I’ve been asked to produce a small animation to demonstrate my computer skills, so it means the smallest blog update for today.
Working on a new animation after all these months reminds me why I never made any film longer than the few tests I uploaded here. I admire people who can do it alone, not simply because any team effort divides the labour but also because working with people provides a shared enthusiasm and a shared will to keep going. Alone, you have to find pleasure where you can in the smallest achievement.
The way I work is to think of the script/idea and find some music to hang it on. I upload the music into the video editing software I’ll use and then draw out the main scenes on paper. Scan then in and place them in the video editor and it produces a kind of storyboard set to music. Then it’s a matter of replacing those individual storyboards with animated versions either in 2D or 3D. Sound easier than it is. The music I’ve chosen is about one and a half minutes long, edited down from about three. I'm also working in 2D but the amount of work I’ll have to do to fill those ninety seconds is shocking compared to the effort it takes to draw even the most complex comic strip.
Yet at the same time, it’s quite fun. It makes a nice change from the comic strips and one panel cartoons, even if it means I haven’t got anything great to post here today. I hope the film will be finished in just a couple of days and then, hopefully, normal business will resume...
Sunday, 11 August 2013
Saturday, 10 August 2013
What Reason To Believe The Frackers?
If you travel down the west coast of England, on the rail line running from Manchester to North Wales, you’ll eventually pass through a long tunnel just beyond Runcorn East. I suppose in European and World terms, it’s a very short tunnel. Yet it’s uniquely a long tunnel in an otherwise flat part of the country and has the novelty of making your ears go pop. Travel through the tunnel lasts a minute or so and you emerge just before Frodsham where a view to the Mersey Estuary opens up on the right and stretches for miles across the sand banks that fill the wide mouth of the river to the point where the brown fresh waters meet the grey brine of the Irish Sea.In the distant past, I worked a year at the cable company, BICC, in Helsby, one stop beyond Frodsham. When I was travelling there each day, Helsby station had just won some national awards for being the best kept station in the country and, to my eyes, it deserved the accolades. It was beautifully maintained with richly coloured abundant flower beds and old style railway buildings that looked like they'd been plucked from some episode of Poirot or Sherlock Holmes. Since then, it’s become unstaffed and much of it is boarded up; no doubt a little money saved but for an incalculable loss of value…
[caption id="" align="alignright" width="384"]
Helsby Hill (Wikipedia)[/caption]Yet Helsby village itself still sits perched on the side of one of the few proper highpoints in the area, rising 370 feet over the surrounding land. Looking up the sheer rock face is dizzying, especially when it’s being climbed as it often is by people providing points of Lyrcra colour against the reddish grey rock. Walk to the top and the view is magnificent, with the misted mountains of Wales visible through the clouds to the west and Liverpool in the distant northwest where the Liver Building stands distinct and often glitters in the sun against the banks of the brown river. Directly to the north, you look across the runways of John Lennon Airport and the movements of planes make if feel like you’re watching a diorama of a functioning airport, perfect down to the infinitesimal scale. On a clear day, it’s an uplifting view and quite unique in that it gives a view of a huge swathe of the north, filled with remarkable things to see. Yet perhaps the most telling view is to be seen if you turn your eyes to the northeast and look at the eyesore of the petro-chemical industry that’s built up around Runcorn and Widnes.
The scale of the chemical works is something to behold and locals I knew would often talk about the problems they’d experienced living near such concentrated industry. I don’t know how true this is but I was told that one leak (chlorine, I think it was) meant the police ordered the residents to stay indoors. It was wise they did. Apparently, the leak even changed the colour of their windows and walls.
I always found it hard to believe that people could live happily with dangerous chemicals just a few gusts away, but then, closer to home, there was Warrington where climbing off the train at Bank Quay station, you would often be subjected to the smell of the soap works, the taste of washing powder on your tongue, and, at its worst, a mild burning sensation in your eyes and nostrils. I grew up in the shadow of a gasholder, when the full tank would block our TV reception, and I played for hours on the local ‘mountains’ which were actually industrial waste from the local vitriol industry which had dump its spoil there. I’m also far more used to the problems of subsidence, being born, raised, and living in one of the most heavily mined areas of the country. There are old local tales of houses being swallowed up in sink holes and my old school was eventually demolished because of subsidence but I remember its later years when the second floor listed so heavily to one side that it made it difficult to walk down parts of the corridor. Of course, as a child, you find that sort of thing funny, walking on something that resembled the walkway into a funhouse. As an adult you realise that the whole place was literally falling down around our ears.
Although tighter environmental laws mean that things have improved dramatically in recent years, having lived or worked in proximity to the chemical industry and mining subsidence, I’m wary of the promises made by the fracking industry and the assurances they give people about its safety. I worry when I hear another high profile head in the fracking debate suggest that shale fracking should be done in the north to save the industry from the kind of protests they’ve seen in the south. Up here, apparently, things are desolate and there isn’t as much to go wrong should deep fracking cause problems at the surface.
It’s odd that southern politicians and business men should talk like this, almost as though repetition of disputed facts make them more likely to be true. Perhaps they mean that protests will be ignored by the southern based media, which is certainly likely and, indeed, probable. The Times recently sacked their northern correspondent as part of cuts. That is clearly what we mean to those in London.
Perhaps they also mean that influential people won’t stand in their way if drilling is conducted beneath the homes of people with less political sway. That is also true. There aren’t that many rich influential land owners with connections to politicians living in these parts. That’s why the landscape around here is littered with examples of what happens when industry is left to tend to its own affairs.
Yet the perception that the north is desolate is one I don’t recognise at all. My experience of travelling between the north and south is that, except for the densely built area around London, there’s far more empty space in the south than there is anywhere in the North West. High up beyond Blackburn and heading towards the Lake District, things might get more desolate but there are huge swathes of southern England where you can also look from the horizon to horizon without seeing more than a few buildings. In the North West, there aren’t that many times you can look to the horizon and see only green. Industrial estates, new housing developments, towns, and villages seem to spread from Blackpool down to Southport, across to Preston, and down to the densely built belt running across the country from Liverpool in the West, through to Manchester, Leeds, and Sheffield.
Energy independence is to be welcomed but while I’m not sure we need yet another dirty form of energy, I am positive that if this industry isn’t suitable for the fields of Sussex and the South Downs, then it shouldn’t be suitable for Merseyside, Cheshire, Lancashire, and Yorkshire, where more than just a few people happen to live. The only case the government could make is that we really are the second class citizens they seem to believe we are.
Not that I suppose our protests would amount to anything. Not give the kind of casual ignorance demonstrated by those in power. Government thinking is rank with easy stereotypes, from their assumptions about immigration, the poor, the unemployed, all the way to their belief that bankers are victimised and underpaid. Or at least that’s how it appears when Lord Howell, George Osborne’s father in law, explained that he didn’t mean to insult the North East by suggesting it was desolate when, in fact, he actually meant to say the North West.
