Busy EMT shift on Tuesday night, including my first definite (as in, previous positive test) COVID-19 patient; with the decontamination and sanitization required, everything takes about twice as long as it does normally. I am short on sleep and despairing for the safety of everybody working the healthcare end of this crisis¹, but at least there’s some good stuff happening in Webcomickia:

• Rich Stevens often reacts to uncertainty by throwing himself into merch design and/or giving away stuff. He can’t really get out and work, but he’s got a bunch of envelopes, a bunch of stamps, and a bunch of stickers ’round the house, and figures giving them away will while away some hours. Details here, first come first served.
• Ryan Estrada has had the great good luck to live for a number of years in Busan, South Korea, a country that knows how to treat pandemics — particularly the respiratory kind — seriously. COVID-19 may have delayed his next book (see Monday’s post re: Iron Circus), but it’s about to come out and his co-author/wife, Kim Hyun Sook, have made a comic about their experience making the graphic novel.

  In case you didn’t know, Kim has had experience living through an authoritarian regime, having grown up in South Korea in its military dictatorship period; that time in her life is the basis of Banned Book Club, as she and her friends defied a repressive government to read forbidden books. If the thought of Estrada living in a society that’s functional in the face of pandemic threats isn’t interesting, maybe learning from Kim how to undermine the grip of a jumped-up authoritarian with a cabal of noncompetent sycophant enablers will be useful to you at this time.

• We’re light on specifics at the moment, but :01 Books (a place where everybody there is just the best person) have announced a virtual book festival for a week from Saturday. On 18 April from 11:00am to 5:00pm EDT (8:00am to 2:00pm PDT), creators will come together to show how the comics you (and they) love are made. Info here, register here (they’ll get back to you with further info), and we’ll share details in the coming days as they’re released.

Spam of the day:

Introducing the multi-state concealed carry certification. One ONLINE ONLY Certification is changing the way Americans get multi-state concealed carry permits.

Oh yes, please, all you gunhumpers please give this scammer your money for a piece of paper and try to conceal-carry in the state of New Jersey. No, don’t look up our laws, or how multi-state concealed carry isn’t a thing, just do it and see what happens.

And be sure to do it where there’s lots of cameras, because I can’t wait to watch that video on YouTube.

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¹ And let me be clear, I am doing this once a week, with sufficient PPE; if that ceases to be the case, I will not put my crew in harm’s way because nothing about being an EMT requires you to commit suicide, especially when you’re doing it for free. So for the sake of whatever you hold dear, keep your ass at home, no exceptions, until we’ve got a handle on this shit.

I myself am too spiteful to die in a pandemic that Donald Trump is mismanaging out of a combination of ignorance, stupidity, and malice (no matter what, I will live long enough to shit on his grave and to see his spawn and also Jared sent to prison for the rest of their lives) but others won’t be so indestructible. Stay home and leave the good masks for those doing the work.