Waffle

Ladies and gentlemen, we have comments. Try them!

This weekend, we'll see some changes around the ROCR.net website, webcomic and blog. Some of these will be disruptive.
Most important of all: New Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan story starting on Monday! I'll be running Invasion in stead of the storyline I interrupted in October, Feral, because Invasion is part of a multi-comic event that's set to a fixed schedule, and much as I'd like to give you two Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan stories simultaneously, I can't. Indeed it's so far been a mad scramble to get the pages for Invasion ready in time while also doing my work for Hello You! and teaching.

To help me keep the story to a fixed schedule and at an acceptable level of quality, I've called for the help of three people: Drooling Fan Girl, Mravac Kid and Calvin Bexfield. DFG and Mravac will be taking turns colouring the comics on a per-sequence basis, so DFG will do the introductory chapter set in the Gnomian Republic, while Mravac will colour the next few scenes, set, er, elsewhere. Starting on page 11, Calvin Bexfield will be applying his considerable drafting skills to the backgrounds, drawing castles, towns and longhouses like you've never seen them in this comic before.

There'll be some cleanup on the archives. First thing on Sunday morning, I'll be moving all the White House in Orbit chapters to their own subsection of the website, which will be here-abouts. It's been fun showing these three stories and the guest comics; we'll be returning to the remaining stories later in the year. If you come to the site on Monday, the last few episodes may appear to have vanished, but they're still there, and I'll put up a separate post pointing latecomers to them. I'll also merge several of the incidental, one-drawing ROCR chapters into a new chapter, and put those, and the guest comics, in a separate section with the crossover comics, so the archives will seem a lot shorter.

As for the blog, you'll have noticed that I've added a few new writers and attempted to upgrade the software. I haven't quite got to my ultimate goal of having functional comments again; so far, the comment form sends people using it to the Xepher.net front page, which wouldn't be so bad by itself, but it also fails to send their comments to my database. I'll be working on it. As part of working on it, I will probably have to reset the blog's templates to their defaults, because I can't remember for the life of me which part of the comments code I've taken out over the years. While I'm doing that, the archives, entries and indices may look a bit funny. Can't be helped.

Getting this far has been difficult enough, by the way, because after two years, A Six Apart still haven't fixed the resource consumption problems that made the comments functionality so vulnerable in the first place (as some of you may remember, I made a mistake upgrading the antispam plugins, and within minutes, a spam attack took down not just the Movable Type installation but the entire host). Xepher and I have spent several hours getting the resource use down to manageable (note how I don't say "acceptible", because the resource consumption is still insane) levels, which was time we would probably both have preferred to spend otherwise.

Soon enough, we will have comments back and we will be seeing more posts from the new posters, who so far include studio-mate Jelena, ROCR colourist DFG and new ROCR background artist Calvin Bexfield. I'll be inviting some more people as well. I'm also planning to add some functionality like Gravatars that will make the blog part of the site a little niftier and a more inviting place than it has been recently.

I missed this at Making Light's Sidelights, but managed to catch it at Avedon Carol's Sideshow: Richard Thompson has a new song up on his website, called Dad's Gonna Kill Me. First impression: pretty energetic delivery with his usual strong guitar work. Dunno if it's the best writing he's ever done, yet, but I'll know when I've listened to it more.

Another quick catch: the Earth Day Footprint Quiz tells me that if everyone lived like me, we'd need 2.1 planets. This in spite of me not owning a car and living in a very modest apartment. My footprint is well below the average for a person living in the Netherlands, but, like my cellphone, it's not small enough.

Among the many criticisms in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District was that ID was not science, that it offers no testable hypotheses, and is not subject to change as new evidence comes to light. Indeed, during the trial clear evidence of this was shown:

Although in Darwin's Black Box, Professor Behe wrote that not only were there no natural explanations or the immune system at the time, but that natural explanations were impossible regarding its origin. (P-647 at 139; 2:26-27 (Miller)). However, Dr. Miller presented peer-reviewed studies refuting Professor Behe's claim that the immune system was irreducibly complex. Between 1996 and 2002, various studies confirmed each element of the evolutionary hypothesis explaining the origin of the immune system. (2:31 (Miller)). In fact, on cross-examination, Professor Behe was questioned concerning his 1996 claim that science would never find an evolutionary explanation for the immune system. He was presented with fifty-eight peer-reviewed publications, nine books, and several immunology textbook chapters about the evolution of the immune system; however, he simply insisted that this was still not sufficient evidence of evolution, and that it was not "good enough." (23:19 (Behe)).

Clearly, the problem is that they don't sound sciency enough! What can a noble, upstanding group of liars do to try and retrieve their shattered reputation?

Why, what they always do: Make stuff up. Come with me, then, into the wilds of Baraminology, where the elephant in the corner must never, ever be spoken of.

(more...)

I'm in the process of upgrading Waffle. If you can see this post, then all is well. If not, then you won't know about it.

Most of the upgrade process so far went smoothly, but there seems to be a problem with rebuilding the old files. Let's see if Movable Type 3.3 can publish this post.

Another test. The script seems to hit the CPU/memory limits, hard. .... trying again. And again. And yet again..... Aaaand again. And yet again, again and again. And again, because we just switched to a different database system.

Right. It works now. Comments are still wonky though. I'll switch them off for now and I'll try to figure out what's wrong with them tomorrow.

Kristofer Straub reports on the deletion of his webcomic Starslip Crisis:

Delete Wikipedia: A Webcomics Case Study:

The Webcomics Purge of ‘07 continues with the deletion of Starslip Crisis‘ article. An article for deletion was submitted to Wikipedia, to delete Starslip Crisis, and the measure carried.

The result was delete and redirect to Blank Label Comics. — Nearly Headless Nick {C} 10:42, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

I started the vote to delete Starslip Crisis.

I started the vote to delete Starslip Crisis using a freshly-registered user with no other edits under his belt.

I also used faulty logic to initiate the discussion: I said www.starslip.com has no Alexa data, and isn’t notable as a result. (www.starslip.com is just a redirect: the comic’s URL is www.starslipcrisis.com and has an Alexa rank.)

Then I registered ten more fake users to stuff the original delete vote. This is called “sock puppetry” in Wikipedia terminology, and is frowned upon. The names of the fake users I used in the AfD are: Salby, Incredulous, Banalzebub, Hammerabbi, LKeith30, Repromancer, Expiwikist, Floxman, YothSog, and 66.27.212.63.

It’s so frowned upon that when someone else — a person I don’t know calling himself WizardBrad — tried to use a sock puppet to get his Keep vote to count twice, he was found to be cheating and his vote was struck from the record! Bless your heart, WizardBrad.

Here I was terrified that the Wikipedia editors-that-be would uncover my ruse to falsely delete a webcomic from their pages, and not only did they not find me out, they discounted someone cheating in Starslip’s favor!! How did they catch him and not me? Why did they bother to check up on his IP and not the IP address I used for the ten fake voters?

Oh, I will admit, I was sly. My fake voters engaged in conversation with one another, even one convincing another that the article should be deleted, not just merged under something else. Wikipedia cautions its editors that sock puppets can appear, and that the “straw man sock puppets”

are created by users with one point of view, but act as though they have an opposing point of view, in order to make that point of view look bad, or to act as an online agent provocateur.

What I tried to do was take the popular point of view among Wikipedia’s editors — “delete webcomics” — and then prove that it would be accepted even under fallacious/suspicious circumstances. And it looks like I was successful.

Starslip Crisis is gone from Wikipedia for made-up reasons championed by my team of ten grudge-carrying fakes.

As it turns out, it’s not hard to get something deleted from Wikipedia, especially if it’s on some ice-blasted, barren frontier land on the internet like webcomics, where no one really knows what’s important and what isn’t, and no one really cares to make sure.

Yes, it does look to me like the process is broken, why do you ask?

If you read Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan, you'll undoubtedly have seen the occasional "Coloured by DFG" discreetly announced below an archived ROCR comic. Drooling Fan Girl, as she's known to the webcomics-reading public, is the comic's most frequent guest colourist. She's a very vocal, argumentative and at times eccentric presence in webcomics-related forums and IRC channels as well. Starting the 19th, DFG will alternate colouring duties on the next ROCR story, provisionally entitled "Attack of the Nightmares" until I can find a title that doesn't suck, with second colourist Mravac Kid.

1...2...3...

This is DFG aka Drooling Fan Girl I've colored comics for reinder, and yammer with (at) him in IRC.

I've had a few story ideas here and there. And hopefully, I'll have something more interesting to share another time.

I did some research and found that there were no technical restrictions on this Movable Type installation. The license restricted me to five authors, but I've just gone to Movable Type's site and accepted the new license which allows me to have more.

So welcome, Jelena Stellaard, to this blog. Jelena has been my studio-mate for the past year. She's a cartoonist, a musician and a geek, so we get along like a house on fire. Jelena has been asked to teach a series of cartooning workshops similar to the workshops I teach, and I asked her a while ago to write about her experiences in this blog like I've been doing with mine. Not that she'll be restricted to posting about teaching, of course.

The second new blogger I'll invite is my other studio-mate, Calvin Bexfield. Calvin is the new background artist for Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan whose meticulous drafting and design you'll enjoy (that's an order!) starting in March. DFG got there first!

Eh... Erm.... Hello?... Test... Is this thing on?...... Ah..Well...Ahem!
H-Hello dear readers. My name is Jelena Stellaard and I will join Reinder in 'besmirching' (or how do you write that word) this lovely Waffle-Blööög... So as of now you will be able to read next to Reinders rubbish, some exquisite prose from my hand (and no I did not just now watch two episodes of Pride and Predjudice in one go... well it's Valentines Day for goodness sake!)... Ahwell... anyway... Feel free to read my lovely blog entries (or die!) and well, maybe you could sometimes visit my splendid- I mean HUMBLE website (www.saiso.nl/jelena spamspam). 'Kay that's it for now, bye bye, yours truly etcetc.