Waffle

Adam, who is leaning over my shoulder as I speak, reminds me to mention that Timmerryn/Rahball's run on Dangerous and Fluffy started this weekend. Timm brought a lighter touch and atmosphere to the comic during its first run, fitting the farcical turn Adam's writing was taking at the time.
Timm appears to have dropped out of comics, though, and hasn't even posted on this blog much, despite being a co-blogger since almost the beginning. Too bad as Timm's work on this and The Pantheon was always fun to read.

There's about three months' worth of reruns left - three months for Adam to find Artist No. 3. I'm not sure if he's put out a call, but it's likely he will.

First: Beer! Crooked Timber's pet contrarian, Daniel Davies, writes In Praise of Budweiser in which he argues that the much-reviled American beer is a perfectly tasty product, not a ripoff of Budvar beer and by any criteria every bit as good as any British Real Ale. He discusses its history, its recipe, the merits of using rice as a brewing grain, and beer as an industrial product. Of all the evidence he mentions, taste is the one that is the most subjective and contentious, but on this issue, he backs up his argument with science:

Budweiser does not taste like piss. Normal urine has a pH of 4.6 to 8.0. Budweiser, like most lagers, has a pH of around 4.0. Therefore, Budweiser is definitely more acidic than piss. It’s also just the ticket if you happen to be drinking beer for breakfast, as the fresh taste of the rice content goes particularly well with most cereals (it is not coincidental that nobody has yet marketed Barley Krispies).

Read the rest.

Second: Morons! P.Z. Myers has something to say about March of the Morons and the familiar underlying argument that stupid people will outbreed smart ones:

The most troubling part of it all is the attempt to root the distinction in biology—it's intrinsic. "They" are lesser beings than "us" because, while their gonads work marvelously well, their brains are inherently less capacious and their children are born with less ability. It's the kind of unwarranted labeling of people that leads to decisions like "three generations of imbeciles are enough"—bigotry built on bad biology to justify suppression by class.

People, they are us.

There are no grounds to argue that there are distinct subpopulations of people with different potentials for intelligence. Genes flow fluidly — if you sneer at the underclass and think your line is superior, I suspect you won't have to go back very many generations to find your stock comes out of that same seething mob. Do you have any Irish, or Jewish, or Italian, or Native American, or Asian, or whatever (literally—it's hard to find any ethnic origin that wasn't despised at some time) in your ancestry? Go back a hundred years or so, and your great- or great-great-grandparents were regarded as apes or subhumans or mentally deficient lackeys suitable only for menial labor.

Are you staring aghast at the latest cluster of immigrants in this country, are you fretting that they're breeding like rabbits? That generation of children will be the people your kids grow up with, go to school with, date, and marry. It may take a while, but eventually, your line will merge with theirs. Presuming you propagate at all, your genes are destined to disperse into that great living pool of humanity. Get used to it.

Again, read the whole thing and might I add that if I'm ever stuck out at sea in a small lifeboat with a Young Earth Creationist Jesus-Zombie type of person and a Social Darwinist, I will conspire with the Jesus Zombie to eat the Social Darwinist first. They're just about the one group of people that get my hackles up more than outright evolution-deniers.

Reader Doc commented to this comic saying "Lolskwirrel!", so I took that ball and ran with it. Here are some Lolskwurl ads:

The first three will go live tonight as Project Wonderful ads. I need to ask Starline Hodge permission to use the last one, because the character Menjou belongs to her. As the actual art is all mine, I can post it here, but I draw the line at slapping it across potentially hundreds of websites without her approval.

Does anyone want base images to make their own Lolskwirrel ads?

Racing heart, hyperventilation and the screaming heebie-jeebies - and that was just the practice run!

The hunt for temporary employment is on. On Calvin Bexfield's advice, I applied with a temp agency serving the call center industry. The original plan was to get into phone support for the revenue service, because despite my limited expertise in tax matters, I get asked about them all the time (similar to me and computers, really. People see me, they conclude that I must be some sort of computer nerd and ask me questions which usually turn out to be above my actual skill level. Sometimes, I manage to be helpful anyway). That didn't work out, because the revenue has strict rules about who gets to peek into their database, and people with their own companies (as defined at least in part by having their own VAT number) aren't allowed to do so. Can't fault them for drawing a line, I guess, but it was a bit of a bummer for me that they've drawn it there. I'm not even registered at a chamber of commerce...

