After Africa, being dead was the easiest way to stay alive

No pr0n for blogwatchers today, just random sketches run up while watching the horrendously smug Fairly legal.

Oh Manga Studio - I'm sure you're great, but intuitive? Not so much.
Pretty sure I'm supposed to be learning how to use that anyway... Hm.

everything I touch is food for my hunger - my hunger for power

Just a wee break from Fallout: New Vegas (it is the weekend, after all) to take Manga Studio's line tools for a spin. Not quite there yet, but the perspective grid thingy sounds like fun whenever I finally get to it.

While you were gone the Globetrotters held a press conference informing everyone that I was a jive sucker.

Manga Studio fiddling continues apace as I pull a move from an actual manga studio like what they have in Japan and start making myself a library of backgrounds and whatnot for basic gag strips or whatever. Still not entirely sold on MS, but then I wasn't sold on Photoshop either and now can't draw a straight line without the bloody thing.
I think my main issue is finding the right balance of line weight and stroke correction so it comes out how I want rather than relying on serendipity, as I can't actually tell what I'm doing around actual pixel size and for the most part just try to make blobs roughly the right shape.
Also, it's Friday night and I miss the booze.


Watching:
four films called Sahara from 1943, 1983, 1995 and 2005 respectively. Why? Because they're there, really, though nobody needs a reason to watch a Humphrey Bogart movie.
Batman: Under the Red Hood, which seems to mistake 'brooding' and 'moping' - quite an unfortunate mix-up for a film about Batman, as you can imagine. He spends long minutes moping and having heartfelt conversations with Alfred about his feelings rather than punching people in the head. This is - as far as I'm aware - Jason Todd's first appearance in a medium other than comic books and as such his death and resurrection seem a contrivance for the purposes of the movie and its heartfelt conversations about the Dark Knight's feelings and stuff rather than a story that might once have held a lot of cache because Jason Todd - alongside Bucky - was one of those rare characters who stayed dead (until someone brought him back). This being his first appearance outside funnybooks, there's no resonance to Todd's death as there was in that medium and I suppose that could be what all the moping is supposed to be about, but it still doesn't change that there's no sense of gravitas or import, it's a story about someone Batman thought was dead that could have been told a dozen times already across several iterations of tv show and straight-to-video movies and wouldn't have been especially interesting there, either. It's not a terrible film, just unexceptional, though John "Bender" DiMaggio is a terrible Joker, which is an opinion I certainly wouldn't have expected to hold given the toss I've paid attention to once I realise Bender is in it. I'm also pretty sure they're going a little too far out of their way to paint Nightwing as a homosexual, which is fine if you're going to go ahead and actually make a character a homosexual man - but if you pussyfoot around it to the point you create an equivalence between effeminate/gay and 'funny'(abnormal), you're not helping the case for diversity much, you're just reinforcing stereotypes.

I kind of hate Manga Studio.

Why does the brush tool pick random settings every time I switch to a different layer? Why can't I actually use the colour I pick from the swatches and instead get some random mix of texture brush and halftone fill? Why does it not actually make any mark at all on the canvas except when it inexplicably does make a mark?
I realise I've spent a grand total of (checks the run time of the latest House episode) 43 minutes and 6 seconds in it, but I've been using Photoshop for years now and I'd like to think - even in the face of Adobe's own inability to universalise tools and settings across two industry-standard programs they themselves create - that some stuff should be standardised rather than necessitating chasing down some particular setting or option every time you attempt to do the exact same thing you've been doing except on a different layer.
It's not an intuitive setup. I'm sure professionals and people with training in the use of such programs will disagree, but for me, plain Joe arsehole who just wants to draw a line on a page, it's utterly baffling from the ten minutes spent just trying to open a fucking file, through the random brush settings, to the fact that I have no idea how to export the file from the program in a usable form without layers inexplicably disappearing - which is just mental.

So yeah - hate it. In fairness, I didn't think much of Photoshop when I started out either, and still don't think much of Illustrator. Possibly if my patience holds I might end up loving it, but the urge to smash my foot through the screen is quite strong.