I’ve had a few days now to think about Taral’s passing. It’s still kind of hard to make it real. Not for the reason you’d expect—that he was always around and now he’s gone—but essentially the opposite. I saw so little of him in the past several years that his being gone is still pretty much just a conceptual thing. I guess that’s just how it’s going to be for me.

It’s not that it doesn’t sadden me. It sure does. ‘Unique’ is an overused word… it needs to be held in reserve for moments like this. Taral really was unique in my experience. He really wasn’t like anyone else I’ve ever known. That the option to tap him here on FurAffinity, ask if he’s available on an upcoming Saturday and get myself down to Parkdale is now gone forever is finally really beginning to settle in. That comfortable forever-mañana, no longer a tomorrow, has become the forever-yesterday. I wish now that I’d availed myself of it at least a little more often.

So why didn’t I? I had a long absence from Taral that ended not quite ten years ago, and at that point I began seeing him not exactly regularly, but often enough. Five or six times a year, anyway. Getting to his neighbourhood and trying to park there was kind of a chore, and he was rarely up and functional before two in the afternoon. More than half the day was effectively shot by the time the visit was just starting. Given his circumstances for most of the time I knew him, the onus was definitely on you to make the effort and visit him. Crossing the continent on a plane to go to a con he’d do at the drop of a hat. Crossing the city on a bus to hang at your place for the day? Not so much. At least not in my experience. So the day I was down there and knocking on his door and phoning from the hall and getting no response for most of half an hour, when he’d known I was coming, was kind of the last straw… though not that I thought so at the time; it just turned out that way. I never again could quite muster the urge to plow through traffic for an hour only to risk being stood up at the three-yard line. I wish I had. But I didn’t. Given that I’m told that that same lack of response was what prompted his unfortunate discovery for another, far better friend of his than me, I find myself now ashamed that, at the time, the idea he might have been in trouble rather than just sleeping through an appointment with me didn’t occur to me. It’s a good thing he never had to count on me.

There’s also the aspect that, quite frankly, I found it hard to see him the way he’d become. It was pity… I never told him that; I don’t think he would have wanted it; but it’s true just the same. When I first met him—he seemed old to me at the time, yet he was considerably younger then than I am now—he was, sure, heavy (look who’s talking), but he was robust, impressively full of energy, charging around and in love with long walks. His predilection for not taking public transit wasn’t down to meanness or anything—though he was picky about how he spent his money—but genuinely did come down to his opinion that why should you ride anyplace that was within comfortable walking distance? And for him, back then, that was upwards of two or three miles both ways. But by the time I was back seeing him again, he wasn’t like that anymore. The intervening years had taken a real toll on his health, and by then it was taxing on him just getting around the tiny one-bedroom apartment he occupied for roughly 35 years. Gone were the brisk walks around Parkdale with their running commentaries on history and societal observations. He had a motorized chair scooter he dubbed “Travelling Matt” after the eponymous Fraggle character. He was harder of hearing than before and his dental problems, already an issue when I met him in his early 40s, by then were abysmal. He got around—he insisted on it—but it sure wasn’t easy or anything like as enjoyable for him. Or, I confess, for me. In spite of that, he didn’t wallow in self-pity; he cursed the darkness a lot but he also lit all the candles against it he manageably could. He didn’t seek pity but he was glad to accept a leg-up. He was never a martyr; he was always practical about his limitations, be they circumstantial, financial, or physical. But still, it was hard for me to see him reduced to that, and one more reason to hedge on hooking up.

That said, I don’t remember him ever inviting me to swing by, either; at least not in recent years, so the fault’s not all on one side. Rather, we corresponded through notes on FurAffinity or email. It wasn’t often, but frequent enough that there was a sense of a long, protracted conversation that could easily be picked up whenever one or the other of us found something worth saying. So I guess that’s something, at least.

I guess that’s enough of confession and excuse-making for now. Let me tell you about the man I knew. These are, please remember, my own personal recollections and impressions… they’re subjective and by no means meant to be definitive. Taral was a complicated person, like anyone else, and he touched everyone who knew him in his own unique way (there’s that word again). So, here goes.

