One More Before the Weekend

Hot off my tablet:

Kid Viking.

I'm getting so sick of doing these character designs... But I want to do this comic right, and that means having clean reference images. Le sigh.

It also means having scripts, which I haven't touched in some time... But that's a whole other problem, and a less immediate one since when I stopped writing I still had seven or eight (can't recall) completed issues, so I'll be good for a while.

Anyway, going to a family reunion on the weekend, I'll likely be back sometime Saturday Night or Sunday afternoon.

Another Name Off the List

Captain Thunder this time.

Alloy

Viewable here.

I've lost track of how many more character designs I want to do before I get started on the comic itself, but the list is getting shorter bit by bit.

Deviant Art Update

Been working on this one for a while:

Rooftop Battle Royale.

Landmark Charter Case

It took almost eight years for the case to make its way through our court system, but in the end the precedent has been set in the Supreme Court of Canada regarding the denial of Alan Ward's rights. As the article at the CBC says:

The ruling means that people whose rights have been infringed can seek damages even if they suffered no actual loss and even if the authorities acted in good faith.

So, score one for the good guys. Luckily, the denial of citizens' rights by state authorities is incredibly rare here, so it's doubtful this precedent will ever really apply to any other cases.

Harper, Statistics, and the Left-Wing Bias of Reality

By now, most anyone who reads my blog has probably heard that Harper recently launched his latest salvo in his party's war on facts and knowledge. If not, you can read all about it in that left-wing rag, the Globe and Mail. Basically, Harper wants to scrap the long-form compulsory census and replace it with a voluntary form. But to make up for the fact that it's voluntary, he'll be mailing the census forms to many more households than previous, so that the whole thing is 30 million dollars more expensive!

That's fiscal responsibility for you. And why did he scrap the long form? Privacy complaints, goes the claim.

Guess how many complaints were made over the census in the past decade?

Go on, guess.

The answer is three.

Why am I talking about this? Well, a recent disastrous internal town hall meeting brought it into my mind. During this internal town hall, a chief statistician seems to be gearing up to resign in protest over these changes. His is just the latest voice being added in protest of this move, a chorus that indicates a potential Fed-Province battle on the horizon, with the media and scholastic circles siding firmly on the side of the provinces.

Will this finally be the straw that breaks the back of the Canadian voting populace? Will we finally vote out this evil prick? Hope springs eternal.

This is, of course, part of a pattern on Harper's part - he's long been antagonistic towards StatsCan. Now, Harper's supposed to be savvy and, to be fair, he's pretty good at twisting the political process to his own ends. In a gaming group he'd be what's called a Rules Lawyering Jerk. Everything he does may technically be within the lines, but only as much as does the "I'm Not Touching You!" game that children play in the back seat of the car. Allow me a visual aid.



Uploaded with ImageShack.us

But this is a bad move. It's an obvious bad move - he had to have been aware of the chances that this could play very poorly with pretty much everyone. So, why?

The answer is ideology. The Tories are, more than any other party, driven by ideology, and rather than look at reality and allow their ideology to conform to known facts, they blaze on with their ideologically pure agenda and demand reality conform to them. It's pretty much classic neo-con, an art perfected during Bush's tenure south of the border. Anytime the Tories seek to introduce some terrible bit of legislation that directly contradicts what expert research says works, they'll come back with some rejoinder about how they couldn't give a wet fart about what some ivory tower intellectuals think. (E.g., gun registry, pensions, nuclear safety, global warming, environmental science, &c.) Still, every time they do this, it costs them.

So, they gut the census. They can't do away with it entirely, of course - that would require a vote which they'd inevitably lose. But Harper can make these changes unilaterally - it's in his power to do so - and that will effectively ruin whatever benefits the census provides, as any good statistician will tell you. Hell, anyone who's taken any statistics course whatsoever, who has even a passing familiarity with how statistics works will be able to tell you of how little value a purely voluntary census would be. Selection bias, anyone? And it even costs more! But money well spent to remove the opposition's ability to point at solid research and say "The world doesn't work the way you want it to."

Sometimes I think about the adage "you get the government you deserve," and I despair.

EDIT: Seems that Sheikh is no longer merely considering resigning... He's actually gone through with it, as reported here.

Because it seems so rare...

I do love it when stories have a happy ending.

Hopefully the next time that school board thinks about giving in to hate, they'll think long and hard about it.

Drawings &c Minus the &c

So, just drawings really.

Only two new ones to show off this time.

Vitalia, who becomes the kinda-sorta sidekick of the team...
and Zortok, a former Chemical plant janitor who thinks he's an alien invader.

Infiniforce

This took me a long time to do - I wanted to get the building right, and it was four designs rather than my usual one for design pics.

In fact, I watched the entire first season of Raising the Bar while drawing this.

In the story, only one of these characters is alive enough to show up in the current day, and that's only planned to be a brief appearance... However, the characters are all pretty important to the setting, and show up in flashbacks. They appear as a park statue in the first storyline, which is why I wanted to get their designs down.

Prediction for Saturday

Germany over Argentina.

The octopus says so.