Mike

Schnow

2009-12-21T22:30:55Z

I have now had several cuuuute Skype chats with my wonderful girlfriend, incluing just now. A series of snatched short ones before i go to bed and she goes to work, to keep us going til we can meet again and cute-ly snuggle.

Anyway last Thursday it snowed loads, and also the electric went off, which made Friday morning's wake up and drive very interesting. Then it was supar-cold and snowing a little over the weekend to keep the white stuff on the ground. Today it was melting a bit and it also rained, so i thought that was that. But a bit earlier a load more snow fell... white Christmas ahoy, perhaps.

Today's Japanese:

Here it is: http://create-games.com/download.asp?id=8040

:3 :3 :3

2009-12-06T15:37:50Z

Just had a cuuute Skype chat with my wonderful girlfriend ^^

Also my home-made banner for the 2010 UK Webcomix Thing got accepted onto the official banners page. Try and spot it:
http://ukwebcomixthing.co.uk/2010/banners.php

That was the whole week, again

2009-12-05T19:28:59Z

On Monday the ice machine at work stopped working. I expected it was the "bastard" water pump that had caused the previous week's trouble, but actually when the maintenance bloke came out it was actually the ice machine that had gone wrong itself, and what's more he was able to fix it there and then. Panic over.

Until Wednesday when i got a cute call off Yasue, except happiness turned to terror when she mentioned that "we should break up". After much exhange of text and Myspace messages, and me using loads of credit checking Myspace on my phone every 10 minutes of the day, she called me her boyfriend again today :3 :3. Today i also sent her some christmas presents :3 hope they get there in time XD.

Today's Japanese:

Arimasu - -is there (lit. "Exists") for objects
Imasu - -is there (people and animals)
Miemasu - I see (lit. "is visible"), for things you can see, not for stuff on TV
Ikimasu - Going (X ni ikimasu = i'm going to X)
Kaerimasu - Going back (X no kaerimasu = i'm going back to, typically used for home)

That was the whole week

2009-11-28T20:02:05Z

Had another lab flood on Wednesday morning >.< after i thought everything had been fixed it happened again. But this time it was just because the drain pipe from the big autoclave had been knocked away from the drain so it had emptied onto the floor.
The maintenance guy still came around to look at the water softener, and after poking about with it declared it "totally fucked". Apparently it's supposed to have rubber balls and o-rings in it, but they've all long since perished and disintegrated, so actually for probably years it's just been part of the "pipes" that water flows through and not actually doing anything. Oh well the autoclave doesn't seem to have limescale'd and the washing machine has it's own water softener inside it, so there's been no problems XD.

Also had my first probationary period progress meeting on Friday, and it's going good enough for there to be no real issues raised, other than sorting out things that built up while i wasn't there like odd lab coats laying around, and waterbaths not being cleaned. I cleaned one that was a bit nasty.
At lunch time i realised i had forgot my lunch so had a "quick pop" up the M11 to Bar Hill Tescos. Except i "quickly popped" the wrong way and didn't realise til Duxford. So i went back again, got some sushi, then tried to come back only to find you can't just "come back" to where i work and have to go through Cambridge, in which i got lost and only found my way back by luck, at exactly the end of my lunch break time XD.

Today i went to Cambridge to go to Borders as it was the closing down sale. Except the tight bastards have only knocked off 20%, so i spent about 84 quid on various christmas presents, the last 3 issues of Death Note, some Korean comic i liked the cover of, the book of the 12 best air combat Commando Comics, yet another Japanese dictionary (this one without confusing jargon and odd letters XD) and a book about how to learn Kanji, which is interesting.
I always thought that Chinese characters (which Kanji mostly are copied from) were more "interpretable" than simply learning 2000 of them, and they are. For instance the one for "Blind" is made up of the ones for "Dead" and "Eyes" crammed into the space of one. Still it's not gonna be easy to get up to the level of a Japanese 6 year old XD. I need to get some young kid's comics with furigana in when i next go there.

