Waffle

Yes, I know ROCR.net is down, as apparently is all of Keen ToonWhateverspace, the server ROCR.net is on.

The devil does always crap on the big pile, doesn't he?

The computer at the studio went on another one of its strikes on Saturday. I waited until today to take it for repairs, because the last time this happened, the repair people found nothing - it worked when they tested it.
I have got an emergency scanner working now, and I should be able to deliver comics on time and even get ahead because without the whole Internet to distract me I can concentrate pretty well. Except for one thing: the Internet connection at home is also flaking out a lot lately, and this may lead to delays. Or it may not. But I thought I'd warn you anyway.

I'm a bit busy now, but Livejournaler Loneraven has a pretty good lowdown on "The Empty Child".

It wasn't as scary as I expected (the Fear Factor panel had rated it as terrifying with the youngest of the four disengaging from the episode), but I did find it gripping enough. I did find some of the dialogue hard to follow - I didn't catch on to the first few Spock references and it's only through the Livejournal reviews that I know what they said about the alert colours in the opening sequence. Might be my ears though.

Oh, and I hated Captain Bumbandit at first sight. Not the character, but the "actor" playing him. Wouldn't know timing if it smacked him in the face. Bleagh.

Oh, and this week's "Bad Wolf" reference? I thought that was easy.

-- Oh my, sir, what a big nose you've got!
-- The better to stick it where it doesn't belong smell you with, my dear.

Oh, I didn't say anything about "Father's Day", did I? Read this instead. I liked it a lot.

We should campaign for the breakup of Belgium. We should also stir up local trouble between the German Bundeslaender, in the hope that Bremen, Hamburg, Niedersachsen and Nordrhein-Westfalen —our nearest neighbours— all become independent nations. A minor civil war may be a price worth paying; after all, the former Yugoslav Republics were all killing each other's citizens a decades ago, and now they love one another, they really do. This basically validates the aims of the event. They are good aims, and they work.
We should stop sending people of Surinamian or Antillian descent. Sorry to be so bluntly racist about it, but New Europe doesn't want to look at them, doesn't care about their musical heritage, and won't award them points. Instead, we should pick the teenaged daughter of a Yugoslavian refugee off the streets, dye her hair blond, stick her in front of a microphone, and let her warble in her ancestral language. English doesn't increase appeal like it used to. Actually, we may not have to dye her hair blonde — it seemed to me that the peroxide quota was down this year.
What we should stop do is pick contestants based on their singing abilities. First of all, sounding like Whitney Houston is clearly worse than singing out of tune. Secondly, we have a history of sending out singers who fail to hit that high note on the big day, in the same way that we have a history of missing penalty shots when the pressure is up. Better not to shoot for that high note at all; after all, there were quite a few contestants who couldn't sing at all, and they got through to the finals. As a strategy, impressing the viewers with your vocal qualities is doomed to fail.
We should probably try to get some decent songwriting into the event, but only if it's squarely aimed at the lowest common denominator. Danceable ethno-pop or tunes that sound like John "Jellybean" Benitez rejects from 1985 will do quite nicely; impassioned soul ballads will not. Alternatively, we should finally embrace the high camp of the event like everyone else.
Only if we do those things will the Netherlands have any chance of ever taking part in the Eurovision Song Contest finals again, let alone winning. So let's start fomenting unrest in Germany and Belgium today.

... I think Today's Courtly Manners page looks like a Reinder Dijkhuis comic. Not necessarily a great one, mind, but it's getting back on its feet.

I have X!Gloop on my mind.

Out of context, that doesn't make a whole lot of sense. I'm not sure if it will make any sense once I've provided some context, but let's try.

(click on image for full page. Opens in a new window)

I made the first page of The Grismoon, the first ever story featuring my character X!Gloop, one Tuesday evening in October of 1989. I had just read The Airtight Garage and decided to start doing a weird, incoherent, improvised comic as well. Just about anything that crossed my mind went into the comic. I wanted a weird monster? Weird monster it was! I had a book beside me in which the phrase "Exp?Zworp" was used, so the lead character got the name X!Gloop. There was a music programme on the radio in which a musician discussed booking agencies, so mention of booking agencies was worked into the dialogue. And I'd just started my English Language and Literature studies and was introduced to a wide range of analyses of both grammar and the internal workings of literary forms, so those were introduced as well. For all that's fantastic about the first page, it's a perfect picture of the time it was made.

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How much common sense can a designer expect from the user?

Just a minute ago, studio-mate [censored] asked me if I had a calculator around. I said "yes, on the computer". My studio-mate said, "So do I, but it doesn't have a divider". I pointed out the "divide by" button, the one with the slash on it, and asked "what kind of a calculator would it be if it couldn't divide?"

Now it's likely that my studiomate had overlooked the button. That happens, and it doesn't mean that my studio-mate is stupid. But that question "What kind of [app] would it be if it didn't do [y]?" is one that my studio-mate might have asked [my studio-mate's gender in the possessive pronoun]self.

This situation used to happen a lot with The Gimp. Newcomers would come rushing to support forums, torn-out clumps of hair still in their clenched fists, asking "Why doesn't it do straight lines?" and GIMP gurus would patronisingly tell them of the magic key to the left of the Z (on a QWERTY keyboard). There is of course no reason to assume it's obvious that holding down the shift key while using one of the paint tools will result in a straight line. But what should be obvious to users that no one, not even in the world of Open Source software, will be daft enough to release an image creation tool that can't do straight lines.

Or shouldn't it?

I've been able to get today's Courtly Manners done and uploaded in mid-afternoon, which shows that I'm making them slightly faster than I strictly need to, but not fast enough to have time to build a buffer. I suppose I could, but only if I was willing to work late on a regular basis, which for now I am not. Much better to allow myself to relax and let the quality climb back up again.
And in relation to that problem, I have to apologise to Geir for not involving him in changes to the script for Monday's episode, today's, and any episodes that will follow right to the end. I haven't deviated from the substance of Geir's script, yet, but I've eliminated a lot of voice-over stuff, slowed the pacing, split the action into far more panels than was originally indicated and also made the rhino veer to the left instead of the right, because the racers were going clockwise and the Queen's box is inbetween the seats. It was the only way I could go on doing the comic at all, really. The script in its original form was great fun to draw at the start, but as the race progressed, I realised that I couldn't figure out how to draw the action as described. There was too much stuff going on, and the angles, movement and division of the space were too far removed from the way I "see" a comic in my head. So both the quality of the work and my motivation for tackling the next page dropped precipitously in the 9 or so pages I drew after the story started running on the websites. The only way out for me has been to redo the script, making it my own. Monday's page, at least, was better than last Friday's, and I think today's is better than Monday's.

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Memo to self: read this tomorrow, when I'm awake. It may just help me fix a time bomb under my websites: the fact that the width of my comics varies between 400 and 650 pixels, and will become much wider than that when the Stone of Contention reruns start.

Sam has a pretty good idea what the "Bad Wolf" references in the new Who refer to, but when I read this:

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