Comics Daze

Wow, I’ve gotten a lot of comics lately, and I’ve been busy with other things, so I haven’t had time to read them. So it’s time for another Day Of Doing Nothing Except Reading Comics. And for music today — albums from 1996 only. Because.

Oval: 94diskont

12:27: Warnebi by Wiebke Boldvan (Fieldmouse Press)

This is excellent — it’s a pretty quiet book without much drama, and it feels very true and accurate.

And it’s never obvious where it’s going, so it’s pretty exciting. Nine thumbs up.

(The translation is sometimes a bit clumsy, though.)

12:43: Voyage d’hiver by Anne Brouillard (& esperluète éditions)

This is one of those er “accordion books”? Or whatever they are called.

I.e., it’s one long painting, really, but it’s kinda sorta slightly narrative, I think: We start with these people getting on a train…

… and then I think the rest might be what they’re viewing from the train? And it ends with them arriving at a new train station.

Lovely artwork and a fun concept. And the indicia says “quatrième edition”, so it’s a big hit.

12:53: Poor Helpless Comics! by Ed Subitzky (New York Review Comics)

This looks very cool… Design by Mark Newgarden.

It’s got interviews and stuff.

Oh, wow — these are very intricate (but amusing) works. Hm… OK, I think I’m gonna bounce — this looks like something I’d rather read some late night while drinking tea, so I’m shifting it over to the magazine holder next to my reading chair. But here on my comics couch, I’m instead continuing with:

Spring Heel Jack: 68 Million Shades

13:02: Girl Juice by Benji Nate (Drawn & Quarterly)

Oops, I’ve already read this.

13:06: Holy Fools & Funny Gods by Izar Lunaček (Uncivilized Books)

I buy everything that Uncivilized release by reflex, but this doesn’t really look like my kind of thing? I mean, it’s about religion?

So this is a comics version of a scientifictic (that’s a word) book Lunaček has published.

But the language here is often very awkward. “Those that see laughter as deriding the funny”? Uhm? Lunaček is Slovenian, but there is no translator listed, so perhaps he wrote this in English himself? There’s a guy credited with “language check” and a “translation editor”…

And… I’m sure this there are people that will find this interesting, but I read about a third and then ditched it. Sorry!

13:43: Galago #162 edited by Anders Annikas (Galago)

Sweden’s oldest running comics anthology has gone to a quarterly schedule (bad news) but has doubled its size (good news), so let’s have a look at the latest new-format issue.

As usual, there’s a theme for the anthology, and this time around it’s “music”.

So in addition to the comics, we also get a few articles, like this one about album covers done by comics artists.

But it’s mostly comics.

Heh heh.

It’s a solid anthology — varied in style, but somewhat unified by the theme.

Morcheeba: Who Can You Trust?

Hm, perhaps 1996 wasn’t the best year for music…

14:12: Mini Kuš (Kuš)

Five more minis I bought from here.

Tiina Lehikoinen does a very unsettling thing about a boy with a horse head.

Emelie Östergren’s book is very ambiguous.

Michael Jordan goes on a strange odyssey.

Anna Vaivare’s book is lovely and affecting.

Jyrki Heikkinen’s book is strangely unnerving (and looks great).

Five great little books!

DJ Krush: Only the Strong Survive

14:25: Return to Eden by Paco Roca (Fantagraphics)

This starts off with 20-ish black pages. Very portentous!

As usual with Roca, this book looks like it’s excavating more of his family’s history.

This is mostly about Antonia, which I’m guessing is either Roca’s aunt or mother? Probably mother, I’m thinking.

The bits about the family are interesting and sometimes gripping, but when Roca goes into Spain’s Fascist history, the book sort of collapses, I think? And this is something I’d be interested in, but the tone here is just… off.

And, yes, it must be about Roca’s mother, because we’re told that she has a son named Paco.

Anyway, it’s a good book, really — the ending is incredibly moving.

The Black Dog: Music for Adverts (and short films)

15:28: Smoke Signal edited by Gabe Fowler (Desert Island)

Most of the recent issues of Smoke Signal have been focused on illustration more than comics, I think? Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but it’s fun to get comics in this huge format.

Here’s Kade McClements on the dangers of small press comics publishing. Hm… is this a roman à clef kind of thing? A midwestern small press publisher (financed by selling both his kidneys) that pays in copies of comics only? I’m sure that’s not a reference to anything!

