Welcome back to Murphy’s Law, this issue coming directly from the cold North. In this episode we are stumbling into a dialogue with a mysterious stranger. Chilling.

More on my adventures in Finland coming up soonish.

Not much to say anyway except that I’ve finally arrived in Joensuu, sitting in a quaint little hostel with free WiFi. Driving down those long Finnish motorways comes close to mediation. Forests, lakes, a few fields, forests with lakes shining through, forests and lakes. There wasn’t much of a freeway, most of it was country roads with little dirt paths forking off into the woods, and sometimes, if you were lucky, a lay-by next to a lake.

Well, maybe not upwards.

Finns seem to have a very laid-back driving style, and mostly going at a mere 80-100kph down the 450km drive from Helsinki to Joensuu cannot compare to the aggressive hassle on the German Autobahn. It also saves on fuel. Whether Finns only have such a relaxed driving style due to the many, many, MANY speed traps that line the way or whether they have their tempomats set to chill, I have yet to find out.

Also, I’m growing fond to the local cuisine, namely the incredibly tasty Karelian Pierogi. Had them for breakfast pretty much each day since I had set foot onto the ferry, and both for breakfast and lunch today. My rating: Extremely nommable. Addictive even. And quite inexpensive as well! Now don’t lecture me about the calory intake of carbs with fat and more carbs. I’ve officially stopped caring. <3

Not all too expensive... depends on how much you value your immortal soul.

Mhhh. So, after watching a nice sunset over the Baltic Sea (and a nasty wind whipping up my hair), there was not much left to report about my ferry trip. The next day I was greeted by cold rain, and when I finally drove my car out of the ship’s steel belly and onto the freeway, my sound system started blasting Dropkick Murphys’ “Sunshine Highway”. Well screw you too, random iPod playlist.

In the city, I parked my car at the next convenient spot (free parking till 9am, yay) and had a first glance at Helsinki in the rain. I laid my eyes on the Finnish Parliament, the music park (under construction), and walked on the rocky roof of Temppeliaukio Church… with rabbits living in it! Egads!

Didn't get a better shot than that. Them little varmints is quick!

A quick stroll through the surrounding area later, and noticing that next to nothing is open at 7.30am on a Sunday, I parked my car near the hostel and went up the Olympia Stadium’s tower to watch the city sprawl below me. Lucky for me that by that time the rain had finally stopped. The route was settled: Finlandia Park, inner city, the port, and pretty much everywhere else my feet would lead me. Now, what struck me most while wearing down my soles was the city’s architectural style. Or lack thereof. I can imagine that architecture-savvy travellers will be quite stricken by the many different styles from many different periods, all right next to each other, and sometimes even on the same building. Just check these little shots:

Come to think of it... architecture blogging would be a cool way to get around the globe. Now all I need is some knowledge on the subject...

... I think I just outnerded myself.

Sometimes it’s modern, sometimes Victorian, sometimes industrial and sometimes you have that ugly decaying grey concrete that can only be described as… Soviet. On my aimless walk through the southeastern city, I saw quite a bit of art and sins. Take Kallio Church for instance. Beautiful from the outside, and dwarfing all surrounding buildings on its hill. The inside, however, is as bland as my hostel room. The port, on the other hand, is completely beautiful, and by the time I reached the city proper it was swaming with people to liven the place up a deal. Before, I had seen more seagulls than actual people. Hell, in this city it seems that seagulls think they are people:

Second from the left be pimpin'.

There's also the yellow super mutant variant... what?!

Johan Ludvig Runeberg, composer of the Finnish national anthem and his feathery friend Runebergull, composer of bird droppings.

When I saw those streets filled with people, that’s when I realised… they open up their shops on a Sunday! (cue valley-guy speak) And I was like, amagad, I still need a new jacket, like, for Winter and stuff. Because it’s like totally cold here in Finnorwegimark. And they open up shops like on Sundays, so I was like “I’m totally looking for a jacket now”. Even though my hair was, like, all tangly because I had no time to, like, wash it on the ferry. And I was like, amagad, what if they, like, think I’m a drifter… *cough, sputter* Ugh. That is harder to pull off than it looks. Yeh. Well, the point is that even Finns don’t sell winter jackets in August. I found one that was slightly warmer than the rest and affordable, but I doubt it would keep me from freezing to death while watching auroras in Lapland… which does sound like a euphemism for something kinky, come to I think of it.

