I need one or two people to help me test a new comics archiving system developed for Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan. I spent the past few days at home doing this sort of thing myself, going through over a thousand entries to see if they were correctly uploaded and configured, but there's always a chance that I'll miss some or that other people will discover bugs in the system itself. As I speak, there are about three dozen missing image files, which I will fill in as soon as I can release myself from self-imposed quarantaine and go to the studio where most of the entries are stored. By the time that is done, it'll be time for someone else to go over it and check my work. If you're a regular Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan reader and wouldn't mind spending an afternoon or so re-reading the archives, email me.

Update (October 17): What with the New storyline launching tomorrow I could no longer delay the announcement that the archives were moved. Although I haven't fixed the problems that were reported yet, I will look into any problem people spot

I'm not feeling too bad, but I'm quarantaining myself anyway. For a while I was a little puzzled that the disease seemed to be stuck at the "sore throat" stage, but I now seem to be moving beyond that to the stage where all the interesting stuff happens - interesting if you like mucus. Sucks, but at least it's progressing.

I've actually been able to do some of those behind-the-scenes things I mentioned from home. More on that later.

The unexpectedly hard time I had completing the fourth Gang of 4 comic for Hello You! has lead to me getting behind on some other things, particularly my preparation for the next Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan story. The Stone of Contention ends on Wednesday. Most of the work on the next series, The Green Knight's Belt, is done, but a few crucial things are not, including the "cover art", blurb and various behind-the-scenes things to do with the organisation of the website. I was not looking forward to scrambling to finish those things in time before Thursday, and as far as the behind-the-scenes things are concerned, it was by no means certain that I could. Still, I hate to delay updates. The whole debate raging in my head was rendered moot tonight after my return from the day's cycling trip (by the way, if you're now wondering why I went cycling when I had so much to do for the next week, my answer is that it's very important for me to have the edge taken off me by strenuous physical exertion. You don't want to be around me when I miss it. I don't want to be around me when I miss it). My throat started seizing up, then my ears started hurting. I am coming down with something and it's likely to keep me at home for a few days, possibly all week and all of next week if it's full-blown 'flu. In fact, it was a bit of a race against time to configure the updates for Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday before my brain functions shut down. So I even if I was eager to do the behind-the-scenes work, I'm not going to be in any state to do it for a while.

Of course, there'll be other stuff for you to read. The Eye of the Underworld will go on updating all week, regular as clockwork. The Lives of X!Gloop has just ended for the time being, but it's there if you want to catch up with my juvenalia (scanning more pages from the unfinished stories was one project I would have postponed anyway even if I hadn't got sick).

By the way, that line Ioannes uses in Friday's The Eye of The Underworld, "I am a pacifist! I have a bad back" also appeared, with minor variations, in Friday's Alice. I never realised it at the time, but I've come to wonder if that line isn't a quotation from something I should have read or watched, but haven't...

While cycling through our lovely province, Sidsel and I often point at noteworthy buildings going "That's a charming little abode! Wouldn't it be nice to have a studio in there?" The properties we select for this are invariably old gentlemen farmers' houses – castle-sized Saxon barns with sizeable living quarters for the farmer and family and posh façades to impress the labourers with. There's a semi-serious dream of ours, to have a rustically-located workplace for a group of artists, behind this running gag. Sidsel in fact has a serious opening for a suitable property that her parents are willing to back her up on if she wants to buy it. That place, described by Sidsel as a castle, is for sale at a price that you could, at best, buy a broom cupboard for in Amsterdam*); what makes it hard for her to decide about this is that it's back home in Denmark. Cycling through De Marne today, we saw another promising place that we took a more than usually serious look at. This 19th-century bar, located opposite the church in Hornhuizen, has a lot of space and a good deal of daylight coming through the windows. It could house a studio on the second floor and the bar area could be converted to a gallery.

We've noticed on our trips that a lot of artists do this. Hornhuizen, a small village, already has several galleries. It's not hard to figure out why: the De Marne area is economically disadvantaged so the real estate goes for a much lower price than similar properties elsewhere would. In addition, the area is really, really nice. The rural landscape is wide open - flat without being featureless. Scattered around it are villages that have mostly kept their rural style, with most of the buildings being more than a century old and decaying romantically. The sea is nearby; a short bike trip from anywhere within De Marne will take you to the sea dike where you can enjoy the view of the tidal marshes and be free from the noise of cars. In the silence there, you can hear the sheep (the sea dikes' dominant species) chew and flocks of oystercatchers twitter from near the horizon. No wonder the area's a magnet for artists and for slightly eccentric businesses that wouldn't stand a chance anywhere else. But there'd also be downsides to living and working there. After a year or so, the relative lack of nightlife and the distance from the city would stop being so appealing. Many of those eccentric businesses and galleries fail or hang on by the skins of their owners' teeth. Country life may seem nice for a few weeks, but it isn't for everyone.

So while cycling away from that interesting little alehouse, I thought it might be better for that place to keep some of its old functionality and become a hotel or a retreat for artists – a place where they could spend a few weeks getting away from it all, recharge their creative batteries and take in some new influences, while continuing to work.