All the artists here get two pages each, which in most anthologies would have meant a pretty choppy reading experience. But since these pieces are (almost all, I think?) made with this format in mind, you get bigger stories than you’d have thought (Molly Dwyer here).

It’s just an insanely good anthology (Angela Fanche here). I’m not sure whether it’s available via mail order? Doesn’t look like it… So I guess you all have to make a pilgrimage to the Desert Island shop to pick up a copy.

16:07: Tank Tankuro by Gajo Sakamoto (Presspop)

This is fancee — it’s a very serious-looking hardback that comes in a sturdy slipcase. Hm… Oh, the slipcase is by Chris Ware. Duh!

These are comics from 1934 (I guess from the cover), and I guess I can see why the publisher went with a Ware cover instead of a cover by the featured artist. And if I want to be snide (and I always do), I could also say something about how wise it is to have the book in a tight slipcase, wrapped in plastic, so that nobody can see the insides.

Thanks for that footnote, translator! I’m sure nobody knew that.

I mean, it’s not that it’s bad… it’s pretty inventive? And for 1934, it must have been quite something.

But whenever things seem to be getting interesting (is he doing anti war agitation here?)…

… we just get One More Absurd Thing.

You know what this reminds me of? Very early Tintin — for instance Tintin au pays des Soviets from 1929: Hergé hadn’t figured out how to actually tell a story (and struggled with that for most of the next decade), so he’d just add one mad-cap humour/action scene after another until he had enough pages to call it a day. I’m assuming that Gajo Sakamoto likewise turned into a big deal later? (There’s a big essay at the end of the book, but who’s got time to read stuff like that? I’ve got comics to read!)

Paul Schütze: New Maps of Hell

16:37: A Simple Truth by Kavin Sacco (SLG Graphics)

SLG? Is that a new name for Slave Labor Graphics or something? Haven’t heard about them in decades.

The storytelling in this is really abrupt — it’s about a couple that miscarriages and then adopts a child.

But it’s hard to know how to read this book — the start of it is so filled with dread and random bad things that happen that I thought it was going to be one of those books where one gruesome thing after another was going to continue to happen, and I was waiting for the other shoe to fall when things start going better. And then it doesn’t — it’s instead… er… autobio? I mean, the dedication seems to point to it being autobio, but I don’t think it can be?

Anyway, it’s confusing on several levels.

16:56: Masters of the Nefarious by Pierre la Police (New York Review Comics)

Wow, this book is wonderful — it’s the funniest thing I’ve read in yonks. It’s like Tales Designed to Thrizzle by Michael Kupperman — it’s totally absurd.

Here’s the plot:

See? Best plot ever. And the wonderful thing about this book is that everything really kinda ties together — it’s not just one absurd thing after another, but a book that feels like a proper epic (even if it’s too short).

And he does while doing one laugh out loud silly thing after another.

A wonderful book.

Bundy K. Brown, Doug Scharin, James Warden: Directions In Music

17:18: The N* Word of God by Mark Doox (Fantagraphics)

Hey! This isn’t comics! *shakes fist in the general direction of Fantagraphics* And the artwork is, like, Photoshop collages with some additional drawing? It’s not really my thing — it’s kinda Juxtapoz-ish.

So what we’re getting here is a sort of alternate take on creation myths from the Bible and stuff, which, again, isn’t my thing at all.

But it’s pretty amusing in places.

It’s a slightly lazy book, though — when we get towards the middle of the book, there’s sometimes dozens of pages of text without any illustrations whatsoever.

Beth Orton: Trailer Park

*gasp* He’s right! I never thought of that! My god! I mean, Saint Sambo!

Sarcasm aside, it’s a more entertaining book that I thought it would be when I first opened it.

18:34: Uptight #5 by Jordan Crane (Fantagraphics)

The Mystery Mail sometimes has some really mysterious books — like this ten year old issue of Uptight.

The longest thing in the book is a chapter of Keeping II, which was collected and released to great acclaim a couple years ago.

But there’s a lot more stuff in here — a mysterious short story about a woman in a hotel room.

A mysterious longer sci fi story about some space miners.

And a shorter, but still mysterious, story about a guy floating at sea.

It’s a pretty amazing issue.

18:48: Undead by Pakito Bolino (Desert Island)

Actually, I’m not sure who the creator is here…

Another collagey book…

It’s fun, but I found it pretty disturbing by how much of this is sourced from low resolution JPEGs — there’s so much artefacting going on here that I found myself looking more at the artefacts than the collages.

Manic Street Preachers: Everything Must Go

18:59: The End

OK, that was a weird selection of books, and I think I should stop reading comics now because I’m getting annoyed, and I’m expecting whatever I’m going to read next to suck, which is the wrong attitude to have.

Might also have something to do with the music — I didn’t remember 1996 as being this uninspiring musically?

The Simplest Thing In The World: Modifying Keymaps in Wayland

To remap the PrtSc key to the Hyper modifier key under Wayland with Gnome Shell on Ubuntu/Debian on the 28th of April 2024 (around noon) with a us keyboard mapping (I’m hedging my bets here), put the following in the ~/.config/xkb/symbol/us file:

partial alphanumeric_keys modifier_keys
xkb_symbols "hyper" {
    name[Group1]= "Hyper (US)";
    include "us(basic)"
    key <PRSC> { [ Hyper_L ] };
    modifier_map Mod3 { <PRSC> };
};

And then log out and back in again.

That’s it. That’s definitely all I had to say. Or perhaps…

Yes, it’s bitching and moaning time again, but I feel like I’m entitled — because I’ve been struggling with this for (and I’m not exaggerating) years. That is, I’ve taken stabs at making this work going back at least a decade. In total, I’ve probably spent more than a dozen hours pulling my hair and swearing at the computer. So:

In the Olden Days Of Yore, the first thing that happened when you used a computer for the first time was getting really annoyed with the keyboard because nothing was ever exactly like you wanted. (Especially with the national varieties of different keyboards from different companies — the horror!) I remember back at the university in the 90s, people had all kinds of fancy and amusing layouts, making it impossible for anybody to use anybody elses keyboards — keyboard encryption as a security feature, eh? And these shenanigans were possible because it was trivial to modify keyboard definitions. If you wanted to have a Hyper key on PrtSc (if that key did indeed exist back then; probably not on most keyboards), you put this in ~/.Xmodmap and went on with your life:

keycode 107 = Hyper_L
add Mod3 = Hyper_L

This still works to this day, three decades later — sort of. Any changes to the HID device hierarchy these days and the OS is likely to blank the setting and then you have to xmodmap it “manually”. And this only works if you’re still running X, of course, which is getting to be more and more difficult.

I got a new Lenovo Yoga X1 Gen 8, which is a nice laptop — I like a Yoga while travelling, because you can flip it around and watch movies on it without having the keyboard in front of you.

See? It’s nice.

And it has a built-in WWAN/5G modem, so I can use the laptop when there’s no WIFI and without tethering and stuff.

But the modem didn’t work in Debian/stable, so I installed Ubuntu. The modem works fine there, but:

I opened the Settings app, and there were all these horizontal stripes and glitches and stuff? I mean… what? This is a totally normal laptop with built-in normal Intel graphics:

00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Raptor Lake-P [Iris Xe Graphics] (rev 04)

And still, just opening the Settings apps displays oodles of glitches in the default configuration? So they’ve obviously stopped even testing in Xorg — everything is moving to Wayland anyway, right?

And then I tried watching a video with mpv! My god!

Googling showed a lot of people having problems in this area, and the solutions were along the lines of:

i915.enable_dc=0
intel_idle.max_cstate=2

And other boot parameters, none of which had any effect for me. So after trying that for a few hours, the writing’s on the wall, even if I’ve resisted for years: I have to switch to Wayland before I get so old that there’s no chance of me ever figuring out any computer stuff ever again: I have to finally make The Configuration For The Future.

So how do you do something as trivial as assigning Hyper_L to the PrtSc key? As the keyboard(5) man page says:

The specification of the keyboard layout in the keyboard file is based on the XKB options XkbModel, XkbLayout, XkbVariant and XkbOptions. Un- fortunately, there is little documentation how to use them.

The keyboard definition in an Ubuntu/Debian machine is in /etc/default/keyboard:

cat /etc/default/keyboard
# KEYBOARD CONFIGURATION FILE

# Consult the keyboard(5) manual page.

XKBMODEL="pc105"
XKBLAYOUT="us"
XKBVARIANT=""
XKBOPTIONS=""

BACKSPACE="guess"

OK. And Wayland is using the xkb stuff? Confusing, but OK. So I google how to redefine things in this system, and… there’s a million people as confused as I am. Because surely things can’t be as bad as this, fifteen years on since Wayland was created?