After a very late lunch in an authentic Finnish restaurant some noodle place, I made my way back through a few shops towards the hostel, longing to send those little tidbits over the ether to you. All in all, Helsinki is, even in rain, a beautiful city by the sea that doesn’t smell like it.

PS: I’ll set up a Flickr account later, for all those pics that our server can’t won’t should not have to handle.

I’m on a ferry motherfucker, take a look at me
Straight flowin’ on a ferry on the deep blue sea
Bustin’ five knots, wind whippin’ my Burberry
You can’t stop me motherfucker, ’cause I’m on a ferry

Now that that obvious reference is out of the way, I think I owe you a little explanation. At this very moment I’m en route from Rostock to beautiful Helsinki, for a Sunday full of awe and wonder, and then on to scenic little Joensuu where I will spend my Autumn semester. Seeing as it’s the in-thing to blog about your happenings in a strange new world, I’ve started a new category going by the name of “New Horizons” where I will blog about my time abroad. I will also retroactively put that category on all my (two) travel-related posts from the past, for your convenience™.

While I’ve made some very uninteresting pics of the ferry’s interior and surrounding sea, the WiFi on board blocks all my attempts to upload them here. For the above pic I had to go some detours and have it saved to a rather unsavoury location outside the WordPress framework by our almighty webmaster. Some smart IT person on board must have blocked all features (even youtube!) that would drag down the WiFi’s performance and make it even more sluggish than it already is. But hey, I’m glad I can post at all.

So, I’ll just have to describe this bucket of bolts to you. As you can see on the pic, it’s the Superfast VIII, a ship of the Tallink-Silja fleet, that is so incredibly lighting quick that the trip from Rostock to Helsinki only takes… 28 hours. We cleared Rockstock port at 2am German time, which meant sleeping through most of the coastal view. I’m glad I shelled out an additional €40 for a shared cabin. The people staying in the deck seat area did look all but rested. And smelling some of them, I guess my sleep wouldn’t have been as tight next to someone down there… the other gents in my little 4-bed cabin, however, are pleasant enough. Two of of them actually didn’t show up last night. Kinda weird, come to think of it.

Food is okay-ish. A bit too expensive, but I guess that’s what you can pull off, if you have the on-board monopoly. The cakes we had for lunch however… mouthwatering. Let’s see what dinner has in store. Not much else to do here anyway, except maybe to stare out at sea and write; either silly blog posts or that nagging little paper that despite all my efforts did not cave in and write itself. They never do. Had a nice talk during breakfast with a German Professor, who took up teaching in Tallin. Judging from his tales, it seems I need to put Estonia on my map of “places to check out at some point” as well. Or Tallin, at least.

Well, that’s all for now. Tomorrow will be all about my sight-seeing adventures in Helsinki. Let’s hope that hostel has some free WiFi for me to pepper my post with some flavour pictures. Till then, moi moi!

The last month provided quite a bit of a hassle and procrastination for me at the same time. Apart from work and university, StarCraft II held me in its Ultralisk-like claws, giving me the guilty pleasure of wasting away in front of the screen for a few hours again. Well, wasting away in front of the screen doing something else than writing texts or fooling around with illustration software. God, that screen is shiny. And yours will shine as well, as soon as you lay your eyes upon a new (well, old remade) episode of Murphy’s Law!

Welcome back to Murphy’s Law, now available in my usual slow update cycle. In this episode, we follow Corporal Florian Pleathers as he tries to hit up Detective Debjit Murphy. Irony ensues.

Well, what can I tell you about this one? Redesigning Pleathers was something for which I needed a sketch first. Going free-hand in Illustrator is nice, but I fail quite a bit at recreating my personal style without some reference material. The mission was clear: New Pleathers should be even more loatheworthy than the original one. From Murphy’s point of view, anyway. Basically I went with a weak chin, huge bulbous forehead and one of those 90ies gel’d up short haircuts. You know the one. Further abuse testing of their social interaction will show whether that works out visually.