Still, the agency needs people, hard, so they've contacted me twice about other opportunities, quizzing me about my past experiences and my ability to do cross-selling. They also practiced some cross-selling on me by bringing up the possibility of doing outbound telemarketing, which I flatly refused. I do have some pride left. And they sent me a link to a test to fill in.

The test is interesting. It consists of three parts: a Dutch language proficiency test, which I don't think was problematic*); a speed and accuracy test, which I didn't get around to doing, and a timed skills test, which was the reason I didn't get around to doing the speed and accuracy test.

The skills test consists of exercises in which you have to read a piece of test and then enter data extracted from it into a web form, as if someone is telling you his travel plans over the phone and you have to replicate them in a web based travel planner to tell them when to leave. Before the actual test, you get two opportunities to do a practice run, so you at least know the drill in advance. I did the first, got a twitchy mouse, hit a TAB key causing me to get knocked out of the window, and just about failed to finish in time. I did the second and finished that in time... but at the end, my heart was racing, I was hyperventilating, my hands were shaking and I needed to get away from the screen for a little while. Once I'd recovered, I fired off an email telling the agency I was calling the whole thing off.

To be clear about this, what I experienced wasn't normal test stress. I've done exams. I've done IQ tests (under time pressure) as part of the application process for other jobs. I've done job interviews, performance reviews, all the regular stress fests that come with getting and keeping jobs. I've worked to deadline, I've worked past deadline. I've taught classes full of unruly children. I know how the body normally primes itself for pressure and this wasn't it. I've never had stress symptoms physically incapacitate me.

Calvin tells me that the actual work he does is pretty much at the other extreme from this - that it's dull and that his biggest problem is not falling asleep. Let's hope the next agency I try has some more representative tests, then, because I can't cope with this one.

Has anyone else reading this had this experience? How do I prevent it from happening again?

*)Though, to be honest, it was more difficult than I expected. I am becoming like those geezers my own generation used to mock, who'd had their primary education before 1952 and still spelled common words according to the official spelling rules of the day. Since I left University, there have been not one, but two official spelling reforms, the latter of which was so controversial that an organisation was founded to promote an alternate spelling manual. This has eroded my confidence in my own Dutch spelling prowess, which used to be formidable, but probably isn't anymore.

Kim (who promises she will write something in the blog when she has time) was over at my house this evening, and over dinner we did our usual thing in which we discussed life, the universe and everything, but mostly my appallingly bad financial prospects. She pushed me to do some back-of-the-envelope budget calculations, which indicate that a call-center job, which I've been sort of halfheartedly pursuing lately, would not be enough to get me out of the woods unless I did it full-time for several months (meaning no new comics for a while). That's going to make my attempts even more half-hearted... more on money, jobs, and such in another post at a later date - soon, because the problem is becoming just a little bit urgent.

While discussing other lines of work, I mentioned a recurring dream I'd had, in which I am back at University to claim and document credits for classes that I'd passed exams for but which somehow hadn't end up on my final credit list. In the dream, I'm doing this so I can finally get my diploma. It's one of those dreams that look and feel realistic enough to convince me, for some time after waking up, that what I just experienced was real. It can take me up to a day to realise that, hey, I did in fact get my University diploma in 1995.

Kim mentioned that she had a similar recurring dream, usually to do with credits from her second year at the University, which was a nightmare.

I can't help but wonder if these dreams turn up as a result of some barely-registered worry that we have unfinished business at the University, or some rather more obvious low-level worry that we've let the side down during and after our University education. Kim is one of the most intelligent and able people I know, and I, ehrm, I graduated from the Praedinius Gymnasium with excellent grades. My progress through University had a flying start, but after the second or so year, I got lazy and disengaged, leading to worsening grades and a final paper that was sort of mediocre. After that, I did a number of things but mostly remained stuck in "I don't know what I want to do when I grow up, but I can't be arsed to decide now" mode until a disastrous three-year spell at a software company at least gave me a picture of what I didn't want. Kim always did well, but her final paper became a nightmare lasting a decade, marked by one setback after another. That's a story that's for her to tell, though, if she wants to.

And here I am, twelve years after I got a piece of paper saying I was really quite smart and learned, and I'm contemplating taking a low-wage job to make ends meet. Yeah, I guess something went wrong, though if you consider that I held out for six years since quitting that last job, doing creative work all that time, you could argue that something (finally) went right. I've thought about going back to school a couple of times, and the fact that Kim's now pursuing a postgraduate position at the University of Groningen is sort of tickling my interest right now. Do I have unfinished business? Should I try and go back and prove that I'm worthy of that chit after all?

