We're Moving...

In the next few days, I'll be moving the Lovarian Adventures website at http://lovaria.com/ from our current PHP webhost PHPWebhosting to the ASP.Net webhost Brinkster.

The reason behind the move is two-fold. First reason I suppose is because Brinkster has this 50% discount offering for their professional account with 1GB webspace, 30GB traffic, ASP.Net and PHP support (supposedly), and a free domain name all for under $10/month ($7.95/month if you pay yearly). So that's like $4/month for the first year because of the discount.

The second reason is that I've always wanted to move to an ASP/ASP.Net host. I'm an ASP/ASP.Net developer by trade so it just makes sense that the site I'm maintaining use the same technologies I regularly use at work. It's just easier for me that way.

The domain name Raquel and I chose for the new site is Palabok.com. It's a delicious type of pansit (noodle) dish that's very popular in the Philippines. But the term palabok (as in "mapalabok") is sometimes used to mean that a thing (may that be a dish, an event, a document) has a lot of added (but not often necessary) ingredients/additions/stuff in it. Well, that wasn't really accurate but that meaning should be close enough. We had the second meaning in mind when we chose the word.

As you can deduce, the new site will not be a Lovaria-centric site. It will be more of a site that both Raquel and I will use for whatever purpose we decide. Lovarian Adventures will thus be moved to a folder in the new domain. I'll most likely create a sub-domain for it the first chance I get. So the new Lovaria website will probably be located in http://palabok.com/lovaria/ or http://lovaria.palabok.com/ or both.

That's all for now. I'll keep you guys posted.

Tablets and Drawing

Let me first qualify that the tablet I'm referring to is an electronic device that allows a computer user to use a pen-like gadget called a stylus to write or draw on a tablet and have the writing or drawing be reflected on the computer. Marvelous piece of technology, isn't it? Now, that's all clear, let me get on with the actual rant.

I have a Wacom Graphire3 Tablet and I admittedly love it. It's very responsive and relatively inexpensive. I have been using it for some time now but mostly for colouring and "painting" (and by this I mean using the tablet to paint in conjunction with a painter program such as OpenCanvas or the ever-popular Corel Painter). And sometimes, I use it to draw the actual under drawing and/or virtually ink the art.

At the moment, I'm working on a Nadine (a main character in my webcomic Lovarian Adventures) image and I drew it from scratch. It's still a work in progress but you can look at the unfinished version by clicking this link here. I just finished inking the piece and I sure am relieved that bit's over. My right hand hurt like you wouldn't believe it while I was trying to finish it and I cannot for the life of me draw a straight line or a perfect curve with that hand while doing so.

It reminded me of my attempt to draw an entire page of my webcomic entirely on a tablet and it was painful to draw as well.

I guess what I'm really saying is that I've learned my lesson. I will never draw from scratch using a tablet. I'll still use it for touch ups and for colouring, sure. But never drawing or even just inking. It's just not worth the time and effort for me. It would've been a lot easier if I drew with a standard pencil and paper.

I'm also writing this down here so that I have a reminder for myself of this lesson learned. I know there are people out there that do amazing work with just tablets like my friend Ju (see here webcomic ROMB). Good on them. As for me, I'll just be sticking with pencils.

The Other Good Thing...

...about using blogger now is that I can type up a new post via email and it will automatically publish my blog in here. Also, I get an email whenever somebody puts in a comment to my blogs which is good because I used to miss that all the time.

As for the comic itself, although I have stopped drawing the comic-strip thingy, I've decided to just draw an actual one pager instead. But when will this be? I cannot say. But I do feel my enthusiasm for drawing slowly returning. We'll see.

Refurbished Old Blog

Ok. Don't panic people. I know the post before this was in year 2002. The thing is, before I started using my very own blog mechanism in Lovaria, I used to employ blogger.com's services. So based on this historic blog, my last postage before this one was back in March 29, 2002.

Anyway, I'm back to using blogger now that their services is much much improved. :) So I'll be posting future stuff using the blogger service and any new post should reflect in here.