Zompist

Well, since ged did it, with such appalling results....

Here's what gotoquiz.com thinks:

92% Chris Dodd
91% Barack Obama
89% John Edwards
88% Hillary Clinton
86% Joe Biden
79% Mike Gravel
77% Dennis Kucinich
76% Bill Richardson
46% Rudy Giuliani
35% John McCain
29% Tom Tancredo
26% Mitt Romney
26% Mike Huckabee
16% Ron Paul
16% Fred Thompson

2008 Presidential Candidate Matching Quiz

glassbooth.org offers a rather different, weighted list, and provides an interesting report per candidate. Its lists is as follows; I noted what it thinks are my major disagreements with each candidate.

79% Dennis Kucinich (but: Iraq)
78% Mike Gravel (but: Iraq)
76% John Edwards (but: gay rights, Iraq)
76% Bill Richardson (but: gay rights)
75% Christopher Dodd (but: gay rights, Iraq)
73% Joe Biden (but: gay rights, Iraq)
71% Barrack Obama (but: gay rights, Iraq)
68% Hillary Clinton (but: gay rights, Iraq)
56% Mike Huckabee (but: abortion, gay rights)
56% Rudy Giuliani (but: gay rights, civil liberties)
53% John McCain (but: gay rights, trade, abortion)
50% Mitt Romney (but social security, civil liberties, gay rights)
50% Fred Thompson (4 issues very different)
48% Duncan Hunter (4 issues very different)
43% Ron Paul (4 issues very different)
37% Tom Tancredo (5 issues very different)

I don't think this sort of math is very informative, though... e.g. it has Ron Paul's position on Iraq as "very different" because he strongly opposed the surge... I think it did improve things, but I don't have a problem with his principled and consistent opposition to the war. (I have lots of problems with his particular combination of laissez-faire economics and theocracy however.)

The bits about Iraq are tricky, because the information available on the candidates is mostly what they think about Bush's policy, and that doesn't really tell us what they'll do once Bush is out.

I've been reading William Harrison's The Description of England, first published in 1587— a rambling stroll through Tudor England with a contemporary. This passage, in the chapter on food and diet, struck me as amusing:

In Scotland likewise they have given themselves (of late years to speak of) unto very ample and large diet, wherein, as for some respect Nature doth make them equal to us, so otherwise they far exceed us in overmuch and distemperate gourmandise, and so engross their bodies that divers of them do ofte become unapt to any other purpose than to spend their times in large tabling and bellycheer. Against this pampering of their carcasses doth Hector Boece in his description of the country very sharply inveigh in the first chapter of that treatise:

Some by long sickness and languishing griefs do grow into such deformity only through excessive feeding and greedy abuse of wine that, if you knew them when they were children and young men, you shall hardly remember them when they be old and aged; and that which more is, in comparison of other that live more soberly, you will hardly think them to be born in the isle, but rather suppose them to be changelings and monsters, brought out of other countries to gaze and look upon.

Cap'n, the waistcoats canna take nae more!

Scott McCloud finally added his online addendum to Making Comics:

Making webcomics

So now he tells us that the recommended way to do webcomics is to use a succession of screen-shaped (i.e. not book-page-shaped) panels, rather than experiments with the infinite canvas. Bastid!

I kind of like the scrolling panels I used for Fuschia; they create (I think) an anything-might-happen feeling since you can't read ahead, and there's only one UI gesture for the whole comic. And I find the click-for-next-page mechanism a little clunky. Is it the natural way to read longer webcomics, or is it as tired as the widespread adoption of the three-panel newspaper strip as a model?

The addendum isn't all that deep, but it does point to some interesting examples. Now I'm tempted to try yet another approach to backgrounds for Fuschia.

I was going to talk about my vacation, so I could mention getting together twice with muckefuck among a whirl of social engagements such as I haven't had since college; but instead I thought I'd talk about drawing.  

I spent the last few days doing a new Fuschia comic, the first in five years.  I was eager to try out a new method for doing backgrounds, as opposed to my last method for doing backgrounds, which was to not do any.  

The base problem is that drawing is hard.  I've been teaching myself to draw for years, and I can now kind of do figure drawing as I'd like.  The human body, especially Fuschia's, is fun to draw, but very complicated.  I learn some techniques for one pose, and then have to learn a bunch more for any slight variation, and that's to say nothing of foreshortening, or getting facial expressions right, or keeping the drawing from looking anatomically correct but dull.  The thing is, backgrounds are full of objects, and almost all of them are just as hard to draw as bodies, but less interesting.  Cars and trees, for instance, would both take years for me to draw correctly.  

So what I'm trying is photos, lightly distorted using Photoshop to harmonize more with the drawings.  I used photo references for the figures, too-- I would have terrible trouble making up the poses in the first four drawings from memory-- but those are much more heavily modified, not least because I don't have a beautiful Asian girl to model for me.  Applications are being accepted.

Another tidbit: Mariana (Fuschia's girlfriend) came out a little dark.  And yet I actually swiped her skin color from a photo of a Latina.  

As you can probably tell, I really love the airbrush tool.  It really adds to the realism, and sometimes even cover up some of the not-quite-right anatomy!

There should be at least one entry yearly here, I think.

Last month I bought myself the New Yorker. Over 4000 issues. It comes on 8 DVDs, and my Mac's screen is just big enough to show a readable two-page spread.

Rather as with the magazine itself, I've started with the humor pieces, the movie reviews, and the cartoons. First thing, in fact, I read all of Dorothy Parker's book reviews-- which are more comedy routines than reviews, especially since she was at her best when she absolutely hated a book. (This suited the magazine in its first years, when it was a lot more like Spy.)

The search function is pretty neat, except that many articles lack abstracts... this is frustrating if (say) you want to browse the movie reviews.

The ads are a special treat in the early decades. The cartoons in the early issues, however, mostly suck. I'll have to find out when they started to be good.

I'm fascinated by the fact that Chinese restaurants often have a different name in English and in Chinese. I was curious about the place we ate at tonight, which is called the Quincy Dynasty; its Chinese name is 稘來軒. My friend muckefuck is much better at characters; I had to bring a napkin home to look them up. In Mandarin it's qí lái xuān, which is as best as I can make out 'auspicious future house'. Nothing to do with dynasties at all, nor with Quincy, which if I'm reading this aright is 昆市-- Mandarin kūnshì, Cantonese kuanshi.

(Now we'll see if LiveJournal can handle Unicode characters...)

As I'm finally a little tired of Civ (can beat Civ2 too easily, can't beat Civ3 on Monarch), I went out and bought Age of Empires II. It's close enough to be quick to pick up, and different enough to be entertaining. Though good Lord, the units love to go get themselves lost.

I'm also trying to develop a Flash game, which should be ready in early 2126.

This week's fun project: I removed a skylight. Skylights look good in magazine photos, but in an actual house, they suck. We had three, and they make the back of the house hot in summer and cold in winter, and they leak.

So, I decided to rip the worst offender out. Lots of nifty mold-laden water damage. I repaired the roof, hopefully watertight, and this weekend I finished replacing the insulation and drywall from within the back bedroom.

I like carpentry, because if you're a quarter inch off in your measurements, you can fix it somehow. With plumbing, if you're a quarter inch off, things get wet.

There's another, bigger leaking skylight, but it only leaks into the back hall, so it may stay there awhile.

create your own visited country map
or write about it on the open travel guide

Not as thorough a globetrotting as I'd like. And this is even more depressing:

I probably won't do anything with this, but I wanted to have an account for commenting on other people's journals.