Micropayments are a perfectly valid and succesful business tool - as long as the end user stays out of the picture

In the wake of the failure of Bitpass and Scott McCloud's decision to stop charging a micropayment for The Right Number, discussion of micropayments as an option for making money with web content, specifically, webcomics, has flared up again. Note, for example, Clay Shirky declaring victory for his side of an argument that took place several years ago. Joey Manley thought the tone of the article was a bit vindictive, but like several commenters to Joey's post, I think it was necessary for Shirky to make the post so that debate had some closure.

Of course, these things never truly end. On Comixpedia, Joel Fagin has another go at it, making some good points about the difference between a service and a project and arguing that that distinction, not micropayments themselves, are what caused micropayment-supported webcomics to fail. As long as webcomics are sold as a service (you pay to login and see the comics on the server), rather than a product (you pay for comics to download and keep), they won't be worth charging for. As an example of a micropayment-enabled product, Fagin cites iTunes (and comment hijinx ensue).

I have trouble with the idea of iTunes as a micropayments business, though a quick look at the Wikipedia article on micropayments suggests that it qualifies, because the payments involved are too small to process economically through the credit card system, and aggregated inside iTunes' billing system on a weekly basis. But I don't think the 1-dollar per song price tag was what micropayments' original boosters had in mind. The Case For Micropayments by Jakob Nielsen, from 1998 (that's how long we've had this conversation, folks), talks in terms of cents rather than dollars. That's a big difference.

By the definition that allows iTunes to be a micropayments-based business, Modern Tales is one - though no longer primarily so. In its original business model, prices for monthly subscriptions were in the too-small-for-credit-cards category, but annual subscriptions were not. Today, of course, most of the content is free, supported by ads from Google and Project Wonderful.

What happens internally at Modern Tales is a lot closer to the original idea of micropayments than what happens at the customer level at Modern Tales, or at iTunes. When a subscriber clicks on a link to an archived Modern Tales comic, that creator gets points equivalent to the number of comics pages served as a result of that link. These points get aggregated and divided by the total number of points in a given period to give a percentage of the earnings that the cartoonist should get. I'll spare you the details, but "points" act as stand-ins for really small sums of money - i.e. micropayments.
Likewise, Project Wonderful's cost-per-day, measured in tiny sums of money that are aggregated in advance by the advertiser, is a micropayment-based system. Come to think of it, for most smaller hosts, Google Ads' internal accounting and aggregation would count as well.

In the backends of web-based businesses, micropayments are used all the time. Maybe that distinction, between charging micropayments to end users and charging them to advertisers or publishers/portals, is more meaningful than the distinction between products and services.

It's probably ironic that the biggest boosters of micropayments wanted them to kill ads, when what micropayments actually do is enable them on more sites that wouldn't otherwise have had them.

DFG pointed me to Action Figure Graveyard, a wonderful surrealistic, science-and mythology-literate comic drawn in a loose, lively art style. The archive has only 34 comics, but each of them is a full-colour, full-page bundle of awesomeness and glee.

I'd also put up the makers, House and Greer, for a webdesign award, because their clean, uncluttered design with just one persistent mindfuck in it - the back to front navigation buttons - is a work of evil genius in its own right.

I'd particularly recommend it for fans of Dresden Codak and XKCD, even though it doesn't really resemble those comics at all. It just hits the nerd buttons in the same way.

This week, Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan will update 4 times. Monday's update will be a filler-ish thing: a montage of panels from another comic that recapitulates what has happened in that other comic over the past month. Tuesday's update will be a proper ROCR comic, continuing from the events in that other comic. The other regular updates will be on Wednesday and Friday.

There may be a filler on Thursday, but I wouldn't hold my breath. Usually, the same time constraints that prevent me from making five comics a week also prevent me from creating fillers. This week's material has been pretty intensive to create, too.

Also, Krakatoa cast page for Invasion is up.

....much better. The story of The Lazarus Experiment was a bit unambitious and consisted largely of chase scenes, but this time the people involved managed to hang some good direction and dialogue on that storyline, and while the resolution was a bit daft, it looked and sounded good enough to work. I liked the nod to the Third Doctor, and the first real appearance of Mr. Saxon's aide.

