I finally fixed this site’s single post display as promised:
Small but satisfying 2015-01-01 Indieweb commitment fulfilled! :)
Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant closes today. Now begins the very long task of watching over the radioactive waste.
Indieweb commitment for 2015-01-01: Fix this site’s single post views.
♫ Music for careening into the holidays: “Domino Polka” by Ray Henry and His Orchestra.
Whoah, Neil Gaiman started teaching at Bard College this year! I was a student there when Sandman helped reintroduce me to comics. http://www.tor.com/blogs/2013/10/neil-gaiman-bard-college-professor
The year after I was born, legendary DJ Larry Levan remixed legendary muppet Cookie Monster.
♫ “C is for Cookie — Funky version (Special Disco Mix by Larry Levan)” by Cookie Monster
I got brainfreeze while washing my hair in the coldest shower I’ve ever taken today. I hope the power comes back by tomorrow!
When the power goes out…
…the ghost cat appears!
Cheerful bird emoticon: (^)> ♪
Appropriate for any occasion calling for a cheerful li’l bird in text format.
Vote to keep our country from going belly up!
There’s still time!
Remember to vote today!
Rdio.com without JavaScript. No text, no pictures, no music — just a serene shade of dark blue. Makes a good eyerest.
Oh, a ghost by the shrubbery! Or maybe me in a bedsheet.
This Halloween I hung out with my friend Anne as she doled out treats to hordes of kids, and I donned the traditional bedsheet ghost costume so rarely seen these days. I almost didn’t bother because even with help it came out crooked, but I’m glad I did because kids’ reactions were a hoot (the photo’s just a pose; I sat on the stoop with Anne).
The first pair shook my hand before leaving. One boy asked if I was a Mister or Miss Ghost and got agitated when I played coy, trying to get a close look and saying things like “What is your gender?” and “Show me your mustache!” We had a couple of skeptics, too; one said, “Nice costume, but I’m not buying it,” and later another said, “You’re not a ghost!” — but only after peering closely :)
Anyone know a good way to share playlists online? I was using Youtube because it has a lot of music but their ads ruin the experience (I only noticed recently on a friend’s computer; I use an adblocker on mine). I basically want to post online mixtapes but I haven’t kept up with streaming music stuff so I don’t know what’s out there or if it’s even feasible given copyright issues.
Happy Halloween!
Well, look at that — the Vault-Keeper did an introduction for “Midnight Snack“! I’m deeply, creepily honored ;)
(Art by Johnny Craig from Tales From the Crypt #24.)
“Oh Charles,” says Charlotte, “I’ve had such a wonderful time tonight — and the moon is so beautiful!”
“OH NO!” exclaims Charles. “I have to go right now!”
“But why?”
“A terrible curse!” says Charles. “Every full moon I turn into a — AGH!” He doubles over in pain.
“Charles, what — ?”
“RRR — RUN! AAAAAA” Charles screams from off panel as the woman gasps in fright and surprise.
“Charles, you’re a — a — a house!” says Charlotte. And indeed, a one-story house stands in Charles’s place. She hesitates, then asks, “May I use your bathroom?”
This is all a story told by a young girl to her younger brother, who says, “Whooooaaa” in amazement. “So that’s what a warehouse is!”
♫ October is time for ghostly tunes; this one has cows: “Ghost Riders in the Sky” by the Ramrods.
Happy Bonza Bottler Day!
Another October means another set of Trick or Treat Comics! Eight miniature comics perfect for giving to trick-or-treaters, Halloween party-goers, goblins, etc, Trick or Treat Comics #3 features trick-or-treating pumpkins, monster hybrids, bone-playing instructions, were-comics, trick-or-treating dinosaurs, and more!
Eight 2.75″ x 4.25″ 8-page comics by:
Planning to hand them out for Halloween? You can get all three sets of Trick or Treat Comics for the price of two.
“The Mysterious Skeleton” by Zander Cannon is a fun spooky mystery 12-hour comic — fine October reading, and particularly pertinent since I’ll be making a 12-hour comic this Saturday.
I’m doing it — why not you, too?
Make a twelve-page comic in twelve hours on October 11 at Keene Public Library!
We’ll begin […] at noon with a brief COMICS WORKSHOP crash-course in comics creation and self-publishing from N.H. cartoonist Marek Bennett. Then we’ll dive in and draw for the next half-day, pausing for a pizza party dinner and a reading of our work as midnight approaches. Whether you bring an existing art project or start a completely new one, the time limit and group dynamics will help you find, nurture, and grow that sweet spot of inspiration, improvisation, and concentration.
