, no, hippo!" He then picked up the hippo, looked at me and said, "Hippo time out." He marched across the room to his crib, threw the hippo piece in, and marched back to room, to look me solemnly in the face and say again, "Hippo time out." Holding back a laugh, I nodded and answered, "Oh, did the hippo need a time out?" 

A couple minutes later, he went back in, got the hippo out of his crib, and showed it to me. He then threw his tiger across the room, and repeated the whole process ("Tiger time out" - which will be the name of my new band). Most of the animals spent a little time in the crib that night for time out. 

It's good to know that our lessons are having such an impact. :)


Current mood: giggly