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July 28th, 2010
My drawing idea is the least possible lines for a maximum impact. I suppose if you could show me a blank piece of paper and somehow I got a tremendous joke about – I don’t know – ice cream trucks out of it — that would be the ideal drawing in my book. That’s not going to happen, tho, but the artists I most admire use the very, very most simple styles.
For example, Pictures for Sad Children.
They are all a lot like this. Dry. Dark. Punchy.A few of them basically make no sense, but mostly they are sublime. Like a meditation in which you laugh.
Posted in visual, style, arts, comix | No Comments »
July 27th, 2010
Yesterday I was at work and I snagged an old thumb drive of mine to see if it had some of the workshops I’d written at my last job on it. I used to do workshops on different aspects of organizing all the time, but I’ve been doing them less these days. Just the nature of my work being different, but those notes are super helpful to teaching these things well again. While I was looking around (I did find some of them, by the way), I found a bunch of old short stories I’d written.
Many of which I’d forgotten about.
Most of which I’d like to try to get out there at some point in the future.
So I uploaded them all to Google Docs. I spent $5 so Google would give me 28GB of space on their servers and I haven’t even come close to using all of them. I know there are better back up systems out there, but not as cheap and not specificially for documents.
So, now a bunch of my work is saved there, and the next time I’m out on a work road trip and I’ve done all I can for work that day and I’ve got my laptop and coffee shop, I might be able to rewrite some stories and submit them to small web-sites here and there.
That would be great.
A kid can dream, can’t he?
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July 26th, 2010
Facebook, as everyone knows, creates a feed of your friends activity on your homepage. It doesn’t show you everything. It tries to figure out who you are most interested in by tracking how much you look at other people’s pages and interacting with them. It works really well. Mostly. Except, I find it seldom shows me very much about my very best friends. Why? Because I hardly ever look at their pages. I already know what’s going on with them. Why do I need to see if they had any new photos? If they had any new photos, I would know, because I would have been there.
Posted in worldview, pop culture, consumer alert, social | No Comments »
July 15th, 2010
I watched about a half hour of television tonight. I’m staying in Chester County at a hotel for a gathering of organizations that I’m a part of. I watched the end of a ghost show and the beginning of Mary Knows Best. Both on SyFy. That’s more TV that I watch in a typical month.
It was too much.
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July 13th, 2010
Hasn’t anyone read 1984? It stuns me how many evil organizations can use straight Orwell-Speak with a straight face. Case in point: forced pooling versus “fair pooling.”
So, my organization wrote a letter and got a bunch of groups to sign onto it, taking a stance against forced pooling: the legal practice of forcing landowners to permit natural gas drillers to extract gas from beneath their land without permission. The landowners would get paid for the gas extracted, but they lose control over their own property.
Pennsylvania doesn’t have a law allowing forced-pooling yet, but the industry wants one. That said, they’ve started calling it “Fair Pooling.”
From an organizing perspective, it’s important to us because the traditional hold-out is a champion that can provide leadership to his or her neighbor. “Forced Pooling” makes it impossible to be a hold out.
Now, the Marcellus Shale Coalition, led by Kathryn Klaber, is trying to rename forced-pooling as “fair pooling.” Somehow, in their minds, it’s “fair” to steal from other people’s property as long as you do it underground and as long as you give them a check that may or may not be sufficient to pay for what you took, and certainly won’t pay for the damage to the natural areas around you.
I don’t know how Katy Klaber sleeps at night, but I am sure she can afford very expensive pillows.
Posted in worldview, works, places, Pennsylvania, ethics, social, economics, political, writing | No Comments »
June 25th, 2010
And if you want to see it more up close and personal, here’s some of my friends in Dimock, Pennsylvania, on Vanity Fair’s website:
Posted in worldview, places, Pennsylvania, ethics, political, economics | No Comments »
June 24th, 2010
Jesse Moynihan is bringing the shit.
Jesse was a Philadelphia cartoonist for quite a while. Now I think he’s living in LA. I am sure he has a perfectly good reason for moving to the wrong coast, but I can never really support anyone heading in that direction. Go East, young man, I say.
He’s making some awesome comics out there, despite the Wrong Coastishness. I’ve stolen one panel that I can’t help but love from page 16 of a comic that’s already up to 75 pages (all the links in this post, tho, go to the first page of the comic). I’ve only made it to page 33, but I’ve only been reading it since last night and this morning.
Jesse’s really made something here. It’s a story comic, so you do need to start at the beginning. It’s a very, very layered story based on all kinds of crazy mythology and wrapped in a crazy sense of color and humor. 100% worth your time.The main reason to love “Forming,” is because every time it starts to get all deep and mystical, some character will say something like “Who’s your daddy?” or curse in some really outlandish way.The humor is a bit crass, but I’m a four year old boy, so I like that.
In my humble opinion, you should start digging on “Forming” right now before I bring the shit.
Posted in blogging, literature, arts, comix | No Comments »
June 17th, 2010
A friend pointed out Questionable Content to me today. I didn’t hate it. This is notable, because normally I would. See, this comic is drawn entirely on computer. The lettering is just computer font. God, I hate that in comics. Sure, it’s pretty much the rule in mainstream comics at this point, but I still hate it. It looks worse on-line.
But I kind of enjoyed this. I only read about a week or so of it, but it was amusing. I like the little robots. Anyway… I always like to admit it when someone overcomes something artistically, that, in general, I sorta hate.
No one has written a musical yet that doesn’t make me cringe, but it could happen.
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June 15th, 2010
So, not going to say a lot about what this really means, but I think you can guess that it is tracking activity. I’ve been using it for a little over a month now, and it’s working. I’ve been much more active. This is good.
For context, this is up in my kitchen in my house. I see this board several times a day. I love being able to add a date to the board. Fulfilling my little commitment to myself.
This sort of tracking is working for me. Do you have a way that works for you?
Posted in works, blogging, drawings, arts, writing, comix | No Comments »
June 2nd, 2010
In my nascent tour of web-comics, I found Big Fat Whale. This is just an excerpt from the larger comic, “Great Moments in Convention Speeches.” Most of them are like this. Big theme, lots of jokes in a sort of one-liner comic form. Many have some sort of social or political angle to them. Love it.
Why are you still reading? Go check it out! If you don’t like this one, you’ll love “The 26 Cent Book Bin.“
Posted in literature, arts, comix | No Comments »
