I Am Afraid Of Everything

Okay so when I first heard about Twitter I thought "oh that is a cute idea but it sounds totally useless."

Eventually I got a Twitter account of my own so that I could post status updates for the comic and people would stop hitting F5 over and over again all night.* At this point my opinion was "okay MAYBE Twitter has its uses but it is still pretty dumb to be all 'oh hey guys I just had the most AWESOME sandwich for lunch.'"

Then I started following other people on Twitter. Dudes like RStevens and Paul Southworth who tweet basically ALL DAY. I was expecting to be annoyed by this but somehow it has become COMPELLING READING, even though the majority of people's posts are exactly the kind of "awesome sandwich" Tweets I thought were so "dumb" in the first place.

Now I'm completely addicted. I find myself following more and more people (right now I'm sticking to folks I know personally either via Internet or Real Life). The highlight of getting in to the office is catching up on Twitter while I drink my coffee and responding to people's tweets where appropriate. The other day I think I must have made like twenty posts in an afternoon.

The appeal of Twitter, for me, is the CONTENT: constant streams of new things to read, all day, every day. It's the same reason I've been reading Jerkcity for the last, oh, eight years:† even if not every new bit of content is funny, enough of it is to make the aggregate worthwhile.

So Twitter, I wasn't wrong about you. You are a web application with genuine uses, but 99% of your content is "awesome sandwich" inanity. And I think that is totally awesome and fun. I have become a Twitterer, for better or worse.

PS: My Twitter name is "jephjacques" in case you want to follow me.

*This has not worked.
†Holy shit you guys Jerkcity is TEN YEARS OLD this August.

For those of you not following my Twitter,

( a zombified remix of QC #1136 )

This has been floating around in webcomic-land today so I'll join in.

ME AT SEVENTEEN VERSUS ME AT TWENTY SEVEN:

1. My username is _____ because ____

It is qcjeph because I think just "jeph" was taken, and I wanted something that would say "yes I am THAT GUY from questionablecontent.net." In hindsight I don't think it's a very good LJ name but it is MINE so it will STAY.

2. My name is _____ because ______.

My first name is Jeph because of a longish story. My full, legal name is still Jeffrey (people going "oh man that is totally not his real name he is so pretentious" can cackle and slap their tard-arms together with glee) but everybody, even my parents, call me Jeph (and spell it like that). Basically when I was a kid (eleven or twelve? I honestly forget) I started spelling my name "Jeph" as a self-deprecating joke (OH LOOK AT MISTER ARTSY BOY HE THINKS HE'S SO FANCY), and for whatever reason it stuck. I am almost 28 so it has been that way for well over half my life now.

My last name is Jacques pronounced "jacks" because my grandfather's side of the family is of French Huguenot descent. In case you aren't familiar, the Huguenots are one of the groups that got kicked out of mainland Europe, went to Britain, got kicked out of THERE, and then came to the US. So it's pronounced "jacks" and not "zhock" because it has been Anglicized not once but twice. In fact many people with our family name have simply changed the spelling to "Jacks" or got it changed for them because of this confusion.

My middle name is Paul because my parents are Catholic. I do not hate women.

3. My journal is titled ____ because ____.

QC Livejournal because I was not feeling very imaginative when I made this thing, apparently. Maybe I should change it to something funnier or weirder. EDIT: oh hey look I changed it to something more appropriate.

4. My friends page is called ____ because ____.

These People Are Creepy because goddamnit people are creepy on the internet. Mainly though I thought it would be funny.

5. My default userpic is ____ because ____.

A drawing I did of myself years ago because I wanted to have a QC version of myself I guess? It's horribly out of date, my hair is much shorter and I have a beard and more piercings and I should probably exercise more. Also I need to add some Hanners-esque bags under my eyes.

The comments on the last entry, near as I can tell, worked out to roughly 50/50 thick vs. thin, which was basically what I expected. Thanks to everyone for sharing your opinions, they were very useful!

Tuesday's QC was an experiment with the thin line weight, and I think it looks okay. The basic brush I used for the characters was a 10px round brush with the Cintiq set to a really light touch. I bear down pretty hard so everything came out more or less the same weight. To balance things out, I think I'll do Wednesday's brush with my "heavy" inks- a 30 or 40px round brush, with the Cintiq sensitivity jacked down a couple notches so I can vary the lines more with pressure.

