Category: Blogging

Dead bird sketch

I’ve deactivated my twitter account.

I loved twitter, signed up in December 2006, and would be considered a high usage person (or a “saddo”).

Twitter has given me extraordinary experiences that could have only come about because of twitter – most recently, the current gig literally came about because I had a gap and posted on twitter “I need work!”. More on that as I can talk about it.

It was twitter I leaned on when my son was going through periods of anxiety and things were tough, and got to chat to Count Arthur Strong (from the self titled tv show- and extraordinarily funny show) , who sent me some CDs of his radio show to cheer him up, and I sent some comics to him in exchange. (he’s a comic reader!)

I spent a day hanging out with Jonathan Ross, because he saw my tweets about Clip Studio and wanted to learn how to use it.

And I’ve had thousands of small interactions with people I consider heroes that have brightened my day and just generally made my life richer, and even more with people I never knew but who’ve since become friends – I only did a podcast because I asked on twitter if anyone was interested in doing a podcast with me… that was over a decade ago and we had some fun doing that.

Of course it’s not all been amazing. I’ve found myself at the sharp end of a couple of pile ons (I quickly learnt, if you’re gonna reply to a high profile twitter user about politics, do so while wearing a very strong flame retardant suit – and turn off replies, and make your profile private)

And my own use of twitter has frequently adopted doom scrolling as my morning, deeply unhealthy routine.

The rot, for me, really set in pre-Trump, when it was obvious that outrage was becoming the currency, in an attention based world the one furious man is king.

But as long as you steered clear of that world, and avoided using words that could be triggers you could still have a pretty decent time, but it was hard to ignore the fact that the floorboards were starting to rot and moving to a different room in the party was only going to be a short term solution.

Musk’s purchase of twitter is going to be transformational, he likes the stuff about twitter that I consider its flaws and while Jack Dorsey and twitter’s previous owners were also not without their problems, Musk ownership and direction he’s steering the ship in are not something I find myself able to ignore.

So in the spirit of the best way to deal with a narcissist is to not deal with them at all, I’ve deactivate my twitter account. It was coming anyway, this has just been the final nail for me. I’ve watched friends disengage more and more with the platform as the far right successfully hijack language and weaponise kindness and consideration.

So, I will always be available here (or via email pjholden at-symbol gmail.com ) or I’ll be sending out an irregular newsletter via https://www.tinyletter.com/pjholden and while I’m on mastodon (@pauljholden@mastodon.social) and hive (@pauljholden – no idea how to link to it, sorry!) and instagram (@pauljasonholden) it’s likely my taste for social media has soured.

On the plus side it’s given me more time to read books, but I do miss everyone… well, maybe not everyone…

(btw if this turns up on twitter, it’ll be because even if I’ve deactivated my twitter account it *might* reactivate to publish this… we’ll see…)

Bingewatch: The Devil’s Hour

Amazon Prime.

The Devil’s Hour is a six part Amazon Prime drama about a woman haunted by something, a child who seems to be absoloutly emotionless and a mother who talks to herself. All while Peter Capaldi sits in a prison cell being enigmatic and coy.

Prima facia it’s your standard crime drama with some hints at supernatural, and feels like a british version of True Detective Series 1 – and from this point forward – here be spoilers (after the drawing)

Not a great likeness, but a 15 minute Peter Capaldi painting done in clip studio

Ok, slowly but surely over the episode, through flashbacks, flashforward and things that look like hallucinations it feels like maybe this is a show trying to make us feel the madness of a central character and Capaldi’s serial killer schtick is maybe someone playing with the main characters mind.

It’s a story about a man who lives his life over and over again, each time trying to save more and more people, sometimes by letting the air out of tyre he doesn’t have to rewatch them crash their car because of a tyre blowout as he’d done in another life. Sometimes it’s by catching and killing someone before the kill someone else.

