Waffle

Some more books that I am giving away. All of these can be yours for the price of postage if you live outside Groningen, the Netherlands, and for free if you live somewhere where I can deliver them or are willing to pick them up directly from me. No strings attached; just contact me (comments will do) if you want any of those:

Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow (hardback), Climbing Mount Improbable (hardback), The God Delusion (hardback) and A Devil's Chaplain. I'm keeping exactly one Dawkins book, The Selfish Gene.

Dave Sim, Cerebus, High Society, Church & State I;
Dave Sim and Gerhard, Church & State II, Jaka's Story, Melmoth, Flight, Women, Reads, Minds, Guys, Latter Days, The Last Day. These comprise all but two of all the Cerebus the Aardvark storylines ever made. Latter Days has some water damage from a leak in my old studio. I have one of the other storylines, Rick's Story as separate issues and will throw those in to someone who wants to take over the entire collection. If no one wants to take the whole collection, I will start giving away individual volumes, but in that case I will be keeping High Society Also, normally it's first come first served, but for these I will prioritize takers in Groningen over takers from elsewhere, because of the sheer size of the collection and the likely cost of shipping and possibly taxes. Still, do let me know if you're living elsewhere and are interested.

Anonymous (Michael Scheuer): Through Our Enemies' Eyes: Osama Bin LAden, Radical Islam and the Future of America (hardback). See what I wrote about Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terrorin Books that are Going, Part 2. I still have that book as well.

Michael Moorcock: A Cure for Cancer. One of his Jerry Cornelius books I like me some Moorcock but I could never get into this one. Nevertheless, the paperback is well worn because I bought it used.

Mark O'Hare: D is for Dog. A Citizen Dog collection. I probably bought this on the strength of the Thanksgiving turkey gags.

Various Artists: Groningen bij Nacht: Beeldverhalen Uit Een Stad (Dutch). Two copies. This is an anthology of comics that I'm in with the story "Kobolden" which is the Dutch version of Roadworks Goblins. Other contributors include Barbara Stok, Eric Snelleman, Erik Wielaert and Fearless Cartooneer.

Lately I've been getting some comments to blog posts from months to a year ago, usually record reviews. These may or may not be substantive in nature but are usually in an insulting tone. Since I have no intention to perform blog archeology and get insulted in the process, I have changed the blog settings so that comments now close after 90 days.

Waffle doesn't get a whole lot of comments as it's currently just a personal blog that I post on sporadically. So there's no need at this point for any rules or comment policies. But even at low volume, drive-by comments that respond to stuff that is ancient history to me, and do so in the style of a fourteen-year-old YouTube commenter, are a pain in the butt to deal with, so I won't. Automatic comment closing served me well when Waffle was on Movable Type and overrun with spam, and it will serve me well again.

During my last two long stays in the US with my fiancee, I got the gardening bug, bad. But right now, I'm over here in Groningen and not over there in middle Tennessee. And I'm moving out in May, so it's not like I can complete a growing season here. The solution: windowsill gardening with a sharply abbreviated season.
I have bought a bunch of seeds, a propagator, potting soil and some inner pots (I had some outer pots left) and have got on with preparing/soaking seeds and planting them.
The whole project assumes that no plants are going to be planted outside (except one), so I have decided to ignore the start date instructions on the packaging; plants are going to be sown now or next week, in standard potting soil, using the same procedure for each of them, and we'll see what comes up and what will be ready to eat in the next few weeks. The one good thing about not having a real growing season anyway, and doing this for the first time, is that I can make mistakes and not regret them - all that will be lost is 25 Euros worth of supplies. Whatever I learn from the experience will be usefull next year, when I will be in the US and doing real gardening and farming.

I am going to grow:
Cayenne peppers
Leek (as a sprouting vegetable)
Red cabbage (as a sprouting vegetable)
Spring onions
Cilantro
Fennel (as a herb)
Celery (as a herb)
Spring spinach (this is the one that's going to go into the ground as it is a fast growing variety that should be ready to eat within two months)
Basil (not planted yet as I ran out of pots).

