Waffle

Today, July 1, marks the 9th anniversary of Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan as an English-language webcomic. In previous years, we've had special artwork for the occasion, but this time around, I didn't have any good ideas for it, so you get an extra regular update instead. Yes, June's been a very productive months for new updates.

Aggie's made something for the occasion too, and that will go up as soon as one of us has scanned and processed it.

Meanwhile, over at the Drunk Duck mirror where I have been posting reruns of the older comics, often in remastered format, we've just hit comic no. 700 on this very day! That makes it a double milestone.

Would you believe that Wikipedia long had a policy which says that plot summaries - a core part of encyclopedic coverage - are something that Wikipedia was not? After this misbegotten thing was changed to a weaker version - which simply said they were highly discouraged without other content - goodbye any articles discussing the plot of the work from cited sources - there's now a movement to restore the ARRGHUTTERIMBICILITY version.

Don't believe me?

They're currently voting on it.

The old version they want it changed back to says:

Wikipedia is not....

...

* Plot summaries: The coverage of a fictional work should not be a mere plot summary. A summary should facilitate substantial coverage of the work's real-world development, reception, and significance. See also Wikipedia:Manual of Style (writing about fiction).

This option is leading, beating out slightly more sensible wording, and the option of deleting the whole misbegotten thing. Evidently, Wikipedia wants plot summaries are to be officially declared to be useless in themselves - even what Wikipedia is not - unless someone writes lots of analysis which most readers aren't interested in.

Pity that they're also the most useful part of an article for someone trying to find out about a fictional topic they aren't familiar with.

Mythwood - The Art of Larry MacDougal and A Vintage Sky are both sketchblogs showing lots of fantasy art in neat storybook illustration style. I find them very inspirational.

Meanwhile, in her blog, Aggie linked to two comics that I need to check out: The Epic of Cuchulainn and Lovecraft is missing. I'll get around to reading'em one of these days - both are still new enough not to have inconveniently large archives.

Adventurecon was fantastic and very productive. I'm still in the US with Aggie, working long-distance for my employer in the Netherlands as an experiment. Aggie got me hooked on True Blood; the rest of my spare time is spent working on comics and trying to prevent a puppy from chewing up its surgical bandages. Life is good.

Aggie and I will be sharing a table at Knoxville Adventurecon where we will try to reach out to the general public, show off our portfolios and hobnob with Lou Ferrigno the other artists. For some reason, we were put on the guest list with no questions asked.

It's unlikely, though, that we will have anything to sell. I've scrambled hard to get the Headsmen book done, but we're out of printer ink, out of time, and as I write this, Aggie's not feeling too well and may not be able to go get new ink and paper. I will use the last bits of ink to print off some individual pages for the portfolio and will be taking the PDF files with me - anyone who brings a thumbdrive can get a copy, at least if we get access to a power strip.

If you live in the area of Knoxville and read ROCR or American Gothic Daily, we hope to see you at the con!

New free Headsmen PDF e-book! This is the final step towards finally creating the print version of Headsmen that I've been promising for years. This new PDF e-book has a higher resolution than the existing CBR-based version, and contains one extra story, Alchemists, in colour!

Because the book is three years late, and because I do not have time right now to set up a payment method for it, I am offering it for free for the time being. I do, however, request that you pay a voluntary donation not to me, but to someone who needs emergency funding more than I need extra beer money:
Carson Fire of Book Elves, a cartoonist who has been instrumental in getting me to publish Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan as an English-language webcomic, is in acute danger of becoming homeless after many years of bad luck. So if you grab yourself a copy of this new PDF e-book containing some favorite stories from the Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan archives, please consider sending him a few dollars to help him raise the money he needs to keep a roof over his head. The payment buttons below are taken from Carson's site and will help you donate directly to him. Thanks.

DOWNLOAD the Headsmen e-book (Unpackaged PDF file, 75 MB; right-click to download to your hard drive, or CTRL-click if you're on a Mac).

DONATE to CARSON FIRE:

We'll be back to our regularly scheduled Feral on Monday, after which this page will be moved to the Downloads section.

Another Caption Contest / me showing off my extensive collection of Victorian engravings!

