Comics by Reinder: Looming, plus a break

This episode of the newsletter got delayed by more than a week, but that's actually OK! I took a little break and then got a bit sick for the second time in a month. Generally, it feels to me like things have started to wind down a bit. Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan is taking some time off and there was a gap of a week in which there was no Greyfriar's Isle comic scheduled, because it is scheduled for the first and third Wednesday of each month.

But actually, I'm still doing a lot of things! They're just not ready for publication yet.

This Wednesday

The 113th Greyfriar’s Isle comic, “Beer” is now available for free to read on Planet Nude:

Earlier

Last Monday’s Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan page was The precious loom (Öffnet in neuem Fenster):

It is now baked in that this will be the last new Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan comic for a while. My illness in September and early October just destroyed whatever momentum I had and even when I get back to normal productivity, it will simply take too long to get a page going to keep meeting the weekly deadline. But what a good time to binge-read the comic from the start (Öffnet in neuem Fenster):

Items of interest this week

From the going to hell in a handbasket department: Wikipedia Says AI Is Causing a Dangerous Decline in Human Visitors (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) - Emmanuel Maiberg, 404 Media. The slop machine first devours, then destroys human knowledge.

Tom The Dancing Bug is honestly hit-and-miss for me. This one’s a hit (Öffnet in neuem Fenster).

Misinformation websites are more open to AI crawlers than reputable sites (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) - Nicolas Steinacker-Olsztyn, Devashish Gosain, Ha Dao at Arxiv.org. Sounds like a problem, but I’m still not opening my website to crawlers.

An important list: the companies that pay for Trump’s attempt (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) to turn the White House into Mar-A-Lago. (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) When I talk about Europeanizing my tech stack, these are the companies I most want to be able to avoid paying money to.

And hey, an uplifting story from the internet! Cat Valente writes Tiny Adds Up: Unshittification and The Pawshank Redemption (Öffnet in neuem Fenster):

People started saying “Well, I can drive her to x if you can get her to y and cover expenses...” and a chain started forming that could almost work to get her here. Except for the middle of the country. There just didn’t seem like any way to bridge between Idaho or Montana and Minneapolis, where the next westernmost volunteer was.

Then Linkwood Anarchy Hub (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) appeared, and said he could take her all the way from Portland to Minneapolis. Stormzand (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) said he could pick her up at the shelter in Eugene and get her to Portland. SimonsFolly (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) said he could take her from Minneapolis to the New York State Line. RisaWolf (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) said she could get the pup from any NY state border to New Hampshire, and IndependentTeapot (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) said she could bring the girl all the way home from New Hampshire.

And these amazing, kind, generous, thoughtful, beautiful human beings leapt into action so fast that that very smug-looking pup up there who clearly knows how lucky she is, left the shelter Saturday afternoon and is cruising through Idaho as I type this sentence.

She’s right. We do need an internet that does more of that. See also her classic post Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things: Three Decades of Survival in the Desert of Social Media (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) for a history of three decades of the tech broligarchy snatching that internet from our hands.

Another uplifting thing from the world of tech: The Python Foundation has principles and is sticking to them. (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) This sort of thing is easier for a non-profit that isn’t beholden to shareholders, but still not easy given what the grant they’ve turned down would have enabled them to do.

Plugging another artist: I've been getting back into synthesizers and this course (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) by Ether Diver has been a useful and fun refresher. I look forward to learning more about FM synthesis from him.

Earlier still

This week’s back-to-normal blast from the past is Inquisition? We were expecting you an hour ago! (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) from 2024, bringing us full-circle to the time I started this newsletter, I think. I’m pretty sure it’s been posted as ‘the new comic’ before. But time passes, and now it’s not!

The full page looks more or less the same (Comicfury version with different lettering):

I don’t know why I even bothered chopping it up for the newsletter. Here’s what I wrote about the comic at the time:

It's incredible that this page was delayed by four whole years! It didn't take four years to draw; instead what happened was that every few months, I would open it up on my iPad, draw or ink a few lines, then close it again to do something else. But with a change to the process and the art software, it became relatively easy to do and it came together in the coloring.

Honestly, I don't know if this signals a return to regular updates. View it as a sign-of-life update until further notice. I did enjoy working on this, though. It feels good.

Now, I could go on posting Feral-based blasts from the past, but as we get closer to the present, I may decide to mix things up and post some other comics instead. We'll see in a week or so.