Comics Daze

It’s another rainy day, so… comics!

This time around I’ve got a bunch of small press comics — both from the UK and from the US (including a whopping package from Domino Books). I’ve also been shopping at a sale here at a local comics shop, as well as getting some corporate comics. My inclination would be to just read all the small press books, but then I’d have to read all the “literaries” later, so I think I’ll mix things up… try to get, like, half and half small press and not? Let’s see how that goes.

They Hate Change: Now, and Never Again

13:42: Penny by Karl Stevens (Birdcage Bottom Books)

This was published in 2021, but I randomly happened across it while browsing something else on the web. And I’m a fan av Stevens — I think I’ve got basically all his other books, but it’s just so hard to just learn what’s being published out there, even if you’re trying to pay attention. There’s just no way to do publicity… I mean, it’s not even publicity — you just need to tell people that this thing exists.

It’s a collection of (mostly) one-page strips featuring Stevens’ cat Penny ruminating about life and stuff. It’s fun. I’m guessing these were originally published on Instagram?

The artwork is gorgeous.

It does get slightly monotonous reading single page after single page, but Stevens breaks this up once in a while with longer stories.

Still House Plants: Fast Edit

14:26: Keeping Score & Two Minis by Jesse Reklaw (Fantagraphics)

Hey! It’s another book of single page cat strips. What are the odds.

It’s a sneaky book, though — it turns out to be kinda devastating, and it’s not really about the cat.

The second mini is a comics tour diary thing, and it’s quite amusing. But also horrifying.

Pizza Hotline: Level Select

Right, I got these books from Reklaw’s web site…

So this is another diary comic, but without much of a concept this time around — just daily strips.

There’s also a bunch of guest strips.

It’s a pretty exhausting thing to read, because Reklaw’s like just seems impossibly busy and chaotic, really. But the book is compelling reading — it does shape itself into a kind of narrative, and you want to know whether the laptop problems were going to get fixed, and so on. It’s a solid book.

Ministry: Toronto 1986

16:32: Punkserier by Mare Kandre (Kartago förlag)

Found this at the sale. This is a collection of comics done by an apparently famous Swedish punk musician who died in 2005. I think the artwork is really striking, right? The story doesn’t really go anywhere, though.

The one about mental illness is more fully formed, storywise.

Interesting stuff, anyway.

There’s also a biography (which I didn’t read)…

… and a CD, which I should have been listening to, but I didn’t know that it was there. Ooops!

Musson, Edwards, Sanders: Bibimbap

16:50: Six Minis by Lando/Tsemberlidis (Decadence Comics)

I got these from Decadence Comics, a British publisher. The books themselves don’t really seem to say who’s the artist behind these, but there’s “Lando” on one and “Tsemberlidis” on two, and the rest are anonymous.

Mysterious little objects.

They’re all propulsive — just short wordless vignettes filled with action.

Oh, and some flyers…

It’s all vaguely sf action stuff…

… and they’re drawn in a kind of mid-point between late 70s French comics and Japanese comics?

They’re really attractive.

Natural Wonder Beauty Concept: Natural Wonder Beauty Concept

But extremely quick reads.

17:01: I Spent Too Long on this Lettering by Heather Loase

Loase did last year’s funniest comic book, Puttana Cartoonist. This is a collection of slightly older one-page comics, presented in reverse chronological order, I think?

It’s totally wild and out of control, and it’s pretty funny. But not as funny as Puttana Cartoonist. But then again, very little is.

Oh right… I also got these… “tapestries”. Which is a fancy word for “blankets”, apparently.

But they’re great — this is the Jim Woodring one…

And this gorgeous one is by Lisa Hanawalt. Now I’m ready for winter.

17:33: Rattfylleri by Tara Booth (Lystring)

This is an expanded version of the D.U.I. book that was originally published by Colorama in Berlin.

The first half of this is the story of Booth being put in a holding cell overnight for drunken driving.

It’s fun! The last half is about how she stopped drinking, and it’s not as much fun, but it’s heartfelt and moving.

