Waffle

I'm offering only 50% chance that Friday's Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan update will be on time. Workshops and the museum continue to demand way too much of my time...

I'm back from a trip to England, but won't be blogging much as I'm still overwhelmed by work. I've already put in the first hours of a two-week string of workshops and put in some more tweaks of the exhibit (now running in kiosk mode and with Stripster's massive collection included as the latest update) and will spend this evening working on next Friday's ROCR page and preparing for Friday's workshops in which I will be teaching adults. Whew!

... because the people involved didn't get my mails, got them but didn't answer them, got them and answered them but I didn't get their replies, got them and answered them and I got their replies but lost them...

The Spiders by Patrick Farley;
Player Versus Player by Scott Kurtz.

I still want both, and have in fact prepared archives for both, in case they email me back to confirm (if they email me back to say no, I'll just delete the archives). You probably know PVP, but if you don't, go check it out. Patrick Farley's The Spiders is a favorite among the arty, innovative webcomics crowd, and rightly so. It also has a great story.

(Forgot to post this one before leaving. Sorry)

I've been back to the museum to copy some more work to it. I ended up staying there a little longer than I anticipated, but I didn't mind because in daylight, with a fresher eye, the exhibit looks a lot better. I've fixed a few glaring errors in the exhibit itself, and spent some time trying to get those monitors working properly. They still aren't (Danny's suggestion in this morning's comments was followed up but I couldn't find the setting he referred to) but I now know who to ask - and if I can't reach that person, well, the monitors have to be configured through through NVidia Nview (surely someone reading this has worked with that?)

I mentioned damage to the prints covering the columns yesterday, but I'm glad to report that I saw rolled-up replacement prints in the room today. Also, there will be opportunities to install an updated version next week. Things are looking up!

By the way, I have new pictures, but infuriatingly, the linux system won't let me upload them from the digital camera even though I did exactly the same things I to get to them as yesterday. Computers? We're better off scratching pictures into the sand with sticks!

One thing I didn't mention in my last blog entry was that there is still this huge configuration problem with the monitors. The photos in which I tried to show the monitor setup were all useless, but there are TV screens mounted above the regular monitors which are *supposed* to show the same thing as the regular monitors. However, they're doing nothing of the sort. Some show only a Windows desktop background with nothing on top, some seemingly arbitrarily show a secondary desktop, so that windows open on the TV screens but not on the monitors. In neither case can the mouse cursor be made visible on the TV screens.
The museum's computer workers haven't quite figured out what they're doing wrong, and I, not being nearly as good at that sort of stuff as people automatically assume I am, also don't know how to make it work properly. It's not my job, but I would find it embarrassing if it still wasn't working come opening day. So how do you make two different screens show the same picture in Windows XP professional? Something tells me that it shouldn't be that difficult, but apparently it is (note that I can't try things at home, this being a linux machine and all)...

I've spent all day working on the exhibit, and there's good news and bad news, both resulting from the guy in charge of hardware cracking the whip. He called insisting that I install the bulk of the exhibit today. So I slaved away with the HTML until 6 PM, then slaved some more installing it on the museum's computers, which turned out to be a considerably greater hassle than just copying a bunch of files should be.
The good news, then, is: it's almost finished, and a first version is already installed.

The bad news is: there is a lot left to do, and unless I do it tomorrow, I may not be allowed to do it.
The to-do list includes:
1. fixing some faults that showed up in the exhibit once I'd copied it to a real system, ranging from missing images to the rather stupid oversight on my part that there wasn't an obvious way to get back to the exhibit's front page. Those are easy. I'll take a floppy with fixes to the museum tomorrow and fix those.
2. adding some materials from people, who, for whatever reasons, didn't get their material in on time. This is the most frustrating one for me because the people involved all did extra work for the exhibit. I'm not sure I even know how to break it to them that unless I have it in the mail tomorrow morning, I may not be able to use it before the museum opens. As always, I'll see what I can do *provided* that it doesn't lead to me canceling my trip to England, or showing up there empty handed and/or looking like a vagrant. Those possibilities are out of the question.
3. House style compliance. This may also not happen, but I don't find it that frustrating, simply because the house style was still under development while I was already putting stuff together, and I only got a CD of fonts last Friday, after emailing and phoning people repeatedly. Those fonts, of the Neutratext family, all turned out to be mac versions... When the museum gets its hands on some PC versions, it will be easy enough to change the CSS files so that everything is in Neutratext, and matches the museum's stationary.
4. Security. Turns out that the people from the hardware firm thought I knew about that, whereas I thought the museum's own computer people would do the necessary stuff to keep the exhibit vandalism proof. I'll phone around tomorrow to see who can do what, but I for one can only do the most obvious things.