( For instance, something like this: )

I'm constantly waffling back and forth on the line weight in my comics. On the one hand, I really like the heavy, variable line weight of Sam Logan's stuff. On the other hand, I like the thinner (still varied, but more subtly) line art that Rene Engström uses. Of course since both of them can draw better than me it's probably a moot concern, but you get the idea.

Anyway here is a doodle of Hanners, one with the line weight I've been using lately and one with thinner lines that I was playing with this afternoon. Tell me which you like. Apologies for sloppy coloring and weird proportions etc.



PS I know Hanners' face is all kinds of fucked up in the first one, plz ignore

'Bout damn time I got another song recorded. It's a big 'un, something like 9 minutes long. I probably could've dragged it out to 15, but sanity (and Garageband choking on the massive file) prevailed. Enjoy, hopefully!

Back to work.

PS at the risk of destroying my bandwidth, here's a page for Every Deathmøle song I've done recently.

So it turns out that when you get a temporary crown put on one of your molars and the dentist says "make sure you don't eat anything too hard or sticky because it could pull off the crown" the reason they tell you that is because having the exposed, ground-down stump of your original molar exposed HURTS LIKE MOTHERFUCKING HELL.

Five more hours. Five more hours and I get to go to the denstist and fix it.

Fucking peanut butter sandwiches.

UPDATE: would you believe putting the permanent crown on hurt even MORE? Truly this was the Decayed Tooth From Hell. Thank god for Advil.

PS: I SURE DO LIKE COMPLAINING HUH

PPS: WAAAAAAAH

Apparently getting out of town for a weekend was good for me. Here's two new songs, one kind of death metal, the other some weird techno thing.

Enjoy(!?!???)

A silly indie rock song.

[guitar nerd]

Man the vintage Marshall sounds on my POD are so fun to mess around with

[/guitar nerd]

So this weekend I completely lucked my way into getting a sweet Les Paul for really really cheap. The first thing I recorded with it is a silly little indie rock song which I shall post shortly. The SECOND thing I recorded with it is this droney thing. Best enjoyed at extremely high volume.

Wow, I had no idea people would actually enjoy looking at those autobio comics. They're really quick and easy to draw, so I made some more. Maybe I'll keep doing 'em and see if I don't lose interest.

( more stupid comics after the cut )

This is the most dissonant thing I have ever written (on purpose, anyway- I did some things in college that I am not proud of). I have been listening to way too much Deathspell Omega.

This is significantly less dissonant.

In other news, our office is on the top floor of our building, and at night you can hear the pigeons cooing to one another as they snooze on the roof. It's very soothing.

It's very surreal when pictures of a girl you used to know pop up on Space Ghetto.

It's also very surreal when pictures of a friend's girlfriend pop up on Fleshbot.

(I am not going to say which ladies these are, it is up to you to SPECULATE)

So a while back I got a Line 6 POD X3. I like it a lot! This is the first song I've done entirely using the Pod for guitar sounds. They actually sound like they came out of an amplifier now! Enjoy.

If you have a drinking glass that, due to its construction and unbeknownst to you, has little pockets of air inside, and you pour boiling water into the glass to make tea, the hot water will in turn heat the air inside the pockets, causing it to expand, and shatter the glass full of boiling water in your hand.

This, perhaps, is why most people, who are not idiots like me, drink their tea from a mug.

PS: don't worry, aside from some minor scalding and two very, very startled bunnies (this was literally the first time in their lives they had ever heard me make a noise louder than my usual speaking voice) everything is fine.

PPS: oh god so many commas oh god

So if you read any of the newsposts over on my comic or pay attention to the post-times of the comics themselves you probably know that I have basically the most fucked up sleep schedule in the history of mankind. I'm talkin' weeks without seeing daylight kind of stuff here. Pretty much the only time I get up early is if we have to travel someplace for a con or such.

Anyway for the past week or so, and I'm not exactly sure how this happened, I have been getting up at like 8 in the morning. It is insane. Things are open! And there's a lot more traffic. I think I have been more productive too but it is hard to be sure.

Anyway, getting up at a somewhat normal hour gets a tentative thumbs up. Let's see how long it takes me to drift back into my usual up till 7/asleep till 4 schedule.

In other news I got my shoulder x-rayed and there doesn't seem to be any serious damage. It still hurts and I have a weird bump there, but apparently it'll just get better over time. The doctor thinks I just pulled some ligaments in my rotator cuff or something. I don't recommend it!

Man this is a BLOG post. What is up with that? WELCOME TO 2002, JEPH JACQUES.