andyluke

It's an exciting time for comics! Laydeez Do Comics, which started out as two women in London thinking it would be nice to gather a few other people and talk about comics, has grown now to meetings in eight cities! You can go along to events in London, Leeds, Glasgow, Bristol, Brighton, Chicago, San Francisco... and now Dublin!! Here's the team taking part in the very first meeting: organiser Lynda Rucker, comics artist speaker Maeve Clancy and organiser Maura McHugh. We had pre-drinks at the Central Hotel, which is where I stayed for Irish 24-Hour Comics Day several years ago.



In London, we always have one designated person to make sketches from the evening, and in Dubin this time, it was Róisín Curé . You can see more of her drawings from the evening here! The idea of Laydeez is to focus on comics made by women, but also have a female-friendly space to talk about comics made by both men and women. So men are very welcome, too! Speaker Alan Nolan did a great job of being an honourary lady that evening.



You can see that I spouted lots of deep and meaningful feminist diatribe, ha ha. I only realised it when Maura pointed it out, but I was the first speaker at the inaugural London Laydeez Do Comics meeting, so I've helped open two branches of it. I'm rather proud of this! :)



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• Fri, 13:20: RT @d20monkey: Sam opens up for some "Essential Therapy" today at d20Monkey. http://t.co/KAJZ25JRw5 #webcomics #dnd
• Fri, 13:20: RT @Scaredemy: Simon shakes his booty, new strip at http://t.co/3nqkaFTtD2 #Sh'mon #80s #webcomics #comics #rad
• Fri, 13:20: RT @Axonite: Station V3 - Linton didn't like being called incompetent... http://t.co/HgyOi6uOsE #webcomics #comics
• Fri, 13:21: RT @The_Evil_Hare: Jake the Evil Hare - Fighting crime one beating at a time! http://t.co/vWJ0VErIzn #comics #webcomics #NDCA #NWO #wtf
• Fri, 13:21: RT @GeeksComicStrip: With Great Power... http://t.co/HrbMPTc3Rl #webcomic #webcomics #ComicStrip #comic #comics #funny #humor #sontaran #do…
• Fri, 13:21: RT @tamurancomic: Chapter 10 page 2 is posted: http://t.co/jdCE8rItqA Breakfast time. This will end well. #fantasy #webcomics #lfwc
• Fri, 16:24: It's so cold and wet. I've got my winter woollies and the heating on. #summer
• Fri, 17:35: Just been on #BBC news in a report about Clinical Vaccine Trials. On again at 10
• Fri, 18:12: Promised ages ago I'd do some Bi-themed comics for a magazine. Finally getting around to drawing some strips. #Bisexual #comics
• Fri, 21:24: I bought more #chocolate but I ate it all. Once more I am in the hideous position of having no chocolate. AHHHHHHHRRRRG!!!!

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Been a bit down recently due to health and DIY woes, so decided that this weekend would be all about enjoying Leicester's first Handmade Festival.

Off to see lots more bands later - it will be a mellow start with Weikie at Bishop Street Methodist Church.

According to my Flickr records, I've had my account there for over seven years. I didn't realize it had been that long, since that stat isn't very obvious on the pages I go to there. Or, at least, it wasn't, but Flickr has just upgraded itself, and in sort of a LiveJournal-y way, meaning by doing something it probably shouldn't have.

I'm not that familiar with some of the more popular sites, like Facebook and Instagram, but I imagine some of Flickr's changes were inspired by them. Gone is the simple, streamlined page I've been used to for years, the one where you see roughly 20 pictures at a time, along with their captions (very important for some of my pictures), plus a row of sets along the side. Now, it's like you're looking at the results from a Google image search. It's just pictures, no captions, no way to tell if the picture I'm looking at is locked down or public--important to me, since I do lock down pictures of my family members, for instance.

I'd also gotten an email the other day to let me know that everyone now gets a terabyte of storage! Hooray! But this comes at a price, namely that they're now ad-supported. But if you don't want to see ads you can pay to not see them. This is different from before, where you paid for actual services, like getting more storage space (which now is an obsolete feature) and some other things that I found useful and did, in fact, pay for. Supposedly I can continue paying at whatever rate I was paying previously, and at least that way I won't see ads, but otherwise it's not like I'll be gaining actual features like before. Oh, I think the main reason I went pro (what they called paid accounts) was because with the standard free account, only your most recent 200 pictures were available for viewing or something. I take more than that just at camp. I'd like to be able to see all my pictures, thanks.

The one thing I like about the new Flickr is that I can set my own banner picture, which I've done, but that's pretty much it. They're already bugging me to change my profile picture, complaining it's too small. Well, guess what; it's the size you initially set it at, and it's based off a picture that, lo and behold, is on your server, so why you can't just access it again and resize it yourself is beyond me. (Okay, it's not, but it still pisses me off a bit since, well, it's not my fault you couldn't have sized it bigger to begin with, and now you're mad at me for something I personally didn't change?)

I'm certainly not the only person complaining; I went to the site's Help section because, for one, a number of the buttons aren't labeled and I have no idea what the heck they do, and clicking on them frankly did nothing but stall the page from loading. I fear that maybe they've gone to infinite scroll, which is about my least favorite thing, and considering I have over 7,000 pictures seems like an incredibly stupid thing to have on a page like mine. At least the sets all load on one page now, and the icons are bigger; okay, I do sort of like that. But there wasn't anything wrong with the way the page initially was set up, and I imagine they could easily have allowed the pictures to become bigger without completely changing the page; all they'd have had to do was lose some white space, really.

I have a number of feelings on the subject, but it's close to my bedtime and I fear I'll just start to ramble if I say any more. So, long story short, I give the Flickr redo two thumbs down. There's not enough good to outweigh the bad.

These are the worst of times that I have known.
I'd like to say they'll pass, yet fear to lie.
It's probable that some of you will die
before all this is done. Will die alone

in exile or in prison, slowly starve
die from diseases we know how to cure
be left to die from them because too poor.
Worse yet, know while you live your every breath

is stolen from those poorer. Make them count
each angry moment, live write fuck and dance.
You cannot choose your time. So take each chance
to live. Remember me. Give good account

of who I was. And make the bastards pay
who kill our world, our lives, our brief lost day.