Joëlle Léandre & Paul Lovens: Off Course

17:44: Machine Detective by The Holland Boys

This looks really wild, but it’s actually a straightforward story — it’s two cops investigating a massacre. (One is a robot and the other not.)

Hijinx ensue.

I like it.

Oops, gotta run some errands. Be right back.

The Cure: Join the Dots (3)

18:53: Girls Named Meghan by Beth Heinly

Hm… this book feels like it’s print-on-demand. (No that there’s anything wrong with that. Some of my best friends are on-demand.)

This is an autobio book about being fifteen and friends with somebody who has a lot of drama. It’s pretty good! The art style sometimes makes it a bit difficult to remember who is who — I mean, they’re all drawn differently, but you have to cram to remember who’s who…

The storytelling is also sometimes a bit choppy, and there’s a certain uneasiness about word balloon placement and reading order. But it’s an enjoyable read.

19:32: Husky Tales by Andrew Field

Well, this is something else, isn’t it? It’s a series of stories presented as Jewish folk tales (I don’t know if that’s true or not).

I’m not sure whether they actually connect in a meaningful way, but it’s an interesting read anyway.

Shearwater: Jet Plane and Oxbow

19:47: The Sleep Gas by Chris Cajero Cilla (Fantagraphics)

This has a 90s indie comics feel to it, except that it feels like the panels have been printed in random order or something. That is, the stories are stubbornly nonsensical — perhaps it’s a pot thing?

The other half of the book has more traditionally narrative stories, but I’m not really feeling it.

I should go make some food. Perhaps I’m just cranky because I’m hungry.

Mourning [A] BLKstar: Reckoning

20:43: Blueberry – Amertume Apache by Christophe Blain/Joann Sfar (Cobolt)

I think this is the first “special adventure of” for Blueberry (i.e., when they invite some famous comics artists to do their take on a character where the creators have died).

Well, they’re doing the general storytelling style quite successfully…

But it assumes that you’re really familiar with the old Blueberry albums. I’ve read them all, but it’s been a while (to put it mildly). This is like one of those Marvel mini-series that have an asterisk on page three that says “* This takes place between panels 3 and 4 on page 19 of The Uncanny X-Men #178”?

But my god, this is tedious. There’s way too many characters, none of which are very interesting, and way too many soap opera scenes. It just drags and drags — and the story isn’t even finished in this album, but in the next one.

Which I won’t be buying.

What a disappointment — both Sfar and Blain have done some really good things before, but they’ve really struck out on this one.

21:19: Laab Magazine #04 by Ronald Wimberley & Josh O’Neill (Beehive Books)

I’m a sucker for elaborately printed comics, and this is kind of fun:

It’s a number of folded-up broadsheets inside a cardboard sleeve. Folded out, these pages are huge.

There’s something thrilling about the sheer size of these pages.

Hey! They paid the contributors? Is that even legal for projects like this?

There’s also a bunch of text features here, which is perhaps a somewhat odd choice for a huge-format book like this. And many of the pages seem to be printed with really large margins?

Anyway, as a physical object it’s great, but the contents are… uhm… they don’t really feel that vital. I’d guesstimate that about a third of the pages are by the editors themselves, and the rest are mostly one-page strips that don’t really seem to have much to say other than “hey, I’m sure printed big”.

King Crimson: The Complete 1969 Recordings (18): Sessions 6

22:04: 3 Minis by Julia Gförer

Gförer’s comics are gorgeous, and brimming with dread.

I think this is the newest one? The linework seems simpler and less gothic than earlier… but the story is really intriguing.

This one is from a few years ago, and is very metaphorical or something.

Anyway, three class minis.

22:22: Trigger Shot/Flat Filters by Tal Brosh and Chino Moya

Trigger Shot is about artificial insemination, and then in-vitro fertilisation.

And it’s absolutely amazing. It manages to be both abstract and concrete at the same time — the entire story is told this way, but it’s not particularly confusing.

Except the ending — I think this is a horror story? But I’m not quite sure.

Wonderful book — utterly original.

Flat Filters is an earlier book, and is more traditional.