...which might be Feb, hopefully :3

Today, i are mo(i)stly been getting mopper's elbow.

2009-11-23T20:36:12Z

I thought i'd put the glassware washer and autoclave on as i left work on Friday, just to get the stuff in them done for Monday to give me something to fill the time up. I got in today to find a note on the glassware washer saying it had had some error message about 5 minutes after i'd gone home. I was farting about with it and then noticed the autoclave had also had an error.
I then thought it must be the fault of the water softener they are both hooked up to, so spent most of the day taking it to bits and cleaning a load of clay-like sediment out of it. I put it back together and it seemingly didn't work, so it took it to bits again and had a really good poke about to find blockages. Eventually i gave up and thought i'd get the engineer called in tomorrow.
I leave the lab to go to one of the others (i work in 3 buildings), i get back 10 minutes later to find half the building's flooded O_O . I'm very mystified at how this happened as the pump on the water softener was not attached, or plugged in, or turned on. One huge cleanup operation later and i notice the ice machine, which had also stoppd working, was now working again. I also THEN noticed it was not actually connected to the water softener but just to the pipe, so the actual pipe had no water coming through it and there was nothing wrong with the softener. One of the maintenance blokes helping with the clean-up then mentioned that they had turned that part of the water supply off. NOW ya tall me!

...at least it gave me something to do.

"iGoogle"

2009-11-21T21:26:35Z

Please tell me this is a joke.

Also when it's next census time, everybody should put "mixed race", for one nobody can prove you aren't, for two it will make the whole concept of having a section to specify race look as ridiculous as it is.

.

2009-11-15T16:13:30Z

Why no, i won't be available at 7:00 tonight.

Water discovered on the moon

2009-11-14T18:49:01Z

Inb4 some traitor to the human race spouts "we shouldn't expand out into space until we sort everything out on earth", yeah like that's going to happen.

Put them against the wall and shoot them, every one of the fuckers.

Weekend time

2009-11-13T22:00:39Z

Which will be spent drawing more Tigers of Punjab for issue 3 of my comic. I wanna finish it by March to sell at the UK Webcomix Thing. Hopefully i'll get 1 page done and another started, optimistically XD.

Still don't know what to use the spare 2 pages for... thinking of a text serial, but i dunno what it can be about. Might go for a boarding school story, but you have to invent characters for those and i'm pretty rubbish at that. Also thought about stories set in either the civil war or Boudicca's rebellion against the Romans (if only for gleeful descriptions of the destruction of London).

I've also been thinking about a series of stories following a Japanese pilot for my pocket library comics (which will be A5 sized and have self-contained stories). One of which will be set in the Siberian intervention, if only for gleeful illustrations of communists being bombed. The hero of the story will get to fly an Albatross sent from Germany as reparations... if only because it's the coolest looking first world war plane. By the looks of Japanese propaganda posters of the era, though, thier actual aircraft were stringy contraptions wouldn't have disgraced the Wright brother's drawing boards.

I also want to make a 3D(!) sequel to this: http://www.fagshategod.co.uk/other/games/dgames/jambusterex/index.html which was a "knocked out" remake of this: http://www.fagshategod.co.uk/other/games/dgames/jambuster/index.html . There's a few obstacles to making the game, though. Including:
1: I don't know anything about 3D game making
2: I don't know anything about 3D modelling except for Sketchup, and that's useless for making things that aren't houses, office blocks, sheds etc
3: I can't code
I do have a great engine to make it in though, Unity! Which i paid well over 100 quid for a while ago. Just about 61 days before they decided to launch the next version of it for free, and refund people who had bought it in the previous 60 days, great.

At least i have a job XD

Status update!

2009-11-07T18:24:26Z

Mike just saw the terrifying future of motorsport - two cars at once in a "knock out" competition, 'racing' on seperated tracks entirely enclosed by barriers, going no faster than about 55 at the absolute most.