Given he represents a North West constituency, George Osborne’s recent encouragement to the fracking industry might have been a little surprising had he not already demonstrated a wilful disregard for the north. I just hope his constituents remember this the next time they have chance to stick a cross beside to his name as Member of Parliament for Tatton. Wilmslow, within his constituency, is one of the richer areas of the region, home to Alex Ferguson and many top Premiership footballers from City and United. It's strange how all those golf courses were never thought the obvious place to start the search for shale gas...
Thursday, 8 August 2013
It's A Sparks Show: Episode 8
Here’s a very hastily doodled adventure of Ron and Russell Mael, or at least, my imaginary versions of them. And yes, you might say that I’m still peeved that they’re coming to the UK but not playing a venue within 200 miles of where I live. I’m having very little luck at the moment. The job hunt is soul destroying, I’ve now run out of Bristol Board, and like the Ralph Steadman exhibition and Baconface’s stand-up before them, Sparks have chosen to ignore the north west of England. It’s also quite surprising. After their last Manchester gig, I thought they’d definitely return, especially given that their live Two Hands One Mouth album ends with the rousing Manchester finale. That they’re playing three nights in London was also a surprise and adds to the sense of grim futility that pervades everything at the moment. Needless to say, I won't get to see the perform this year.
But enough glum talk… This cartoon strip is thanks to Virginia, who told me that Sparks fans have been enjoying these highly unauthorised shows. I hope they have. I’m currently spending my days with the album The Seduction of Ingmar Bergman looping as I work, so no doubt there’ll be another Sparks strip at some point, perhaps in Swedish just for you, but then again, perhaps not.
But enough glum talk… This cartoon strip is thanks to Virginia, who told me that Sparks fans have been enjoying these highly unauthorised shows. I hope they have. I’m currently spending my days with the album The Seduction of Ingmar Bergman looping as I work, so no doubt there’ll be another Sparks strip at some point, perhaps in Swedish just for you, but then again, perhaps not.
Why I Love Canadians
The great virtue of Canadians is that they have a wilderness approach to living. Only sexually active when adjacent to permafrost, they mate like the hoary marmot of their Northwest Territories: once a year their hind quarters quiver quite visibly and they then enjoy a long period of hibernation as they dream about moose. It means that they’re an affable and honest nation. Canadians have that wipe-its-ass-and-pass-me-the-mustard attitude towards eating and they don’t consider a walk healthy unless it involves a couple of mountains and fording a raging stream with a length of hemp rope and flying squirrel.
Their attitude to comedy is equally liberal and involves nothing more sophisticated than pointing at something and laughing as hard as you can until you puncture a lung. It means they have a healthy attitude to promoting themselves. I was gratified to see that my work has now achieved some degree of fame by appearing on Baconface’s website. Is this is an honour to rival my appearance on the Sparks Facebook page? You bet it is, though like Ron and Russell Mael, Baconface is another conspicuously avoiding a visit to the north west of England this year. I won’t get to see him and that is sad because, as a northerner, I feel a great affinity towards Canadians. In many respect, we northerners are the Canadians of England, very similar in outlook and spirit but lacking the vole fixation.
Saying all this in praise of Canadians, I do have to ask you: what kind of operation takes another man’s work without even providing a backlink? Not that I blame the crack team of social engineers working on Baconface’s behalf. They’re probably Canadians too, with the mentality of outlaws and bodies like Newfoundland fisherman brought up on walrus fins and woodchuck. Backlinks won’t be invented in Canada for another ninety years. It will help them retain their innocence whilst the rest of the world descends into anarchy and wingding porn.
After yesterday’s news, it was also gratifying to see that Baconface has not shied away from also publishing The Guardian review that so offended me. That takes some hutzpah, which, as you know, is a good old Canadian word meaning ‘porpoise testicles in brine’. To tackle your severest critics head on is the way to be. So, have at them, Baconface, and long may your perishable meat remain free of brain parasites!
Their attitude to comedy is equally liberal and involves nothing more sophisticated than pointing at something and laughing as hard as you can until you puncture a lung. It means they have a healthy attitude to promoting themselves. I was gratified to see that my work has now achieved some degree of fame by appearing on Baconface’s website. Is this is an honour to rival my appearance on the Sparks Facebook page? You bet it is, though like Ron and Russell Mael, Baconface is another conspicuously avoiding a visit to the north west of England this year. I won’t get to see him and that is sad because, as a northerner, I feel a great affinity towards Canadians. In many respect, we northerners are the Canadians of England, very similar in outlook and spirit but lacking the vole fixation.
Saying all this in praise of Canadians, I do have to ask you: what kind of operation takes another man’s work without even providing a backlink? Not that I blame the crack team of social engineers working on Baconface’s behalf. They’re probably Canadians too, with the mentality of outlaws and bodies like Newfoundland fisherman brought up on walrus fins and woodchuck. Backlinks won’t be invented in Canada for another ninety years. It will help them retain their innocence whilst the rest of the world descends into anarchy and wingding porn.
After yesterday’s news, it was also gratifying to see that Baconface has not shied away from also publishing The Guardian review that so offended me. That takes some hutzpah, which, as you know, is a good old Canadian word meaning ‘porpoise testicles in brine’. To tackle your severest critics head on is the way to be. So, have at them, Baconface, and long may your perishable meat remain free of brain parasites!
My Penis Writes...
I was going to write something else this morning but found myself absorbed in writing this response to yet another miserable man-hating article by Suzanne Moore over at The Guardian. In many respects, I still prefer The Guardian to other newspapers but lately it has been testing my patience and I do find myself reading it less than I used to. Its feminist agenda has become quite virulent over the summer and probably needs to be pruned back to let in a little daylight and some rational thought.
Another day and another nasty man-baiting article on the front page of The Guardian… Congratulations, you rich London middle class liberals. I find myself reading your newspaper less each day. Your tedious feminist agenda might be attracting the audience demographic you crave but you’re losing the one you already have. Perhaps your new North American readership loves this new direction. Yee haw! I’m just from the North of England, where this newspaper once originated, and you are increasingly less relevant to my life. Up here, having a penis doesn’t seem that significant even when we are sticking them in toasters or forgetting to wash them. We have other fun games to play such as dealing with government cuts (remember them?) and the increasingly brazen divide between the north and the south.
And to think I used to send my articles to The Guardian with the hope of publication. Oh, such typical naïve penis-led optimism! It never happened so I thought my comic prose might be at fault. Now I see it was my comic penis. There it limply hangs, ready to be ridiculed because obviously that’s all I am, all I amount to. You say The Sun demeans women by publishing Page 3 but, if I’m honest, I can’t see much difference to the way you routinely demean those of us damned by the meat. Whatever abilities I bring to this world mean nothing because of this precious piece of nothing between my thighs. My entire being is routinely reduced to the worst stereotype. Yesterday Polly Toynbee implied that because I’m a man, I’m part of that misogynistic culture that apparently pervades our country. Perhaps I am. Perhaps I have no right to reply. I’m just another of those slobbering would-be rapists, Twitter abusers, craven women haters in that big solid ball of ugliness you’ve created and labelled ‘men’.