And I’ll be honest, even up to the last few minutes of the last episode I was thinking “wow, how are they gonna turn this around in to a normal crime drama and “it turns out it was all a dream” – and they don’t.

I loved it. Thought it was great, hauntingly supernatural with a time travel twist (though as Nick over on twitter pointed out, he has more or less the exact same powers as Moira McTaggert in Jonathan Hickman’s X Men run – Nick is a writer and has a cracking collection of short stories here.)

Unusually in a show with a single show stopper premise, it was also prepared to expand that out and look at different ramifications that could have. In fact, despite Capaldi being our protaganist it’s almost entirely focused on Lucy Chambers whose emotionless son seems to be able to see these other lives.

Clever premise, not exactly as youd think, and a good show which sort of leaves on ah “what will they do if they get a second series…” and in a way that explains why Chambers is the way she is.

Anyway, five stars.

Where’s that Wally (on Social Media)

So, in the current arrgh!-what-are-we-all-gonna do panic, people have started to move on to a variety of other social media platforms, making a nest for if twitter just implodes (and honestly, I’m not convinced it wont).

So here’s other places you can find me, but in all honesty, I’m hitting a point where I too old and tired to try and burn up another platform, so I don’t expect these to be anything other than unused life rafts.

Let’s start with instagram (which I have used more than the others)

https://www.instagram.com/pauljasonholden (I’ve deleted and recreated this one once already, which is why I’ve had to go the full “Paul Jason”)

Mastodon Social/@pauljholden Signed up to that one in 2017. Never used it.

https://ello.co/pjholden Oh this one is still working! Actually it looks pretty good, artist focused. Unlikely I’ll ever use it. Man, just checked and my earliest notification from it looks like sometime in 2014…

And, lastly twitter:

https://www.twitter.com/pauljholden

https://www.twitter.com/pjhtips

I’m eschewing facebook entirely (at least I’m nothing but a lurker on there, no friends, don’t want any friends, just want to occasionally look at some lovely art by some artists I like)

Twitter has been an absolutely invaluable place for me to find work, and be offered work (current gig, in fact, came about precisely because of twitter) and so, as much as I’ve been tempted to I’m unlikely to delete the account, but I HAVE given up the blue tick of validation, which to be honest, weighed heavily on me for a number of reasons – even pre Musk. It always seemed silly I had a blue tick and a number of much better known writers/artists didn’t have one, and getting one seemed weirdly arbitrary. Post Musk I felt like a lot of the criticism I had of how Musk was handling the *new* blue tick of verification (which isn’t verified beyond, you know, you paying for it) was easy to interpret as me going “but my blue tick is special and so I don’t want anyone else to have one” – removing the tick has made me feel weirdly relieved about criticising what’s going on and lifted a slight weight of whether twitter was a job or not.

My threshold on facebook – that tipping point where I went – NO. NO more. Was when I was looking at some people who wanted to friend me and I was spending days, weeks, months agonising over whether to friend them and I realised it had become an unpaid job, helping facebook gather accurate information about it. It was the unpaid part that got my goat, so it went.

The thoughts of paying twitter to actually help it give me more focused advertising seemed bonkers.

Anyway, blue tick gone now. Faint feeling of relief.

Back to my first love of blogging, maybe. I started blogging before blogs existed. Hand coding entries on a static web page. WordPress is a bit easier. A bit.

(if you’ve got a tick and you want rid of it, the answer is change your username to something else and then change it back and boom! blue tick be gone!)

This week in TV: SAS Rogue Heroes

A rough sketch of "Jock" Lewes, David Sterling and Paddy Mayne.

I’ve pretty much binged all of SAS Rogue Heroes this week, based on the true story of the origins of the SAS. And look, honestly, I’m deeply conflicted, I’m not sure real characters should feature in gung ho whiz bang boys own adventure stories about WARS! (which this show clearly is, even as it also suggests that the characters were not unaffected by what was done by them) and a lot of the real people in real life were … not pleasant, and this arguably strips all the unpleasantness away and leaves very much movie style heroism.