Despite living in more or less the same city, I knew Taral first more by reputation than actual acquaintance. The owner of the suburban comic store I frequented knew my tastes and one weekend I found in my box a small hand-produced fanzine; a few sheets of 8½”x11” paper photocopied, stapled together in the middle and folded over. It was unlike anything I’d seen before; it purported to be an interview with Rocky the Flying Squirrel—or rather, the rodent actress who played him, “Jasmine”. The author, also the artist, had taken a simple childish cartoon character and imbued him, now “her”, with an interesting, well-rounded life, very faintly nodding to June Foray. I was enchanted, impressed with both the art and the writing. The creator was one “Taral Wayne”. With a name like that, I assumed he was some young man of perhaps mixed English and Arab heritage.

Several years passed before I found out any different. As I came into the fandom back in those primitive days just prior to the dawn of the internet, I began to encounter more and more of his work. I remember being in touch with a Georgian artist who really had it in for Taral, and to curry favour with him, a friend and I did a parody of Plush—a fanzine of Taral’s that the Georgian guy sent to us—that we called Flush. Not long after that, Taral reached out to me personally with greetings and extending an invitation to a fan get-together at his home. I made the journey with some trepidation, half-expecting a public dressing down… not to mention the fact that his address made it obvious he lived on the 21st floor of some building. But, of course, it all went well, and if Taral ever saw Flush, he was far too big and sanguine a personality to be bothered by it. The buzzing of gnats to a moose.

What I encountered was not a young artist, but a seasoned middle aged one. There was nothing of the Middle East about the man, self-titled “Taral”; he was in fact of a thoroughly Scottish background with the given name Wayne and the family name Macdonald; a name I heard him use in reference to himself in the thirty years I knew him probably less than a dozen times. He wasn’t ashamed of it so much as he outgrew it. It was the name of his father… a far lesser man who let down his family in general and his son in particular in nearly every way that wouldn’t actually result in prison time. I never got the impression that Taral hated the old man; he simply took him as an object lesson of the sort of person he didn’t intend to be. And if Taral was never well-off or lived as large as he would have liked, it was due to the shots he called, and called with his eyes wide open. He might have lamented his circumstances but I don’t think he would ever have changed any of the major decisions he made in, and about, his life. That was something I genuinely admired about him.

He was quite open to me about his younger days, even when we were first acquainted. I once made an off-colour joke to him that resulted in him blithely mentioning he was still a virgin; to him, it wasn’t embarrassing, it was simply a fact and one he felt entirely fine with disclosing to a relatively new friend. I was always impressed with his candor. He had a way of stating things plainly that, even when they were less than complimentary, never felt petty or cutting. He was just calling it as he saw it, without venom or rancor or, on the other hand, false flattery or obsequiousness. When Taral paid you a compliment… which in my own experience was pretty rare… it really meant something. You tended to remember it.

But the days of his youth were days of extreme financial and residential insecurity. Taral’s family moved around a lot, often to stay ahead of creditors. In the city, out of the city; into the countryside that fueled his imagination. An open field in a neighbouring town, long since vanished beneath a subdivision, became the site where, circa 1970, his imaginary alter-ego/significant other, Saara Mar, first landed when she “discovered” Earth from the Kjola perspective. I recall him once taking me past a veterinary clinic on Bloor Street near Islington Avenue where his family both lived and worked in the late 60s, when it was still kind of the boonies. It was situated on the very banks of the Humber River, and as a teenager Taral spent the late summer night-till-mornings exploring the river and its tributaries, wearing perforce very little or nothing at all, experiencing the water, the soil, the rocks, the mud, the vegetation. There’s more than a little of the romance of those moments of total freedom reflected in themes he returned to again and again in his art; things that resonated with me. I envied him that; the places and the times he lived in when he was young.

Though, as I’ve said, not the circumstances. As I recall, it was in that same place and time that he more or less abandoned public education. It wasn’t that he couldn’t keep up; far from it. He found it boring and a waste of time. They were loading him with pedantic busywork that was intellectually far beneath him, and so he simply quit. Some years ago I heard the word “autodidact” in the Tragically Hip song “It Can’t Be Nashville Every Night”, and I was driven to look it up. I discovered it means someone who’s self-taught, particularly on academic matters. Before I ever closed the dictionary I was thinking of Taral. It was exactly the right word. Taral’s skills, Taral’s knowledge, Taral’s concerns and grasp of the world… they were largely his own discoveries, or even his own inventions. Probably more than anyone else I’ve ever known, Taral Wayne shaped himself… right down to the name he adopted.

