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'.

A Cartoon About Poppies

My body just gave out last night and I slept most of the evening. I'm not feeling particularly better this morning, though there's definitely a fretful edge about me as I now worry about possible bugs in the game. As I've said previously, we live in a strange age where the consumer is God and I now feel utterly obliged to fix everything and anything that might be wrong with my code.

It's a odd place to be. On the one hand, I feel like I've come to the end of a journey of many months, when every day I've had to figure out another problem or learn to do something new and often difficult. The reality is that I'm now judged by strangers with the power of clicking on a star rating which can either destroy me or build me up. Yet I also understand that there's no way of knowing the real value of that rating. In the internet age, we're used to rating things and people sometimes rate out of sheer spite or malicious intent. We're also in throwaway age, when people try and discard with equal indifference. For me, however, all of that is plumbed directly into my central nervous system and strangers now have the power to make me feel sick and faint, buzzing or glad, miserable or elated. Never look at the reviews has always been a motto I live by. With Google, you can't avoid it. It's there, visible and unavoidable, when you need to examine the bug reports for your code.

But that's for tomorrow. For me, today , I just feel so damn happy that I wrote 10,000 lines of code which made a kind of logical sense.

All of the above was rattling around in my head, last night, when I fell asleep. When I awoke I tried to relax by drawing a cartoon. Taking the encouragement of Ben as my starting point, I thought I'd try to change my style. I can't honestly say I followed any example, though I was looking at some cartoons by Bill Stott earlier in the evening and had I realised how much I enjoy lines which aren't straight. So I tried to draw this with a deliberately unsteady hand. After a couple of less successful attempts, I began to settle into a style and I drew three cartoons in rapid succession and I was surprised that I liked the results.

The Last Day?

Today I intend to make the last day I work on this game before launching it. Whether that comes to pass, I don't know. Other business crowds my schedule and I'm finding it difficult to squeeze in enough quiet hours to stare at code, trace logic, and track down the last remaining bugs. I've finally decided that I'll publish two versions, having discovered that advertising inside apps/game tends to earn so very little that I might as well maximise my chances by offering an ad-free version of the game. Not that any of this game is meant to make me a fortune but even a few quid from all my efforts would be rewarding.

Income for work. It's a strangely old fashioned notion in this world where everybody works for nothing or works for very little. Somebody once told me (I think through a comment on this blog) that I should charge £60 an hour for building websites. I laughed. That's so far from my reality that it's depressing. The smaller the world becomes, the smaller wages become. There's always some genius in China or India willing to do the same work for a twentieth of the price. I was thinking the other day how the best jobs might be those that demand a local presence, like window cleaning or sweeping the streets. There's no chance of that work moving to Bangalor, which is a good thing since I reckon it's probably the job I'll end up doing.

We live in a single dollar economy with countless websites offering a place where workers can offer their skills for the price of a book of stamps. Amazon, one of the richest companies on the planet, encourage authors to publish their books for pennies or for nothing, as part of their loan scheme, where they promise you a share in a million dollar pot. They also run Amazon Turk, which is a depressing example of modern labour economics. App and game development is the same. The market is overcrowded, with small independent publishers struggling to overcome the advertising might of companies like EA, Zinga and Supercell. Hard work is being rewarded with poverty and only the love of the business (or, perhaps more realistically, the dream of making a fortune) keep people making the apps.

It was always thus, you might say and quality will always rise to the top. I'm not so sure, though my app, I hasten to add, won't fall into either bracket of poor or bad. I'm too small, tired, and busy to make it anything more than my 'best effort'. I hope to publish in the next couple of days and then I'll talk more about it. For now, I have bugs to hunt and pennies to earn.