I'm currently fighting with finishing the fourth comic about Eva, Glass Rain, in order to be able to publish Tunguska #5 before the year 2005 has ended.

Meanwhile, the extra comic that will accompany Driftwood in issue #6 - Pigs Have Wings - has been finished a long time ago. I originally drew it for a manga contest this autumn.

I'm really having trouble with Glass Rain, as it's kind of complex and tricky. So, today I asked myself whether it wouldn't be easier to just switch places between Pigs Have Wings and Glass Rain, and have the former in #5 and the latter in #6 ...

The reasons why I hadn't considered this earlier were the following:

a) Glass Rain is longer than Pigs Have Wings, and Driftwood chapter 5 (in #5) is shorter than chapter 6. If I put Pigs Have Wings in issue 5 with Driftwood chapter 5, Tunguska # 5 would be thinner (50 pages or so), while Tunguska #6 would be really thick (70 pages minimum).

b) I've already drawn the cover for #5, and it has Eva on it.

c) I thought I would be able to publish issue 5 much sooner, and if I'd have included Pigs Have Wings, it would have breached against the rule in the manga contest about the entry not having been published anywhere previously.

But then, (c) is irrelevant now, and (b) is easily solved if I redraw the '#5' on the cover into '#6', and draw a new cover for #5 ...
(a) remains slightly problematic, but I've had previous issues being both very thin and very thick, so it doesn't really matter anyway.

Yay ... so if I switch these two comics, I can suddenly work on Glass Rain without any stress (for instance, I can finish it during the Christmas holidays at mum's place). And all my poor neglected fans (okay, the two of them) will finally get their long-awaited fifth issues.

Phew.

I came across "the world's first applications to apply the scientifically advanced technologies of face detection and recognition to family history and to consumer photos".

Here are the results ...

Last weekend, me and Mihai went to Malmö, where we walked across the city to IKEA (it wasn't very far ...). Along the way we came across this house in an industrial zone, opposite of the Olympus office.



Mihai inquired whether I would like to move in there. "YES!", I exclaimed, and immediately started planning what would have to be done in order to get it in shape. Getting window panes, for instance (unless they were still intact underneath the boards). Mihai seemed to agree, and said it would be a perfect place for loud parties, as there was no one near who would be disturbed.



The house must have been beautiful in the autumn, when the leaves of the vines turned red. Now their stems have been cut off. Too bad ...

A detail of the entrance:

Yesterday, I watched the film Monster by Patty Jenkins, a highly socially critical story based on the life of Aileen Wuornos, the highway prostitute who was convicted of the murder of seven men and (incorrectly) labelled "the first female serial killer [in the USA]".

In the film, Wuornos decides to quit working as a prostitute after she is raped, tortured and almost killed by the man who became her first 'victim'. After that, it's shown how she completely went over to killing in order to support her young girlfriend Tyria Moore. The real Wuornos, however, seems to have kept on working as a prostitute during the 13-month period when she killed the seven men, and resorted to killing her Johns only when they attacked her (as she repeatedly said herself) and/or in order to get bigger stacks of money at times when she felt that Tyria might leave her (as suggested by Sue Russell, who has written her biography).

Prisonactivist.org campaigned for "equal justice for Aileen Wuornos", maintaining that the handling of her case was highly influenced by sexism, anti-lesbian and anti-prostitute prejudice. Their campaign article is still online, and presents interesting statistics, which unfortunately aren't backed by any bibliography. But also Sue Russell mentions this kind of bias: "One prosecutor described her at the 1992 trial as a 'homicidal predator', saying she was 'like a spider on the side of the road, waiting for prey-men'."

In any case, Aileen Wuornos 'volunteered' for death after serving about ten years on death row. Maybe she didn't see much point in continuing her miserable life.

A bunch of heart-shaped balloons got caught in a tree next to Klosterkyrkan.

So that's why it was 'dry clean only' ...

Actually, it's not funny.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4481546.stm

In Canada, a 15-year-old girl has died after kissing her boyfriend. He had eaten a peanut butter sandwich nine hours earlier, and didn't know that she was extremely allergic to peanuts.

Imagine what a trauma the boyfriend is going through now.

It's right here:

http://www.kommiekomiks.com/judy-comic/index.htm

If it says 'page not found', it's because my web host's servers are 'under maintenance', I guess. That has been the case now and then lately ... Or at least I think it's that, because they haven't answered my e-mail to their support yet.

In the free daily paper Metro every issue has in one way or another focussed on rape lately. Every time I pass the Metro news bill, it shouts out that someone has been raped, that there are new, 'shocking' statistics about rape, that the paper has a guide for 'protecting yourself against rape', who the typical rapist is, etc.

I wonder if it's some kind of misguided way of partaking in the white ribbon campaign (against violence against women), or maybe the editorial staff at Metro is made up of perverts who get off on sexual violence?

In any case, I would guess that this kind of exploiting overexposure of rape all over the place just makes people more frightened.

This reminds me of a column by Bella Frank in Arbetaren, where she writes about how she has been almost paranoically scared of rape ever since she was in second grade and heard that a girl in her school had been raped.

The first time I read it, I got angry at Bella Frank for being so irrational and letting people scare her that way.
The second time I read it, I instead got angry at a society where little girls have to be scared of sexual violence to the point where they learn to take measures: having parents pick them up from school, sleeping over at a friend's house, carrying weapons (a stone, a bottle or a small hammer) and a mobile phone whenever they have to walk alone, and always being 'ready' for THAT.

I've personally never been afraid to walk alone at night. When I moved out of my mum's house to my own place, I took Aun San Suu-Kyi's quote "I cured my fear of the dark by wandering in the night" literally, and went jogging alone late in the evenings. Since then I've walked around alone in many strange cities at night (Moscow, Tel Aviv, Bucharest ... Malmö) without ever being afraid of sexual violence. I recently worked a couple of months as a morning paper distributor and met all kinds of strange, drunk or crazy people, but I wasn't really scared of anything but perhaps a presumed ghost in one of the buildings ...

I've learned that if you show that you are afraid, people with ill intentions will notice it and see you as an easy target. Mihai's best friend Gusti is always scared of robbers, and so, he has been robbed quite often. While I've encountered some very insistent people who wanted to have sex with me or to grope me (but not in a violent way - actually, no one has ever hit me in my entire life), I was never scared, just irritated and embarrassed. Some of them simply gave up after a while, while one guy who had groped my breast from behind looked somehow startled or even frightened and ran away when I turned around and clenched my fist. (At the time I was a bit concerned with the risk of him trying to steal my camera, while his groping didn't really disturb me that much.)

But it makes me really angry that not everyone can be as fearless as I am.

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Bloggaren Pernilla Karlsson skriver mer om Metro och våldtäkt.