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Trouble in CMO land? So I missed this week’s update again. I could rush it out and have it looking much like this:
Or I could polish it up and update ASAP, possibly next Tues considering I wanted to do this one in colour. (It’s the first Annabel page in a long time, and she hasn’t had a full colour page in years) I need to stop kidding myself that I can possibly do this to schedule at the quality I’d like.. Buffers never last me long either. Either I need to cut down on panels, go totally tone/colour free or keep somewhat irregular updates.
I vote for somewhat irregular updates personally. As long as it never gets left long so we don’t have another months/years long absence. What do you think?
I’m still aiming to beat my annual update record though. 
It's bigger than it looks!
This Sunday.. Noon-middnight. Leeds. Cottage Road Cinema. Woohoo! Details here.
Actually pretty excited about this one as they’re showing a couple of things I’ve not seen before. Shocking.
Ellie had her third birthday. Three years! She had a great time and a party with her friends from pre-school. It was crazy. She’s generally doing really well, though she has a bug at the moment. 
Blog posts seem to be few and far between here.. Next time I’ll probably write about our Minecraft server, which is steadily getting a load of CMO content added.
In this little box I’m going to be posting polls and featuring art etc. Might not leave it here though. Who knows! Click the pic to visit her page!
After a seemingly endless set of false starts I’m planning on returning to CMO updates soon.
There’s been quite a bit of work done on the site over the last couple of weeks. I just finished character keywording all the pages and I’ve got the character bios and galleries (largely) in order. If I’ve missed any feel free to send me a link!
Obviously there’s the whole Sid & Sophie thing to resolve as well as a further look at Anna’s diary. Various arty things are bubbling over and I’m pleased with whats going on. See you soon!
I got two new pairs of glasses today. Obviously this calls for celebration. Woo! 
I wasn’t imagining it; my eyesight has been deteriorating. And my stupid giant pupils might contribute to eyestrain and headaches I get so I have anti-reflective coatings now to hopefully soak up some of the glare from the many screens I point my eyes at all day/night.
Ignoring the fact that I look sightly crazy in the photo.. Being able to see this clearly makes me happy. Now I’m going to go do some drawing!
It’s been a long time, again. I’ve been doing a lot lately. Since last post I’ve been working hard on iphone development and sorting out a lot of cruft, making sites and my work setup function better. After 10 years using the same filing system on my primary creative machine it was getting incredibly badly organised. Having a “work in progress” folder with work i completed or abandoned a decade ago isn’t very productive.
Talking about productivity, I didn’t stay at the job I mentioned last post (it wasn’t feasible with the commute, among other problems). That was a very frustrating time – hopefully my next job will be more successful!
Will CMO updates be more frequent now? I cant really commit to more than one update every two weeks, possibly one a week tops. I have far too many things to work on as well as the obvious toddler thing. Ellie is getting on great still, and she’s as much of a joy as ever.
On the online side of things I’ve now got a development blog over on Tumblr: mixelmagic.tumblr.com – it made sense to have it branch off from my main sites to avoid confusion to people just checking it out. You can see any progress I make on my iOS and other game dev there.
Here’s a video of Spooky School ABCs, my first iPhone app.
If you want to keep up to date with that now you know where to go!
I’m still working on the CreepingMeOut layout so sorry if things go a little wonky at times.
Tomorrow I start full time office/computer work. I’m looking forward to it. I’ve never been great at separating work time from free time when I’ve just got my own projects and future development to work on. It takes some of the joy out of “play” when you feel you could be working, and it takes much of the joy out of working if you’re not raking in enough money to make it seem like work. Now anything I do at home will be bonus and not so critical seeming, hopefully things will be fun again.
I will miss having so much time with Elizabeth though, but there’s always time for that!
You’ll have noticed CMO hasn’t been updated in a timely manner in a while. Things have been simultaneously hectic and uneventful. We’ve been on lots of family trips out with Elizabeth – she loves animals! She’s also increasingly demanding (and bossy!). Today she had her first potty-training breakthrough. Obviously we’re proud.
Another big change has been in Ellie’s art. She’s begun drawing things which make (sort of) sense. lots of faces, and disembodied legs. She’s good with a graphics tablet already and I’ve started tentatively teaching her to use a mouse. They have a computer in her next room up at Nursery, so I’m sure the mouse skills will keep her in good stead. About nursery – she loves it there and is getting socially very good. She’s still really shy with new adults but is getting better with that. She’s starting her third day-per-week soon. Growing up so quickly!
I’m building her first PC, waiting on some of the components. I’ll post photos when it’s done. It’ll be a reasonably small HTPC. Anyone got any suggestions for pre-schooler applications? Sofar I’ve only heard Tuxpaint, which was a great idea (thanks Darryl).
Back to my projects though.. Here’s a zombie schoolgirl request I got from Phono Paul, for use on a clubnight poster. Meanwhile – CMO is still active, just slow! I have a new, much shinier version of my portfolio site up at MFDawes.com – A few tiny new things, but largely the same old stuff. Currently I’m concentrating on learning my various tools better, the results of which should be clear soon. I have quite a lot to learn about Cheetah3D and Zbrush. I have an iOS project in the very early stages using GameSalad – It’s very cute and hopefully has quite wide appeal. Obviously that’s what I’m most excited about, but it’s also one of the most terrifying things I’ve had to work on. Learning new systems is such a time investment and there’s always the looming fear that it’ll be time wasted. Lets hope not!
In the past couple of weeks Elizabeth has been learning things alarmingly fast. She knows most of the alphabet now.
I’ve been taking a lot of photos using Hipstamatic – it makes the most mundane things look epic. I love it!
We retired the fire-guard around the TV, so she’s been looking at all the boxes and knows the names of all the appealing looking games. She likes the look of Mario, Ratchet & Clank, Wii Sports, Katamari Forever, Little Big Planet and so on. She’s been playing a bit of EyePet lately too, which she enjoys but gets a bit too boisterous to look after the poor thing properly.
Hopefully once she’s used to being able to access this stuff she’ll stop wanting to take it out and look at it so much. She’s pretty careful with things but she does spread it everywhere!
Testing cross-posting, My WordPress is my main blog now, but I’ll continue sending to Livejournal too if it works well. Fingers crossed!
A few people have asked to see what Ellie draws when she uses the iPhone. Well. Whatever this lot is. She usually gives a running commentary on what she’s drawing, but it doesn’t tend to help..
To begin with I had to navigate the gui, now she can choose brush type/size and colours on her own.. Which is impressive considering it requires different GUI pages to get to them! I like the middle-left one most.
So I’m still watching to see when she starts connecting things together. Right now she often draws a face or an animal but with seemingly no connection between the individual elements or real thought put into what they end up looking like.. Usually a set of spirals in the correct colours.. She has a lot of fun just with making a mess, which is great!