BUT the whole show is a bag of fun. WWII by way of the James Gunn suicide squad, I suppose. Mixing the music of George Formby with Ace of Spades, and the action sequences are visceral fun.

Plus, it did make me pick up the book it was based on and start reading it, so I’m certainly not taking it as read that the people we see on screen are the people they were in real life (and certainly even the books say a lot of these guys were largely unknowable and by all accounts, frequently just awful human beings).

(The real characters in war stories is something Garth Ennis avoids, when he does include them it’s usually as side characters who if they speak usually do so with the actual words attributed to them in historical records)

Anyway, you should check it out if that’s your bag. And I suspect if you’re following me on twitter or blogs or my work at all, it probably is your bag…

The Science of Judge Dredd

Sparked by a (funny) question on the 2000ad message board:

Screenshot from 2000ad Message Board: Genuine question - does the lawgiver only eject casings on covers? I’m sure I’ve seen it before on covers but not that I’ve seen it in stripwork. Posted by BPP

Genuine question – does the lawgiver only eject casings on covers? I’m sure I’ve seen it before om [sic] covers but not that I’ve seen it in stripwork.

http://futureshockd.wordpress.com/

http://twitter.com/#!/FutureShockd

BPP

As someone with a passing interest in this stuff, I have considered this question. What I’m suggesting isn’t – by any means definitive – but it’s an explanation of why I draw things the way I draw them, but first, let me talk more generally about my approach to Dredd.

I would rather draw something that explains the story and gives an emotional punch more than something that is the actual science of the world. As, I think Russell T Davis said of the Sonic Screwdriver (and I’m both paraphrasing and unsure if he’s the right writer) nobody wants to watch a Doctor Who episode where he spends much of it figuring out how to unlock dozens of doors, so the sonic screwdriver just magically does it.

So let’s start with that stupid/amazing/vision-obscuring/visionary helmet. Designed by Carlos Ezquerra to look like an executioner’s hood, and refined and refined over the years by list of the giants of British Comics, including Mike McMahon, Brian Bolland, Steve Dillon, Brendan McCarthy, and you know, nearly every UK british artist has had a go.

What’s striking about Dredd’s helmet is just how malleable it is, how open to interpretation and how iconic each artist can make it. Here’s a fun link, Steve Green takes a bunch of Dreddworld helmet designs and renders them in 3d, including Brendan McCarthy outrageously flared helmet, which on first glance I’d’ve said you could never make in 3d, but it works really well.

Personally my helmet design probably comes mostly from Steve Dillon, but also – and hold on to your Dredd-hats – partly from the Stallone Dredd movie.

From Dillon the general Dredd shape, from Stallone movie various frills, but also an opening mechanisim at the back, as well as a little extra padding at the back of the neck…

Elements, I’ve always presumed that came from practicalities of wearing the damn thing.

I’ve banged on about my approach to Dredd’s uniform already, so if you’re interested, that is here.

Now, as to the science, I tend to think of Dredd’s helmet as delivering information directly to Dredd’s eyes/ears, essentially super-vision, a Heads up display – possibly fed from tiny cameras around the head (If you’ve ever used an oculus rift in its camera mode, you’ll see how cool that can look), literal eyes in the back of his head. Linked to his gun too, so it would be fairly possible for him to turn his head fractionally, but have accurate vision 180deg behind him and to fire at a target without missing.

I’d also imagine that helmet would reduce/increase the information feed to Dredd depending on what’s happening. Dredd on a bike gets a HUD that’s different to Dredd on the street. Dredd with gun out, will get information about targets that he can acquire and suggesions for ammo type. Once the gun is ‘hot’ it’ll switch to a simpler mode.

