Sydney Padua's Blog, page 6

User Experience Page 3

PAGE THE THIRD, oh ye of little faith!

The poster-slathered walls come from the glorious, unparalleled, incredible The Poster Man

Painted by John Orlando Parry, who somehow combined a genius for graphic design with one for music-hall performance, after the exhausting multi-tasking productivity habits of Victorians. If you’re in London you can admire it in person at the Royal Academy of Music until mid-December.

User Experience, Page the Second

Page the second! And introducing the difficulties of rejiggering this beast for a different format! If I was clever I’d have worked out some ingenious html5 way of presenting this comic but sadly I’m just some clown so just click and scroll, folks!

A Few Noteses:

George’s dialogue, with fortuitous aptness and of great help to my laziness in dialogue-hewing, is from the opening of her first piece of fiction, Scenes of Clerical Life.

The ‘terror and alarm’ on one of the posters would have been occasioned by Chartist demonstrations.

‘Guppy’s Gadgets’ is presided over by Sarah Guppy– a fascinating and very under-documented lady, close to the Brunels.

Mmmm.. what else.. oh! How could I have failed to identify the mind behind the message zip-cables! Charles Babbage OF COURSE, suggested them in Machines and Manufactures, where they could make use of those otherwise unproductive church steeples, converging, naturally, on St Paul’s Cathedral. Of course Babbage’s plan was to have the cables themselves move, like a cable-car, which would be more efficient to be sure but not quite so cute as little teeny self-propelled steam-capsules.

USER EXPERIENCE Page the FIRST

For many months promised! For many more delayed! The vagaries of day jobs, publishing contracts, creative torments etc etc have exacted their deadly toll! But no more! Prepare yourselves, its… USER EXPERIENCE! Page the FIRST!

 

So I’m going to try an experiment folks– a new page every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Who has ever heard of such a thing! I may even figure out how to do a ‘next’ button! Notes of necessity will vary in elaboraticity. In this particular instance the merest sprinkling–

 

NOTES:

Marian Evans was not to my CERTAIN knowledge ever behind on her rent, though as a writer possessing the fabled Room Of Her Own and £90 a year in the Hungry Forties I dare say she had some anxious moments. Having moved to London and taken up the life of the pen around 1851 she JUST squeaks into the timeline of this comic. Thank heavens!

If anything I am diminishing the size of her magnificent nose.

ADDITIONAL REFLECTIONS BY THE AUTHOR: User Experience, as I’ve long been trailing, was developed as an experimental comic for the iPad. It also appears in the book.. this version is slightly different from both of those for what will be increasingly obvious reasons of formatting.

Posting to the web after some discussion with interested parties because 1) there is just no way I can get back to Vampire Poets, DESPERATE as I am to do so, until I’ve finished the heavy lifting on what is fondly known around here as THE BOOK 2) I hate not having stuff up on the site 3) as it turns out it’s almost impossible for me to write dialogue outside of my natural sphere, viz, three hours past my bedtime the day after I really should have posted a new comic.

A Panorama!

Just a cool thing I thought I ought to share!

If you’ve ever cast a glance at the ‘Donate’ button on the right yonder, you may have wondered if I spend the gratefully received monies on anything other than booze and dangerous men. I do indeed! I spend it additionally on my principle vice, OLD BOOKS. I love using collages in the comic and hence can justify this degrading habit by the fact that they are a most excellent source of images which once scanned are mine and the world’s.

I’m going to start posting some scans and I shall start with the piece-the-resistance, three months worth of t-shirt money peoples:

A PANORAMA OF LONDON 1849!

Under this demure cover these wonders await!

The whole DAMN THING:

Saw this at an antique shop a few months ago and my heart went piterpat.. eventually some evil whisper talked me into it! Enjoy, it is pretty dang epic! That’s the world of Lovelace and Babbage right there folks, two years before Lovelace died and only a few years after the she wrote the first published paper on computer science. Picture that!

A couple of other notices of interest:

The Ada Initiative, to support women in Open Source, is on the last couple of days of fundraising! I did a poster for them last year– Go and give them a hand, they have some limited edition Kate Beaton prints this year!

I have an extremely rambly interview at Sequential Tart.

Aaand Noted Author Nick Harkaway, penner of the fine touch-o-steampunk spies and clockwork romp Angelmaker, has a guest post by MOI at his Muse And Me tumblr.

