Waffle

Cartoon Symbolia has names for all those stink lines, drop shapes, wavy sunray-representing lines and other graphic symbols found in comics, with funny comics to demonstrate them. There's even a story woven into his depictions of plewds, briffits, vulgarats and fumix. Very nice.

I'll have to give Aquamacs a spin as soon as I'm on the iBook again. Not everyone likes emacs - a lot of linux geeks loathe it with a passion - but I do. It's flexible, full-featured and on one occasion was the thing that enabled me to rescue a botched linux install. It was the one editor that was a) definitely installed, and b) functional when the Windowing system was broken. If the incident happened again today I would use pico, but I've got good memories of emacs as a bail-out tool.

Quite a few Unixy, open-source apps that are adapted for the Mac are improved in the process - Adium is a much better program overall than Gaim for messaging, for instance. So I'm hopeful that Aquamacs will turn out to be the editor I've been looking for - I've found the easily available free OSX text editors to be a bit ornery to work with for some reason.

From the screenshots, it looks like Aquamacs looks more like a traditional OSX program, which is a good thing. But I'm happy to say it still looks excentric enough for Mac zealots who see it for the first time to go "What the fuck is this?"

Onlinecomics listing for Christmas at Blocksberg. If you like the comic that is now being Tooncast at the Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan site and have an Onlinecomics account, please do us a favour and make it a favourite so that more people will discover it.

As always, if you're a cartoonist with a comic listed there, and you happen to know that I like your work, you can alert me if your comic isn't among my favourites. I don't do reciprocal links or reciprocal fave-ing as such, but I want to be thorough about supporting comics I like in all possible ways. I'm sure the same goes for Geir.

Addendum: It's also listed at The Webcomic List.

A good, carpet-F-bombing rant from Fuckchristmas.org:

Can we back up just a couple steps here? At what point did a basic understanding of the separation of church and state become a fucking war on religion? And how did we get to the point where you can call an organization set up to defend our civil liberties "Terrorists" on national television and no one fires your ass? Enough. Fuck all of you lying little shitheads who wish the world was out to get you so you could play the poor oppressed victims. Wake up assholes — you're the cowboys, not the fucking Indians.

"But we want to display our Christmas tree on city property!" You can, go right ahead. "They're stopping us from praying in school!" They're not, so fuck off. "We're not allowed to say 'Merry Christmas' anymore!" Are you fucking kidding me? Knock yourself out. Say it at work, scream it in your high school lunch room, hell, tattoo it on your fucking forehead for all we care. Guess who's gonna be there defending your right to do every one of those things? The fucking ACLU. One of these days you bastards are going to drive those fuckers out of business, and then you'll see some actual attacks on your religious liberties. I thought conservatives were supposed to be all proud and independent? When did they turn into a bunch of fucking crybabies?

[snipped bit including an interesting link to a Christian website summarising the known scholarship on the birth of Christ and its celebration, or rather, the lack thereof, in early Christian history]

But you boys at FOX still freak out every year about how everyone's out to get your special trees. This is really the most important thing you have to talk about? Whether Target says Happy Holidays or Merry Christmas? Here's a brainstorm: there's a fucking war on. Our soldiers are out there dying while you guys do your 14th live feed of the day from WalMart to show us what good little consumers we are. What Would Jesus Do? He'd jump over that newsdesk and kick your ass for that shit. Are you sure you want to hang your journalism credentials on a story about what some guy calls a tree?

Well we've fucking had it. You want to play bullshit games and scream about how God's fucking judgment is gonna come raining down on us if we don't start watching our vocabulary? Go right the fuck ahead. But let me clue you in on something: fire and brimstone ain't no deterrent for us. We're not going to hell, assholes, we're fucking in hell. We live with you.

That cheered both me and Jeroen up after a difficult Monday and Tuesday morning... (Via)

In my continuing bid to stay abreast of every technological fadmake my archives as accessible as they could possibly be, I've added Oh No, Robot to the Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan web pages. Oh No Robot allows readers to transcribe webcomics, making them more searchable. I'll hold off on adding the search box to the front page until some more comics have been transcribed; the buttons to allow you (and myself) to do that are on each of the individual archive pages.
A few comments:
Although I know the makers of Oh No, Robot are working on ways to make their system work with Webcomicsnation-style archives, the service is definitely biased in favor of one-episode-a-page archiving, so using this will discourage cartoonists from using other archiving approaches.
Also, I could only associate myself with one comic. I was going to just dip my toe in by testing the system on Christmas at Blocksberg but apart from that archiving bias, it also would associate me with that comic, and that comic only. I'll leave the decision to Robotize Blocksberg and other Chronicles of the Witch Queen comics to Geir and Daniel.
Also annoying, especially in the light of that one-author-one-comic approach, is that the Search Engine lists Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan as "Reinder Dijkhuis" and there's no obvious way for me to change that. This is clunky to say the least.
On the plus side, if anyone has a transcription for the entire archives lying around on their hard drive, I hear they can contact the Robot team to have it imported. Anyone? ANYONE?

