peteashtondotcom

Alan Moore Knows The Score. One of the few songs I know all the lyrics to is PWEI’s Can U Dig It, and here’s what it all means…

Yes, It’s been raining a bit, but there have been some benefits. Firstly, I was the only one able to get to work on time so had an hour sitting in the office drinking tea. Secondly, the skies cleared dramatically around 3.00pm with a hint of sunshine and then a very cold snap as night fell. I was walking from Bloomsbury to Kings Cross and nearly carried on to Camden. It was cold enough to justify a coat and hat without getting sweaty but not so cold your feet freeze. Rather refreshing and when I entered the Underground the sudden heat made me feel rather detatched in a nice way. This faded rather quickly of course, it being 6.00pm and there being a shortage of trains (not one of the benefits…). I spent the rest of the journey home figuring out if I could walk back to East Finchley from the centre. Unfortunately there’s no direct road and the small matter of Hampstead Heath in the way…

I’ve had this site Jesusified.
bugpowder.com and pete@bugpowder.com

Adobe® GoLive™ 5.0 software may well give you “industrial-strength design, production, and management features so you can create professional dynamic-database driven Web sites” and it may well happen that by being “tightly integrated with other Adobe products such as Photoshop®, Illustrator®, and LiveMotion™, Adobe GoLive software protects your code from modification and corruption while offering industry-leading site layout and management functionality” but that’s no excuse for not running on my machine.

For the record I have 96meg basic memory (plus 96meg virtual memory) on a one year old iMac. I can run many applications at once and, like pretty much everyone, often have 5 or 6 running at any given time. I quite like using Golive 4 because it lets me switch between the HTML code and a wysiwig interface and helps my page templates consistent. It doesn’t fuck up my code too much, generally leaves scripts intact and has a neat FTP interface that fits in nicely with the Mac desktop

I recently upgraded to Golive 5 for a reasonable fee. Is it really necessary for an HTML editor to require 48meg of memory? To put this in perspective, with the Mac OS using 28meg I am unable to launch IE or Netscape from Golive without the virtual memory going into overdrive and the Mac inevitably crashing. Heaven help me if I’ve got Photoshop or Outlook running at the same time (as I’m likely to if I’m designing a page).

It’s an HTML editor with somenobs on. Why does it need more memory than anything else on my hard drive? If it was a really fancy piece of kit I’d understand but it’s an HTML editor.

To get some idea of the mindset at Adobe towers, check out the source code for the above page, bearing in mind it’s the menu page for Golive. At 12pt type on my word processor (which uses 3.2meg of memory) it fills 29 pages with 71,000 characters.

I’ll get over it, but really…

I’m intrigued by this Cafepress setup where the print mugs to order from your designs and give you a customisable shop to sell them from (see the powazek cafepress store), but it’s US based and shipping to the UK is $20.00. Anyone know of a UK based operation? I’m thinking UK small press comics on mugs. I thinking this could be the future.

Plato was right.

Following on from my interest in No Logo and Cluetrain, the Play Ethic is very interesting.

I’m back in London now and back on the normal email address. All eye/forehead related stuff is A-OK, thanks for asking.

Aparently the report of my operation caused some distress to certain readers of this blog. All I can say is you shouldn’t be eating over your computer or you’ll suffer long term problems.

GBlogs Gateway is an interesting attempt to bring together all the UK weblogs in one list. I’m on there (though not as a link yet…). It seems like a work in progress but is a somewhat welcome addition to the many blog portals out there, giving a bit of regional focus to the whole blogging phenomenon.

Hidden away in an article hidden away in a Guardian supplement was an interesting piece of information. Aparently music CD sales in the US have increased by 20% since Napster became widespread. Allowing for other factors (online stores selling CDs cheaply) this raises a few questions.

Does this mean that after downloading some tracks of artists they are curious about, the kids with the disposable income actually go out and buy the albums? If this is the case, why are artists moaning about it?

