Sunday, September 12, 2010

QC, PQ2 + Chuck

... are what have mainly been occupying me in this second glorious week of holiday. These being Questionable Content, Puzzle Quest 2 (on Steam) and a show about a nerd who gets sucked into the CIA. The first of these inspired this picture of Hello Kitty in Mirrorworld.

I hope you like the unicorn, I probably ended up spending more time on that than the whole rest of the picture. It boggles my mind the number of hours comic artists routinely expend. QC has 1500 or so pages, each of which took 10 hours or so. If it was a 9-5 job that's 7.5 years of labour.

Quite evidently I'm loving my graphics tablet (Wacom Bamboo Fun, large). The touch interface can be finicky, it's hard to get it to recognise the zoom and rotate gestures sometimes. The pen is spot on as you might expect; I'm getting used to not pushing the buttons on it by accident. The eraser end is really convenient, in the GIMP it can have its own tool + FG/BG colours set.

Besides making childish drawings, I've been using it to read QC and play PQ2. It's not the best device for web browsing really, but I've been using it so much that switching back to the mouse feels like a pain! For 'casual' games like PQ2 or Plants vs Zombies, which are really designed for a touch interface anyway, it's perfect. I did try playing Starcraft 2 with it but - no. There are two buttons on the pen, one of which acts as RMB and the other... I'm not quite sure. They're not designed to be used frequently though, I find them a bit awkward. SC2 uses RMB a lot so the tablet doesn't really work, sadly.

I really recommend Chuck btw. The agent girl voiced Miranda in Mass Effect 2 and it features the ever-awesome Adam Baldwin as well. He's been in Angel, Firefly and Full Metal Jacket. I'm thinking of putting up posters of actors after I move into my new house (squee), but it'll be hard to avoid having the whole cast of Firefly up! My favourites are probably Mal, Jayne and of course Kaylee.

Feel free, if you wish, to take a moment to daydream on the flash of wonder that was Firefly. Now, for my post-closing question I was going to ask who they are. I would much rather someone riddle me this: what does it mean if something boggles your body? Illustrations welcome, although if I should not be eating when I look at them I'd appreciate a warning.