Random Thoughts

Comics Daze

Geez. I still haven’t fixed my sleeping patterns, and one needs to be bright awake to read comics, right? But let’s see how this goes.

And for music er “today”, let’s go with albums from 2024 only.

Bogdan Raczynski: You’re Only Young Once But You Can Be Stupid Forever

04:45: Mini Kuš #127-130 (Kuš)

This is the first Walker Tate book I’ve seen in colour? I think? And it’s a departure in other ways, too — it’s more of an er story? But it’s good.

Apolonija Lučïć gives us tips on collecting seashells.

Yuma Wang seems to be telling us to be more selfish. I don’t think that’s usually a problem most people have…

etchingroom1 talks about love.

It’s another lovely batch of minis, and you can get them from here.

My Brightest Diamond: Fight The Real Terror

04:58: Holler by Jeremy Massie (Dark Horse)

This art style is like a distillation of the 90s Alternative Comics style… bu on a Cintiq, so it loses that appealing texture those books sometimes had.

The books is mostly shorter anecdotes about being in a band, and a teenager in love, and guys being dicks to each other, and religious damage. It’s almost supernaturally standard. If you like this kind of thing, this is the kind of thing you like.

Where it goes totally off the rails are in these bits that are supernaturally tedious.

And there’s the generally embarrassing bits.

But it’s OK, I guess? I’m guessing a lot of people would like this book.

Oranssi Pazuzu: Muuntautuja

06:12: Orakelet Taler by Liv Strömquist (Forlaget Manifest)

This book is basically about being a human bean today. It’s mostly a critique of self help books and influencers and stuff, and the influencer parodies are very funny.

This sort of thing can devolve into an illustrated essay, which wouldn’t be very exciting, but Strömquist is a very inventive comics maker.

The bits where she makes fun of religions are also very amusing.

Porridge Radio: Clouds In The Sky They Will Always Be There For Me

Heh heh heh. It’s funny and smart. I wonder whether there’ll be an English language edition? I hope so.

Sophie: Sophie

07:47: Adrift on a Painted Sea by Tim Bird & Sue Bird (Avery Hill)

This little book is very moving — it features paintings by the author’s mother (who has recently died)…

… and the author tries to make sense of her stuff and things. It’s great — it’s really unresolved, but the vagueness of the structure is perfect for the material.

08:02: Welcome to Casa Baba by Giulia Cellino/Jindrich Janicek/Jurits Tatarkins (Baba Jaga)

I got this from the nice people at Kuš, and it’s a collection of things created while on artist residency programs.

This one is very funny — I LOL’d out loud several times.

Really like the moody artwork here — and the story is about working in a bookstore, which is a nice staple for a reason.

The last one is a bit more abstract — more sketchbook like. But cool, too.

That residency program sounds nice.

Squarepusher: Venus No. 17 Maximised

08:18: Clay Footed Giants by Alain Chevarier/Mark McGuire (Mad Cave)

Wow, Mad Cave had a lot of people working on this book. Especially surprising since this was originally published in French by a totally different publisher.

I don’t think I’ve ever bought anything from Mad Cave before, though? They’ve never been on my radar…

I like the artist’s rendering style, if not his actual faces and stuff.

It starts off being about the stress of handling your kids while your wife is away on work trips. Looks stressful!

Then it becomes all about daddy issues, because of course it does.

So I’m guessing this book features a lot of details from the authors’ own history? But it doesn’t read like an autobio thing at all — it seems very much like it’s following pat fiction structures. You’ve got the three acts, the scenes of So Much Unbelievable Drama, the pat resolutions…

Thurston Moore: Flow Critical Lucidity

What I’m saying is that it’s not very good (except some of the artwork), and that I’m going back to ignoring Mad Cave again, even if they have so many people working on their books.

Bill Frisell, Kit Downes, Andrew Cyrille: Breaking the Shell

09:49: Folkbokförd i rännstenen by Tommy Sundvall (Galago)

This book collects four tall tales featuring these two characters.

The artwork’s pretty basic, but get the job done.

The Necks: Bleed

A bigger problem is that the author seems to lose his enthusiasm for the project half way through. The book starts with a lot of mad-cap crimes, but then it sort of deflates.

It’s fun, though.

Xylitol: Anemones

11:27: Exceptional X-Men #1-2 by Ewing/Carnero/Woodard (Marvel Comics)

Another attempt at finding a monthly super-hero book to read…

The storytelling here is just… like… wha? Even on a modern super-hero scale, it’s just hard to place people in relation to each other and tell what’s supposed to be going on.