But still quite odd. It’s a compelling book, though — very original.

22:47: Frykt & medlidenhet by Ane Barstad Solvang (No Comprendo Press)

This is very full on — it’s about having a reunion with old high school friends, getting drunk and telling story after story about horrific gynaecological problems.

It’s funny, and the art really reflects the chaos of the stories being told.

Then things turn really serious in the third act, and there’s also a twist of sorts (perhaps the narrator isn’t totally reliable?)… I’m not sure that’s totally successful, but it’s a pretty good book.

Various: Fabric 75 (Maya Jane Coles)

23:24: Sell-Out Comics by Mike Dawson

This is a collection of short, chatty pieces. Dawson gets some good jokes in here, and it’s pretty thoughtful throughout.

It’s good, but it’s depressing, because he’s right.

23:38: Terraformonauts by Rodger Binyone

This is a narrative book, but I’m not quite sure what’s happening? I think something is being given birth to, or something.

I think the cover and this amazing spread are screenprinted? It feels that way — that slightly sticky feeling. The rest of the book doesn’t seem to be, but I have no idea. It’s a class book, anyway — quite compelling.

They Hate Change: Meters

23:43: Visages du temps/Rêve de Jean-Marie Massou by Sammy Stein (Lystring)

Is this risograph, perhaps? Or fake riso. In any case, the book is about a sort of static utopia…

The text is both in French and Swedish.

It’s kinda great.

The large book is a collection of short pieces that have previously been published in a variety of venues.

Many of the pieces are about exhibitions in museums or galleries, and feature conversations from people talking about the exhibitions in a kind of distracted way. It’s a meditative book, in a way?

It’s great — it’s a very pretty book, and teeters between abstraction and narrative in a very mindful way. It’s not dream-like, but it’s rather like being asleep.

Genesis P. Orridge & The Halfer Trio: Dream Less Suite

00:22: Københavnermysteriet by Sussi Bech/Frank Madsen/Jens Olaf Pepke Pedersen (Eudor)

I should go to bed — I’m pleasantly exhausted from all this reading. But just one more.

Uhm… is this book just a way to fool kids into learning snippets about physics and stuff?

Yes indeed!

I don’t want no book learnin’!

So I ditched this halfway through. There should have been a warning on the cover.

00:38: The End

So now I’m going to bed.

That was a very varied bunch of comics, and some really excellent ones in there.

Raspberries & Screens

I’ve had a “Home Automation System” (i.e., thing that makes lights go on and off) based on Telldus Tellstick and Z-Wave for more than a decade, and it works fine. I’ve got a bunch of computers around the house, and I’ve installed the USB dongles and server programs on them, which seemed like the most convenient solution.

But I went away for a while back, and I switched off the computers (as I usually do when going away for a longer trip) — but I’d forgotten that there were people coming over while I was away, and they were then stuck in an apt that was mostly pitch black.

Oops.

So I thought I’d get real and move the control units to gadgets that could be always-on. So they’d have to be something that doesn’t take a lot of power, so they’d be less likely to burst into flames while I’m away.

A bunch of Raspberry Pis would fit this use case well.

But I was reminded of a different problem I’ve been having:

I’ve got a bunch of small DisplayLink USB-powered monitors around the apt, that displays data about the temperature, the weather and what’s playing on the stereo. And I’ve been having recurring problems with these. Not the units themselves — they’re from Mimo and work without a hitch — but the Linux support for them.

Back when I got them, which might be a decade ago, they were basically plug and play. As the years have passed, the Linux people have phased out the udlfb driver (the UDL framebuffer driver), and replaced that with a module that’s just called “udl”. On some of my Mimo devices, that doesn’t work at all. On others, the support was broken for a couple of years, but has now been fixed again.

The writing is on the wall, though — there’s been no new devices from Mimo in several years for this segment, and I think support is going to go away at some point. (And there’s an issue with tearing when I’m playing tiny videos on the screens.)

So why not address two problems at once: I need some always-on power-sipping devices, and I need screens. So: Small all-in-one computers that run Linux? That has to exist, right?