Aaaaand that’s it for now! But prick up your ears folks, comics comics this week!

Ada Lovelace Day! With Special Guest Star Mary Somerville

Happy Ada Lovelace Day everyone! This is by way of being a national holiday here on 2dgoggles, as it roughly marks our inauguration– this quasi-comic was born three or so years ago (Ada Lovelace Day being a moveable feast) in celebration of and remembrance of Women in Technology.

Before I get to our guest star, some housekeep announcements..

– the image above is now a tshirt by popular (well, by one comment!) demand! Let me know how it goes, if you order this one, as being an impromptu effort I haven’t had a chance to test the tshirtness of this one.

– I get a fair few newcomers to the site for some reason today, so I’ll plug the handy-dandy all portable! all-navigable! Lovelace and Babbage iPad app, featuring Lovelace The Origin FREE! complete with my very best primary docs. A pretty good all-round introduction to Lovelace and Babbage and the engine, if I do say so myself, and so many footnotes it has reportedly taken some conscientious readers four hours to read an eight-page comic.

And without further ado.. our special guest star! Introduced by an ALL-NEW SNEAK PREVIEW from the Lovelace and Babbage book..

Mary Somerville, Lovelace’s mentor, and namesake of the first Oxford women’s college, is someone I’ve been wanting to work into the comic for ages, and the expanded Origin story in the book is an excellent place for her. She was the zen-calm Obi Wan to Lovelace’s impatient Luke, as it were.

Her books are then as now excellent thorough introductions to Victorian science, and her autobiography is full of interest. She’s particularly interesting on her clear-eyed recounting of what obstacles she faces in studying mathematics as a woman, which she only became liberated to do when she became widowed– the only common state in which a Victorian woman could control her own time and money, and buy her own books for instance.. her first husband, we learn, did not like her studying:

I was thirty-three years of age when I bought this excellent little library. I could hardly believe that I possessed such a treasure when I looked back on the day that I first saw the mysterious word “Algebra,” and the long course of years in which I had persevered almost without hope. It taught me never to despair. I had now the means, and pursued my studies with increased assiduity; concealment was no longer possible, nor was it attempted. I was considered eccentric and foolish, and my conduct was highly disapproved of by many, especially by some members of my own family, as will be seen hereafter. They expected me to entertain and keep a gay house for them, and in that they were disappointed. As I was quite independent, I did not care for their criticism.

She is of particular inspiration to those coming back to math, as a lot of women I’m talking to are, after a long absence. Prevented from her father and husband from studying as a girl, she took it up in her thirties, self-teaching herself entirely from books and almost entirely alone. Then she married a great guy and moved to Italy! Now there’s a role model.

And because it’s nice to make chains of these things, the cites some of her own inspirational women, including this geologist:

I also took lessons in mineralogy from Mrs. Lowry, a Jewess, the wife of an eminent line engraver, who had a large collection of minerals, and in the evening Somerville and I amused ourselves with our own, which were not numerous.

Some books to peruse on an idle hour:

Mechanism of the Heavens (1831)

The Connection of the Physical Sciences (1835)

Physical Geography (1850)

On Molecular and Microscopic Science (1869– when she was almost 90!)

Ada Lovelace Day 2012 Coming Soon!

Howdy folks! Just returned from a sojurn in the woods of the Great White North, where I laboured like the noble Canadian beaver on The Book. You’re doubtless sick of my hinting that there will be comics soon, so, I will remain as silent as the tundra under a blanket of fresh snow on a windless February… oh, patient ones! Believe how keenly I feel the lack of posts! Like an elk unsuccessful at the autumn rut without a single cow! Up where I was staying we have a truly horrendous collection of early-to-mid 20th century Canadian adventure stories for young people, can you tell?

I do have a couple of announcements however!

Ada Lovelace Day 2012, the institution to which we owe our genesis, falls upon OCTOBER 16 this year (it is a moveable feast)! I’ll be giving a little talk at the star-studded Ada Lovelace Day Live! where I’ll be sharing some of my favorite primary docs; it’ll be live-streamed and I’ll give a link closer to the day. So sharpen your keyboards and blog or tweet or merely reflect fondly on your favorite women in tech and sci! I’m also working up a poster of the above image for the Ada Lovelace Day fundraiser.

