Harper's a Liar? Say it aint so!

This one flew completely under my radar, but apparently Harper's changed the rules regarding drilling of the East Coast, so that drilling companies no longer have to have a back-up plan in place to drill a relief well in the event of a blow-out.

You know, the sort of plan that would have prevented what's going on in the Gulf of Mexico right now. That's a small story, not making many headlines, but maybe you've heard of it?

That's some commitment to ideology. Particularly given it's exactly what he promised he wouldn't do just a month before.

What a douchenozzle. What is it with guys named Steve, anyway?

In other news, this guy's building a fusion reactor in his basement. Which is pretty cool.

I have no idea how I missed this before...

Saturday Morning Watchmen.

Justice Delayed, but Not Yet Denied

It's been three years, but it looks like the white-wash of Robert Dziekanski's killing is being given a proper examination... And unsurprisingly, things aren't looking so good for the officers involved.

I remember when this story first broke, and the Mounties' claims of exactly how the event went down happened to blatantly contradict the youtube video that was uploaded shortly thereafter. They revised their statements, and promised to investigate the matter themselves and - quelle surprise! - found that they hadn't done anything wrong.

I'm glad the blatant miscarriage of justice is being reviewed. Nothing can bring Mr. Dziekanski back, but once this is done hopefully his mother will be able to get some closure.

Cops must absolutely hate the age of cell phone video cameras.

Hawkes Goon Squad

With these three drawings, I've completed designs for all of Richard Hawkes' inner circle:

Mr. Jones
Ms. Widow
Mr. Black

Add Mr. Singe and Mr. Frost, and you've got all of Hawkes' regulars. I've got vague concepts for a few others (a psychic named Mr. Book, the slasher villain Mr. Nice, and a cyborg called Mr. Gears), but to be honest I don't know if they'll ever see the light of day so I'm not worried too much about finishing their designs anytime soon.

More Drawings, and Politics

A wonderful combination!

My latest uploads:

Shinigami Sketches
Shinigami Portrait
Bolt Out-of-Costume
Peter Morissey

So, it seems there are plans for a right-wing Canadian news channel explicitly modelled after Fox news. Pierre Karl Peladeau, that useless waste of skin, is even calling his intended channel "Fox News of the North."

It's a pretty stupid idea for a number of reasons.

-Explicitly right-wing news sources tend to have trouble in Canada, due to so few potential readers/viewers. I mean, you've got the prairies, and... er... well. Yeah. Witness the financial troubles of the National Post.
-CBC News has already been plenty FOXified. For a while just recently, it was pretty much "Tiger Woods News Central."
-The channel this is being modelled after is not exactly raking in the dough. It makes little to no money, its stocks are nearly worthless, and its viewership lags behind all its major competitors.

We're not looking at much potential success, even if you factor in conservatives' tendencies to watch more television than they read. So... Why?

Well, I already covered that question: Pierre Peladeau is a waste of skin. I expect he views this project much like Izzy Asper long viewed the National Post - basically a place to have his disgusting political positions gain a modicum of legitimacy and voter-consciousness-penetration. On that level, even as it fails it may well succeed.

And Harper? Harper will love it for however long it lasts.

Sigh.

Those Merger Rumours

So, as Mordaith pointed out to me, there are persistent rumours floating about regarding a Liberal-NDP merger - despite both parties' best efforts to quash such rumours. This idea is being floated simply to defeat the next Harper government (a worthy goal, make no mistake)... That is, not because the parties have a lot of common ground in terms of policy (they don't), but because they oppose so much of the PC agenda.

This is a terrible idea, of course, and not only because giving voters less choice is usually a bad thing, nor simply because without the NDP Canada will lose its only true left-wing party. No, besides those reasons, it's a bad idea because, as DemocraticSPACE points out, these parties would better spend their energy elsewhere:

Single-party federal majorities are becoming a thing of the past. No single party is truly national. We have a party whose support is largely rural and suburban (Conservatives), a party whose support is largely urban (Liberals), a party whose support is largely in heavily unionized areas (NDP), and a party whose support is in Quebec (Bloc). I don’t see this fundamentally changing any time soon. These are natural tendencies, given different shared interests.

And Canada has been living with a minority government for six years already. We’ve been operating in a situation where one party has to count on the support of another on an issue-by-issue basis. That would be fine if not for our voting system, which is the very thing that creates uncertainty and instability. Why? Because minute shifts in public sentiment can reward one party with a bounty of seats won by narrow margins. So we see endless games on Parliament Hill. A better (more stable) situation instead of perpetual minorities governments and political charades would be stable two-party coalitions, which would be the most common result of a more proportional voting system.

Head over to DemocraticSPACE for the full article. It's worth the read.

Ten Designs Down...

...fourteen more to go before I've got all the character designs needed for the first story arc.

The latest additions to the gallery are:

Mr. Frost
Hawkes (in Power Suit)
Lex Talionis

As always, feedback welcomed.

More Arts!

My cintiq's been getting a workout.

Two new pics:

Richard Hawkes
Mr. Singe

Also, I uploaded an older pic of Shinigami.

I guess I'm a Deviant now.

To make art management easier, I've made a Deviant Art account to upload my images to.

It was kinda neat - not three minutes after uploading my first image (here), someone favourited it.

Anyway, here's what I've uploaded so far (besides Devil Girl, which I've already shared in my previous post):

Bolt's New Costume
Bolt's Classic Costume
Bolt Portraits

I'm doing colours quick-and-dirty style. In other words, badly. To be honest, I've never been good with colours, and the best I've really ever been able to manage is a very basic cel-shaded look - that's what you'll find above. I may start trying other techniques soon, too.

One of these days, I'll need to buckle down and learn me some proper colour theory.

I love my Cintiq

My Cintiq has arrived. I'm still getting used to it, but I've already done a drawing.

It's a Devil Girl!



Uploaded with ImageShack.us

Devil Girl is a minor character who appears briefly somewhere around issue 10 or 11 of the webcomic I want to make. However, I find I like drawing her, so I may change that at some point.

I screwed up the colours - they looked very different in Photoshop than they did when I exported them into a jpeg. Much brighter here. Still, it's a learning process, and overall I'm still quite pleased. Having a cintiq really makes things a lot easier.

I've got four and a half more character designs to do still before I'll be ready to start on the first webcomic story arc (which lasts about three "issues").

EDIT: I played around with the colour settings a bit, I've got it a bit better now.