Random Thoughts

Comics Daze

I finally got a bunch of new comics, both mainstreamey and art stuff! It really seems like US comics is having some kind of meltdown after the Diamond bankruptcy — is it really the case that Drawn & Quarterly only has a single book planned for November? It could just be a programming error on my part, but I really can’t find out who’s even distributing them these days…

Let’s see — what does DCBS say for October?

Yeah, that’s what I thought. Is D&Q via bookstore distributors only now? It seems like this should be a news item or something, but can’t see anything on Comics Beat…

Anyway. Finally a comics readin’ day. And let’s go with music from… er… 1981? only.

Japan: Tin Drum (1)

15:49: The Yard by Jack Lloyd

I really like the colour pages here. They have something special going on.

But I mean, the black and white pages are also cool. Kinda 60s undergroundey feeling?

It’s hard to say where the story is going based on this, but it seems like we’re in for a drugged up odyssey.

15:57: Cookies and Herb by Matt MacFarland (Fieldmouse Press)

I got the Fieldmouse books from here.

This is one of those childhood autobio things, and MacFarland manages to make the kid (i.e., himself) pretty unlikable, which is unusual, I guess.

But then again, his dad was an asshole, too, so…

Yukihiro Takahashi: Neuromantic

16:11: Ms. Understood by Juliette Collet (Neoglyphic Media)

I really like the artwork…

Is it done with coloured pencils and crayons? Very attractive.

The stories are mostly about S&M and porn, but take some detours into other subject matter, too.

16:34: Womb Rider by Emil Friis Ernst (Uncivilized Books)

This is like an American (? I don’t know) version of Yuichi Yokoyama.

Very loud. But in a car instead of walking! It’s good stuff — very visceral, but the twist ending is a bit of a letdown.

The Cure: Faith (1)

16:39: Cannon by Lee Lai (Drawn & Quarterly)

This isn’t quite the kind of book I usually enjoy — that is, initially it felt like it’s one of those books that’s really a pitch for an indie movie (perhaps because I didn’t really take to her previous (much-awarded) book).

But then things really changed and it’s something else altogether.

It’s an intricate and compelling book. It’s quite original in many ways, and ends up being gripping and moving. Very surprising.

Simple Minds: Sister Feelings Call

17:41: Unrest by Jurijs Tatarkins (Fieldmouse Press)

This is fun!

I like it.

Simple Minds: Sons and Fascination

17:49: Who Killed Nessie? by Paul Cornell/Rachel Smith (Avery Hill)

This is very high concept — it’s about a convention for supernatural beings, and then there’s been a murder! And a human has to investigate.

So that sounds fun, but who is this for, really? There’s endless sex jokes in here, so it’s not for children… but the tablet-ey art style is totally for children.

And it really gets bogged down in one info dump after another about the mechanics of supernatural beings. It unfortunately has the whiff of “YA adults” — grown ups who think way too much about children’s literature.

It started off well, and then just became crushingly tedious.

18:30: The Museum of the History of the Ideas about the Fall by Goda Trakumaite (Domino Books)

I got this from here.

This is really cool. It’s a comics essay about health care and stuff. I really like the artwork here — it feels solidly 70s Undergrounds — very attractive. And for an essay, the storytelling is very solid.

I particularly liked the framing of witches’ medicine as empirically based while mainstream medicine (well, in those days particularly) was based mostly on superstition.

18:55: Laser Eye Surgery by Walker Tate (Fantagraphics)

I’ve loved all books by Tate that I’ve read. They’re mostly kinda oblique, and many are based on dance. This is very different — it’s a quite straightforward story — a horror story, and it’s really unnerving. Ace!

But of course it’s a Walker Tate book, so you also have wonderful pages like this.

Fantastic book.

Tom Tom Club: Tom Tom Club

19:05: Dark Garbage by Jon-Michael Frank (Floating World Comics)

This is a lot of fun. Vague adventures filled with gags, but also musings on life and stuff.

Heh heh, just when I read “as above so below” here, the Tom Tom Club were singing the same lyrics! It’s a miracle!

I really enjoyed the book. It’s got something going on.

