Archive for BC Holmes

Untalented

December 19, 2012 BC Holmes Comics 2 comments

So there I am at the sports bar, surrounded by televisions. I sooo love being surrounded by televisions. Televisions barfing out sports.

But one of my colleagues recently resigned — he’s one of the long-time folks, so there’s a do. At a sports bar. I show up because it’d be crass not to, but it’s basically a social event, and I kinda suck at those. I figure I’ll show up, put in twenty minutes of face time and then sneak away.

“You know that there’s no hockey on, right?” one of my colleagues says to me, to make conversation. I figure the sports-themed surroundings have infected him.

“Hockey. That’s the one with the sticks, right?” I reply, dryly. I’m accustomed to people rolling their eyes at me.

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Conversations with my annoyance

December 12, 2012 BC Holmes Comics No comments

I’ve been trying to think through why it was that Monday night’s class annoyed me as much as it did.

Perhaps it all boils down to jarred expectations. I went away and did what I thought was our homework: I took my selected pitch, I fleshed out the characters and considered the stuff that I’d need to address in a first issue, and developed a story that, I felt, gave a useful introduction to the setting, the characters, and the overarching themes, and also had a bit of action/adventure for fun. I broke down my story into a story map — I know exactly what’s happening on each page. I’ve already had to hack and slash some of the stuff that I wish I had room for. But I was really happy with the story and wanted to feel good about it a bit.

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Man, that was really irritating

December 10, 2012 BC Holmes Uncategorized No comments

After being so excited to get to class tonight, actually attending pissed me off. Mostly because I feel like we were asked to do a bunch of prep that never got used. And I think I’m going to hate next week — it sounds like we’re being asked to work out partial scripts in class. I’m beyond the point of wanting to toy around with structure and skeletons; I want to do the hard work of actually bringing the story to fruition now, and I doubt that working that out in class is a productive way to do that.

Bah. I want real homework.

Barely sit still or hold a thought in my head

December 9, 2012 BC Holmes Uncategorized No comments

I must have really turned a corner on my apprehensions of my Writing class because I’m really excited about tomorrow’s class and I CAN’T WAIT.

Writer’s Workshops at WisCon

December 5, 2012 BC Holmes Uncategorized No comments

What do people think of the Writer’s Workshops that take place at WisCon? Has anyone on my friends list tried one? Impressions?

Pitch Night

December 4, 2012 BC Holmes Comics 3 comments

Tonight was “pitch night” at Writing for Comics Part 2. We were instructed to bring 3 ideas for new on-going series (or, perhaps, a longish graphic novel), and we’d each pitch our ideas to the class. Ty gave us a bunch of key things that our pitches needed to cover off, and he’d critique how well we “sold” the ideas, and the class would ultimately vote on one of the three pitches. The winning pitch essentially becomes the idea you hafta run with for the final two classes (and final writing exercises).

Some of the ideas were grounded in exercises we’d done in other classes. For example, one of my favourite ideas from a classmate involves a group of Catholic priests/exorcists who fight demons and perform martial arts. The guy who presented this idea had sketched out elements of this particular story world in the world building exercise, and fleshed out some characters for the world in our character archetypes exercise. Tonight, he pitched it, more formally, as “The Exorcist from U.N.C.L.E.” and it’s the one I voted for (and, conveniently, the idea of his that “won”, so I look forward to seeing the actual story).

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Thought for the Day

December 1, 2012 BC Holmes Uncategorized No comments

Held up for decades as something of a “miracle cure” for global poverty, microfinance became one of the world’s most high-profile and generously funded development interventions. Everyone, it seemed, was talking about how small loans could unlock endless opportunities for the world’s poorest people.

By 2010, however, microfinance was in crisis. New studies began to challenge the promise of microfinance to bring about an unprecedented reduction in poverty. Crisis in rapidly growing microcredit industries prompted parallels with the US subprime mortgage collapse. Reports of skyrocketing interest rates and suicides among indebted borrowers in Andhra Pradesh, India, suggested a sinister side to the microcredit boom. Suddenly, the story wasn’t so simple.

— Claire Provost, “The rise and fall of microfinance”, The Guardian

Hm. I wonder if the cited studies make any distinction between microcredit as it’s offered by groups like Grameen versus microcredit offered by traditional banks. Must learn more.

Meteor + Firefox + Cookie settings = SecurityError

November 30, 2012 BC Holmes Geek No comments

I first noticed these symptoms last week, and had this in the back of my mind to track down. I deployed our Meteor app to an internal server last week, and started having problems with Firefox. Firefox is still my default browser (yes, I’ve heard ALL THE THINGS about Chrome, but I haven’t changed), so it was a little sad to discover that my app didn’t work. In particular, my first page ended up being completely blank because a JavaScript exception was being thrown and no rendering was taking place.

Looking into the JavaScript log, I found this error:

SecurityError? The operation is insecure? Wuh?

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Thought for the Day

November 26, 2012 BC Holmes Uncategorized No comments

But that hearing had more in it than just football — it has every other thing that has defined Ford’s mayoralty: his obsessing over small amounts of money; his steadfast refusal to pay any attention to details; his belligerent insistence that normal rules and procedures governing ethics and integrity do not apply to him; and his unique ability to inspire a citizen revolt against him. This case has all of it.

— “‘I declare the seat of the respondent, Rob Ford, on Toronto city council, vacant'”, Edward Keenan

The Assassination of Conflict of Interest Laws by the Coward Rob Ford

November 26, 2012 BC Holmes Uncategorized No comments

Today is the best day ever.

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