Vision augmented, and the same will be true of his auditory input. (And this may even have some sort of neural link directly to him (this, by the way, almost all falls under the heading of “fan wank” – ie, 90% of readers won’t care, but some – SOME LIKE ME – get really excited about shit like this)

NOW! On to the gun…

Here’s how I see it: Dredd’s gun is essentially a super sophisticated 3d printer. It holds multiple ingredients for building multiple types of bullet.

The device is primed (usually through spoken command, though it will default to smartly identifying the type of bullet) theory: maybe cadets are trained to shout out the bullet type so other Judges can have a better situational awareness. Dredd shouts “Armour piercing”? everyone else goes with Armour Piercing.

(Again, this is very much fan wank – the real reason Dredd shouts out the bullet type is so the reader knows what Dredd has fired…)

Why the shells? Well, the real reason is: they look cool. The in-my-head reason is that some of the raw material (but not all) is held in cartridges, and so they eject after they’re spent.

The question I have is, is it like my colour printer : where if you don’t have yellow ink you can’t (for some reason) print black and white. If you lack ingredient X can you still use bullet Y that doesn’t use it, or is the gun out of ammo?

I suspect some ingredients are common to all bullet types (projectile types? is bullet the right word?)

But that’s it. Now you can just ignore all of this, because, let’s face it, it’s just my fanciful head canon, that I’m just as liable to ignore myself if there’s a more interesting way to draw it.

The one thing I can’t explain, is why the Judge Eagle would sometimes flip on to the wrong shoulder…

UPDATE: I’ve turned on comments if you want to pop your own “How does the science of Dredd work” theory in here…

2000ad Prog 2240

Cover by Toby Willsmer

And here we go, the last episode of Chimpsky! (for the time being!)

For fans of inside baseball, page 1 panel 2 had me switch the angle around.

And that’s it! Hope you enjoyed it. Ken has a few ideas in mind for where to go to next, and personally I hope we get to see far more of our super smart simian pal, but it’s really up to the readers – and Tharg – TELL THARG IF YOU LIKED IT! (I mean, you could tell him if you don’t, too, I suppose – but what kind of horrid rotter would do that?)

Holiday Day 3

well, it’s our last night in the Loft (in Ballyliny) tomorrow we head off to my mother-in-laws house to avoid the last of the 12th of July celebrations, coming as they are the day after England’s defeat at the Euros.

We went to Ballintoy today.

It’s the location used by Game of Thrones for part of the Iron Islands. Small and winding road takes you down to the port, and it’s tiny, but very pretty – and just choca-blocked with cars. Go early if you ever fancy, though, truth to tell, unless you’re taking a boat out (£15 per person) it’s unlikely you’ll find much to do so the turnover in parking is pretty rapid, usually someone leaving.

After that we headed to Ballycastle to dip in the sea, but, turns out the weather… well winter was coming (or at least some horrible dark clouds). That’s Northern Ireland for you.

After that, home, popped to Bushmills for a Chinese. We don’t really get chinese food any more, once I went gluten free it was impossible to get chinese food that definitely didn’t contain gluten. So everyone got that and I ended up with a good fellas frozen gluten free pizza. Yes, it’s an unfair world.

Then we watched the football. I’ve never been in to football, you’ve probably guessed. It honestly does nothing for me – not watching it, not playing it. But my wife likes it (sometimes) and the kids (occasionally) enjoy it, so we all sat down to watch the match. And let’s move on from that.

On another front, once again I thought I’d give video games a go! I have apple arcade, so I’ve played a couple of rounds of solitaire. It’s good when it’s easy, first hard game and I’ve lost all interest in playing solitaire.

Drawing is about the only thing I’ve ever been able to turn my attention to and keep it focused on that, but that’s got harder and harder as the years go by. Sometimes that’s my own internal brainfarts moving me hither and yon and sometimes it’s just run of the mill family stuff.

Anyway, have got about half way through a book – John Wyndham’s The Kraken Wakes, which, I admit, is only about 236 pages. BUT I TAKE THE WIN WHERE I CAN.

And have done zero writing – aside from these blog posts.

Oh well, it is supposed to be a holiday, innit?

Holiday Day 2

Is it possible to have finished the internet? Maybe not, but it’s almost certainly possible to exist those little corners of the internet that you regularly check on. In that endeavour, I use twitter like a filling. Filling the gaps between big chunks of internet. So I’ve been missing twitter. I replaced my twitter app on my phone with the kindle app, thinking (oh-so-cleverly) that muscle memory will make me open up the kindle app and read a book instead of twitter. Half right, muscle memory means I tap the icon but when confronted with a book I half swear and close the app.

Anyway, day 2 of no twitter is going swimmingly.

Today we hit The Giant’s Causeway.

We’ve done the giant’s causeway innumerable times with the kids – and while the causeway never change our kids have gotten progressively bigger over the years, and that always make you feel a little melancholic.

After that we headed for Coleraine, not a town I’m very familiar with (though I’m sure I’ve done a comic festival there once) but it has a waterstones and I love a book shop. Picked up Brian Bilston’s “Alexa, what is there know about love?” a signed short collection of poetry lots of funny, short clever little pieces. I enjoyed, particualrly “The Caveman’s Lament” which opens with:

me think about her when sun rises
me think about her when sun sets
me say to her how much me love her
she tell me love invent not yet

I also wanted to pick up Junji Ito’s Uzamacki, but Thomas (13) and I have been struggling over which of us would get to keep the book on our shelves. (He’s also probably a bit young for it)

Headed for a McDonald’s in Coleraine too, and look, I’m aware that’s not exactly fancy eating, but when you’re trying to avoid gluten you find options close down and sometimes getting a McDonalds without a bun is your least-worst option. (We had lunch at 1:30 or so, by which time we were all ready to make war such was the level of hangry)

I woke up about 6 nearly throwing up, not sure what was wrong, and my stomach has felt like it’s been sitting a vom-mark 4 all day today. I suspect an over dose on sweets and just too-much food. So I’ve been trying to eat less crap today (and mcdonald’s was ..er.. borderline that).

Still not sure how I feel now.

Anyway, after Coleraine back to the loft and I fell asleep for a few hours, as I’ve gotten older after/early evening naps have really become my goto strategy for filling a few hours of each day.

Generally two locations in one day is enough, but for whatever reason the kids wanted to head off somewhere else, so we went to Portstewart – Portrush and Portstewart are pretty close together on the North coast, but they’re fairly different.

Portrush was where my parents would take us as kids if we wanted the sand and gaming machines – and Barry’s amusements. Barry’s was the famous amusement arcade in Portrush – though ‘arcade’ is doing the thing a disservice. It was a national institution for kids from Belfast.

It’s closed now, covid did for it (though actually I think it’s been closed already, the website suggestions they’ve been trying to sell it either as an ongoing concern or for development. I suspect someone will make flats out of the place.

Anyway, today we went to Portstewart, and Portstewart is very different. Golf courses, and fancy eating places, and that’s your lot – not a single amusment arcade to be found (at least not that I saw). Historically it was upper middle classes would go there. Yesterday in Portrush we saw some young fellas lay into each other in a fight, today in Portstewart we saw some old people order ice-cream. They are very different places.

We have a National Trust membership so went to Portstewart Strand parked the car up, got out some collapsable chairs we bought a couple of days ago and watched our kids play on the beach. It was a good day.

Got dinner at Bob & Berts (gluten free options aplenty, but to be honest, not as nice as the mcdonalds). Man, we’ve got to start budgeting for eating while on holidays – it’s our biggest expense.

Came back to the loft having broken our youngest (age 13 and taller than me but honestly, if I could’ve carried him from the car to the loft he would’ve been glad of it).

And, in fact, everyone is away to bed, it’s 10:12pm.

Except me, but then I had that craft nap earlier on, eh readers?

Little finger

I’ve been reading Wyndams The Kraken Wakes and found myself at some dialogue when the husband and wife journalists are talking about inviting guests over to wheedle some info out of them:

“Darling, you know you thoroughly enjoy the art of the little finger. And you’d be furious if I concealed you under a bushel.”

“well, that’s very well,” she said. “But I’d just like to feel a little more certain whose little finger we’re talking about.”

having watched game of thrones, I thought “I’ve heard that term in that context before” – I’d assumed “Little Finger” in game of thrones – a quick google search suggests his name is specifically about two things:

Petyr grew up at House Tully’s castle Riverrun with Hoster’s daughters Catelyn and Lysa, and son Edmure; Edmure nicknamed Petyr “Littlefinger” in reference to his short stature and his family’s lands on the smallest of the peninsulas called the Fingers.

And googling, I found this on urban dictionary:

Littlefinger v. to manipulate people excessively and brilliantly to achieve your own goals.

ah hah! I thought, clever writers littlefinger is clearly named for his manipulative beha… oh

Origin: Game of Thrones Character Littlefinger

no, I’m pretty sure little finger refers to manipulation of people predating game of thrones; the kraken wakes was written in 1953, and I also found this reference in an article written in 1932

But the thought occurs,–imagine rising with a hangover to greet a nine o’clock on the “Amenities of Gin,” and an eleven o’clock laboratory exercise in “The Art of the little finger as applied to Chartreusel”

https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1932/12/10/the-pied-piper-pdr-william-muhlberg/

but that’s it. Now it’s entirely possible I’m overthinking this, and “the art of the little finger” is just an uncommon usage of something like “skilled at wrapping people around their little finger”.

anyway this is the sort of nonsense I save for Twitter.

Holiday day 1.

I’m on me hols!

Which, as my family knows, usually means I’m doing everything exactly the same but with slightly worse internet.

I got 10 pages of pencils of the most recent thing sent off to the writer, and I’m off for few days over the 12th of July holidays in Northern Ireland. This time of the year I usually try and get out of dodge, this year may go off without incident or may be chaos, I have no idea.

I decided to delete twitter off my phone and ipad, I can still access it from the website, but not having the app may mean I don’t sit there hitting reload like a rat hitting a button wired up to its pleasure centres.

I’ll be honest, it’s not been a great success so far – I checked it this morning, in a fit of “what on earth do I do with my hands” (which, I imagine, is how a smoker might feel after giving them up – the nicotine hit is one thing, but what do you do with your hands now they’re suddenly free?) Of course the moment I checked I had a dm which meant I was responding to that, but, I’ve tried not to respond to anything on the general twitter feed.

Honestly, I think I’m pretty good at twitter (in so far as I enjoy it and I use it regularly, but – let’s be honest, no one is handing out eisners for tweets) but I don’t half use it too much.

Taking a break isn’t a bad idea, and the fact that even the attempt at it feels like I’m missing something tells me I really need to take a break. Obviously, I’ll be back.

I figured if I saved up all my stupid twitter thoughts throughout the day I could then blog them and get some of the same hit from tweeting (it hasn’t worked).

We’re staying in a loft in Ballylinny at the Giant’s Causeway, it’s beautiful up here and we’re having a good time. I’m up from a typical 3k steps to 13k steps today, and will probably do similar over the next few days.

These are our ideal holiday conditions – a large house to stay in, decent internet and something to go visit every day.

Today we went to Mussenden Temple – incredible views, and a real sense that wow, people in the past had a lot of money to waste on follys.

The we hit the beach at Portrush – pretty much empty, I assume because it was later in the day and anyone with any sense had started heading home, some wading in the icy cold atlantic ocean (it’s what passes for warm here) and back to the loft totally exhausted.

Tomorrow I’m determined to look at my phone less and I’d really like to sit and see if I can hack away at one or two of the ideas I’ve written in my script ideas book (a red notebook that becomes the new home for any half baked story idea that I would normally tweet out, like a loon).

Anyway, good evening and we’ll chat tomorrow!