Waffle

This won't be news to many of my readers in the US, but I'm posting this for the benefit of Jeroen, who likes Kinky Friedman's old records: The Bull Moose reports that the Kinkster's gubernatorial bid, what there is of it, is doing well in the polls:

The spirit of Sam Houston independent style politics is alive and well! Kinky Friedman is well on his way to the Governor's mansion. The first Bill Hillsman commercial has been released - must see TV. A highly unscientific but encouraging San Antonio Express-News on-line poll shows the Kinkster in the lead -

"If the election were today, who would get your vote for Texas governor?Kinky Friedman 32.6% Chris Bell 24.8% Rick Perry 15.9% Carole Keeton Strayhorn 15.8%Someone else 10.9%"

And the mainstream press is increasingly taking Kinky's candidacy seriously (seriously!). From the Houston Chronicle,

"Republican activist Betty Sterquell, 77, of Amarillo, said there are Friedman bumper stickers across her city. Sterquell attended her first gubernatorial inauguration in 1939 for another singer-turned-politician, "Pappy" Lee O'Daniel.

"We all thought he was goofy with his 'Pass the biscuits, Pappy' and his Light Crust Doughboys, and he just walked away with it," Sterquell said.

Check out what is now Kinky's campaign site.

Cover art for The Green Knight's Belt, nearly finished.

This is the third version, and I'm getting closer. I need to clean it up (working on it until 1:30 AM took its toll on my ability to spot faults) and some more shading is needed, but for the most part, this is it. I'll add lettering and maybe a little extra along the sides before publishing it to the main Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan website.

I spend nearly as much time on Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan as I did when I was still creating new pages and struggling to meet my deadlines. For a while, all the time went into getting ahead with translating and editing the old pages; lately I've been spending it on practising my drawing and colouring. In addition to the three versions of the Green Knight's Belt cover I did a simple thing called Mute Rage and a more involved piece called In the Bath House. That last one didn't turn out the way I had hoped, but that doesn't matter right now; what mattered was having something to practise Photoshop CS 2 on. I want to master as much of that program as possible before my free trial ends. I haven't even done any lettering in it, let alone used the vector shape tools. Also, I have to avoid getting out of practise. I noticed that it took me a long time to draw the latest Gang of Four comic, and that told me I was losing routine. Too much time spent fixing up the old stuff on the computer, and not enough at the drawing board.
Both drawings are based on sequences from the old Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan books, by the way. You'll find them on the main site some day.
While I'm overloading you with stuff I've posted on DeviantArt lately, look at this Trial page I did for the Webcomics Hurricane Relief Telethon. I'd thumbnailed out this script that I thought would be suitable, and decided to draw the first one, as quickly as I could, to get an estimate of how long it would take me to finish the story. This page was done in just over 2.45 hours from ruling up the panels to having it posted on DA. The first panel fell way short of what I had in mind for it, but even with that compromise, it was clear to me that I would not have been able to finish the story in time without cutting into my other work. And there were some more demanding pages ahead. So I nixed the idea and scrambled to do something else. The good news here is that a script that had been in my notebooks for a while is now much further ahead, and can probably be drawn properly at an average speed of five hours a page. I'll get this time management down to an art eventually!

Dsquared at Crooked Timber:

No matter how ludicrous your predictions, if they are sufficiently wildly utopian, then your thinking has a greater expected value than anyone else’s (see here for the general idea). Thus, if Kurzweil reckons that we will upload our consciousness onto software and live for ever as pure energy on the internet, then I say all that and a pony too! Not just any old pony by the way, but a super technonanopony! Which eats racism and shits pure gasoline … on the internet! Oh yeh and we will constantly be having multiple orgasms … and not just the normal kind either (more details to come). You might say that it’s pretty unlikely and I’ve failed to spell out important details, but as long as there is at least some probability that I’m right, then I am more important than Ray Kurzweil to the tune nU^(-rT), where U is the utility of a magic pony, n is the probability I’m right, r is the discount rate and T is the time it will take to sort us all out with one. Keep reading CT folks, because in expected value terms, it is only going to become more important!!

(Note: All album links in this post go to Amazon UK. )
I've got several albums in the review queue, but I'm going to do this one first, for two reasons:
1. My referrals indicate that there are a lot of people interested in reading about new Jethro Tull releases, possibly because the band's official website dropped the ball on Ian Anderson Plays the Orchestral Jethro Tull. This album is still being announced as a future release even though I could buy it in July. It's a future release in the US but not in Europe.
2. This new live album is a limited edition in Europe, so for the benefit of the people searching for info on Orchestral Jethro Tull I want to mention it in case it sells out before they've heard of it. Fans in the US will be able to get it as a freebie if they buy tickets for concerts taking place this Fall.

