| Aliases | mental, MenTaLguY, MenTaLsaN (when I'm feeling pretentious). I've used various names in the Open Source world since the mid-90's. |
|---|---|
| Location | Undisclosed location on the US eastern seaboard. |
| mental at rydia dot net, or use the feedback form. | |
| Age | 26 |
| Hardware | VA Linux custom workstation (if these things interest you: 500MHz Intel Celeron processor, 512MiB RAM, 20GiB HDD) |
| Software | Debian GNU/Linux; GIMP 1.3; Inkscape CVS; Batik 1.5beta3; Mozilla Firefox 0.8; nvi 1.79; autotrace 0.29; xsltproc 1.0.18; GNU Make 3.79.1 |
| Interests | programming, Free Software, music composition, graphic art, sequential art, writing, poetry, Tae Kwon Do, Anime, comparative religion and mythology, to name a few... |
| Favorite Artists/Writers/Poets | JRR Tolkien, Flannery O'Connor, Edgar Allen Poe, Alfred Hitchcock, Scott McCloud, Edward Hopper, El Greco, Bronwen Wallace, Saint Francis of Assisi, Hiyao Miyazaki, and many others... |
Origins of Lunar 8
Lunar 8 started life years ago as a some friends and I were bored on IRC. We were just playing around at first, but with time intricate themes, plots and backstories developed and the whole thing took on a life of its own.
When I picked up art again (after an ill-concieved hiatus), the material we'd developed still interested me intensely. With the group's blessing, I assembled a narrative from the fragments and finished the unfinished story.
Often dark, occasionally whimsical, I hope the promise underlying the narrative becomes evident by the end. Grace is manifest in even the darkest tragedy, and redemption is open to even the most unlikely people.
Making the Manga
The process is probably more complicated than it really needs to be. :P
I draw of the artwork in pencil before scanning and tracing it by hand in Sodipodi (or sometimes automatically with autotrace). I do have a tablet, but I don't use it much yet.
Sodipodi also gets used for page layout. I run each page layout through an XSLT filter to replace the placeholder images with the real ones before doing the final rendering with Batik.
Finally, slicing the rendered image and laying out those slices in HTML pages is handled by a piece of custom software I wrote in C.
Browser Compatability
I mostly test this site in Firefox, but any browser that supports CSS positioning should work acceptably (e.g. Opera or Safari). If there are any problems in other browsers, I'll certainly try to fix them as soon as possible. Let me know.
Mozilla Firefox, Netscape 7, Safari, Konqueror and Opera
Should work fine.
Internet Explorer for Macintosh
Some minor layout bugs, but works fine otherwise.
Internet Explorer for Windows
Internet Explorer for Windows is the only modern browser that's given me much trouble, because it has severe bugs handling alpha transparency in images. The workaround is pretty heinous, but it does work.
(...and yes, according to MSDN it is the official way in IE...)
Have a look at style/alpha.htc and style/msie.css if you're morbidly curious. I'm putting the HTML component (alpha.htc) I wrote into the public domain, so feel free to use it for your own site if you want.
n.b. Apache and other non-Microsoft web servers usually need to be configured to serve .htc files with the MIME type text/x-component before this workaround will function. It's not the default.
Netscape 4 and earlier
Just... don't. Many sites work in Netscape 4, but only because the designers took great pains to work around the bugs. I only do Lunar 8 in my spare time, so I don't have that luxury. IE is bad enough...