Taral’s father was not only unreliable—financially and maritally—he tended to be belligerent when he was drinking. One evening when Taral was about 20 his father was being abusive towards his mother and he finally popped the old man and laid down the law. Things changed after that. His father drifted away, but his mother and sisters never resented Taral for it. It was overdue in everyone’s minds… God knows, maybe even his father’s. Taral did see him every now and again for many years afterward, but eventually lost track of him. He casually wondered about the old man to me from time to time; what he might be up to; was he even still alive.

But his father abandoning the family saw them move to assisted housing in Willowdale where Taral lived for about a decade. It was there his career as an artist took flight, including things like creating that Rocky interview that first brought him to my attention. As time went by his sisters married and moved out, leaving Taral alone with their mom. When she passed away, the city decided the place was too big to justify just one person living in it, so they moved him out of it and into the one-person apartment down in Parkdale that, as it turned out, he was to live in for the rest of his life. He’d only been there a few years when I first met him.

Taral was interested in me as a young local artist. I was flunking out of animation school at the time and ended up with spotty employment in the industry, but the hobby work I was doing attracted enough of his attention for him to call me down to where he held court for us all and bring me into the fold. He largely lost interest in what I did after a while, which I admit has always bothered me. Like him, I put a lot of work and a lot of time into world-building, and I was proud of what I came up with. I wrote long stories about characters I cared for passionately and I put a lot of effort into my art. Can I be brave and honest enough to admit I desired his praise and attention and was resentful that he withheld it from me and lavished it on artists who—by my estimation—put far less of themselves into what they actually did, and yet lit Taral up and garnered his attention and correspondence and collaboration. There’s no accounting for taste; I just wasn’t quite his. I was a peer, I suppose, but not an illustrious one. So when he loudly complained, as he was occasionally prone to do, that he deserved better from the Hugo awarding committee than to perennially lose out to the latest popular flash-in-the-pan fan artist, let me just say that in a different context I understood just exactly how he felt, and I indulged myself in a little quiet schadenfreude every time. But that’s just between us, wink wink.

For myself, I was always fascinated with the world he created, even if that fascination was never reciprocal. He called it Willow Run: an alternate Earth with a rather different history, geography, and a vast array of non-human sapient beings living peacefully, even romantically, beside and among us. He had maps; towns, countries, landscapes with interesting little wonders hinting at adventures that simply couldn’t be had in our own mundane world. He had characters of all different species that he made up, from godlike Kjola down to humble house gamins. He spent hours designing the houses he imagined suitable for his real-world friends to inhabit in this world of his imagination. The one he cooked up for me was the upper floor of an old house, a walk-up apartment with several cozy rooms that was situated above a storefront on the main drag, if memory serves. That was quite a gift. If he didn’t care much for the imaginary world that I inhabited, at least he thought enough of me to make a place for me in the midst of his.

What frustrated me about it was that, having created this vast canvas upon which to work, he did practically nothing with it. One of his biggest frustrations expressed to me was how little regard the world gave him as a writer. I spent quite a bit of time trying to gently needle him into taking this magnificent vehicle he’d created, all chrome and fins and molded accents, out on the road. But having built it, he never seemed to be able to think of where to take it. He’d never risk denting its perfection by taking a journey in it. It just stayed parked in his files, in his sketches, in his head, and went nowhere. And now it never will.

