What I’ve been up to:

Tuesday, stayed up till 3 AM packing. I have way too many fucking books, even after throwing plenty away.

Wednesday, got up at 7 AM (after having not really been able to sleep much) to finish up packing before the movers got there at 9 AM. Only they didn’t actually get there will about 11. Actually packing everything only took about two hours. They drove the stuff to Brooklyn, where bugsybanana supervised the unpacking, and I spent four hours cleaning up. Then I took the subway to Brooklyn and collapsed on the couch for the rest of the day.

Thursday, went over to nearby WiFi-having coffee shop, only to discover that their net connectivity was down. Did a bit of light shopping, reassembled my dressers. Visited local Target, bought a $30 DVD player. The shopping in this area has vastly improved since I last lived here.

Today, back to the coffee shop, catching up on RSS feeds. May install air conditioner in living room later.

This was a very purchase-light MoCCA for me. I’ve spent the past few weeks sorting through books, packing some, throwing away others, and I can’t look at books now without thinking about the fact that I don’t have space enough for the one’s I’ve already got. And worse for floppies and minis, which I can’t just stick on a shelf.

So my self-imposed limit this years was: No floppies or minis, only books with actual spines. I only bought six or seven, and left them over at the Brooklyn apartment, since why bring them to Jersey City only to box them up and bring them to Brooklyn in three days. So, this year’s MoCCA haul:

Books:

• Sordid City Blues, by Charles Schneeflock Snow, who I also got to chat with.
• Abraxas and the Earthman, by Rick Veitch, an SF treatment of Moby Dick, which ran in Epic umpteen years ago.
• Scott Bateman’s Secret Sketchbook of Shame, by Scott Bateman and shame. I think it’s been a few years since I’ve seen Scott.
• Deogratias: A Tale of Rwanda, by JP Stassen.
• And two or three other books, which I’ve already forgotten. This here’s a placeholder, and I’ll go back and fill it in at some point when the books and I are in the same state.

I missed out on getting a copy of I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets, the Fletcher Hanks collection (about which Coop said “looking at those panels is like eating a whole bag of Cheetos made of heroin.”). It sold out on Saturday.

Ever since I pretty much stopped buying big-company superhero comics and comics in pamphlet format, I often find myself complaining that there’s nothing new for me to buy at the comics shop on Wednesdays. These past couple weeks, I’ve had the opposite problem. Enough has come out that I not only have a backlog of unread comics, but there’s stuff I still need to buy that I haven’t because I don’t want to carry that much weight home all at once. Here’s some of the recent stuff:

Bought and read

Fell, vol 1: Feral City by Warren Ellis and Ben Templesmith
Cop gets transferred to the seamy side of a fictional city. More likable than most Ellis protagonists; in this book it’s the setting that provides the over-the-top nastiness. As with Global Frequency, each chapter is a stand-alone story, which doesn’t matter as much in a collection as it did in pamphlets, but as long as Ellis is following the pamphlet-then-book business model, that seems like a good plan. Templesmith’s art looks like low-rent Sienkevitch, and I eventually figured out that all the characters’ hands aren’t all spindly and crippled-looking for a dramatic reason, Templesmith just draws hands that way. Can you tell I’m not a Ben Templesmith fan? Still, the art mostly serves the setting well.

The Clarence Principle by Fehed Said and Shari Chankhamma
Cute goth comic. Clarence seems to have killed himself — he wakes up in the afterlife in a bathtub with slashed wrists. Much quirkiness follows, leading to an ironic ending that wasn’t really sufficiently supported by the preceding material. Maybe it would have seemed more plausible if I were an antisocial teenage goth.

The Homeless Channel by Matt Silady
Drama about a 24-hour cable TV channel devoted to the homeless. The writing is pretty good, especially the dialog, but the art (high-contrast photo-based) is crude enough that I had trouble telling the major female characters apart for much of the book. (There’s only one major male character, which is pretty unusual in itself.)

