My New Interior Design Blog

Uhm…

Thank you for that very helpful “ALTO UP OBEN” sticker, Nemo — as you can see from the diagram, the arrow is pointing to the left side of the lamp, so it’s 95 degrees off… (And the other label being upside down is just perfection.)

Oh, hi! Welcome to my brand new Interior Design Blog!

Or rather — a couple weeks ago, I had to drill some walls here (it’s old brick building from around the turn of the previous century — hard stuff), and I was so fed up with my old hammer drill: It had a cord! “*gasp*”, I hear you say. “The ignominy!” But, you know, for small projects, finding a darn place to plug that darn cord in is half the job…

So I finally bought a BOSCH HAMMER DRILL UNIVERSAL 18V (they shout a lot on web sites for tools and stuff — I guess they get hard of hearing after usiNG A HAMMER DRILL FOR A WHILE oops caps lock). So I had to find something to use it for so that I could test that it worked, and I thought “well, my closet is kind of dark” so I bought a lamp.

And… my first attempt was maximally unlucky — I hit the edge of a brick, I think, so the drill veered upwards and went into the mortar. Which you can’t fasten anything in. I should have stopped at the first hole, but I was nonplussed at first, and thought that perhaps I could use these holes after all. Nope.

(I know that studfinders exist — so that you can find a place to screw on wooden walls — but do brickfinders exist? That would have been handy here, where you have non-exposed brick…)

So I drilled two new holes right below them, so the old holes are hidden by the lamp. This time I hit pay dirt. Or bricks. Probably bricks, because the dust was red. And man, can that drill drill — it chewed up those bricks like *snap*.

(If the next owner of this apt wonders why there’s a double set of holes in that wall and googled — now they know.)

And un-pro tip: Last time I drilled into bricks in this apt, I spent way too much time to clean up afterwards, because that red dust is really, really fine and is almost impossible to get rid of once it hits something like plastics. It just (sort of) melts into the soft plastics. So this time I used a towel! And now I find out whether the washing machine manages to clean the towel! I don’t have high hopes! I shouldn’t have used a white towel! Am I out of my exclamation mark quota!? I AM!?!

Behold! I mean… er… I guess you can’t really see the lamp at all. But it’s blue! I swear!

OK, if I hold another lamp up to it, you can almost see that it’s blue. Perhaps I should have gotten the red one instead of the blue one…

Anyway! That’s my tip for the day! Buy a cordless drill!

Comics Daze

It’s another lazy Sunday, so how about some comics reading?

The last few times I’ve been going “well, I shouldn’t buy more French comics that I can only read veeeeery slowly; I should definitely wait, like, half a year”, so inevitably:

Yes, I’ve bought more than 1K pages of Pratt/Oesterheld comics.

I’ve read most of Pratt’s comics already, of course (because most of them have been translated into languages I understand), but these ones, written by Oesterheld, haven’t been.

They’re early work, and there’s probably a reason they’ve been skipped, but c’mon. It’s artwork by Hugo Pratt.

Ernie Pike is about a war journalist, and Sgt. Kirk looks like a western… and these are quite handsome editions. And, like I said, about a thousand pages in total! *gasp*

Gotta hurry up and expand my French vocabulary so that I can read these… Duolingo, c’mon! Faster!

Meanwhile, I’ll be reading non-French comics. And for music… only albums that I haven’t listened to for a while.

Róisín Murphy: Ruby Blue

14:16: Lena Finkle’s Magic Barrel by Anya Ulinich (Penguin)

Huh, Penguin doesn’t publish a lot of comics these days.

Oh, it’s ten years old… Physically, it’s a pretty special book in that it doesn’t feel like a typical comic book book — it’s printed on normal Penguin paperback stock, and the cover is pretty floppy, too, so it feels like a bigger version of an 70s Penguin paperback. It’s very nice.

This is autobio, I guess, but with changed names? It’s fascinating — it hits exactly that sweet spot where the material doesn’t feel over-digested (you can tell when the author has had too much therapy, or too “helpful” editors) nor just an undigested gulp of… stuff. (Oops. Sorry for imagery.)

Cabaret Voltaire: Groovy, Laidback and Nasty

The Knife: Silent Shout

The pages are can seem a bit er heavy on the text, but the storytelling really works.

Ooops! What’s that I see over here behind me…

*gulp*

Anyway, this book is really good. The story is original, and feels very true? I think the reason I bough the book is because somebody on the intertubes recommended it, and that’s a good thing, because I absolutely hadn’t heard of it before. And it was published in 2014, but the first printing is still available, so I’m guessing it didn’t really sell well. It’s one of the best comics I’ve read this year.

