Didn’t I tell you …?

… the main site is back up. Go-go-go check it out!

Like X-mas

Getting geared up for the comics festival, although experience dictates that I will likely be disappointed. Through the studio and my job at publisher Faraos Cigarer, I can follow the chaotic cavortings of the organizers pretty closely.Of course nothing is written in stone yet, as is to be expected for an event like this; however, at times it seems like the responsible parties don’t even know one end of the chisel from the other.

It follows that the actual festival and its program isn’t what gets me excited these days. Previous festivals have got me jaded, and I anticipate plenty laughable mixups and planning lapses. What I am looking forward to is meeting the other guests that have through some incredible stroke of coincidence been invited. Martin tom Dieck. David B. Barbucci and Canepa. I’ve listed them in more detail previously. And I’m really, really looking forward to seeing some of the Danish colleagues that I haven’t seen since, oh, last komiks.dk, two years ago.

And jeez, let there be readers … I’m so nervous I could shit, whether anybody will care if I’m there or not. Because I bitch and I moan about my own importance, but I know full well it might all be in my head. I can be a real emo sometimes.

[Listening to: The Blackest Incarnation - The Black Dahlia Murder - A Cold-Blooded Epitaph EP (4:48)]

Schooling Snejbjerg’s ass

The site is nearing completion, and I’m actually finding time off here and there to get some drawing done. Well, that is, if my publisher didn’t push small jobs my way, like helping Peter Snejbjerg’s debut Hypernauten see reprint. I’ve been obstructing their work on the 2nd edition for weeks, so Torben must have figured the only way to get me out of their hair was to let me in on the project.

My job has been setting up files for print, as well as giving the odd advice or pointed hint concerning the books look. A major pleasure was schooling Peter on cover composition. Everybody should have the chance once in their life to deprecate the people they looked up to iin their youth. In the end, both Peter’s and my ideas for cover images were scrapped, but he drew a new original from a hastily scribbled sketch I made …. which is sadly included in the book, too. Peter gets the last laugh, I suppose

Im’ no sore loser, though … Below are both images, for your viewing pleasure

Minor bumps on the way

There have been some setbacks in getting the site online, lately. Most importantly, a bad setting in one plugin has got me locked out from the dashboard, which puts me in the category “Shouldn’t be allowed near WP installs”

On a less pressing note, I’m getting annoyed with w.bloggar for not having automatic paragraph formatting. I press enter, I want a god damn paragraph, mmkay? Not some weak ass line break, a frigging paragraph!
What’s that? Push ctrl-shift-w? What kind of shortcut is that? Any combination of more than two keys is a detour, not a shortcut.

Okay sure, it’s a small thing, but one that really gets on my nerves. I’d think that was somehow cofigurable, but no. Seems I’ll be checking out ecto next. If it has won the hearts of the Mac people, I’m sure I could warm to it

Online offline – the magic of web productivity tools

Yup, you may have noticed that all of a sudden I’m flooding the blog with posts after a, shall we say, meager period in the update department. The reason is that I have started dappling with offline blog editors, meaninng I can blog ahoy while commuting between Malmö and Copenhagen. First application up for trial is the w.bloggar editor, which seems to run smoothly enough – that is, if this sees print (screen?)
If this works out well, I’ll most likely stick with w.b; otherwise ecto, lipidr, and a host of others are lined up to take its place. Consider this a fair warning, little software

Komiks dot Dee Kay, j’accuse.

The countdown clock is ticking for this year’s Danish comic festival, Komiks.dk, held on May 31st and June 1st.
Like previous years, I have been invited to participate, and once again, I find myself wonderfullly under-utilized and free to do whatever I want. Which usually amounts to hanging out with colleagues during and after opening hours.
One signing of Black Mouth is scheduled on Sunday June 1st (at the Faraos Cigarer stall), but there will probably be another on Saturday at the Brun Blomst stall. Otherwise I will be at Gimle Studio’s booth most of the time, doodling, humming, having a laugh.. Wasting time. The usual.
Lest we forget the other guests, the festival has managed to attract such alternative (ie, non-superhero, non-duck and off-mainstream bande-desinées) creators as have been lacking in previous years. David B (Epileptic, Babel), Martin tom Dieck (!!!!!) and theorist Thierry Groensteen are attending this year, along with more reader-friendly Italian fumettioli (is that a word?) Barbucci & Canepa (Sky Doll) and Duck-maestro Giorgio Cavazzano.

I make light of the fact that I haven’t been callled to participate in panels and such, but I can’t help noticing that my book has been casually omitted from the shortlist for the grand prize of the festival. The decision has to do with the publication date, I’m told, but books published on the same date have been taken into consideration, and I suspect there are other motives to the lapse. My publisher was told off the record that Black Mouth has had enough media coverage as it is, and it is true that I went on national tv twice in promotion of the book.
Well, pardon me for getting air time. I’m sorry for getting good reviews. And I’m terribly sorry that the nominators of the festival don’t see that as a value. Really. But one mustn’t forget that the festiva at this point is a non-profit event, and the people behind it, enthusiast grassroots. For their effort and engagement, I salute them.

