More progress

Played one game of Steam Tunnel last night — amusing, but scoring’s a bitch, and the gameplay didn’t seem interesting enough to put up with it. Played a few games of Light Speed, which is far and away my favorite Cheapass game so far. Plays really quickly, about ten minutes to a game once you get the hang of it, and the mechanics are just neat. We tried playing with two asteroids, which seems to reward the get-all-your-ships-out-quick strategy, but also results in a narrower range of scores.

Woke up this morning to the delightful news that I currently weigh 275.5 pounds. That’s about a two-pound loss from a week ago. If I can keep this up (which I probably can do for certain if I can find a good source of cardio exercise) I’ll hold off on doing Atkins till I hit a tough plateau.

These drawings are part of my efforts at growing that online strip idea from the other day. It has to do with demons. (No, I’m pretty sure it won’t bear a strong resemblence to Demonology 101.) I’ve got some rough plot ideas (tying in with an idea I’ve been kicking around for a while, a parody of CS Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters), but the visual inspiration just isn’t keeping up yet.

And I think I’ve dodged that cold.

Sketching at the mall

Today was beautiful, sunny and warm, the kind of day that makes me think that winter might actually have gone for good (or at least for eight months or so). I was going to spend the day doing my taxes, but I wound up doing most of the work last night. At some point in the afternoon I realized that a lovely day was slipping past as I sat in front of the computer, so I headed out for a stroll.

I had vague notions of sitting in the Pavonia/Newport Starbucks (which has a great view of downtown Manhattan) and sketching, but the lines were long. I checked out the pier, looked at the yachts (one had a satellite dish; how can that stay fixed on the satellite when the boat is rocking on the water?), and eventually wound up having Mongolian barbecue in the mall’s food court.

The food court was pretty crowded, giving my plenty of sketching opportunities. The guy with the soul patch and glasses spotted me, and motioned me over when he saw I was leaving. He’s deaf, so we had to have our brief conversation in writing and gestures. He seemed pretty amused by my sketch of him, and gave me a thumbs-up. Like most deaf people who lost hearing too early to get a grip on spoken language (at least, that’s how it seems to me), he has really emphatic facial expressions and body language, a natural cartoonist’s reference, but they were too fleeting for me to capture on paper.