Instead, a great deal of his creative efforts went into franchises created by other people, which always astonished and bewildered me. Strong female characters—particularly cute ones—held a special fascination for him, and early into our acquaintance, the Power Puff Girls became the locus of his muse. He drew them. Plotted stories about them. Lived them beyond their world all the way into his; he had a penchant for mashups that I just never shared… for me, a worldset is a worldset, each hermetically sealed and self-contained, and never the twain shall meet. Not him. His Saara Mar was just as likely to wind up on an adventure with Scrooge McDuck on the moon, the two of them flanked by Blossom, Buttercup, and Bubbles, as she was to be with his own Tangel or Petl back in Willow Run. After that, Sawyer from Cats Don’t Dance caught his eye and was drafted into his efforts for a time. In recent years, he largely immersed himself in the world of Fraggle Rock, writing himself into the scenario in the thinly-veiled self-insert of Darl, the human-cum-Fraggle paramour of Kiki who, I gather, slowly goes native under her guidance even as he exposes her to the wonders we’ve wrought in “Outer Space”. He shared these stories with me, among scores of other people, and seemed forever disappointed and frustrated by the lack of response and engagement they inspired. I can only speak for myself, but… Fraggles? First of all, it’s somebody else’s world, and one that was largely explored, mapped out, and mined out when I was still in high school. Try as I might (at least initially), I found it hard to invest much time or interest in what was, in truth, Taral writing about an idealized version of himself engaging with stock characters (the Adventurous One, the Impulsive One, the Pessimistic One, the Nurturing One, etc., etc.) from 30 or 40 years ago in a world that, even back then, I found a little claustrophobic in terms of scope and potential. I kept waiting for him to get bored with it and maybe, finally, start building something with all that timber he created almost as long ago in the form of Willow Run. But he never got tired of the Fraggles, and in the end, that’s the creative home he moved into and lived in for the last decade or so of his life. What can I say? It made him happy. I only wish the wonders he genuinely created in and of himself had given him as much joy and provided as much inspiration. It’s selfish, I know, but I would have enjoyed that. I would have adored it.

Oh, well. If he was a little impenetrable in terms of why folks weren’t enraptured with his work in the world of Fraggle Rock, I have to give him credit for the depth of his perception when it came to the great sweeping arc of the real world. There are a few observations of his that bare mentioning here, I think. For instance, I remember long ago discussing Quebec separatism with him. I was of the opinion that was an open sore that would never heal: a significant fraction of each new generation would take up the cause and it would start all over again every 10 or 15 years or so. But Taral said no; he saw it as largely a spent force—that it had achieved much of what it set out to do, that Quebec had acquired a large degree of autonomy and secured its language and culture within Canada, and that younger Quebecois would largely think of it as a fait accompli and see themselves as having the best of both worlds: ‘a free Quebec within a united Canada’, as the joke used to go. Why gamble all that just to get a flag on a table at the UN? And from the looks of the last 30 years or so, he seems to have been right. Later, when I said the US was going to just walk into Iraq, get what it wanted, and be done with the place in six months, he told me he saw the thing as a quagmire that would eat up American lives, American money, and American resources both political and materiel, and that it would be so for years, a lot like Vietnam… all to no great success. And, again, he turned out to be right. More recently he told me that the future he saw for the United States wasn’t one of open and official split, right and left, urban and rural, into two actual separate countries… that the US was just too big, too entrenched in the mind, and too useful a ‘tool’ to dismantle. Rather, he said, states would simply increasingly go their own way, ignoring the federal government whenever and wherever they could, forming internal alliances and seeking their own understanding and engagement with the outside world insofar as they were able. And in recent years, it really has started to look like that. Liberal states kept legalizing pot, no matter what Washington said. Conservative states kept cooking up new approaches to ban abortion and insist Christianity back into the schools and other aspects of public life. Right now there’s increasing pushback… maybe the last gasp of trying to, in Lincoln’s words, make the place “all one thing, or all the other”. It might succeed. Or the fever might break, sort of the way it did in Canada with regard to Quebec, with a blasé live-and-let-live shrug of disengagement. Time will tell, but I’ve been impressed that he called that shot and to a large extent, that’s what I’ve seen. What I mean is, that’s a pretty good batting average for a high school dropout who never went to college, only read and observed and thought. I’ve always lamented the professor and best-selling visionary he might have been if he’d had the ambition and the perspicacity to jump through the hoops society demands of those who get there. I really think he could have made it. He was that caliber.

So four thousand words later, how do I sum this up? If you’re still with me, what should I leave you with? What’s the thing I’m really going to remember about Taral? The wit, the intelligence, the talent? The self-assured, uncompromising probable-genius who spent his life buying up the treasures of a childhood he yearned for but never had? A solitary man who leaves behind scores of friends who’ll miss him and cherish his art for years to come? All of that was, and remains, enviable. Not one person in ten thousand can lay claim to that. But finally, it’s not those things that touch me the most, the deepest.

