Waffle

Moe of Obsidian Wings has got the blog blues and is quitting. Personally, I think blogging is a bit like being in Fairport Convention - you can join but you can never truely quit.
I want to thank Moe for setting up one of the best political group weblogs I know. For all my partisan venting over the past couple of weeks (which, by the way, will be toned down considerably after the US election), I admire him for the good-humored, temperate way in which he ran things, and the focused, honest way in which he stuck up for his conservative politics.
Gosh, this is beginning to sound like an obituary.
I hope the website will continue. It's really really good. Three cheers for Moe!

A pleasant little soiree at Finntroll Manor, with chamber music and polite conversation.

Back in 2001, I reviewed Humppa-black-metallers Finntroll's second album, Jaktens Tid, giving it a big thumbs up. This year, the band released an acoustic album Visor om Slutet, and an electric album, Nattf?dd, both of which I snapped up when they came out. At the time, though, I wasn't too keen on either of them, but I've been listening to Nattf?dd while drawing lately, and it's actually almost as good as Jaktens Tid. That's quite an achievement if you realise that the band has had what amounted to a brain transplant between those two albums. First, vocalist Katla developed a viral tumor in his throat and had to stop singing or die. Visor om Slutet was recorded with Katla sharing the vocals with his hand-picked successor Wilska. Then, guitarist Teemu "Somnium" Raimoranta, while drunk, fell off a bridge and didn't get up. Katla and Somnium were the originators of Finntroll's combination of Black Metal, polka-like rhythms and ethnic Finnish instrumentation, so this was a bit like James and Lars dying in Metallica's 1986 bus accident, leaving Cliff and Kirk to soldier on as best they could.
Against the odds, Nattf?dd is a fine album, and every bit as good for drawing by as Jaktens Tid. The remaining original Trolls have stuck with the concept well, with keyboardist Trollhorn writing most of the music. What makes Finntroll so much more fun than other Black Metal bands I've heard (and thanks to my headbanging buddy Danny I get to hear a lot of them)?

(more...)

"The list" of course, being "mendacity, malevolence, incompetence and simple disconnection from reality". I suppose "negligence" is technically covered under the "incompetence" rubric, but the recklessness of letting 350 tonnes of high explosives remain unguarded needs to be highlighted separately:

Some 350 tons of high explosives (RDX and HMX), which were under IAEA seal while Saddam was in power, were looted during the early days of the US occupation. Like so much else, it was just left unguarded.

Not only are these super-high-yield explosives probably being used in many, if not most, of the various suicide and car bombings in Iraq, but these particular explosives are ones used in the triggering process for nuclear weapons.

In other words, it's bad stuff.

What also emerges in the Nelson Report is that the Defense Department has been trying to keep this secret for some time. The DOD even went so far as to order the Iraqis not to inform the IAEA that the materials had gone missing. Informing the IAEA, of course, would lead to it becoming public knowledge in the United States.

.

Whether the coverup goes under the heading of "malevolence" or "mendacity" is a matter for debate.

Juan Cole:

So let me ask this again. Bush is making us safer? The American public trusts him to fight terror more effectively than Kerry? On what record? Bush appears to have all but just called up Usamah and Khamenei and told them where Saddam's old stuff was in case they needed it for their programs. And he politely made sure that no pesky US troops would be around to impede their access.

(see also: The New York Times: Tracking the Weapons: Huge Cache of Explosives Vanished From Site in Iraq, Michael Froomkin: Mistakes, Incompetence and Coverup Beyond Fevered Imaginings, Talking Points Memo's coverage, Obsidian Wings: This Defies Belief, etc, etc. etc. I have to agree with Brad of The Ancient and Hermetic Order of the Shrill when he says: "Impeach the fuckers. Impeach them tomorrow")

Today's "Bwa ha ha" moment comes from The Poor Man, concerning the effectiveness of the Bush/Cheney campaign's new "wolves" ad. I haven't seen the ad itself, but I hear it's inspiring gales of Homeric laughter among viewers across the world. I'll have to make do with the Poor Man's parody, and the counter-punch from Wolf Packs for Truth.

Oh, and Slate's dissection of the ad. Surprise, surprise: It's a crock.

