Category: Other

This year I didn’t spend very much time on (new) personal projects, but I had a crazy growth in my professional and personal development, so I thought I’d write about that.

It became a very long post, so I’ve divided it up into a trilogy. Read part 1 and part 2 here. Today, we’re looking at social life:

(more…)

This year I didn’t spend very much time on (new) personal projects, but I had a crazy growth in my professional and personal development, so I thought I’d write about that.

It became a very long post, so I’ve divided it up into a trilogy. Read part 1 and part 3 here. Today, we’re looking at career:

(more…)

This year I didn’t spend very much time on (new) personal projects, but I had a crazy growth in my professional and personal development, so I thought I’d write about that.

It became a very long post, so I’ve divided it up into a trilogy. Read part 2 and part 3 here. Today, we’re looking at creativity:

(more…)

Following the example of some friends, I started keeping track of the media I consume. I thought it would make an interesting list to look back on at the end of the year. So without further ado, here we go.

GAMES

The Witcher 3 – epic.
Oxenfree – creepy.
Disney Infinity 3.0 – not just for kids.
Star Wars Battlefront – pew pew pew.
Firewatch – breath of fresh air.
Mad Max – punch punch vroom.
Batman Arkham Knight – too many buttons.
Rise Of The Tomb Raider – masterpiece.
The Witness – pretty.
Adr1ft – keep breathing.
Californium – trippy.
Inside – brutally beautiful.
Abzu – zen fishing.
Virginia – look at all the cooolooors.
Just Cause 3 – EXPLOSIONS!
Kentucky Route Zero IV – too many words.
Pokemon GO – how could you not.
HITMAN 2016 season 1 – finally distilled perfectly.
No Man’s Sky – why?
DOOM – ballet of death.
Astroneer – fun-to-be.
Deadly Tower Of Monsters – king of pulp.
Sky Force Reloaded – one more game.
Assassin’s Creed Unity – they got me back.
Broken Sword 5 – digging through the mud for gold.
Overcooked – friends fun fantastic.

MOVIES

The Hateful Eight – long.
The Peanuts Movie – rote.
Deadpool – fun!
Inside Out – we get it.
Hardcore Henry – Sharlto Copley <3.
The Hunchback Of Notre Dame – about time.
The Man From U.N.C.L.E. – Oof.
The Secret Life Of Pets – woof.
X-Men: Apocalypse – fine.
Captain America: Civil War – muscles.
Dark Shadows – Depp.
Zootropolis – it’s so fluffay!
The Red Turtle – tears.
Cafe Society – the old days.
Star Trek Beyond – … great??
John Wick – meh.
Deliver Us From Evil – deliver me from this movie.
Escape Plan – old gods.
Snowpiercer – Jesus Christ.
Ant-Man – not bad.
The Finest Hours – fuck the sea.
The Signal – wait, what?
Mission Impossible Rogue Nation – return to form.
Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them – magical.
Arrival – headache.
Non-Stop – just stop.
Edge Of Tomorrow – I want to do it again!
Catch Me If You Can – Dicaprio <3
It Follows – surprising restraint.
La La Land – glee.
Rogue One – nailed it.

TV SHOWS

Mad Men (rewatch) – still unbeatable.
Fargo season 2 – afro on point.
A Young Doctor’s Notebook – more Draper.
Breaking Bad (rewatch) – I AM THE ONE WHO KNOCKS!
Stranger Things – nostalgia.
Mr. Robot season 2 – wait what?
How I Met Your Mother (rewatch) – old friends.
Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency – baffling, but in a good way.

BOOKS AND COMICS

Jerusalem, Guy Deslile – oh man.
Naamloos, Pepijn Lanen – eat sleep rave repeat.
Delilah Dirk And The Turkish Lieutenant, Tony Cliff – adventure.

I want to practice more and do more anatomy and gesture drawings, but this one here was a quick exercise in hands. Particularly the perspective when facing the palm with the fingers bending in is hard to do.

This is a weekly recap of what has been going on in my professional life. It’s to keep track of what I’m up to and to give you a peek at what it’s like being an independent creator. For illustrated depictions of these events, visit my daily comics page.

Last week we were hard at work on the Vrije Vogels beta at Hubbub. The task management software we use offers a useful ‘burndown’ chart, and we were indeed burning down tasks hard, the angle on the chart was pretty steep.