So, thank you Guardian. You’ve put me off reading anything else here today. And thank you Suzanne Moore. You’ve earned your monthly stipend by again lowering the standards of a once great newspaper and proving that in an already shallow world there is always room for a little more crass vulgarity.
I would say more but I must stop typing. My penis is getting very sore from hitting all these keys.
Another day and another nasty man-baiting article on the front page of The Guardian… Congratulations, you rich London middle class liberals. I find myself reading your newspaper less each day. Your tedious feminist agenda might be attracting the audience demographic you crave but you’re losing the one you already have. Perhaps your new North American readership loves this new direction. Yee haw! I’m just from the North of England, where this newspaper once originated, and you are increasingly less relevant to my life. Up here, having a penis doesn’t seem that significant even when we are sticking them in toasters or forgetting to wash them. We have other fun games to play such as dealing with government cuts (remember them?) and the increasingly brazen divide between the north and the south.
And to think I used to send my articles to The Guardian with the hope of publication. Oh, such typical naïve penis-led optimism! It never happened so I thought my comic prose might be at fault. Now I see it was my comic penis. There it limply hangs, ready to be ridiculed because obviously that’s all I am, all I amount to. You say The Sun demeans women by publishing Page 3 but, if I’m honest, I can’t see much difference to the way you routinely demean those of us damned by the meat. Whatever abilities I bring to this world mean nothing because of this precious piece of nothing between my thighs. My entire being is routinely reduced to the worst stereotype. Yesterday Polly Toynbee implied that because I’m a man, I’m part of that misogynistic culture that apparently pervades our country. Perhaps I am. Perhaps I have no right to reply. I’m just another of those slobbering would-be rapists, Twitter abusers, craven women haters in that big solid ball of ugliness you’ve created and labelled ‘men’.
So, thank you Guardian. You’ve put me off reading anything else here today. And thank you Suzanne Moore. You’ve earned your monthly stipend by again lowering the standards of a once great newspaper and proving that in an already shallow world there is always room for a little more crass vulgarity.
I would say more but I must stop typing. My penis is getting very sore from hitting all these keys.
Wednesday, 7 August 2013
Tuesday, 6 August 2013
Minimalist Cartoon
In my efforts to draw something in a minimal style, I came up with this one yesterday. It is, however, probably too minimal.
Big Breasts and Foot Fetishists: The joys of looking for work on Craigslist
I failed my first test. It’s probably not a good sign.
As you might know, I face an on-going struggle to find work. Today I’ve been trawling through the usual freelance opportunities hoping to find something I can do remotely. By remotely, I mean working from home, though I guess I also mean something in which I might have some remote competence. Working from home would be my ideal job: able to work longer hours undistracted by office chatter and without a long flu-dosed commute into Liverpool or Manchester. I’d also have my own equipment and software arranged just as I like it and a chair that can handle my lanky frame and doesn’t give me back ache. The thought excited me so much that I was wide awake at six this morning searching for opportunities. I even went so far as to set up an account at one of the bigger freelancing sites.
By 9am I'd already failed the first test they set to see if I’d absorbed all the guff they sent about their company and the freelancing processes. I admit I’m terrible with bureaucracy. My rebellious instincts take over. I’m like this when I’m putting up IKEA shelves: I’d much rather just get on with it and figure it out as I go along than read the instructions. I’m the same with multiple choice questions which appear to insult my intelligence… Well, okay, I probably shouldn’t have clicked on ‘all of the above’ for every answer but I thought I’d spotted a pattern… I guess hubris is another of my more developed skills.
Since I’d failed the test and have to wait days to try again, I made my usual trawl through Gumtree and then, in desperation, turned my attention to Craigslist.
The first thing I discovered is that busty blondes are desperately needed in the Warrington area and they will be paid good money. Sadly, my hair is brown even if my breasts do seem to get bigger with each passing year. Busty? Not yet but one day! Oh, boy! One day!
Putting the disappointment of my breasts to one side (or both sides, given how they lie), I then noticed that a foot model can earn £2000 in Manchester. That’s good money but my hairy feet probably won’t get pass the interview stage and I’m dubious that feet can really earn that much without having to get naked with other feet…
More in my line of work was the ad for a new magazine wanting writers. Intrigued, I followed the link which took me to a Wordpress installation much worse than this one and with all manner of terribly written content produced by desperate people working for nothing. I’d never realised it was so easy to launch a blog and get other poor saps to fill it for you. I might have to call this blog a magazine and me a magazine publisher. Just look at my cigar and zero penny rates for paid content…
The last ad to intrigue me was by one of my fellow job hunters. A Dutch woman in Turkey is looking for work writing English content. She claimed she was ‘near native’ in the language and included this little example of her near native English: ‘I have done editing for different projects, last work I have done was for a Turkish children movie called Hititya.’
Now, I point this out not to demean the woman's skills when she is clearly a gifted linguist. Her four languages far outstrips anything I’ve ever managed and deserve to be put to better use than having to advertise on Craigspace among the breasts and feet. But ‘near native’? In my best Larry David voice: that’s where we have a little little problem…
It’s clearly an interesting world I’m entering, where levels of ability are wildly overstated. Freelancing appears to require confidence, self-belief, and a degree of what we might call 'creative elaboration'. Look on the freelancing websites and you’ll see all the smiling faces of hipster Americans who you know are just great at their jobs. I don’t know how I could compete. They say that people who upload their photo gets five times the work than those without. I doubt if I could even get myself to pose of a photo, let alone upload it, and I think that’s the whole of my problem.
I’m a fanatically hard worker and I like to think a reasonably bright guy with a good sense of humour. But I always fail the professional bullshit test. I couldn’t bullshit or misrepresent myself to save my life. I can never forget that I’m a pale English bloke from the North who sometimes laughs and sometimes frowns. I don’t enjoy snowboarding when I’m not coding PHP. I don’t even consider myself an expert in anything in which I’m supposedly an expert. I have a degree in computing but what does that measure? I taught myself all the HTML I know. The same with CSS, Java, and PHP. I taught myself assembly language as a teenager and was more advanced when I started my woeful degree course than when I finished it. It probably stunted my growth as a programmer by forcing me to learn high level languages which were becoming obsolete as we learnt them. Where are all the Pascal programmers these days?