One of the last times I saw him, Taral and I went out to an Indian restaurant in his neighbourhood we both enjoyed. My treat, of course, despite the government benefits of his “retirement” kicking in to the point that he took up a hobby of collecting Roman coins, some of them gold. Like I said, he was picky about how he spent his money (not yours, though). As we ate, Taral did most of the talking, as usual, and the conversation, if I can call it that, turned to the reminiscences of his youth, a subject I’ve always enjoyed and was happy enough to indulge him in. He took us back to a time when he was old enough to be perceptive and responsible, but still young enough to be denied any real say in things or effective agency to act. The family was living somewhere rural again, happily looking after a large array of pets… cats and dogs, needful strays and trusting hearts. Then once again, circumstances reared their ugly heads and compelled the Macdonalds to pack up and move on. The notion of the pets coming with them was, of course, out of the question. One of the last acts of his father on that occasion was to have all the pets gathered up and euthanized. Taral related all this to me in that matter-of-fact businessman’s baritone of his.

Now, Taral was not really a person I would have said wore his emotions on his sleeve. Sure, he could get bold and even animated making a point or ridiculing the absurdity of some person or situation, but maudlin and sentimental he was not. So when his storytelling abruptly stopped and he set down his fork, I took notice. I watched in amazement as his eyes misted up, and he glanced away, and for ten, maybe fifteen terrible, beautiful seconds, I held my tongue as this man, this archetype of self-possession and actualization, became again the storm-tossed boy in that little family lifeboat, captained by a profligate drunk; powerless to prevent a monstrous act of heartless disregard masquerading as compassion. It was that moment, and heaven knows how many others like it, that made the man sitting across from me… now just a memory himself. A man who took for himself the power to say who he was, what would matter to him, what he would and would not do, and what his life would be, all to the best of his abilities and the limits of his resources. And some of us, we got to know him, and even call him friend.

Unique. That’s the word.

I've never liked the remote controller that came with the Cintiq Pro 24 I got last year. It never acted like part of the tablet, unlike the ones built into my old Cintiq 24 HDT. You have to turn it on separately even when it's USB connected; it shuts itself off if you don't use it frequently enough (and you can't turn that off or change the latency period), and I was forever forgetting what function I'd paired to which button. Essentially the only use I had for it was varying my brush size.

Well, I've been looking on and off for a replacement for it and I finally found one, the Xencelabs Quick Keys. (One-minute video the company made introducing it: (https://youtu.be/6LUAa_ZXT_E).) This thing is really impressive. You can either use the Bluetooth dongle with it, or connect it by USB—where it willturn on with either the computer, or the Cintiq if it's plugged into that. It has a dial with a button in the middle that can be set to four different uses (I'll be mainly using it for brush size, of course), and eight buttons that can be set to five different sets of uses per application profile, stepped through using a ninth button for that purpose. And you can have as many application profiles as you like, and not just for art programs... anything. Browsers, video editors, word processors... When you switch between windows, it automatically detects what program you're using and either switches to that profile or to the "global" profile if there isn't one. But it also does something I've never seen on such a device before... generally, you can only map one modifier key or one keystroke combination to any button press. But this thing will let you map strings of key press combos... for example, to create a layer below the current layer in Clip Studio Paint is two commands; create new layer and move layer down... but I now have a single key that does those things in that order with a single key press. And maybe coolest of all, it has an LED screen up the middle that TELLS YOU WHAT EACH KEY CURRENTLY IS MAPPED TO DO, as named by you (hark, the herald angels sing!).

They put an astonishing amount of good thought into this thing, and if I'm willing to spend some time programming the keys, I could really get a lot of work out of this. The only caveat is that some people have had some build quality issues (it still scores well over 4 out of 5 on Amazon), and I was hit by that with my first one. The dial didn't reliably size up and down; it was miscalibrated somehow and sort of just bipped back and forth between adjacent sizes rather than going consistently down and consistently up. So I'm returning that one today; meanwhile, the replacement showed up Tuesday and so far it works just fine. As long as you get one that's build right, it's a heck of a piece of thinking. You don't even have to be a digital artist for this thing to be a boon to you.

So I've been playing around with Premiere lately. Have a boo. :)

https://www.deviantart.com/qtmarx/a.....n-On-942778135

I've been using Adobe Premiere Pro for something like 15 years now, more or less. Nearly all of what I've done with it has been basic taking footage and cutting it up and spitting something out at the end. I've done a few interesting things here and there like credits crawls and masking effects, but it's been pretty rudimentary.

