Comics Daze

What the…

Oh, this is one of those days…

I think perhaps I won’t be going anywhere today?

So perhaps I should just read some comics.

xPropoganda: The Heart Is Strange

11:20: The Boy From Clearwater 1 by Yu Pei-Yun/Zhou Jian-Xin (Levine Querido)

Oh, it’s an earthquake… I guess depicting action isn’t their forte…

These captions are pretty… annoying? They’re cloying.

And you get a lot of these footnotes — reading this is starting to feel like homework. The artwork’s OK, but the narrative (which isn’t all that interesting in itself) trips over these captions and narratives all the time — everything becomes bogged down. Was this book meant to be used in a classroom? Or is the translator adding these footnotes to tell us stupid foreign readers more about Taiwan?

Oh, why should anybody possibly care? These characters aren’t even cardboard — they’re tissue paper.

This may be the most annoying book I’ve read in yonks, and I’m at my limit. It’s a really bad book. But it’s apparently the new Persepolis.

Public Enemy: It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold us Back

11:44: Niki de Saint Phalle: The Garden of Secrets by Dominique Osuch/Sandrine Martin (NBM)

This books looks really familiar now that I’m holding it. And it’s from 2018, so I guess it’s possible that I’ve re-bought it. Hm. But I can’t find it anywhere here. Anyway, let’s get reading.

This is told from a first person point of view, which can feel rather presumptous in a biography (especially in a comic book).

And is the translation odd or is it just me? “Oh! That reminds of…” etc. Or was the original also wonky and the translator is just replicating the original wonkiness? There’s a lot of sentences like that. Might also just be bad proff-reading. I mean, I never have typpons in my writtings.

Various: Fabric 60 (Dave Clarke)

I think I must have seen a documentary on de Saint Phalle before, or something, because parts of the story seemed familiar to me. But this biography is… er… I don’t know who the audience here would be? After we get through her youth, it’s a quite impersonal biography. We get all her major exhibition, all her meetings with other famous people, names names names. They’ve really crammed her entire Wikiepedia page into this thing. And while some of it works, I have to admit I started skimming when I was two thirds in. (Well. I tell a lie. I didn’t have to admit anything! Hah! You’re not the boss of me!)

Fad Gadget: Under the Flag

12:53: Redbeard 1 by Kraehn/Carloni (Cinebook)

Oh! This is a continuation of the old, old Charlier series, Barbe-Rouge. Or a reboot. Or something. I never really liked that series — it was stiff and awkward; definitely one of my least favourite of the French(ey) boys’ adventure series of the 50s/60s.

It’s a continuation of the story, I guess, because there’s all these characters that I’m totally unfamiliar with. And I think it’s pretty true to the Charlier albums? That is, it’s hopelessly overwritten and not very exciting.

Bit it’s OK, I guess. I definitely won’t be reading any more of these albums, though.

13:52: Cry Wolf Girl by Ariel Ries (Shortbox)

This is pretty good.

It’s a fable thing, but it’s pretty gripping.

13:59: Cat & Bag by Viviane Schwarz (Shortbox)

I’ve been reading a lot of Shortbox books the last few weeks, and I haven’t mentioned this before, but: The binding on their books isn’t optimal. It’s very tight, and things are printed way into the spine, so you have to bend a struggle to read the books.

I mean, it’s not a deal breaker or anything, but the binding really is the worst. I wonder why most of their books is like this…

Anyway, I really like this book otherwise. The artwork sorta reminds me of Cathy Hill, one of my favourite scribbly cartoonists of the 80s. And the little vignettes here are pretty entertaining and a bit wistful. (Oh, that’s a pretty interesting blog all over… Who’s Out There, that is.)

The Cure: Join the Dots (2)

14:23: Conan Turtlepack’s Day Out by Valentine Gallardo (Shortbox)

This is wildly original.

It’s a really intriguing little book — it’s got a great flow, and it’s unnerving in a gentle way. I really like this one.

14:33: The Labyrinth by Guido Buzzelli (Floating World Comics)

Huh. This is a pretty unusual project for Floating World Comics. They usually do small press US comics? And I think they’re the ones who reprint outsider comics from the 90s? But this is an album sized book — the first in a “library” — and the artist is Italian, I guess?

Well, this looks really really 70s Italian — but with a dash of Argentine, perhaps? Did Buzzelli do some work outside of Italy, by any chance? Anyway, the first story here is a post-apocalyptic thing…

… and I guess it’s even more loopy that the Italian comics (and British comics with Italian artists) that used to pop up in various anthologies here back then.

The second story is a lot more original — it’s about a guy that’s falling to pieces, and it has an attractive desperation to it. I’m not sure that I actually find it that compelling, though…

Oh! The edition was (partially) financed by the Italian gummint. Now it all makes more sense: There’s been all these American editions of European comics over the past few years where I’ve gone “well, that’s an odd thing to publish in the US now”, and they’re all financed by some European gummint or other.