I stopped by the studio on wednesday to check a few things on the iPad build and finish up most of my open tasks.

Inbetween I upgraded the Adventure Creator plugin to its latest version in all my personal projects. Every new release brings some great features, it got me wanting to work on all these projects at once! I’d better continue working on Orlova first.

On friday I went to Nijmegen to talk with Embodied Games again. The first assignment packet was ready so we talked about that, and I got to know some of the other folks in the department over lunch.

Over the weekend the girlfriend and I planned a vacation in two weeks for some hard-earned R&R.

Next week: finishing up this Vrije Vogels sprint, and my first assignment for Embodied Games.

This is a weekly recap of what has been going on in my professional life. It’s to keep track of what I’m up to and to give you a peek at what it’s like being an independent creator. For illustrated depictions of these events, visit my daily comics page.

In week 107 I worked on a prototype for Geometry Girl, the reading app that Niels ‘t Hooft is developing. I built in Marvel, which is a great way to mock up an iOS app. Especially having it right on your phone is great to quickly try things out. It wasn’t easy to put all our ideas into their framework, but it should be enough for the programmers to get started on the real thing.

Once that was done, the new sprint for Hubbub’s museum game (now titled Vrije Vogels) was on the doorstep last week. It was good to see the Hubbub guys again, the last sprint had been a while ago now.

During that week I also went to Nijmegen to talk with a group inside the Radboud University calling themselves Embodied Games. They’re working on gesture-based games to help kids and youngsters learn a variety of skills. And they were looking for a freelance artist and designer! So I went there for an interview, and it looks like we’ll be working together soon. It kinda came out of nowhere, but I’m excited to start working with these people, they have a lot of energy.

Next week: going hard on the Vrije Vogels to-do list.

Trying out a more detailed color-only style this morning and practicing hair rendering with my new custom Photoshop brush. I’ve tried a bunch of custom brushes in the past (Kyle’s are great) and I finally figured out what all the options do kinda, so now I have a brush called the Hedgefield which is perfectly tailored to my drawing style. And paired with the Lazy Nezumi Pro plugin my linework looks better than ever.

This is a weekly recap of what has been going on in my professional life. It’s to keep track of what I’m up to and to give you a peek at what it’s like being an independent creator. For illustrated depictions of these events, visit my daily comics page.

Welp looks like I forgot to write a blogpost last week, so here’s a combo platter for you.

Two weeks ago we started polishing up the latest Home Rule beta so we could playtest with it last wednesday. I wasn’t present myself because I had an aquisition meeting with another client but I hear it went really well! Just a few things to work on now before we have a version of the game that can launch in the museum. And two more museums have expressed interest to join the pilot program, so good times.

After that my slate was pretty much clean for a week or two so I mostly spent that time setting up my new laptop which finally arrived and subsequently playing the Witcher 3 on it. It was a glorious time.

I also confirmed my appearance on the dutch radio show Opium in two weeks, so today I’ve been brainstorming ideas for the game I will be making during that week. It’s gonna be exciting!

Next week: probably not a lot going on seeing as it will be above 30 degrees celsius all week…

About a year ago, I was sitting at a sidewalk cafe with some friends, and one of them made a quip about how I’m writing a semi-autobiographical comic. He was referring to DinerDate. Up to that point I had never even considered it as autobiographical, but when I thought about it I realized just how right he was, how much of myself had seeped into DD over the years.

Two years earlier, right after the original DinerDate ended, I started writing the sequel. I chose to write something closer to my heart this time, so I moved the setting to Amsterdam and changed the tone of the narrative. I wrote about 50 strips over the next few months following the lives of a group of friends, but it felt like something was missing so I left it to gestate and decided that I could probably only ever finish it if I moved to Amsterdam myself. Back then I was still living with my parents and had no plans of moving until I finished college.

Cut to today,  my senior year, I have now lived in Amsterdam 8 months running. I hadn’t planned on it but the opportunity just sort of presented itself. And what’s more, I find what I had written all those years ago to be frighteningly accurate to what I have experienced here so far.