As for the ranks, I’ve had a few switcheroos after reading up on American Police Ranks. Not really informed any more on that topic now than I had been in the beginning, but immensely more confused, I demoted the Chief down to Captain, as I hadn’t really intended him to be in charge of anything more than the precinct. But more to that, later. I’ve also made Pleathers a Corporal, complete with two inverted chevrons on his shoulders. I just hope that’s even remotely correct…

Adding the blood proved to be a whole new challenge. Or rather, I avoided that challenge by downloading a number of blood splatter brushes for Photoshop and slapping them onto my Illustration after I had already exported it. So, what you have here is the first post-produced Murphy’s Law comic in history, ladies and gents! Well, okay, apart from those with a sepia tone slapped on. And those where I enhanced the contrast and colours a bit. The first post-produced one I did in Illustrator anyway.

I will let you bask in its gory glory until the next issue hits the digital shelves. In the meantime, I shall ponder whether “splorch” really is a good sound effect.

I actually liked the hand-drawn art style in the old one better, as it is the most dynamical version of Murphy I’ve created up to this date. However, what it has in style, it lacks in detail and reproducability. So, while I don’t consider this illustration an improvement, but more of a sidegrade, it serves to level the comic’s style quite a bit. And I now have more templates to work with in the future.

But go ahead and make up your own mind.

Welcome back to Murphy’s Law, which last time took six months to go from the teaser-trailer to page one. I guess you could call that an improvement. In this episode, we follow Detective Debjit Murphy as he puts the “tool” in “multitool”!

Initially, I wanted to give the cola a more fiery design and call it Phoenix Cola, but apparently some New Zealandian do-gooders were one step ahead of me. Herbal cola that’s not actually, ahem, “herbal” but contains Ginko, eh? That burns on a wholly different level. The worst thing? I wanna drink one of those now. Damn you people.

Oh well. Guess the reference works this way, too, if not even better. Stay cool the best you can folks, until next time. And remember to drink the Wright stuff™!

I guess you can now look upon it as the intro sequence. The prologue. The real starting point. Ladies and Gentlemen: Murphy’s Law is at hand!

Welcome to Murphy’s Law, where we follow the exploits of Indio-American all-purpose dective Debjit Murphy in the crime ridden city of Peaceful Hamlet. In this episode, we’re treated to… A TEASER TRAILER! BLAM-O!

All the work with Illustrator over the years finally made this one a breeze. Well almost. If you take the frustration out of trying to illustrate something and fill it with progressive success, it feels more like a breeze even if it takes hours. In summery heat. On a metal Mac. Oh well, at least I could do it outside in the grass. As long as the sun wouldn’t hit Steve’s patented über-reflective screen. Thanks man.

Technical difficulties aside, I retconned (link goes to TVtropes, enter at your own risk) Murphy into being of Indian (as in “from India”) descent now. I never could make up my mind what nationality he stems from, and how the name Murphy would make sense in that.
He started out as a sketch that I, at the time heavily influenced by the Ace Attorney series, based around the useless-but-amiable Detective Gumshoe. He ended up looking too much like the “grizzled detective” stereotype, so I reworked his hairdo to look a bit less conventional. That, again, looked so much better when I gave him dark skin. Following this completely arbitrary design progress, he appeared to simply be Afro-American at first. But that soon became unattractive as I did not want to invoke any Shaft-esque cop story that would border on Blaxploitation (crap, I did it again). Giving him the project name “Lavernious Murphy” didn’t help much either.
I then thought about where else he could be from, conceding with “oh what the hell, how about the Middle-East”. And there was Darius Murphy, of Iranian descent, whose parents came to the states and got a new name. Or grandparents. Or his mother married an American. As you can see, that backstory felt incredibly uncomfortable to form.
In the final design stages of the last few weeks, I shifted his skin colour a bit more towards Auburn, and bam, suddenly he had an Indio-Irish heritage… you may get a look at that scrambled up genealogy later. Soon as I have it figured out myself. All he needed now was something of a more stereotypical name. Thankfully, the internet is full of creative ways to name your baby boys, even in Hindi. He ended up with the name Debjit, which not only sounds like some sort of Irish curse and thus goes nicely with Murphy, but apparently also means “one who has conquered the gods”.