All ages welcome! No experience needed! Work hard! Have fun! Meet artists!
The cover of Little Zero #6: Curse of the Were-Comics, part of Trick or Treat Comics #3.
♫ “Be You (Beep Beep) Dub Disco Mix” — Punks Jump Up
I made the comics navigation prettier and more usable, and made the “sidebar” visible on small screens (it currently lives just above the footer in all views). Onward! (Previously)
This weekend I table at MICE (the Massachusetts Independent Comics Expo); it’s a great show and admission is free, so don’t miss it!
The Massachusetts Independent Comics Expo was established in 2010 to create a showcase space for artists and writers in the greater-Boston area working in the field of comics. The event is a joint project between the Boston Comics Roundtable (an independent arts collective) and the Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University. Unlike traditional comics shows, which emphasize commerce and memorabilia, MICE puts a focus on the art of making comics. We connect local creators with local audience. We also run a number of workshops for children and adults, as well as panel discussions on the craft and relevance of the comics form. We’ll be featuring several special guest creators, along with an expanded line-up of programming.
Comics are navigable again. I need to make the navigation links prettier and more usable, but it works and that’s the main thing.
♫ Music for tomorrow’s Pickle Festival: “Pickle & Peppers Polka” by Polka Generations (you know you love it).
I guess I shouldn’t have said what WordPress theme I was using so soon, since I switched again. Now I’m using Four Years as my base theme; I’ve made several changes and still have more to do (so many details!) but I’m pretty happy with how the homepage is shaping up. I still need to fix the comics navigation, though — that’s next.
Celebrate with me as I finally return* to the most convenient event I’ve ever tabled at — the Winchester Pickle Festival, right here in Winchester, NH this Saturday, September 27 from 10:00 AM to 4:00 PM!
You get not only me and the fabulous Trees & Hills comics booth, but all this:
The event kicks off at 10:00 am with a parade! […] Nelson town band, Winchester town band, northern ridge rythm band, weathered roads country band, junction 1-3-5 quartet, mavericks line dancers. Free pickles, homemade pickle judging, pickle eating contests!
(c) 2006 Mark Martin (inspired by his visit to the Winchester Pickle Festival)
Mr. Pickle actually exists! He doesn’t look like that drawing above, though; he is our State Representative Henry Parkhurst in an eye-popping green suit and bowler.
* Last time was in 2008, the year before MICE started; luckily MICE (where I’m also tabling) changed its date this year. ^
Hoo-ha! I finally finished moving all my comics images and turned off Webcomic! Now I get to figure out which theme to use. No matter what I pick it’ll need some changes; for now I’m using Mercury, but I need to finish reviewing some others. I also need to get the comics navigation back up, but I think it can wait for a day.
Update (~10 minutes later): Switched to Publish for now (Mercury’s great, though! Hoping to use it for Trees & Hills as a collaboration tool if not for the main blog).
♫ Feelin’ wiki-obsessed this week; time for “Jam On It” by Newcleus.
Time for another Web protest to keep the cable companies from breaking the internet…
The goal now is to get the FCC to reclassify Internet Service Providers in a way that will allow the them to effectively enforce net neutrality (Title II is the key to net neutrality—so what is it?).
What can you do? Submit a comment to the FCC by September 15 (enter “14-28†in the proceeding number field and “Protecting and Promoting the Open Internet†for the name of flier field. Read others’ comments here). Encourage others by emailing, writing a post, and/or participating in tomorrow’s Internet Slowdown protest with a bit of code to display an alert on your site for the day (as I’ll be doing) or a “page loading” icon for your social media thingy.
Trick or Treat Comics workshop was pretty fun :) http://treesandhills.org/2014/09/trick-or-treat-comics-workshop-report/
Sign up in the sidebar or at https://tinyletter.com/colintedford.
I’m running a free workshop for Trees & Hills‘ third collection of Halloween comics this Saturday in Keene — join in and make some spooky fun!
September 6, 12:30 PM – 5:30 PM
Colony Mill Marketplace food court, 222 West St., Keene, NHHaving trouble finding time to work on your submission for Trick or Treat Comics #3? This is that time! We’ll start off with a brief intro and a brainstorming session for those who don’t have story ideas yet, then settle down to draw. If there is interest in doing so, we may come back after supper to draw some more.
We will meet in the semi-spooky ex-food court at the Colony Mill, which is at the opposite end from the bookstore and the smokestack.
If you plan to attend please comment, email (organize@treesandhills.org), or RSVP on Facebook so we can have a sense of how many people to expect.
I’m about 1/4 done copying my comic images from the obsolete version of the Webcomic plugin that I run to regular ol’ blog posts. Looking forward to finishing this dull task so I can install a new theme that works better on small screens.