I have rearranged the Gallery somewhat so that the Headsmen sketches are now in one nested album. While doing that, I discovered that the URLs of existing images were changed as a result, so some older blog entries referring to the Headsmen sketches may have broken links. I'll try to clean up after myself but some items may remain broken. Next project, I'll just start out by making a new sub-album for sketches I want to show.

The sketch above is for the cover art for Headsmen. Comment in the Gallery itself if you have critical suggestions. I know that it's early days, that the sketch itself is very rough and that you haven't seen the actual story it's for, but my cover art is still very much a weak spot and I often don't see what makes a good cover, and how bad covers can improve. Right now, I like this one but who knows what I may be overlooking?
Update: Version 2.

The Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan story I finished almost a year ago, The Rite of Serfdom, was very long and very uneven. The reason was that I worked with only a very rough outline and improvised large chunks of the script. That's actually OK when I'm making a short story, and it's even doable in a longer story if I'm well ahead of the published episodes, but once I started getting behind, the quality of both the art and the script started to vary. Nevertheless, it has some of my best art in the church, Inside Ottar and Grimborg sequences.

One of my aims with each new story is to avoid the mistakes of the previous one, so Headsmen is both short and tightly scripted. One of my other aims is for each page of the story to be better than the best work I've done so far. As a result, the creative process is... intense. Pages that are already inked may still change their appearance completely. In the one above, I tried to create the impression of pitch darkness (inside a tent in the forest at night) without actually making it all black... and without using tones other than black and white.

It'd be easy to do in colour, but colour isn't feasible if I want to have the project finished in time. Besides, I'm a bit fed up with colouring webcomics at the computer.
It would be fairly easy with cross-hatching or old-fashioned screen tones. But If I used those, I'd make it harder to colour the comic at a later date. Or I'd have to create multiple versions which in my experience is the sort of thinking that leads to raving madness in no time. So, time to expand my skills and take advice from my studio-mates.
The page above? Is now 65% covered in ink and still readable. It's looking rather good, in fact.

As I am increasingly busy in the field of webdesign (this is Jeroen writing) I thougt to see what Macromedia Dreamweaver costs these days, it being one of the leading webdesign tools around. I've worked with an early version of it (3.0 if I recall) and I had quite liked it.
On the macromedia website Dreamweaver is said to cost $ 399. Not cheap, but as software goes, not ridiculously expensive I guess. I proceed to the online store. Please select country. Ok, sure, I live in the Netherlands.
Now, to my astonishment, the product, Dreamweaver 8.0, no longer costs 399 dollars, but 479 EURO's (ex vat).
Woah!
I convert dollars into euro's and lo and behold, 399 dollars makes for 340.27 euro's. Isn't that odd? I'm supposed to pay 139 euro's (163 USD) extra for living in the Netherlands?
They have got to be kidding! Daylight robbery I say!

It looks like trackbacks on Waffle have suddenly, spontaneously become un-borked. Straaaaange. Seems to have happened in mid-November for no good reason at all.

Tonight is St. Nicholas Eve.

Tonight we leave out our shoes, in hopes that St. Nicholas will leave a chocolate or other small gift. Tonight St. Nicholas rides his white horse, giving presents.

St. Nicholas, bishop of Myra, is the patron saint of New York City. (That's why, in the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade, Santa Claus arrives last in the train. It's a patron's celebration.)

[...]

St. Nicholas is a saint in the Catholic and the Orthodox churches, and is honored among Protestants. When the Twin Towers fell, they fell on St. Nicholas' Orthodox church, which held some of his relics. Those relics were never found, and are now mixed with those of other New Yorkers from that attack.

[...]

We should not speak here of Black Peter, who accompanies St. Nicholas on his rounds. Black Peter beats bad children with his cane. You were wondering what candy canes were all about, eh?

But we have all been good. We have put out our shoes.

I had no idea that St. Nicholas' Eve was celebrated in its original form anywhere outside of the Dutch-speaking part of the world. You learn something new everyday. Thanks, Jim at Making Light.

Addendum: Next year, we should use Krampus in the Chronicles of the Witch Queen Christmas special.