kelmcdonald

[kelmcdonald]

𝕯𝖎𝖘𝖓𝖊𝖞 𝖛𝖎𝖑𝖑𝖆𝖎𝖓𝖘 𝖈𝖔𝖓𝖈𝖊𝖕𝖙 𝖆𝖗𝖙 ➔ 𝕱𝖎𝖓𝖆𝖑 𝖋𝖎𝖑𝖒 ⬧︎ [𝔭𝔞𝔯𝔱 3]

[kelmcdonald]

Things cats were right about all along:

Fuck staying hydrated by drinking enough water - eat! more! wet! food! (watermelon, cucumbers, SOUP!)

Feels great to be really high up in your house where you can see the whole place (loft bed loft bed loft bed loft bed!)

Express yourself as clearly as possible when people are touching you and you don't want them to.

Optional, but you can also express yourself clearly when your people are not touching you and you want them to.

Sometimes it's important to just go "hmm. actually, I don't care" and wander off.

You don't have to be the strongest or toughest to defend yourself, it's enough to just be difficult enough to not be worth the trouble.

Ghosts will eventually leave if you stare at them for long enough.

[kelmcdonald]

via

[kelmcdonald]

you just don't get shit like this with 8-episode streaming seasons

[kelmcdonald]

I love Colon and Nobby's discussion of art in Thud!. Colon's assertion that the difference between artistic nude and smutty images is whether the picture also includes an urn or a plinth is silly on the surface, but suggests a real conversation about classism and what sort of art is valued in society and the double-standards therein.

Because it's true. Not just any artist's nude work will be valued. You have to urn it.

[kelmcdonald]

[kelmcdonald]

@shortboxcomicsfair is officially live and you can purchase BALLAD FOR BLACK CASSANDRA right here! 🔶💧🔥 (and check out all the other amazing comics while you're at it)

[kelmcdonald]

please listen to this it is destroying me its so funny

[kelmcdonald]

I used to do cross country in high school, and there was this guy on the team that was wonderful. Great guy. But his advice to everyone that asked how to get good was to run 20k a day.

If you don't run, I'll just tell you, most people's bodies cannot take that kind of abuse. No matter how much you train, you will not be able to run 20k a day. It's like how you can't train to make your cuts heal faster. You recover as fast as you recover. So while a big part of what made this guy so succesful was the dedication and mental toughness needed to actually run 20k a day, an equally big part was that he healed like fucking Wolverine. And that's fine, but it would've been nice if he knew that and stopped telling new guys to commit suicide by jogging.

Different guy on the team ran like, 5-6k a day, which actually isn't all that much. His problem when he gave advice was that he didn't really get that 5-6k a day doesn't generally produce elite results for most people. He was lucky in the sense that he didn't have to work all that hard to get great results, and unlucky in the sense that if he pushed himself much further than that, he fell apart.

I think about those two whenever I get advice from succesful people. The very things that make them outliers also make their advice useless to most people. Worse, they're often outliers on totally separate ends of the same spectrum, so their advice will be contradictory.

[kelmcdonald]

Just to make a point, every time I finished a panel of this I would export it as a PNG on the perceptual setting and use it as a color reference for the next panel

IT'S BAD

PLEASE CHECK YOUR COLOR SETTINGS

EDIT: If you're still having problems, it might help to switch from "Save/Save as" to "Export (as a) Single Layer". Just. Make SURE the box labeled "Expression Color" is set to RGB. I've been messing with this all day, and it looks like this combination of settings will allow exported PNGs to maintain their colors perfectly. To you. So far both Discord and Toyhouse still only display desaturated images and I cannot for the life of me figure out why

[kelmcdonald]

In college, I found out that all my cousins knew I was our grandma's favorite grandchild because and i quote "You're gonna give (my mom) back all the crap (my mom) gave (my grandma)"

Anyway, have you heard of a poem called This be The Verse by Phillip Larkin? Why am I asking? No reason.

[kelmcdonald]

[kelmcdonald]

“Lie close,” Laura said, Pricking up her golden head: “We must not look at goblin men, We must not buy their fruits: Who knows upon what soil they fed Their hungry thirsty roots?”

A wolf goes for a walk in the woods and meets a dog for the first time

[kelmcdonald]

[kelmcdonald]

i am an advocate for Big Dumb Man rights and i will not take this blatant erasure by the anime twitter users

[kelmcdonald]

Rose City is this Weekend! 

Hey everyone, I put out my September newsletter. You can sign up and be notified for future newletters here: https://mailchi.mp/fa17a626907f/keepingupwithkel

Here is a copy/paste of what it says:

I'm at table B-12! Right up front! Stop by and get some books! I'll have copies of Failure to Launch!

Perfect Crime Party is currently crowdfunding! I mentioned it last month but this is the newest anthology I edited for Iron Circus. There is a lot of fun lighthearted crime stories. So please grab yourself a copy!

This months werewolf movie is An American Werewolf in Paris. I'll be hosting it on my discord September 17th at 4pm pt. If you wanna join, just sign up for my discord here. I starting to run out of the big deal werewolf movies. So I'm also open to recommendations. 

Tuesday 8pm-10pm PST – Art times

Wednesday 8pm-10pm PST – Art times

Thursday 6pm-8pm PST (during the Iron Circus Geekshow)

Sunday 8pm-11pm PST – Playing Baldur’s Gate 3

Please stop by!