And the answer is… not really. There’s a bunch of tablet-like devices, but these all have batteries included. Which I want to avoid in an always-on device — the batteries are the most dangerous bit, statistically speaking.

There’s also the exciting world of industrial panel computers. These would be perfect, except they either run Windows, Android, are just really ugly, or use outdated monitor technologies (i.e., not IPS or similar).

I was about to give up — I’d been googling for hours now — when I found Chipsee.

It just looks too good to be true — it’s got everything on my wishlist, and more:

  • It’s a Raspberry Pi in a screen, so just one cable needed (and the Pi is a known entity)
  • IPS display, so it’ll have nice viewing angles
  • Touchscreen, so that I can use it as a control unit
  • Internal speaker, so that I can make it beep if I want to
  • All the connectors your’d expect
  • 10″, which is just about right.
  • LAN, WAN, etc
  • Takes just about any voltage
  • Looks nice

So I ordered one, and today I got it.

Epic unboxing:

So shiny!

It didn’t come with a power adapter, which is fine, because I’ve got plenty.

I plugged it in, and… it came up into Raspbian without a hitch. It comes pre-installed! Just plug the power and play.

The first impression of the screen is very positive — the colours are vibrant, and the viewing angles are excellent.

But… it gives a warning during installation that you should never say “apt upgrade”, because that will make the screen stop working (sorry, I clicked OK before I snapped a pic of the message). That seems… really problematic. I understand that integrating stuff like this is hard, but can’t they, like, lock whatever packages they’ve hacked to work with this hardware, and let people upgrade stuff?

Hm… Oops! I needed to do a “apt build-dep emacs” here, so I had to do an “apt update” first (to get the dep-src stuff), and perhaps I’ve already broken the system? *gulp* Perhaps I should reboot and check.

Yup… came back up. But it seems finicky — WIFI didn’t work on the first reboot.

And after doing some testing, it turns out that there’s no way to get tear-free video on a Raspberry Pi, because that’s something nobody ever wants? *sigh* But then again, video wasn’t really a vital requirement — it’d just be nice to have. So let’s carry on and pretend like nothing’s happened…

Hm, looking at the syslog, there’s these lines appearing every second:

Jul 19 14:19:04 dielman1 dpms-lcd.sh[1166]: /opt/chipsee/dpms-lcd.sh: 33: [: =: unexpected operator
Jul 19 14:19:04 dielman1 dpms-lcd.sh[1166]: /opt/chipsee/dpms-lcd.sh: 38: [: =: unexpected operator

It’s a shell script that’s looping once per second, and there’s a syntax error in two of the if statements… It doesn’t exactly make me extremely confident in the software here… I fixed that (just to make the logs more calm), and then it’s time to plug in the Tellstick:

Well, OK, the USB ports are so far down that the Tellstick doesn’t fit directly. So I used an extension cord, and… that doesn’t quite fit, either — the plug is so long that it juts a few millimetres below the screen.

I need something like this, I guess.

Or these, even… Hm… do those look like they’d fit? Worth a try.

And… it works! You’re actually looking at an Emacs frame there displaying the temperature and current song playing, because why not?

While fiddling around with this, I found the display driver to be rather … finicky. Before starting Emacs fullscreen, I experimented a bit with making the frame larger than the window (so that the mode line etc wouldn’t show), and that made X crash.

So… again, doesn’t inspire that much confidence.

Instead I just start Emacs fullscreen, and made the mode line/decorations go away, and I guess that’s a more elegant solution anyway, so whatevs.

Aand… everything else just seems to work — it’s able to use the Tellstick without any problems, and I don’t see any screen glitches with this setup. I guess the question is how stable these things are long term, but things are looking promising: I may have found a workable solution for the home automation stuff.

I have not tried to use the touch screen support for anything yet, but it could be used to control the lights or the volume, I guess, but I already have physical buttons on the walls for that, so I’m not sure I need it. But perhaps I’ll think if something to do with touching; it’s a nice option to have.