Could it be that the record companies no longer have control over what music is being bought? I wouldn’t be surprised if that 20% increase was not just current releases which get a lot of radio play. Could removing the marketing men from music promotion be seen as a bad idea for record companies? After all, why spend thousands promoting an album if the kids will listen to it via Napster for free, decide it’s not that good and go buy something else (after listening to it via Napster for free)?

If sales are up and more people are listening to music, is this really such a bad thing? I guess if you’re in the business of branding acts and manipulating markets it’s pretty awful, in which case you deserve everything you get.

Left the house for the first time since Tuesday today. First realisation was that rain is the enemy when you have stitches on your face. Second realisation was that when your body is trying to fix a big hole in it you get tired really quickly. When I went for a nap afterwards I had a quite vivid dream which I won’t bore you with here but it was one of those moments when everything you’ve been thinking about settles down and you have a calm idea of what you’re up to. Or maybe it’s becasue I haven’t had a drop of booze for days…

Kate’s come up to Brum now and we’re going back to London on Monday. Poor thing’s just moved the Children’s department at her bookshop across the shop (none of the customers were happy about this - ungrateful fuckers) while worrying about me. Awww.

Dad reminded me it’s my sisters birthday today so HAPPY BIRTHDAY LUCY! Hey, kid, I was gonna email you but your address is in London and I’m up here. See you Xmas. (Lucy lives in Portland, USA with her hubby Jeff)

The Operation
a report

The operation took place on Tuesday and I’ve been living the life of luxury ever since at Kate’s parents house. Actually, I’ve been a bit bored today which I take to be a good sign. I look like I’ve been involved in a drunken fracas with a broken bottle around the nose area with mucho stitching and loads of dried blood smeared around my face. While I can clean it when it spreads away from the stitches, they don’t want it touched for a few days. This gets rather uncomfortable when the blood dries on the skin, but it’s not that painful. In fact the big surprise is I’m not in any real pain at all, considering exactly what happened yesterday…

cue wibbly-wobbly screen…

As the Tuesday got closer I started to feel what I guess was nervousness, although I put this down to a bad mood, and by the time I got to the hospital (after a two hour train journey and an hour in the car with Kate’s dad David (Hi David!) I was not in the most cheery of moods. But still, it had to happen so let’s get it over with.

The operation was going to happen in at least two stages. First the Rodent Ulcer is removed and sent to another hospital for examination. They then report back to tell the surgeon if he succeeded in removing the whole lot or if he left any bits in there. I then go back under the knife for the final scrape and the reconstruction.

Rodent Ulcer: I don’t know exactly what it is but the “Rodent” means it’s burrowing, albeit very slowly. It’s actually a form of skin cancer - non-malignant - what was probably cause by me growing up in Singapore and running around in the equatorial sunshine. I first noticed it about seven years ago but never thought it was serious. A year ago my doctor referred me to the skin centre and the long journey to this operation began.

The surgeon’s name is Mr Reusser who has the air of a reassuring aristocrat. Very English, very in control, and very good at making you feel at ease. He says “It’s just in-out, not a problem”. You think “It’s just in-out, not a problem”. He takes another photo of my eye. Apparently it’s very unusual for someone my age to develop a Rodent Ulcer, especially as I was approx 22 when it appeared. When I first went to the skin centre they were very surprised to see such a young man there and called in all the other doctors to have a look. The same thing happened at the eye centre when Mr Reusser videoed my face. This time he took a digital photo. I meant to ask him to email me a jpg of it. I will be used for teaching purposes. I may even appear in a book.

The photo was interesting as I’d never really seen the Rodent Ulcer properly. I see it from the front with my nose in the way, normally obscured by my glasses. He took it from the best angle and it really is rather large and ugly. Or rather it was. It’s gone now. He cut it out.

The worst part was the anaesthetic. They used a local meaning I was awake for the whole procedure. This wasn’t a problem because you can’t feel anything and as long as you keep your eyes shut you can’t see the knives descending on your face. However, needles going into you eyelids are another matter. For future reference: Needle in upper eyelid = not that bad. Needle in lower eyelid = fucking painful. Those of you who read Cerebus (not many, I know) will remember the “injury to eye motif” section. I do believe I went through that same procedure. An injection below the tear duct. The only bruise I have from the whole procedure is in that spot. But at least it was over in a few seconds when the anaesthetic took it’s effect. And the breathing exercises my yoga-fuelled meditating mother taught me came into their own.