These days I don’t bother with courses. If I need something doing, I teach myself and figure it out as I’m going along. I don’t have my skillset listed like an Excel table. I’m an organic mess of things I can do well, things I can figure out if I need them doing, and things I’d probably fail at no matter how many times I try. As for my Ph.D, what does it mean? I can talk off the top of my head about eighteenth century poetry? Well, perhaps but I don’t know how long I could talk before I’d start to repeat myself. Some of that knowledge is still there but much of it is lost. So what does the PhD represent? That I was once considered bright enough to do a doctorate? That I was naïve enough to think that it would actually help my chances of finding work? If I lived in London, a doctorate might make a difference. Around here: I’d be better off having my neck tattooed and my bollocks pierced (pardon the French).
The main difficulty I face is that a website asks me: how competent is your written English? I pick the answer 'somewhat'. Somewhat! But that’s because I believe in the old saying that the more I know the more I realise the less I know. It’s probably not the ideal mindset for entering into the business of selling yourself on the internet. Probably not an ideal way to getting a job anywhere except one of those supremely enlightened and creative companies that want unique individuals. I’m always reading about them in papers and they sound great. It's just a shame they only exist like pots of gold at the end of every rainbow and I've not seen a rainbow for months.
As you might know, I face an on-going struggle to find work. Today I’ve been trawling through the usual freelance opportunities hoping to find something I can do remotely. By remotely, I mean working from home, though I guess I also mean something in which I might have some remote competence. Working from home would be my ideal job: able to work longer hours undistracted by office chatter and without a long flu-dosed commute into Liverpool or Manchester. I’d also have my own equipment and software arranged just as I like it and a chair that can handle my lanky frame and doesn’t give me back ache. The thought excited me so much that I was wide awake at six this morning searching for opportunities. I even went so far as to set up an account at one of the bigger freelancing sites.
By 9am I'd already failed the first test they set to see if I’d absorbed all the guff they sent about their company and the freelancing processes. I admit I’m terrible with bureaucracy. My rebellious instincts take over. I’m like this when I’m putting up IKEA shelves: I’d much rather just get on with it and figure it out as I go along than read the instructions. I’m the same with multiple choice questions which appear to insult my intelligence… Well, okay, I probably shouldn’t have clicked on ‘all of the above’ for every answer but I thought I’d spotted a pattern… I guess hubris is another of my more developed skills.
Since I’d failed the test and have to wait days to try again, I made my usual trawl through Gumtree and then, in desperation, turned my attention to Craigslist.
The first thing I discovered is that busty blondes are desperately needed in the Warrington area and they will be paid good money. Sadly, my hair is brown even if my breasts do seem to get bigger with each passing year. Busty? Not yet but one day! Oh, boy! One day!
Putting the disappointment of my breasts to one side (or both sides, given how they lie), I then noticed that a foot model can earn £2000 in Manchester. That’s good money but my hairy feet probably won’t get pass the interview stage and I’m dubious that feet can really earn that much without having to get naked with other feet…
More in my line of work was the ad for a new magazine wanting writers. Intrigued, I followed the link which took me to a Wordpress installation much worse than this one and with all manner of terribly written content produced by desperate people working for nothing. I’d never realised it was so easy to launch a blog and get other poor saps to fill it for you. I might have to call this blog a magazine and me a magazine publisher. Just look at my cigar and zero penny rates for paid content…
The last ad to intrigue me was by one of my fellow job hunters. A Dutch woman in Turkey is looking for work writing English content. She claimed she was ‘near native’ in the language and included this little example of her near native English: ‘I have done editing for different projects, last work I have done was for a Turkish children movie called Hititya.’
Now, I point this out not to demean the woman's skills when she is clearly a gifted linguist. Her four languages far outstrips anything I’ve ever managed and deserve to be put to better use than having to advertise on Craigspace among the breasts and feet. But ‘near native’? In my best Larry David voice: that’s where we have a little little problem…
It’s clearly an interesting world I’m entering, where levels of ability are wildly overstated. Freelancing appears to require confidence, self-belief, and a degree of what we might call 'creative elaboration'. Look on the freelancing websites and you’ll see all the smiling faces of hipster Americans who you know are just great at their jobs. I don’t know how I could compete. They say that people who upload their photo gets five times the work than those without. I doubt if I could even get myself to pose of a photo, let alone upload it, and I think that’s the whole of my problem.
I’m a fanatically hard worker and I like to think a reasonably bright guy with a good sense of humour. But I always fail the professional bullshit test. I couldn’t bullshit or misrepresent myself to save my life. I can never forget that I’m a pale English bloke from the North who sometimes laughs and sometimes frowns. I don’t enjoy snowboarding when I’m not coding PHP. I don’t even consider myself an expert in anything in which I’m supposedly an expert. I have a degree in computing but what does that measure? I taught myself all the HTML I know. The same with CSS, Java, and PHP. I taught myself assembly language as a teenager and was more advanced when I started my woeful degree course than when I finished it. It probably stunted my growth as a programmer by forcing me to learn high level languages which were becoming obsolete as we learnt them. Where are all the Pascal programmers these days?
These days I don’t bother with courses. If I need something doing, I teach myself and figure it out as I’m going along. I don’t have my skillset listed like an Excel table. I’m an organic mess of things I can do well, things I can figure out if I need them doing, and things I’d probably fail at no matter how many times I try. As for my Ph.D, what does it mean? I can talk off the top of my head about eighteenth century poetry? Well, perhaps but I don’t know how long I could talk before I’d start to repeat myself. Some of that knowledge is still there but much of it is lost. So what does the PhD represent? That I was once considered bright enough to do a doctorate? That I was naïve enough to think that it would actually help my chances of finding work? If I lived in London, a doctorate might make a difference. Around here: I’d be better off having my neck tattooed and my bollocks pierced (pardon the French).
The main difficulty I face is that a website asks me: how competent is your written English? I pick the answer 'somewhat'. Somewhat! But that’s because I believe in the old saying that the more I know the more I realise the less I know. It’s probably not the ideal mindset for entering into the business of selling yourself on the internet. Probably not an ideal way to getting a job anywhere except one of those supremely enlightened and creative companies that want unique individuals. I’m always reading about them in papers and they sound great. It's just a shame they only exist like pots of gold at the end of every rainbow and I've not seen a rainbow for months.
Monday, 5 August 2013
R Crumb: Stuntman
I don't normally post other people's work on this blog but I like to make the odd exception, especially when that exception is a video of Robert Crumb doing backflips and pratfalls to a woman playing the kazoo. Crumb's been very quiet of late but I noticed him among the page of 'selfies' (mobile phone self portraits) posted at the The Guardian the other day. I hope this video is a sign of him returning from his brief exile. A new comic or book would be great but in the meantime I'll make do with his guest appearance on this album. Credit to Mike Lynch for bringing this video to my attention.
De-Crumbing Myself
In a different post, a different David kindly offered some cartooning tips to this David. The main suggestion was that I should try to reduce the detail in my cartoons and make them less like illustrations. Armed with this good advice, I hit the drawing desk this afternoon and produced two of the worst cartoons I’ve ever drawn. However, the third seemed a bit better and I’m posting the very rough and ready version here. To be honest, reducing my style felt much more difficult than the previous way I was working. More is less, as they say, but less certainly takes far more effort.
I guess the same is true of written prose. I forget which writer once opened a letter apologising to the recipient by admitting that they hadn’t had enough time to write less. I definitely find that my longer blog posts are certainly indicative of my having worked less to reduce the word count.
Will this new style work for me? I feel like it’s the first step of a new challenge. The way I originally taught myself to draw was to study the work of Robert Crumb. It accounts for my love of crosshatching, even if I haven't got any part of that mastered. Perhaps David is right. Perhaps the Crumb style doesn't work with gag cartoons. I was looking at the work of Tony Husband, whose style is about as reductive as you can get. It is deceptively difficult to draw less but keep the same gag. I hope my next efforts are better...
The What of Who
So Peter Capaldi becomes the new Doctor Who and not long after Malcolm Tucker departed from our screens, he now returns in the guise of a family friendly Time Lord.
I’m not overly excited by the news which only tangentially glances off my interest because of Capaldi’s involvement. I’ve never been a Doctor Who fan and as much as I love science fiction (Oblivion is my film of the year so far), I’ve never caught the Doctor Who bug. I don’t even really know what to call it. Is it Doctor Who or Dr Who? I always thought the latter but IMDB now suggests the former. But the problem of the name aside, I’ve had even bigger problems with the show.
Even as a child I probably realised it contained too little science fiction and too much hammy acting for my tastes. I have a similar problem with most of the superheroes that are now appearing in the big film franchises. In many respects, I should be perfect fodder for buying into the genre. I’m interested in comics and genuinely enjoy science fiction, yet films like The Avengers, The Fantastic Five, and The Green Lantern leave me cold. In fact, I find the majority of Stan Lee’s superheroes ultimately quite boring. It’s the Doctor Who problem, I think: science fiction as imagined by people who don’t like science fiction but have their own ideas what science fiction should be. And that was the overriding sense that emerged watching the show last night. Apart from Stephen Hawking and that Mancunian star gazer with the funny voice, the guests talking about Doctor Who were not how I imagine science fiction fans.
It was also noticeable on last night’s ‘big reveal’ that they had the great Bernard Cribbins in the studio. They mentioned his long career in TV, including his recent appearance as Wilfred Mott in the new Doctor Who. What they didn’t mention was that he’d appeared opposite Peter Cushion in the 1966 film, Daleks' Invasion Earth: 2150 A.D., which is probably the only Doctor Who I’ve ever enjoyed. Or I assume it was that film. There was another, made a year earlier, called Dr. Who and the Daleks. Occasionally I come across one or the other on TV and find myself being drawn into its post-apocalyptic vision of London long before London became people’s post-apocalyptic setting of choice.
That the BBC ignored Cushing’s films is disappointing but obviously part of their attempts to portray the franchise as the jewel in the BBC crown, the years between 1985 and 2005 when it languished in production limbo now long forgotten. Doctor Who has become one of the BBC’s cash cows, played to a new audience of fans via BBC America. That success I can only attribute to its appealing to audiences very different to yours truly.
The question I have to ask myself is: can Capaldi encourage me to watch the next series? That I very much doubt. The problem I have with the show is precisely the problem I have with amateur theatrical productions. It has the pretense that it’s real theatre but there’s no overcoming the presence of the large woman in the wig pretending to be Doris Day circa Calamity Jane. The same is true of Who. When it was relaunched it was quickly swamped by minor celebrities hiding behind latex and daft names. It’s not the Doctor himself who I ever thought they needed to change. It was just everything else about the show.
I’m not overly excited by the news which only tangentially glances off my interest because of Capaldi’s involvement. I’ve never been a Doctor Who fan and as much as I love science fiction (Oblivion is my film of the year so far), I’ve never caught the Doctor Who bug. I don’t even really know what to call it. Is it Doctor Who or Dr Who? I always thought the latter but IMDB now suggests the former. But the problem of the name aside, I’ve had even bigger problems with the show.
Even as a child I probably realised it contained too little science fiction and too much hammy acting for my tastes. I have a similar problem with most of the superheroes that are now appearing in the big film franchises. In many respects, I should be perfect fodder for buying into the genre. I’m interested in comics and genuinely enjoy science fiction, yet films like The Avengers, The Fantastic Five, and The Green Lantern leave me cold. In fact, I find the majority of Stan Lee’s superheroes ultimately quite boring. It’s the Doctor Who problem, I think: science fiction as imagined by people who don’t like science fiction but have their own ideas what science fiction should be. And that was the overriding sense that emerged watching the show last night. Apart from Stephen Hawking and that Mancunian star gazer with the funny voice, the guests talking about Doctor Who were not how I imagine science fiction fans.
It was also noticeable on last night’s ‘big reveal’ that they had the great Bernard Cribbins in the studio. They mentioned his long career in TV, including his recent appearance as Wilfred Mott in the new Doctor Who. What they didn’t mention was that he’d appeared opposite Peter Cushion in the 1966 film, Daleks' Invasion Earth: 2150 A.D., which is probably the only Doctor Who I’ve ever enjoyed. Or I assume it was that film. There was another, made a year earlier, called Dr. Who and the Daleks. Occasionally I come across one or the other on TV and find myself being drawn into its post-apocalyptic vision of London long before London became people’s post-apocalyptic setting of choice.
That the BBC ignored Cushing’s films is disappointing but obviously part of their attempts to portray the franchise as the jewel in the BBC crown, the years between 1985 and 2005 when it languished in production limbo now long forgotten. Doctor Who has become one of the BBC’s cash cows, played to a new audience of fans via BBC America. That success I can only attribute to its appealing to audiences very different to yours truly.
The question I have to ask myself is: can Capaldi encourage me to watch the next series? That I very much doubt. The problem I have with the show is precisely the problem I have with amateur theatrical productions. It has the pretense that it’s real theatre but there’s no overcoming the presence of the large woman in the wig pretending to be Doris Day circa Calamity Jane. The same is true of Who. When it was relaunched it was quickly swamped by minor celebrities hiding behind latex and daft names. It’s not the Doctor himself who I ever thought they needed to change. It was just everything else about the show.
Sunday, 4 August 2013
So has Twitter finally shown the middle classes that the world is ugly?
Back when I was still one of those blue-skied optimists who smiled at kittens and sang Abba hits when walking jauntily down the road, I used to enjoy Twitter as an intellectual game. Writing a funny one liner in 140 characters or less was an enjoyable routine for a year or so. It was akin to doing the daily Sudoku but with a generally funnier outcome. Then the celebrities took over. Twitter was suddenly full of every hacking newspaper columnist, unfunny comedian, and chirpy radio DJ filling the timelines with their awfully privileged banter.