Astoria, May update

While construction of the main site is crawling along at a geological pace, work on the Astoria segments is going swimmingly. As in butter, the Danish idiom goes; swimming in butter? Yeah, that fits the bill just fine
I’m still puttting down uncommitting sketches, but I am making great progress in the concept department. The various pieces are coming into their own in ways that carry the corpus of the book to new, welll, places if not heights
For the “Great Old Ones” piece, I will be working in information graphics, as described by Edward Tufte in his books “The Visual Display of Quantitative Information” and “Envisioning Information”. The clarity of his theories juxtaposed with the multivocal theme of “G.O.O.” will work pretty well, or at least confuse the reader enough to make him/her think. That is an ulterior goal, of course.
For “Our Lady of Centuries”, I am lookiing at dada and art concréte, and a director I worked with last year introduced me to some incredibly dense colllage/scribble/paranoic delusive artwork that apparently were being left for strangers to find in the Copenhagen commuter trains, some years back (in photocopy, as I understand). The sprawling, occasional symmetry of these pieces have inspired me to work from strict grids in composing the spreads.
I spend a lot of time on the train each day, and I work through sketchbooks like a powerdrill. That works quite well with some of the more intuitive installemnts of the book, like “Brainfeeeders” [If anybody has a better title, I'm open to suggestions. The working title was filled in, rather than actuallly selected, when I needed a headline on the late website]. I am currently reworking and expanding upon the original piece, and it is essentially growing in all directions at the same time. As usual with that sort of piece, the hardest thing will be weeding out the weaker saplings.
The problem with working in the sketchbook is that I don’t have any time to scan from it right now. My sparse freetime is spent wrapping up the site :/

Flock on!

:p Whatta dumb headline!
Well, I’m testing the Flock browser, specifically the onboard blog editor – literally, as I write this.

Overall, Flock seems pretty cool, based as it is on Firefox, only integrating certain add-ons as core elements. With Flock comes the power to blog anything, directly through the browser interface; being constantly connected to friends and (more likely) virtual acquaintances through the most popular networking services; following their online movements (!) using services like me.dium …

While I’m sure some people need instant connectivity to all and any web2.0 service, I would really, really like the ability to turn some of them off in Flock. Like, say, Facebook, YouTube, any ‘media sharing’-services, and the blogging providers I don’t use …

Call me picky, but does anybody have simultaneous Blogger, Blogsome, Live Journal, TypePad, WordPress and Xanga accounts?! Other than the bloggers who, goldfish-like, refuse to learn from the first dotcom bubble and imagine they will become millionaires overnight, just by posting 24/7 about some cleverly angled personal fascination? Sorry, I’m a couple years too old to fit that bill. So, sadly, are some of the aforementioned.

But other than the beautyspot of lacking a customizable interface, Flock is growing nicely on me. Not all the possibilities for extending myself onto the web are superfluous annoyances. Some I’d never heard of, others are being reconsidered now that I have them collected right here in my browser.

<sore conscience>Trouble is, although I am doing this to make my (still under reconstruction) website more interesting and extrovert, the research is taking time I could spend rebuilding it.</sore conscience>

Let’s set a date then, shall we? A deadline of sorts. The grand opening of the newly improved haverholm.com is to be taking place two weeks from now. It’ll be really nice and quiet, since nobody reads this, but what the hell … See ya there!

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Tags: flock, web2.0, blogging, social

Mouth for War

An excerpt of some lyrics that have followed me since my teens -

 Now a new look in my eyes my spirit rise
Forget the past
Present tense works and lasts
Got shit on
Pissed on
Spit on
Stepped on
Fucked with
Pointed at by lesser men

New life in place of old life
Unscarred by trials

A new level of confidence and power

Which have to be followed by -

 I see you had your mind all made up you group of pitiful liars.
Before I woke to face the day, your master plan transpired.
Something told me – this job had more than meets the eye.
My song is not believed? My words somewhat deceiving?

Now I’m unwhole.

Youve waged a war of nerves
But you cant crush the kingdom
Can’t be what your idols are. Can’t leave the scar.
You cry for compensation.
I ask you please just give us…

5 minutes alone

The first was ‘A new level’, second ’5 minutes alone’. Both written by Phil Anselmo. They somehow seemed fitting.

You gotta laugh …?

Well,  you have to try, anyways. The site transfer went through today, but it seems I uploaded a bad database or something. Meaning? As far as I can estimate, I have to build the durn thing again from scratch.