If all this stuff just grows as I hope for, this will probably be the only post about the windowsill gardening project. If anything interesting goes wrong, though, I'll let everybody know.

I have updated the cast page with short bios of two minor characters from the Rite of Serfdom storyline: Brakeburn and Brushhead (whose page comes up looking wonky in Safari for a reason I cannot understand). I have also linked the page for Hywel Bastardsson which I created last Summer but forgot to link from the main cast page. Faerie body parts galore so don't read them at work.

I am trying out some Photoshop alternatives for both OS X and Windows, so there will probably be a lot more small updates featuring little graphics made from art created earlier, using Pixelmator, Pixel Studio Pro, Seashore, Paint.net and whatever else I can find. So far, I really like Pixelmator for jobs that are too small to load a full-featured graphics program for. It opens promptly and handles smaller graphics well, and the interface makes common tasks a breeze. For larger, multi-layered jobs, its performance is still severely impaired on my MacBook. Pixel Studio Pro has the advantage of being multi-platform and is also easy to use, but it is also crash-prone on Windows and it comically misinterprets my larger images as animations. Both are hard to bail out of once the spinning beach ball appears. I will want to try both of them intensively, though.

Another piece of technology I'm very interested in is Opera Unite, the small, simple web/file server built into new versions of the Opera web browser. I am already using it to develop and host some new web pages right from my computers at home, and it does make development and sharing a lot easier and more fun. It is very limited, and I wouldn't run a dynamic, database driven website on it even if I could, but as with those small graphics apps, the features it does offer are very handy and will speed up new development on the website. Living in the boonies for months has given me a much stronger appreciation of the need for simplicity in websites, and I do have some ideas for simplifying the ROCR site.

Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan is now on Facebook. Has been for a while actually, but because it's easier to post quick announcements about the comic there than here, I recommend adding the page if you want to keep up with things. Longer, less-frequent announcements and commentary will still also be posted here, though.

I've not been updating much since December, but Aggie has been kicking ass and taking names over at American Gothic Daily lately, and now has several pages backed up so that she can increase the frequency again for a while.

There are still a lot of books from Books that are going, part 1 and Books that are going, part 2 that haven't found new owners yet. Just ask about any of the books. Also, I'm a wee bit behind with shipping some them out because I had to buy shipping boxes for the ones that had to go overseas. I'll get to it, soon enough. Meanwhile, the next big cull from my media collection consists of CDs and DVDs, split over two posts, because the list of CDs is very long. Here's what I've got to offer. As before, I am giving them away, all you need to pay for is the shipping if I have to mail them out.

Anime
Hayao Miyazaki: Princess Mononoke and Howl's Moving Castle. I like Miyazaki, but those two movies did nothing for me. Both are region 2.

Music
Deep Purple: Bombay Calling. Live DVD from the early days after Steve Morse joined in 1995. A good performance with an extended stage set and some early stabs at new songs that would end up on their next album Purpendicular, but filmed in an unexciting manner and with poor sound quality. Also, the opening seconds of the first song are missing, which is papered over by including a press conference before the start. You'll still like this if you're a Deep Purple completist, but it's a very flawed release, more of an official bootleg. Region-free.

TV series: Doctor Who
I have the following Doctor Who DVDs to give away.
William Hartnell, the First Doctor: The Dalek Invasion of Earth.
Patrick Troughton, the Second Doctor: The Tomb of the Cybermen.
Jon Pertwee, the Third Doctor: The Claws of Axos.
Tom Baker, the Fourth Doctor: The Ark in Space, The Robots of Death, Horror of Fang Rock, Pyramids of Mars. All Region 2.
Peter Davison, the Fifth Doctor: Earthshock, The Caves of Androzani.
Sylvester McCoy, the Seventh Doctor: The Curse of Fenric, Ghost Light.
All Doctor Who DVDs are BBC editions and are Region 2 + 4, except the Fourth Doctor ones, which were reissued in the Netherlands with (optional) Dutch subtitles and in Region 2 only.

Next up, CDs! I have really done a major cull with the CDs, and it helped that as I reorganised them a bit after pulling the first few dozens out, a whole teetering stack of them came tumbling down. I really do need to get rid of even more of them.