Tuxedomoon: Desire

19:59: Selections from the Richy Vegas Songbook 2 by Richard Alexander

This doesn’t use the circular storytelling thing that Alexander uses in his main series…

… but it’s still fascinating. It’s autobio stuff from a unique viewpoint, and it really grabs your attention. The storytelling is flawless.

Kraftwerk: Computer World

20:12: Doctor of the Shawo by Olga Volozova/Daniel Volozov

I don’t think I’ve seen a comic book done in this fashion before — it’s cut-outs and dioramas with dolls, and then backgrounds are drawings…

It’s interesting — it’s about a mother and a son going to a psychologist (or do they?), and it spins out in an abstract way. I like it.

Talking Heads: The Name Of This Band Is Talking Heads (Disc 1: 1977-1979)

20:23: The Hanging by Aaron Losty (Strangers Publishing)

I think I got this from here?

This is a really attractive book. I mean physically — perfect paper stock, binding, printing… and I love these colours. Somebody should win a design award.

Ooooh — the artwork has a real French pop art thing going on.

It’s pretty good all over — it’s a dystopian story of people trying to survive in the near future.

20:56: Pushing Buttons by Ursula Blix (Black Panel Press)

Speaking of design… this is just uncomfortable. The paper is super shiny, so I have to tip it every which way to see what’s on the page. And that coupled with the tiny lettering and the colour scheme just makes reading this a chore.

Which is a shame, because it’s otherwise a charming book.

21:11: Collected Oil by James Tonra (Desert Island)

Whoa! Cool.

I have absolutely no idea what’s going on in any of these short pieces, but it’s fun to look at.

21:25: The Thing vs. the Marvel Universe by Ryan North and others (Marvel Comics)

Oh, it’s all single panel pages? It’s a long slug fest? Sure, why not.

But it’s so badly done! The pages look awkward and stiff, and they’re apparently not be meant to read next to each other, because they look like double page splash pages more often than not (and they’re not).

The twist ending is fun, though, so Ryan delivers on that point.

21:36: The End

And now I think I’m going to make dinner, so I guess it’s time to call it a day.

Book Club 2025: The Vor Game by Lois McMaster Bujold

I’m at the tail end of a cold here, so it felt like the perfect time to bundle up on the couch with a Bujold book. I’ve read this a couple times before, but the last time is at least 15 years ago, so I remembered virtually nothing about this book.

And it’s just what the doctor ordered. It’s a delight to read — amusing, exciting, well-written. It’s all that good stuff. And now my cold is gone!

One thing I did notice this time around was how utterly dependent on happenstance and coincidence Bujold was in this novel. I mean, the protagonist goes halfway across the galaxy and just happens to meet up with [redacted], like one does. And then happens to meet a spaceship piloted by [redacted]. And so on. It’s so shameless that it almost reminds me of (early) P. G. Wodehouse — sometimes he really couldn’t be bothered to think out anything resembling a plot, so he’d just have everybody stumbling over each other in various cities.

I mean, I’m not complaining — the random coincidences add a certain something to the proceedings.

It’s good fun — I was smiling the entire time I was reading this.

The Vor Game (1990) by Lois McMaster Bujold (buy used, 4.27 on Goodreads)

Sorry, sorry

The last time I moaned about this was in 2015, so once per decade can’t be too much, surely?

But I had to upgrade my TV machine (for stupid reasons), and of course my little wireless keyboard that I use to control Emacs/mpv on the TV started misbehaving: The PgUp/PgDw keys stopped working, because they’re using non-standard key codes or something.

The solution is to:

Clone this repo
Apply this patch
Compile

cp ~larsi/src/xf86-input-evdev/src/.libs/evdev_drv.so /usr/lib/xorg/modules/input/evdev_drv.so

(Yes, that’s stupid, because you can’t update X without recompiling, but never mind.)

And then config X.

