Waffle

Wow.

Dismemberment, cannibalism, psychosis, hillbilly cousin-cest, monsters made of malignant brain tumours and entrails... all in wonderfully gnarly black and white with perfect pacing and composition. Warren horror comics really rocked the hizbah like the hizbah hasn't been rocked since. And some people say webcomics get a bit too raucous?

While looking for more blogospheric criticism of Day by Day (it's been one of those days), I found a mention of Carson Fire's Winger on Alicublog, of all places, read the comments, followed one link to the comic and found out that Carson's behind with his rent again. So far, I've avoided linking to Winger or mentioning it in this blog for any reason, because even to denounce it would cause compulsive rubberneckers to waste their time on it. But I like Cars's other work, especially Elf Life, and while we haven't spoken in quite a while, I still don't like the idea of him being turned out of his home. He's taking commissions sending bonus artworks to people donating $20 or more. Perhaps a bunch of readers could club together to pay him for new Elf Life updates? Just a thought.

I am feeling the pull of the political blogs again, for the first time since the US Presidential elections of 2004. I've been reading them a lot, and have added Red State Son, The Whiskey Bar and Wisse Words to my blogroll. The former two are essayistic blogs rather than quote-and-link blogs. The latter does a bit of both, and has been a consistently reliable source of stuff for me to quote-and-link. I ought to apologise to Martin for taking so long to add it.
I fear this renewed interest in political subjects will turn out to be a precursor to me writing about politics again myself. I'm not happy with the idea, not yet anyway. I don't think of my own opinions as being particularly trenchant, interesting or well-informed. But as a writer and artist I also know that sometimes when you get an itch you must scratch it. At least, I hope that the next time around I won't be pulling my punches or putting up any pretence of being balanced or reasonable. Seeing both (or all) sides of an issue is something my readers are smart enough to do themselves, in their own time, and if they can't, then they're pretty much part of the problem and not worth talking to.

On Lebanon: I think Juan Cole continues to be the most readable pundit. His enemies on the American right have called him anything from a Chicken Little to an Anti-Semite; the one label they haven't been able to pin on him is "wrong". As a result, I'm very alarmed by the same things that alarm Professor Cole Justified defensive war, my foot.

On the crossroads of politics, blogs and comics, Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings, Scott Lemieux at Lawyers, Guns and Money, John Holbo at Crooked Timber and countless others have commented on recent Day By Day comics making very uninformed references to German philosophers such as Immanuel Kant. I have nothing to add except that if I ever hear "Why is the NY Times so anti-American?" as a conversation starter, I'm going to assume I've got heat stroke again and am hallucinating.

More on right-wing comics in a separate post.

1. When sports journalists write that Floyd Landis bonked in Wednesday's climbing stage, they mean the second meaning of the word. Not the first, which you have to admit would have been something to see.

2. Because the internet is not for geeks anymore*), it is no longer safe to use symbols like "!=" in a public discussion. Especially one about events in the Middle East. For the record, I do not believe that Lebanon is in any way similar to Afghanistan, and rather thought that that was such a blindingly obvious point that I was unprepared to make more than a minimal effort in putting it in writing. That's one mistake I won't soon make again, obviously.

*) Which in most contexts is very much a good thing, if only because geek triumphalism is a distasteful thing to have to witness. But having spent quite a bit of effort, back in the day, on learning the language, I now have to adjust to situations where using it gets me into trouble, which is a bit of a bummer.

Hey, he's having fun, all right? If you haven't ululated along with Finntroll, you haven't lived.

Now that the Modern Tales relaunch is off the ground, there's finally some movement on the Adultwebcomics front.

AdultWebcomics.com is seeking submissions of one-panel cartoon gags, ongoing comic strips, graphic novels, and short stories in sequential art form, in the genres of sexual humor and/or erotica.

AdultWebcomics is the newest project from some of the people who brought you Modern Tales and Webcomics Nation. Because of certain limitations imposed on those sites by some of our business partners, we are unable to host "mature" content on our other, currently more-famous sites. AWC is meant to work around those limitations by providing cartoonists with an uninhibited playground, where the fine scatological and erotic traditions of cartoon art can be honored and extended. We are looking for the best of the best in the genre.

In other words, send us the stuff that's too "hot" for Modern Tales — or for our competitors, for that matter (all of whom have similar restrictions on adult content).