Speaking of, uh, speaking, I’ll be dropping into the Thinking Comics evening at Gosh on November 14th, where they’ll be discussing Lovelace and Babbage and Logicomix. Should be fun and I see they repair afterwards on occasion to the very appropriate John Snow pub.

That’s about it for the moment.. keep the RSS feed and go about your lives, citizens! One bright day a low rumble and the dam will burst! Or, um, be constructed. Mixed dam-building metaphors. Anyways! And don’t forget, when in Canada, keep your bear-spray inside your coat lest it freeze and be rendered useless against the wolves! Not making that up!

Interlude: Queen Victoria’s VERY SECRET DIARY!

Just a quick squib of a comic in celebration of Queen Victoria’s Diaries, online!

ALL TRUE! There could not possibly be a more typical Victorian document search result, I am in a position to tell you, than a Lovelace-shaped blank, and a nugget of Babbage comedy gold.

On the User Experience comic front, we are advancing slowly forward under heavy fire and strained coffee supply lines. Hang in there!

The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage- BOOK!

This week (well, last week) marks the three-year anniversary of The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage.

I hardly know whether it feels as though I’ve been drawing these forever, or if it’s impossible that I’ve been drawing them so long. What started as a punchline to a one-shot comic– hey, wouldn’t it be hilarious if there was a comic about Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage fighting crime? –has evolved into… well, a really really long punchline. With footnotes!

Now it my great pleasure to announce that this humble comic has been elevated to the PANTHEON one might say, actually, one would definitely say, because Pantheon Books has heard your pleas (a lot more effectively than I have it seems) and we are going to do Lovelace and Babbage: The Papery Thing with Ink On!

Pantheon is the legendary publisher of Very Important Graphic Novels Maus, Persepolis, and Habibi, so, you know, NO PRESSURE. As you may imagine I’ve spent the last couple of months alternating between lurking in Gosh Comics muttering, “Do you have any idea who I am?” and hiding under the bed. Not to mention, quivering with the need to tell someone!

Fair warning: if you start queuing now outside your local bookstore bring a lot of jerky and evaporated soup as it’s going to take me a year of hard drawing to get this thing done! Now I know what you’re asking yourself: ‘What does this mean for ME, the long-suffering 2dgoggles Comics Consumer, the very incarnation of Patience on a Monument? Have I not gone without Lovelace and Babbage LONG ENOUGH??”

FEAR NOT Citizens! Mine has not been the blank, barren silence of the indolent layabout, but rather the expectant, the pregnant silence of Feverish Labour behind the scenes!

USER EXPERIENCE, my bells-and-whistles experimental extravaganza has endured some delay, as I was in the throes of negotiating with Pantheon. As it turns out they are awesome and totally cool with me putting it up here for your enjoyment. As a great deal of it is drawn already expect a sudden sharp shocking increase in the usual pace of things around here. So stand by for that!

Poor Vampire Poets, of which I am so very very fond, continues to be under a Mysterious Curse and will have to endure another several months in the coffin, I’m afraid.

Anyways..

I would like to thank all you wonderful readers for being so supportive of this odd comic-shaped pocket universe. I was not setting out to do a graphic novel; as far as I can recall, I don’t think I was setting out to do anything but enjoy myself, advance my craft, and avoid working on the stuff I was supposed to be working on. It has cost me much labour and not a little stress but your kind comments, enthusiasm, and patience have kept me doodling away. Lovelace and Babbage have not only been excellent company themselves, they have been my means of introduction to so many wonderful, fascinating people. So thank you all! and many many more comics soon!

COMING SOON (ISH)

Just hold on a little longer!

Spinny Beachball, Turny Hourglass, Immobile Progress Bar, Whatever

Folks, folks. I know. I'm really really sorry. There is stuff going on, and things, whereof which presently I can't speak, therefore I must remain silent. We here at 2dgoggles Emalgamated Comics Industries are in what you might term a state of flux.

Hoping to have more comics happening soon! In the meantime, being a woman-type thing I'm evidently meant to be on Pinterest, where I have put pictures of 2d-gogglish clothes and engines.

Also, in some Lovelace news:

- not sure how she'd feel about having a Giant Boring Machine named after her..

- if you live anywhere near Cambridge Massachusets, you can go to a musical where Ada Lovelace meets a world-weary Civil War veteran, in something that sounds like a dream I might have had after too many late nights on John Carter and User Exprience