But the old ways of configuring this stuff has changed. For something that’s supposed to be on life support, people are sure changing how X is being configured. It used to be that you said:

Section "InputDevice"
    Identifier     "Logitech TV730"
    Driver         "evdev"
    Option         "Device" "/dev/input/tv730"
    Option         "event_key_remap" "402=112 403=117 272=89"
EndSection

This does nothing now. Instead you say:

Section "InputClass"
    Identifier "Force evdev for my Logitech"
    MatchProduct "Logitech TV730"   # use exact name from `xinput list`         
    MatchIsKeyboard "on"
    Driver "evdev"
    Option "event_key_remap" "402=112 403=117 272=89"
EndSection

See? MUCH BETTER!!!! That only took me two hours to find out, and I had to use ChatGPT, because this info is not readily accessible via Google, as far as I can see.

Perhaps after posting this, it will be?

While I’m moaning — the proprietary Nvidia drivers, man… The 5xx drivers don’t support my VIDIA Corporation GP107 [GeForce GTX 1050 Ti] video card. And the 3xx drivers, that do, won’t build.

(The doc says that the 5xx drivers are necessary for the Pascal architecture, but my card is Pascal. But whatevs.)

So I’m using the nouveau for the first time… and they seem to actually kind of work now? So that’s progress. There’s no acceleration, though, so I’m not sure it’ll actually be usable for watching 4K movies?

Hm… tried it with Thor: Love and Bullshit now, and it seems to work? Huh. Didn’t expect that.

[Edit: Total brain fart on my part that I spent hours to ponder. The 5xx drivers work perfectly, but the xorg.conf had to be tweaked a bit.]

Book Club 2025: Sannheten bortenfor by Anne Holt

I’ve still got a cold, so I thought I’d read a mystery.

And it’s pretty good! Holt is a solid mystery writer — she’s got the craft down. So we get a murder, and then lots of police investigation with a myriad of clues, and then a quite surprising, but satisfying, resolution.

My only quibble here is the length. It’s 340 pages, and while there’s really no part of the book that’s boring, it just doesn’t feel like it warrants that length, really.

And now I’m wondering whether she’s begun to be translated. I mean, Nordic Noir is huge, but Holt isn’t really a Nordic Noir author — she started in the 90s, and the amount of grisliness is kept to a minimum, really. Let’s see…

Yeah, there was a hardback from Scribner in 2016, for instance.

But what does the critics think?

Right.

Sannheten bortenfor (2003) by Anne Holt (buy new, buy used, 3.60 on Goodreads)

Having the SVG stroke go on the outside should be easy, right? Right?

My go-to tool to generate images (with text overlays and stuff) is svg.el in Emacs. It provides a convenient interface for making SVG files, and then I can just convert it to something else for display. The thing I’ve been using it for lately is to display actor names in movies I’m watching.

Which brings me to what I’m yammering about today — adding outlines to text. Because if you’re displaying text over random (moving) pictures, you have to add an outline so that you can read the text.

The normal way to do that in SVG is to specify a stroke-width. But as you can see, that’s ugly — the stroke is inside the letter shapes, effectively shrinking the shapes down and making them spindly and awkward.

Perhaps easier to see if you really exaggerate the width.

So the obvious question is: Can you specify that the stroke goes on the outside of the shape instead of the inside?

And:

Yes, very amusing. The quibbles are kinda quibbly:

Etc. So: Nope.

But of course it is possible to add an outline to a shape — you can do that perfectly in HTML/CSS with borders and stuff, so instead SVG has grown filters. Look how simple:

<svg width="900" height="200" viewBox="100 0 900 200">
    <filter id="outline">
        <feMorphology in="SourceAlpha" result="DILATED" operator="dilate" radius="4"></feMorphology>
        
        <feFlood flood-color="#32DFEC" flood-opacity="1" result="PINK"></feFlood>
        <feComposite in="PINK" in2="DILATED" operator="in" result="OUTLINE"></feComposite>

        <feMerge>
            <feMergeNode in="OUTLINE" />
            <feMergeNode in="SourceGraphic" />
        </feMerge>
    </filter>

    <!-- DILATED TEXT -->
    <text font-size="85px" dx="125" dy="130" font-weight="700" filter="url(#outline)">upgrade yourself</text>
</svg>

Which reminds me of this classic: