(Did anyone notice that Catan reference in the second Kinfolk comic? No? Ah well, doesn’t matter, just my ’tism being the ’tism.) Okay anyway, I think I may have found Eden and I thought it important to report back to the internet. In the actual real world, I’m currently sitting on a creaking leather chair in a pub that’s older than capitalism (the pub, not the chair), listening to the crackle of a huuuuge log fire and the occasional creak of ancient floorboards as one or two people move about the otherwise empty place. Bliss.
Hold on … the mantlepiece of this fire is taller than I am!! Crazy. I mean I’m not particularly tall, but still. I could walk bodily into the fireplace without stooping. [Edit: Oop, no I can’t. Nearly, though.] This is one of the things I love about Merrie Olde Englande, you can’t beat the ancient crap lying about; this pub is about an hour’s walk from my home and I’ve never tried to walk to this particular one before, but here we are. Oak barrels and dark smugglers booths and candles and … it’s like a scene from the Witcher, except real and actual and basically untouched for hundreds of years. I love places like this. Zero gambling machines, zero LED lights, zero wifi, zero music, and there isn’t even a Carling label or a bag of nuts to be seen. Just in-house brewery and Camra signs. Perfect.
In fact the only thing that suggests this is not Eden, is that … I just bought a pint of organic ale and the guy said “That’s £7.40 please”.
And I said pardon me.
As we know, in the 1600s, £7.40 would’ve bought you a house, a pig, a vast barrel of [obviously organic] ale and a clutch of sluts for a month of big-titted debauchery.
Fucking capitalism. This fucking pint had better be fucking good.
Seven pounds forty.
I frequently have to go to Westminster, and even that den of misery doesn’t take quite so many pisses.
It tastes alright.
Fuck.
Hold on, their non-organic beers are half the price and I’ve only just noticed.
Fuck.
…
Ah well, reminds me of a moment from one of my unreleased development comics (which are many). It’s a scifi but this guy gets marooned on a planet where the little green aliens are a touch behind in developmental terms, it’s a slightly Lord of the Rings scenario, just with green hobbits. Here’s the page in question:
… it wasn’t SEVEN pounds FORTY though, was it?! Anyway, maybe I should release all of my half-finished comics? I do wonder that – if I’m really not going to finish them (and some have been shelved for many years), I could probably just dump the scripts at the end of them as text-only, and release them into the wild anyway? Hmm. No rush. I might get to them in the fullness. They’ll see the light in some form, one day.
(you’d think there would be a point to this blog post. No.)
Hi Sindy, The pub sounds wonderful. Organic sounds good, but with earth’s population it’s just more elitist than practical, isn’t it? Ultra-premium marketing.
What, it’s elitist to make food organic? Not sure I can agree with that, though I’d agree in practice organic food tends to be a little more expensive currently. But having enormous sterile fields and G-M crap everywhere isn’t a ‘necessity for Earth’s population’, it’s just wrecking the entire food chain as well as physically buggering the environment … for the sake of profit … https://www.soilassociation.org/take-action/organic-living/what-is-organic/
As a 35 year veteran of the food industry, from farm to fork. I’d like to know how non-GMOs would feed 8.2billion people? Show me a current food that exists that his not modified by human hands whether through selective breeding (again humans interfering in nature because it suits them) or GMOs? This is like the silly big pharma delusional drivel anti-vax lepton-brains keep spouting at the cost of lives.
Yeah if you get rid of selective breeding or minor changes entirely then sure the system wouldn’t work; I’m not saying “Hey let’s all live off blackberries and nettle tea” – I’m saying moving to organic feeds and seeds is good and doable, and there are lots of case studies that would agree. It’s quite a leap to say I’m anti-vaxxing … I’m really not.
It’s not just the Soil Association and Scientists banging on about organic, but real examples: https://www.fwi.co.uk/livestock/beef/how-switch-to-organic-farming-drove-performance-off-forage (that’s sometimes paywalled depending on your location). I also personally know a couple who moved their centuries-old family farm over to organic 20+ years ago, and never looked back – not in terms of bourgeois profits, but actual regular output. (Tbh it was their lived experience that convinced me)
The “You can’t feed 8 billion people on non-GMO” argument I think misses the point; I definitely agree that ‘No Farmers = No Food’, but a fundamentally compromised and depleted environment … also means no food. There is a balance we’re missing by destroying the ground we work … I’d have thought that’s hard to deny, especially in the US https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0301479725040125 (EU has different laws and thankfully avoids the incredible level of GM and hormone-injected stuff America puts up with; I’ve eaten steak and chicken and chocolate in America and it all tasted like watered-down crap … maybe that was just the fault of the places I ate during the couple of months I was there, but still. I came across some extremely iffy foods I’d never encountered before).