Here's the next batch of books readers of the blog can pick through before I sell them! The previous giveaway found new homes for the Stainless Steel Rat omnibus and the three Vlad Taltos collections, but the others are still available if you either live in Groningen or are willing to pay shipping.

The next batch is a bit more diverse and contains some non-fiction and some comics, but we'll start off with some more science fiction & fantasy:

Douglas A. Anderson, editor: Tales Before Narnia, an anthology of fantasy stories that inspired, or in some cases may have inspired, C.S. Lewis and includes stories and poems by Robert Louis Stephenson, G.K. Chesterton, J.R.R. Tolkien, Rudyard Kipling, Charles Dickens, Sir Walter Scott and others.

David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer, editors: The Hard SF Renaissance. A range of hard SF stories by a wide range of older and younger writers. Few of the stories left any impression on me but I recall that "Bicycle Repairman" by David Brin delivered the goods. In any case, it's almost 1,000 pages so there should be something for everyone in there.

Diana Wynne Jones: The Tough Guide to Fantasy Land. A classic guide to fantasy clichés that's well worth a read and won't suck up your time as much as TV Tropes will.

Aloys Winterling: Caligula: Een Biografie, Dutch, translated from German. What it says on the tin: a somewhat contrarian biography of the Roman emperor, attempting to sort the truth from the accumulated legends and giving an overview of the kind of political landscape in which someone might want to appoint a horse as a senator.

Anonymous (Michael Scheuer): Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror. I bought this before I realized that Scheuer was nuts. At the time I thought the analysis, especially of Osama Bin Laden's motivations and of political and intelligence-related errors in the War on Terror was strong, but re-reading the preface now for a recap of what's in the rest of the book, it looks absolutely hysterical. Nevertheless, it was an important book in its day and still has some worthwhile analysis in it from a former CIA insider.

Christopher Hitchens: The Trial of Henry Kissinger. An overview of the case that might be made against Henry Kissinger if he was ever charged before the International Criminal Court.

Thomas von der Dunk: De Vader, de Zoon en de Geest van Pim: Nederland in het Rampjaar 2002 (Dutch, obviously). A collection of newspaper columns by von der Dunk, written in what was really quite a turbulent year for the Netherlands.

Eric S. Raymond: The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary. It must have seemed interesting at the time... I expect in another ten years, it will be again as a piece of social history of the geek movement.

Kamagurka: Bezige Bert, De Zanger is Ziek Vandaag: two latter-day collections from the Belgian absurdist cartoonist, in Dutch.

Jakob Nielsen: Functioneel Webdesign (Dutch, translated from the English). I used this in a previous iteration of the ROCR.net site. Unfortunately, web design and development bore me to tears and designing for usability is no exception, so it hasn't helped me all that much; the big takeaway I got from this was that for someone like me, following the herd works, especially when combined with simplicity. I still try to keep the number of design elements low and use labels that people recognise from other webcomics, but beyond that, I simply don't spend enough time on design to benefit from this book. Still, Nielsen's insights usually hold up well over a long period and if you are interested in usability design, this is still good despite its age.

Steve Krug: Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability. See above, mostly.

Ian McEwan: The Child In Time. Egads, I read this for school before I went to University. Honestly, I don't remember if this is any good or not.

Bernard Malamud: The Assistant. Egads, I read this for University. Bored me to tears, it did!

Momir Stosic Moki, editor: Signed By War. International benefit anthology for independent comics artists in the then-war-torn republics of the Former Yugoslavia. Black and White. Contributions by Enki Bilal, Marcel Ruijters, Lian Ong, Zoran Janjetov, Sasa Rakezic, Edmond Baudoin, Peter Kuper, Lorenzo Mattotti and others.

Scott Adams: Dogbert's Clues for the Clueless. A collection of Dilbert strips featuring Dogbert.

Breathed, Berkeley: Tales too Ticklish To Tell. A Bloom County collection.

Breathed, Berkeley: Politically, Fashionably and Aerodynamically Incorrect, His Kisses Are Dreamy... But Those Hairballs Down My Cleavage...!. Two Outland collections. I liked those at the time but they now leave me cold.

