On the DEWLine 2.0: Dwight Williams

Yeah, this is something the people who make the gadgets I find Useful should be concerned about. Just saying.

http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/silicon-valley-has-an-empathy-vacuum

There are consequences that go beyond unemployment rates and election results.

The new issue showed up in my mail this morning. Sorry that I missed the release party.


The cover only begins to hint at the stuff inside, projects and images, ideas and debates, all about what makes a city - any city - work, and what might make a city work better. If you're reading this entry - not just in the cities named on the cover, but in Ottawa and Regina, Halifax and Victoria, Guelph and Serfaus(across the Atlantic in Austria!)...well, there's a lot of ground to cover.

No, I don't have any material in this one. But you might want to take a good look anyway.

If you do, let them know what caught your attention?

Back to other stuff in a little while...

I have renewed my subscriptions to the print editions of Spacing and The Walrus. Both publications, I recommend highly to anyone reading this weblog.

I am considering other forms of constructive action to help rationalize a reversal of the service cuts.

You've probably seen it reported on other blogs, the comics industry press websites, or on Facebook and Diaspora*: the Comic Buyers Guide will be no more as of this upcoming March.

I first encountered it as a weekly newspaper in my teen years in Saskatchewan. Found out about via one of its sister publications, Comics Collector, if memory serves. It was one of many discoveries I made during those years about the wider comics community actually being a real thing. Collecting for fun or for profit, gathering with like-minded people in clubs of one sort or another...all of this was new to me then. CBG helped make it real, even before the move to Ottawa. 

If it's truly the end of the brand, I'll miss it. If someone out there's of a mind and possessed of the means to rescue the brand and work some new magic with it for future generations, I'll thank them for that. Certainly, the art form and industry have changed over the decades, and perhaps CBG has to vanish for a while before being reworked for new decades to come.

I'll be sad to see it forever gone.

I'm feeling a little achey, a lot of tired...and I'm still connecting dots in my head. Also, feeling a little rant-minded. So, if you'll forgive me?

New issues of National Geographic, Canadian Geographic and The Walrus came out in recent weeks, and there's a topic linkage in that: oil and its consequences.

National Geographic was covering the wake of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, including a foldout map of the Gulf of Mexico complete with federal exploration leases actively explored/exploited, pile lines, wildlife refuges and so forth all marked out clearly. To call it an extensive network is probably to damn myself for understating the situation.

Walrus had a feature on the Albertan oil industry's push against the Northwest Territories to get onside with their perceived needs for the McKenzie River Valley watershed. A lot of people in the NWT are not all that pleased with the push. However, being a territory and not a province still has more than a few political and financial drawbacks for the NWT. And those could end up creating some ecological headaches for future generations.

Canadian Geographic's October 2010 issue is devoted to the direct consequences of climate derangement for Canada as a whole. Desertification of the South Saskatchewan River basin, loss of harbourfront real estate in old downtown Halifax (and likely, its counterpart in the former city of Dartmouth right across the harbour as well ), overheated cities(with Montréal as an exemplar of where we could be headed with or without remedial and preventative measures)...

You see where my brain is going tonight?

When I stumbled onto the last of these at Mags and Fags, that news-stand on Elgin Street, late this afternoon, I muttered something about "climate derangement" - my phrase for the situation many - most? - of us are scared of. A guy standing next to me who'd chuckled moments earlier about some novelty item proclaimed by its packaging to be "made of real poo" - I have my doubts on that one - responded on automatic that "I don't believe it. It's all a scam by people looking to bring carbon taxes."

I suppose it's an inevitability. Live in Ottawa long enough, you'll run into all kinds. Sometimes it only takes a month, sometimes a quarter-century. And you'll have to live next to them, work with them, and occasionally marry into each others' families. If you - and they - are lucky enough and careful enough, you'll figure out a way to not only co-exist, but thrive in concert. Someday. Preferably sooner than later.

Anyway.

I told him flat: if it's my lungs or someone else's cars? I'm siding with my lungs. So if that means carbon taxes? Go, carbon taxes, go!

I do not normally truck with the content of the National Post, but in this instance, I might well make an exception for the sake of our dignity as humans and my own petty career ambitions as both writer and illustrator.

Read on and react as you will.

Update on 8 Jan 2010: After about a day and a half, the alleged directive was withdrawn, re-interpreted...you get the idea.

Hoping for the best. Namely, that we don't ever get a repeat instance of this.

I'm afraid this is going to be an occasional series of posts with a common topic: making room for new stuff in the library/studio here in the basement. I need the space, badly!

( Read more... )

I just found out about this one via Warren Ellis' Bad Signal. Apparently, they're in need of subscribers.

Alternatively, does anyone in Ottawa (or anywhere, really) know where this title might be found at a retail level?