And while typing this, I see that The Comics Journal published a review of this just a couple of hours ago:

I would easily consider it one of the best collections of old material published last year.

So there you go.

Keith & Julie Tippett: Couple In Spirit

15:32: The Tribute by Rochette & Legrand (Titan Comics)

What? Another English language edition of an old European comic book?

Nooo! He was just about to retire when he was killed!

Kode9: Escapology

But it’s otherwise a pretty original work, I guess. I mean, I think it is — I can’t really tell what’s going on most of the time. I suspect that the translation is wonky, and that’s what makes some of these dialogies difficult to follow (there’s certainly a lack of proff-reading, as usual with Titan books), but there’s so many apparent non sequiturs here…

I like being pleasantly confused when reading comics — it’s fun. But this book mostly just seems like nonsense, which isn’t as fun.

Ah, the first half of this was published in 1996, and then they finished the story in 2016? I’m guessing it wasn’t a major success (there’s very few ratings on Bedetheque), and the disjointedness of the er narrative is partly because of the two decade pause in the middle.

Boris: Phenomenons Drive

16:58: Unnatural Order by Yost/Rodrigues/etc (Vault Comics)

DCBS sometimes include free comics, but this time they’ve included two copies of the free comic? I bet it’ll be worth millions of Euros in the near future!

OK, so it’s a fantasy thing with over-the-top violence and stuff…

… and a scrappy team of misfit anti-heroes banding together to vanquish an evil sorcerer or something. I like the artwork.

And the twist at the end is fun.

17:08: Phase Eternal by Matt Seneca

Oh wow, this looks really cool.

And it’s a spiritual awakening kind of story, i guess… but with a fun/depressing twist at the end. Class.

17:12: Minötaar by Lissa Treiman (Shortbox)

Oh, this is one of those “ain’t Ikea horrible” things? As a Scandinavian, Ikea is in my lifeblood (and building the stuff is fun (more Scandinavian background: Lego)), so I never quite got the “oooh noooes”…

But this mashes up the whole Minotaur/labyrinth thing with Ikea stuff, and it’s fun. It’s a solid book.

Until December: The 415 Sessions (1)

17:24: She Would Feel The Same by Emma Hunsinger (Shortbox)

This isn’t good — it’s fantastic! It’s got a wonderful, mysterious flow — it’s entrancing.

And very funny. It’s a wonderful, perfect little book. Darn — she doesn’t seem to have published any other books? Well, I hope she’s at work with something new, because I want more.

17:44: Stoke by Sam Wade (Shortbox)

It’s like a heist movie? I mean comic.

I like the stark graphics, but the story is pretty slight.

17:57: Homunculus by Joe Sparrow (Shortbox)

Hm… this looks really familiar. Have I read it before?

This is very high concept — we see everything from the point of view of a new AI thingie in a lab.

It’s pretty good.

And now I should probably make some dinner. I think I forgot to have lunch… Well, who can think of food when they’re reading comics, eh?

Laura Jean: Amateurs

18:32: Eloise by Ibrahim R. Ineke (Sherpa)

Well, that was fast. Mmm, pancakes. I mean crepes.

Wow, love the artwork. It has echoes of Jeffrey Catherine Jones and other 70s fantasy artists, I guess?

The story is a kinda mysterious horror thing. Sort of. But cosmic. It’s great! The book has a real mood going on, and is downright gripping.

18:51: Š! #49 (Kuš)

The theme this issue is “chaos”, and most of the artists here have gone quite abstract.

Gina Wynbrandt hasn’t, though.

Aidan Koch’s is pretty inscrutable, but…

… not as inscrutable as Walker Tate’s.

And finally, ads for useful gadgets.

In short, it’s yet another good issue of Š!.

Patrick Cowley: Malebox

19:11: Outlaws 1 by Chabbert/Runberg (Cinebook)

So this is a sci-fi thing..

… and it’s all about immigrants being forced into slavery and stuff. It’s almost as if it’s a reference to something…

It’s not bad? They try to make all the aliens look wildly different, I think, but they all basically look like humans with some sacs protruding here and there, which is disappointing. And it feels like the first chapter of a book instead of a complete album… But it’s fine. I probably won’t keep reading the series, though.

Adrian Belew: elevator

19:37: The End

But I think I’m throwing in the towel now, earlier than I had planned. Because unusually many of these comics were annoying, and I’d rather finish this book I’m in the middle of:

And the book is very non-annoying.

Washing Machine

Before you start reading, start this song:

Mrs. Bartolozzi -- Kate Bush

It should make reading the blathering nonsense below slightly less annoying.

Aren’t I helpful.