Necessity is the mother of invention, as they say. Well, I guess I really haven't "invented" anything, so maybe "Necessity is the mother of education" is more apt in my case. Last month my boss came to me and one of my coworkers and tasked us with interviewing another department and creating a video from the footage for the company's quarterly meeting. We got about an hour's worth of footage on our cell phones. Since I have a subscription to Adobe CC and I've got some minor professional experience in multimedia production, I took on the task of doing the editing.

It was blast. It took about three weeks and more revisions that I could keep track of, but after a couple false starts, I finally produced something of some polished quality that came in nicely under the ten-minute mark limit. It was played at the meeting and got a wonderful positive response, and we have a green light to do it for the meetings coming up in the new year.

I've learned a lot about Premiere in the past month or so and right now I'm hungry to learn more. I'm picking up a lot of interesting new techniques and learning about things I didn't even know Premiere could do, despite having it for well over a decade. I'm hoping to incorporate some of what I learn in the little things I put up over on DA from time to time. When applicable, I'll drop in links from the related artwork here.

I don't think I've ever actually written a journal entry here on FA. I keep seeing all my friends here doing it. Why not me? :)

So. About four years ago now, I managed to get up and running on a second-hand Cintiq 24 Touch. I, and a couple of friends of mine, have noticed a marked uptick in the quality of what I've been producing since then. Having this kind of space to work and create in really has improved what I do.

A little background, if you'll indulge me. I started drawing and working digitally in a half-serious way around 2010, when I found a guy locally who was reselling refurb Toshiba M400s. These were little laptops with a pressure-sensitive capacitive screen you could draw on with a hideaway pen. PaintTool SAI was making the rounds and I got a hold of it and started. But something I felt I really wanted was the ability to zoom, pan, and rotate with finger gestures, and the M400s were not touchscreens.

Enter the ASUS EP121. This was a tablet computer with a Bluetooth keyboard (which had a terrible propensity to disconnect from the computer). This computer also had a pressure-sensitive hideaway pen you could use to draw, and it was a touchscreen, so at long last, I had both a pressure-sensitive way to draw and a means to arrange the view just using gestures. That suited me for about four or five years, during which time I discovered and fell in love with Clip Studio Paint.

A bit later on, in 2016, a friend advised me that finding an old Surface Pro 2 would be a good idea. Smaller, lighter, a bit quicker than the EP121s, and with everything else I was looking for. That was largely what I used for the next few years. Briefly I used another laptop, the Lenovo MIIX 520, but ultimately, something about it didn't really click.

Then I got up and running with the Cintiq 24 Touch. It's been a fantastic means for creating art ever since. But me being me, it's always nagged me that, if anything went wrong with it, I'd be dropping back down to the Surface Pro 2. I've picked it up from time and time and at point, I find it very difficult to work with. So I've looked, from time to time, to find someone looking to get rid of another Cintiq I could use as a backup. Part of the problem is that, for me, it really needs to be a Touch model, and those ones tend be rare. Most artists seem to get by without it, but it's been a part of how I draw now for about ten years, and it would be very difficult to get used to zooming, panning, and rotating by other means. It would interrupt my flow almost constantly.

Recently, I found a guy out in Victoria who was selling his Cintiq 24 Pro Touch, along with its supporting flex arm, because he wasn't making much use of it and wanted something more manageable in the 16" form range. I reached out to him and, luckily, he was willing to take the trouble of packing the thing up and shipping it most of the way across the country. It arrived yesterday, and as I write this, it's still in its boxes. It's superior to the one I currently have in nearly every respect. The one I have in front of me right now is 1920x1200, 2048 levels of pressure. The new one is 4K and 8192 levels of pressure. The flex arm allows it to be put into nearly any position... though given the Cintiq itself comes with fold-out stand legs that recline it at about 19 degrees, which is more or less what I'm working at generally anyhow, it remains to be seen if I'll bother with it. We'll see.

Because... now comes the hard part. Setting it up. Praying everything works. This is probably a task for this weekend at some point.

I also need to store the current Cintiq away as backup. These are large, complex machines and they need to be stored with care.

Anyway, I'm hoping that the upgrade will lend even more support to what I'm able to do and make me a slightly better artist as time goes by. Watch this space, I guess. :)