Waffle

PZ Myers pointed to an entry in The Primate Diaries, which from reading a few more articles, like this one on the Grandmother hypothesis, looks like being an excellent blog indeed.

I mean, squid and worms are all great fun and games to read about, and I'll happily waste some of my time reading about colour perception in squirrels or bee lifestyles, but for serious evolutioning, you need apes. Can't be helped. The true object of science is greater primates. I'll be reading this blog.

Two and a half weeks in, I'm settling in to... well, still caffeine addiction but a lower level of it. I sleep better, and longer, at least if I let myself go to bed on time. I wake up earlier, and most importantly, spend less time hitting the snooze button and going back to sleep after the alarm goes off. When I get my morning coffee, it tastes better — partly because I'm more sensitive to it, but also because now, when I wake up, I'm actually rested enough to make coffee without misjudging the dose, breaking my cup or spilling boiling water on my feet. Win.

I'm moving closer to a regular, nine-to-five working day. That should be handy when I get a full-time job. Also, early-evening appointments (life drawing, running, seeing friends) are now easier to fit into my schedule. I do get sleepy earlier in the evening, but that is by design. I've even stepped up my exercise program to ensure that I'm good and tired by half past ten in the evening. This also helps keep the metabolism going after the coffee wears out. I run twice a week with the club and am now making an effort to swim every day, half an hour at a time. Half an hour isn't long, but it's an amount of time and energy I can afford to spend every day. I'll probably build it up a little in the next few weeks.

I'm also slowly breaking the habit of procrastination. I spend less time distracted by blogs, webcomics and forums, though I need to cut much more deeply into that habit before I'll consider myself optimally productive. It's difficult, because most of the work I do is on the internet and is deeply intertwined with my online reading habits, but it will be worth it just to be able to combine whatever job I get with continued webcomic production. Of course, if everyone did that, there'd be no one left to read my work.

Back to the coffee: I tried cutting down from three cups before noon to two, but I don't think that's a step I'm ready to take, or indeed one that I need to. Coffee's not all bad, after all, as I mentioned earlier.

Look at this Before-and-after montage of, er, someone called Faith Hill on a magazine cover. It's hypnotic and freaky, but what's especially worrying is the arm in the published version. Arms don't work that way. If a comic book artist was found drawing arms like that, they'd be posted all over Scans Daily within a day.

At the end of the training this evening, one runner asked me if I had any vacation plans. I said "No, I'm broke" and told her about the work I'd been doing and the plans I had for a career change. When I mentioned translation, another runner butted in and suggested I applied with [company from the list I posted earlier]. I said I had been to their website and that I knew they were looking for both freelancers and staff translators. I asked her if she worked there. She said she worked for [company I had actually applied with in May last year], so I asked her if she was the one who'd stolen my vacancy.

She answered that the vacancy had gone to a candidate with eight years' consecutive experience. That was interesting - I hadn't got around to calling that company again and asking why they hadn't hired me, even though I knew I really ought to have. There was no way I could have beaten that candidate.

I asked her how the test translations were judged - specifically whether field-specific language use wasn't weighted rather more heavily in the judging process than companies claim it is. She answered that it was factored in in the case of freelancers, but not so much with staff translators.

While the end of a running training, when you're all sweaty and light in the head and gasping for breath, probably isn't the best time to evaluate information like that, I did come away with the impression that I need to work on my IT-related vocabulary. So my plan to do as many test translations as I can is a good one, but I also need to do some real work in the field. I think I should do some localisation work for an open-source software project, just to develop my skills in the real world. Preferably it should be open-source software that I use, because I'm more likely to already have domain-specific vocabulary for it. I'll look for a project.

It's interesting how much you can find out about people in your sports club. I know there's a fair number of nurses in my group, some sports instructors, one very well-traveled marketer in tailored suits, and when I'm face to face with several others, I could probably remember, or perhaps even guess, what industries they're in. And it's not like I spend a lot of time socialising with them after the training - perhaps I should.

