Ramblings and webcomics from LeEMS
Everything not a comic page
Very apropos comic for this month. I have a poltergeist–what’s keeping you from writing? Drawn!, by the by, is a fantastic blog. And Tom Gauld is awesome. I have to talk about the blogs I like on my blog now that Google reader doesn’t offer a shared posts thingy anymore. Oh, Google plus will replace it or something but I’m not ready to go that social yet.
You know, it’s not too late to sign up and start your novel this month. I mean, don’t let it get you down that 5 days have already passed. I’ve only written a measly amount on just one of those five days, so you could totally start now.
I really hate to say this, but I am a little disappointed in NaNoWriMo’s new site if only because it no longer has a place to put a book cover. I’ve never been successful in thinking up or creating a book cover within the same month I am desperately trying to write a book, so I have never been able to take advantage. This year was going to be different, and maybe the reason why I’ve only written a paltry amount so far, but I had a book cover in mind–and here it is. I’ll show it to you instead of the NaNoWriMo site. You will be the select few who will ever know about my great cover idea. Take that NaNoWriMo! I love you!
After my new website redesign I realized that I’ve never really talked about some of the projects I show-cased, and, it being October and Halloweeny and all, I thought this was a perfect time to talk about my witches project.
Now bear with me ’cause I’m not going to check my sources here when I tell you what I know of these women.
First and foremost is Lilith. Ya’ll know the story. She was Adam’s first wife, made out of earth just like him and because of this, completely equal. Well, not being beholden meant she had no reason to stick around when he pissed her off. She left the garden and went out into the surrounding darkness to give birth to all the monsters in the world. She is associated with many things: owls, roses, lions. She is said to have bird feet.
She is also the first child-stealer. You see, when infant mortality was high and unexplained, sudden baby death was blamed on evil witches. I always found it funny that these same witches were often called on to inspire fertility as well.
Anyway, there’s an old saying to ward her off: “she that flies in rooms of darkness, pass quickly quickly Lilith.”
Another powerful child-stealer is Lamashtu with the head of a lion and the feet of a bird of prey. She especially is known for fertility even though she is also blamed for infant mortality. She is thought to be filthy, and as an illustration of both this filth and her fertility, she is sometimes shown nursing both a dog and a pig.
Another powerful and well known witch is Baba Yaga. Her house stands on chicken legs in the middle of a Russian forest. It is surrounded by a fence of skulls and bones. Because of it’s high and mobile position, her house is nearly impossible to get into–not that you’d want to–and whenever Baba Yaga herself wants to enter she must say: “Izbushka, Izbushka, stand with your back to the forest and your front to me.” Izbushka is the house’s name; yup, house has a name.
Her house isn’t the only thing that extraordinary about Baba Yaga. She has nails and tusks of steel and flies about the sky in a mortar and pestle instead of a broom.
More witches can be found on the Projects page. Happy October time.
Allow me to introduce you to Idge, he’s a mascot–has been since I first starting paying money for my domain and opened an Etsy store. Though, he’s never looked quite like this before.
I’ve been playing around with making him a little more mobile and I’m pretty darn happy with the results. This is one. Another is now supervising from the menu column to the right. Little comic strips of his exploits will begin to show up on The Drawing Board.
So, in the spirit of National Novel Writing Month, I have made mock-up covers to replace two of the ‘image coming soon’ notices on my stories page. They just happen to be for the stories that have a finished draft–that was totally accidental. I still have no idea what I’m writing for National Novel Writing Month, and I am still trying to finish another in progress before November 1st rolls around. It’d be nice if this year were the first I could come up with a cover idea for November’s novel before November is over. I’ll keep dreaming.
I didn’t really leave this desk all day. This was taken early when I could still focus my eyes. Anyway, I’m really glad to have done 24 hour comics day. I love this dis-connected connection with the rest of the world through online challenges.
Apparently there is this thing called inktober (http://drawn.ca/archive/inktober/) that I totally missed the boat on. You’d think that after 24 hour comics day people would stop drawing for a few days, but I’m proof that they don’t. I just haven’t been sharing it. I need to get it together!
I did some combing through of the 24 hour comics day participants (that named themselves anyway) and found some treasures. I share.
Do you ever find yourself feeling like a complete dweeb because you didn’t know how awesome someone was until someone else told you? Yeah, well, I don’t feel that way ’cause I’d seen Rion Sabean’s photography long before the article on jezebel. But, I have to admit, the success and renown that Rion’s work is already receiving is really really impressive.
I wanted to do my part to talk him up as one of the coolest people I know. You can see more of his work, and order the Men-Up! calendar on his site: rionsabean.com.
OOOOOOOooooooooOOOOH YEAH! I finally got everything working the way I wanted everything to work; yes I did. The navigation should carry through from site (machine) to blog (bean) and back again. Comics have a new launch page on the Bean and they post separate in that fancy way I wanted the comic pages to post. They also update the Bean’s overall RSS feed, so if you get this, you will see all 24 of the 24 hour comic day comic I did (which you can now read in it’s handy new layout).
I will be moving over No Evil and Flip Side to this type of comic posting very soon, but Levi Levi and the other static ones will stay where they are.
