I used to make comics. I know that because strangers would look at my work and immediately share their most excruciatingly banal experiences with me:

— that time a motorised wheelchair cut in front of them in the line at the supermarket;
— when the dentist pulled the wrong tooth and they tried to get a discount;
— eating off an apple and finding half a worm in it;

every anecdote rounded of with a triumphant “You should make a comic about that!”

Then I would take my 300 pages graphic novel out of their hands, both of us knowing full well they weren’t going to buy it, and I’d smile politely, “Yeah, sure. Someday.”

“Don’t try to cheat me out of my royalties when you publish it,” they would guffaw and walk away to grant comics creator status onto their next victim.

Nowadays I make work that feels even more truly like comics to me than that almost twenty years old graphic novel. Collage-y, abstract stuff that breaks all the rules just begging to be broken. Linear narrative is ashes settling in my trails, montage stretched thin and warping in new, interesting directions.

I teach comics techniques at a university level based in my current work. I even make an infrequent podcast talking to other avantgarde artists about their work in the same field.

Still, sometimes at night my subconscious whispers the truth in my ear: Nobody ever insists I turn their inane bullshit nonevents into comics these days, and while I am a happier, more balanced person as a result of that, I guess that means I don’t make comics any longer after all.

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Joined 25 days ago
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Cake day: November 23rd, 2024

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  • Look, at a glance it looks to me like you’re populating a monetised platform with content off the fediverse without attribution. That’s strike one.

    Then you seem to stall for time to implement federation while admitting your developer quit… and continuing the above content scraping. Strike two.

    And from what I read in this thread it appears you’re actively dodging defederation by using subdomains to keep scraping content. Strike three.

    My concern in this is the integrity of the fediverse and its users. Yours, apparently, is “saving” a platform that leeches content off federated platforms to make a buck off those users. I don’t see much chance of agreement on “what is fair”.

    @jwr1@kbin.earth, I stand by that request to defederate.


  • Ugh, sorry to hear about your experiences. Yeah, I’m not going to bat for all bus drivers. I’m speaking in favour of having a human onboard, because the passengers aren’t necessarily an ideal crowd either…

    The role of being a proxy authority figure can definitely turn some asshole drivers further to the dark side… I don’t want to come off as defending those.





  • So close, and yet…

    The “market economy” is the death cult. The notion that somehow market forces are inevitable, natural powers is the logical fallacy.

    We are so primed to capitalist market thinking that we accept its dogma. As Frederic Jameson said, at this point it is actually easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.

    It isn’t the “rot economy”; It’s the Economy, Stupid.






  • “Ghost town” = Not driven to oversharing by algorithms.

    “getting shit” = nobody wanting to listen to a youtuber’s outrage bait.

    It must be confusing to log into the fediverse straight off of Youtube, though. “Why aren’t people compulsively clicking and subscribing to everything? How am I not being recommended radicalising posts by conspiracy theorists and terror organisations within five clicks?”

    “Honey, this is Mastodon”

    <switches to Blooskie>

    “Ah, much better!”






  • Why are nerds so insistent that people understand technology?

    Because technology forms the basis of the online environments we inhabit, and gives us the tools to tell how, say, our data is stored and processed.

    If you’re going to get in the water, it’s probably a good skill to be able to swim. If you’re going to drive a car and don’t have the faintest idea how the engine works, you’ll be at the mercy of manufacturers and mechanics.

    The solution to your issue is not that everybody should conform to the lowest common denominator of technology literacy, but that the general internet user should get a fucking idea of the environment they navigate.

    Stop being nerds

    Never.