For one, I wrote about a foreign exchange student moving in at the start of the story; next thing I end up with roommates that regularly host foreign travellers. I actually met two travellers who are not even that dissimilar from the character I wrote. There have even been times where I found myself uttering lines from a few strips verbatim in real life. Those were surreal moments, where it felt like I was living what I wrote.

It’s been an amazing experience so far, but it also worries me; I don’t want DD turning into some sort of twilight version of my life. Luckily there are still plenty of differences. But right now I gotta focus on graduating first (one month to go!), after that I’m jonesin’ to get back into the webcomics game.

The other day I was on my way to a meeting with our programmers at the TU in Delft. My train was approaching Rotterdam station. It was early and I had overslept, so I was travelling on autopilot.

When my train came to a halt, I disembarked and descended the stairs into the hallway, looking for some sort of signage to indicate which train I had to get on next.

Upon reaching the bottom, I found myself in a long concrete hallway with a low ceiling. Memories engulfed me like a warm bath.

Suddenly, I was no longer here. I was no longer now. I was back then. The only other time I had been at Rotterdam station.

Then, it had marked the start of something beautiful. But back here, in the now, I found myself at the other end of that chapter. So much had happened in between.

And I wished so much I could be there again.

I found the signage. Track 5. The 11:05 to Delft station.

It was 10:59. No time to waste.

That’s usually the go-to joke when someone mentions twitter. People seem to have the general idea that twitter is best used for keeping track of your pooping habits (actually that’s what Penny Arcade seems to think aswell), and sure, twitter can be just for that (although I don’t know why you would want to. Unless you…y’know…swing that way), but there is so much more you can use it for.

Chris Brogan made an interesting analogy: Twitter is like your Director’s Commentary. It can give extra meaning to what you do.

When I started using twitter, I used it to quickly jot down random thoughts or things I was working on. They were very short and to the point. Almost like a sort of diary. Most of them only made sense to me, and that was fine, because it wasn’t like anybody was reading them anyway. That’s in essence what twitter is about; asking yourself: What is on my mind?” But since then twitter has become so much more.

There are many ways to enjoy twitter. You could use it for:

Sharing
When I find an interesting or funny link or quote, or have something to show or announce myself, I post it to my twitter for other people to see, and as a sort of note for myself later. People often post inspiring quotes or funny anecdotes aswell, and that might be just be that little pick-me-up you needed.

Communicating
As you start to follow more people, and people follow you, sometimes conversations arise. You see something you want to respond to, or someone responds to something you posted. Twitter makes it easy to reply to eachother and share interests, perhaps striking up a new friendship in the process.

Admiring
I also follow people on twitter that I admire or who are working on things I am interested in, like tech bloggers, game developers or comic artists (and even musicians or politicians). Especially with bigger names it’s great to get an insight in their lives and read about how they spend their day. It’s a form of inspiration in it’s own way. And you feel more connected with these people for it.

Leisa Reichelt effectively describes this as ‘ambient intimacy’. I like that term.

Learning
Just as you can follow people, you can follow -or ‘track’- certain phrases. Say you’re interested in a certain book. All you have to do is track it’s title, and you get a notification whenever ANYBODY on twitter mentions it. Hey, if you’re lucky the author himself might be on twitter!

Getting answers
Twitter is great for asking questions to a large and random group of people. “What’s the best HDTV?”, “Who is your favourite artist?”, “How do these crazy airplane seatbelts works?!”

There’s always somebody with an answer.

And the other way around it’s a great way to help people.

To me, twitter is the pinnacle of Web 2.0. With so many users all across the world, breaking news often appears on twitter before anywhere else. When there is a big conference or event going on, you can get news and impressions as it happens. You can seek out likeminded people and see what is on their mind in realtime. You can learn more about your friends than you might in real life. And you can let everybody know what is going on in your life at a moment’s notice.

It’s a collection of snapshots of your thoughts, what you felt at that moment in time. And to me, reading that back a few years later is much more valuable than just flipping through a bunch of pictures.

In closing, my favourite twitter ‘app’: Twitstori. It finds tweets (twitter posts) bases on 6 keywords; Love, Hate, Think, Believe, Feel and Wish. The result vary from mundane musings to profound prose. It’s hard to put into words, you have to see for yourself.

Today I turned 20.

Looking back on this last year, I have changed a lot.