The general Raspberry Pi ecology is a bit mystifying. You’d expect a per-user program startup thing, but instead you’re apparently supposed to edit /etc/xdg/lxsession/LXDE-pi/autostart, and stuff like that. I know that an RPi is best thought of as a single task machine, but setup just seems spread out in an un-Linuxey way?

But, eh, whatevs.

The initial wifi problems I had seems to be gone — perhaps it was a DHCP server issue or something? It was transient, at least. Everything seems to be working fine now.

They really are handy devices — just a single cable (for power), and that’s it, so they’re very tidy. 10″ is perhaps a bit on the large side — 9″ would have been perfect, but it’s fine.

So I’ll be buying three more of these things to have one in every room, replacing the DisplayLink monitors and using them as Tellstick transmitters. (Because the range of the Tellstick stuff is about seven metres.)

Chipsee web site, next up.

My New Lamp Repair Blog

A week ago, I got a lamp called Midori from Artimide.

It came shipped amusingly flat…

… and with plenty of assembly to do, which is fun.

It folds out pretty impressively. So what’s the problem?

I have all my lamps plugged into wall sockets that are controlled remotely, so when I go to bed, I just push a button and all the lamps in the apt are switched off.

But this lamp doesn’t go on when the power returns — it remains stubbornly off until I physically hit the button on the cable.

Is this a new trend? I bought a lamp half a year ago that did the same, but that one was a dual battery/powered lamp, so it at least had a possible reason to not light up? Or are there new EU regulations that say that all lamps should remain off until they’ve been properly fondled by a human? (As a power savings thing. (They did enact similar laws for amplifiers, for instance — when not in use, they’re supposed to automatically go to stand by mode, so when you play some music, you have to fondle the amplifier, then wait for five seconds for it to boot without any indication whether it’s booting, and then not be sure whether you fondled it correctly, so you fondle it off, and then have to wait five seconds for it to switch itself off, and then re-fondle it and go away and cry in shame. (Most amplifiers do have a documented way to switch this shit off, mostly involving “hold these seven buttons down in the correct sequence for 1.75s, while twirling” or something similar.)))

Perhaps Artimide just wanted people to behold — behold! — how smoothly it switches itself on and off again. You can’t have a light go to 100% brightness immediately; you have to do a soft on/off, or it’s not luxed. (That’s a word.)

The innards of the power switch are surprisingly complex. My immediate thought was to just cut this thing off and replace it with a normal light switch… but… this is a 24V DC thing, and is it possible that it’s doing more logic for the actual LED chip in the lamp than just act as a So Soft So Luxurious On Off Button? I don’t know from LED, dude!

Let’s do my immediate thought, because I don’t have a second one.

I snipped it anyway! Hah! Living on the edge!

Shiny wire to shiny wire, black wire to black wire…

Done!

And… if you’ve seen the scroll bars on this blog, you know that it didn’t work.

What happens is that the LED comes on, and then goes off, then comes on, and then goes off and remains off. Whenever I turn the power on. So… er… there’s indeed some logic in the original power button that’s … doing something?

OH WELL I GUESS I JUST HAVE TO THROW THE LAMP AWAY

Or I could fiddle with it some further.

The actual lighting fixture in this lamp is this: It’s made by Artimide, and it’s bespoke for this lamp, apparently.

And indeed, the innards are extremely simple.

But is it all one integrated thing?

No! The important bit, the thing that holds the “bulb” in the lamp is this thing — it’s two magnets and a hole. And the dimensions look quite a lot like a normal bulb fixture thingiemabob!

So off to the stores again and buy more stuff.

Fiddle fiddle…

Done! It fits!

And to preserve the er artistic integrity of it all, I wanted to have the light appear in the lamp at a similar height, so I used one of these smaller bulbs instead of the normal larger ones.

*gasp*

IT WORKES! I think I got the height and lms pretty much right — it looks the same as before this operation.

So that was totally worth it. Two trips to the store, a day and a half of work, that’s going to save me tens and tens of seconds over the next decade.

The question remains: Why is Artimide so evil? SO EVIL