Had a great podcast this afternoon with Ryan Sohmer of www.licd.com .  I was invited to be a co-host with Mike Lafferty of the BAMF podcast to interview Ryan.  It was a great time and a cool thing to interview someone who has done a lot to promote web comics as a main stream form of entertainment. If you haven't checked it out and you don't mind some adult humor, check it out.  Doctor's orders.

This weekend I am hoping to sit on my porch with a good cup of coffee and finish the cover for TYPE Casting # 4, Street Tough.  This one has been a long time coming.  Once the cover is done then we can upload and go to 'print.'

Here is the rough cover image

Regards, 

Walt

Kung fu is my muse.  When I throwing hands with the guys I bleed out all the stresses of the day and it allows me to think in a more focused fashion.  I have been working on several new things for HAZARD and things come smoothly if I am not bummed out by the impending holiday.

The down side to being in a service industry is that on a big holiday like the fourth, everything ramps up like crazy in order to stock the shelves so people can have what they need.  The rough side is that when the day off does come, we now have to pack 5 days worth of deliveries into four.

Enter Kung Fu.  When I punch and kick the crap out of folks, it allows all that tension to melt away.  This summer marks 32 years of kung fu.  The best part is that I am more excited about my training than I have ever been.  Although I don't do it for sport or for enlightenment ( i tend to gravitate toward realistic martial arts because of my other job in the Military) i have come to rely on it daily in order to clear my head.

Just goes to show you that therapists really don't have the market cornered, a good heavy bag and about twenty minutes of playtime is all you need to live stress free.

Regards,
Walt

Don't cry over Spilled Ink

Well it has been a long time since the last TYPE Casting hit the shelves.  The BASH Ultimate Edition rules gave us quite a bit to play with in regards to ready to play archetypes.  It is huge to have stuff like that at the table so that new players and those not familiar with the game can just jump right into the fun.  That is why we decided to come forward with the TYPE Casting Series.  BASH is a game that has enough options to play with that it can be kind of daunting ( even though there is a unified method to the mayhem so that once you get the hang of things it becomes a breeze ).  By putting out more archetypes, we could ensure that there was an incredible amount of choice when it came to jumping into the game.  The next one out of the gate will be Street Tough, and will feature five archetypes to play with a more gritty tone.

Beyond that there is a huge amount of stuff going on at the Studio right now.  We are currently trying to draft another artist to jump into things as well as branching out in color and design.  For some reason I have been labeled a "layout guy," so I have been getting a lot of work laying out products for other studios.  Not a big deal although it often means that my own stuff gets put on the back burner.

Also be on the lookout for Zenith Comics.  There is a huge design shift that is going back and forth with it and because of that behind the scenes things are moving at breakneck speed.  Can't wait to see what happens next.

Regards,
Walt

Crap OPS

OK... So my web host provider has been smoking cheerios!  First I couldn't get some custom email addresses to load.  No biggie.  Then they didn't get back to me with the engineer info I was looking for to fix the problem.  I am not looking for a lot of stuff here.  I just wanted to make sure that the email addy's I was putting in for the guys over at Zenith Comics were going through so that everything was in the green.

THAT'S WHEN THE PROBLEMS STARTED!

Whatever the first batch of techs did to fix my problem must have blown out all my security settings.  My private files on my server (secured with passwords and supposedly groovy types of technogook security) were suddenly showing up in regular old search engines.  Wouldn't be a problem if it was just some pictures of my wife naked... she might have a problem with that but I digress... a lot of my ongoing projects including stuff I am doing for HAZARD and Zenith comics were now coming up when some one typed in the right keywords.

This of course meant that some of the copyrighted files i had on there (as well as the project stuff) were now showing up as well.  UGH!

I just want to thank my friends down south (you know who you are) for cluing me in.  So sorry about this, guys...

In any case... It also led me to a site revamp and and some house cleaning on the site.  I have been assured that this is not going to happen again.  We'll see.

The cloud SUCKS!
Regards,
Walt