I didn’t think this was going to work out as the flavor was pretty chalky when it was freshly made, but after a day in the fridge this bundle of curds from slightly off milk is actually tolerable. Nice and firm, easy to snack. I should have added salt when it was first curdled, but the seasoning salt on the outside is fine.

This week’s 8 page ashcan comic was done all digitally and it took… 17 hours. I blame my lack of scale. So, so many lack of scales. A lot of my details, you can even notice digitally in the first couple of panels, were just lost once I printed it out.

I used Concepts to draw it. I had a lot of complaints while I was getting familiar with it, it still really sucks with precision as you can’t even align items and I have no idea how to adjust the PPI in it, but even still I think I’ll keep using it. It’s vector hybrid editing really helped when on the last 2 pages I realize I had scaled my comic pages wrong and had to edit my layouts to be taller.

Trying to do 8 page ashcan comics as fast as I can. This one was hand drawn and was an interesting re-learning of my whole comic making process. The product was a mess and my work pages were pretty much destroyed. I’m happy to reassert my allegiances to digital art. I had it my head that I could hammer one out in maybe 4 hours…this took 12 hours over the week.

I made 7 video games as Christmas presents. Okay, it’s not actually as great as it sounds, but I will stand by that title thanks to one simple trick, and I’m quite excited about game number 5. I do have some personal gains to declare here, but to get the tricks out of the way: this was possible for me because of GDevelop and (surprise, surprise) Chat GPT.

I started with GDevelop, which is a game engine that specializes in web based games, with mostly codeless programming. My first few games were graphic swaps of their car coin collecting, endless runner, and ragdoll biking templates; but I made an “original” as well. The very first interactive tutorial on GDevelop’s website was about mouse-dragging physics, so I expanded that into a scene with two characters (my nephew and his wife) with a stamina meter for each of them, and when one is full, fuel is generated for the other character which needs to be tossed across the screen while avoiding a couple of obstacles. It’s a game I swear.

Chat GPT helped me with the other games; a visual novel, a two player clicker-arm-wrestling match, and a virtual pet. Honestly it just helped, and I learned lots. Proof being that I had to make the games in css and html, because that’s all I could ask GPT to do that I could understand. Then it helped me learn JavaScript along the way. By the end of each game I was working around GPTs limitations to add new features.

I want to make specific posts for the games that took the most effort, but in any case GPT didn’t have a great understanding of its own instructions. It would often rearrange code or change it altogether and break the game. So it really kept me focused on learning function by function. But that didn’t help when it simply didn’t understand how the code was operating.

The biggest problem was trying to animate with CSS. With CSS you can move an object from one point to another, and you can even map out more points so long as its pre-scripted. GPT (v3.5) was convinced this could be done dynamically by just updating the destination points of the keyframes. And maybe there really is a simple way to accomplish this, but not by any method GPT was attempting. Once an animation runs in CSS, it’s done. Updating any destination or source coordinates just causes the object to teleport with no animation. What I had to do was animate the object to a new spot, update the source coordinates to the new location (which requires independent maths because the source coordinates are based on the size of the parent object (for example, the size of the window) while destination coordinates are based on the height and width of the animating object), then have JavaScript delete the animation script which will load the object at its newly adjusted source location, then calculate a new destination to restart a brand new animation script. GPT never understood this limitation and would always rewrite these extra steps out of the code.

So once I got a functioning understanding of the code, it became easiest to relegate GPT to syntax editing. “Where’s the error?”, or “Is this function written correctly”. Each game code got long enough where GPT would just explain the collective features of my code rather than answer any specific question I had about it.

I never would have been able to get anywhere without Chat GPT’s help, but I think I legitimately collaborated enough to have earned the credit.

It’s hard to recommend a specific piece of media to commemorate this year’s Halloween season because there’s been so much great stuff. Dan’s Gaming’s Horror Month has essentially been perfected and is always wonderful to burn yourself out on. Even The Exploring Series has been doing nightly SCP readings. But I think what’s impacted me the most this year is last year’s Treehouse of Horror from the Simpsons.

I could probably write a whole post on my relationship with the Simpsons, but I can keep it brief by saying that I’ve always loved the Simpsons but for years I was a purist, never venturing past season 10, though 4 and 5 was the safety zone. A few years ago I started to catch up on my missed episodes. It was probably season 23 when I accepted the show as being properly “good” again. Now I’m just a year behind the latest release and took a slight pause so I could watch Treehouse of Horror XXXIII in its proper spooky season. There. Now I shouldn’t have to ever write that dedicated Simpsons post.

I caught the hype of the Deathnote tribute last year and don’t have anything to add to all that, but it was the West World tribute that really cemented the episode for me. A very on the nose way to say “yes, we know our fanbase”, but the breadth and depth of the references, and how fun the episode was, was proper convincing.

Not just Treehouse of Horror XXXIII but the next 2 episodes as well; From Beer to Paternity and Step Brother from the Same Planet. While no longer Halloween focused, these three episodes were a perfect little microcosm to embody the value of the latest generation of Simpsons story telling. Treehouse of Horror acknowledging the greatest moments of the series while transcending them. The paternity episode was on the nose with classic Simpsons sensitivity and character growth, and modern politics that weren’t heavy handed, and kept me giggling the whole way through. I guess the Step Brother episode was more of that, but it really made me nostalgic for Disney’s Goofy Movie in a way that I haven’t encountered from any media before, and that’s worth mentioning to me. When Nelson Met Lisa also really neatly fits in this batch of overall series tribute as a great “future Simpsons” episode, but Simpson stories of reoccurring broken romantic relationships always make me feel icky and I’m ready to stop gushing.

So my Halloween recommendation this year is for last year’s Simpsons.