his_spiffynesss

 I got my second page for THEY SAVED AYN RAND'S BRAIN!!! inked and scanned today, I also got excessively anal retentive about this page. I ended up setting up  a slew of guides in Photoshop and realigned all of the borders straight and square.

When I'm drawing I can't ever get the lines really straight, just sort of close. Each time I pull out those little blue lines out of the ruler edges they mock me for my imperfections. So I systematically removed the lines and used the guides and the selector tool to make nice straight lines and solid right angles. 

Mostly I'm just wanting to make certain I can crop the images down square. In the past I've left the border intact on the images, but now I've decided to cut it out to save on file size.

Of late I got the hankering to read up Edgar Rice Burrough's John Carter of Mars books. Thankfully ManyBooks.net has the first five available as ebooks so I have them loaded up on the nook. Since the Disney movie is due out in March, I thought it would be a good idea to actually read the books. My expectations for the movie are pretty low, though after watching the Asylum version of the story (featuring Antonio Sabato Jr. and Traci Lords) I know Disney will at least make their version slightly more entertaining.

I've realized as I started reading the story. The book is written in first person, and I find I'm hearing John Carter's voice being played by True Blood's Steven Moyer and his overboard Southern accent. Carter, after all, is supposed to be this perfect Southern Gentleman, so found myself applying the voice of Bill Compton to him.

The whole "sword and planet" pulp genre has piqued my interest in general. I've had this idea that my next Kaza and Gwenna story will be some sword and planet wackiness with a tinge of very odd politics and a healthy dose of crack. All I will say is the title is going to be "Kaza Goes to Ganymede"

Also, with my focus on role playing games lately I've been giving some thought to a trying to play a game in that kind of game world. I was actually looking online for some reference material. It seems back in the truly early of RPGs, Gary Gygax actually made a game based on it but the Burroughs estate ended up nixing it. I've been thinking of taking a shot at making some kind of world book, maybe build it as a Basic Fantasy supplement.

I'm thinking about going the Wold Newton route and try to not only compile all the material from the Barsoom books, but also H.G.Wells' Martians and the lesser know Gullivar Jones. I have this idea of crafting a nice little history for Barsoom. The idea is that the world was once a thriving center of galactic commerce (thus the numerous sentient species) but was brought low by combination of natural disaster and galactic war. Thus we have the remnants of miraculously advanced technology, but no real underlying infrastructure. I need to come up with a bit more, and maybe work everything together in an ebook or something.