AdultWebcomics only seeks a non-exclusive right to post your work on our website. This means that the material may also appear elsewhere on the web — on your own website, or on a portal, or anywhere else you choose to put it — at the same time it appears at AdultWebcomics.com.

Submissions should be sent to: adultwebcomics@gmail.com

It's surprisingly difficult to build a business on adult (as in erotic, pornographic or containing sexual humour) webcomics. The potentially greater mass appeal is off-set by a much larger number of obstacles the adult-oriented cartoonist finds in his way: mainstream, non-porn advertisers are less likely to want to work with you, credit card companies insist on having you pay punitive rates, online payment providers find themselves acting as proxies for the credit card companies and either forcing you to pay punitive rates themselves or refusing to do business with you outright. This is the reason why AWC:
a) exists at all - having adult webcomics on webcomicsnation would cause the entire service to be treated as an adult content site; and
b) morphed from being a web service provider like webcomicsnation to being an edited, but not subscription-based website similar to the free parts of Modern Tales. I don't quite remember the details - and some of them came up in private discussion groups that I oughtn't to quote from anyway - but there were additional risks associated with not having an editor stand between the contributors and the website.

Nevertheless, it's about to be launched now, and could provide opportunities for webcartoonists who like to draw more risqué, sexy material.

Via Branko, I hear of Bad Behavior, a

fingerprinting method for HTTP requests, [which] has proven, as one user called it, "shockingly effective" at identifying and blocking malicious activity, including blog/wiki spam, e-mail address harvesting, automated cracking attempts, and more. It does all of this looking only at the HTTP request headers; for POST data, the content of the spam is not analyzed at all.

If you have a WordPress blog, you probably need this, but it is designed to be easily integrateable into other PHP-based content management systems. If I read the documentation correctly, I could install it now and have it do basic spam-blocking work in Willow, but I prefer to wait until Mithandir has given me his opinion and maybe done whatever tweaks are necessary to make all the functionality cooperate with Willow.
(Mithandir's own motivation for doing this is probably a bit low right now, though - he's vacationing in Norway, and he reports that the amount of spam on his own website has dropped spontaneously over the past few days. So I may change my mind and muck about with the plugin myself. I should be able to stick in an "Include Once" call....)

The year's second heatwave is turning out to be a bit of a downer. The newspapers are full of warnings of the country's open waters falling prey to cyanobacteria, botulism and other pestilences. Plant life is visibly affected now - grass is drying out in quite a few places. Hosepipe bans are in place in many localities. And the heat is beginning to kill. In the venerable four-day walking event the Vierdaagse van Nijmegen (AKA International Four Days' Marches Nijmegen, more than 300 people became unwell as a result of the heat, five of them so unwell that they needed reanimation, and two of them died. With higher temperatures expected for tomorrow, the event, which had three days yet to go, has been canceled.
The Vierdaagse has been shortened before, but this is the first time ever that the event has been canceled in peace time.

The Death Warrant is now uploaded to the Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan archives on Modern Tales. Took almost exactly an hour to do, because the database is fast and the control panel has great usability if you don't have to add text to an episode. The main ROCR archive still looks better though.

OK, I've speeded up my schedule for bringing the ROCR archives at Modern Tales up to date, and uploaded The Green Knight's Belt today. Two reasons:

1. Much to my own surprise, Modern Tales is still a big deal to me. It's a prominent comics site that I'm proud of being a part of.

2. I need to be well-mirrored as a hedge against hackers, script kiddies or the website going down for no good reason at all. ROCR.net is under almost constant attack. So is Modern Tales, but the odds of them both buckling under at the same time are small.
(Today, by the way, there's a likely attack in progress focusing on the reinderdijkhuis.com domain, which points to rocr.net. The symptom is a very large number of pageviews from one IP, over a period that's far too short for any human reader to read as many pages as are being requested. It may be innocuous, a new web crawler sucking up pages, or someone speed-downloading the site for offline reading, but I'm watching it with suspicion. Only damage so far is that it buggers up my statistics, but the behaviour shown could be merely reconnaissance for a real hack. Yes, I'm paranoid. I have reasons.)

The data entry on Modern Tales is easy, but tedious, so I won't do The Death Warrant before tonight. I'm gonna spend the afternoon switched off in the sweltering heat.