So I’m lying on a bed with a pad on my chest and a heartbeat monitor on my finger (going beep, beep, beep) with my eyes closed. It took me a good minute before I realised he was cutting into my face. I wasn’t sure how he would be cutting it out but there was a snipping noise going on. It’s a bit like having your hair cut. You can’t feel anything but there are small vibrations echoing through your head. I rather liked be awake during the op. After about fifteen minutes it was over and he removed the Rodent Ulcer. To my regret I didn’t get a chance to look at it. I imagined it would be like a root vegetable - a bloody carrot. I’ll ask him when I have the stitches out. Now separated from my face the Rodent Ulcer went off to another hospital in central Birmingham to be looked at to see if any bits had been left in me. I used to live near a hospital and often got in minicabs with “Hospital Contract” stickers in the window. I assumed they were used to take patients home. I didn’t realise they were used to ferry samples between hospitals.

So back to the ward with a large bandage on my face. I felt rather sleepy and drifted off in the chair. Even though I felt nothing I expect my body was slightly in shock after such an invasion and I slept for about an hour. When I came round the anaesthetic was wearing off and I was in some pain. On top of this there was a television in the ward and the old guy in the corner was watching children’s programs on ITV. Plus I find when I wake up after a short snooze I’m usually in a bad mood. The results came through and they walked me back to the theatre with a “let’s get this over with then” attitude and I was in no mood to disagree. Another “injury to eye motif” and the final stage began.

Thankfully Mr Reusser had removed everything the first time. He removed a bit more to be safe and then I could smell burning. At first I thought his head was too close to the lights and his hair was being singed. Then I realised he was using a red hot scalpel to cut off a section of my skin from above my nose and it was my flesh that was burning. Weird. This was placed over the hole by my eye and both areas were stitched up, which took quite a long time. I must have been in there for about an hour but I didn’t notice time passing. Suddenly it was over. I opened my eyes and they wheeled me back into the ward. Again, I felt quite weak even though I felt nothing. David was waiting in the ward to take me home and they brought me a cup of tea.

I asked for a mirror. I had no real idea what had been going on other than a lot of cutting and stitching and had this idea that there would not be much different up there. How wrong I was. The stitching looks quite rough, rather like how I stitch up trousers - functional but not too pretty. There was a load of blood and this clear antiseptic gel layered over the wounds. Add to this my tired, puffy eyes and I did look a bit of a state. Before going in I asked when he thought I could go back to work. He said next Monday would be fine but the customers might not like it. I understood what he meant. I think I will go to work on Monday just for that very reason! A bit of a shock was when I stood up to get dressed and blood poured off my face (well, three or four large drops). The wound was leaking and had collected in my right eye. This continued for most of the evening and I slept with a towel on the pillow. This morning I woke up with my eyelids coated in dried blood and only now, 36 hours later, has it really stopped..

But there’s no pain. None at all. I’ve had a hole a centimetre in diameter made in the space between my right eye and my nose removed and a patch of skin from above my nose removed to plug the hole and I feel nothing. I haven’t even taken a Nurofen. Weird.

Instructions for using Word 2000:

Look for something called “autoformat” (it may also be called “autocorrect” or “autotext”). Open this up and you will find lots of options. Switch them all off. All of them. They may seem like a good idea but they will piss you off as soon as you type something unlike a “general document”, which is anything really. So leave no box checked.

You may now type your document in peace.

Requiem for a Dream - who needs television? Rather revolutionary little interactive movie (mentioned by Jez)

Minor Surgery!

Tomorrow afternoon I’ll be in Solihull Hospital undergoing minor surgery on a Rodent Ulcer that’s been sitting next to my eye for the last seven years. It would be a relatively simple operation were it not centimetres from my eyeball. They have to go in with a very small knife under a microscope and gradually remove it bit by bit over four hours with me under local anaesthetic (so I’m awake…).