Anyway. We were chatting on irc the other day about this:

And I was going “and that’s why I’ll never have an Internet-connected washing machine. Never! That’s totally insane and only total morons would do that! Hackers will install ransomware on the washing machine and demand hundreds of bitcoins to set my laundry free!” But then somebody said “it sure would be convenient if the washing machine could tell me when the cycle was over” and I went “yes! I want that! I have to buy an Internet-connected washing machine straight away!”

Let me explain: I usually batch my laundry. Once in a while I’ll go “I sure do have a lot of things I should wash”, and then I spend the rest of the day running everything through the washing machine. But the problem is that I can’t hear the alarm that says “done now”, and I’m forgetful, so these laundry days aren’t as efficient as they could be: The washing cycle may have been over for an hour or two before I remember to check, and that means that I don’t get done with everything as planned.

This is the worst problem ever in the history of mankind! HOW CAN ONE LIVE LIKE THIS

But… I’m really satisfied with my Miele W 3923 — I’ve had it for… what… 15 years now? And there’s never been any problems, and it washes things very gently, and most important of all: It glows in the dark.

So I wondered: Could I detect the “beep beep”s at the end and use that to make some kind of notification device… but then I thought “electricity!” Surely someone has made a device to measure power usage that has a convenient local API I can access?

And… yes!

The TP Link Tapo P110 looks exactly what I need, and somebody has made a Python library to interface with it locally. So I can script something that detects that the machine is running, and when it stops running, it notifies… something… that I’ll actually notice? Worth a shot.

(No, I don’t want to integrate this with Alexa or anything. And I think I’ll block it from accessing the Internet, because these devices update automatically, and you can’t switch the updates off, even if the app says you can and they will randomly stop working because they change the API. And besides, I don’t want a botnet to use it to DDoS Sourcehut or whatever.)

So with the plug installed and configured, I can measure what the washing machine pulls when idle. Let’s see… when it’s idle and the light is on, it pulls 5W. When the light goes off, it’s 2W, so I guess that’s the basic idle wattage.

Let’s see what a washing cycle looks like.

The bad news is that a wool cycle is very… languorous.

It starts off by pulling in some water, and then it jumps up to 2kW while it’s heating the water to 30C.

But after that, it’ll mostly just soak the clothes, so it’s at 3W for a couple of a minutes at a time between doing anything. And at the end there, when it’s done (after that final spin cycle), it’s also at 3W!

So if I just do this naively, I’ll have to wait for several minutes to be sure that the wool cycle is over. And that sucks! It’s a very… “trailing indicator”, and I want to be Maximally Efficient, right?

And this is what a 60C cotton cycle looks like: It’s a lot more energetic, and it basically seldom goes down to idle wattage (i.e., 3W). However — it doesn’t really flatline at the end there, either? Let’s zoom:

Yeah, it does an anti wrinkle thing — it rotates the drum a couple times per minute after ending the cycle. So I can’t really do a “just check for idle power” here, either.

*sigh*

Well, perhaps we can recognise patterns in the data? Perhaps I should send the data to ChatGPT and ask “is the washing cycle over now? How about now?” Or perhaps not.

The wool cycle ends with 20s of 13-14W, and then we go down to 3W. That’s something that never happens elsewhere in the cycle, and should be easy to detect!

For the cotton cycle: It seems like the anti-wrinkle thing at the end is basically around 30-35 seconds of 3W, and then between 4s and 10s of >30W. And then repeat. And eyeballing the data… it doesn’t seem like that pattern ever appears during the wash cycle.

But does the end-of-wool signal appear during the cotton cycle, or vice versa? Hm… Well, I’ve got the data, so I can just implement my guesses here, and then simulate the thing.

When the thing is running, the algorithm should basically be: The script polls the P110 once every minute. If it detects that the washing machine is running (i.e., uses more than 20W, say), it shifts to polling every second, so that it can get the shape of the curves here. Then when it detects end-of-cycle, it notifies me by flashing some lamps in the apt. And then, if it detects either that I’ve started a new cycle, or that I’ve switched the washing machine off (i.e., it goes down to ~0W), it stops flashing the lights? I think that should basically be sane. (And perhaps I should have a button somewhere to switch the flashing off manually, in case of er me being to lazy to take the things out of the washing machine right away.)

Yay! It works for the wool cycle!

But there’s a false positive in the cotton cycle at 21:05, and then it thinks that the anti-wrinkle means that it started again. OK, bugs…

Yes!

OK, I should have implemented that by a state machine and not half-assed it, because it’s pretty brittle… It might not work on, say, the silk cycle? But state machines are hard, man. I mean, to test.

For the alarms… well… a flashing duck? That should be alarming enough.

I don’t really have any singly-connected “subtle” lamps like that (and I guess they should be LED because they survive flashing better, perhaps?) in the living room, but how about this one:

Eeexcellent.

OK, this is going to save me at least… MINUTES… over the next decades.

Or until next year, when the washing machine breaks down and I get a WIFI-connected one.