It’s a shame, because the story seems pretty OK? Perhaps I’ll give it a couple more issues.

Xeno & Oaklander: VIA NEGATIVA (in the doorway light)

11:44: Sine qua non by Katie Lane

I really like the artwork.

I think I’ve read at least parts of this before? Perhaps in an anthology? And this is printed very small (and sometimes faintly), so it’s a bit of a strain on my old eyes to read this…

repository: Xiu Xiu

11:53: Curriculum BD by Annie Goetzinger (Les humanoides associes)

This is a collection of things Goetzinger did for Metal Hurlant in the 70s, I think? I’ve never read any of this before.

And her style is a lot more florid than her later style. It’s really cool, though.

The stories vary in length from single pages to a handful of pages, and some of them are pretty lame (mostly ones she didn’t write herself). It’s still fun.

Dummy: Free Energy

12:42: Earthbound by Blonk (Pow Pow Press)

This is a relationship drama/sitcom starring a zombie, and it’s told (mostly) in these two-page spreads that have a vague punchline at the end.

And… even for a zombie thing, there’s so much drama.

This is totally not my thing, so I’m ditching it halfway through.

13:09: The End

And that’s enough comics for today. I lasted longer than I thought I would!

TBE2021: Jetcat & Friends

Jetcat & Friends (2021) by Jay Stephens

Nice endpapers.

When I read a contents page like this, my heart sinks a bit — “so this is just gonna be a random collection of random stuff!?!?”

But nothing could be further from the truth. This book is a masterclass in smart sequencing — while many of the pieces weren’t originally meant to be part of the same “thing”, they fit together so well here.

It’s mostly shorter pieces, but there’s a couple longer things, and the above is the centrepiece: It’s a substantial story about how Jetcat (and friend) gets stuck in an alternate dimension. It gives the whole book a sort of narrative arc, even if many of the shorter pieces are really pretty random.

I have just one gripe about the book: It’s how tight the spine is. I’m sitting here fighting the book all the time to be able to read the bits in the centre.

It’s gags gags gags all the time, and they’re good gags. And because the book is sequenced so well, you get that cumulative effect where things just get funnier and funnier the more you read.

But there’s also variety, like this longer Tutenstein story reprinted from the original Land of Nod series.

But it’s mostly just one gloriously stupid gag (with on point cartooning) after another. It’s wonderful.

So: It’s a collection of very funny strips that also feels extremely satisfying as a book. It’s a marvel.

Draw! #16, page #35:

What percentage of your income were you making
from, let’s say, cartooning, from comic books? You’re doing a
comic strip, and you’re still doing stuff for Nick Magazine?
JS 100% of my income has been cartooning for years, whether I
was making ends meet or not. I haven’t had a day job since art
school. Thc last real job I had was, like, greasy spoon manager. I
had zero qualifications to do anything else! And I had to scram-
ble. Also, during all this time—most starving cartoonists will
identify—I’m doing people’s business cards, and business
brochures, and medical illustrations for your local doctor’s office.
J was doing anything to make ends meet,
so I was working constantly. But that
strip, Oddville!, had a character called
Jetcat in it, and Fred Schaefer saw that
after he’d optioned Tulenstein, and
optioned Jetcat, too. So I started to see,
“Hint, hint. These characters that you’re
creating that people in comics don’t
appreciate, they have legs elsewhere.”
It’s funny, though, because
Jetcat was actually on TV before
Tutenstein.
JS: Yup, it went further, faster. We got
Jefcat picked up as shorts on
Nickelodeon really quickly, and then
Tutenstein took a lot longer. I mean,
from the time he optioned it to the time
it aired, it was seven years.
DRAWI: Wow. So they had to keep
renewing the option, I take it?
JS Yeah, which is great. [laughs] But
we developed the hell out of that show,
too. Because the original concept was so
basic, you could really push that charac-
ter and that setup in so many different
ways, so we really worked hard on get-
ting it right for Discovery Kids, who was
the eventual client. And it turned out
very differently than I conceived it.

The print edition seems to be sold out, but you can buy the ebook version here.

I’m unable to find any reviews, which is odd.

This blog post is part of the Total Black Eye series.

Bluesky & Development & Expectations & Stuff

I’m not really “on” Bluesky — but I autopost links to mah blog, because why not. To do this, I installed the Simple Auto Poster For Bluesky plugin. It does what it’s supposed to pretty well, but I wanted to tweak the look of the posts, so now — whaddayouknow — I’m a Bluesky API developer.

