Pitt brush markers

I finally found those Pitt colored brush markers I’d been looking for these past few months! They had them at Pearl Paint, which is in the middle of swapping the top two floors, so half the fourth floor is on the fifth and vice versa.

They’re pretty sweet. The basic set is all bright primary and secondary colors —magenta, yellow, cyan, green, orange, purple. The landscape set has a sky blue, a dark blue (looks like Prussian), three greens, and a reddish brown. The terra set has a warm yellow, an orange that’s similar, but not quite identical to, the one in the basic set, and four browns. The lightest of the browns might do for a tan skin tone, but otherwise you’ll have a tough time coloring in people at the low end of the melanin-content scale. I hope Faber-Castell comes out with a portrait set.

( Marker sketches, about 60k )

BFL, week 6, day 4: cardio

( Cardio numbers )

More web comics!

cadhla turned me on to Pibgorn, a color fantasy strip by Brooke McEldowney, creator of 9 Chickweed Lane. Unfortunately, it’s hosted on Comics.com, which only archives the last 30 days worth of strips. (And also the first 20 strips, which in this case are black-and-white in traditional daily format.) The art is lovely, and from what I can tell the stories are interesting (I haven’t managed to read a full one yet), even if the humor is sometimes lame.

I’ve also shelled out five bucks to check out Modern Tales and Serializer.net for a month. (I may pay another two for Girlamatic.) So far there’s lots of stuff I don’t care for, with a few gems. My favorites so far are Streets of Northhampton and American Born Chinese. Teaching Baby Paranoia also looks good, but I’ve only looked at a little of it so far.

Two things that really bug me:

1. The sites don’t use the HEIGHT and WIDTH attributes in the IMG tags for the comics panels/pages. This means that pages rearrange themselves while I’m reading them as the images download and render, really annoying. There are a couple of ways to fix this, the easiest being to use the PHP getimagesize function.

2. There’s a bug in the navigation for moving within a multi-page installment. When I first hit a new installment, I get a page with no comics, a message telling me that this installment has multiple pages, and a string of linked numbers and an arrow for navigation. The number 1 is unlinked, implying that I’m already on page 1 for this installment. I click the link for page 2, I get taken to a page with comics, and I see that 1 is linked, so I click that, and I get the actual first page of comics content for that installment. This is clearly some kind of bug in the PHP code that generates the navigation, but I’m surprised it’s still there.

Hey, guys, looking to hire a PHP coder? I could fix both these problems for you!

For sale: Iraq (cash only)

“A real fixer-upper. Present owner needs to sell because he has to win an election in 2004, and Iraq is a drag in the opinion polls. Also forgot to tell the American people the true cost before invasion and occupation.”