But anyway, I’ll be recuperating at Kate’s parents home nearby for a few days and won’t be back in London until the Sunday night, so any mail to pete@bugpowder.com will not be answered straight away. If you need to contact me urgently I’ll have access to my yahoo account at peteychap@yahoo.com

I’ll also be able to work on this Blog and will have a lot of time on my hands (assuming I can see).

From Andy Luke, who produces TRS2, a regular postal review sheet for small press comics inspired by my version a few years back…

I love what I’m doing with TRS(2), and I’m fortunate in that I have thhe resources (time, money, journalistic training and a history, hobby > comic booklets)

Know Peter, that your actions do leave people changed. I wasn’t interested in indies until I seen Cerebus and when Patrick Brown, Ralph Kidson and yourself put signals before me it opened a window at my stuffy periphery. TRS keeps me busier than my unaware lazy Earth Minus counterpart would realise.
Increased personal investment is double-edged. I see more in the booklets I read and view, appreciative like never before

Bugpowder.com is representative of you, your personal approach and your business approach. Personal affects: Pete invites Andrew to the pub, tells him about neat comics and offers him encouragement. Gives him a place to sleep. Andy is encouraged to retain involvement in comics, and delete his shortcomings. Andrew’s expectations of people is enhanced, optimism. Andrew travels to Galway and meets Emmett Taylor, where he tells Emmy of the new joys in his life. Andy and Emmy are newly mets, but a chord is struck. Emmy sends Andy a cover, and draws a 20pg story before going on to produce well over 100 pages of his own comic, building a group of new friends and contemporaries.

I’m keen on Matty’s idea of a message board. I check onto the CI board once in a while, yet its just too big and inconsequential. Messages are around 40-90 a day, with many of those two-liners. Following a thread is very time consuming as there are ‘too many voices’.

I check into Bugpowder about once every couple of days (too often in my opinion!) Perhaps I’m waiting for a message board. You’re very good at creating a comfortable environment Peter, and if a message bord was up and running, I have true faith that invested willpower, atmosphere would seep. transmute, be. (Uh, it could quite well work and I’m in)

I’ve been discussing the pros and cons of a discussion forum on BugPowder with Jez. Here’s an edited key snippet from my email to him. I welcome your comments. Like, would you take part?

Okay, how about this. A forum which ostensily is there to comment on posts on the main bp blog but can go in any direction. This forum is free to spiral in any direction and I pick out interesting posts / announcements and put them on the blog.

Case study. A new Eddie Campbell book comes out. I mention this on the blog. A discussion starts about Eddie Campbell which moves onto Phil Elliot. Someone mentions Phil’s site and a new comic he’s running there. I put this on the Blog.

I’m personally erring towards an email mailing list that does not require you to register to take part. I like the format and the off-line reading, especially for a low number of posters. (/. as a mailing list would be impossible. The Comics International mailing list is nearly impossible as it has over 100 posts a day. BP-as-currently would probably only have 10 posts a day at most).

When something from the mailing list is mentioned on the blog there’s a link or small form (”enter email address” - box - submit) to subscribe and at the bottom of each email post information on unsubscribing.

This strikes me as a best-fit solution in the short term. It’s a bit like the CI scenario where Dez culls the mailing list for the magazine, only less cynical. Then, in time, the mailing list can be archived on the site, like topica/egroups does, only without all the topica/egroups stuff.

Any thoughts on this?

From Jez in a hurry:

Re conflict between BugPowder corporate, Pete personal, comics
community spend a few days reading www.scripting.com to see a
bloke struggling to combine company/personal/community in one
site, failing absymally, not seeing his failure and constantly
declaring his success. (See winerlog.editthispage.com for
counterpoint where the Zaphod entity - which includes me - take
the piss out of him, using !IRONY! his own software and server to
do it. !DOUBLE IRONY! We pay enough attention to care that his
few good ideas are lost in the bollox).

