I’m not sure Treiss gets it.

Oh well.  Lunch time!

If you have no idea what we’re spoofing here, just have a look at this Silent Hill wiki link (specifically, we’re spoofing Silent Hill 2).

In a sort of “Silent Hill if it was more light-hearted” vein, check out this comic called Underling.  I haven’t read all the way through it yet, but it looks pretty cool.

I’m still working on my little indie-RPG.  I’ve got about 200 tiles drawn, but I still have a lot to go.  I guess it’s a good thing I like to draw them.  I’ve drawn all the exterior terrain tiles I need and I’ve worked my way through most of what I’ll need for city terrain.  I’m getting ready to move on to dungeons, and from there it’ll finally be time to draw objects.  Whew.

I also have a vague electronics hobby.  One of my first jobs was de-soldering, soldering, and reprogramming a chip on a PCB.  The manufacturer we had made the board incorrectly so I got to add 0 resistance resistors to a thousand boards.  It was pretty tedious, but I got really good at soldering.

Anyway, I found this site just now and thought it was pretty neat.  If you like hobby electronics or robotics and you know of any cool sites them please share them in the comments.  I don’t have a lot of money to throw around, but window shopping is still fun.  I have seen some really cool things in robotics lately too.   Check out DelFly II and see what I mean.  If you know of any other neat videos like that please let me know (note: I’ve seen Bigdog already).

My job search has expanded to include almost any area (minus huge cities like NYC and LA), so if you know of a college or university that’s advertising to hire more techs please let me know.  I’d prefer to work at a 4 year school.

Thanks and have a great week!

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Why is there a portable game system inside Toasterbot?

Oh right, Bear made it.

I know, I know.  We’ll get back to Silent Kill soon. 

I’ve started actually using my Twitter account, so if you want Catena updates via Twitter, please add me to your watch list.  I tweet when I have a new comic and sometimes I’ll Tweet random stuff through the day depending on what’s going on.  I don’t tweet that much, so it shouldn’t get annoying.  Catena also has a Facebook page and a Live Journal.  The Facebook page has new comic announcements plus general news.  The Livejournal basically just has new comic announcements.

Does anyone use Tumblr?  I keep hearing about it.

I’ll probably send out some requests for link swaps this week to try and increase our steady traffic some more.  If you want a link on our links page and your site has an average of 5000 unique hits per day please contact me and we’ll swap.  I’ve set a lower limit because I’m starting to run out of space, not because I’m trying to keep anyone out.

It’s April (well almost), and I’m starting to think about the great outdoors again.  Last year I made a home-made folding camp stove out of stainless steel and some tin snips.  The stove was meant to be a wood gasifier, but I designed it incorrectly and could not get it to boil water after several tries and varying amounts of wood chip.  This year I’m ready to try again with a hopefully improved design.  I’m not looking forward to using tin snips again though because they really killed my hands.  If only I had a home laser cutting system that was punchy enough to go through steel.  C’mon future, you promised me phasers by now.

Speaking of the future, I think Portal 2 must be coming out soon because I keep seeing buzz in the press and I noticed that it was available for pre-order.  If you somehow missed the original Portal game, do yourself a favor and play it.  It’s the most demented action-puzzle game you may ever see.  It also comes with free dessert at the end.

Somewhat related to Portal is this robotic bird-bot I saw flying across the web last week.  You can read more about Smartbird here, or you can just watch the video here.

That’s pretty cool.  I would totally take a toy version to the park and watch it fly around.

See you next week!

Thanks!

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Add this to the list of 5 million reasons having a tail would be annoying.

I’ll be all over Diablo 3 when it comes out.  Killing Diablo is fun! 

On a far more serious note, as you must have heard by now, Japan experienced a series of large earthquakes last week that triggered tsunami, damaged nuclear power plants, destroyed homes, and caused loss of life.  We have friends living in Japan and we want to do what we can to help.

$$ $$  SALE $$  $$

This week we’re selling Belle desktop downloads for $1.  All profit from sales of this desktop will go to Americares.  Americares is an efficient charity that does a lot of disaster response work.  They delivered 400,000 pounds of medical and relief supplies after the earthquakes in Japan in 1995 and they already have a disaster response person in Tokyo coordinating relief efforts.  If you’d like to donate more than a dollar that is fine too – you can fill in any amount you want – but it only takes a dollar to get the desktop.  Thanks!

