Waffle

Vanity Fair has a lovely eight-page article called Songs in the Key of Lacerating on the sprawling and very talented Wainwright/McGarricle clan. Read it. (Via)

My brother is going to be in England for six months, and has been looking for temporary homes for his cats (he's managed to acquire seven of them in a year). Unfortunately, he's had to leave a week earlier than expected, and all seven cats are still in his house. My father will be looking after them once or twice a day for a week, but that's not something you can do for months on end. I took care of his cats over Christmas, but back then there were only four of them, and even then they triggered my allergies just a little bit, and, as I found out while visiting my brother's place yesterday, I get wheezy pretty quickly now that there are seven of them in the house.

So, if you live in or around Groningen, the Netherlands, and want a cat (or two - but no one is expecting anyone to take all seven) to keep you company for a few months, please give me a call. We have a wide range of colours, ages and temperaments on offer, ranging from nearly-grown kittens to elderly mother cats and from the extremely sociable to the very self-reliant. All but one of the cats have been neutered and all have had their shots, with papers to prove it.

My brother is also willing to let someone live in his house for free if they agree to look after the however many cats remain in there. Might be worth your while if you've got a temporary job in the city.

My very first job was in a powdered milk factory, filling cans on a conveyor belt. One day, the conveyor belt, which was one of three different but connected machines, broke, and the entire assembly line stopped. No one in the entire room worked until the conveyor belt, which was reputed to have been bought from a factory in the German Democratic Republic, was repaired. In the second room, the forklift guys continued working, but it was clear that they too would have to stop if the problem lasted long enough.

The assembly line for Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan is running again, but like the one at that factory, it's running at half speed while some persistent problems are being worked on. Calvin is available for a few hours a week to do backgrounds. DFG is available to colour, but her Internet connection is still shaky. Mravac's PC is still out of commission, and while he's making do with Paint Shop Pro 5 on an old machine, he can't do colour work on large comics pages that way. And there's my rather urgent need to spend less time on the comic and more time on finding work that actually pays the bills.

The update schedule will be back to Monday, Wednesday and Friday for a few more weeks while I sloooooowly buffer up again. I'd like to do more; we're very close to the end of the story, and I've got some nice stuff written for that. But three is what's doable so three is what you'll get.

I did some advertising on the fantasy webcomic Exiern a while ago. The comic is not my favorite thing in the world (see Robert A. Howard's capsule review. While his comparison between writer Drowemos' early art and that of Jamie Robertson is absurd, the rest of his description is good enough), but advertising on it has been worth my while.

What I do find fascinating about it is the money it attracts. According to its Project Wonderful stats, it has an audience of about 10,000 visitors a day, which is quite impressive for an obscure webcomic. But from that audience, it has managed to raise $1800 in a month to pay its artist with and the writer is about to start up new web projects with the money. While there have been other webcomics that have raised as much in a similar period, they tend to be better-known ones that generate more buzz and inspire visible fanaticism from their audiences.

Drowemos should rent himself out as business manager to struggling webcartoonists. He seems to be doing the obvious thing: create donation-only wallpapers, offer subscriptions to uncensored versions of Exiern, that sort of thing. Yes, we know that tittilation works, especially in combination with good art. Drowemos and Studio Boom have made it work much better than I've learned to expect. And it's bringing in respectable Project Wonderful money.

Anyway. I just wanted to offer this up as a data point. There are comics out there that raise funds effectively and make themselves self-financing, while still staying under the radar of the big webcomics blogs.

It's time for me to start worrying about next month's rent again, so I'm offering some more new originals for sale through the webcomicsnation swapmeet. But you can buy them from this page as well. These are some of my favourite pages from the Headsmen storyline:

Page for January 9, 2006. $ 80 including shipping and handling. Description

Page for January 10, 2006.. $80 including shipping and handling. Description

Page for January 19, 2006. $80 inc. shipping and handling. Description

Page for January 20, 2006. $80 including shipping and handling. Description

All payments are handled by Paypal. You don't need a Paypal account to buy; a valid Visa or Mastercard will do the trick quite nicely.

The listing system at Webcomicsnation, as observed before, is clunky and doesn't allow me to show the products properly. Entering this listing in the blog was sheer torture, with the first Paypal button appearing broken in the preview (I will have to publish this entry to see if the problem shows up in publication as well). I will investigate some way of making the process of listing, selling and buying original art more straightforward. If any of my readers have any experience with e-commerce systems such as OScommerce, please let me know.

One possible reason for me not to kick the coffee habit entirely:

This coffee and asthma treatment can help a patient who is suffering from an onset of asthma symptoms and finds himself without an inhaler breathe more easily until the inhaler can be obtained. This emergency treatment has proven extremely effective due to the similarities between caffeine and a tried-and-true asthma medication known as theophylline.

The similarities between these two chemicals lead doctors to routinely advise patients who are about to undergo tests for lung function to avoid coffee and other caffeinated beverages for one to two days prior to the time of the test.

Several large coffee and asthma studies conducted in the past few years have examined the relationship between drinking coffee and the prevalence of asthma. A study of over seventy thousand Italians showed that there was a significant reduction in the appearance of asthma amongst patients who would regularly drink coffee.

The risk of asthma symptoms fell by 28% when patients drank three or more cups of coffee every day.

In 1992, the Second National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES II) examined over twenty thousand Americans. The study found that the risk of symptoms from patients with asthma going into the study fell dramatically (over 29%) when patients who regularly drank coffee were compared with patients who did not drink coffee on a regular basis.

