Everything is Teeth, a comic book memoir by Evie Wyld, is told from the perspective of a six- and seven-year-old on her trips to Australia to visit her mother’s family — so the story and drawings are gauzy, like the memories of childhood. The result is a dreamy, not-quite-nightmare of a book about a young girl’s obsession with sharks and shark attacks and her relationships with the ocean in Australia and her family, which becomes quite clear at the finale of the book. The story is sort of a series of interconnected vignettes: reading about Rodney Fox’s brush with death after a shark attack, being increasingly anxious and scared of the water, going to a roadside shark museum with her father, and finally viscerally picturing her mother and brother being devoured. I really liked the slow burn of unease that the narrative built this way, though I agree with some other reviewers that it could feel disjointed.

The art, however, is incredible, and completely makes up for the slight problems with narrative. The drawings by Joe Sumner are mostly simplistic, cartoony even, except for the sharks and their aftermaths. I couldn’t figure out if the sharks are all photographs or colored pencil, but they’re definitely photorealistic, cutting into the majority of pages menacingly, lurking around, so the reader gets a sense of the impending doom that haunts young Evie. Sumner’s images also give a lot of space for Wyld’s words to swim around themselves, which builds the dream-like quality of the narrative.

Overall, it makes for an interesting memoir, though the ending felt tacked-on. I hate to say that, since I have a feeling it’s what precipitated the entire project, but it does feel that way. Like a weird coda. Of course, I have no suggestions for how else it could’ve ended.

The first was the first volume of Tezuka’sEsteemed writer of Astro Boy and others, including Buddha. Black Jack, which is billed as a thrilling medical drama but which I found to be largely goofy, with stories centering around outlandish surgeries, including brain and arm transplants, and weird science storylines that stretched my suspension of disbelief past breaking.

Still, I liked the character of Black Jack, mysterious, first-rate surgeon without a medical license but with the best skills in the world, and though the storylines were mostly ridiculous, they were short enough and light enough that I didn’t really mind. There were also a few true gems in the collection, such as the penultimate story about a boy with polio walking across Japan to raise awareness for the condition.

Tezuka’s art is also great, especially his drawings of surgeries and landscapes, as well as the visual pacing of his stories. There were a lot of drawn-in jokes in the pages, too, though I didn’t really get most of them.

Honestly, I’ll probably grab the next issue from the library too. It was a quick enough read, and I kind of like the ridiculous stories.

I really like dmenu, which is a simple menu that takes input from stdin, allows the user to select one by typing, Tabbing or pointing, and prints it to stdout, to be processed by another program in the pipeline. Many people use it as a program launcher, but it can be used for just about anything.

I also really like fzf, which is a fuzzy finder — that is, a program similar to dmenu in that it interactively narrows a large number of items to one selection, but it uses fuzzy matching, which means it allows the user to type non-contiguous letters of what they’re looking for.

I wanted to set up fzf like dmenu,There is a patch that adds fuzzy searching for dmenu, but I didn’t like how it worked. I also wanted this challenge, of course. but since it’s a commandline program figuring out stdin and stdout was a challenge. I couldn’t figure out how to pipe text straight into a terminal, so I used temporary files.

The script as it stands uses the st terminal in addition to fzf. It could easily be changed to use another terminal, however.

#!/usr/bin/env bash

PROG="fmenu"
VERSION=0.0.1

version()
{
	printf '%s v%s (c) Case Duckworth' $PROG $VERSION
	exit 0
}

usage()
{
	if [ $# -ge 2 ]; then
		printf '%s: %s\n' "$PROG" "$2" >&2
	fi
	cat >&2 <<-ENDOFUSAGE
	$PROG: a dmenu clone using st and fzf
	usage:	$PROG [-g GEOMETRY] [-t NAME] [-i] [-f FZF_OPTION...]
	:	$PROG [-h] [-v]

	st(1)-tweaking options:
	-g GEOMETRY:	set terminal's geometry.
	-t NAME:	set fmenu's window title and name.
	-i:		see st(1)'s "-i" option.

	fzf(1)-tweaking options:
	-f FZF_OPTION:	add an option to fzf(1)'s command line.
	:		it should be a long option,
	:		e.g. "--exact", "--color=light", "+i".
	:		see fzf(1) for details.
	
	-h:	show this help message.
	-v:	display version information.

	see also st(1), fzf(1).
	ENDOFUSAGE
	exit "${1:-0}"
}

setup()
{
	IN=$(mktemp)
	OUT=$(mktemp)

	if ! ST="$(command -v st)"; then
		printf '%s: st required\n' $PROG >&2
		exit 2
	fi

	if ! FZF="$(command -v fzf)"; then
		printf '%s: fzf required\n' $PROG >&2
		exit 2
	else
		FZF="${FZF} --layout=reverse"
	fi

	GEOMETRY="60x18"
	WNAME="fmenu"
}

cleanup()
{
	rm -f "$IN" "$OUT"
	exit
}

main()
{
	cat > "$IN"

	$ST -t "$WNAME" -n "$WNAME" \
		-g "$GEOMETRY" \
		-e sh -c "${FZF} <$IN >$OUT"

	cat "$OUT"
}

trap cleanup EXIT INT

setup
while getopts ':hvg:t:f:i' opt; do
	case "$opt" in
		h) usage ;;
		v) version ;;
		g) GEOMETRY="$OPTARG" ;;
		t) WNAME="$OPTARG" ;;
		f) FZF="${FZF} $OPTARG" ;;
		# XXX: this doesn't work in dwm if there's a rule for 'fmenu'
		# windows. I tried changing the WNAME too but that didn't work.
		i) ST="${ST} -i" ;;
		\?) usage 1 "Bad option: \"-$OPTARG\"" ;;
		:) usage 1 "Argument \"-$OPTARG\" needs an argument" ;;
	esac
done
shift $((OPTIND - 1))

main "$@"
cleanup

Listen:

a long time ago there was nothing, or it looked like nothing, or more accurately it didn’t look like anything because there was no light. That’s when the Sun came in. It lit up the world, or about half of it, and we could all see what, in retrospect, had already (always) been there, but at the time we thought had just been made by the Sun. So we decided to worship it.

We started out pretty tamely — we looked at it til our eyes hurt, sang it songs we wrote about how great it was, we even left it little gifts of food, stuff we were making for dinner and thought it might enjoy. But it never ate any of the food or said thank you or anything, so we guessed it didn’t really like our gifts. And our eyes were really hurting from staring at it.

So we were at a loss, until a dog just died one day and the sun got really strong. Like it really liked that dead dog. We were kind of weirded out, but who were we to judge? There is no, as they say, accounting for taste.

We killed another dog, to make sure it wasn’t just a coincidence. The sun got really strong again. Apparently it really did like dead dogs. We started killing like, one a week, and leaving it out for the sun to do whatever it did with it.

everything changes	everything changes all
of the time	suddenly and irrevocably	but
that's no cause for alarm	right	it happens all
the time	like raindrops happen
spread out over hours	or days sometimes not
in a big buckety splash	not all at once
each little thing though	little changes
each of them is sudden	is out of seemingly nowhere
has no sense	nothing has no sense
sense must be made by someone	that is our job
so they say so they	are fond of repeating
someday they will stop saying it	someday suddenly