Waffle

The studio computer is at the store. They'll call me soon enough to tell me what they think is wrong, but repairs may take a week. That's too short for me to switch gears towards coloring the material for that period in a different application on the home machine, but I will if it takes longer. What I plan to do now: work ahead, draw the next few pages at a steady clip and then start coloring them next weekend no matter what. Until then, I will post fillers on regular update days (partly to test the automatic updates on the mirror site and partly to give you something while you're waiting). These will look like today's comic - they'll have simple, flat colors, and be single panels or illustrations. As for Jeroen, he's annoyed that he can't get the printer working on his laptop, but he can use it to scan. He'll be able to create his work even if he can't bill clients for it.

Pete Ashton pointed to an interview with a varmint comment spammer oh what the hell, "varmint" covers it quite nicely. Like Pete himself says in his linkblog, a "nailgun in the bollocks is too good for them". But the disgusting parasite is kind enough to fill in some of the gaps in my knowledge of the history of blog spam.

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Crossposted to Talk About Comics: Share the Love: Reinder Dijkhuis loves and hates L. Frank Weber's Crab Allan

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Digby has posted a Conservative Civility Roundup so I don't have to. There's some other stuff about the "Leninist Strategy" practiced by rightist think tanks as well; scroll to the bottom to read the trash-talking.

Update: Broken link fixed. Thanks to reader Mithandir for pointing it out. Damonk mentions in passing that the artist of On the Playground is only twelve years old. Wow. OTP is a funny strip. The drawing is only good for a twelve-year-old, but learning to draw takes a lot of time, and I'm sure Alan Anderson will develop just fine. The gag-writing, on the other hand, goes way beyond that level. The timing, dialogue, characters, and the gag ideas themselves just work which is hard to do at any age. And you don't get the feeling that there's a child's sense of humour at work. It has a child's perspective on the lives of younger children, but that's a good thing. Alan knows these characters well.

Count Your Sheep fans, take note of this Ship Cameo. In fact, this strip deserves special praise, because Alan has given the teacher a personality and an imagination. There are many who wouldn't bother with that and make the authority figure a faceless dullard.

The studio PC's motherboard suddenly gave up the ghost this afternoon while I was coloring. I'm sort of covered for that: I have a good computer and a usable scanner at home. But rather than make a desperate last-ditch attempt to get the comic ready on time while at the same time refamiliarising myself with The GIMP's interface and quirks (no Paint Shop Pro on the linux machine, alas), I've decided to postpone Monday's comic to give myself time to work on other, better-paid projects and to do the work properly. I'll take the PC to the shop on Monday, and depending on what they tell me, I'll either wait for it to come back or start working on the coloring at home on Tuesday. I can't guarantee a Wednesday comic on that basis either, but at least it will allow me to stay almost completely sane, and the comic won't look like it's been colored by a blind monkey when it's done (at least not more than usually). In the mean time, I'll post the odd filler or two.

The computer troubles may also interfere with Jeroen's ability to get work done, although he'll probably be able to hook the scanner to his laptop and get it done that way.

Commiserrate with our computer problems on the forum

Talk About Comics has come back online, and is now a blog. It's looking like a mighty good'un, except that for some reason I have posting privileges there so I will spoil everyone's enjoyment with my wittering. Fearless Leader explains the change. I'll add it to the blogroll, and maybe plug it into my blog, or plug my blog into it. Or I'll plug both into my webcomic, which is also a blog.

In the future, everything will be a blog. We will fly to our blogging jobs at McBlogblog using rocket-powered blogs strapped to our shoulders and wearing silver suits that will also have blogs on them. We will spend all our time plugging every blog we can find into every other blog we can find and then go home plugging the day's work into our Livejournals and vice versa. This is good, because we will still be able to find productive work, for a new and somewhat loose definition of productive, while robots do all the farming and building. Together, robots and blogs are the answer to all social problems.

There are still forums to discuss stuff on. They too are pretty good, and should now be a lot more stable, but they are not blogs, yet.

Update: Comixpedia has got in on this "putting stuff inside other stuff" act early. They've got the headlines from TAC on their front page before I'd even got it to show up properly in Bloglines.

Update: New news reports say that Donner is only "thinking about" a ban and will make a decision in March. That's sort of reassuring, but my concerns still stand.

Just heard on the radio: the Dutch Justice Minister Donner supports a European swastika ban (link doesn't mention Donner). How disappointing. I'm a bit puzzled by this. Donner's no fool. He's one of the sanest, calmest persons in the Cabinet. Yet he supports nonsense like this, which would probably make the likes of Prince Harry think twice but won't stop mosque vandalisers from doing their already illegal work, and won't make any neo-nazi discover peace, love and understanding. Donner also supported resurrecting The Netherlands' old blasphemy law, which likewise has never done a goddamned bit of good. In this case, at least, he had an excuse: the law was made by his grandfather (the Donners being a hundred-year-old political dynasty in the Netherlands) and keeping your ancestors' names alive is a worthy cause. That blew up in his face, in any case, which makes it even more bizarre that he should try and go that route again. Does he just like to ban things? Does he have a banning fetish that overwhelms his calm, rational judgment?

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The ROCR mirror site now runs on Movable Type. I will change the design around a bit, fix broken images and integrate Waffle into the site, but functionally, it already does what I had in mind (apart from scheduled updates, which I will configure later. The immediate beneficial effect is that there is now an RSS feed for the comic which should include the full comic, allowing you to read it through Bloglines and such. Adding the appropriate links at the appropriate places is another item on the to-do list.

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Von of the mighty Obsidian Wings needs to fix that spelin miztaeck in the headline to his piece on The Pro-Torture Right (and let's hope that if and when he does, it doesn't break this link), but he's right to be scathing about the rabid little racists at the Blog That LGFWatch Watches:

So it goes. If you want uninformed political commentary from a guy whose reaction to the Madrid bombings was to make fun of the mourners; who presides over one of the most insular and profane commentaraits in the blogosphere; who has the fervor of the zealot without the restraining humility of actual belief; and who engages in rational thought only to the extent that he needs to rationalize the latest fact into his preset response tree -- well, by all means, read Charles Johnson.

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