Today's may be familiar to some of you, but let's have a little fun with it anyway

As always, I've uploaded a full-resolution scan to Wikipedia, as I believe in free art. Also, if you're reading this under Reinder's comic, you'll have to click on he link to the post to see the image.

-Adam Cuerden

Via Aggie, via Seeing Eye Chick:

I posted the following on a Comicgenesis forums thread about comics for the visually impaired about two weeks ago:

The assumption among most commenters here seems to be that people are either perfectly sighted or completely blind - a lazy assumption that Bruce Tognazzini, former interaction designer for Apple, has some things to say about: Inclusive Design, Part One, Inclusive Design, Part Two. Read those and throw the "all or nothing", "we can't give blind people the full experience so why give them anything at all?" or "let's tack on some features as an afterthought" mentality out of the window. Instead, design your comic and website from the ground up so that people with a range of impairments can use it.

Sight impairments:
Many people are near-sighted. Everyone in my family is. That is usually easily corrected and in any case the computer monitor is usually close.
About five percent of all males have some form of colorblindness. When was the last time you tested your site and comic in an online colorblindness simulator? (Ur....... two years ago, in my case)
My parents are in their late sixties and have aging, presbyopic eyes. They need large print on their monitor - does your website force small type, low-contrast type or white-on-black with seriphs? Give people a way to set their own type size easily. (I can see reading glasses in my near future myself.)
For more severe vision impairments, you could provide a magnifying glass feature. This can be implemented in DHTML/Java or you can point to a browser plugin that does this. This group will also benefit from screen-readable text hidden in the alt attribute or elsewhere on your site, as will very young readers, the completely blind or readers with severe dyslexia and other learning disabilities.

Speaking of which, studies have shown that if you design with some consideration for the very young, the very old or people with learning disabilities, everybody else also benefits because completing tasks on a website becomes easier for everyone. Get ahead of everyone else by designing inclusively!

(Do I practice what I preach? Not fully, yet. I've only recently started thinking about these things again. But the next iteration of my website will have more of these considerations built in)

I'm reposting it here because there's one disability you can't design for and it's "I can write but I can't read" syndrome, which is very prevalent on the web in general and on large forums in particular. While several people including the original poster either got it or said that that was what they were thinking about all along, it took but a handful of follow-up posts for the thread to go back into the "but comics are a visual medium so designing for the blind is stupid, ha ha ha you are stupid/if you take away the visuals it's an audiobook not a comic, ha ha ha you are stupid" mentality. Instead of whining in the forum itself about how my contribution is being ignored, I've decided to repost it somewhere where smart people can read it (and whine a bit about how my contribution is being ignored. Well like I said in my last post, I have a cold and feel like I am entitled to a bit of whining today).

Related: Colorblind web page filter. I posted this link before back in 2005, and it still works. At the time, reader Branko Collin wrote in to say the GIMP had a colorblindness filter built in, but I've not been able to find it in my recent-ish versions of the program.

Today's Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan update is the first one ever that I made while on vacation. I'm staying with Aggie in Tennessee for two months, and that's too long to go without updates, so I'm making them here. I've got a little workspace in her studio now where I can put my laptop, external drives and Wacom tablet and my papers to draw on. I'm also trying to set aside a few hours every day to work on whatever needs doing for my websites. Later during my stay, I will have things set up so I can telecommute to my day job back in NL, though to do that for any length of time, I will need to start getting a visa before I next come back here. For now, though, I'm just trying to cultivate the working habits I will need. What with this update getting done during the week and more being scripted now, I'm off to a good start.

Of course, it doesn't help that I've caught another cold, just like back in March. I think getting exposed to the local germs is doing it, because both times, the cold started at around day 4 of my stay. Luckily, during an eight-week stay, that won't be as bad as catching a cold around day 4 of a week-long stay.

Anyway, the upshot of all this is that for the time being, I am finally in a good position to deliver more frequent updates. I'm going to shoot for two a week for a while - this cold that I've got won't stop me because I will just stay in more for a couple of days. The outlook for the comic has got a lot better, and so has the look of the comic itself: I'm drawing it on larger paper to give myself some more space and I'm very happy with the results.