Personally I think we need to be careful of spreading the food-panic marketing of vast multinationals who tend to use fear to keep selling bee-killing pesticides etc that are literally long-term wrecking the biodiversity of the fields they purport to serve. We’re quick to think people die of famines through lack of food – but in reality famine requires political fiasco and real human greed and corruption; that’s where the real deaths get started.
But then maybe I just need to shut up and go back to my basket-weaving and my hemp socks 🙂
Yup, caught the Catan reference. Made me smirk. Because Catan isn’t THAT old!
Here in the Craft Brew Capitol of The World (San Diego, CA), $10 for a pint of a tasty local hoppy IPA in a grub pub is par for the course. I’m not allowed to bring any of that brew home with me. No matter how much I get, it’s still just a single serving. Sigh.
Share whatever you wish of your previous partial projects, and I’ll gladly give them a gander!
Ah good, I’m glad someone noticed Catan hehe.
Just did a check 2025 £7.40, would be aprox £700 in the 1600’s and would pay a tradesman for 3 months.
Heheh! And in that 3 months they could build me a flippin house!
So, I’m doing another STFW readthrough, following the in-universe chronological order. Revisiting “Kinfolk” was delicious fun. However, “One Human, Being” hits differently this time. Bob’s “preaching” about Eep, and to Steph, has a new subtext this time around. I’ll not get into details, other than to say I’m so glad these comics keep giving each time through. As all good writing is apt to do.
I’m also noticing one thing about the OHB art: Suki is awesome. Darker skin is often done poorly in 3D comics, yet Suki’s seems just right. I used to be a semi-pro photographer, mainly doing weddings, but also doing lots of portfolios and headshots for wannabe actors and models. I love how light plays on darker skin, and my best work has captured that light.
On my first times through OHB, I was more wrapped up in the characters and plot, and this time I’m also taking a better look at the art. Particularly the scene where Bob and Steph are having a Very Serious Conversation while Suki is on Bob’s lap. The lighting on Suki is transcendent, a mix of diffuse and specular reflections, with Suki’s physicality being spot-on. My brain kept bouncing between the art of the dialog and the art of the render. Many, many re-reads of that section. Trying to capture it all, as a whole.
So, Sindy, thanks yet again. The art of your writing and renders are greatly appreciated.
Did I forget to mention the boobs? Especially the boobs.
Ah, thanks BobC, glad you enjoyed OHB with re-reading – interestingly that series was the first time in ages that I’ve tried writing something as I produced it; as in unlike Lithium, I wasn’t sure where it was going at all. I only began to explore Steph’s ‘darker’ side after she said something rather gothic during a conversation in the second comic. And only explored the daddy issues as the tipping point for her wanting to kill herself, after there’d been hints in the middle of the series! So if it was good writing, it certainly wasn’t intentional writing hehe, funny how that sometimes work out.
Guess because the topic was Being Human, I wanted it to leak out of subconscious rather than being too planned.
Thanks for appreciating the work that went into Suki’s skin too, hehe. I didn’t it want to be an obvious race thing, but rather that they all respected her as the leader as a sub-plot reference to the change Bob embodies in moving them from slave-owning to people-honouring. Her existence as a black captain (which is mentioned in the first comic as the reason she can’t approach the boy) was supposed to be the hat-tip to society’s (or individuals) ability to both do well with equality in some ways, and to also have its own blind spots that need challenging.
Also boobs.
I (and I’m sure many others) will eagerly and gladly read anything you choose to release to the world — finished, unfinished, just begun, only a scribble — anything. Your barely realized work is surely far better than mostof the drivel out there.
Oh that pub sounds wonderful! I’ve always wanted to find something like that. I think I first read about it in a Star Trek book. Kirk was sitting at a pub, in a leatherback chair, reading a book. I think it might’ve been The Prime Directive but not sure.
It’s hard to find something like that here in the USA (Fun fact: That pub you were in is probably older than our entire country!)
You said they had no wi-fi? I wonder if they’d mind if you brought a laptop with you? You could probably noodle out a bunch of stories in that location. That’s a good place to write something about old wood and nice chairs and foamy pints. If I can’t find something like that, at least I can read about it.