In addition, the risk of patients suffering from wheeze fell almost 13%. A relationship was also found between the amount of coffee consumed and the effects gained by the asthma patients. Those who drank more coffee had fewer symptoms; those who drank less coffee had more symptoms.

And I was browsing through old issues of Runner's World at my club's home the other day, and it mentioned that filtered coffee also works as a cholesterol reducer. Unfortunately, I've become rather fond of cafetiere coffee since Adam's last visit...

Update: I would like to note that the site that article I quoted from was on looked more than a bit sploggy to me, and that a Google search for "Coffee asthma" turned up a number of borderline quacky sites. It would seem that caffeine's bronchodilatory effect is fairly well-known. A summary of one of the studies mentioned (though not properly cited) in the article can be found at Chestjournal.org.

Sorry all — I'm taking a break from updating regularly until Monday, July 9. It's the only way I can stop chasing my own tail, get the production organised again (which it hasn't been since the week both colourists dropped off with computer problems) and get a decent quality of work out of my hands. Let alone do a whole bunch of non-comic things that I've been delaying for too long.

I'll try to catch up with the schedule next week, though. I was going to drop back to three a week starting that week, but once the organisation is back on track, I might be able to do four for a little longer to make up for lost time. We'll see.

I was going to keep this to myself, but since it affects both comic production and my general online behaviour, I ought to give you all a heads-up. Don't worry, it's nothing bad.

I'm trying to kick my caffeine habit again. Unlike the last time, a few years ago, I'm not going cold turkey. But I am restricting my caffeine intake to the period before noon. So far, the effect on my mood and intellectual/creative performance hasn't been nearly as bad as it was the last time, but I did get a moderately nasty withdrawal headache yesterday, which the morning's coffee intake didn't manage to dispell, and I did spend the day being muddle-headed and in a foul mood. It also showed in the quality and timeliness of the work I did on today's Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan update and in the many mistakes I made posting text to the comic and blog sections yesterday.

On the plus side, I've had two great nights' sleep. Coffee had been fucking up my sleep rhythm so badly that for the past two decades I haven't had much of an idea what my real sleep rhythm actually was. And I'm a lot better today. Still not optimal, but almost as good as I've been with regular doses throughout the day (which admittedly wasn't very). In another week or so, I expect to be feeling great.

Nevertheless, I'm doing this at a time when I'm already having trouble keeping up the pace of the comic. There may or may not be an update tomorrow. There will be four regular comic updates this week; I just don't know what days they will appear on. After this week, unless people suddenly start donating money again, I'll be back to three comics a week, which will be a relief.

Two things:
1. Yesterday's anniversary art has been moved to its own section on the archives all the way down the list. Or you can look at the submissions by following the link to my own drawing of Jodoque as an avenging angel and going on from there. I want to thank all the artists involved for responding to me at short notice and drawing art for me. There are few things I find more encouraging.

2. There are few things I find more discouraging than realising that a prominent front page link, like the one to my drawing of Jodoque as an avenging angel has been broken for almost a day and no one has said anything. I used to have a link for emailing me about broken bits on the front page, but nobody used it except spammers, so I took it down. I still have a generic contact link on the front page in the right column, but nobody uses that either - people seem to prefer to try to contact me with email addresses that have been dead for over two years (nevermind how often I've mentioned it being dead during that period), or using a comment to an archive entry that's unrelated to the part of the site that has been broken.
Well, the email link is now back. I'd have it flash and blink and make adorable "click me" noises, but I doubt it would help. If anything's broken? Email reinder.dijkhuis@gmail.com and I'll drop whatever I'm doing to fix it. I'll even turn off the gas when I'm cooking dinner. Honestly. And I will be grateful to you for kicking my ass. Emailing any other address, or putting your complaint in a comment where I won't find it until hours later and then go "huh, whatshetalkingabout" at it, will probably just trigger another public sulk like this one.

Uhm, apologies for the inconvenience. Yeah, I make mistakes. I'm a bit thick, really.

See The Sound of Drums.

Edit: No, on second thought, don't. I'm watching Confidential now, because I'm such a nerd, and seeing those scenes again, even as the actors and crew are working on them, puts a knot in my stomach from the sheer stupidity of it all. It's an embarrassment. The fact that I was watching the episode on Sunday morning with, if not an actual hangover, enough alcohol residues in my system to take the edge off me a bit, allowed me to let it wash over me just the one time, but the moment the brain gets engaged at all, it rejects what I've just been watching as utter shite. I'd just as soon have another shot at watching the Sixth Doctor storyline Mark of the Rani as look at this again.

Confidential made me realise another thing. People made this. Actual actors and directors and camera crew and set designers and whatever else spent weeks of their lives making this. The actors and director in particular spent a lot of time in tone meetings and read-throughs and rehearsals with the producer and script editor and other powerful people in a position to stop this, and none of them said "Russell, love, this is shit." David Tennant, Freema Agyeman, John Simm, Adjoa Andoh, no matter how good your acting performances were, you are as much to blame for this as Russel T. Davies is. The other day I watched a documentary about Tom Baker's final season, because I'm such a nerd. And I'll tell you this: Tom Baker wouldn't have stood for this. He'd have gone on strike, gone to the pub one lunchtime and not come back until he'd had a completely revised script that didn't suck. And then he'd have done the next filming session completely hammered, just to discourage the writers from ever pulling that shit again. There's something to be said for difficult actors.

But apart from that, surely there was someone on set, maybe a humble key grip or best boy or whatever those people down the credits list do, who could have thought, hey, I get minimum wage for this and there are plenty of other jobs to go around, and gone and dropped the higher-ups a memo to say that, you know, this script is really, really rubbish?