First week done

2009-11-06T23:07:18Z

My first week of my new job is done, it's pretty good, getting in to a routine :3
There's also plenty of people i can annoy into helping me with Kanji when i get that far... haha.

Speaking of learning Japanese, i've been working on a videogame to learn Kana with. Ought to get done this weekend if MMF2 doesn't start chucking inexplicable errors at me when i try to make a simple IF_ELSE_ function, which causes me to have to use stupid inefficient workarounds (hint: this will happen, so don't hold yer breath)

Starting new job tomorrow

2009-11-01T21:34:14Z

^-^

Luckily it's a 9:30 start so i can investigate traffic conditions and it won't matter if i'm late. Worked out a roundabout route to get there going through country roads so i dunno what it will be like.

O yer and...

2009-10-24T15:46:10Z

Yesterday i got an email offering me a job that i had an interview for :3 hopefully i'll be able to go to Japan again soon too once i have money ^^

Evolution of a Jag

2009-10-19T21:47:21Z

I've been re-drawing a few comic panels for issue 3 of my adventure comic, The Red, White & Blue. This panel is also the first time i've tried drawing "2 up", it at double the printed size to "fit in more detail" (that's the theory anyway XD) and just to generally make things easier. Here's the original panel, showing our hero taking cover whilst the leader of the baddies escapes in a Jag:

Not amazing, and the escaping bad guy looks tiny! This panel also has a large text box in the actual comic to further confuse things. So, lets try again...

Now the focus is on the bad guy's car. Of course i don't need to explain why this panel is being binned >.<, try again...

This time it's drawn 2-up, which made drawing the car a hell of a lot easier. The perspective is horrendous but it does allow for our hero (who also looks a bit 'tacked on', but on well) to look larger. Of course the escaping car is now the main focus and it doesn't look too horrible. Though i did forget the numberplate and those naff bonnet louvres will be deleted in post-production before the panel is finally inserted into the comic.

The original version of the page is remaining online:
http://www.felney.co.uk/web/manx/comics/0012.html
(speaking of which, that CSS needs sorting out), but the improved version will only appear in the print edition of the comic, which will be a bit more of an incentive to buy it XD. I just hope once everything is put together that the 'smoothness' of a reduced 2-up image in a page of 1-up images doesn't look too jarring or obvious. The lead strip on the comic's covers (in colour!) will also be made up of a combination of 1 and 2-up panels, as i want it's art to be the best i can do. They did the same thing on Dan Dare in The Eagle... but of course they were professionals and actually knew what they were doing XD.

Stuff i can refer back to later

2009-10-19T19:27:39Z

Alone (as in, any one of):
Iron Maiden
Rammstien
Judas Priest
Rainbow

All or most combined:
Skindred
Metallica
Apocalyptica
Dragonforce (but ask me again in Jan!)
Stiff Little Fingers
Venom
Zeroscape
Spiraldive
V8 ****ers
Dying Embers

Yeah, got a bit obscure towards the end there...

The Soudan campaign 1897-8

2009-10-14T14:53:40Z

...or around that time. The book i mentioned in my last post was set in it but was rather an "uphill" read (some bits were good, though). But imagine my surprise when i got the latest batch of Commando comics, and found that No. 4235 is set in the very same war!

I also recently got a single issue of The Boys' Realm from 1906 with a school story featuring a Japanese character, which is quite interesting. Unfortunatley it's a serial and serials in the trinity of "The Boys'" papers ran for ages and ages and had thier ends dragged out. It also goes without saying that you can't buy 103 year old tabloid-sized comics "just anywhere", so the whole serial might have to remain unread >.<.

Speaking of Japan(ese) i bought an ebook with Japanese words and then some silly visual image you're supposed to memorise, working on the idea that memorising the image will let you memorise the word. I actually went to the blog of the creator of the ebook and he had an example (Sheep is Hitsoji, so imagine "a sheep hits our jeep"). I tried this myself on some words from a dictionary (Criminal is Hanzai, so imagine "Han's Eye, as in Han Solo, a smuggler" - obviously my imagination is not what it was) and it actually seems to work. So i might learn Japanese faster and maybe even post more example words on here again XD.