Also, many people find it very interesting to be talking to an illustrator or cartoonist. Despite the fact that the VOIC alone has over a hundred members, it's very much considered a rare, even unique, profession to be in. Mentioning it has been a good ice-breaker in many places including my running club. One reason to hang on to the title for a little longer - at least until I've settled down in whatever my new career will turn out to be.

Since last week's rain flood in our building, Kitty has learned that she will have her entire concrete floor replaced. It's still impossible for her and her studio-mate to work in her studio, because the water evaporating from the soaked floor causes paper in the room to curl up. Bummer.

The corridors here are still filled with furniture, appliances and artworks from the affected offices and studios. We could be looking at that for a couple more weeks at the least, unless the owners of the stuff decide to put it in storage off-site. There is talk in the corridors and workfloors of filing damage claims against the housing corporation. I think they have a good case; it's their responsibility to maintain the roof and drains. I do find it odd that one drain was routed through the inside of the building like that.

Anyway... new concrete on the floor is going to cost a bundle. And I'm not sure how it will affect our studio at 3-21. It's quite possible that construction work on the floor will affect our ability to use the studio. I'll keep an eye out for messages from the housing corp.

Today, I'm looking for vacancies in the translation and editing fields. To help me remember what I've been checking out, I'll be keeping a log of sites I've visited and what I've done with the information I've found.

I'll be doing this more often, I hope. Last week, I finally did what I've been telling myself and others I'd be doing for a year or so, and signed up with the Centrum voor Werk en Inkomen and applied for income support. One condition for getting income support is that you actively look for work, meaning that on average, you send at least one job application per week. I don't find this all that onerous and fully intend to send more than that. I rather like the idea of earning money, I have plans for my life that I can't pay for with just a handout for the government, and I've even, over the past year, made my peace with working for a boss again. I've been a struggling sole proprietor for over six years, and while I haven't exactly been a starving artist, I've had to give up quite a lot to be able to do that. I'm a bit fed up with that, so it's time for a change. Assimilation into the System, here I come, and I for one welcome any corporate overlords willing to exploit me for financial profit.

But to keep myself on the ball, it's probably a good idea for me to not just report to the relevant bureaucratic institutions whenever they want me to, but to report to the readership of the webcomic and weblog as well. Just so that, should I find myself slacking, there's an audience of several hundred people willing to kick my ass. Have I ever told you people I like it when people kick my ass? Maybe I should look for a position as a professional submissive.
Also, my memory isn't all that good, so it's a good idea for me to write down both what I intend to do and what I've actually done (I actually have difficulty separating the two, which explains a lot about me) as the intention occurs or the action takes place, respectively.

So here goes, below the cut:

(more...)

If you've tried and failed to get a comment published in the Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan comic archives, let me know. The comic has been under a sustained spam attack for over a day now, with almost half of all IPs and pageviews being the node that gets served when a comment is blocked. To deal with this more efficiently, Mithandir has installed an upgrade to the comment system allowing me to quarantine comment spam. Most of the new batch of spam doesn't get blocked until it reaches the content-based filters, which are processor-intensive. With the quarantine, I should be able to see what IP addresses are used for sending the spam, and block those, which is more efficient.

However, there's always the possibility that something has been broken in the upgrade and legitimate comments get blocked. I already know the upgrade didn't go smoothly, so I'm keeping an eye out for both legitimate comments getting blocked and oodles of spam passing through.

The above does not affect the weblog, where comments will remain closed for the time being.

Parrotline has run the numbers of the death tolls of the various wars in the 20th-Century haemoclysm, separating them by religious affiliation. World War II is, quite wisely, listed separately because it's a complex event and separating out all the religious affiliations involved is going to take the scholars until Doomsday. Numbers are shown for deaths in 20th/21st-century wars by religious affiliation of warring parties and deaths in worst 20th/21st-century genocides by religious affiliation of killers and victims. The final scorecard:

Wars involving European-Christians and Asian Buddhists (incl. WWII) have killed 154.8 million people in the past century. Wars involving Muslims (incl. WWII) have killed 25.6 million people in the past century.

Major genocides & atrocities committed by European-Christians and Asian Buddhists have killed 84.0 million people in the past century. Major genocides & atrocities committed by Muslims have killed 3.5 million people in the past century.