Bought, but not yet read

• The Rabbi’s Cat by Joann Sfar
• The Three Paradoxes by Paul Hornschemeier
• Exit Wounds by Rutu Modan

I’d been waiting for The Rabbi’s Cat to come out in paper for, I dunno, I guess a year now, yet I went ahead and bought The Three Paradoxes and Exit Wounds in hardback. I picked up Ivan Brunetti’s Misery Loves Company in hardback too. I think I’ve jumped some internal hurdle that kept my from buying these things in hardcover. Price may also be an issue — Exit Wounds is only $20, and The Three Paradoxes is $15.

Not yet bought, but I’m planning to

• Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel (out in paperback, sez Amazon)
• Casanova, vol 1: Luxuria by Matt Fraction and Gabriel Bá (maybe; it’s a $25 hardcover, a bit pricey for seven issues)
• Percy Gloom by Cathy Malkasian

The bathroom door signs at my most recent workplace:

One for ordinary transgendered people, and one for transgendered UFO abductees.

So I was walking down 9th Street this afternoon, and I pulled my iPod out of my pocket, and it wouldn’t turn on. This is pretty typical behavior now if I’ve left it sitting for more than a day; I have to soft-reset it to get it on. So I soft-booted, and it came up, but none of my music was showing, as if I’d done a hard reset and wiped the drive. I was pretty sure I hadn’t, so I tried soft-resetting it again. This time it came up with the sad iPod icon. Uh oh.

Once I was home, I tried again. Sad icon, and this time I could hear a noise, sort of “Vooo-click-click. Vooo-click-click.” Not a happy sound. Repetitive clicking like that is generally the sound of severe hard drive fuckage.

I looked around a bit on the net. My iPod’s well out of warranty, which means Apple would just charge me $250 and swap me for a new one. For $250 I could just buy a nice new 30GB video iPod, which I have kinda been lusting for, but the rumor mill has it that high-capacity flash iPods will soon be available, and I’d rather wait for one of those if I’m gonna spend money on a new device. (Leaving aside the question of whether I should be spending that much money on a luxury at the moment, which I really shouldn’t.)

So I googled for “ipod ‘hard drive’ failure”, and turned up this article on the Low End Mac site. The guy talks about exactly the problem I was having (sad icon, clicking sounds) with exactly my model of iPod (40GB iPod photo). Turns out it’s a five minute fix, if you can manage to pry the iPod open. It’s a bit of work with a screwdriver, and then you jiggle and re-seat a cable, then snap the iPod back together. Worked like a charm. All my music was even still there. I’m wondering if maybe the needing-a-soft-reset behavior will stop now, too.

Next project: Replacing my laptop’s CD/DVD drive.

More than a month since I posted any sketches here. Crap.

I watched a video Danny Gregory made, and figured out a bit of what I’d been doing wrong in watercolors. See, those nylon waterbrushes? They kinda suck for scraping paint off the watercolor pans and plopping it onto the palettes. Which means I’d been just pulling color off the pans and painting it right on the paper, which works okay for small regions of pure color, but crappy for mixing or covering large regions.

I picked up one of those Cotman portable brushes on sale at Pearl a while back, and a folding water container at Hudson County Art Supply, and today I tried using the waterbrush just as a clean water source, dripping it down onto the pans and palettes, and using the Cotman to grab color and paint, and mixed up batches of color on my palette, and it worked pretty well. This is a guy who was sitting near at the next table in the coffee shop. I’ve still got a lot of practicing ahead of me, but I can see a way forward. And now I’m psyched to try some watercolor techniques with acrylics.

I read the first few chapters of CS Lewis’s Mere Christianity today, and I’m pissed off. I’m pissed off on behalf of everyone who’s ever been taken in by this dishonest piece of propaganda. Check this shit out, from Book 1, chapter 4, “What Lies Behind the Law”:

Ever since men were able to think, they have been wondering what this universe really is and how it came to be there. And, very roughly, two views have been held. First, there is what is called the materialist view. People who take that view think that matter and space just happen to exist, and always have existed, nobody knows why; […] The other view is the religious view. According to it, what is behind the universe is more like a mind than it is like anything else we know. […] Please do not think that one of these views was held a long time ago and that the other has gradually taken its place. Wherever there have been thinking men both views turn up.

