The Comedy Jokes cartoon was so full of comedy, and such a massive success, that i thought we should immediately start on some more comedy jokes.  And we did.  With painted backgrounds, and a nice looking loading screen.  It also includes a possessive noun, which i’m pretty sure will come up at least once in the comments, if anyone watches this.

Then, seriously, we’ll make a real cartoon.  We’ve been working on 10 or 12 scripts, concepts, arts… including some new Tree Agains.  i’d like to get that one wrapped up.

Uriel was here last weekend.  Belts were purchased, and Lego Batman was played.  They’re making a Lego Harry Potter game, but i wish they’d instead make a Lego The Matrix game.

Every time i want to start a small project to get away from one of our larger projects, the small project snowballs into a larger one itself.  i think, then, that every so often, i’m going to try to put a really quick cartoon in a few hours.  Things that should probably be single panel web comics, but end up as animation anyway.

Apparently, COMEDY JOKES was too subtle.  People thought it was Comedy Jokes.

Expect another crappy short next week.  Or this week?  i don’t know.  Crappy ones keep me sane through the serious ones.

A new March calendar  wallpaper by Padre Elephante.  1280 x1024, or 1440×990.  Nihil’s actually working on a cartoon.  I guess I’ll be bowling on Home ^^

something i gave up on in Flash a while ago was using thin, scratchy lines, which is how i actually draw on paper.  this was largely because fine lines, when drawn with a wacom at least, are rendered with gaps.  it probably has to do with the smoothing… honestly, i haven’t really experimented with it.  in Flash 5, there wasn’t an auto smoothing option for brushes, and trying to colour final art that had gaps in it was a pain in the ass.  there’s the line tool, of course, but at the time, i didn’t know that double clicking selected the full line so that it could be easily deleted.  anyway, i ended up getting used to thicker lines, but never completely liked them.  remembering that, i’m trying out thinner lines again, and they’re actually really nice.

i think that looks pretty nice.  so maybe there will be a new short this week.

i think i am interested in reaching out to some new people to contribute voice work to the cartoon we are working on.  If you are interested in possibly contributing a line or two of dialog, drop one of us a line, and maybe send a brief demo reel.  Say whatever you want, demonstrate a minimal range of dumb voices or impressions if you like.  Just something to let me know what you sound like so i know where you might fit in.  Don’t tell me you’re not a voice actor.  Either submit something, or don’t, but don’t waffle around or attach disclaimers to whatever you send me.  This is for possible bit parts.  If we like what we hear, we’ll send you a line, you record it, and send us an MP3 or WAV. 

If you’re going to do this, you MUST be able to get the audio to us in a few days.  It should not take 3 weeks or 6 months.  Remember that it’s all in fun.  Nihil and Rat do not work for Disney, Paramount, or even Adult Swim.  You don’t have to sound like Steve Blum or Kari Wahlgren.  If you happen to sound like Laura Bailey, send lots of audio of you talking like Lust, and also of you talking like Lust but in a Russian accent like The Baroness from GI Joe.  Those files will not be for the cartoon, they will be for me.

Email to mrnihil [at] nihil-and-rat [dot] com or mrs_rat [at] the same thing, you’ll figure it out.

i was looking for some file the other day, and unexpectedly found a word document i’d apparently forgotten about.  A collection of short, short stories from January and March 2008.  i suppose i may as well put them on the site, right?

so here they are.

Nihil has decided that I should double as the President of Marketing, and so I am going to market something:

The New Bizarro Author Series

Yes, this has almost nothing to do with Nihil & Rat directly, but we are Friends of Bizarro, and these new authors need support so that they can become veteran authors.  Kevin Donihe and Carlton Mellick III have really put their backs into giving these guys a chance, too, so consider picking these books up.  You can read more about them via the link posted above.

Hooray, marketing.

i have a hard time giving up on a project, unless it seems totally lost.  The gallery (yeah, caps) didn’t seem like it was a complete wash, so i burned it down and rebuilt it.  The cause of the problem will remain as mysterious as human stupidity, but it’s fixed now.  The gallery, not the stupidity.  Though there’s still nothing in the gallery, it doesn’t take 10, 000 years to bring up the dashboard.  If anything, it’s faster, so chalk that shit up to “bananas,” and walk away.  It’s blowing in the wind.

One of us MAY try to upload some things this week, and one of us MAY try to set up a lightbox for easy viewing, but i’m not going to worry about that right now, and neither are you, because you aren’t reading this.  You’ve never even heard of this site, and you’re off somewhere else, doing something or someone else.  But if you happened to be here, you’d know what i was talking about.  i wouldn’t have to tell you that, though, of course you’d know.  You’ve been here the whole time.  Now i sound off topic, and you’re looking at me like i got off topic, and turned this entry into something it wasn’t.  And i did. 

So what do you want now?  i mean, if you’re reading this, i’m wondering why.  At this point i’m faux-talking to you, like this is some sort of conversation, but it’s not.  i don’t know what this is.  Buuuuuh… that’s all i got, so move along, i don’t want to drag this out any more than i have.

honestly, the more i work with Wordpress on the gallery, the more i just want to walk away from it.  to quote Billo, “this fucking thing sucks.”  maybe that’s not entirely fair, but i’m completely tired of trying to get it to work.  as soon as one issue’s resolved, another pops up.  i wasted all day yesterday, trying to get the gallery set up, only to end the day by deleting everything and starting over.

the admin pages are too fucking slow.  it takes 2-5 minutes just to load the thing i want to work on.  then i bring up the gallery loader, which takes forever, and when it’s finally finished uploading, all i have to show for it are a bunch of red x’s.  i don’t really feel like jumping through so many goddamn hoops when i can just stick something on DA or NG and let someone else figure it out.  i should have been animating this week, not dicking around with a convoluted set of programmes that only work half the time.

i will say that the WP Super cache works nicely (thanks, realityhandbook!), and the Grand Flash Album Gallery is entirely awesome, although i wonder about it when it comes to huge, expanding galleries… you’d probably want to break them up.  but from my brief time with it, i feel like it should get some kind of award or something.

so, i’m going to keep this blog, even though i’ve just found out that Ed Merritt coded it with em instead of px, which is fucking up how it displays in Firefox.  that pisses me off a little.  i’m either going to have to recode it myself, or set up a new layout and alter it to look like this one (within reason).  and i’m going to keep the gallery, but i’m not sure if i’m going to keep the gallery in wordpress.  it’d be nice to set it up with the lightbox plugin i installed, but since this goddamn thing is such an unwieldy piece of crap when it comes to a decent work pace, or just working properly in general, i may just say “screw it” and expect everyone to want to click a thumbnail, then shift back from a jpg on their own.  i was trying to save you the trouble of having to do any of this yourselves, but it’s going to give me an aneurysm, i hate it so much.

two out of 3 isn’t bad, though.  the blog works, minus the em issue, and the comicpress mostly works, even though its search and archive bars look really stupid.  you know, i don’t even know where the gallery is saving the images to?  it’s like some sort of scamming middleman… i’ve looked through every directory, and none of the test images i’ve uploaded appear anywhere.  it’s nonsense.  i’m going to try a few more things today, but after that, i’m torching the entire directory and rebuilding it myself.

so beware… and beware… and beware… the wordpress will bite those who do not dream.  actually, it bites those who DO dream.  those who dream of easy to manage, working websites.

Yesterday, and the day before, we tackled Comicpress.  Comicpress is a bit of an unwieldy behemoth.  Even now, i’ve tried uploading some things only to find that they aren’t posted, despite having posted something only an hour earlier.  So maybe our work is never finished over there.

Easier than Comicpress is Wordpress.  That’s why we used it to set up the Gallery.  Will it work for posting nothing but images?  We hope so.  Reconfiguring all of this is a lot of hassle, and Ed Merritt already designed something that was practically identical to Nihil and Rat .com.  i don’t want to have to tamper with that.  Mrs. Rat doesn’t want to tamper with that.  Why would we?  We wouldn’t.

Bluh.  Now there’s a nearly functioning gallery.  This horrible construction is nearly at an end, and we can at last get back to animation.  Of course, the gallery is currently empty… but i’ll be filling it with all the same wotnot you can already see on our Deviantart and Newgrounds pages.  Here, though, i’ll also be adding unfinished work, sketches, and all kind of other crap i don’t bother uploading to those other sites.  Fun, right?  Of course.  Everyone knows fun rules.