Elin's Journal

Paging trecomics and jameshanrahan, there's a new Cutey Honey on the scene:



Link in case the embed doesn't work.

Cutey Honey: The Live, a new TV show.

Stolen shamelessly from neodragonstar. Seems like they are ramping up the cheesecake factor (which is saying something, since it's a Go Nagai creation) and from what I see in the opening, the main bad guy is a dude...? No way, Honey is supposed to fight hot chicks who may or may not have a sapphic interest in her! Have these people learned nothing from Golden Age Wonder Woman?! XD

Last week was a week of horrible amounts of work. Not too unusual, because that's how it is in comics and how it always has been.

Summary of everything that got finished last week:
( Read more... )

And that's what we did last week. Yesterday, we all basically died, since we'd all had very little sleep the week before.

In cat news, Indy and Batty got into another huge fight out of nowhere (Batty had sneaked out of the back, no one knew he was out and about), and covered each other in lacerations. We got them cleaned up last night and covered in antibiotic cream, but one of Indy's wounds is on his front haunch (near the armpit area) so he has to wear the Cone of Shame to keep him from licking the cream off. He hates it. It's a fairly shallow wound, but rather large, kind of a tear in the loose skin he has there. We are watching it closely. I am hoping very hard we won't have to take him to the vet. Don't feel too sorry for Indy though, he managed to embed a claw casing in Batty's face (which I had to pull out with tweezers), just missing the eye. Fortunately (??) Batty's wounds are all on his head, so he does not have to wear the Cone. This is good, because he can Houdini out of one in two seconds and hide it forever in the process. The bad part about Batty being all black means it's really hard to find wounds on him, so he keeps getting prodded all over to make sure he doesn't have hidden scabs. So, Indy is pissed off and miserable because of the Cone and Batty is pissed off because I keep grabbing him and poking him everywhere. Yay, cats.

We once again have air, and we once again have hot water. The regular (read: not the weekend 311-douche) maintenance guy came by today after willworks went in and put in another work order. He yammered on his cel phone about Mexican restaurants and who was dating whom the entire time he was here, but he made the air conditioner work, and made the standing water under it go away. Then, of course, after three weeks of nothing, he turned on our hot water taps and lo, warm to hot water came out. It's a September miracle.

Now, we have a manga due in four days, tons of mail order to get out and books of our own to work on. I will probably not be online much in the next few days.

Also, I would like to smack any manga translator who deems it necessary to type out an entire script with THE CAPSLOCK KEY PRESSED. Just because comic lettering appears to be all capital letters doesn't mean it actually is. I have to go through and adjust the "I's" in everything, because the rule is that only personal pronoun "I's" should be serif (read: capitalized); the others are supposed to be non-serif. I have to change every freaking letter "I" in the script by hand, since our version of Word is too old to understand capitalization for the find-and-replace function. Rrraaargh! Elin smash!

We finished our hellish manga deadline. We are all exhausted and my right hand (my mouse hand) is trying desperately to seize up into some kind of a withered claw. It's painful, and not really fun to have to hold a pen (which I've had to do today for work purposes). Generic-brand Aleve comes to my rescue.

We are all in pretty sorry shape at this point, but 194 pages of manga are lettered, touched up and uploaded. I lettered about half the book, which accounts for my withered, claw-like hand. None of us got much sleep, but I think I won that race, doing most of my work on two hours of sleep, total. Sometimes, insomnia works in my favor, though I am paying dearly for it today.

I am stunned with the realization that Mephit FurMeet is next weekend. Buh-wha? I've been so busy putting out fires and dealing with all our other (late) stuff, I completely lost track. Here's hoping I got the dates right when I told suarez about the con. Ah-heh. Otherwise, there's no way for me to get there as he is doing the driving honors! If it worked out (and my brain functioned properly), then we will be at the con, sharing a table with dustmeat and Joe Rosales. We won't have a giant amount of stock with us since we couldn't get our own table in time; just the basics and the newest stuff, but we hope to make some sales.

And now, auctions, so that we may potentially partake of groceries and buy more generic Aleve for our aching bones. Even in the middle of the manga crunch, I posted auctions, it's the circle of life.
New eBay stuff lives here!
New FurBid stuff lives here!

And oh yes, the Radio online store got updated recently.