The story told on a thousand web sites is that to alter the keyboard layout, you “just” alter the layout definition file, which is in /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols. (In my case, it’s /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/us, since I’m using a US layout.) But this is absurd! That’s a file that’s updated when the OS updates, so either your changes will be overwritten, or updating won’t touch the file at all, so you won’t get updates from the OS. (Which can be important — keyboards rarely change, but they do evolve slowly over time, and you want a solution you can use for decades, right?)

There’s official-looking pages like this that tries to tell you how to add new layout files:

OK, ignoring the empty “writing a symbol file” entry, they suggest creating a new file /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/test, which is nice, because it won’t be overwritten by the OS… but then you have to register that file in two other files, /usr/share/X11/xkb/rules/xorg.lst and /usr/share/X11/xkb/rules/xorg.xml, which will be overwritten by the OS! This shit is infuriating!

But I did take a stab at it — created the new file and changed /etc/default/keyboard to point to it… and it had absolutely no effect in Gnome Shell, because it doesn’t really rely on it? Only slightly? (Did I mention that none of this is really documented well?)

xkb has specific options for swapping around certain modifiers:

setxkbmap -option caps:hyper

So you can presumably put that into XKBOPTIONS in /etc/default/keyboard if you wanted to map Caps Lock to Hyper… but these options only exist for certain combinations of keys! How insane is that? I mean, it’s nice that the XKB developers thought it would be handy to swap certain keys around, but it’s absurd that they thought they could enumerate them all? Instead of making a handy general utility that allowed people to do whatever they wanted, they hard-coded a few possibilities and called it a day.

But some suggest you do something like this:

cd /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols
mv us us-real
cp hyper us

And then you have

/usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols

be just:

xkb_symbols "basic" {
    name[Group1]= "Hyper (US)";
    include "us-real"
    key <PRSC> { [ Hyper_L ] };
    modifier_map Mod3 { <PRSC> };
};

And this works, and it has the advantage of you being able to actually make sense of whatever changes you’ve made to the layout. But still, it has the problem of not being updated when the OS updates (or conversely, being overwritten). (And in any case, keeping personal configuration under /usr is a horrible long term solution, anyway — you want your config to follow you around as you upgrade laptops, and that ideally means just copying your home directory.)

So many people are trying to make sense of this system — like this guy, who has been through my entire journey, and amusingly enough, he’s also trying to rebind PrtSc to Hyper!

This sounds excellent! Just what I need! This should be the official documentation for when you google “how do I rebind a key”, right? Except that it doesn’t work — at least not under Gnome Shell (the default in Ubuntu), which just seems to ignore the XKB_DEFAULT_LAYOUT variable. I’m guessing the “before starting my compositor” means that he runs Sway or something…

*sigh*

And one more deeply infuriating thing about this whole mess: Whenever you’re testing something, you can never know whether logging out and then in again, or a full reboot is necessary, because it’s never clear whether the changes are applied on login, or by the OS (probably in systemd somewhere nasty) when booting up. What used to be a priority in Unix — being able to try things out iteratively and interactively (with informative error messages when you screw something up) has been replaced by mysterious systems that nobody can tell exactly how interact. So while Wayland uses the XKB files, you can’t use setxkbmap to try out the changes you’re making.

(Instead, if you make a syntax error and log out/in again, the OS will just display the White Screen of Death saying that something’s wrong (but not what, of course.). ssh to the rescue.)

And people are desperately trying to make things work:

I didn’t find any well-working solutions in 2024, so I’ve made one. Search for the “Shyriiwook” extension in the GNOME Shell Extensions store.

I applaud their efforts, but surely this shouldn’t have to be necessary!

But there are other ways to remap key in Linux, surely? OK, let’s take a look at a guide. It lists four different applications that work under Wayland: keyd, kbct, kmonad and interception. These keyboard remapper things all rely on daemons that talk to the evdev layer in the Linux kernel, and should work no matter whether you use Wayland or X.

keyd looks nice, and is available on Ubuntu by default. But:

It doesn’t support a Hyper key.

kbct, kmonad and interception aren’t in Ubuntu, and I didn’t test them, because most guides on the Googles seem to suggest that the generically named input-remapper (which was previously called key-remapper) is the bee’s knees. And it’s in Ubuntu! But when I started it, it didn’t look anything like what people were talking about, and doesn’t match the documentation. Were there several of these?