With the arrival of the celebrities, Twitter lost its largely formless state. Before it hit the mainstream, Twitter was like a page of blank paper sprinkled with iron filings. There was still a sense of equality across the Twittersphere. Quality tweeting could attract an audience. After the celebrities landed with their marketing people, PR consultants, and professional social media teams, the situation was magnetised and every individual aligned themselves towards these powerful points of attraction. Twitter was suddenly another version of the real world. There were those people with power and those without and the popularity of the former had nothing to do with the quality of their tweets. Katie Price (aka Jordan) demonstrated that and still does. Her Twitter account is hugely popular, currently approaching two million followers, all waiting for her gems of wisdom such as ‘Yummie full fat milk and cornflakes 3 bowls can't be normal lol but lasts me till lunch time’ (© 2013 Katie Price).
I understand the attraction of celebrity and I guess I’m as susceptible to it as anybody, even if I like to think the people I admire have more about them than plasticised glands and ghost writers. That’s why I also understand the frustration and urge to write something biting towards celebrities I dislike. I would occasionally launch a sharp taunt towards a celebrity such as Peter Andre. Was I trolling? I never saw it that way and if my barbs were sharp they were never needlessly cruel. Yet I can see (and saw) how some unstable characters out there lacked the wits to engage in humorous taunting and took things to an extreme. For some people, violence, threats and intimidation are the only way they can express themselves. I’ve been victim to that plenty of times myself. Comments coming to me through this blog have often been foul, spiteful, and distressing but after a while I guess you become somewhat immune to them.
You might guess, then, that the current furore over Twitter doesn’t surprise me in the slightest. Before Twitter got rid of the ability to watch the public Twitter timeline, I’d often sit and gaze the world’s tweets in real time. It’s no wonder they disabled that function because it didn’t take long before you would see how truly bestial we are as a species. I don’t even mean that small percentage of people who are, for want of a better word, ‘bad’. I mean huge segments of our population who demonstrated how illiteracy and stupidity prevail. I began using Twitter believing it a novel way to confine language, encourage pithy expression. I grew to realise that it’s actually the perfect way of expressing our piggish grunts, our infantile nature, our utter slavery to branding, marketing, and celebrity. Reading Twitter’s public timeline was like being trapped inside the mind of one enormous planet-sized imbecile.
Certain self-satisfied middle class commentators now want to censor Twitter because they don’t agree with what Twitter allows people to say. They are suddenly shocked about the world and our human nature which they, as columinists, are supposed to understand better than the rest of us. The debate has quite prominently been about threats of rape, which is understandable. The threats were clearly distressing for the victims. Yet these rape threats have channelled the nature of the debate into a familiar and not so helpful territory. Over at The Guardian, it’s turned into the familiar feminist bell ringing as the usual cowled figures wander the streets crying ‘bring out your misogynists’. The arguments sound tired and familiar. There’s barely an acknowledgement that men find these comments as offensive as women and that women are sometimes as guilty of posting ill-considered and sometimes offensive tweets themselves. (As an aside: the offensive comments left for me on this blog were mainly from women who wished me dead in a variety of unpleasant but imaginative ways. Hard lesson learned: never make jokes about Daniel Radcliffe.)
And that’s the point I wanted to make in my slightly rambling way. This debate shouldn’t be about gender. It’s about who we are as individuals and what we become in that silent inner world we inhabit when we’re sitting at our keyboards and are annoyed by something we read. Twitter is a pure expression of humanity at its very worst. It is the world’s inner monologue in written form: a shameful indictment of what we can be and what we’ve become.
With the arrival of the celebrities, Twitter lost its largely formless state. Before it hit the mainstream, Twitter was like a page of blank paper sprinkled with iron filings. There was still a sense of equality across the Twittersphere. Quality tweeting could attract an audience. After the celebrities landed with their marketing people, PR consultants, and professional social media teams, the situation was magnetised and every individual aligned themselves towards these powerful points of attraction. Twitter was suddenly another version of the real world. There were those people with power and those without and the popularity of the former had nothing to do with the quality of their tweets. Katie Price (aka Jordan) demonstrated that and still does. Her Twitter account is hugely popular, currently approaching two million followers, all waiting for her gems of wisdom such as ‘Yummie full fat milk and cornflakes 3 bowls can't be normal lol but lasts me till lunch time’ (© 2013 Katie Price).
I understand the attraction of celebrity and I guess I’m as susceptible to it as anybody, even if I like to think the people I admire have more about them than plasticised glands and ghost writers. That’s why I also understand the frustration and urge to write something biting towards celebrities I dislike. I would occasionally launch a sharp taunt towards a celebrity such as Peter Andre. Was I trolling? I never saw it that way and if my barbs were sharp they were never needlessly cruel. Yet I can see (and saw) how some unstable characters out there lacked the wits to engage in humorous taunting and took things to an extreme. For some people, violence, threats and intimidation are the only way they can express themselves. I’ve been victim to that plenty of times myself. Comments coming to me through this blog have often been foul, spiteful, and distressing but after a while I guess you become somewhat immune to them.
You might guess, then, that the current furore over Twitter doesn’t surprise me in the slightest. Before Twitter got rid of the ability to watch the public Twitter timeline, I’d often sit and gaze the world’s tweets in real time. It’s no wonder they disabled that function because it didn’t take long before you would see how truly bestial we are as a species. I don’t even mean that small percentage of people who are, for want of a better word, ‘bad’. I mean huge segments of our population who demonstrated how illiteracy and stupidity prevail. I began using Twitter believing it a novel way to confine language, encourage pithy expression. I grew to realise that it’s actually the perfect way of expressing our piggish grunts, our infantile nature, our utter slavery to branding, marketing, and celebrity. Reading Twitter’s public timeline was like being trapped inside the mind of one enormous planet-sized imbecile.
Certain self-satisfied middle class commentators now want to censor Twitter because they don’t agree with what Twitter allows people to say. They are suddenly shocked about the world and our human nature which they, as columinists, are supposed to understand better than the rest of us. The debate has quite prominently been about threats of rape, which is understandable. The threats were clearly distressing for the victims. Yet these rape threats have channelled the nature of the debate into a familiar and not so helpful territory. Over at The Guardian, it’s turned into the familiar feminist bell ringing as the usual cowled figures wander the streets crying ‘bring out your misogynists’. The arguments sound tired and familiar. There’s barely an acknowledgement that men find these comments as offensive as women and that women are sometimes as guilty of posting ill-considered and sometimes offensive tweets themselves. (As an aside: the offensive comments left for me on this blog were mainly from women who wished me dead in a variety of unpleasant but imaginative ways. Hard lesson learned: never make jokes about Daniel Radcliffe.)
