Waffle

I'm trying to baffle you lot in this waffle with my first attempt to.....scraffle? Well to post something anyways.

so....here goes: Hi everrrrybodddddy, I'm the guy who does the background 'art' in the Evil Overlord crossover pages of ROCR. I guess nobody has seen my work yet, but you will...soon enough.

A little preview of my work:

Had some photoref.

Well hope you like it, and maybe, someday, I'll daw a picture that really blows your mind...

Children's literature is full of scrotums! (Via Neil Gaiman)

Matt Taibbi: Maybe We Deserve to Be Ripped Off By Bush's Billionaires:

While America obsessed about Brittany's shaved head, Bush offered a budget that offers $32.7 billion in tax cuts to the Wal-Mart family alone, while cutting $28 billion from Medicaid.

MediaFork is a new media-ripper derived from HandBrake, whose development had stalled recently. Works on OSX and linux (linux version Command Line only). I couldn't get the source code to build, but the binary version worked swimmingly. So far, I've done all my DVD ripping with MPlayer, but you can never have enough tools... and this one seems to be a little smarter than MPlayer at finding the correct audio channels automagically.

Teen 'sport killings' of homeless on the rise. Reminded me of this Majikthise post from a month or so ago. Remind me to be nice to a homeless person some time.

The man responsible for putting my old band's music on Sellaband and adding old photos showing me in the band also regularly sends me interesting music links, so I can almost forgive him. Today, he sent me a link to Dalek I, an obscure early synth duo. I didn't care much for this sort of thing when I was actually living through the synth pop era, but a lot of it sounds rather good to me now.

Reinder is not one to blow is own horn, especially if the horn is a rickety old electric guitar and it has been a while since he played it. But with the coming of Sellaband many a band that had previously given up hope of ever being discovered give it another go.

Sellaband is a project where bands can present themselves and ordinary Joe Schmoe can buy shares in order to finance the recording of an album. The first few thousand dollars can be accumulated by spamming friends and family-members, but to get to the magic $ 50.000 mark you have to get some real backing by a wide audience. The first band to achieve this, Dutch Goth metal band Nemesea is about to hit the recording studio.
It is an interesting concept, and certainly a child of the times. It seemse only fair that the public gets the idea it can be part of the music industry, as said industry seems to be increasingly estranged from the public. There are bands to be discovered in all genres and different levels of quality. Personally I'm rooting for Dan.e's band Radius, and will buy my share as soon as my bank balance will allow it. I like the way it allows you to show your support to a band, and it's risk free. If the band doesn't make the 50k you can get your money back, and if they succeed, you'll at least get the album.
I'm not sure though I like the current development of everyone and their tape recorder-toting dog creating a Sellaband-account and sit back and wait to be discovered. A little self-criticism goes a long way and I for one wouldn't mind seeing the project a little less clogged with bands that lack basic musical quality and just seem to be hoping to be hyped into a record deal. Or, in the case of The Hooded Crow, blowing the dust of old tapes. I'm not sure Reinder is aware THC is even on Sellaband, so please read this as a general critique and not pointed at individuals (least of all Reinder). I do not see much point in using Sellaband to promote a band that hasn't been around for a decade, fun though it may be to listen to their music.
Though I'm thankful for the band pictures...

Part I

I'm afraid I may have been a bit misleading with my quotes in Part I: It's actually very unusual for them to use relatively simple language, even in introductory pages. For instance, take today's article, which opens with:

We believe that phylogenetic discontinuity is obvious for most groups approximating the family level and higher categories. Therefore, baraminology sees multidimensional biological character space crisscrossed with a network of discontinuities that circumscribe islands of biological diversity. Within these character space islands, the basic morpho-molecular forms are continuous or potentially continuous. Discontinuity in this sense does not refer to either the minor breaks in quantitative ranges that are used to delimit species or the modifications on a basic theme that demarcate genera. It is the unbridged chasms between body plans - forms for which there is no empirical evidence that the character-state transformations ever occurred. The mere assumption that the transformation had to occur because cladistic analysis places it at a hypothetical ancestral node does not constitute empirical evidence.

This is meant to be a basic description of the field.

Now, I could - and will - criticise the writing style, but first, let's try and figure out what the hell this means...

(more...)

The new Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan story, Invasion, began yesterday, both on the ROCR.net site and on the Chronicles of the Witch Queen website. The COTWQ version has slightly smaller images but is otherwise identical to the ROCR.net version - however, it has a working RSS feed and you can tooncast the comic from it. It also has a cast section in progress which will be separate from the giant Cast section at ROCR.net.