I’ve started college. That may have been the best decision I ever made. I am doing something everyday that I truly love. I found new friends I never would have thought I’d meet. I’ve been to places I’ve never would have thought I’d go to. I’ve done things I never would have thought I’d do. I feel like I’ve only just started living.

In the next 3 or 4 remaining years of my academic life (god willing), there are a few more things I want to accomplish.

I want to get my own place. I love my parents to bits, but I’m starting to outgrow my little sanctuary there. I want to be able to stand on my own feet.

And I want to become the best I can be at what I do.

Yesterday morning, I was at college at 8 AM, even though it was completely unnescessary. There was no actual class, I didn’t learn anything. I could have stayed in bed until noon and it would not have mattered. But I was there. And instead of getting myself down about effort I did for nothing, I felt a strange sense of pride. A rededication to being the best person I can be. And I got a lot of things done because of it.

I feel like everyday now I turn a little more into the person I wanted to be since I was a little kid. I never wanted to be a kid, I always wanted to be an adult. I wanted those things that are in my grasp now. And I never look back with regret. Because inside, that kid is still there. I carry him with me everywhere I go. And he stares out into the world with wide open eyes, amazed at who he has become.

Music can be a great tool to find inspiration.

I often get ‘visions’ of scenes or stories when I’m listening to music, and I’ve heard others say the same. Like I know what would go good with this music, visually speaking. It’s like music triggers your mind to pierce through the mist in the back of your head and offer you a glimpse of what could be.

In his book The War on Art, Steven Pressfield describes inspiration as something ever-present around us, inconspicuous to the untrained eye (or ear). Only those skilled in the craft can pluck it out of the air and shape it into something extraordinary. They’re not yet finished product by any means, just concepts and ideas that could become something more in the right hands.

I like that metaphor, mysticism aside. You could argue this is an almost religious approach to something as ‘simple’ as creativity, but it’s comforting in a way, looking at inspiration as something ethereal that is always there for the taking -under the right circumstances-

My relationship with music is not like most I don’t think. Like I described above, music can strongly influence my mindset. Perhaps that is why I can appreciate so many varieties of music; I value songs primarily for the mood they evoke. Lyrics play a big part in this. While I can appreciate pop music songs if they happen to be well-written or because the melody ‘goes well’ with a certain mindset or activity, it’s not like I can relate much to tales of ‘bitches’ and ‘bling’ that you hear on MTV a lot these days.

So I’ve been exploring the indie scene in search of a new sound. It’s a new generation of singer-songwriters who more often than not find fame via the Interwubs. I follow a few artists on YouTube, but the one who really turned me in this direction was Colbie Callait. She started out singing into her webcam on MySpace. I’m sure you’ve heard her song “Bubbly” many times on the radio or on some variation of MTV. It’s a very solid song, and the rest of her repetoire is pretty good. But two recent favourites are Jamie Scott & the Town, and A Fine Frenzy.

Jamie Scott is a British artist in the line of James Morisson, John Mayer, James Blunt, etc. It’s hard to describe, he writes very soulful, melancholical ballads that at times remind me strongly of Maroon 5.

And then there’s A Fine Frenzy, aka 22-year-old Seattle-born self-taught singer-songwriter Alison Sudol (that enough prefixes for ya?). I am absolutely in love with her music. If you watch music channels, you’ve probably been bombarded with her new video for Almost Lover.

Her music is often described as heartfelt and hypnotic, and I underwrite those connotations. She writes such profound, magical lyrics and evocative melodies. I was so enamored with this song I picked up her debut album, One Cell in the Sea, and I’ve been listening to it continuously the last few days. Just looking at the tracklisting is a treat. The songs are almost exactly what you’d imagine when you read their titles.

When I started listening to the first track, titled Come On, Come Out, the sun just started shining in through my window as she sang

Come on, come out
The weather is warm
A spot in the shade
Away from it all
Watching the sky
You’re watching a painting coming to life
Shifting and shaping
Stopping the time
Rushing, waiting
Leave it behind
It all goes passing by

And I felt just like it was summer.

Just wanted to put that out there.

What’s also nice about these types of artists is that they are much more approachable. Alison is even on Twitter! They just seem much more ‘friendly’ that way, more earnest perhaps. They ‘made’ themselves. And for that they have my respect.

I hope you enjoy these artists as much as I do and find some inspiration through their work.