And that’s the point I wanted to make in my slightly rambling way. This debate shouldn’t be about gender. It’s about who we are as individuals and what we become in that silent inner world we inhabit when we’re sitting at our keyboards and are annoyed by something we read. Twitter is a pure expression of humanity at its very worst. It is the world’s inner monologue in written form: a shameful indictment of what we can be and what we’ve become.
Saturday, 3 August 2013
I'm Not Feeling Very Brian Tong Today...
No cartoons. No new comic strips. No meaningful writing other than this piece of uplifting joy which has all the frivolity of a pig carcass being dragged through the streets.
I just couldn’t be bothered to work last night and I couldn’t be bothered to get up this morning. I rolled my grumbling pale mess of a body from its pit at eleven thirty which is always a sign that my mood chemistry is in a bad way. It’s not lethargy affecting me as much as a feeling of inchoate despair. A bit of good news would cheer me up immeasurably, send me into a new period of productivity. But good news rarely comes my way. Confidence breeds confidence, they say, but I’m low on both the capitalised and non-capitalised forms. Instead, I had to face the usual SPAM repeated tenfold in in my inboxes, the same emails full of bouncing enthusiasm from Youtube about young Americans with their tattoos and cretinous tastes and vile music. I just guess I’m in no mood for Brian Tong.
Brian Tong?
Brian Tong is big cheddar over at the CNET website where I often go to get my tech news. He’s also become in my mind the personification of a kind of global hipsterdom that now prevails of incoherent slang, preening ego, and every shallow mannerism in the ‘Idiot’s Guide to Looking Like an Idiot’. Depending on your point of view, he is either a lion among men or a jester among fools. He’s at the forefront of that generation that tore the world from the grasp of the old elite of bow-tied academics and serious men of letters. These are the mystic shamen of our times who have explored the shallower caves and came back knowing that the secret of the modern world is spin, marketing, big smiles and ever bigger medallions.
Perhaps I’m just tired. I slept poorly the night before last. Before I’d gone to bed, I’d written a snarling comment at the Telegraph in defence of Clive James. That I’d had to defend him was bad enough but I then dreamt about Clive James and it had been one of those horribly vivid dreams in which you meet your heroes. Not in the way I met Ralph Steadman, standing in a queue and with no time to talk and feeling a northern fool. But in that way the world would be if it wasn’t for men like Brian Tong telling us that we should care more about our gadgets than we care about people.
Perhaps it’s just an Englishman’s reaction to an American but I’ve known plenty of Americans who aren’t like Brian Tong. Yet perhaps it’s just me. This morning, I didn’t want to face the usual dozen emails to my various accounts, all of them from Twitter telling me what really well connected but abysmal people are doing. Save me the hand-clasping sincerity of London types with their full social diaries and the interesting things they can do. Here in the north, it’s the weekend of the local town show. It’s a good place to be if you enjoy freakshows and a carnival of the underclass. And perhaps that lies at the heart of this grim matter. I gaze out of the window and I don’t see Clive James or Will Self or Ralph Steadman walking past. I see Brian Tong sitting on the wall. I see Brian Tong walking out of the off license. Brian Tong is sitting outside Wilko. Brian Tong is everywhere and I suddenly feel old and English and so very foolish for not being like Brian Tong at all.
I just couldn’t be bothered to work last night and I couldn’t be bothered to get up this morning. I rolled my grumbling pale mess of a body from its pit at eleven thirty which is always a sign that my mood chemistry is in a bad way. It’s not lethargy affecting me as much as a feeling of inchoate despair. A bit of good news would cheer me up immeasurably, send me into a new period of productivity. But good news rarely comes my way. Confidence breeds confidence, they say, but I’m low on both the capitalised and non-capitalised forms. Instead, I had to face the usual SPAM repeated tenfold in in my inboxes, the same emails full of bouncing enthusiasm from Youtube about young Americans with their tattoos and cretinous tastes and vile music. I just guess I’m in no mood for Brian Tong.
Brian Tong?
Brian Tong is big cheddar over at the CNET website where I often go to get my tech news. He’s also become in my mind the personification of a kind of global hipsterdom that now prevails of incoherent slang, preening ego, and every shallow mannerism in the ‘Idiot’s Guide to Looking Like an Idiot’. Depending on your point of view, he is either a lion among men or a jester among fools. He’s at the forefront of that generation that tore the world from the grasp of the old elite of bow-tied academics and serious men of letters. These are the mystic shamen of our times who have explored the shallower caves and came back knowing that the secret of the modern world is spin, marketing, big smiles and ever bigger medallions.
Perhaps I’m just tired. I slept poorly the night before last. Before I’d gone to bed, I’d written a snarling comment at the Telegraph in defence of Clive James. That I’d had to defend him was bad enough but I then dreamt about Clive James and it had been one of those horribly vivid dreams in which you meet your heroes. Not in the way I met Ralph Steadman, standing in a queue and with no time to talk and feeling a northern fool. But in that way the world would be if it wasn’t for men like Brian Tong telling us that we should care more about our gadgets than we care about people.
Perhaps it’s just an Englishman’s reaction to an American but I’ve known plenty of Americans who aren’t like Brian Tong. Yet perhaps it’s just me. This morning, I didn’t want to face the usual dozen emails to my various accounts, all of them from Twitter telling me what really well connected but abysmal people are doing. Save me the hand-clasping sincerity of London types with their full social diaries and the interesting things they can do. Here in the north, it’s the weekend of the local town show. It’s a good place to be if you enjoy freakshows and a carnival of the underclass. And perhaps that lies at the heart of this grim matter. I gaze out of the window and I don’t see Clive James or Will Self or Ralph Steadman walking past. I see Brian Tong sitting on the wall. I see Brian Tong walking out of the off license. Brian Tong is sitting outside Wilko. Brian Tong is everywhere and I suddenly feel old and English and so very foolish for not being like Brian Tong at all.
Friday, 2 August 2013
Sorry About The Comic Strips...
It seems ironic that just a couple of days ago I talked about wanting more readers not visitors only for me to then posts two football comic strips which have attracted plenty of the latter and no doubt dissuaded the former from ever reading my blog again.
Even if each strip has generated ten times my usual visitors, the last two days have given me very little satisfaction. I doubt if a single one of those visitors has or will ever come back. There’s been no secondary uptake for the cartoons. No links from Facebook or Twitter. No links from blogs or forums. Nothing! I interpret that as a woeful failure. Nobody thought them good enough to pass on. They weren’t even worth a single retweet! It’s depressing.
Yet perhaps that’s what the strips are worth and reflect the fact that I drew them as an academic exercise.