If you want any of those books, drop me a line in the next few weeks. If you live outside of Groningen, the Netherlands, I'll need you to pay shipping; if you live in Groningen, I can hand them over in person or just drop them in your mailbox.

There's some more new ROCR material written, but I need to buy new paper - I got the wrong size last week. Turns out there's another size between A4 and A3 that I hadn't seen in the shops before, so I picked it up thinking it was the A4+ I have been using for the Feral storyline. I expect to have a little bit of drawing time during the week and in the weekend though, so there will be new pages soonish, hopefully maybe.

In the next few months before I go back to Tennessee to get married, I expect to be using my media collection as my ATM a couple of times - it's a way to declutter and get back some of the money I spent on DVD's, CD's, vinyl records and books over a quarter-century. None of it is going to make me rich but there is a lot of volume to get rid of.

Today I've been sorting out some of the books that I no longer want to keep. Into the "to sell" box went:

Four Glenn Cook "Adjective Metal Noun" PI Garrett novels, the latest of which I got only last Christmas. When I first read Petty Pewter Gods in the late 1990s, I loved it, but the concept and style have lost their appeal to me, so out it goes, along with Angry Lead Skies, Cold Copper Teads and Cruel Zinc Melodies.

Four Christopher Moore novels: Fluke, A Dirty Job, Lamb and The Stupidest Angel. Another writer I used to love in the 1990s, I now find time and time that his novels are fun to read once, but then I don't want to read them again (unlike with, say, Terry Pratchett, whose novels I re-read regularly).

Harry Harrison, The Stainless Steel Rat omnibus. I still like the Stainless Steel Rat, but this recent, newly typeset reprint duplicates two novels that I already had and was riddled with punctuation errors, making me wonder if perhaps I had misremembered the style of the originals.

Steven Brust, The Book of Jherek, The Book of Taltos, The Book of Athyra. A lot of people whose opinions I respect love themselves some Steven Brust, but after three omnibus collections I can safely say that I'm just not that into him.

Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon, a book that I've read several times. Stephenson was at one time one of my favorite writers, but this was the last one that I really liked (I gave copies to several people including my brother) and he is another writer who has lost his sheen for me - the ever increasing bloat of his work put me off it if I remember correctly, he said somewhere that his novels are supposed to end like they do, which just doesn't make sense to me. In any case, I don't want to take this big heavy trade paperback edition with me to the States; if I change my mind again, I can always re-buy it in an edition that is less of a doorstop.

That's the first batch of books I want to get rid of, but: if you are a reader of this blog and you're willing to pay shipping (or if you live in Groningen and I can just meet you to hand over one or more books), I'll happily send any one or more of them to you for free. Just let me know sometime in the next week or so, because once they're gone, they're gone.

As you may remember, the day before I left for Tennessee in mid-October, my Macbook died (it got better, especially after I gave up running Parallels on it).
I just came home from Tennessee after a trip that included delays, lies about delays, the worst airline information I have ever come across and 1 hour and 45 minutes of standing in line for the Lost Luggage service because Iberia airlines, the worst airline I've ever flown with, is part of a partnership that can't be bothered to assign more than one person to the lost luggage desk. On returning to my apartment, I found most of it OK, but within about an hour of me switching on the PC, it dies suddenly, and it doesn't take a lot of work to find out that once again, a hard drive has given up the ghost. Of course, all my data are backed up. Of course, all my back-ups are in a suitcase that's stuck in Madrid and that Iberia may or may not manage to retrieve. Except for the one that is in Aggie's house in Tennessee.

I really feel like I can't win. Multiple redundancy gets defeated by multiple points of failure failing at the same time. And you know what? I've had enough. I'm not replacing that drive. I'm retiring that box now and will be working exclusively on the resurrected Macbook until either that dies permanently too, or I have saved up enough money for a really good new desktop. No more rear-guard battles and hurried replacements for me. I have better things to do with my money than buy replacement parts that get blown up within the year. I didn't use that desktop for nearly three months; I can live without it.

I would, however, like to get my life's work back. Not having that at my fingertips in any form makes me very very nervous and twitchy.