Waffle

Checking on my little room during opening day, as one does, I found Jean-Marc van Tol and the girls from Saiso in conversation (Jean-Marc was getting a Saiso minicomic signed) at one of the columns. It was nice to see Jean-Marc again, and to meet the Saisos for the first time. They'll probably be in the next edition of the digital exhibit, once they've done some more work online. There's something about these two that makes it perfectly natural for them to just corner the Gr'nn guys and tell them "We want to be in the next issue of Gr'nn", and get an "OK" back from them. The Lamelos crew, by the way, should also be featured in the digital exhibit, and will be come the next update.

Okay... so now I have a bit of time to write about the museum. My workshops for the week are over, and I've managed to put in an emergency update. Instead of writing one massive update, I'll jot down some of my observations as and when they pop up in my head.

The opening was interesting. Not that I saw much of the actual ceremony; the room chosen wasn't really suitable for mass gatherings. Not only did Jeroen and I not see the speakers, but we also didn't see the screens that were supposed to relay visuals of the speakers to us. Speakers included the Mayor of Groningen, the municipality's public works bigwig, and Bert Lips of Libema, who allegedly introduced cartoonist Henk Kuijpers as "Henk Knippers"! After the opening it was time to go and tour the place, and drink drinks. I hobnobbed with Barbara Stok, Ricky van Duuren, Jeroen, the Lamelos brothers, Gerrie Hondius, Erik Wielaert and some other guys from Gr'nn, Mark Retera, Gerben Valkema and many others who I'll doubtless remember again after posting this. I also spoke to several of the museum's committee, including the famous collector, archivist and Toonder scholar Hans Matla. I saw Jan Kruis but didn't speak to him this time. I got to see and old Toonder animation with fantastic backgrounds and exchange rumors about Toonder's health (another bout of pneumonia prevented him from dropping by or even recording a video message) and that of Jean Dulieu whose section in the exhibit has revealed him to be a major cartooning innovator and one of the best living fantasy illustrators. I'll write some more about him later.

I drank some more drinks, then spotted those errors that got me in such a bad mood. But actually, on reflection, this problem was not nearly as embarrassing as I thought. There are many parts of the museum that have teething problems. The animatronic caroussel (which I managed to take a ride on when it was still working) has broken down more than once and needs troubleshooting. The signposting and climate control both stink. All computer stuff breaks down as a result of the climate control problems, and there is the smell wafting in from the MacDonalds next to the comics shop. They're working on all these things! So I'm not letting my computer niggles bother me too much. It's actually going to be very easy to put in more emergency updates, provided I come in after 4 PM. By that time today, it was quiet enough not to feel like some sort of stage performer while opening those columns and uploading files...

Enough for now. I'll post some more stuff later. There is a lot to say - I had a blast there yesterday, and will love the place as long as I learn not to let little annoyances get to me. In a week's time, most of these problems will be solved, and the good thing is that it doesn't have to me solving all of them!

If you have submitted HTML pages instead of just graphics to the digital exhibit, and any of them have code in them causing links to jump out of the window or frame (including target=_top) please contact me now at reinder@despammed.com . They are causing the exhibit to break. I don't know why they didn't break the exhibit while I was testing it, but they are breaking it now that it has gone live. I will try to hunt down the instances I know about so that I can either destroy them or (in cases where they are really essential) make them safe, but I *know* I won't catch them all.

(And yes, I'd much rather be writing here about the opening ceremonies and how nice it all has turned out, and send some much needed personal communications to people about the various bigger and smaller things that went wrong during the process of building this but I can't because I have to fix this killer problem first, so that only the first 1000 or so visitors will see the broken exhibit.) [Update: I think the reason I missed instances of this in material sent to me by Demian5 and Charley Parker is that they are easy, indeed almost automatic, to ignore when you have a full interface, with a keyboard, a mouse and a back button in the browser. In kiosk mode, with only a trackball for your input, you will notice them and be unable to get back to the exhibit's start page or even the previous page. Lesson learned.]

I promise, I'm not going to make this the place where I talk about how bad we poor widdle cartoonists have it, but two more of my favorite people in comics have got serious problems to deal with.

Scritch cartoonist Lucas Phelps has been jailed on a manslaughter charge (not for manslaughter as Comixpedia's header on the case says). The contents of the article at Comixpedia are copied straight from Graphic Smash's press release:

[The charge] is the result of an auto accident that took place almost two years ago, well before he began Skritch.

He'll be missed, and his return will be welcomed.

I agree, and although I don't know the particulars, I hope he gets cleared of all charges. The two-year delay seems dodgy to me in any case.

[Update: T Campbell reports that Lucas pleaded guilty to manslaughter and was sentenced to 15 years in prison. He will be eligible for parole in 3 1/2 years. T also writes:

I have to come to terms with my own hypocrisy, here. If I had known the victim and not Lucas, I would probably hate Lucas for this. How many others have I condemned in my thoughts as totally evil based upon a single moment of astonishingly poor judgment?

Don't misunderstand me: manslaughter is a grievous wrong. And I accept that he deserves punishment. But I insist he also deserves the chance to continue his art. He plans to: as I write this, his wife is working to get him art supplies. As I said in the original announcement about this, "he will be missed, and his return will be welcomed."