I guess it was pretty dumb of me to agree to draw some football strips for the coming season before I knew whether I could draw David Moyes. I had no quick shorthand caricature of the new United boss and these strips (and another I’m working on), were an experiment before the season kicks off. Not that the traffic has given me much sense that it’s been a successful experiment. In fact, it’s been quite the opposite! Factor in the news that, two minutes ago, Private Eye rejected my traffic cone cartoon and you’ll understand why I sit here scratching my head. When I drew it two days ago, I genuinely thought the traffic cone cartoon the best gag I’d ever drawn. I still think it is but I’m now beginning to doubt my own judgement about these things. But then I was also quite pleased with the two comic strips. Perhaps my humour is too weird, too warped, too obvious, too bland, or simply not funny enough. Perhaps I can’t draw well enough. I don’t know. I’m just as confused as ever. Guess I’ll just keep plugging away on diminishing faith, fuel, and bottles of ice cold Pepsi.
Even if each strip has generated ten times my usual visitors, the last two days have given me very little satisfaction. I doubt if a single one of those visitors has or will ever come back. There’s been no secondary uptake for the cartoons. No links from Facebook or Twitter. No links from blogs or forums. Nothing! I interpret that as a woeful failure. Nobody thought them good enough to pass on. They weren’t even worth a single retweet! It’s depressing.
Yet perhaps that’s what the strips are worth and reflect the fact that I drew them as an academic exercise.
I guess it was pretty dumb of me to agree to draw some football strips for the coming season before I knew whether I could draw David Moyes. I had no quick shorthand caricature of the new United boss and these strips (and another I’m working on), were an experiment before the season kicks off. Not that the traffic has given me much sense that it’s been a successful experiment. In fact, it’s been quite the opposite! Factor in the news that, two minutes ago, Private Eye rejected my traffic cone cartoon and you’ll understand why I sit here scratching my head. When I drew it two days ago, I genuinely thought the traffic cone cartoon the best gag I’d ever drawn. I still think it is but I’m now beginning to doubt my own judgement about these things. But then I was also quite pleased with the two comic strips. Perhaps my humour is too weird, too warped, too obvious, too bland, or simply not funny enough. Perhaps I can’t draw well enough. I don’t know. I’m just as confused as ever. Guess I’ll just keep plugging away on diminishing faith, fuel, and bottles of ice cold Pepsi.
Thursday, 1 August 2013
Wednesday, 31 July 2013
Tuesday, 30 July 2013
Give Me Readers Not Visitors
It feels like another day of living life in lead underpants and with clipped heels. Everything seems to be running so slow: the web, the weather, and even the news. The only thing predictably regular is the arrival of people looking for 3d porn, news about Angelina Jolie’s tattoos, and pictures of Rod Stewart’s mole. Can you imagine how depressing it is to realise that those three things comprise 95% of your blog traffic?
Even if this blog has had plenty of visitors there have only been a few true readers this morning. So to those of you who are readers and have made it back: a sincere thank you. Because, otherwise, there’s something utterly dispiriting about posting something new to a blog and returning three hours later to discover that not a single pair of interested eyes have even looked at it. You begin suspecting problems in the ether but end up reaching for the bottle of ether… Just one reader makes a huge difference.
I write this blog for readers, you sometimes imaginary souls who want to come back and to follow what I write or draw. Visitors, on the other hand, arrive looking for an answer to their search. They don’t want to befriend me or know who I am. They want a cartoon depicting ‘cheese mutilations’. They want to know ‘how tall is Tom Cruise’ or ‘who was the smallest dwarf’, both of which incidentally are the same question asked two different ways. Visitors want to be entertained and the moment you fail to entertain them, they move on. They don’t want you to be a real person, who has good days and bad days and days when you work hard but things just don’t go right.
I dwell on this as I see my webstats crawl. I’m also having one of those days when I’m stuck between projects. I work out of confidence and anger and neither feel particularly strong today. I started to doodle a Ron & Russell Mael strip expressing my profound disappointment that they’re not coming back to play Manchester. I don’t know if I have the enthusiasm to finish it. Then I have my ‘Real Things People Say’ strip which I’d intended to submit to a competition. I need to finish the backgrounds but the fact that it had zero hits and zero feedback from either readers or visitors makes me feel like that too would be a mistake. Perhaps I should send the Putin strip or the Elephant in the Room… Perhaps I should try something else or just give up trying.
Late last night, I thought I’d do something different and try the Steadman approach to drawing a cartoon. I did less preparation, less cross hatching, and tried to be less restrained as I threw ink around the page. I even made use of my mouth atomizer and I think finally understood how to use it. I was quite pleased with the result but that optimism too dissipated once I’d posted it here where it almost died an ignominious death. At least a few of you looked at it.
This afternoon, I need to sit down and put in some hours of hard work. I write this blog for readers not visitors. I hope one day there will be more of you but you are such rare people. Each one of you is worth ten thousand indifferent souls. I’m lucky to call you readers.
Even if this blog has had plenty of visitors there have only been a few true readers this morning. So to those of you who are readers and have made it back: a sincere thank you. Because, otherwise, there’s something utterly dispiriting about posting something new to a blog and returning three hours later to discover that not a single pair of interested eyes have even looked at it. You begin suspecting problems in the ether but end up reaching for the bottle of ether… Just one reader makes a huge difference.
I write this blog for readers, you sometimes imaginary souls who want to come back and to follow what I write or draw. Visitors, on the other hand, arrive looking for an answer to their search. They don’t want to befriend me or know who I am. They want a cartoon depicting ‘cheese mutilations’. They want to know ‘how tall is Tom Cruise’ or ‘who was the smallest dwarf’, both of which incidentally are the same question asked two different ways. Visitors want to be entertained and the moment you fail to entertain them, they move on. They don’t want you to be a real person, who has good days and bad days and days when you work hard but things just don’t go right.
I dwell on this as I see my webstats crawl. I’m also having one of those days when I’m stuck between projects. I work out of confidence and anger and neither feel particularly strong today. I started to doodle a Ron & Russell Mael strip expressing my profound disappointment that they’re not coming back to play Manchester. I don’t know if I have the enthusiasm to finish it. Then I have my ‘Real Things People Say’ strip which I’d intended to submit to a competition. I need to finish the backgrounds but the fact that it had zero hits and zero feedback from either readers or visitors makes me feel like that too would be a mistake. Perhaps I should send the Putin strip or the Elephant in the Room… Perhaps I should try something else or just give up trying.
Late last night, I thought I’d do something different and try the Steadman approach to drawing a cartoon. I did less preparation, less cross hatching, and tried to be less restrained as I threw ink around the page. I even made use of my mouth atomizer and I think finally understood how to use it. I was quite pleased with the result but that optimism too dissipated once I’d posted it here where it almost died an ignominious death. At least a few of you looked at it.
This afternoon, I need to sit down and put in some hours of hard work. I write this blog for readers not visitors. I hope one day there will be more of you but you are such rare people. Each one of you is worth ten thousand indifferent souls. I’m lucky to call you readers.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)