More crap - this one’s from Brett.”How to swear in foreign languages.“

Big Tip from the book world. This year’s book is Peter Ackroyd’s London - The Biography. This isn’t another Londo-centric navel-gazing exercise but a fascinating look at the city as body. From the preface:

The byways of the city resemble thin veins and it’s parks are like lungs. In the mist and rain of an urban autumn, the shining stones and cobbles of the older thoroughfares look as if they are bleeding….

[the city] is fleshy and coracious, grown fat upon its appetite for people and for food, for goods and for drink; it consumes and it excretes, maintained within a continual state of greed and desire…

If you buy one 25 quid hardback this year, I’d go for this one.

The Master has returned. The World of Mayonnaise is here. Tremble-toes a-go-go!

Bloghop informs me that the ratings for this site are going to the wrong place - something called Soap Opera by one David Gentle, a comics fan from Hampshire. I’ve got a weird feeling I know him. It should be fixed soon…

Feeling a bit aimless today so I redesigned this page and put the reading list on another page.

Next time you’re introducing someone to the wonders of the internet, line up a few Blogs for them to try. The Guardian explains…

Regarding the Palm-Blog, chum Dave sez:

the right to blog on the move, it’s a funny thing that many people in
the ‘online community’ have concerns regarding personal privacy and yet
are enthusiastic about the idea of ‘wired living’. Maybe the next part
of the information revolution is when the next generation start to take
control of the web, kids who are used to having mobile phones on all the
time and text messaging mates, kids who don’t have our 20C hang ups
about privacy? It might be that the volume of information becomes so
high that people just get lost in all the noise, and your digital
footprint is hard to track, information overload to the n’th degree.

One of the more intriguing potentials of mobiles with internet browsers for me has been the concept of updating a Blog from a mobile while wondering around the outside world. Unfortunately WAP doesn’t seem up to it and you can’t update Blogger by email, so I’m saved from having a mobile for now. However, you can Blog with a Palm Pilot as this guy has proved. Random thoughts and pointless entries - as wonderfully scatalogical as I suspected it would be (and yes, I did look that up…)

It’s a bit late, I know, but in the last week I’ve started using Napster (via the Mac interface Macster) and playing about with copyrighted mp3s. A few myths were dispelled.

Firstly, it’s nothing to do with the web. You cannot access mp3s on internet servers nor can you share any mp3s that are on your site. All the mp3s are on actual computers and are only available to download when those computers are online. (I may be wrong about this and I know there’s a fine line between a server and a computer connected to a server, but that’s the impression I got). So sharing mp3s via Napster is very different to sticking a bunch of mp3s on your web site and offering them for download. I think this is the distinction Napster are using in court.

Secondly, unless you’ve got a really fast connection, it takes a very long time to download a song. The download speed seems average at 2k/sec and a four minute song takes a good 20-30 minutes. So downloading a whole album is out of the question. I’ve only downloaded 4 songs so far.

Thirdly, this is not affecting my purchasing of music. To be honest I’ve bought three albums in the past 6 months mainly due to the cost. I’m using this to try stuff out in the same way I pay attention to the radio when something I might be interested in comes on. I’m currently downloading a couple of tracks from Radiohead’s Kid A to see what they’re like. Maybe I’ll buy the album later. In fact I’m more likely to after making an informed judgement.

Maybe in the future when I’ve got a fast connection and all that I’ll be downloading hundreds of songs a day and playing them on my integrated hi-fi system, and I guess that’s the threat to the record companies. When there is no distinction between playing a purchased CD and an mp3 then why should I buy a CD? But currently I never buy CDs. I listed to the radio more often than not. Is this a valid argument?

As a footnote, Napster really came into it’s own. Kate has been after a copy of the deleted Ziggy Stardust live recording with the track My Death which she dearly loves. We’ve been searching for this for months with no success. I typed in the title and artist and in half an hour it was on the Mac. Nuff said.

Stared reading 253 by Geoff Ryman today. You know a book is good when your train changes terminus and you don’t notice until you’re on the other side of London…