Any steps forward are a good thing. Hell, at this point I’ll take any day that isn’t a step backwards.

• The thing about webcomics is, no matter how big and audience, or how big an impact on society anybody seems to have, there’s always somebody that’s never even heard of the concept of webcomics and is amazed these things exist. Case in point: Fleen Senior French Correspondent Pierre Lebeaupin pointed me to a story in Venturebeat, of all places, that ties directly into his beat of French [web]comics / bandes desinée [-web] française.

  You may recall that FSFCPL told us about Laurel [Duermael] and her French language autobio comic from Silicon Valley, Comme Convenu, in the context of crowdfunding to print a collection of her webcomics. A crowdfunding that exceeded expectations by about a factor of twenty eight / vingt-huit. Seems that nothing attracts the attention of SV press like success, so Laurel gets a feature about her experiences in startup culture which has to do double duty, explaining not just [web]comics, but also the importance of comics in French culture. And in the middle of that story, one very telling line:

  [Laurel] is now searching for someone to translate the book into English as she is planning her second crowdfunding campaign in early March for the next volume of Comme Convenu.

  If anybody out there is, or knows somebody who is, a qualified French/English translator, do us all a favor and contact Laurel, please. I very much want to read this work, as many volumes of it as there may be.

• I’m going to be pushing the Six-F daily now that we’re down to the last couple of days before it concludes¹. Seems that mentioning it yesterday was a fruitful choice, as the Fund is up more than two thousand damn dollars since I hit Publish not quite 24 hours ago. This is costing me some money.

  Good. Keep it up.

  As a reminder, if you have given any money since Election Day to any of:

  American Civil Liberties Union
  Brennan Center for Justice
  Campaign Zero
  Electronic Frontier Foundation
  International Rescue Committee
  NAACP Legal Defense Fund
  National Resources Defense Council
  Planned Parenthood
  Pro Publica
  Sacred Stone Camp’s GoFundMe
  Syrian Civil Defense aka The White Helmets
  The Trevor Project

  (especially if you’re a creator that had a sale or dedicated a portion of your own profits to these organizations), then email me (gary, who blogs at this here website which is a dot com) because I’m matching your donation. Send the amount, the name of the organization, and how you’d like to be acknowledged (by full name, partial name, or anonymous).

  Matching ends at noon EST on Friday 20 January 2017; all matches will be made in the name of Donald J Trump, except for Planned Parenthood and The Trevor Project, which will be made in the name of Mike Pence.

Spam of the day:

Confirm-Walmart-Order:#7308-Pickup-for-CustomerID-gary.tyrrell- Ready– Mon,-Now!

The only thing that would make me less likely to click on the link in this attempt at thievery is if I thought it actually did some from Walmart and it actually was a US$50 gift card waiting to be claimed. Walmart are evil and fuck them.²

_______________
¹ At least for this year.

² Though very satisfying to type, that’s actually too facile.

Disentangling Walmart from the world economy without hurting anybody other than the billionaires that own it would probably take the rest of my life, so I can’t in good conscience say burn it down.

But I’d be willing to take on the job of carefully taking it apart, burying the remains, and salting the earth so that they never rise again.