Another bit of not-so-good news is that some of the prints on the columns were already showing damage from the wear and tear of raising them up! I hope the museum people find ways to cover these small tears and stains up a bit; otherwise we may find that the prints won't survive long.

(more...)

Announcement: If I'm at all fit to do it, I intend to take part in 24-hour Comics Day. I will start work at midnight, California time (because Scott McCloud who first thought of 24-hour comics lives in California, see) and finish 24 hours later (duh). I'll work at either my own studio or one of the Stripmuseum's public studios (if the museum receives and approves this idea in time - they're all in ultra-crunch mode so they might not be open to it) ; in the former case, I'll webcam it, and in the latter case the museum's visitors will be able to gawp at me.

I intend to go in almost completely blank. No sketches, no developed ideas, and come out with a finished comic.

Okay.. the tide of comment spam is now definitely rising. I have taken the following measures:

1) All co-bloggers can now edit all posts, so unless I missed something they will now be able to delete or neuter comment spam.
2) The default setting for comments on new posts is now "closed". For each new posting, bloggers will have to decide if they want to invite comments or not. This is a temporary measure, until I have resolved item number 3.
3) The single most abused feature is the URL input field. I hate having to disable that, both because it is a courtesy to legitimate posters to let them display their URL, and because the level of discourse tends to be higher when people's posts are associated with a public website or known identity. However, I will not let this blog be polluted through this feature, so when I have a little more time, I will edit the appropriate templates (a single Moveable Type setting to allow or disallow this would be *very* desirable), and URL display will be gone. Blame the terrorists, not me.
4) I will look into preventative measures like MT-blacklist or Typekey. Both solutions have disadvantages. Shared, non-user-visible blacklists similar to MT-blacklist have failed for Usenet and Email so there's no reason to assume that they will work on blogs in the long run. I'll probably install it but it will only be one extra line of defense.
Typekey, on the other hand, makes any blog that uses it considerably less open and hospitable, unless all blogs use it *and* everyone on the internet develops a high level of interest in blog comment posting. Bleah.
A Bayesian filter plugin exists and that might work better. But my prefered solution is still violent retribution meted out on spammers.
5) In the absense of laws allowing for violent retribution, I will name and shame spammers instead.

(more...)

I've blogged here about the financial difficulties webcartoonists can land into. Some two years ago, a webcomics reader known as TGIF was one of a small group of people who had been trying to help a webcartoonist get his hands on much-needed equipment, and he had also been discussing the creation of a fund that would give out loans to cartoonists to cover financial emergencies. A way to keep them working without having them be dependent on the unpredictable charity of individuals. Ironically, around that time, TGIF began to suffer from a rare mitochondrial illness. This has rendered him unable to work and has devastated his family' s finances.

A man who went much further than he had to to help cartoonists as a group now needs help himself. Today, in lieu of a page rate for Yonaka who drew the background for today's ROCR episode, I've made a donation to him, and just this once I'd like to ask you to consider doing the same. Using the button below will send directly to TGIF under his real name.

For the first time in many years, possibly ever, I've drawn an original page that is a nice-looking work of art in its own right. So I'm flogging it! The comic that the artwork is the original for will run on Monday, April 12, which is when the artwork will go on sale in the Modern Tales Swapmeet. So watch that space!