And it reminds me of the Big Drama on Comics Twitter this week:

*gasp* How dare they! People were all upset until somebody said “well, all that major publishers will pay for is YA and memoirs, so that’s what we’re making”, which sounds accurate. (It was amusing for a while after Maus, when nobody in publishing understood why that was a major success — you could see them going “well, Spiegelman is kinda avant garde — perhaps if we publish all his avant garde friends we’ll sell a lot of books?” and that totally failed. It wasn’t until the two-step of Persepolis and Fun Home that all the publishers went “ooh! the trick is memoirs!” and then we got a metric tonne of comics memoirs from the major publishers…)

(Heh. And speaking of Persepolis — I just googled Ulinich, and her prose novel is called Petropolis. Surely a coincidence.)

Juana Molina: Tres Cosas

18:00: Den sjunde vännen by Sara Granér (Galago)

This is a collection of a handful of longer pieces…

… and a lot of one page gags.

The longer pieces aren’t really stories, but are instead ruminations on a theme, in a kind of dissociative way. There’s funny bits in here, but they’re basically serious. It’s nice.

Pet Shop Boys: Fundamental

18:53: Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou 3 by Hitoshi Ashinano (Seven Seas Entertainment)

This is another thing somebody on the interwebs recommended, but I’ve apparently bought volume 3 of this thing? Oops.

Well, OK, so there’s about 900 pages before this, so I’m not surprised that I don’t understand anything, but the Standard Japanese Art Style here doesn’t really help — it’s hard to tell even how many characters there are supposed to be, since they have about two faces to go between them.

I guess you could call the storytelling style “calm”. Not a lot happens over the 450 pages in this book.

And the things that do happen are like “wha”. But again, I’m new around here…

Oh, she’s a robot? Several of them are robots? Well, OK, that explains… er… nothing.

OK, I’m not a fan of this book after reading this volume. But it’s very… calm.

Eurythmics: Touch Dance

19:38: Mennene by Anne-Kristin Strøm & Daniel Østvold (Ford Forlag)

Like the Lena Finkle book, this is also about dating, illustrated by Østvold in his distinctive style.

It’s an odd book — it’s really heartfelt and very amusing at the same time? I started wondering whether perhaps the author Anne-Kristin Strøm (it’s presented in a way that leads the reader to read this as autobio, I guess) was fictional, but apparently not. It’s good.

Cat Power: Sun

20:21: Blake et Mortimer: L’art de la guerre by Floc’h, Fromental et Bocquet (Cobolt)

Oh, wow — this has a much starker graphical quality than you’d expect in one of these nouveau P. Edgar Jacobs books.

It’s almost more like a 40s American comic book look than a Belgian ligne claire thing? And it looks like it’s been drawn at a smaller scale than it’s been printed at, so it looks like clip art in a way? And also a bit like Mike Kupperman… Drawn on an Ipad, perhaps?

And the colouring looks basically flat, but then you notice that it isn’t — you get an almost homeopathic rouging of their chins, for instance.

I’m just saying that Floc’h’s graphical approach here is really striking.

Here’s a page from a thing Floc’h did in 1991 — it’s much more traditional ligne claire.

(Huh. I should buy that album. Done. OOPS!)

Róisín Murphy: Simulation

Anyway, the story is pretty entertaining, too.

Arthur Russell: World of Echo

21:36: Won’t Back Down by Trina Robbins (Last Gasp)

Wow! A new book from Last Gasp… you don’t see that often these days. (Or new anthologies edited by Trina Robbins, for that sake…)

Ah, right, this is an anti forced birth anthology.

And it’s a very mixed bag. The pieces done by underground veterans are generally pretty solid…

… and the ones done by more mainstream creators veer between wildly offensively moronic and just boring.

But like I said, there are some good bits. And it’s for a good cause — the profits go to Planned Parenthood. I guess you can buy it here? Possibly?

22:17: Old Stuff by Alex Schubert

This is a collection of short pieces from all over…

… but they also seem to form a distracted narrative of sorts. It’s weird, and it’s great.

And there’s a book of sketches.

LCD Soundsystem: This Is Happening

22:30: Perry Shitlife/Perry Midlife by S. R. Arnold

Hey, nice sketch!

Perry Midlife is an intense and harrowing book — but also funny? It’s kinda Clowesian, I guess. (And you can order it from here.)

Perry Shitlife is presented as autobio (taking place about ten years ago)…

… but some of the things just seem too unreal. I mean, singing Blue at a karaoke pub?

But it’s funny and it’s quite affecting. I like it.

23:16: The End.

