Finally … Last week the heat was brutal, and things have been a bit tumultous in general.

Mackerel (especially the smoked variety) is one of the most delicious things there is. It’s one of my guilty pleasures as a mostly vegetarian, in which I indulge maybe once or twice a year. Too bad other people can’t restrain themselves as much, so that the mackerel population has been “somewhat depleted in the waters around Europe”. ;_; It’s not (yet) critically endangered, though.

Read more about Atlantic Mackerel at the Blue Ocean Institute.

Sorry about the delay … ;_;

The reasons are that I have some kind of “live drawing” performance coming up on Friday that I’ve been required to rehearse for, besides the fact that it’s infernally hot. I have never before tried to draw comics in heat like this. Today, as I was inking, it was somewhat bearable for a change (just 25 degrees centigrade or so), but I still had to correct a quite extreme amount of things in this page, and it’s overall really sloppy and crappy …

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Anyway, over to hand tool pr0n: The little saw in panel 5 is a kugihiki nokogiri, a Japanese saw made especially for sawing off trunnels neatly.  It’s not really suitable for anything else, but for that one purpose they say it’s most excellent. *drool*

I recently found that I needed a saw (I’m building a small light table for a hand lettering job), so I  got a kataba, as they are small, lightweight and supposedly far superior to Western hand saws in the same price class. I totally underestimated how the blade of the kataba I got is specially designed for either sawing across or along the grain, so I got a cross-grain kataba, which proved to be truly amazing when sawing across the grain, and a total pain in the arse when sawing along the grain. :o) Most of the sawing I did was across the grain, anyway. And since the blades are interchangeable, it’s no problem to at some point get an extra blade for sawing along the grain …

Update July 5th: Maybe no new page this week, because I am VERY FRUSTRATED by other stupid things. V`(oo)´V

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Samona’s looks are based a bit on my sister Ainur, but with an even bigger nose and wavy black hair. (Of course, my drawings are so stylized that she could look like anyone … oh well.)

According to a Kazakh friend, Ainur looks like “a true Tatar girl” in this photo. :o)

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When using trunnels with wedges, you must place the pressure along the grain – i.e. the wedge across the grain – or else it could split the wood. Yes, I learned that from the Internet (though it’s kind of obvious).

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… Is it a sign that you have created a good Mary-Sue/Gary Stu (an overly idealized character that is way too obviously a fantasy-fulfilling insertion of yourself, common in amateurish fiction, or screenplays by Andrei Tarkovsky) when it makes your mum cry reading about the character? My mum claims she cries when she reads Driftwood, because Willie reminds her so much of me. O_o

A weekend full of business and drama delayed this page a bit … Besides, I had to redraw the last two panels like twenty times, even though they are so simple. Gah.

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Willie: A doont speek liek that, really. Bot A do speek liek this.
Aeron: I aktyuelly khev e werry strrongh Rrashn dyialict … Heh, no, I don’t …

Newcastle (Geordie) dialect is so nice. Though Willie’s accent is not very broad, I sometimes feel tempted to ‘show’ it more in the dialogue. But then, I would be obliged to do the same for all the other characters. And while that would be really awesome on some level, I would probably just get caught up in the joys of researching various accents ad infinitum.

So what I do now is try to use expressions that they, with their respective accents, would use, but write them out in standard English. Then those who know what such accents sound like can imagine it in their heads, and the rest can avoid feeling alienated …
The English translation of the first few chapters here is, of course, really bad, and some day I will go over it. (Probably when this prequel is done and I make a printed book …?)

I’ve linked to the International Dialects of English before, and here is a collection of Durham dialect word lists.

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By the way, where is Aeron’s Russian Male Pride? Shouldn’t he insist on doing the drilling? But since he grew up in the 20’s, maybe he thinks that would be uncomradely behaviour towards women. As in: “We must carry out serious work among the Komsomol masses with a view to educating them to have a comradely attitude towards girls. We need to struggle decisively against every type of contemptuous and indecent behaviour towards girls: ‘a mare is not a horse, a baba is not a person’. We must declare a decisive struggle with all kinds of obscene language, with hooliganism, with bawdy stories in the presence of girls, with all seemingly ‘comradely’ behaviour towards a girl that is designed only to ‘catch’ her. All such behaviour forces girls to flee from the union.”

I’m reading Peter Kropotkin’s The Conquest of Bread right now. (You can read it too, on Project Gutenberg!) It’s an extremely inspiring read, and very relevant still.

When Kropotkin wrote it, in the late 19th century, he quoted estimates that each person of working age would need to work four or five hours a day in order to provide for all the necessary food, goods and infrastructure. (With the technical advances we have made since then, today that would probably be even less.) After this necessary manual labour is done, people could invest the rest of their days in pursuing their own personal interests in sciences, arts, publishing, playing with doggies, etc.