I suggest sending large donation amounts directly to Americares instead of going through our donate button as Paypal nibbles a percentage out of our profits.  Also, if you need a tax deductible receipt please donate directly to Americares since we cannot provide that.  If you do a direct donation use Americares’ “in honor of” form to send me (kulhain@yahoo.com) an e-card that has your e-mail enclosed and I can then send you the desktop image that way.

Whew, that was long-winded!

Here’s a sample of the picture.

This donation offer has ended.  Thanks to those who donated!

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Of course Belle was in a sorority.  They had a secret handshake and everything.

Please welcome Sasha, our Birman, to the generally irregular cast of Catena.

A few products that Tracy worked on some time ago finally got published or had recent releases, so let’s take a look and see what we’ve got (wow, we’ve been pretty busy):

My Little Transformer is uh, well, I mean.  Umm.  I voiced a Transformer and Tracy voiced a MLP and they showed it at Botcon so now I can never go to Botcon.  Just watch episodes 84 and 85.  You’ll see what I mean.  PS: We should totally go to Botcon.

Harry Walton: Henchman for Hire is a funny romp through the life of a villain’s henchman.  It’s FOR ADULTS so please don’t pick it up for your kids. Tracy was the colorist on that one.

Wonderdog Inc. is an Indiana Jones style adventure that features action and humor and has a wide family appeal. Tracy did the coloring on that one as well.

If you have an iPhone or (presumably) iPod Touch you can grab a copy of iKids, which is an app that has a bunch of Blue Dream Studios comics on it. Tracy did all the work on Magic Carpet. I haven’t tried the app yet, but I think that you get some comics free and the rest are demos that you can upgrade to the full book by paying a small fee.

And lastly, Luci Phurr’s Imps has published its first book compilation via Penny Farthing Press. Tracy does all the coloring for Luci Phurr and the comic itself is brilliantly written. Please check it out.

If you’re interested in very indie, incredibly low budget, game development, don’t forget to read my meandering blog over here.  I’ll update it about once a week.

And while I’m in a link-tastic mood, I probably ought to remind newcomers that Catena does indeed have a Facebook account and that if you’re interested you can find that here.

The voting button has been downsized and can now be found on the left-hand bar.

Cheers!

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Treiss dear, maybe you don’t want to work in a mall dungeon.  Coffee bunny, umm, stop sampling the wares.  If you don’t get the reference to Victorian Secret, check our archive out – specifically this comic.

First off, thank you to the person who sent The Dark Crystal (25th Anniversary Ed)!  I will definitely be enjoying that for some time to come.  If the people that sent me birthday gifts will send me an e-mail I will give you links to download our high resolution wallpapers as a thank-you.   Some of the receipts had names and e-mails and some were much more mysterious. 

Speaking of high resolution, it’s Valentine’s Day.  This year we’re honoring the romantics and the chocaholics.  For $2 you get both high-resolution, ready-to-print Valentine “cards” that you can e-mail or print out however many copies you need.  Just don’t resell them, post the high-resolution versions on the net, or sell them in with some other commercial offering.  That’s all we really ask.  If you’re unfamiliar with file formats, the .tif file is for printing and the .jpg is for e-mailing.  The .zip file you get when donating is about 17 megs so please factor that in if you have a limited data plan.

This incentive has expired.  Thanks!

Proceeds from the Valentine’s sales go directly to our buddy Razzek who is experiencing some financial difficulty.   I’ll send her the proceeds next Monday, so you have all week to purchase as you like.

Yes, I know, I still need to set up a proper store.  I’m going to get to that.  Hey look -> over here -> it’s one of my favorite manga.  *distraction power*  Seriously though, if you would like to buy our old donation incentives I am looking at ways to make that easy.  Right now, on my side, I can only actually do one incentive at a time due to the way our (lack of) shopping cart is set up.  

In anime news, we’re still watching Darker than Black.  We might finish it up this week, after which point I’m kind of hoping to watch Ghost Hound.  You can watch both through Hulu via the links I posted.  Neat huh?  Apparently some of the people from Kino’s Journeys and Serial Experiments Lain worked on Ghost Hound.  With that group, it has to be weird.  If you’ve already seen the two shows I linked to, please don’t post any spoilers in the comments section.  Thanks!

The voting incentive’s the same.

Have a great week!

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