Thought for the Day

The commercial comics of today are the product of their history. A history of terrible mistakes, of crimes, lies and fuckery, in large part. But we learn from them. We make new mistakes, sure. But Jack Kirby and everyone else taught us to read those contracts, to find that new ground, to recognise that bullshit, to keep moving and to keep trying to do anything. It can seem silly, now, that people might have been angered by someone redrawing Jack Kirby’s Superman heads. But it speaks to a management notion that artists are interchangeable, artists are flunkies, artists may not speak in their own voice even when servicing corporate assets for a passionate audience, artists are just cogs and wheels and should shut up. It’s things like this that should raise a whole range of questions in the head of the young creator who wants to draw Superman one day.

— Warren Ellis on Jack Kirby and Superman's head.

Now can we get rid Harper? Please?

"You can't count on a government that can't count," [Ignatieff] said.

More Snow Leopard Oddities

I have two PDF documents. One document rendered terribly in both Tiger and Leopard. There was one page of the document, in particular, that would not display its text, although the page rendered with text in Ubuntu's PDF viewer. In Snow Leopard, this document renders just fine.

My other document contains greyscale pictures. In Leopard, it rendered fine. Under Snow Leopard, Preview renders three of the images (and only three) as almost negative images (I say "almost" because they aren't on fully black backgrounds -- I think there's some transparency going on -- but all other parts of the image have reversed the colour scheme: black where there should be white, and white where there should be black). Strange.

Under Ubuntu, I'm pretty sure I can report a problem from within the viewer itself. I've been hunting around for a bug reporting mechanism. Blar. (I've found the forums, which seem to be full of people complaining about things being broken in Snow Leopard. I don't want to complain; I just want to report the error.)