I'm gonna spend some time thinking about that. It just might work.

*) You will have to bring your own broom.

It Hit Home has a few cartoons from the recent English-language Fokke & Sukke collection. I saw that in the shops and flicked through it. In translation, not all gags are golden, but the ones reproduced on the blog are pretty good.

It Hit Home also has the latest Kate Bush publicity pics in a long blog post about her career. Clearly a blogger of impeccable taste!

Sorry to those of you who were eager to finally see comments here again; I'm behind in my work, so the blogkeeping I promised the other day will have to be postponed. The one response I got to my earlier message, from Pete Ashton (thanks, mate), urged me to put aside a decent chunk of time, which I won't be able to do until that damned page is finished.

Next weekend, I hope.

I was annoyed a few days ago to hear on the radio that yet another "theory" about the authorship of William Shakespeare's plays had raised its ugly head. Those things are like weeds, or bad pennies, or a particularly sticky kind of dog excrement that you can't quite completely scrape off your shoe. I did some casual googling but couldn't find anything relevant because I hadn't remembered the names of the authors, but Brian Weatherson at Crooked Timber was more dilligent. Actually, his post is far more cautious than I would have been; the comments, however, more than make up for it:

1 from Jason Bridges:

It is perhaps worth mentioning that there is a long history of books purporting to establish that someone other than Shakespeare wrote his plays; that many of these books (like James and Rubinstein's) get favorable press, have approving prefaces written by well-known Shakespearean actors or directors, and marshal circumstantial evidence in a seemingly compelling way; that all of these books (so far) have proven to ignore evidence that decisively contradicts their theses, and that most Shakespeare scholars regard this genre in the way most evolutionary biologists regard intelligent design.

9 from Brian:

Tracing back Steve's links, I see that Prof Rubinstein harbours some familiar doubts about evolution. Given that the Prof is disposed to recycle nonsense from outside his area of expertise, one suspects his scholarly objectivity.

And before anyone gets going about bad ad hominem arguments, I should note that in all of these cases there are many many things one could say on all sides of a given question, and non-experts have to defer to some extent to experts in picking out what is most salient. That means having some confidence that the person putting forward the view is acting in good faith. And I'm not particularly disposed to offer such charity to people who recycle the creationist playbook. So I now suspect there's some fairly obvious reason why the Neville theory can't be true, and that the authors of this book are rather declining to tell us what it might be. Given all the publicity there may well be an expert appearing in the press sooner or later to tell us what it is.

I followed that link in Brian's comment, and yes, it's that Rubinstein. The "Professor" who made a laughing stock of himself by recycling all the Creationist talking points while claiming to have an enquiring mind? Here's The Panda's Thumb's fisking of that bit o'rubbish.

I think Brian's second comment gets it right; given what we know about one of the authors, to wit that he's shown himself to be a bit of an idiot when writing in one field outside his area of expertise, there's no reason to consider him on the merits when he's writing in another field (literary scholarship) that is also outside his area of expertise. However, there's a definite injustice in that this "professor" will undoubtedly make a good deal of money by co-writing a (probably) mendacious and (definitely) ill-thought-out piece of crap that annoys sensible people and actively subtracts from the sum total of human knowledge. At least The Shakespeare Conspiracy still spun a good yarn. This one is just another tiresome variant of "some weak-chinned aristocrat must have written Shakespeare's work because no commoner could be smart enough".

Read all the comments, Pharyngula: A historian disgraces himself, Stromata Blog: A New Shakespeare? and The Times Literary Supplement: Why Not Shakespeare? (scroll). And be glad Einar didn't get to blog about this one first; he's given to hyperbole about human stupidity when faced with IDiocy like that perpetrated by the likes of Rubinstein.

Cute animated music video for "A Quoi Sert L'Amour" by Edith Piaf and Theo Sarape, animated by one Louis Clichy. I like.

The Eye of the Underworld has started. This, the second story in the Chronicles of the Witch Queen series, has been published online elsewhere, but for this rerun it has been remastered.

The Eye of the Underworld was conceived in a meeting between myself and writer Geir Strøm in Ranheim, Norway in 1996. Specifically, it was conceived in a meeting I would later remember nothing of. In Eye, the alchemist Ioannes is sent on a mission to the Arab subcontinent to retrieve a magical artefact from the possession of the Caliph. But for all his ability as a necromancer and maker of humunculi, Ioannes is no James Bond. And when a young, sensibly-dressed thief starts interfering with his work, he's in trouble.

The Eye of the Underworld will update on weekdays, running for one month.

The last episode of The Double has appeared on the site today. Read the whole story from the beginning, if you like. The next series on the Chronicles of the Witch Queen site will be The Eye of the Underworld, written by Geir and drawn by me. Many of you will have seen this story before, as it's been online on one of my old websites since 1997. I've cleaned it up a bit though, and it's still a fair bet that the people who haven't seen it outnumber those who have...