Archive for Uncategorized

Uniform lines

March 23, 2013 BC Holmes Uncategorized No comments

I’m playing with my Red Exodus cover today — I’d like to finish a good first version of it. Two things are tricksy. First, getting a certain amount of smoothness of line has taken practice. Oh well; we learn by doing.

The second thing is that I needed to do a bit of research about Soviet military uniforms, which has been harder than I wanted. Even though my story takes place in an alternate-history in which the Soviet Union is still around in 2013, I wanted some amount of accuracy about Anatoly’s uniform. What does an Army captain’s uniform look like, precisely? What insignia indicates “officer” and “captain”? I’m not one of those people who normally pays attention to military uniforms (unless we’re talking about the gold braids on the Star Trek uniforms!) and I’m sure that there’s lingo that would make this search easier; I just don’t know any of that lingo.

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Oh Ty…

February 16, 2013 BC Holmes Uncategorized No comments

Your naiveté is so quaint.

Do you remember that part in “Letter from Birmingham Jail” where Dr. King talks about the difference between “negative peace” (the absence of tension) and “positive peace” (the presence of justice)?

That Wednesday Thing

February 13, 2013 BC Holmes Uncategorized No comments

www_wednesdays42What am I reading now?

I’m currently reading a book about the CIA called The Master of Disguise by Antonio J. Mendez. It’s a non-fiction biography. It’s okay, but not riveting.

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Thought for the Day

January 21, 2013 BC Holmes Uncategorized No comments

Here’s Scrabble’s dirty little secret: the game is really about maximizing points and space to yield the highest return. Someone who has memorized all the acceptable two-letter words in the formalized dictionary will do much better than someone who knows how to use ‘paletot’ in a sentence. You can forget about neologisms like “eponysterical” or archaic remnants found only in the OED. Scrabble rewards efficiency, memorization and fortune, while remaining ambivalent to creativity, imagination and verve. Maximize property value, minimize artistic expression.

It’s about capitalism, basically.

— Michael Stewart, “Scrabble’s dirty secret”, rabble.ca

Thought for the Day

January 12, 2013 BC Holmes Uncategorized No comments

An Ontario Superior Court judge has taken the novel step of granting a divorce to a same-sex couple over legal objections from the federal Crown.

Madam Justice Ruth Mesbur ruled that same-sex civil partnerships from foreign countries that don’t permit same-sex marriages can nonetheless qualify as marriages under Canadian law.

It was the second time in the past year that the federal government has adopted a restrictive position on same-sex marriages.

In an interview Friday, one of the ex-spouses, Wayne Hincks, expressed anger that the federal Crown strung out a costly, emotional process by injecting itself into the case.

“The Attorney-General of Canada intervened in my very private matter and caused it to be stretched out, almost bankrupting me in the process,” Mr. Hincks said. “I eventually had to leave Toronto with no protections, no financial support to acquire my rights and no social network to rely on for personal support.”

The divorcing couple both have Canadian citizenship. They moved to Toronto in 2010, a year after their civil ceremony took place in London, England.

Britain does not permit same-sex couples to marry. Instead, it has a separate legal regime for same-sex couples that involves a civil partnership ceremony.

— “Ontario court grants same-sex divorce”, The Globe and Mail

Most weekends

January 7, 2013 BC Holmes Uncategorized No comments

I feel like this is me, most weekends:

Going digital

December 29, 2012 BC Holmes Uncategorized One comment

I’m currently on vacation. Which, y’know, is pretty awesome. I spent a coupl’a days in do-nothing mode, sitting on my couch and watching movies. Which is about all that I’m capable of when work has drained me somewhat.

But now I’m in pet-project mode: I want to focus on something interesting. My pet project has been about going digital on the cartooning stuff. None of the instructors I’ve had have been terribly positive about computer-based art. Anthony (my primary instructor during my cartooning programme at George Brown) didn’t quite poo-poo digital art, but fundamentally believed that one had to learn how to draw using traditional tools before learning digital art. He also felt that most of the computer-produced art that he’d seen was very flat and lacked expressiveness.

Ty hasn’t taught us anything related to computers — he seems to draw and ink using traditional media, but he uses tools that Anthony would have turned his nose up at (markers! Pen brushes! Oh noes!) Ty also seemed to think that it was pointless to learn hand-lettering because nobody hand-letters these days. (I notice that Bechdel’s Are You My Mother? seems computer-lettered, whereas Fun Home looked hand-lettered). And Ty’s Bun Toons often include digital colouring and probably a bunch of other computer tweaks. So he seems more pragmatic about the use of computers than Anthony ever did.

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Reading Meme

December 26, 2012 BC Holmes Uncategorized No comments

I’m totally stealing this idea from [personal profile] wild_irises and [personal profile] redbird.

logo for the WWW Wednesdays meme

The meme asks: What are you reading now? What did you just finish reading? What do you expect to read next?

What am I reading now?

I’m reading Redwood and Wildfire by Andrea Hairston. I bought a paper version of this book at Wiscon which I haven’t actually opened, but I’ve been liking reading books on my iPad Mini (which I love — have I mentioned that?) so I bought an ePub version from the Aqueduct web site. I love Aqueduct’s no-nonsense way of selling epubs and wish I could see more of that. I’m not very far into the book, and don’t have any opinions about it.

What did I just finish reading?

Well, on Monday I bought a handful of graphic novels — the first two collections of Rachel Rising by Terry Moore, the hardcover collection of Greg Rucka’s and Matthew Southworth’s Stumptown and Warren Ellis’ newuniversal. Strictly speaking, I finished Rachel Rising last, and enjoyed it, although it feels a touch busy. My big frustration with his Strangers in Paradise series was that nothing ever got resolved — I have that fear about Rachel Rising as well. But his beautiful black and white artwork certainly encourages me to keep going. I just wish that the main character, Rachel, was more visually distinct from Katchoo.

Just before those graphic novels, I finished Among Others, which I’d started in the early part of the year, and then put down for a surprisingly long time. So that’s the last non-graphic-novel book I read.

What do you expect to read next?

Boss 1 loaned me a copy of Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant which is non-fiction. The conversation that we had that lead up to the loaning interests me, so I’m looking forward to checking it out. But the title makes it sound like something I’m gonna hate. We’ll see. I also just grabbed Anna Karenina off of Wikisource, because I’m all obsessive like that. And I have a dead tree version of Liar that I haven’t touched yet.

I am in love, and you can’t ask why about love

December 25, 2012 BC Holmes Uncategorized No comments

Omigod. Hours ago, I watched Anna Karenina, and I’m completely in love with this movie.

Holidays

December 24, 2012 BC Holmes Uncategorized No comments

I like this card, created by Michael Cho in 2009:

Happy Anti-Life everyone.

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