Deep submersion mode is engaged until we finish a particularly hellish manga deadline, which is due tomorrow morning.

I will return to the internets once we are done.

Bullet point style, since there is still a ridiculous amount of work to do.

--immediately upon getting home, we finished and turned in the corrections for Manga Project X, which has been announced on the DMP site, so I can finally say what the title is. It's World's End by Eiki Eiki, and is a sequel to a previous manga we worked on, Dear Myself which is still available on Amazon. World's End will be out in October.

--started working again on Manga Project Y and Z, prepping A to be worked on (the con interfered with the work schedule)

--picked up the new batch of books at the dropbox, need to get them counted and sorted so we can do subscriptions and get them on the online store

--updated the online store, new stuff from us and other companies

--processed a bunch of orders

--answered a bunch of emails, still have hundreds to go through (it never fails, when we are at a convention is when everyone and their brother emails us). I am stressing about the sheer number of emails, and fretting that I am not able to answer everyone fast enough.

--paid the rent (hooray!) and the water bill; put in our complaint about the lack of hot water for the last two weeks. Turns out they need to replace the boiler for our batch of buildings, so the water will be turned off this week at some point. Yay?

--went to the grocery store since we came home to find we were out of everything

--posted more auctions, since the convention completely tapped us out and we need to be able to pay for food and lodging at Mephit FurMeet very soon. (We will be sharing a table; they ran out before we could get our own. But we had such a good show last time, we shouldn't miss it.)

--did maintenence on our online forum and deleted literally over 500 false members made by spam bots. All apparently from Albania. I'm guessing the primary export of Albania is spam bots.

--did a bunch of prep work on Milk #59 and Furrlough #174. Both need to go to Morgan this week. Next week, we must turn in Hit the Beach #14. I'm hoping we can, since as usual, many things have not shown up yet.

--I have caught a cold at the con. I chalk it up to too much stress, since I took my vitamins, used my Purell and washed my hands like Howard Hughes, and ate decent amounts of food at the appropriate times. It's a really stressful show though and whenever I am too stressed out, I catch whatever is floating around.

--still have not had time to do a con report or go through the photos I took

Today we have to ship some comics to Diamond (they didn't get the correct number of books on one of them, it happens), go pay a bill, work on the comics, and work on the subscriptions/mail order. Tomorrow, we have to go pay the storage rent, which of course, went up last month with no warning at all. When things calm down, I will probably be shopping for a new climate controlled storage company. I've been pretty displeased with the customer service at ours since Public Storage bought out their company, especially since we've had the same units for ten years now.

Auction Links! Please check them out!
New eBay auctions are here!
New FurBid auctions are nere!

We've got the Manga Projects of Damocles hanging over our heads, and already looking impossible to complete on the new, earlier deadlines, so that's stress-inducing enough. But, due to torrential rains, I can't go to the post office today either, the usual day we go. So, the mail will all have to go out on Monday, since I have unavoidable manga work and other errands/engagements over the weekend.

Alas, even if it wasn't raining, we'd be behind on the mail processing for the week since the printer has run out of ink again, and I haven't had a chance to get out to buy more.

In more pleasant news, apparently Furrlough #172 has shipped, so at least that's taken care of and at least one book that's not painfully late. Now, if we could just get Genus #83 (and #84) and Milk #59 finished up and out of my hair, everything would be better. Now to start working on Furrlough #173.

Just finished reading: Reiko the Zombie Shop Vol. 1 and Reiko the Zombie Shop Vol. 2 by Rei Mikamoto -I liked it a lot, because it's really cheeseball and over-the-top, with a definite 1970's influence in the art-style. It's really gory though.
Just finished watching: The Killing of Sister George on Turner Classic Movies- a surprising lesbian-themed movie, as none of the lesbians in the film end up dead, as was Hollywood's usual tactic for lesbian characters. None of the characters are particularly likable people, but hey, at least none of them died or committed suicide. I was reminded of the storyline in Love & Rockets, where Hopey ends up living in the mansion of a former wholesome TV star who hires a very young-looking prostitute to dress up as a little girl. I found that unsettling, so I got the same feeling off this movie.

Also, auction spam! Please buy my stuff!
New eBay auctions are here! (including some Batman comic strip collections!)
New FurBid auctions are here!

