Waffle

Tera Forming is a well-drawn, well-written autobiographical comic that is a lot of fun to read. The only downside to it is that it isn't inked, but even under the greyness of the scanned pencil lines, Tera Sanders' drawing chops shine through. Recommended, especially if you like autobios like Planet Karen, which you should.

Update: The comic seems to have disappeared from its webhost, Drunk Duck. Let's hope it turns up somewhere else soon.

I was rereading C.S. Lewis a while ago. I remembered that the last Narnian book wasn't very good. I had forgotten just how bad. Ignoring the simple things: poor characterisation, continuity breaking, new characters who are forced to act like idiots to forward the plot, and Susan not getting to come to Narnia because she decided she liked dating men, we hit the deep problems: The whole thing is about how evolution is a devilish trick that will damn us all, and how horrible Muslims are.

The plot, in simple form, is as follows: A monkey, who later puts on clothes and claims to be a man (spot the allusion to evolution) disguises a donkey in a lion skin and claims he's Aslan. All the other characters act like idiots, so the monkey is able to manipulate things, make deals with an Arabic country to take Narnia over and exploit it, and this causes the end of the world as per the Revelation of St. John. In the process, anything Lewis disliked is bashed, from young girls wearing makeup to evolution to skeptics (there's a group of dwarves who are so wrapped up in not wanting to be tricked that in the end they delude themselves that heaven is a mucky stable, because they entered it through a stable door. Those of you who know my love of dwarves can imagine how I feel about that.)

The first half, with religious feeling leading all the Narnians to bow down to the will of a donkey in a lion skin costume, going so far as accepting their enslavement by the Calormenes (basically, Arabs) because "Aslan" wishes it, is almost a parody of religion. The intended targets, however, remain evolution and Muslims (with a side of skeptics), with the foolishness displayed by the religious evidently being considered absolutely appropriate, I suppose. Lewis' views on evolution are explained further here, where he's quoted saying that Darwin's "monkeying with the ancestry of Man", as well as the study of psychology, stripped away (in that article's summary) "rationality, purpose, volition and freedom, imagination, commitment, [and] the image of God."

...What? So using rational thought to investigate man's origins and modes of thought is less rational than blind belief? Are the vague purposes given man in the Bible - to basically serve God as his servants every waking moment - conductive to volition and freedom, or are they in fact subsuming yourself to a God that cannot be as he is defined in the Bible? Is imagination destroyed by showing us the full spread of reality in all its myriad forms - the animals of Cambrian explosion, the strangeness of nature as a whole, the stars spiraling above us? Or is it destroyed by narrow-mindedness and refusal to consider new ideas that contradict with a single book? Commitment to what? Is this a request to return to the days when beaten wives were forced to remain married to their husbands and put up with it? And what exactly is "the image of God" anyway?

...In short, skip the book. The whole thing, save maybe the last 10 pages, (which it must be admitted do manage, unlike every other depiction I've ever seen, to create a view of Heaven that might actually be livable in), is a badly-writted screed with all the subtlety of "All those with living fathers step forwards. Not so fast, Johnson!"

... I've been sick with flu or flu-related complications such as bronchitis for one month out of the last three. I'm heartily fed up with it.

When the latest epidemic was first confirmed in late February (I was in the tail end of my first bout of the year at the time), some dim-witted trollup on the radio said something like " ah well, if you've got it, chin up! You'll be sick for a day or three and have immunity for a year." I wanted to call up the station and tell her that that only worked if by three days she meant three weeks and by a year she also meant three weeks. I didn't have the energy or the breath to, so I didn't.

I just might be going back to bed after posting this... No comics are due until Monday. On the other hand, I really don't like the look of the latest installment and kind of resent the idea of it staying on the front page all weekend.

PRINCESS ZARA:

A complicated gentleman allow to present,
Of all the arts and faculties the terse embodiment,
He's a great arithmetician who can demonstrate with ease
That two and two are three or five or anything you please;
An eminent Logician who can make it clear to you
That black is white — when looked at from the proper point of view;
A marvelous Philologist who'll undertake to show
That "yes" is but another and a neater form of "no."

SIR BAILEY BARRE

Yes, yes, yes,
"Yes" is but another and a neater form of "no."
All preconceived ideas on any subject I can scout,
And demonstrate beyond all possibility of doubt,
That whether you're an honest man or whether you're a thief
Depends on whose solicitor has given me my brief.

-Utopia Limited, W.S. Gilbert

This is one of Gilbert's best satires - indeed, the whole Act I Finale is marvellous, a concise parody of all the British types beloved of Victorians and of colonialism (the plot literally involves floating an entire country on the stock market - something not as far from reality as one might like, it must be admitted - and satirising every part of it, from the governmental red tape holding back any innovation in Britain to censorship.

It has some dialogue problems - Gilbert's ability to revise was in decline by this point, and so very overly-wordy, formal sentences prevail (it's usually reworked for performance nowadays), but when it does pull together, it's Gilbert at his finest and bravest.

...So you can see why I'm peeved that so many quotation sites insist on attributing part of it to Benjamin Franklin.

I wouldn't normally write about this, because normally, service interruptions at webcomics host Comicgenesis don't affect me directly. I still have a website (two, actually) there, but it hasn't been my main webhost for a long time, and I can take or leave a new update there being on time.

