Neil Gaiman on the importance of reading fiction, and libraries.

"When you watch TV or see a film, you are looking at things happening to other people. Prose fiction is something you build up from 26 letters and a handful of punctuation marks, and you, and you alone, using your imagination, create a world and people it and look out through other eyes. You get to feel things, visit places and worlds you would never otherwise know. You learn that everyone else out there is a me, as well. You're being someone else, and when you return to your own world, you're going to be slightly changed."

...

"[...] all writers – have an obligation to our readers: it's the obligation to write true things, especially important when we are creating tales of people who do not exist in places that never were – to understand that truth is not in what happens but what it tells us about who we are. Fiction is the lie that tells the truth, after all."

- Why the future depends on libraries, reading, and daydreaming, Neil Gaiman, The Guardian

Now, I just wish I liked his prose as much as his comics. I've read novel after novel of his, and I've found all of them somehow... hollow. Beautiful, but hollow. Same goes for his films MirrorMask and Coraline.

Habibi, by Craig Thompson, is like the lovechild of a Coleman Barks' Rumi translation and an older, wiser, kinder Neil Gaiman.

It's also the best comic I've ever read (yes, better than Sandman), and is up there with one of the best books I've ever read.

See more of it here, and if you like Gaiman, and you like Sufi poetry, just get the darn thing already. XD 

There's a bit of an interview here, with the author. I'm not sure where all this 'White Man's Burden' stuff that the interviewer talks about is coming from. I don't remember any white folk in the book at all. But then, since I'm not any of the ethnic groups in that thaar book, maybe that's why I missed it.

The iPad just replaced my desktop for screen-resolution raster work. [Weekly Nuggetsketch]

Sketch sorta turned into Dream from Neil Gaiman's Sandman.

And thanks to Brushes nifty replay feature... we can has movie! Done with my nifty new DIY stylus!

It must be said that the replay thingie makes me look leeter than I am, since it doesn't record undos, and I did a couple of those when doing the star in his eye. However, the medium is so responsive that I'm not undoing much at all, just overlaying more paint, etc.

Wooties!