CaptainSpam @captainspam@social.exclaimindustries.net

Oh, all right, I'll pin a useful toot:

Some amount of this account will refer to my comic, The Dementia of Magic, at https://dementiaofmagic.net. Others may refer to nothing really at all.

Fresh from the Prize Mines, here's A Thing I won from #DB2021 this year. First thing I've ever won from a Desert Bus. Yay!

And there! The Desert Bus has rolled to a full and complete stop for the year, having earned $1,188,181.00 and shattering several records in the process.

Until next year! Ajony!

Your attention please: Round-trip Desert Bus service from Tucson, AZ to Las Vegas, NV begins this Friday, November 12, at 6pm PST.

Everybody on the bus!

https://desertbus.org

The DoM logo's always been a bit troubling, mostly because it depends on a flame I generated once with an ancient plugin I don't remember at all, meaning it's a raster image that doesn't at all scale and I can't remake it exactly the same.

I know some people take issue with the trend towards more simplified logos with flat colors and gradients, but the advantage is that lends itself to vectorization well, which means it scales.

Given all of that, I feel this is an acceptable improvement.

Oh, hey, I just looked over my notes, and I think I'm down to 4-6 comics left to get out of Chapter Eight and finally upload them to the website. Finally. Maybe I'll get this out yet.

Next time you see a comic whose character poses are all similar (i.e. a conversation) and scoff at the artist for taking so long to draw what looks to you like cut-and-pasted art, remember that chances are what took so long was the artist trying to figure out some way to make the poses NOT be similar and deemed them all to be absurd before falling back to what you see just so they could get the story moving again.

Mario's new voice actor is... you. When you see the movie, Mario's voice is yours. You don't remember recording any lines. Nobody does. They all hear their own voice as Mario's.

When the movie ends and they walk out of the theater, everybody in the audience now has the voice of Charles Martinet. A surprise cameo indeed.

It has recently come to my attention there is little to no fanart of Tron Bonne Jovi. Someone get to work on that.

"Introducing the new AMD 6969 XTXTXTX-C! It has a gajillion rendering cores and eleventy bazillion TB of RAM! It's so powerful, your entire life up to this point has been retroactively rendered by one! Wheeeeeeeeeee!"

"Sure, nice, when will consumers be able to buy one, or anything else AMD's made in recent years? Will supplies be improving so that-"

"I SAID WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE."

I remain shocked — SHOCKED, I say — that my desktop actually comes back from sleep mode without major video or other hardware failures. I have never before owned any desktop or laptop that would do so reliably to any extent.

There! The *physical* versions of the second editions of The Dementia of Magic, Chapters Two and Three, are now available for purchase! They're $15 each for a standard-quality-color paperback and $55 each for a premium-quality-color hardcover!

And PDFs are still available for free regardless!

https://dementiaofmagic.net/books/

The one last problem I'm going to have with the books is pricing. I mean, I had a solid idea of the prices already... in USD. Lulu has you specify the price in USD, GBP, EUR, CAD, and AUD. Problem is, the minimums for each don't convert correctly, and the USD prices I had in mind convert to less than said minimums.

I'm guessing there's processing fees going on (Lulu is a US company without a mega global presence), but that's still kinda going to suck for international folk.

There we go. I think this will work. There's a bit of an oddity with the spines where the back cover art is bleeding in a bit, but given I've got everything as correct as I can get there on my end, I'm chalking that up to variances in printing for now.

Going on memes I've seen for many years regarding digital art, I humbly offer the following bit of advice:

Make your sketch layers something like 40% opacity or so and just draw on them in plain ol' black (or whatever color you're using for lines). That way you'll immediately know if you're drawing on the sketch layer or linework layer and won't get an unpleasant surprise when you turn off sketch.

So, the concept of a hardcover book is feasible. Shame my clever idea of hiding doodles in the wrap area won't quite work. Darn. But, I think I can work with this.

Huh, wait a sec... if I tell Lulu NOT to shop the books around to other retailers (that is, the books are only available through their website, like how I used to do it on CreateSpace), the cost goes down DRASTICALLY. Like, around half.

There may be hope for that insane hardcover edition yet...

The new editions of the books have been nearly ready to go. But just to compare, I ordered copies of the premium color versions again. It really is better, but man is it expensive.

Since Lulu gives me the option, I looked into maybe hardcover premium color versions to make it more worth the cost. To that end, I added extra wrap stuff to the covers and placed an order to test.

Then I found that those versions would be around $100 USD each on their store. I don't think I can justify THAT.

Oh, right, profile banners. I should figure out something to do with those in my Mastodon widget...

Don't worry, the Nintendo Switch Pro is juuuuust around the corner! The same as it has been for like four or so years now! Just around an unusually large and wide corner that apparently does not fit in Euclidean geometry!

Hm... yes, yes. I think these versions of the books should do nicely. Much less overly dark, now that I've done some color correction on some of the more shaded parts.

I'll give them one more look-through just to make sure I'm not missing anything really bad, but I might be ready to get them up for sale in due time.