And with that, too, I'm in complete agreement. ]

Carol Lay has found out that the tall, handsome and funny charmer she married a few years ago has racked up $24,000 in secret credit card bills, and stolen and lied about money. To get him out of his life, she needs to buy him off, so she's selling a lot of her originals cheap. read all about it at the Comics Journal Message Board.

After the spate of work on the comics museum project (speaking of which, there is a whole batch of new photographs on the studio computer which I hope to upload as soon as internet access from there is restored, but before the museum's opening day even if it isn't), the final pages for this school year's Hello You, the ROCR work and the trip to England which was as hectic as any of the above, I was pretty exhausted. Much more exhausted than I thought I was, testimony to which are the pile of forgotten bills on my desk, the odd errors in the ROCR comics just before the Sparknoodle sequence we're in now and my own inability to get out of bed if I don't absolutely have to go out and teach at a fixed time. I'm getting better now, but I still find myself having to take naps in the afternoon, which was unheard of this time last year.

Nevertheless, I will have an ROCR update on Wednesday. I'm not resuming the regular Mon/Wed/Fri schedule just yet, but I wanted to have this one out on Wednesday to make up for Friday's missed update. And there will be one on Friday the 23rd, before we go back to the reduced schedule for the rest of April.

Also, I've decided to cancel my plans to do a 24-hour comic on the 24th. If I can't get through a regular working day without a nap now, then it's unlikely that I'll be fit enough to do a 24-hour comic next week. Some other time.

The chase is on again for a graphical ftp client for linux that satisfies the fairly basic (to me) criterion of not actually being harder to use than the command line. gftp just failed it (again!) in a big way. I already started having doubts a few weeks ago when I tried to set a bookmark on it. It turned out that gftp uses the evil style of configuration found in quite a few gtk-based programs, where after you click OK on a change you have to go back to a menu and actually "save changes" for real. That sort of thing always makes me wonder if linux programmers actually use graphical software. Do they just write them because someone told them that is what they have to do to get linux accepted by the masses? Still, that's a minor issue because you don't set bookmarks every time you use a program.

What is a big deal is if, when you try to use the program to upload something, it will not let you drag and drop multiple files, and indeed will treat the files on your drive, which are clearly visible in the left pane, as if they don't exist. I suppose I could have spent some time figuring out what the error was. But what I did instead was reach for the command line ftp app, upload the files in all of one minute using that, and add gftp to the list of useless apps that don't save me time in the way that a 4 years out of date version of WS ftp does.

This comic from 1991 has been in my Gallery for some time, but as I'm no longer updating that (something in the server setting has changed so I can't post anything), I might as well repost it for new readers to boggle at!

As Adam Cuerden said back when I posted it: "Heh heh heh! Delightfully mad! =)"

Flemish vocal goddesses Lais have released a new album. Unfortunately, what it's released on is a shiny disk that may or may not cause music to be played if it is placed in a CD player. So I'll wait for it to either go to mid-price or be released on CD. Instead, I bought the new Finntroll album Nattfödwhich had also just arrived in the shops. It plays in anything! And it's quite alright even if it's not as good as Jaktens Tid.

Seriously, I've had so many playback problems with the last batch of CDs that I bought that had so-called copy control technology on them that I'm losing patience with them even as cheap reissues of albums I already know to be essential. I won't boycott them outright, but it's a huge strike against any album if it's unplayable in my discman or computer.

One question that keeps coming up in the recent workshops I've been doing for kids aged 9-12 is "do you have a website?" At that point I tend to hem and haw and turn more than a bit weasely, because while I think that an intelligent kid who's into fantasy and read it with some parental guidance would not find the material in ROCR objectionable or harmful (I read much stranger stuff at that age), I still wouldn't want it to be the first thing made by me that a child saw. So I need a kid-friendly website, featuring maybe a few Floor material, some info on workshops and space to put other things I might do in the future, aimed at young readers (particularly English-as-a-second-language learners). I have my hands full, so I'm calling for volunteers to design it!

What I'm looking for:

• Kid-friendly design, with particular attention to usability aimed at kids. (this is probably easier than designing usability for adults because kids are more patient about waiting for stuff to load, and are more likely to read instructions).
• Design need not be consistent with the style of my other sites.
• Standards-compliance prefered; not limited to a single browser or platform.
• Extensible - site needs to be able to accommodate future work
• Dutch and English versions of texts (supplied by me) on the same page (English dominant); English with glossaries in the style of Hello You to be used for comic pages.

I don't have a big budget and don't expect anything fancy; if no volunteers are forthcoming I might go with an inexpensive design agency, but first I'd like to see if any of my readers are interested in doing this for me. If so, contact reinder@despammed.com

...like I warned in yesterday's blog entry, I can't get Friday's update done in time, at least not without either driving myself insane or showing up groggy and late at tomorrow's workshops. I hope that this will be the last canceled update for 2004 (having already missed more updates in the first 3 1/2 months of this year than in the 3 1/2 years before that put together, or so it seems), and I do expect things to get back to nearly normal next week, but for now, last Monday's Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan update will stay up until next Monday. I would rather that it didn't, for reasons that I will go into when I have more time and energy (sigh), but that's how it's gonna be.