Dave Whiteland
Just the facts.
- Beholder
-
I write, draw, and program the Beholder projects.
Current Beholder project:
A story about a cat.
Release date uncertain due to work commitments (mine, not the cat’s). - CompSci
- I’m a Computer Scientist by training — until fairly recently I was working full-time in the Comp Sci department at Royal Holloway, where I studied in the 1980s (I taught there in the 1990s, too). You can see some remnants of my earlier time at RHUL (as it is now known) in my scrapbook and vintage illustrations. The CompSci superbasics and Buggy Racing (teaching material) came out of the most recent stint.
- Exploding Pen
- I keep Exploding Pen ticking over, which publishes the Beholder book projects Fudebakudo and The Knot-Shop Man.
- mySociety (2010–2017)
- For seven years I worked full-time at civic-tech pioneers mySociety, a UK-based charity and that makes websites and digital tools that empower citizens all round the world. I became part of their small international team and got to meet, and learn from, some truly remarkable people.
- Illustration & writing
- I started freelancing as Beholder in 1989. My illustrated novel Book of Pages was drawn around that time. It took a while to get published, though... by which time online projects The Concuspidor... and Planetarium had gone live. Some commercial work from my freelancing days is in the scrapbook.
- Technical drawing
- I’ve been an occasional teacher of engineering drawing — on paper taped to drawing boards! — to students of conservation at the beautiful West Dean College. Sometimes I help out with a friend’s engineering company too (mainly crawling under the machines to “do the conduiting”, pick up screws he's dropped, and maybe a bit of Fusion360 too).
- Aikido
- Not brawling for no prizes. In skirts. Weird.
- Sotenjuku dojo, Egham
- Renbukan dojo, Bangkok (Phra Khanong)
- Over the years I’ve trained at aikido clubs in many different countries, and a variety of different dojo in Japan (including, of course, the hombu dojo in Tokyo).
- Thailand
- I spent over seven years, on and off, in Thailand. For two and a half of those years I was a volunteer at a girls’ school, where I taught art to 6-year-olds, and English to 11-year-olds.
- Bike
- I’m an ex-biker, and I miss it. Many, many years ago I had a trusty CX500. My last bike was this Honda NT650DV. If you don’t know about bikes, you’ll think: ooh, big bike. If you know the difference between an NT and a CBR, you’ll think: Dullville.
- Boat
- Another thing now in my past was being crew on a Drascombe. Two masts, tan sails (you care? OK: a gunter-rigged yawl with a loose-footed main) and the whole thing the size of a very large wardrobe.
- Other things
For a few years, as part of my research while writing The Knot-Shop Man, I was a member of the IGKT:
I‘ve been a reader of the following things for a long time:
- Private Eye
- The celebrated satirical magazine, featuring some of Britain’s best cartoonists
- Gruts
- A fine example of blogging: personal, silly, clever, funny (also... buy Richard's book On The Moor)
Three worthy causes to which I belong:
There are a number of people whom I greatly admire, and luckily for me several of them have been my friends, colleagues and teachers.
Finally, in a list of no particular order, here are some people whose lives or work have aspects that I have found to be especially inspirational or impressive:
