My day was spent working on the next batch of comics. All in all I didn't get the next batch finished. The last comic is incomplete, but started. I'll probably spend most of tomorrow finishing it.

I spent most of what little remained of the day browsing TV Tropes and debating about how to go about various things, including one of my other comic ideas.

The link for the day is a strange and wonderful Japanese game show.

Today the main focus was getting some work done on the next batch of comics. After finishing the first comic (which took most of the day), I stopped to work on translating the Life program to C.

So far, I have it working but it's rather buggy. Ironing out the bugs is harder in C as stupid errors are much easier to make and harder to spot.

During the afternoon I finished watching Thundercats and moved on to Voltron. It's more reliant on stock footage than I remembered, and seems to be much lower quality as well.

Lastly, the link of the day is a short video of Thundercats bloopers.

I spent the day attempting a few last tries at speeding up the Life program, none of which worked. I also wrote a somewhat trippy program that generates colored static to test the speed of raw pixel writes; I managed to get both the Linux and GP2X versions of that to run at the same speed.

The remainder of the day was spent trying to get a second toolchain installed and running. I'm guessing that I might get better results by using a different toolchain. It took a lot of trial and error, but I eventually got it working. This second toolchain uses C; I successfully transliterated one of my simpler Pascal GP2X programs to test it. Interestingly, this new toolchain needed help from the first toolchain to compile: it lacked the libraries to link with and the first toolchain provides them.

If I'm going to use it much I'll need to get some shell scripting under my belt; the command to compile with it is nearly as long as this sentience!

Lastly, we've been hit with a ton of snow (nearly a white out outside). We might lose power during the night, and the net has dropped out a sew times. Fortunately, someone got Chewbacca to deal with it.

My day was spent trying to speed up the Life program I wrote yesterday. Nothing I did made it faster, though some improvements crept in. Finding that nothing changed, I wrote a stress test program to find out some specifics about the Wiz/GP2X's systems. The idea behind this was that the bottleneck might not be where I expected it to be. This highlighted a few possible routes, but I was out of time to try them today.

Tomorrow I'll see about implementing them; who knows, it might do something.

Lastly, here's a page that discusses Life in detail.

Most of the day was spent working on some possible improvements to Background Service; I may be drawing their faces differently (read: better) in the near future.

The evening was spent coding my own little version of Conway's Game of Life. It works, features 16 colors and a 64x48 field. It has some noticeable speed issues when ported to the GP2X, so tomorrow I might work at making it run faster.

I spent most of the afternoon feeling sick; fortunately it started going away towards nightfall.

Lastly, Bill Watterson, creator of Calvin and Hobbs, gave an interview recently. It can be found here.

We spent the morning getting stuff mailed and trekking through the local Target. After which we visited the local buffet.

Upon getting home we found that my last ebay auction, a somewhat rare pair of Autobots, had arrived. The next hour was spent getting them unpacked and set up. This was also the last expenditure for a while; I want there to be more leeway in the account before another big purchase or string of little purchases.

The remainder of the day was spent working out a software design issue that is the prelude to serious work on the games I want to make.

Lastly, here's a list of things one should consider doing if you ever wind up as the hero of a fictional work.

This morning was spent shopping for groceries. Since they didn't have their sandwiches out yet, we stopped at the local deli on the way home where I got two meatball subs.

Around dinnertime, we had our planned movie evening with turkey subs, chips and pop.

I spent much of the day finishing up the last batch of comics and uploading them.

Speaking of which, February 1st is also the day my comic switches from grayscale to color thanks to a software change (from MS Paint to KolourPaint).

Another first for today is that I've started using the cycle again. I haven't used it since I stopped exercising last November. In an attempt to prevent myself from getting sicker I stopped exercising completely (sit ups and nausea don't go together well). In January I started lifting the weights again, and now I'm adding the cycle back in to the routine. I can't use it for long, but it's a start.

Tomorrow we have more errands to run.

Lastly, here's a 1950s cartoon about the history of cars. Part 1, Part 2. I like their idea of the year 2000.

I spent today working on the next batch of comics; in the end I completed two and only part of the third, so I'm effectively running behind on that. Tomorrow is the biweekly shopping, so I might be stretched for time and not get it done till Tuesday.

In the late evening I watched my ebay auctions end. While the clock was running out I read through Horror Movie Survival Rules. Afterword, I went and had a quick shower (the irony not being lost) and here we are. Basically I'm only up because my hair isn't dry yet.

In other news the internet has been dropping out at random lately. No idea as to the cause, but the fact that the ISP's network status page is unavailable does cast some suspicion in their direction.

Today was over rather quickly. Most of it was spent working out the scripts for the next batch of comics; despite working out a general plan yesterday I hit writer's block and almost didn't have anything to go on. I did get two panels done and the backgrounds for two comics ready though.

On a completely different subject, here's a cartoon about a young badger. Pity I don't speak Spanish.

The vast majority of the day was spent working out how to do the sprites for the projects I'm planning. The way I draw my comic won't work well for the GP2X's 320x240 resolution, so I need a second style.

Naturally I turned to the NES for inspiration. I rooted through sprite databases and compared various game's styles to find qualities I liked. Eventually I narrowed it down to Dragon Quest I and Ultima. I then selected two sprites from each game and drew them in the style of the other game. The sprites I drew in the style of Ultima's sprites looked the best, so that's the style I'll end up using for inspiration. I'll be tweaking it substantially, so I won't be copying it like a hack.

It's kind of ironic actually. That Ultima title has some of the absolute worst art I've ever seen (and this is the NES I'm talking about here; not exactly high quality to start with). What made it better was that I was better at copying it.

The last Lucky Star DVD arrived in the mail today. Thus mom and I watched it during the evening. This DVD was sadder than the others as one episode talked about Konata's dead mother.

I spent what was left of the day after that to plan ahead for tomorrow's round of comic design.

Lastly, here's a neat site with a lot of information about crosses.