www.boston.com/bigpicture is a marvel The two most recent posts: Shanghai expo and Paralympics are amazing for a million reasons. Ace, ace stuff.

This:

http://mrdoob.com/projects/harmony/

…is well worth a play about with

Work proceeds apace on Wombat Wambot, my online comic drawn almost entirely in Brushes. It’s happening now at: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Wombat-Wambot/373739641256 with one page a day uploaded (weekdays, I deserve a break now and again) from now until July.

Or so the plan goes…

Also: Oh Apple why do you taunt me with a ‘buy your iPad now’ email when you know I am in t he UK and cannot buy one until the end of April when it’s released way off in the future two months

Updates soon, honest, but for the moment Wombat’s sit heavily on my brain.

Edit: Also also, should I post the pages here? Would that make sense? I wonder…

… dashed, to complete the sentence.

Or at least, to complete the story: I’d hoped to do a lot of things really, one of which was to have a storyteller tell the tale of the Big Book Draw at a day for the people who helped. And I asked a few people, one of whom I’ve been a huge fan of since… well, way back when. And then one by one each request came back as a no, very polite no’s that said, and each one I lived in hope that the next one wouldn’t be as upsetting as the last. Every letter I send out, whether it be a request for a quote for Sylver or sending off an ashcan of Wombat or request for a storyteller for Big Book Draw, I said to myself ‘expect a “no” and then it won’t be as demoralising as it is when the no comes in’. But no matter how much practise I get each no comes as a fresh slice of upset upon the last. The last person to get back to me coming in today as the cherry on the top of a hurricane of turbulence.

All told it’s been not the best of days: the class I taught this morning was… reticent to be assisted. They’re determined to go down their own path, which is fine, it’s just not a path which will lead to a positive outcome – too much stuff has been left to the last minute and a list of measures to stem the tide have been ignored one by one over the past week. The I went off to visit a possible secondary school for son boy which, while wonderful, always leaves me… pensive about the future at the very least. I remember meeting a parent of an autistic child at a book fest and she excitedly told me about the book she had written that the film rights had just been sold for… the proceeds of which paid for special education provision for her son for a year. Whereas I’m just worried about getting any sort of specialised provision for my son at all because, lets face it, any place at all requires a fight.

Then, to cap the day, had an education meet at the end of the day which then ended with what should have been a meet up between media teachers who I’m fond of and a sharing or ideas and ideals. You can possibly guess how that went. The spilling of the olives was, possibly, the highlight.

So, a day of no’s and worse. As an email friend of mine was wont to attest, unrelated to anything above, ‘we don’t get what we deserve’ (WWMT version). I probably do get what I deserve, in the end. Sometimes I guess I just hope for more… Hey ho. Time to sleep. Tomorrow may be a better day. Hopefully.

Monday is for TWIT and iFanboy.

Tuesday is for Buzz Out Loud (as are all days but I don’t have a Tues specific one yet). Unless One Life Left comes out promptly in which case it’s for that.

Weds is for Macbreak weekly.

Thurs is for catching up.

Friday evening is for Joystiq podcast.

Saturday is for Fighting Talk and catching up with Mayo and Kermode.

Sunday is a break.

((and I also listen to Fourcast, Sword and Laser, Ben Heck and other special ones like the Apple author podcasts…))

Oh and audiobooks as well. I listen to them too.

I don’t listen to music so much anymore…. Wonder why?

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/02/colorful_india.html

as ever. It’s an every other day visit for me in the hope that there’s a new update up there. Lovely stuff.

As is www.abduzeedo.com which is a daily hit for me for similar reasons. My major regret at the moment is that the places I visit out of awe for the work contained on there will always be above my skill level… But hey ho. Vicariously living through the work of others and all that.

zzzzzzzz….

Well, partially that is my fault: I recorded 24 and then watched it directly after which took me to midnight and then carried on working for a little while after that.

I am a silly person.

All but a couple of my iPad guesses were wrong.

So I’ve spent the past couple of hours listening to Twit Live (nice one guys although how Leo wasn’t ejected from the centre I don’t know), refreshing engadget and gizmodo and chatting on a computer games forum. Buzz out loud wouldn’t work for me, Twitter wouldn’t work and all the other sites had their moments as a deluge of hashtags and page refreshes sent an electronic shockwave stumbling around the unreal world. Really and truly I should have knocked the forum on the head: it was a negative and petty place of misery and mean spirited tetchiness. The other places were fine and the iPad looks very cool indeed. Unless the American pricing equals exactly the same as the UK pricing ($499 – £499) I’ll be getting one the moment its out. Brushes on the big screen looked all sorts of amazing.

So, iPad. Nice looking beast can’t WAIT to play with Brushes on the big screen. Nice one Steve Sprang you were the star of the night… And big ups to the guys and gals who covered the show so others could catch up on it. Much appreciated, even if sometimes I wondered if the show was more impressive than the content at times.

A smorgasbord of possibilities and entertainment angles, provided I can evade the kids and family long enough to keep up with them. Was going to watch Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs (awesome film – up there with the best 3d adventures and proof finally that Mr T can act rather than just be Mr T) with family, with one eye on the Apple tablet announcement, but that’s postponed til tomorrow so that some members of the household can go out and cheer up other family members not in the household. Which leaves me on child end of day duties, with one eye on the Apple tablet announcement.

These things WILL happen:

No-one will talk to Mr McGraw Hill. He’s either a twit or a shill and everyone will shun him and he will stand in a corner alone eating canopes.

Stevie J will take to the stage wearing an artists smock and beret.

The naming game will end. It’ll be called the Apple PaintSplodge.

The PaintSplodge will eat newspapers for fun.

It will be the best comic reader known to man.

My wallet will cry.

It will have Pixelmator and Brushes built in, or easily buyable from the SplodgeStore. I will be very happy about this.

Molly Wood, CNET’s Apple antagonist par excellance (and the person who sings the word ‘awesome’ better than an-e-bod-e), will be the Chun Li to Stevie J’s Ken.

The internet will buckle and crash and burn as a million twillion uber nerds refresh Engadget every four seconds. Twitter will cease to exist after the first four seconds of the iNote under a deluge of mostly related hashtags. Lots of people will say it’s just a bigger iPhone.

Apart from that it should be quite a quiet evening I’m a guessing. I’m also guessing I will end it substantially poorer than I started it.

So Project Wombat part one of four is nearing completion and I’m in the process of emailing it out to people. That’s the least fun part of a project for me, when gritty realism meets blue sky dream head on. We’ll see how the next few weeks go, basically. This is one of the sample images sent out, I may end up posting all of the first issue here or somewhere, we’ll see… But as always as ever at least it’s not bad for something drawn on an iPod touch.

Can’t wait for tomorrow incidentally. Hoping it’s a corker of an announcement.