No, it just turns out that there’s a new version out, and it looks totally different, and has a different configuration hierarchy:

Thanks, thanks. So I downloaded that from Github, managed to get it installed and the daemon running, and

# input-remapper-control --symbol-names | grep -i hyper
#

It doesn’t support remapping a key to Hyper.

*sigh*

This excellent page is what finally pointed me in the right direction. The recipe given there doesn’t work for me, and as he says:

Now, I fully agree that this is cumbersome, clunky and feels outdated.

But after testing a number of variations on this theme, I ended up with the solution I posted above. Which works. Today.

Who knows what these Gnome/Wayland people will come up with tomorrow. It would be nice if it were something that, you know, works, but I’m not really holding my breath.

So now that the first hurdle is out of the way, I just have to fix all the other things that don’t quite work under Wayland. I mean, it’s only fifteen years old; one can’t expect everything to work yet…

Comics Daze

I had planned on going to London today, but then I didn’t, so now I’m reading comics instead. And for music… only albums from 1977-78. Just because.

But before I start reading, I just wanted to mention this book I’ve been slowly working my way through over the past few weeks: Marvel February 1964. And I remember thinking a few years back “it sure would be cool if Marvel just released a series of books reprinting all their comics in chronological order”. Well, this isn’t that…

… but this book reprints all of the comics Marvel published in February 1964, which is pretty cool. And it’s the fourth book in the series, but I missed the 1961-1963 books (which also do one month each).

Now, somebody should make a book to reprint all comics published in the US in a particular month, right? So we could experience what it’d be like at a newsstand in the US in, say, August 1963 or something… The book would probably be thick as a longbox, though.

Here we get some of Marvel’s fantastic creations like The Human Top.

Four out of the 17 comics here are Patsy Walker related.

Yes, 17 comics, and they all bear the credit “Written by Stan Lee”, which seems in-credible. But while it’s popular to contest that when it comes to, say, Fantastic Four, I haven’t really seen many people fight to get Stan Goldberg given greater credit on these comics. Such ironic.

Still, even if Lee didn’t actually write any of these comics, he presumably scripted them all, which means that he had less than two days to script each book, which is a pretty good clip. I mean, while doing everything else at the same time…

And I have to say that I enjoyed reading this volume — there’s a lot of fun stuff.

And also experience the mix of comics at Marvel — it’s all super-heroes, romance or westerns at this point. So I think I’ll go and buy the previous volumes.

Anyway! It’s readerin’ time!

Talking Heads: 77 (Sire)

13:42: Ruins by Peter Kuper (Selfmadehero)

Oh, this book is almost a decade old? This is a new edition, which is why it showed up in Previews, I guess. But how odd — I mean, I’m a huge Kuper fan, but I was totally unaware that this book existed. And it’s such a hefty book, too — I think it has to be Kuper’s largest work? And the book won an Eisner award? I must have been asleep in 2015 or something.

Heh.

Anyway, this book seems very thoroughly worked through — we follow a monarch butterfly on its journey from Canada to Mexico, observing things along the way…

… while the main story here is about these two people who are spending a year in Oaxaca.

She’s writing a book, and we get excerpts from that book, and then there’s a demonstration, and corrupt Mexican politicians, and then there’s a stray dog that the guy fights with and eventually becomes friends with, and then there’s a recurring scorpion, and then there’s the plot bit where she wants to get pregnant, and he doesn’t want a child, and there’s an artist she’s getting involved with, and then there’s a photo journalist friend…

Devo: Satisfaction (I Can’t Get Me No)

I’m just saying that this feels like a book that Kuper has worked a lot at. It’s not that it feels overstuffed particularly, but Kuper had a lot he wanted to fit in here — sort of making his Grand Opus or something? It has that feeling.

But it’s good! It’s good stuff. Lovely artwork; solid storytelling. It builds on his charming travel comics — they are very freewheeling, and he’s taken bits of pieces from that and jigsawed it into a major work.

I wonder what the critical reaction was:

This is a story that shows a lot of respect and affection toward Oaxaca (verging on but never crossing the line into exoticization), but it’s an ex-pat story nonetheless. That respect is made manifest in Kuper’s astonishing facility with his watercolors and colored pencils.

Really?:

The butterfly is more sympathetic than either of the self-absorbed pair, whose early adventures – fleeing local dogs and mooching around the colourful streets – feel like the hackneyed stuff of an expat romcom.