I am, however, getting a bit fed up with the design of the monsters - and by the way, having the lead bad guy turn into a monster? Yawn. The problem with many of the current crop of monsters is that they're all mandibles and spider legs and glistening skin and exposed internal organs and stingers and pinchers - all the outward signifiers of predatory dangerousness, but somehow they fail to impress. A Dalek, in comparison, really is a superior design. A Dalek doesn't look dangerous. It looks a bit preposterous right until it egg-whisks you to death. Much more effective. These monsters just look like they're overcompensating. And I will probably go to my grave believing that CGI monsters lack the necessary physical presence to be truly menacing.

But apart from that, here was one episode that I could enjoy again. Love Martha's mother. She's much more formidable than Jackie Tyler, just like her daughters are much more formidable than Rose.

Oooh, that trailer looked wonderful. Nice to see a familiar face again. One would almost forget it's going to be scripted by Chris bloody Cribnall....

I can't quite recall in which episode the Master did what Saxon's aide did in this one, poisoning people's minds against the Doctor. I think it was a Sixth Doctor episode, which would explain why I can't quite recall it. I recently watched a whole batch of Sixth and Seventh Doctor episodes and found the overwhelming majority of the Sixth Doctor's body of work to be intolerably bad. So I've in all likelihood repressed the memory. Was it Mark of the Rani?

Finally, I note with a weary heart that the science was bollocks again, though at least this script wasn't as brazen about it as that of Daleks in Manhattan/Evolution of the Daleks. It's a better quality of bollocks, if you will. I've noticed in the fan reviews on Livejournal that people have started spelling it "teh skience", which I take as a sign that they've given up on getting any science within the series that they can take seriously. Something for the producers to pay more attention to in Series 4, I guess.

No Doctor Who next week, but I'll probably find something to review. I'll either watch and review one of the DVDs that I haven't discussed yet, or download something especially to watch and review. Maybe a Dalek episode, or one featuring the Master.

From the Graun:

Folk music is liberalism with guitars, right? Wrong. Our understanding of it is based on deep-seated racism, argue Hugh Barker and Yuval Taylor

...
One of the main tasks folk song collectors have always faced is choosing which of the many songs their informants sing are folk songs and which aren't. Most of them have thought this a relatively easy task: folk songs are uncommercial, pure products of a shared heritage, passed on from generation to generation, whereas pop songs are outside interlopers, invasive species that endanger the survival of the genetically unmodified, authentic, living tradition.

...most folklorists assumed that distinct and culturally separate groups ranging from American blacks to Appalachian whites still existed, despite the evidence that their music had undergone countless transformations through the mixing of traditions. John Lomax, who, along with his son Alan was the premier collector of American folk music, embarked on his monumental quest for black American folk songs in 1933 by defining them as the "songs that are ... the least contaminated by white influence or by modern negro jazz". What Lomax was really after, though, he had revealed a year earlier: he wanted to feel "carried across to Africa ... as if I were listening to the tom-toms of savage blacks". ...In other words, when deciding which songs were "most unlike those of the white race", Lomax would always choose the most primitive forms of expression, disregarding the jaw-dropping complexity and sophistication of much of the black music of his time.

The "white influence" was, of course, impossible for Lomax to escape. In the Southern black penitentiaries, where he assumed the prisoners would "slough off the white idiom they may have employed", his informants inevitably sang garbled versions of songs of black, white, and mixed origin, distantly remembered from their days of freedom. Lomax was also forceful in suggesting the kinds of songs he was looking for. In one recording he tries to cajole the blues singer Blind Willie McTell into playing some of that "complaining music" about hard times, in spite of McTell's protests that he didn't know any.

By contrast, the English folksong collector Cecil Sharp was interested in isolating white Britishness. He travelled the country lanes of England seeking out rural workers for their unadulterated traditional material. In their songs he saw a distant reflection of the "merrie England" of myth. Sharp then travelled to America to document the survival of the English and Scottish tradition in the isolated communities of the Appalachian mountains. At the time, one out of every eight Appalachians was black, but Sharp dubbed black Americans "a lower race", recoiled from towns with too high a proportion of them, and concentrated only on those songs he considered pure British folk song.

My own working definition of folk music is if it's gone through any kind of oral tradition it counts as folk, no matter the origin. Smoke on the Water? Totally folk. Works much better than any kind of purism.

Read the whole article (Via Crooked Timber). See also: Robert Johnson = Britney Spears.