Nearly two full months into the ol' 2024, and already I've managed to crank out the same amount of art that I did in all of last year - both of them comic pages, no less! So hopefully the creative hiatus has done me some good and allow me to get back into it.

Eastwind Rising
My new HP laptop "Eastwind" has proven to have been really good to use with Krita and my oh-gods-is-it-THAT-old? Wacom Bamboo CTL-460 tablet. There's been no performance issues at all when drawing, and the only slight niggle of some micro-delays in saving are probably due to the HDD performance, which will be resolved when I give the ol' girl a new SDD at some time in the future. And testing with streaming indicates that Eastwind and the WiFi connection is more than capable of handling streaming on Picarto... once I find (a) something worthwhile to work on during a a stream and b) find a time to do it which doesn't clash with RL stuff but still finds me an actual audience.

"A Date With Delilah" progress
I've decided that ADWD will be primarily something I'll work on during the cold dark winter months, so I'll be restarting coding and artwork for Chapter 3 around the beginning of May. Chapter 3 will feature the introduction of "Big Freda" du Farre as  Delilah's "partner in pleasure", giving Mel the protagonist an opportunity to indulge in a threesome with both of these lovely ladies. I was hoping to release some of this chapter last year, but I got enthusiastic about writing up both the threesome and a session between Mel and Freda at the same time without finishing either, losing sight of the philosophy that a game doesn't need to be complete when it's released, it just needs to be playable. So yeah, lesson learned.

Decommissioning Vixen-IV
Today I took the final steps in decommissioning my old 2007-vintage desktop Vixen IV, first nuking-by-reformatting the original 250GB HDD then reinstalling Linux Mint 21.3 on the 1TB HDD and wiping out all personal data on both drives in the process. While Vixen IV is still planned to be taken to e-waste recycling, I decided to leave the old gils at least somewhat bootable in case someone is looking for an old PC box for something-or-other. As long as they don't expect much in performance and keep the box on its side so the CPU heatsink doesn't fall off, they'll be fine!

The international situation
It's so fucked-up that places like here, e621, e-hentai and feckin' Pornhub with NSFW content are actually quite wholesome compared to some of the frankly shitty posts on LinkedIn...

Ahem.
Anyway, as a palate-cleanser of normality here's some awesome footage set to some hard-rocking music of a British Cold War jet interceptor that not only is "the aeronautical embodiement of the 'Wallace and Grommet' theme-tune" made by "one of those post-war businesses that made everything from washing-machines to nuclear reactors", but features in addition to going blindingly fast and the ability to climb to altitude like a homesick angel, features "a pot-belly and a weird set of undercarriage, top-loading fuel tanks, a face with a hole in it, a sideways butt and two funny hanging-off missile things." :-)