I'm having a Field Day

(As befits a Field Engineer, perhaps.)

Another challenging callout tonight, to a faulty PC in Barnet. The "fault" being that he'd turned it off at the wall. Another fierce test of my technical skills there.

However, this gave me a chance to run an errand and collect a Freecycled UK101, which has aroused so much interest on ClassicCmp that I plan to auction it off on eBay and donate the proceeds to Bletchley Park.

Driving back to the office featured a number of unexpected experiences. Finding myself briefly stopped outside the flat of ukmonty, former home of mr_flay, hitherto an unknown bit of North London I'd once Tubed and bussed to to fix Edwin's Mac, and indeed, unexpectedly stayed the night at; randomly driving past d_floorlandmine and valkyriekaren; and then to pip the lot...

I was listening to Xfm, as is my wont when I transform into White Van Man. On a whim, I pulled over and emailed in an entry to the competition on John Kennedy's Xposure show. By answering with the title of Laura Marling's debut album - "Alas, I Cannot Swim" - you could win various prizes. And I did! I came 2nd, and I've got a pair of tickets to the Field Day festival on 9th August and a pair of Converse trainers, apparently.

Huzzah!

Looks like August will be The Month Of Festivals. Current plans:
Field Day (indie/alternative) - 9^th
Bloodstock, Derby (black metal) - 15/16/17^th
InFest, Bradford (goth/electronic) - 22^nd/23^rd/24^th

Double huzzah!

Sodomy and Webcomics

A little more on the origins of sodomy...



(A classic from a little while ago, by Randy "Something Positive" Milholland, here.)

Currently, mostly reading Platinum Grit. Fantastic stuff; some of the best art in webcomics. As has been widely observed, there are hints of Jamie Hewlett and Tank Girl and something of Phil "Girl Genius" Foglio in Trudy Cooper's art - especially around male characters' eyes. (She's also _gertrude_, FWIW.) However, I also reckon there's also a Philip Bond influence disernable and more. PG is fantastic stuff. It doesn't appear often - each episode takes months to years to write and draw and quite a while to read.

It's been running since 1994, so there's a lot of back-story to read. The art is visibly a bit rougher in Episode 1, but it's good even back then. Storylines and action are anarchic, chaotic and rather random, but it's well worth your time.

The major irritation with PG is the format. I enjoy Looking For Group, by the Least I Could Do team of Ryan Sohmer and Lar Desouza, but the full-screen pop-open pages are a bit of an irritation. More vexing still is the site of the gorgeous, hallucinatory dreamworld of Ramón Perez' Kikuburi, but it winds me up that every time I have to pick "current" and then use a tiny « or » control to flip the pages.

But PG is worse. In an effort to both break out of the print-comics page-by-page mould and to use the interactiveness of a website, it's in Macromedia animated movie format. The images are still, soundless, black and white, none of which is any problem whatsoever; but the reader must use keyboard or screen controls to flip though every frame or group of frames. Occasionally, it's really visually effective, but mostly, it's a pain in the ass. Each episode can be hundreds of frames long and you can't mark your place. Worse still, the bulk of it is in the fairly obscure Shockwave format, not Flash, so unless you are on Windows or PowerPC Mac, you're probably stuffed. Linux and (I believe) Macintel boxes don't have a native Shockwave player. You can't download it or anything. Confounded compounded nuisance.

But it's still well worth reading.