Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany — Ty Bomba

Throughout my life, from my childhood until the present day, I've had brief, intense periods in which I became obsessed with chess. It's an irresistible compulsion, the gaming equivalent of pon farr. After a few days or weeks, the fever passes. This waning of my sudden affection is helped along by the fact that I've always been pretty rubbish at chess. I've no head for playing competitively nor competently.  I'm a much better fit for backgammon, a game I came to late in life, but deliberately and by choice. That is to say, at an early age, someone decided I...

Sometimes, a cover starts with a sketch. (The word sketch is probably being overly generous, given that my drawing skills leave a lot to be desired.) This was the case with Operation Unthinkable. I started by sketching out the cover on a small scrap of paper. A quick sketch, of course, and an imprecise one: the box proportions are roughly there, but are a little too long, and thus a bad approximation of the actual canvas. The text is in my trademark illegible scrawl, and thus it's very irregular and lacks any sense of proportion. Once I select a typeface...