And now I think I’ve read enough for today. It was a pretty good batch, eh?

Can you spot the date I said “I’m done”?

Anyhoo… the reason I checked was because I was cleaning up my closet, which I’m told you have to do five times a century, whether it needs it or not.

I got about er 11? of these refuse sacs (a lot of yellowed white t-shirts, and why did I have 20 bed sets? dating back to the 80s, and some bleached-out black t-shirts, and some disgusting old pillows).

Look! Now I can squeeze in more stuff. But the reason I was reminded of the Emacs thing was that I happened upon these shirts:

I’d forgotten that I had some overflow No Gnus t-shirts — and as you can see, some of them are kinda dusty and/or sun bleached (there should be no sun in closets, but there is in mine, and these have been lying around for more than a decade). (Never worn! How dare you even ask!)

So, I’ve got four XL and four L shirts (in various colours)…

… and one Twenty Years of September t-shirt (I was supposed to do a Thirty Years last autumn, but I er didn’t; perhaps I’ll do them this spring).

So if you want one (primarily if you’re a Gnus user, I guess), send me an email (at larsi@gnus.org) with your snail-mail address, and I’ll do a lottery in about a week, and then send you a shirt if you win. (Free postage, too.) Remember to state your size, and whether you have any colour preference.

My New Book Review Blog

Just kidding! Ain’t nobody got time for reviewing, but I just read this book:

It’s Sheri Tepper’s final book, written when she was in her 80s and published two years before she died. On Goodreads, Fish Tails has a kinda normal 3.6 total grade, but there are so many one star reviews like this:

I cannot believe I am giving a Sheri Tepper book a one star review, but this book is a horrid mess.

So I wanted to natter on about it a bit. I’ll let you read the first three pages first:

I understand why many people really dislike this book — it’s not a good book. Most everything they say about it is true: It’s too long (700 pages), it’s repetetive (there’s a 13 page introduction that’s inexplicably repeated 70 pages later, but expanded to about 20 pages, among other oddities), it doesn’t have much of a plot arc (a magical alien swoops in the last 100 pages and fixes everything OOPS SPOILERS)…

I just found it to be a pleasant read. Tepper’s previous book was in 2010, and this was published in 2014 (the longest wait between books ever — she used to publish a couple books per year), so I guess she wrote it over several years. It has that kind of feel. Reading this book is basically like sitting listening to somebody confabulate about an imagined world. The main part of the book has the main characters drive slowly through this world, and they encounter people (oh so many people), and every one of these people explicate at length about some part of this world.

Even when they stop moving around, there are random people poking their heads in and talk for a couple of pages about, well, anything — mating rituals, soup production, how to pack a bag — and are then never heard from again.

So how the novel was constructed is very obvious — the seams are showing. Tepper was probably thinking about this world all the time, and whenever she came up with something, she put it into the novel. And then a few days later, she sees that that didn’t quite add up, so she adds a new character clarifying the previous bit. And so on until you have this brick of a book.

That’s no way to make a novel! They should have, like, plots and stuff! And stakes! But eh, whatevs.

Some of the characters obsess a bit too much about certain things, and that’s annoying — but that’s also acknowledged within the book, where other characters tell them to stop going over the same things again and again. So Tepper seemed aware that the book may be annoying to some, but she doesn’t care that much. And that’s fine.

This book has several magical dohickeys that could fix anything the characters encounter, but they always seem to be forgotten when there’s some bad people around, but Tepper has an explanation for that, too: Her characters forgot to read the instructions on the dohickeys. Sure, why not.

So would I recommend this book? Of course. Not. Tepper has written a good number of really solid novels (like Beauty or The Gate To Women’s Country), but after you’ve read all the other er 40? books, you may or may not want to just spend some more time with Tepper, and that’s what this book offers.

I’m not sure many people want to, these days. First of all — most science fiction authors are pretty much forgotten when they stop publishing. The new books function like ads for the older books, and when they stop writing, people stop buying all their old books, too.

Here’s the bookshop.org results for Sheri Tepper:

The ones that have “add to cart” are probably still in print, and the “backorder” ones may not be. But more importantly, we get 9 results in total, and she’s written so many more books.

But beyond just, like, being dead, there may be other reasons why she’s being forgotten: Her Big Theme was that People Are Awful And Something Should Be Done About It. This could have been her theme song:

Gary Clail On-U Sound System - Human Nature

And Tepper’s solution (throughout many of her books) is eugenics. The only way to get a better future, or a future at all, is to breed better humans. This, coupled with her perhaps essentialist views on gender, won’t endear her to many liberals. But perhaps right-wing people would enjoy her books? Hah! Right-wing-itude is what she wanted to breed out of the human race, so not many sales there, either.