Oh, have I got plans for you, Murphy! Stay tuned for more of my Redesign Retcon Rampage.

And there goes my resolve. With that reworked borderless design, and customizeable highlights in rugged-ish lines, they finally look exactly how I imagined them. All in all putting that sketch into an illustration only took me a double lecture (hey, guy’s gotta keep his hands busy during long, excruciationg philosophical dead-end discussions) so it might be sensible to go with semi-clean illustrator cubism after all. Ahh, decisions decisions. And what to do when my lectures end? I’ll keep you posted.

I know my last post may have been a bit harsh towards a sad little font that only wants to be our friend. I did not mean that this font is a useless rotting mass of flesh that through some sort of wicked sorcery and/or viral infection manages to still stumble over the surface this planet and bring terror and destruction wherever it smells an intact human brain… well, okay, I did call it a zombie apocalypse. But there are several uses for Comic Sans after all! Kinda like in the ending of Shaun of the Dead!

I’ve strained my tasty grey matter to uncover just a few of the million ways one could use Comic Sans for personal or societal benefit:

1. Put it on a flyer for your party to make sure no designers show up and ruin the mood with their constant gobbledygook technicalese babble.
2. Use it as a font for the potentially dangerous additives in your chemically enhanced food. No one will take that part serious. It’s way better than fine print.
3. Make it the official font in all videogames, so children go outside to play or read a book. One printed in a proper font, of course.
4. Print tax exemption forms with it, which should quickly reduce all of your country’s debts in just a few years.
5. Write a declaration of war in it, thus not violating any conventions but being able to deliver the first strike, while the enemy still wonder whether you’re for real.
6. Use it on an application to stress test how much the company really wants you for your skills and adjust your wage negotiations accordingly.

See? Comic Sans can be your friend, if you use it in just the right way! And there are so much more ways in which you can make this frowning typeface feel needed and a valuable member of fontiety. Because excluding a handicapped font just because of its physical properties is just plain wrong. Just, because. And I won’t tolerate any fontism on my blog, no siree!

PS: You have no idea how closely MS Bob escaped font zombie hell.

Folks, there is an evil lurking on your hard drives. No, not a virus. Not some sort of evil corporate OS either. No. Read those words with as much contempt I had writing them: Comic Sans!

Yes, I know. Just another whiny rant about a font that has been scorned by designers and typenerds ever since its unholy inception. But I have had it with this one particular font. People use it because they think it’s endearing. Because it looks like fun. Because it feels more hand-written. Because it looks like you’re not really serious about what you are writing. Well, I can agree to the latter point. It’s what I always think when I read something written in Comic Sans. You cannot be serious!

Just look at those letters. Really look at them. They appear slightly bent, but not in any natural way. No-one would ever write like this. They look sickly, a mere husk of an actual font, empty, and soulless. So, cue the drum roll for my grand analogy of the day: Comic Sans is the Zombie Apocalypse of all fonts.

According to that wiki, the font was first implemented for use with MS 3D Movie Maker, so let’s call that program “Patient Zero” (…looking at the characters, the description is quite fitting). MS Bob only narrowly escaped that horrible fate. From here the font spread, with Windows 95 as its catalyst, to infect PCs and all the poor helpless Macs over the world. Its purpose? To devour human brains, especially that tasty section responsible for your sense of style.

“Oh, but Tim”, you say now, “that font is supposed to just be fun; there is not that many fonts out there that convey the same feeling!”
First of all, they got you! The font zombies got you! There is no hope left. You can’t stop the infection, well, except for the usual method. Consult the Zombie flick of your preference for further details. Secondly, yes, yes indeed, even Times New Roman and Papyrus fail to induce the same degree of nausea and dread that Comic Sans brings. However, if you want well-designed comic-style fonts, see Dr. Blambot for a prescription.

Make the world a better place. Only you can prevent font zombification!

Edit: Learn something new every day… Illustrator actually has a “Russian Poster” colour set! Immediately went to improve my propaganda revolutionary poster. Looks so much better.