Aqualung Live is a live recreation of Jethro Tull's best-known album Aqualung, recorded as part of XM Radio's "Then Again" series. Royalties from the European release go to various charities for the homeless.

(more...)

I know Reinder wants to skip it this year, but I found it fun to notice more and more people in these here usually pirateless parts share in the fun of Arr! Yarr! and Shiver me timbers!

Man, this cover art is giving me trouble:

Second version of the planned cover art for the Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan story "The Green Knight's Belt". I'm not sure this one is better overall... there was so much space wasted in the drawing that I had to crop it severely, to the point where it's no longer even a horizontal drawing as it was intended to be.

(more...)

The best coverage I've seen of the German elections comes from Mrs. T at a A Fistful of Euros. If you're at all interested in the situation there, read her dozen or so most recent posts. Mrs. T covers all bases, and pays attention to the dark horse of the race: the Left Party, who polled 8%.

It's easy to fail to pay the 'Left Party' the attention they deserve, mostly because nobody is likely to form a coalition with them. But still it should be noted: they did very well in this election. They should receive the congratulations they deserve.

Congratulations, then, wendebeschädigte East German communists: you polled surprisingly well, once you put yourselves under a West German carpetbagger.

And congratulations, Oskar Lafontaine. Many years ago you were the only major German political leader willing to speak the truth about the cost of unification. What a way you've come since then, finishing your career by becoming the first West German head of the SED.

That's gotta hurt. Oskar Lafontaine is like the Ralph Nader of the 2005 German elections, only seedier: his split from the SPD is almost entirely ego-driven, and instead of with a bunch of ineffectual Greens (the German Greens were already in government with the SPD) he got himself in bed with the inheritors of the East German Parteiapparat.
Read the rest, I tells ya.

Tomorrow, as Branko and others remind me, is Talk Like a Pirate Day. How fast a year rolls around! It seemed like only yesterday that people were going "Arr, matey" and "Shiver me timbers" randomly in online conversations and submitting sexy pirate drawings to DeviantArt.
Come to think of it, it was yesterday. And the day before, and the day before that, and generally every damned day since September 19, 2004. Every day is Talk Like a Pirate Day now.
It's been done, milked, sucked dry and then bled until it was just a hollow shell of what it was even two years ago (when I first heard of it). It's not funny anymore. So I propose that we just forget about the whole thing for a year or so, and pretend that all those people going "Arr" are all Devonshire farmers. Farmers. Yes, that will work. Farmers with eyepatches and parrotsducks. No pirates here, no sirree. And that's no sea shanty we be singin' but a traditional ploughin' song. Avast, bucko, sheep ahoy! Prepare to board!
By the way, if I never see a ninja, monkey or robot anymore it'll be too soon.

P.S. But that keyboard Branko linked to? That's still pretty funny.

(Late correction: that should be Devonshire, not Lancashire. The idea was that that area was where the pirate lingo came from)

Le site officiel de Laurel contient des dessins mignons, sexys et bien-faits. Ses BDs sont drôles aussi.
(Trouvé par Peter Breedveld)

(This is about all I have to show for the French I took for five years in secondary school. Sad how that gets rusty. But Laurel's drawings are quite lovely)

Photoshop CS for OSX is one of the less benightedly awful jumbles of useless bytecode that it's been my profound lack of pleasure to be unable to avoid having to use. In fact, coloring on the iBook using CS was almost pleasant. The interface, while still damnably inconsistent, is much improved compared to PS 6 which I've been using on the previous two Gang of Four comics and is also quite easy on the eyes. The program is stable, and unlike PS 6 on the studio PC is capable of such complex operations as opening a file in good time.
I'd have enjoyed the work more if it wasn't for the Wacom tablet sucking all the joy out of it by going berserk and generating random clicks all over my images. Together with one interface fault in PS CS, the fact that the pencil cursor is all but invisible, this meant that a lot of time was wasted Undoing things, checking that all the faulty clicks had in fact been undone, and having coronaries. If it isn't one thing, it's another. Computer systems hate me and I spend more and more energy on hating them back with each passing day.

As I've said before, laptop screens are less than ideal for this kind of work although a fresh laptop screen is probably better than a CRT that is on its deathbed. I've posted the images (de-texted) on my DeviantARt site for sanity-checking. Doesn't look too bad, methinks.