The colour work in the opening chapter is done by Drooling Fan Girl, fresh-faced new blog poster and previously a recurring guest colourist. As the chapter progresses, you'll find she's outdone herself this time. Someone should give her a paid colouring job! She doesn't want me to say that, though. The action of the first chapter is set far away from Clwyd-Rhan, in a forest on the farthest edges of the Gnomian Republic, where humans do not go. We will see humans in the second chapter though, as well as some very strange creatures indeed...The second chapter will have colour by Mravac Kid and backgrounds by my studio-mate and even fresher-faced blog poster Calvin Bexfield. We'll introduce them properly later.

The publication of Invasion happens while that other story, Feral, is still on hiatus. We'll be, er, co-ordinating with some other webcomics later on, and as a result, Invasion has to be run on a fixed schedule. Feral isn't abandoned, though; there are 10 new installments on my hard drive, which will only have to be cleaned up, coloured, lettered and prepared for web publication.

I'd say more, but I'd spoil things.

Peter Venables' 22 panels challenge. Peter has re-worked Wallace Wood's famous 22 pictures that always work in his own style. I'll take this challenge some day, but not now.

Wellington Grey explains how science and faith work in nifty flow charts. His website and journal are also great, except that for some reason he wants to stop people posting cat pictures on the internet, which tells me there's something not quite right about him. He'll be calling for a ban on internet porn next (via Boing Boing).

Wellington Grey's going to hate this: 1700+ pictures of cats found on the internet (via Pete Ashton, who asks "what more do you need? " Er, another 1700 pictures of cats?)

Following up on Jelena's teaching report, below: my own recent teaching experiences have been fairly routine, though it was interesting a few weeks ago to visit the same school on two consecutive days. It was a big difference; on Thursday, I felt like a rock star, while on Friday, I felt like a wannabe stand up comedian on open mic night. I didn't do anything particularly different between those two days (five classes in all), but for some reason I could grab the kids' attention and whip up a lot of enthusiasm on day one, and not on day two. The most likely cause was that on Friday, the kids had had a sporting event in the morning, so they had this big old adrenaline/endorphin cocktail running through their veins and weren't as sharp as they would otherwise have been.

I still manage to enjoy teaching even when the kids are being a bit difficult, though. Which is useful because last Thursday's follow-up class at the same school was a difficult one. I had a classroom full, after school hours, of kids who normally sat in different home rooms, with no regular staff member or volunteer present. I wasted a lot of time getting one particularly noisy little girl to shut up and get back to work, and as a result forgot to ride the waves of the other kids' attention spans. You know, normally while a class is working on a project, you can tell when the class starts buzzing a bit, and it's time to get them off the task they've been carrying out and on to something new. This time, I got distracted, so so did several of the other kids. Of course, a class that large is going to be quite heterogeneous, and there were quite a few who just quietly got on with the work and had some rather neat comics ready at the end of the hour.

I don't mind having to deal with loud kids, personally. It's a skill I think I should learn to get better at. But on the other hand, it's not fair to the other kids if one or two of them drain all my attention while I'm learning this skill. So for the second follow-up class, at another school, I'm going to ask if one of the volunteers can be present to keep an eye on things. If they don't have any available, I'll just try the best I can. Shouldn't be as many kids in that one anyway.

It's interesting that Jelena's Thursday class was filled with Manga fans; mine wasn't. One could offer the self-selected nature of Jelena's group of students as an explanation, but my group at this point was self-selected as well, unlike the groups at the introductory workshops. Of the 18 or so kids, some liked manga, but most predominantly read the classic comics - the same ones I read as a child. European and American comics such as Donald Duck, Asterix, Suske & Wiske. Maybe the fact that I do give these introductory workshops to whole classrooms causes a wider group of kids to sign up for the after-school classes...

THE HOOORRROOOORR!!!!! .. No just joking. Last thursday I taught my very first comic drawing lesson ever and it actually went quite well! I teach 6 boys between 9 and 12 years old and they are a very enthousiastic bunch. At first I tried to teach them some standard comic-emotions, but they were so full of Manga (miss will you draw me a figure from Dragonball Z?!!), that I decided to focus more on the art of making manga. So next thursday I'm going to teach them how to draw a manga head, with hair and everyting. And maybe already start with the body.

The only problem I incountered with the boys was that they were a bit loud in their enthousiasm, but as long as they listen and pay attention, I don't mind...

Yeah I know, it is a bit of a boring story, but maybe next time they'll wreck the whole place and you will be able to read some dramatic yet exciting stuff...

The new File Uploader in Movable Type can make thumbnails! So I can now do this:

and show you previews that still fit within the blog column on the ROCR.net front page. This means that:
1) my search for a better file uploader (in which the only one that looked promising enough to try was for-pay) yesterday was a waste of time; and
2) I don't need to give people complicated instructions for how to post an image without breaking the front page layout. Yay!