Insufferable?:

Choosing to tell the story of Oaxaca and the 2006 teachers’ strike massacre through the POV of two insufferable white New Yorkers puts Kuper at an incredible disadvantage, and he digs himself deeper by failing to effectively develop any characters except for George, one half of his ex-pat couple.

Well, that’s just not true:

Ruins isn’t the kind of book you can take in over the course of an afternoon. Even its wordless sequences are packed with moment, inviting the reader to stay and linger a while (even if you’d rather look away). But it’s also anything but obtuse, illuminating the realities of a disintegrating relationship in ways that will be familiar to almost anyone. Much like Oaxaca itself, Ruins is a work that’s worth getting lost in.

Peter Gabriel: Peter Gabriel 1

14:47: Nuie by Nuie (2d cloud)

This is a lovely little book.

It feels like it’s narrative in a way, even though I don’t really know what’s happening. Very cool.

14:54: Of Thunder & Lightning by Kimberley Wang (Silver Sprocket)

This is very video game influenced, I guess. (As well as the obligatory Japanese comics influence.)

But it’s an intriguing book. There’s a lot going on, and the cartooning is on point.

Pink Floyd: Animals

15:06: Mini Kuš (Kuš)

Kuš had found a lot of older minis that I didn’t have, so I bought a little stack of them. Let’s read these five at random.

Aidan Koch’s mini starts out very abstract and then it turns out to be a therapy session.

Ernest Kjavins & Andrej Klavins do an amusing story about diving and performance enhancing drugs.

Akvile Miseviciute does a story about fighting back.

Emmi Valve does an autobio thing about friendship and stuff.

Finally, Amanda Baeza does a stylish thing about… er… I don’t know, but it’s cool.

Joni Mitchell: Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter

15:28: Mors dag by Klara Wiksten (Galago)

Man, this book is the saddest book ever.

And I mean that in a good way. It has thirteen short stories, and they are all about the same thing: People whose mothers have died when they were children.

Kraftwerk: Trans-Europe Express

So it’s a book about boundless grief and how to deal with that, and it’s super duper affecting — it’s a seven hanky book, at least. It’s amazing how well Wiksten tells these small stories — she avoids clichés and easy solutions, and just goes straight for the jugular.

It’s fantastic, and the artwork is perfect in its rawness for these stories.

And as you can imagine, it’s an absolutely exhausting book to read, so I think I’ll go for a little walk.

David Bowie: Low

17:49: M: skrattens ridder gjenfødes by Mads Eriksen (Strand forlag)

Eriksen was doing a very popular daily strip in Norway, but apparently burned out (at least a decade ago) doing that (which isn’t unusual). But he hasn’t done much since that, so this is kind of a comeback event.

We start off with a sort of Dark Knight Returns parody/reference thing, and it’s pretty funny.

But why did they print the strips so large? And with the middle of panels disappearing into the spine?

Anyway, it’s good stuff.

Alice Coltrane: Transcendence

18:34: First There Was Chaos by Joel Priddy (Uncivilized Books)

OK, this isn’t my kind of thing — it’s not that I mind Greek myths and stuff, but this is all spiritual and stuff, which just makes my eyes glaze over.

But it’s an inventive book.

And I’m sure if you’re into this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you’d be into.

And! It has a very extensive fold out page thing.

David Bowie: “Heroes”

18:57: What’s Fear Got To Do With It? by Ivana Filipovich (Conundrum Press)

Ivana Filipovich! I absolutely adored the last book of hers that I read, if I remember correctly.

Hm, this looks familiar… oh! It’s an expanded version of a strip that ran in that self published collection? Sure, I’m on board for that.

The artwork here is just amazing. It’s so fluid and exciting — very 70s Italian, I guess? The story, on the other hand didn’t really gain all that much from being expanded, I think — it’s more meandering now? That’s fine, though, because it’s a pretty exiting milieu to be in for a while.

The end notes says that this has been languishing in a drawer for quite a while until Conundrum expressed an interest in publishing it. Hopefully there’s more in that drawer (or Filipovich does new comics).

Supertramp: Even in the Quietest Moments

20:06: Sensible Footwear by Kate Charlesworth (Myriad Editions)

This is a sort of history gay life in Britain (done in a collage-ey style)…

Sandy Denny: Rendezvous

… but also an autobio book that covers the same years (done in a wide variety of styles).

Aksak Maboul: Onze danses pour combattre la migraine

It’s a fun book — the artwork is often amazing, and the storytelling moves in strange and amusing ways. It can be pretty difficult to keep track of who’s going out with whom at times, but it’s both affecting and funny.