Email should let me hide the “Subject” field when I write and just have it copy the first sentence.
My pal Madsahara & I will hawk our garlic-themed (& other) comics & art at the Trees & Hills booth this weekend at the 19th annual Southern Vermont Garlic and Herb Festival in Bennington, VT. I’ll of course have “Super Friendly Garlic” (in Square Dance #4), Pickle Vampire magnets, and “Midnight Snack” (in Square Dance #6 and Trick or Treat Comics #2)
August 30 & 31, 10:00 AM – 5:00 PM
Camelot Village, 1545 Route 9, Bennington, VT
Admission is $5 per day or $8 for a two-day pass. Children 12 & under get in for $1.00.
Kittycorner.
Ominous clouds signalled an ill-timed excursion for errands and exercise yesterday. Luckily the heavy rain that followed let up long enough for me to to still take an evening walk.
I forgot to bring tent poles on a three day night camping trip last week; luckily my camping companions had more engineering acumen than I. After some futzing, they used too-short rain fly poles in place of the normal poles and some cord to suspend the back end of the tent from a tree trunk (we also put an odd short pole inside to prop the roof but I don’t know how much it helped). The resulting shelter looked weirder and had much less space than the normal dome shape, but it was enough to sleep in. Thank you Dan, Fardeen, Phayvanh, Randall, and Sarah for rigging it up!
One of the most remarkable things to me about the music of the ’70s is the prevalence of the word “boogie” (e.g. “Blame it on the Boogie” by the Jacksons).
Today I made basic navigation for the comics* in preparation for deactivating the Webcomic plugin, which is a step toward moving off of WordPress. They’re both lovely, but I want stop storing my stuff in a database and present as much of my site as possible as static HTML. I have a lot of backlogged and new plans for this site brewing; I also have some other obligations that take priority, but I’m giving myself permission to peck away at it a little.
*(which I should remove next time because it’s redundant right now)
Downpower was a secondary blog I maintained from late 2007 to mid 2008, a “journal chronicling the attempt” to “make my life better for the world”. The attempt and the blog were both underwhelming; the latter came to seven posts, which I’ve just realized are still online (I thought I’d taken the blog down). The WordPress installation is of course way out of date, which is a big no-no, so I’ve merged the posts and comments into my main blog, tagged them, and taken the standalone version off the Web. I hate linkrot, but I haven’t learned all the redirecting magic and I doubt it’ll affect anyone anyway, so as a stopgap here is a list of the posts and their old addresses:
http://www.colintedford.com/downpower/2007/11/07/introduction/)http://www.colintedford.com/downpower/2007/11/14/stuff/)http://www.colintedford.com/downpower/2007/11/28/cutting-your-car-use/)http://www.colintedford.com/downpower/2007/12/05/in-the-absence-of-the-sacred/)http://www.colintedford.com/downpower/2007/12/12/doing-the-laundry/)http://www.colintedford.com/downpower/2008/01/02/walden-and-the-dryer-update/)http://www.colintedford.com/downpower/2008/01/16/off-to-a-bad-start/)http://www.colintedford.com/downpower/2008/07/30/on-hiatus/)There were also two pages of links:
(formerly at http://www.colintedford.com/downpower/local-links/)
(formerly at http://www.colintedford.com/downpower/general-links/)
And to round it all out, here’s a screenshot of how it looked:
♫ “Getaway” by Earth, Wind & Fire https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xN_3nib4r3Y
Zero #12: Library of the Lost minicomic (reprinted from Before Sleep #5)
I try to always have free comics like the Zero series on hand, both for promotional purposes and just because I like giving comics away. I also like leaving them in public places sometimes. The other day a person who found a copy of Library of the Lost pinned to the bulletin board at a bank in Milford, NH emailed me to say they’d enjoyed the comic and its “message-in-a-bottle distribution, which was like opening a Cracker Jack prize”. That feeling is one of the reasons I like leaving comics around, but what made this extra delightful to me is that I didn’t put that comic there. I guess one of the many people I gave a copy to at Broke must have decided to share with Milford’s banking public. The person who found it said they left it at the Milford library for others to enjoy. This all pleases me. :D
Tonight I’m attending Sarah Glidden’s talk at Modern Myths in Northampton, MA. If you’re into nonfiction comics like I am and are in the area, I recommend you do the same!
Funny, it didn’t feel that cold…
Visit me this coming Saturday at the Holyoke Arts Bazaar in Holyoke, MA as I belatedly emerge from hibernation for the annual Spring Tour:
I hope to see you at one or more of these fine events!