• Firefox keeps updating and improving. The most recent addition is prettyfication with personas, which make the browser easier on the eye but the tool bar harder to read, depending on the persona you choose.

    I have only one quibble with this. Along with the pretty toolbars has come a little picture in the footer bar. I know it’s meant to be a Firefox Fox, but to me it looks very like the Foxybingo.com Fox. (No I’m not going to add a link.)

    I’m sticking to Safari on my mac. The Jeremy Kyle show is sponsored by Foxy Bingo. I’m worried that they might hijack my webcam and I’ll find I’m live on National TV, right in the middle of some ghastly story about a boyfriend-beating, drug-using beauty with shaved hair and very few teeth who wonders why her Mother doesn’t love her.

  • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBIRGnrPEm0

    Here’s a new video for you in the Writing School line, all about the ghastly business of editing. Everyone hates it, but the thing is to unclench and let go. Writing is a journey from me to you. Editing is the process of letting go. Hope you like it.

  • Taken from Wikipedia:

    Calum MacKenzie in his preface to the exhibition catalog, The Scottish Cartoonists, published in 1979 by the Glasgow Print Studio Gallery, defined the selection criteria:

    The difference between a cartoonist and an illustrator was the same as the difference between a comedian and a comedy actor – the former both deliver their own lines and take full responsibility for them, the latter could always hide behind the fact that it was not his entire creation.

    I began my career as an illustrator, and even though I was writing and having my own books published from the start, some twenty-three years ago, I thought of myself as an illustrator and worked mostly on other people’s stories.

    Time moved on, and even though I still spend most of my time drawing and illustrating, I’m thought of now as an author. I’m often asked in schools who illustrates my books. People seem surprised when I say I do. I’m blessed with two talents – most people would be happy with one of them.

    But, I go on to explain, the thing that ties the to together is storytelling, In fact I’m probably happiest in front of an audience drawing and telling stories live. Illustrators often write, writers very rarely illustrate. It’s storytelling that makes an illustrator different to other artists.

    People of ten refer to my “cartoon style”. They say it in an apologetic way as if trying not to offend. Reading the quote above this morning, made me wonder – is that what I am? Am I a cartoonist, but I don’t know it? I feel that what I do write are really graphic novels or even Manga, in the Japanese sense. In the west we think of Manga as being a particular style, which should really be termed Anime. As I understand it, Manga is the telling of stories with lots of pictures and text – which is what I do.

    However, authors get treated a lot better than illustrators and I think illustrators are treated a tad above cartoonists. Cartoonists tend to be dismissed as ephemeral, whimsical, cheap comedians, whereas it is assumed illustrators can probably do proper art if they tried.

    Perhaps I’d better stay convincing people that I’m an author and stay in the room with wine and canapes – The artists tend to get shoved in a room out the back with beer and sandwiches!