(via)

I've updated my online biography partly to reflect the fact that I'm looking for work, but also to clarify that I'm in the Netherlands after a reviewer at the Giant in the Playground forums got that wrong.

I've also updated the full list of comics I've got online, streamlining the list itself a bit, adding a few comics and de-linking a few others. The ones I've de-linked are currently only hosted on my old personal website at http://users.bart.nl/~samizdat, which I expect to go down the next time my former ISP has to clean up its servers. I haven't had FTP access to the site in over a year, anyway, and at least one javascript on that site now does something completely different from what it did when I put it there. Time to let it go off into that great web archive in the sky. I hope my email address there gets shut down soon as well; it's been a repository of spam for some time, checked only for the one message in 10,000 that could possibly, conceivably, actually be a legit email message for me.

It's possible that I've forgotten to de-link some comics on the list or update some URL that is no longer valid. If you find one, let me know. The de-linked comics will eventually be back in re-scanned, remastered form.

At a little after six, just as I was done admiring the giant hailstones that had been falling around the studio, and had gone back to my laptop to tell some of my friends about it in IRC, Kitty from the costuming studio at the beginning of the hall came in to ask me for the corporate landlords' emergency phone number. She said that she had a major leakage from the roof, causing flooding in her studio and was going downstairs to the studio below hers to check if it wasn't seeping through there. I looked up the number, came after her to give it to her, and then got on with scavenging the area for buckets, waste bins and other containers to put under the leaky spot.

The leakage was bad! It looked more like a pipe had sprung a leak than the sort of thing you usually get with rain seeping through the roof. Her entire floor was submerged and the bucket she had put under the leak was already overflowing. As it turned out, the studio below her did have some minor seepage, but it was nothing compared to what was happening to hers. Two people from that other studio also helped out with buckets, moving vulnerable objects and also bailing out the floor. Luckily, Kitty's home decor taste runs to the Brutalist, so she has a bare concrete floor that water could easily be scooped up from. Not so luckily, her studio-mate, an animation student, had a case full of paper materials for his graduation project in the path of the flood water. Most of that was salvaged, though, but it was a close call.

That studio wasn't the only one affected by leakage though. At the other end of the hall, two other studios have been flooded - we could tell because water was running off into the hallway from them. Unfortunately, the users of those studios weren't in, and were unwilling or unable to come over to check the damage, so the extent of the damage there isn't known. I have reason to believe that in at least one of them, it could be considerable, because I paid a visit to the office below that one, and it looked like a pipe had sprung there as well.

As someone who wasn't personally affected by the flooding, I found bailing out, tossing buckets of water out of a third-floor window (and possibly onto the heads of poolgoers below), and mopping up the hallway afterwards rather fun. At some point I had to wipe a goofy grin off my face as Kitty, who saw her life's work and that of her studio-mate in danger, looked me straight in the eye. Yeah, I know. It wouldn't be fun if it was my stuff going to hell. But it was a break in the monotony, and an opportunity to meet the people on the floor below me, who I rarely exchange more than a few words with.

Kitty's workplace has a drain duct leading right through it, and that was where the leak was, which explains why it gushed down so badly. I don't know about the places at the back of the hall.

I do know that one reason we (the five of us using no. 3-21) escaped from this was that we'd spotted a leak one or two years ago during a similar, though less severe, storm. That did mild damage to a few comic books, which is a low price to pay for being forewarned and prepared. Lucky us... but we're still going to look into insuring our studio against this sort of thing.

... After the storm, those of us who were still hanging around in the building were treated to a fantastic double rainbow. Also, walking down the tree-lined path by the cemetary on my way out, I spotted the biggest rainworm I'd ever seen, crossing the road at great speed and with more determination than I'd ever think a creature with no face or limbs could possibly be able to express. What this summer lacks in hours of sunlight, it makes up for in freakiness.

Update: Not to be outdone, Geir emails a link to an Aftenposten article with pictures of the flooding in Kongsberg, Norway, where he works. Damn those Scandinavians and their one-upmanship!