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Dave Whiteland

Just the facts.

Beholder: I write, draw, and program the Beholder projects.

Current project:
I’m currently working on a story about a cat.
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 as part of the international team at mySociety, a UK-based charity and sort-of-NGO that makes websites and digital tools that empower citizens all round the world.
CompSci: I’m a Computer Scientist by training — I studied and later taught at the Comp Sci department at Royal Holloway. You can see some remnants of this in my scrapbook and vintage illustrations.

Thailand: I’ve probably 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.

For not entirely practical reasons, I used to be 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

Three worthy causes to which I belong:

There are a number of people whom I greatly admire, and luckily for me several of them are my friends, colleagues and teachers.

Finally, in a list of no particular order, here are some people whose lives or work are, to my mind, especially deserving of a standing ovation: