Dan Shive

@danshive.bsky.social

Okay, so I worked fifteen minutes later than is supposed to be my evening cutoff, but I have the next three story pages sketched. I strongly doubt I can complete all three tomorrow, but I'm getting as far as I can, darn it (with Friday's page at a minimum, of course). #egscomics

The more editing I do, the more aware I become of my tendency to write out sentences in strange ways. I don’t have an example handy, but I imagine I could end up with several without even trying if I wrote anything long enough.

There are people who will accept art commissions and just generate AI images instead. One way to catch this is to know that sketches should look like sketches. A fully rendered image that’s simply low-res and greyscale is not a sketch. It should look far from complete, not just grey.

Skip and Loafer is one of my favorite manga / anime because of its emotional intelligence and the feelings it explores. You and I Are Polar Opposites is much sillier and has a very different style, but it’s exploring matters of perception and communication in ways I greatly appreciate.

I’ve started watching You and I Are Polar Opposites, and had to pause because I was baffled by the protagonist’s ear piercings, and THEN I realized I had no idea what that part of the ear (tragus?!) was called. But yeah, I didn’t know tragus piercing was a thing. Or that tragus were tragus.

I’ll just look up these animal legs for reference, and— “Hi there, hello. I see you’re hungry for dinner.” What no I “Check out these tasty legs of meat you can—“ NOPE

I kind of hate a lot of writing advice due to the focus on writing as a product. Don’t get me wrong. The advice is often helpful, and I get WHY it’s treating it as a product. People want to do it for a living. If you sell it, you are making a product. It just feels a bit icky to me.

I think surprise gifts are best when small. Anything that comes with care, upkeep, space, use, etc obligations / expectations of the recipient should generally be discussed first. Among other things, it risks being the buyer of an awkward “I literally can’t accept this” moment.

Subtitles: “I love you!” Literal thing being said: “Skiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii!” Not even daisuki. Just suki (silent u). Basically yelling “liiiiiiiiiiike!” at one’s crush.

I don’t really want anything new from Star Wars. That isn’t the same as saying it can’t provide anything I’d like. It’s just there’s nothing new I crave. I can’t predict what it could give me that I’d be happy about. I couldn’t have guessed I’d like Thrawn, for example.

Goal for tomorrow is finish Thurs EGSNP, and do as much preliminary work on as many story pages as possible. Not finish any. This is the point of the day off from posting Wednesday. It’s so multiple pages will be partly done. I’m getting Thurs EGSNP done first so Wednesday can be 100% working ahead

I do think a value found in chess is practice looking ahead in several directions at once. Granted, madness that way lies, but it could be a useful madness.

“Ten? No no no, that’s absurd. You‘re eligible for Pokémon training certification at 18, and you’ll be at least 21 before you can start a legitimate Pokémon journey and fight gym leaders.”

I treat Blenders with the same seriousness I would heavy machinery. It is NOT plugged in until I’m ready to use it, and once it’s done, I turn it off and unplug it. The juicer has no juice unless there is IMMEDIATE juice to be juiced 😅

I am attempting to use writing ahead to speed up the story. I couldn't really take full advantage of that during an action sequence. The visuals made certain demands (as evidenced by two one-panel pages). I absolutely can edit things down when it's mostly dialogue, though.