The Gods of the Internet Don't like Cartoons.

The gods of the internet don't like cartoons. This is something I've noticed in the approximately two months I've been back, trying to write or draw something new for the blog every single day. If I write a blog post, the gods will generally look my way. They send their minions to scurry around the article, rip out the keywords, and then transmit these to the other minions that start to send traffic my way.

However, if I draw a cartoon, the gods aren't happy and their minions don't do their work. They don't have easy keywords to manipulate, so they don't then trigger the other minions to send people over here. The whole thing is strange and without logic. It's also extremely unfair to anybody who puts effort into drawing a cartoon.

Last night's doodle took me, perhaps, the best part of four or five hours to draw and is therefore probably no longer a doodle. It started around 7.30pm. I was feeling tired and just wanting to play around with the proportions of Nigel Farage's head. His head is something I want to master drawing and this wasn't meant to be a finished cartoon. However, around 9pm I saw that the story of Farage's meetings with Desmond and the head quickly became a body. I wanted to draw it in the spirit of those horrible porn mags that were once passed around the schoolyard as though they were the high watermark of erotica; the kind of thing that had ugly women hanging their sagging boobs out of the back of a Ford Cortina. However, try as I might, I couldn't get Nigel to look quite that tawdry as that so I just reduced him to an ugly set of genitals. Looking back, I should have left his socks on.

About midnight, I was still tired but still in the mood to draw so I quickly drew Richard Desmond. It didn't take me long because I guess few people could say what he looks like and I don't know his face well enough to have a sense of my capturing any recognisable features. Finally, I added a few shadows, which I borrowed/lifted/stole straight from the great Gerald Scarfe who uses shadows particularly well as a framing device.

Not that Google's gods would have been interested in any of this when I posted the cartoon. However, now I've put all this into words, perhaps they'll have something to chew on.

***

This afternoon I have to head out but, once home, I hope to finally put the finishing touches to version 1.1 of Shuffleboard King. The problem is that I've changed so many things, I fear that I'll have to give it a thorough testing before I can upload it to the Play store. The ad revenue is coming in but very slowly. I'd intended the next version to be the paid-for version I'd actually earn a little from but I'll probably end up giving it away. Google have now introduced a policy that all developers selling products on the Play Store must provide their home address which will be visible on the store. It's something that nearly the entire development community is angry about and has already seen many small developers quit Android development in favour of Apple. It's typical, however, that the one way I might have earned a little from the months of work on this game is now blocked off to me.

Isn't it always the way? The small guy always gets screwed.  Amazon wants us to sell our books for pennies and now Google want us to give our home addresses away to anybody who fancies sending me crap for all the crap I've done in the past. I really don't want to spend the next few years, tearing up UKIP newsletters because some clever sod thought it would be funny to send them my name and address.

I'm so desperate that I woke up with the idea of publishing a book on Amazon that I've had written/illustrated for months but will now never see the light of day. I might as well publish it before it becomes completely outdated. Earning pennies is surely better than earning nothing. Or is that how all saps think? I don't know. The whole thing is so damn confusing. Yesterday, I was visited by an engineer who came to install a new modem. His life seemed to much easier. He just spends his day installing modems and fixes TV installations and he earns what is euphemistically called a 'shit load'. At night, I guess, he drinks a lot. Everything about him said: heavy drinker. I guess I should have got into that game a long time ago. Then I might not now be looking at a life that I've utterly ruined by trying to be different. Some days if feels like I can do so much and have so many skills yet I know that as soon as I walk into a job centre they'd reduce me down to a big fat zero. They say all artists suffer for their art and that's great except I don't think of myself as an artist. Artists are those cool guys and girls with talent. I'm just me, creating the stuff that makes me extremely happy to create. At the time and moment I write this, it feels like the rest of the world looks my way and mutters 'what a complete shmuck'.