Monthly Archives: May 2009

Inhuman character contest winner

By far, this week's contest proved the most difficult to judge. There were so many great entries, showing an amazing amount of creativity and versatility, I was honestly blown away. The images of the Finalists after the jump are fairly large, but I hope you'll review them all because they're really quite spectacular.

Many thanks to everyone's hard work who entered, I sincerely appreciate your taking the time not only to create your character, but to share it with the rest of us. Bravo, one and all!

And now, to your Finalists, with the winner to come at the end.

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META: He's baaaaack

I just wanted to let you know that I am back in Texas and working on the HeroMachine 3 Alpha save code once again. The old way I thought was working is, in fact, not working. So it's back to the drawing board, but the new approach is promising in its early stages. We'll see.

I should have the last contest results posted this afternoon.

Random Panel: Wrong on so many levels

exciting-comics-8-1941-critter-back-door

(From "Exciting Comics" number 8, 1941.)

Poll Position: There can be only one … ok, two. At least.

I've noticed that when it comes to geek movies, sequels are often better than the original. Sometimes WAY better. Which brings us to this week's question:

{democracy:82}

Discussion after the jump.

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Random Panel: I've never heard it called a rugged luck before …

wonder-comics-17-1948-actually-thats-his-johnson

Random Panel: Attack of the Fishwangs!

wonder-comics-17-1947-fishwang

(From "Wonder Comics" number 17, 1948.)

Random Panel: What subtext?

gaybatman

Reason #9: The Covers

Somewhere along the line, the powers-that-be realized that perhaps Liefeld's "greatest" weaknesses -- complete lack of page layout ability, utter disregard for basic anatomy, the wordsmithing of a Tourette's-afflicted kindergartner, unnatural fixation on shouting/grimacing/overwrought faces -- could be turned into strengths if he were used as a cover artist instead of a regular interior penciler. Which gives us horrors like the following:

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Random Panel: Great moments in bad comics ideas

wonder-comics-12-1947-gum

(From "Wonder Comics" number 12, 1947.)

HM3: Working on saving

The latest on HeroMachine 3 development is that I am working on the Load/Save code, which we've been badly in need of for some time. The good news is the fundamental trick that was needed turned out to be much easier than I feared it would be; I know how to do what needs to be done and have that basic bit already in place.

The bad news is all the other stuff that has to surround that heart. There's a lot of it, and it's going to take a while to crank out.

To elaborate, I have the bit in place that takes all the items you've put together and saves them to your local hard drive, then reloads them -- IF you already have all the preview sets loaded up. But I still have to write the part that cranks through each item set you need, loads it up, then moves on to the next one until they're all loaded. And I have to write all the error checking and dialog boxing -- "Are you sure you want to load/save a previous character, this will lose your current one" and "Which character do you want to load" and the like. For each of those you have to provide functionality based on what the user picks -- ok or cancel -- and all the associated baggage that goes along with it.

Along the way you have to be sure you're resetting all the other stuff that needs to be reset like variable names, toggle button settings, arrays, and the like.

So while the basics turned out to be easy enough, there's still a lot of grunt work to go through to make it all work usefully. Which is going to take a while, probably about a week.

In the meantime, I head to Oregon tomorrow for a long weekend, which means I won't be back to work on HeroMachine stuff till Tuesday.

I've got posts scheduled to go up while I'm out, and I should be able to access everything through my iPhone to approve moderated posts and such, but I won't be releasing any new updates or items or anything.