See what’s going on there? He’s aware of the vague notion most people have that religion is an old-fashioned belief and atheism a new, modern belief, and wants to break this association in his audience’s minds. And that’s fine — believing something because it’s new and exciting-sounding (or because it’s old and established-seeming) is a form of sloppy thinking that an honest person does well to argue against. But look here, at the start of Book 2:

If you are a Christian you do not have to believe that all the other religions are simply wrong all through. If you are an atheist you do have to believe that the main point in all the religions of the whole world is simply one huge mistake. If you are a Christian, you are free to think that all those religions, even the queerest ones, contain at least some hint of the truth. […] The first big division of humanity is into the majority, who believe in some kind of God or gods, and the minority who do not. On this point, Christianity lines up with the majority — lines up with ancient Greeks and Romans, modern savages, Stoics, Platonists, Hindus, Mohammedans, etc, against the modern Western European materialist.

What? Suddenly, instead of being a view that appears wherever there have been thinking people, materialism is just a little minority view from Western Europe. And not only is Lewis contradicting himself here, and not only is he trying to convince us that the religion that brought us the homoousios-vs-homoiousios flamewars is some kind of paragon of liberal toleration, but the very point that he spends his opening paragraphs making here is not logically tied to anything. He just goes on to another matter. He never says “Most people have believed in a God or gods, and therefore ….” As well he shouldn’t, because doing so would draw the reader’s attention to the logical fallacy he’s trying to get you to swallow unnoticed — that truth is a popularity contest.

I’m maybe a quarter of the way into the book, and that’s as far as I’ll go. I want to throw the damned thing across the room. I don’t think I’ll be able to read anything of Lewis’s again.

How many of you remember Big Numbers?

In the late 1980s and early ’90s, there was a big self-publishing movement in comics. The big year was 1988, which saw both Dave Sim’s Toronto meeting and Eastman and Laird’s Northampton (Massachusetts) Summit; the latter was where the “Creator’s Bill of Rights” was drafted. For a while it seemed like everyone interesting in comics was starting their own company and publishing just what they wanted to publish and hoping that somehow profits would come out of it. Looking back, it seems a bit like a precursor of the webcomics scene.

Alan Moore’s company was called Mad Love. Mad Love published the AARGH (Artists Against Rampant Government Homophobia) one-shot, two issues of Big Numbers, and (as far as I can tell) nothing else.

Big Numbers was going to be Moore’s magnum opus, the work that made Watchmen look like a kiddie book. It was planned as a 12-issue series, set in Northampton (England), using metaphors from fractal mathematics to examine the lives and activities of the town’s residents as an American shopping mall opens up. The writing was Moore at his sharpest. The art, by Bill Sienkiewicz, was gorgeous.

The series stopped after two issues. Sienkiewicz couldn’t handle the workload, and his assistant Al Columbia took over and, I dunno, I’ve heard rumors about Columbia destroying his own art and quitting the project, but I don’t know if they’re true. Moore considers the project cursed, and doesn’t plan on finishing it. I hadn’t expected to ever see anything more.

Till today, thanks to eurotard. Here:

• Ten pages of Sienkiewicz’s art for issue #3 (unlettered, and not ten contiguous pages, sadly)

• Moore’s script for the first eight pages of issue #3

Y’know how bad a president Dubya is? He’s so bad that Richard Mellon Scaife now thinks Clinton was pretty good:

Christopher Ruddy, who once worked full-time for Mr. Scaife investigating the Clintons and now runs a conservative online publication he co-owns with Mr. Scaife, said, “Both of us have had a rethinking.”

“Clinton wasn’t such a bad president,” Mr. Ruddy said. “In fact, he was a pretty good president in a lot of ways, and Dick feels that way today.”

(via Kevin Drum)