Some of our manga deadlines just got changed, so there is going to be even more work piled on our heads at the moment. Ain't that always the way? Life will become much more regimented for a while in order to get everything accomplished in a timely manner.

theuberbob brought over the latest three episodes of Dr. Who last night, and I was riveted to the TV. Well, in between making dinner (turkey loaf!) and answering a jillion phone calls. I really loved "Human Nature" and "The Family of Blood", because of the great characterizations. And also, hello, Jessica Hynes from Spaced! She was fantastic! Harry Lloyd was brilliant as the incredibly creepy Baines. But nothing could top the next episode, "Blink", for sheer nightmare fuel potential. I am now terrified of weeping angel statues and couldn't get to sleep until four in the morning, when I managed to convince myself that even if I couldn't keep my eyes open constantly, I was surrounded by cats who can stare forever. Steven Moffat writes excellent Who material! Nice snappy dialogue as well. Definitely better episodes than the Daleks in Manhattan episodes. (Which you know, were okay because of Daleks, but actually had me going "oh, come on now!" for a lot of the time...) Of course, all three episodes were chock full of David Tennant being unbearably cute, so there was much squeeing on my part.

Today there will be errands of some sort, manga work, comic work, mail order paperwork and more... off to get started.

The flu-like item I contracted late Saturday night/early Sunday morning seems to have gone away. Either it was a minor stomach bug, or my system just decided I needed to throw up and have the shakes for several painful hours to punish me for not giving it much sleep the three days prior. (Which it is wont to do... witness A-Kon 8 or 9, when I assimilated a hotel bathroom and ended up in a Dallas hospital from dehydration from barfing every ten minutes for two days straight.) Yes, I was so worried about the cat being sick, I could not sleep. The manga deadline did not help this matter.

Manga Project X has been completed and ftp'd away. Now we wait for corrections and to get started on Manga Project Y.

Yubi is taking her medicine every day, and seems to have increased appetite and a better attitude towards grooming. I guess the painkiller they have her on is helping. Thursday, I must go to pick up a refill on the antibiotics, since they only last for five days but she needs to take them for ten.

Updates need to be made to the SinFactoryComix site (NSFW!!!) and the Radio Online Store, so those will be worked on this week. Also, more mail order, subscriptions and of course, auctions will be worked on as well.

The TV (which actually belongs to willworks) finally gave up the ghost and completely died. It warped the picture into some weird twisty thing and then would shut itself off and refuse to come back on. So, we got the loaner TV from suarez and got that set up today. Which took some doing, since it didn't have a remote and TV setup menus are now designed with remotes in mind. But I am not going to look a gift TV in the mouth. It works very well since Will was able to find the manual for the make & model online so we could do proper set-up. Everything is now accessible through the Pelican system selector- cable, VCR, DVD burner (all these live on the "Other" button), PD's GameCube, Will's PS2 and XBox, and the DVD player, which lives on the "DreamCast" button. Awww, poor useless DreamCast button! We hardly got to use you at all!

Tomorrow is a busy day of work and errands, so I must sleep.

1. Kitchen Floor: cleaned, so it's no longer sticky in front of the fridge. (I have no idea how it got that way, nor do I want to know. I'm pretty sure Kool-Aid was involved somehow.)

2. New Back Issue Ad: two-thirds completed, just need to plop the scans of the new issues into it.

3. New Editorial For the Radio Waves: half written, just need to finish it up and fling a spell check at it.

4. Furrlough #169 and Genus #82: half assembled, will go in to the printers today once the final pieces are in place.

5. New Auctions: Last posted on Saturday; more to post today after the book work is finished.

6. Manga Project X: deep in art clean up/sound effect touch up/lettering territory. I am starting rewrite on Manga Project Y.

7. Video Tape Transfer Project: clocking in at over 355 tapes transferred to DVD now. It has barely made a dent. Sheesh.

8. Head: pounding- the storms last night brought in pressure systems and blew some kind of hell pollen into town from the Hill Country. My sinuses are currently trying to explode out of the front of my skull.

9. Daylight Savings Time: despised. I don't get enough sleep anyway, thanks for losing me an extra hour of it, world.

Much to do today. Much!

Still reading: that third Jacqueline Carey novel; still watching: Carnivale Season 1, Angel Season 1, Gilmore Girls Season 3. Finally finished up Buffy Season 4.