I spent a big chunk of August traveling. I went to Worldcon for the first time. It was in Glasgow, Scotland. My thought was if I didn't like the con, then I could just leave and do something touristy. I did end up enjoying the con and I plan to go when it's in Seattle next year. My hotel was about a 20 min to the convention center but it was pretty nice and along the river. 

If you don't know, Worldcon is a sci-fi fantasy con where the Hugos are held. It's in a different city every year. While there is some fan stuff, it is mainly aimed at pros and aspiring pros. As such the vibe was very different at Worldcon that the many comic shows I've been to. I think a lot of the panels at comic cons are basically press releases. There are some panels on craft, but they usually get buried/given bad time slots. Which makes sense because those comic shows are more focused on fans and sales. 

So it was nice to listen to some topics with writing being the focus. I particularly liked one I went to about governments in sci-fi and fantasy and why those two genres tend toward writing about fascism or monarchy. I went because in The City Between, Connor's husband Jordan is their worlds equivalent of the governor. I think I got some good notes and ideas on how to flesh that angle out more in future stories.

Also at Worldcon I grabbed some new books. One I ready finished, To Shape a Dragon's Breath. It is about a native girl who finds a dragon. Her people used to have dragons but were wiped out when white settlers started colonizing the area. Said white colonizers also have a lot of laws about dragons, so she has to go to one of their schools for dragon riders. It was very well written and I got through it pretty fast. My one complaint is at the beginning the main character is a bit too nice for my tastes. That isn't a flaw with the book, just my personal taste. I frequently like characters that are trash monsters to the point where my friends tell me they can't watch someone of my favorite shows because everyone is too awful. So me thinking a character is too nice, is probably a plus for everyone else. 

After Worldcon, I stayed in Glasgow an extra day to explore. I was traveling with my pal Bones Leopard who wanted to visit the Glasgow Necropolis. I took a lot of graves I thought had cool designs. 

Right next to it is Glasgows Cathedral. So we also popped in and I took a bunch of pictures of that. 

Afterward, Bones feet started to hurt, so I ended up wandering around on my own and talking pictures of architecture I thought was neat. And while exploring I came across a group of bagpipers performing. 

After that I went to Edinburgh for a few days. Mostly I walked around and saw some performances. The Fridge Fest was going on while I was there. So I got to see a few fun street performances. On day was pretty rainy in the afternoon so I spelt it in the National Museum of Scotland. But the big thing I did in Edinburgh was I climbed Arthur's Seat. The view was amazing!

I put all my Scotland pictures in my google drive. Anyone who wants to see them can browse here. The folder includes:

a bunch of buildings I thought looked neat in Glasgow and Edinburgh

walking along the river

all the graves I took pics of

a religion museum next to the graveyard and cathedral

inside the cathedral

the oldest house in Glasgow (each floor showed it in a different time period)

some landscapes/hills taken from inside the train to Edinburgh

climbing Arthur's Seat

photos from the National Museum of Scotland

The whole trip was fun. I also got to hang out with Kate Ashwin in person. Iron Circus wants to do a boxset of Cautionary Fables, so we sat down and figured out what we want the box to look like.  Now that I'm home I'm gonna rest up and focus on The City Between. I have like 4 pages left of Shards of Reflection to finish up. So I need to make sure the next story, Glass Diamonds, is ready to go fairly soon. One that is done I need to rearrange my patreon a bit.

Obviously, I haven't had time to get back to You are the Chosen One in over a year. But Patreon removed goals from Patreon over a year ago. When I started You are the Chosen One, I was using goals as a milestone to justify when either You are the Chosen One or The City Between could have another update day. The goal is removed and I wouldn't have time to do that even if my patreon did reach it. So I need to reassess what I'm doing. I will probably start posting it publicly, however I don't know if I want to rotate it's chapters with The City Between with updates on Wednesdays, or just post it whenever.  Also, Patreon removing goals was a more minor example it continuiously making unhelpful changes. The newest of which is them forcing everyone to switch to a different payment model. Basically, until this month, I charged all my Patreon backers on the 1st. That is how subsciptions used to work on all patreons. But they thought that was a problem because sometimes someone would sign up the 25th of a month and then be charged twice in a short amount of time. For the past year, Patreon has been pushing creators to switch to everyone gets charged on whatever day they signed up on a monthly basis. While pushing everyone to make this change, they also made an app, one that barely works. Because they made an app, now anyone who pays via the app is giving Apple 30% of what they pay. This sucks but it is thing that has been known and talked about in the tech community for years. Like before Comixology died, it wouldn't let you buy things in it's Apple app BECAUSE of this 30% fee. So Patreon has made some news posts complaining that Apple is doing this. But the sneaky part is they are using Apple enforcing it's shitty TOS as an excuse to force creators to switch to new subscription model. The new model is worse for me because well it's nice to get a big chunk of money all at once each month, rather than have it trickle in day.

Anyway, this was fuuuuun news to come back to when I was very jet-lagged. There is a new patreon-like service called Comradery. It definately looks appealing. So I'll probably look into mirroring my patreon content on there. But that will probably be something I sit down and figure out in like December rather than right now. For now I gotta focus on keeping The City Between running. 

That's all for this month. Thanks everyone for you support as always!

[kelmcdonald]