Another thing they said over at Goodreads is that Tepper is famously humourless… and I guess I see what they mean, because she’s very earnest about certain things. But she’s also hilarious: In one of the novels, she has an alien species that’s going to save the world (again, by breeding better humans), but this species is pretty wasp-like. And at one point in the book, it’s mating season, so they have to lay their eggs (that turn into larvae) somewhere. And it has to be in a sentient creature! (For some reason that I’m sure was explained.) And they’re working on saving Earth, so they can’t leave, so they have to lay their eggs in humans. Who to choose? Well, of course they have to choose somebody who thinks that all life is sacrosanct, so they choose a few dozen (male) Pro-Lifers (priests, politicians, etc), lay their eggs in them, and then the larvae chew their way out of their abdomens.

It was the funniest thing ever! Pure glee!

I couldn’t remember the name of the book, so I googled, and it’s Fresco:

But according to Tepper (in this book at least – not neccesarily her personal view) it’s ok to rape men if they are anti-abortion.

Lots of people (I guess mostly men) were really offended. Tee hee!

Anyway, that’s the last Tepper book, and I’ve already read all the rest (even the ones written under other pseudonyms), so that’s a bit wistful…

Er… So that’s it. I’m done typing now.

Translation, Apps, Comics, oh la la…

I’m learning French (so that I’ll be able to read French comics, as one does). I started absolutely from scratch (no high school French or nuttin), and after about half a year, I’m at that point where I can sort of kinda actually read some French comics. Sort of. If they’re for children.

Of course, even if I can basically parse a French sentence, I still have a minuscule vocabulary. I don’t want to use a dictionary or do a lot of typing, because I want to read comics, not like “work” at “learning” or something obnoxious like that. The only way to keep myself motivated to keep reading is if it’s fun.

So it’d be great if there were some kind of magical device I could wave in front of the offending word and, presto, it’d tell me what that word meant. Sounds like science fiction, right?

But I haven’t come to praise and say “how far technology has come today, eh, eh?”, but instead to bitch about how things aren’t perfect.

So here’s my situation: I’m sitting here, reading Modeste et Pompon (a French series from the 50s by Franquin), and I see something I don’t understand. So I whip out my Iphone with Google Translate and hold it up to the difficult panel:

But but… it’s not able to focus? Yes, it’s a well known bug in Google Translate: On Iphone 14 and 15, it can’t use the macro camera…

… so to be able to focus, I have to hold the phone waaaay off the page…

… but at least then it’ll do pretty good OCR. But I’ve got an Ipad Mini, and Google Translate doesn’t have that bug there:

Now, the Mini isn’t as convenient to hold, but that’s… Hang on, what’s with that translation? “Et pourquis pas, garnement?” The last word was what I was wondering about, and Google Translate says that it’s “you bitch”? In a 50s comic for children?

Well, Google Translate has always been astoundingly bad at idioms — it’s always been risibly literal. That was amusing 15 years ago, but it’s basically never gotten any better at that stuff, even with the LLM revolution happening over the past few years. Somebody on the Yellow Site speculated (well, since half the people on that site seem to work for Google, it was probably not speculation) that the head of Google Translate is so set on not ditching the work they’ve done on translation for decades for the shiny new LLM toy that there’s been no progress in that direction. Or any progress at all — asking Google Translate to translate a French sentence still often yield English text that makes no sense at all.

So that brings me to the point of this blog post: Does anybody know of an app that fits my use case? That is, that allows me to just sit here in my chair and read comics, and when I wonder about a word, I can wave my phone around and it’ll tell me? I don’t want to be typing, because that’s too awkward and takes too much time.

I’ve tried several apps now, and the one that comes closest is Deep L. Which from the name sounds like it has something to do with AI. It’s good at doing the OCR, it uses the macro camera on Iphone 15 fine, and it’s faster than Google Translate at doing the translation (which is very important — I want to be reading comics, not waiting for translations), and most important of all: It’s much better than Google Translate at actually translating. It turns out that the sentence in question really meant “And why not, you rascal?” which makes more sense, and sounds idiomatic.

If Deep L is so perfect, what’s the problem? This is the problem: I’m guessing they didn’t have comics reading as the (ahem) primary use case, so it’s just really bad at actually determining what it’s supposed to translate. It’ll often randomly fixate on a single line or two, and it’s impossible to get it to change its mind.

So — does anybody know of a better app? The “live view” bit is essential. There’s several apps that allow you to snap a pic and then translate that, but it takes several button presses and a long time, so it’s just not convenient.