However, now that the updater problems have gone into their second day, they're making this massive multi-artist crossover event I'm in a bit confusing. I mean more confusing than it would be if everything was still running smoothly. So, a few practical things:

1. All comics are being collected at the Crossover Wars hub, including the ones linked from my archives that aren't currently updating. CameoComic for April 3. CameoComic for April 4. This is done manually, so there's still a delay, but the material is finding its way online through people's Photobuckets and alternate hosting solutions. (I would particularly invite cartoonists to get a free account on Webcomicsnation because setting up a series there is easy, and the cross-promotion works, but there are plenty of other good, free solutions. BTW, I would definitely classify Comicgenesis as both free and good, these days, even taking into account this annoying glitch.)

2. I am keeping the links in my archives as they were originally planned, unless someone pipes up from Comicgenesis and says that the problems will persist for the long term. If that happens, I will start linking to people's permanent, alternative solutions. Otherwise, I'll have the devil of a time reversing all the changes once the problem is solved. In the past, I've found that crossovers are high-maintenance things to have in an archive, and I don't want to give myself more of a maintenance load than is strictly necessary.

3. Pimpette still has long-term problems getting back on track, so I'll hold off on linking to any more of Norla and Ottar's adventures in that webcomic until things are normal again.

Things happen. Points to reader Alun Clewe, creator of the webcomic Soup, for predicting that something like this would happen, but more points go to L.P. Hogan, organiser of the event, for taking precautions.

So, what's the problem? Well, as far as I can tell, it started with hardware failure in the box that handles their Domain Name Service. They had two servers for that, but both broke at roughly the same time. Yet another case of redundancy not working. As it happened, they were working on one of those boxes when the other broke, so they could fix that relatively quickly. But ever since, the updater has run very slowly. The updater is a script that creates static HTML pages at the time set by the account holder - a new front page, a new archive page, refreshed pages that link to the new archive page, and any other stuff that the account holder may have queued up to be generated - for all accounts. And there are thousands of accounts. The current script has been revamped since I had ROCR.net on Comicgenesis, and is presumably a lot more powerful, robust and intelligent than it was then, but it's still the most vulnerable in case of something breaking, and when it gets behind on running through its queued updates, it can take it forever to catch up, especially when some other part of the system is still broken. So Caitlin and Ti-Phil and all the others involved are now having to wait for that to finish. They're producing their comics all right, but the site automation isn't taking them. Latest reports I've read on the forums said the queues were only getting longer, which is something I've seen before. In the past, that's been the harbinger of an even more catastrophic problem. While I don't think this will be the case this time, it may be a good idea for CG cartoonists to back up their archived material.

Co-bloggers Jeroen and Adam helped me out with today's Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan comic in which Jake visits the world of Dangerous and Fluffy. That wasn't intended as a full guest comic; it just so happened that I had already asked Adam to script it and then fell behind as a result of illness and overwork, so we thought we'd ask Jeroen to draw it. And he came through! Otherwise I'd have had to delay it, and that would have been a bad thing to do in the middle of a crossover.

In the end, ROCR may well be the only comic in this crossover thread that isn't delayed, though. Pimpette was already out for the count; new updates are finally being published, but it's still well behind. And yesterday's outage at webcomics host ComicGenesis means that some others haven't been able to upload their contributions yet. Caitlin Woods of CameoComic mentioned in her journal that she was going to reschedule her work on the comic if she wasn't going to be able to upload it anyway, and that sort of thing is hard to go back on even if the webhost does come back up all of a sudden. Since the problem was caused by ComicGenesis's own DNS server breaking, it may not, in fact, be up for everyone. I can see the sites just fine, but I don't know if Caitlin can.

So, today's ride may be a bit rough and I may even decide to delay tomorrow's comic in order to re-synchronise things with the folks I'm collaborating with. Apologies for the inconvenience, can't do anything about it guvnah, it'll be right as rain in a day or two.

I'd actually had a Doctor Who-related dream the other night, involving Mel Smith, Griff Rhys Jones, and several incarnations of the Doctor. I don't remember everything from it, but I do remember that Colin Baker, the Sixth Doctor, looked uncannily young and svelte in it. Even when he wasn't standing next to Mel Smith, I mean.

The real first episode was pretty good. Though I was disappointed by much of Series 2, I'd missed the guy and was looking forward to seeing him again with a new companion. "Smith and Jones" wasn't perfect - the plot was stretched a bit thin for 45 minutes - but it had a sense of fun that was missing in much of Torchwood, built up the tension well, had a few laughs, a lot of running-in-corridors and some neat visuals. It was formulaic, but the formula was executed well. I like new companion Martha Jones - she's smarter and less "primal" so to speak, than Rose Tyler was, and hopefully won't be as clingy towards him. She's pretty pleasing to the eye as well, and there was definitely a sexual dynamic between the two, so fanficcers can start sharpening their pencils right now.

The best direct comparison between the two companions is of course the bit where they see the inside of the TARDIS for the first time, a gag that the Doctor can't get enough of and neither can I. Where Rose just ran around it and went "ook?", Martha Jones stayed calm, talked, analysed, tried to figure it out, and of course failed, because there isn't really anything to comprehend. It's bigger on the inside, is all there is to it. Throughout the episode it was clear that the Doctor wanted to work with someone who used her brain, and Martha passed that test.

A good start to the season, I think. I'll definitely go on watching this.