OK, I’m fading now, but just one more comic book…

Kate & Anna McGarrigle: Dancer With Bruised Knees

22:37: You Will Own Nothing And You Will Be Happy #2 by Simon Hanselmann

I got this from here, and… it’s not sold out yet!? The first issue was sold out almost immediately, I think? Hm… Oh, there’s a second printing of #1, so get on that, then.

So this continues on straight from the first issue. (Nice touch with the Cybertrucks.)

And… I wasn’t totally on board with the first issue, mostly because I was just “eh? zombies? really?”, but now I’ve gotten used to the idea, I guess. Because I was really into this issue! Or perhaps there’s just more going on in this issue… I think. I mean, the previous issue was a year ago, so I may be misremembering.

Anyway, Hanselmann says in a text at the end of the issue that he’s doing TV deals at the moment, so he’s unsure when he’ll be able to do the next “proper” Megg & Mogg book… and when the next issue of this is going to be out. *crosses fingers*

Throbbing Gristle: The Second Annual Report Of Throbbing Gristle (2)

22:58: The End

And now I’m exhausted, so it’s time to call it a night.

My New Career as a Lenovo Laptop Repair Guy

Some years back I accidentally broke the keyboard of a Lenovo Thinkpad 25th Anniversary Edition.

The attraction of this laptop is, of course, that it’s got an actual almost proper keyboard — I think it’s the last one ever without a chiclet keyboard? And it was done as a retro thing. But I was using it as my main programming laptop, while I was using a Carbon X1 for travelling etc. It has a much worse keyboard; here, let me show you:

See? It’s a “modern” chiclet keyboard, which is much thinner, but not as pleasant to type on. In any case, since I already had a laptop, I rather forgot about having the 25th Anniversary laptop fixed.

Until now, and I wondered whether it was still possible to fix it. I mean by myself — it’s a laptop from 2017, and I bought it in a different country, so…
Anyway, Lenovo is still selling spare parts for this! I’m amazed! I bought one…

… pried the old one out (you can slightly spot the place I broke the it if you look closely)…

… and put the new keyboard in! And it works! I’m amazed! At how easy it was. Because Lenovo puts nice service manual out there for anyone to peruse.

Even if some of it is slightly gnomic — like, what do the screws have to do with that plastic thing? (Nothing, as it turns out — you just have to do both (in any order).)

It turned out to be really easy — I didn’t need any special tools or anything, and I did it while slightly incredibly drunk, and while watching Fallout s1e3 (it’s not that good).

And look at all the parts you can still buy!

Etc etc. Almost makes me want to rebuild it from scratch, just because I like Lego.

I’m not sure I’m actually going to use this laptop for anything, but, er, you know.

(Disclaimer: Even though I like the repairability of the Lenovo laptops, I can’t really recommend them. I’ve had several that just stopped working at random, and more where the Trackpoint just goes wonky. But I hate using a trackpad, so my choices are limited to Thinkpads, so…)

But! There was one thing in this laptop that didn’t work, and that was the “built-in” battery — this thing has two batteries, one you can switch out easily and one that’s under the cover. And the latter one had died while the laptop was in storage, apparently, so…

… I bought a new one! And it arrived today, so let’s get swapparooing, because this it pretty fun. For me, I mean.

So this is what it looks like at the bottom.

And see? There’s that swappable battery I was talking about at the top there.

Err… and after unscrewing some screws I’m now supposed to… Oh, push and pull and wiggle?

And then finger the corner there aggressively until it comes off?

And then… just… pull it from all sides at once, sort of? OK, I tried, but my fingers aren’t strong enough for this sort of thing…

… so I resorted to using tools. Like an animal!

Et voila! Easy peasy. Somebody should tell Lenovo that tools exist and make things easier than trying to pull these things apart with your fingers.

But it’s really fun working on the innards here — everything is so precise and so easy to work with.

And then the new battery just slots in without any bother. Nice.

Huh. Why is the cover spray painted with coppery paint, apparently?

Anyway, it slots right back on again without any problems. Thank you, Lenovo.

It even boots! Whoho! And the battery charges! It’s alive! But I should wash that screen.

And here’s my professional Repair Guy setup: A footstool with a 40W lamp. It’s what every doctor recommends for maximum ergonomics.

So there you are — Lenovo laptops are really very repairable, and that’s nice.