August 2009 Archives

I've put the cartoons I've so far drawn for Dr Dobbs, and some of the essays, together into this booklet-format Word file that I printed to show at Oxford's Caption 2009 comics meeting.

If you're interested, download them from the above link, and print on double-sided white A4, preferably on 80 gsm glossy paper, with card covers. The images are higher resolution than the ones I blogged. There are a few cartoons not in the blog, one of which — following the Holoburger advert — shows what happened to the Strategic Defense Initiative. Though it's an old cartoon, and I probably ought to update the list of countries...

I drew most of the cartoons, and most of each cartoon, with a Pentel Brush Pen. Pentel is a Japanese company, and their Brush Pen is a portable pen which can be used for Japanese and Chinese calligraphy and painting. It has a synthetic brush tip fed by replaceable cartridges, which is easier than carrying around an ink stick and ink stone. Thanks to Oxford's Brush & Compass, now merged with Broad Canvas, for introducing me to this excellent instrument.

Twitter made David Cameron more notorious last week than if nabbed claiming an entire islandful of duck islands on expenses. Interviewed on breakfast radio, he uttered a word that despite denoting a piece of anatomy owned by half the human race, has been deemed so obscene that (I believe) it was once banned from radio:

The trouble with Twitter, the instantness of it -- too many twits might make a tw*t.

Twitter has been on my mind since I read Spectator journalist Rod Liddle's feature It is the narcissistic middle-aged, not the young, who love Facebook and Twitter. Liddle says few teenagers use Twitter, because they realise how pointless it is to tweet personal confessions such as "I have just tied up my shoelaces. I did the right one first. And then the left." It's older people like Stephen Fry, Liddle says, who Twitter obsesses.

I don't want to read Stephen Fry tweeting about the steak he ate for dinner. I also don't want my messages limited to 140 characters. Perhaps Twitter don't own enough storage to hold longer messages. Then they should hand over to Google. Google have so much capacity that they could issue every single electron with its own URL, and still have space in reserve to tag the extra electrons generated by pair production while the Universe is running. And the positrons.

But in truth, this restriction, and Twitter itself, are as futile as forcing Fermat to write all his maths in margins.