Blog – Page 33 – Xaviar X. Xerexes

United States Election Map

by Xaviar XerexesNovember 22, 2012

We had a big election in the United States this Fall. Somehow I suspect you, whomever you are, heard something about it. There are a lot of maps showing BLUE and RED results — all based on geographic political boundaries. Which isn’t surprising as the U.S. presidential election is still a state by state election (our “Electoral College”) and not a national election. But it does seriously distort understanding how the actual peoples voted. The below map which I spotted at Talking Points Memo does a much better job of showing where the peoples are and how they voted:

New York City

by Xaviar XerexesNovember 22, 2012

Bad Toro

by Xaviar XerexesNovember 11, 2012

I like coffee cups with interesting designs. T-shirts too. It’s disposable pop art and a lot cheaper than things to hang on the wall. This one is from a trip to Spain a few years back – it says “Bad Toro” on it which I guess is done kind of marketing slogan. I just like the simplified bull image and the red and black color scheme.

Year Without ComixTALK

by Xaviar XerexesNovember 3, 2012

The way this has shaken out it’s been the year without ComixTALK which is probably irrelevant to everyone but me. It’s been actually pretty easy to not worry about it — I certainly wrote a lot of verbage about comics over the 00s decade and I just haven’t felt the need to tell the world what I think about comics writ large or any individual comic. To the extent I have felt like piping up posting here has been enough for me. I do wish I had a clone or an army to put into place the ideas I have …

Stripped Documentary Excerpt: Classroom Film on Comic Syndicates

by Xaviar XerexesOctober 21, 2012

This is so well done it gives me tremendous confidence in the Stripped documentary on comics — not entirely sure of when it will be available but the latest Kickstarter update talked about submitting it to festivals. The update also included a link to this excerpt from the current edit of the film which is a snarky little mock classroom film on comic strip syndicates.

Sin Titulo Finale

by Xaviar XerexesOctober 20, 2012March 8, 2020

Cameron Stewart finished Sin Titulo this week after five years of work. I won’t say it was a perfect ending, given the ambitious reach and metaphorical nature of the story, I think it might have been impossible to construct an ending that was perfect for everyone. It was exciting, and a bit of a twist for me at least. It also nicely synced back up to where Stewart begun in the very first page of the comic. Above all I really enjoyed the art work, the panel composition, the visual power that Stewart built into this work. It’s a traditional …

Clay Shirky on a Git-ized Government

by Xaviar XerexesSeptember 29, 2012

Clay Shirky is a professor and a keen observer of how technology is changing society. This talk at TED on how open source may change government is an interesting overview of some of the changes the Internet has already wrought and how unpredictable more changes will be to us. In particular he focuses on Git which was developed to manage the messy process of open source development. His buzzword is “cooperation without coordination” or rather I’d say a tremendous reduction in the cost of coordination. Shirky looks at Git as a new form of argument and puts forth that changes …

Illuminate!

by Xaviar XerexesSeptember 10, 2012

I never checked out Hijinks Ensue in years past — its appearance and visibility came in a time when my webcomic reading list was overloaded, disorganized and I was in no mood to check out every new flashy bauble that came along. Still I knew I ought look at, as it seemed plausible that I would like it. I added it on Comic Rocket this year but I can’t do the archives, too big, too topical and sometimes FEAR OF AN ARCHIVED PLANET is what’s holding me up from actually reading the dang thing. So I just plunged in to …