The Lost Art of Longhand, by Elayne Riggs
8:30 AM, Bx7 bus southbound to subway: It’s favored by Luddites and techies alike. Early adopter Neil Gaiman, for instance, writes all his first drafts this way, using various fancy pens. (Me, I use my Uniball blue roller ’cause it’s what I carry in my pocketbook.) It’s physically draining, at least if you’re not used to it. It requires both concentration to keep your hand steady, and a heightened awareness of your surroundings, particularly on moving vehicles. It certainly isn’t for everyone; I’d rarely recommend it for myself. But a pad of paper is a lot lighter and more flexible than my laptop, and not having the distractions of checking email and blogs and playing online games forces me to focus on the here-and-now of completing this week’s column. Besides, I need the practice in transcribing relatively illegible handwriting.
My Dad had beautiful longhand. Which amazed me, because he was naturally left-handed which was a no-no in hyper-superstitious Romania in the ’30s. His schoolteachers beat that left-handedness out of him — not entirely, I think he still shaved and did a few other things lefty, but he became right-handed for purposes of writing. I inherited his "sinister" gene, but by 1960s secular America children were allowed to retain such peculiar proclivities.
8:55 AM, "1" train southbound into Manhattan: Unfortunately, I never inherited Dad’s longhand flair. I can add a few flourishes here and there, but only if I slow down and write very carefully and deliberately, and that starts my hand aching again. I figure I’m okay as long as I’m just legible enough to make out a check (I’m mired enough in the 20th century to still use checks on occasion). Damn, I have to put this away now, someone just sat down next to me and I can no longer comfortably use my right arm to prop this up… (more…)
On the one hand, io9 
It’s been a hell of a winter for me. Under the Lennonesque heading of life being what happens to you whilst you’re busy making other plans, the latest in a series of stumbling blocks that have come between me and my ability to participate more in ComicMix’s news section — including the still-ongoing detox from my former job (which kept calling me back in through the end of last year), the nearly-full-time search for a new means of income, and a nasty lingering flu – was last week’s call to jury duty. It was inevitable, but given my temporary unemployment period I’m glad it happened when it did. It’s been over four years since I last served, and now it’ll be another four years at least until they call me up again, which should gladden any potential employer.
The comics blogosphere is spreading the word quite effectively about the current situation of Rachel Nabors, who’s facing a dental bill of up to $25,000 to correct a serious jaw problem. Nabors, a Friends of Lulu Kim Yale award winner, doesn’t have any health insurance. As Theresa Tschetter 
Many people in this country are experiencing the age of interactive television for the first time. In other countries such as the UK, they’ve had a version of this for some time, in the form of a curious informational additive known as teletext, a useful imp that lives in the bands of the picture that we don’t normally see, and which can be accessed by Brits wanting to know the local weather, transportation timetables, sports scores, and lots of other stuff that most of us in the US can only get online or through cable systems. Here in the US I’ve just discovered my digital cable system has interactive channels that can personalize my weather, traffic, pretty much whatever I want. And that’s not even counting the on-demand entertainment, a tiny percentage of which is available at no extra charge!
Of all the artificial divisions of labor that modern assembly-line comics have spawned, inking is probably the least understood and most maligned, containing elements of both specialized artistic crafting and production talent. Most laypeople and casual comics readers still regard inking as merely the latter, a form of "tracing" requiring little more than a steady hand and an eye towards deadlines. 
Have you heard of the proverbial dancing bear? It’s apparently a Russian expression, which has its origin in some folk tale or other, and holds that the amazing thing about the performing animal isn’t how well it dances, but that it dances at all. This metaphor (sometimes substituting "dog" for "bear" after the 
