Waffle

I've been wondering for some time why opposition to the new ID card laws in England is so much stronger than that in the Netherlands, where for some time, there was talk of draconian punishment for not carrying ID when requested.

Via Nosemonkey, now I know. No2ID explains the political rationale (and it is all about politics, not policy — the value of the law, as with much of the unlamented mr. Blunkett's law and order policy is in outflanking the Tories on the right, not in delivering results), and explains what sort of data are to be held by the government and, one way or another, to be accessible through the ID cards.

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Sometimes it's just fun to look at your search referrals and click on the link to see what you get. I found that this Google search lead someone to this weblog. I repeated the search and was surprised to find that the top result was actually from a web page dedicated to transformations and were-ism in comics, listing among others The Wotch and El Goonish Shive.
I shouldn't have been too surprised. Interest in transformations is not nearly as specialised as it would seem at first glance. It's a natural offshoot of interest in furries, were-beasts and transgenderism, all of which appear copiously in the two comics mentioned. I could easily add a few well-known comics that the makers of that list missed out on.
In fact, I would hope that anyone finding the blog through a websearch for transformation-related comics would go on to take a look at Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan. The comic has a leading character who shapeshifts; more importantly, the current chapter (link will expire when the chapter moves to the paid archives) of the ongoing, epic storyline is all about transformations. The whole idea of the Grimborg is that it's a place a person comes out of as something other than what they went in as. More literally, there will be some interesting transformations when regular updates resume in the new year, including one that, for people who have been following the story the past two years, will put a bit of a sting in the tail. I'd laugh maniacally if I didn't have a bit of a problem with my throat right now.
So if you came here looking for "Anne Onymous transformation", ROCR is the place to go even though Anne Onymous isn't in it.
(By the way, I'm not just saying this to shill for my comic. It ties in to what I just posted in Promotion, part 1. Watch this space.)

For two years, I hardly promoted my webcomics at all. I had stopped sending out press releases, gradually taken down all of the link exchanges, button things, topsite lists and all those other page-fillers that individually all seem like a good idea but collectively clutter up the websites they're on. I also didn't advertise. I adopted an attitude of "wait and see what happens if I just draw the comic, updated and let the site speak for itself."
Of course, there was still the internal promotion at Modern Tales, plus my routine activities at comics forums everywhere, but I didn't make any special effort to promote. My reason for that was simple enough: I had no faith in the effectiveness of the promotional mechanisms I abandoned.

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The saga of my bizarre and unexpected utilities bills continues...
I just got my end-of-year statement from my electricity company, and it looks like, what with me being, apparently, the beneficiary of a "Heffingskorting" (i.e. a rebate on taxes on electricity consumed), my total electricity bill is negative.

You heard that right. I got electricity all year, and I'm getting some money to go with that. And no, it's not negative after factoring the monthly payments. It's negative before the monthly payments are subtracted, and after they're subtracted, the negative number just gets bigger.

So I'm getting a sizeable amount of money "back" from the electricity company. It's making me feel a bit rosier about the whole privatisation/market liberalisation dealie that's been pushed through in the past decade, but pardon me if I don't rush out to spend this little windfall. Nuh-uh, it's going into savings to cover for potential unexpected bills from, I don't know, the atomic binding company that's keeping my protons and neutrons together for me. Or the gravity board. Something like that.

... I can't send email to you for some reason. Mail sent to Hotmail addresses just bounces, either immediately or after a few days. If you must contact me, provide a real, ISP-based address, or one at despammed.com or gmail.

I just put the final touches to the seventh Floor episode of the season. Barring emergencies, this will have been the last bit of production work for the rest of the year. I'm taking a break from the long, hard days in the studio.
Oh, I will doodle, script, study, sketch, brainstorm and put commit some of the things haunting my head to paper. And I'll probably work on the website a bit. But for the next two weeks, I will not tear off another Bristol sheet or use the ruler.
This weekend, and Monday and Tuesday, I'll read, relax, go swimming, go skating, resume spring cleaning, sort my cupboards, prepare my accounts for the next round of taxy stuff and do Christmas shopping. Oh, and I'll catch up on sleep, blessed sleep.
Then at an ungodly early hour, I'll head for England with my parents to celebrate Christmas at my brother's new digs. Internet access during those days will be intermittent at best (which is why any guest artists must have their stuff in on the 20th). I'll be back on the 27th, and between then and the new year I do not intend to leave my bed for anything other than drinks. The update for January 3 is already in the can, so I will probably resume drawing comics again around that time.
A whole two weeks off. Wow.

Today, for the first time in 2 years, "Previous comic" and "first comic" buttons appeared on the front page of the Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan website. In part, this is just a convenience allowing new readers to page through the guest fortnight comics and the chapter that I left up for the benefit of incoming readers from the Clan of the Cats campaign.
But it reflects a more structural change in how ROCR is going to be published in the next year. A few months ago, Joey Manley changed the terms for Modern Tales family cartoonists to allow them to make free up to 10% of their total archives, and giving them the tools to do so. Soon enough, many cartoonists started freeing up the latest chapter of their comics, making it easier for non-subscribing readers to catch up as well as giving new readers a larger sample. I was against this at first, because I thought it diluted and complicated the "last one free, subscribe for the rest" model, but since starting the COTC campaign, I've come to realise that it is possible to bring in many new readers and hook them with such a reasonably-sized sample, and that should benefit me in the long run. It will add a little bit to my workload, because I will have to maintain and prune the archives more actively, but it will improve the comic's accessibility out of proportion to that.
When I return from my break in January, "Rásdondr" will be removed from the free archives, and "Grimborg" will become the free chapter (a few episodes of "Grimborg" are available now, but this is very much unofficial).
This introduces one other change to how ROCR is made: what with the 70 pages of Dolphins and Dragons being already free, I am very close to the 10% norm, and I will have to script chapters from beginning to end before publication, to ensure that they don't exceed my margin, which is about 20 pages. So you'll get more tightly-scripted comics as a result of this change. That's a good thing, trust me.

I missed this because I don't check the comic regularly, but Anne Onymous (groan) of The Wotch has quit her job after a successful donation campaign, enabling her to resume regular work on her comic. Congratulations on reaching this milestone, Anne!
It's not quite a Randy Milholland level achievement because Anne is younger and has more modest needs than Randy (I can't tell how much she has raised but the job it replaces is part-time janitorial work), but it's still a cool thing for her to accomplish.
I took a look at Anne's art commission info page, and lemme tell ya, the girl knows how to find a niche and fill it! For only $ 70, you can buy a "Single-Character Four-Panel Transformation sequence, with bystander". Even Dan Shive hasn't thought of that, I'm sure.

Meanwhile, Clan of the Cats is out of the woods for the foreseeable future.

I just adore this comic! It's absolutely hilarious, whilst being Science fiction done more-or-less straight. Wonderful stuff! How have I missed it?




Freefall is found at http://freefall.purrsia.com Read it now!

... if the kind folks at Keenspot are throwing these ads on Quick Keen in for free with the ad impressions I bought on Clan of the Cats (if so, thanks!), or if there's some other reason the ads are showing up there now. I should ask Keenspot Gav, when I'm a bit more awake than I am now.