Via Europhobia: The Nation lists a 100 undisputable instances of mendacity, malevolence, incompetence, corruption and simple disconnection from reality on the part of the Bush administration. Every one of them properly sourced, and divided into the categories "Iraq", "Terrorism", "National Security", "Cronyism and corruption", "The Economy", "Education", "Healthcare", "Environment", "Rights and Liberties" "Flip Flops", (Bush's) "Biography". Essential reading for those outside the reality-based community who still argue "but Bush has accomplished a lot, really".
It's hard to tell which of the 100 facts is the most damning, but try Nosemonkey's shortlist if you're in a hurry.

This week's Sunday Cycling is canceled because Sidsel will be in Utrecht, so I have an extra day to work (I'll go on a short cycling trip on my own but won't spend a whole day in the saddle). This is a good thing, because Kangra's testimony, which I'm scripting now, will be a bit longer than Kel's. This sequence will fill in some gaps in Kangra's motivation for what she was doing early in the storyline, and it will also take us back to the Stone of Contention storyline, which I first put online 10 years ago and which I'll republish after the WebComicsNation launch. Drawing it will involve some interesting challenges. I'll need to design a war memorial, come up with some credible new characters (for bit parts - don't worry about me adding anyone major. However, this may be an opportunity to test the new, Movable Type-enabled system for adding cast pages) and revisit some old ones from Contention. I'm appalled at how badly drawn the second half of Contention is - it's actually worse than 1992's The Green Knight's Belt which at least was drawn with a lot of care. Re-drawing the bits that will appear in Kangra's testimony will highlight the difference between today's style and that of 1994-6. I'll need to come up with a slightly child-like style in which to render Kangra's flashbacks though. Something to fit her guileless personality.
I'll also have some tasty footnotes about the various tribes that appeared in Contention and the medals that the Resistance gave out at the time. It'll be fun, but it will go on for several pages, and now that I'm caught up I'd like to speed things up a little.
If I can get Wednesday's update in the can by Sunday night, a double update on Friday should be feasible.

I have two questions to other people who use Movable Type:

1. Is upgrading worth it? I may have use for two features that MT 3.* offers: the scheduled postings and the subcategories. But if there's a lot of hassle involved I can live without either of them.

2. I want to turn some of the reviews in my old spotlights page into backdated blog entries. Is this a good idea? I've noticed that sometimes changing the dates on an existing entry messes up the sequence of blog entries so that readers can't navigate through the archive. Will that sort of thing occur a lot, and how will it affect upgrading and archive migration?

Please let me know your experiences, either through the comments or in email.

Yes! I've made it! Friday's Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan episode will be a double. 14 panels in total. And I'll have time on Friday and over the weekend to make Monday's episode as well!

What struck me as I was putting the finishing touches to this installment was how much less cute Kel has become recently. It's not intentional; she just flows out of my pen that way. But I do think it's the right way for her to look. Working at the tempo that I've done recently means that I rely less on technique and more on what feels right at the time. I don't think the anatomy is up to the standard that I'm capable of, but the change in how I draw Kel in this sequence does reflect my changed attitude to the character - an awareness that she's not 20 anymore, and is feeling a bit put upon right now.

Or maybe it's just a subconscious attempt to lower the Mary Sue quotient.

Abu Aardvark makes some predictions:

If Kerry wins, and Chalabi joins with Sadr to form an effective mass movement against the political regime which Kerry helps create in Iraq, I predict that certain elements of the current neo-conservative right will side with this Chalabist insurgency over the American-backed regime.
...
If Kerry wins, and there is a terrorist attack against the US homeland in the first year, conservatives will howl for blood, if not impeachment. There will be no rallying around the president...

... and more. I'll hang a scorecard over my monitor on November 3.

Speaking of ads, this ad:

belongs on Sexy Losers. It belongs on Ghastly's Ghastly Comics.
It does not belong on General Protection Fault or Schlock Mercenary. This isn't just because the owners of those last two sites would find those ads inappropriate or offensive, but also because the viewers of the former sites would click on the ad in droves, and the viewers of the latter would not. Some of them would, I'm sure, but not nearly as many. By not having a system in place to show ads on adult-oriented comics, Keenspot are throwing advertisers' money away. Admittedly, what with having to work with so many different networks, developing such a system is probably more difficult than it looks.

Me, I don't think ROCR would be a great match for the ads. But it'd be a better one than GPF and Schlock, and I'd take the advertiser's money with great enthusiasm.

Advertising on Keenspot does yield pretty good results for cartoonists, though. Really, there are a lot of gaps to be filled, and any cartoonist who has advertised on the Modern Tales network should also consider putting ads on the Keen network. I've done it in the past and I'm going to do it again in November.