Oh, and by the by, if you want only a certain permutation of RSS feed, check the right hand menu to see if it’s already available.
Cheers, –LeE
All right kittens. The new NaNoWriMo site is finally up! Is it sad that I was waiting for this? I mean, it’s still mid October and I have a couple of stories that I really really really want to finish up before starting something shiny and new on November first, but I’m really excited about National Novel Writing Month this year. The past two years I’ve tried, but because of moving and unforeseen circumstances I was not able to make much of a go of it or a show of it. And then there was the 23,000 word thumbdrive corruption…..
Why is my lease set in November?
Anyway! In an effort to distract myself from writing, I will still be drawing and trying to figure out how to integrate a web-comic posting function into this here blog, or website.
Once the buddy function is up and running make me a friend and we’ll write together come November.
If you are subscribed to the Bean feed then you may have been noticing some weird stuff going on with comic pages showing up, disappearing, repeating. That’s me. I’m trying to figure out how to make the Bean host comics like those cool comic hosting sites while still remaining my blog.
I think I have an idea of how to do it now, and it may mean some more comic reposting in your feeds, so please bear with me.
Also–my idea of how to do it now will change the site a little too, so if you are visiting the web pages you will see some tweaks here and there.
At the end of this week is 24 hour comics day. Saturday, October 1st to be exact. My challenge will start at 8am. I’m kind of thinking that it will be ok, and that my tendency to draw draw draw every evening will serve me well. And then I’m thinking that I’m underestimating the challenge and I will be a crazy eyed zombie by the time it is done.
Anyway! I will be posting the pages here as they are completed, so check in to see how I’m doing.
Alright kiddies. I had an epiphany–I greatly dislike manual upkeep on an rss feed, which is what I was doing for Levi Levi ever since I took it off of it’s old blog platform years ago. Combine that with the guilt I’ve been feeling about not regularly updating the Bean and voila! — a new website for my projects means a new life for the Bean. While there will still be some consumption commentary, the Bean will be more about production.
I mean, it only makes sense yeah? The Bean is my bean, and since I’ve been more into making things than taking things it should be too.
This is my idea: this fancy new blogging platform makes it easy to offer multiple feeds out of one blog. Sooooooo, the Bean will make my comic feeds for me. So far, I’ve listed the currently production ready comics as their own ‘subscribe to’ links over on the right. Updates on the Bean will happen before updates to the comic pages themselves–but the pages won’t be too far behind.
I love feeds, they’re awesome!
This new roll-out comes complete with a little more of comics that I’d only touched on in my previous web site release. Well, those pages are expanded now too, as I’ve just updated the web site again. No Evil and Flip Side are underway, along with upcoming pages for Levi Levi. Soon to follow is Left Overs.
Cheers!
I’ve heard of this, somewhere, on someone’s tumblr or deviant art page at some point in time, but I never remembered to figure out what it is, which is weird because I like participating in online creative challenges. Never remembered to figure it out until now, that is. I just signed up for 24 hour comics day. The site is weird and the sign up process is a lot like making a charitable pledge, but I circled around it a bunch of times to make sure it was the right place.
On October 1st (I decided to start myself at 8 a.m.) I will be drawing a 24 page comic in 24 hours. The frenzied activity will distract me from my hasty rush to finish a couple of in progress stories before NaNoWriMo, and my obsession with trying to figure out what I am doing for NaNoWriMo. Now I just have to figure out what I am doing for 24 hour comics day.
So, come on! Whose with me?
–LeE
Alright, HELLO! once again. I am happy to be back, though truthfully, the Bean was the least affected of all my web site woes. Moving around took a little more finagling than I had anticipated, but I’ve learned a whole lot of new things. Right now I am happy to wave buh-bye to third party domain retailers, wonky web elements in IE, and my lousy ‘check back soon’ home page. Yay!
Of all the things I’ve run into that have astounded me, there is one that I cannot find anyone talking about online–complaints or fixes. Maybe I’m just searching it wrong. But here goes–I have a fancy SLR digital camera that I love to bitsies. Harvesting off of this loverly camera results in a bunch of .JPG files–note JPG not jpg. What’s the difference, you ask; why should this matter? The answer is somewhere I’m sure, but I haven’t found it. The problem is a whole bunch of html, java, and whatnot don’t read one the same as the other, and it’s damned aggravating.
That’s enough of that, what’s really important is that I have a NEW WEBSITE, at the old hangout. And on this NEW WEBSITE are NEW LEVI LEVI pages and an entirely NEW and COMPLETE comic (part 1 anyway) called Unlikely Bedfellows. There’s a whole bunch of other stuff too. I’m so proud!
Well, alright. I am working on a web-site overhaul and in the midst of planning I submitted to my dissatisfaction with my domain host and moved sites. The LeEMS machine still looks the same and you can still get to it in the same way, but the Bean has moved and changed. Well, it’s still at the same address…I’m just not sure that it’s RSS feed is at the same address. AND in the process of moving platforms, I only transferred the 10 most recent posts of three or so years worth of posts. I’m thinking of posting the archives in pdf chunks, but I don’t know if there’s any call for that. I’ll keep thinking.
Anyway, I am really excited with my code that you can’t see yet. So, we’ll see what happens.