In other news i'm on the dole again (-_-), trying to find a job in various places (not much doin') and have done no comic-making even though i have loads of free time (no excuse for that one -_-)

G.A. Henty

2009-10-08T20:25:24Z

I'd heard he was a good writer of boys' own adventures, so i bought one called "With Kitchener in the Soudan". I can safely say i've read better (usually by criminally uncredited and/or forgotten writers). I came wanting great huge battle scenes with loads of Dervishes being swept away by maxim guns, not some rambling history lesson with great long descriptions of plans made by a fictional patrol in a real event for what would happen if they encountered an attack which then doesn't happen!

Now, really...

2009-10-07T14:35:37Z

I can't see somebody called Mohammed El-Demardesh using "paris21boo" as his MSN nickname...

There's deluded ebay ads

2009-10-05T18:26:49Z

Then there's deluded ebay ads,

Then there's this: http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/20-DIXON-HAWKE-LIBARY-BOOKS_W0QQitemZ190339801040QQcmdZViewItemQQptZAntiquarian_Books_UK?hash=item2c5122dfd0&_trksid=p3286.c0.m14

Today's Japanese

2009-10-05T18:13:43Z

Mikka - 3 days
Yokka - 4 days
Itsuka - 5 days
Muika - 6 days (remember it sounds like 3, which is half of 6 XD)

Oya - Parent (or "oh dear" etc, context implies which one it is)

Haha - Mother (your own)
Hahaoya - Mother (lit: mother parent. Perhaps more polite?)

Chichi - Father (your own)
Chichioya - And again

Nani - What? (questioning - often used as "pardon?" if you don't understand somebody).
Can also mean what in a general sense, or why.

Nan - What?
Can also mean Why or Many. In these two (it says here) it is linked with Nen (nan-nen)

As usual, the context implies the meaning.

Comiket

2009-10-04T18:20:20Z

The biggest comic convention on earth!

...in Tokyo.

I'd been half-planning to try and get back to Nippon for the new year to see thier celebrations and this might have convinced me a bit more. Not that i can read Japanese.

Today's Japanese

2009-10-03T20:29:44Z

Mikka = Three days
Atchi = Hot

Sore wa watashi no desu = That one is mine

Today's Japanese

2009-10-02T14:38:55Z

Futsuka - 2 days
Nimotsu - Luggage/Baggage
Tomodachi - Friend

Today's Japanese

2009-10-01T20:06:23Z

Given up on heavy grammatical learnings for now and am just trying to get some words in my head. Some of these were picked up on my trip out there.

Domo = "Thanks". Say in shops with a slight bow after being served.
Arigatou Gozaimasu = Thank you very much. Often said by the staff of a shop to you simply because you walked in. In small resturants and bars (which are absolutely everywhere) this means every member of staff says it to you simultaneously when you enter.
Arigatou Gozaimashta = Thank you very much (past tense). May romanisation may be wrong, but that's what it sounds like. Said after somebody has bought something in a shop, or done something. Also said by the stewardesses on Japanese planes after the flight.]

Anata = You
Kare = He
Kanojo = She
Ano Kata = She (very polite and respectful)

No = "possesive" particle, for instance
"Watashi no" = My
"Anata no" = Your

Pinku = Pink
Aka = Red

Tsuitachi = 1 day

Back from Japan

2009-09-29T13:44:40Z

Best holiday evar! having a girlfriend to spend it with made it more wonderful, though.

I need to learn the kana, mind. Outside the absolutely most touristey areas romaji is nonexistent, even on train maps and things.

Also i saw approximately 10 minutes of anime in the entire 2 weeks. Not counting Porco Rosso on the plane back (and why is it not in Italian?)