Strange how these things happen.

First of all, I have to say that the protocol is pretty nice? It seems like they’ve given a lot of thought to the hard problems — like how everything is distributed, not just posts. (On the other hand, Mastodon has only dealt with the trivial problems and handwave all the difficult problems, so they’ve ended up with a system that’s even more primitive than NNTP, really.)

I’m writing this blog post to kvetch about the more trivial issues that are nevertheless … issues? Sort of.

The documentation is nice and clear, with lots of examples. That’s great. What’s not so great is that it’s unclear where the formal spec is.

For instance, here’s the description of how to create a link: You include something called a “facet” that describes the various bits. You say “the text that starts at byte 74 and ends at byte 108 should be displayed as a link that points to this URL”. This is smart, and is better than using a character based system, because what is a character, after all? 🧎🏻‍♂️, for instance, should be displayed as one glyph but is composed of multiple code points.

(I also like that this eschews the common Do What I Mean approach, and instead is a clear Do What I Say thing.)

But notice that this description doesn’t mention UTF-8 at all. And in the protocol itself, they’re displaying Unicode literals, and not UTF-8 at all. So do the bytes refer to the encoded text, or the decoded text, or what? 🤷

It turns out to be indeed talking about UTF-8… but doesn’t really say what happens if the byte specified is inside a UTF-8 sequence.

For all I know, this is documented extensively somewhere, but I haven’t been able to make Google cough up that documentation.

This is linked from the documentation, but how you’re supposed to use that information is pretty obscure.

Anyway, so there’s good documentation, but not really stringent documentation (that’s easily available).

But I’m writing this boring blog post because of this:

So that’s how you’re supposed to include an image. First you upload a blob, and then you link that blog with an embed that says to use that blog as an image. That’s fine, but the weird thing is that there’s nothing in the blob object about the dimensions of the image, and I found that surprising — because when you render an image, you really have to know how big it is to pre-compute the layout.

This apparent oversight surely isn’t going to byte anybody in the ass, right?

Yes, a couple of days ago my beautiful posts started having cropped images — cropped to 1:1.

After much googling, I found this:

It’s kinda dramatic for some people:

So what happened?

They introduced a new field in the embed: aspectRatio, which is something the client (!) fills out to say what the aspect ratio (!!) of the image is. Note — not the width/height dimensions, necessarily, but the aspect ratio!? But why? The dimensions work perfectly as dimensions, too, so…

Yes, that’s bad, but… why… don’t you just compute the dimensions?

So because they’ve seen that the client supplied dimensions are often bad (well, duh!) they’re going to make all clients that don’t supply aspectRatio (a new field, which is not mentioned in the main guide at all) cropped to a 1:1 square.

*sigh*

Now, people are understandably in a huff — this is really a breaking change, but hasn’t been communicated to developers at all, as far as I can tell.

Yes, that looks horrible. But on the other hand: Twitter changed their image cropping algorithm at least half a dozen times, and people just had to live with it. It was their web site, and they’re free to do what they want. And Bluesky is their web site, and they’re also free to do what they want, so this rhetoric feels overblown and extremely entitled. And besides — Bluesky is 20 people? They don’t have a team to liaison with developers, and that fine.

And it sounds like they’re just going to tweak the CSS on the site (after thanksgiving weekend) to display images in full — but with blank space over/below or right/left to get to a 1:1 layout.

The moral here is: 1) try to keep the implementation guides better updated, and 2) don’t have a public bug tracker, because then people get huffy and shirty.

(I still don’t comprehend why they’re doing all this in the first place — precomputing the dimensions of the images when you upload the blobs seems like a no-brainer, but perhaps the reason for that is on some Discord or other.)

And that’s how I wasted a few hours this weekend, but at least my version of the API client now inserts aspectRatio:

And now I can go back to blogging about comics again.

[Update on Dec 5]

They’ve now pushed a CSS update that displays aspectRatio-less images like this — so they still occupy a 1:1 square layout wise, but aren’t cropped.

November Music

Music I’ve bought in November.

Wow, all of a sudden there’s a ton of music. Are record companies still pushing more albums ahead of Xmas? Like in the olden days? Even though nobody buys albums any more?

Or perhaps it’s just random, but apparently I bought like 40 albums this month.

So, anything interesting? Let’s see…

Moebius