Two tweets of interest, from Sam Logan:

15 years of Sam and Fuzzy! That’s a long time on the internet. 3 years older than YouTube, 2 older than Facebook, 4 younger than Google.

Today is Sam & Fuzzy’s 15th birthday, but I got YOU a present! It’s a free e-book copy [of] Volume 1. Spread and enjoy! http://gumroad.com/samandfuzzy

Fifteen years is forever in internet times. To give you an idea of how much Logan is giving you, each of the first five collections are normally US$9. Bonus: as part of the anniversary special you can get volumes 2-5 for US$10 or more; for US$20 or more, you also get the giant omnibuses that comprise all of the first thirteen years of the strip. If you haven’t read Sam & Fuzzy, this would be a good (and economical!) time to start.

Spam of the day:

Kära företagskund, Du har fått en ny anmälan. Klicka här för att läsa.

Jag är ledsen, jag läser inte svenska

To be fair, he’s waiting on a previously-announced thing to happen so he can tell us about it. Hopefully soon, because a day without Fleen Senior French Correspondent Pierre Lebeaupin is a day without sunshine¹.

• But we shall persevere, particularly when we have wisdom (cloaked by humor) from Boulet. It’s not the latest English-language post at Bouletcorp, but rather (at the time of this writing) the third most recent. It’s about who comics creators are, and why they do what they do, and neatly encapsulates the French tendency of webcomics towards autobio², as Boulet contrasts his own work with that of colleagues Zviane and Lewis Trondheim.

  From there it becomes nothing less than a meditation on the nature of creativity (and the importance of random, dumb circumstance above technical skill, education, hard work, and pretty much every other conventional wisdom indicator of success) and concludes that comics artists (quoting here) are all freaking platypuses. As with everything from Boulet, it’s a delight.

• Book Corner time: coming next month (20 June, to be precise) from :01 Books is a delightful young-readers-plus-their-parents book from Benjamin Renner, The Big Bad Fox. Pre-order it now. The story is simple enough: a fox who can’t ever manage to snag a chicken (his friends the rabbit and the pig slip him turnips so he doesn’t starve) is convinced by a wolf to steal some eggs and raise chicks to adulthood for an easy meal. Genius!

  Until the chicks aren’t afraid of the Big, Bad Fox, because he’s mom. And the fox (who isn’t really big or bad) gets to like (love, even) his surrogate children. Hilarity ensues. The entire thing reads like a Chuck Jones cartoon (Renner, an animator, took an Academy Award as one of the three directors of Ernest & Celestine), with a style to match. The dog, charged with protecting the farmyard, looks a bit like a heavy-lidded Question Hound at his This Is Finest as he does the absolute least possible to manage the drama around him. The wolf is menacing in a slouchy way, and the fox is …

  Okay, the original French title, Le Grand Méchant Renard, is suggested by Google Translate as The Great Evil Fox. But that key word — méchant — has several meanings listed: bad meaning wicked, mischievous, nasty, evil. But also bad meaning mediocre, incompetent. Bingo. The fox is Wile E Coyote: rangy, mangy, prone to failure the more elaborate his schemes get, motivated more by hunger than malice, but ready to find a spark of empathy and take the hard way out (a pretty savage beating by the chickens, trained to ninja-like lethality) if it means sparing “his” children distress (or a noshing by the wolf).

  It’s charming, funny, and turns more than one expectation on its head³. Many thanks to Gina Gagliano at :01 for the review copy, and even more thanks to :01 for continuing to bring the best of French comics to these shores.

Spam of the day:

Beat Insomnia: The Fastest Way To FallSleep

I close my eyes and then I sleep.

_______________
¹ Which, coincidentally, it is here. Overcast, spitty rain, which is thankfully predicted to clear for the holiday weekend. Oh, yeah, Monday’s a holiday, probably no post then.

² As previously explained by FSFCPL; we just can’t quit him.

³ By the end, the fox and his kids play “Fox and Chicken”. He plays the big mean chicken, they play terrified foxes, fleeing for their lives.

It’s a good time for nonfiction books written by webcomickers — Kelly and Zach Weinersmith have Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That’ll Improve and/or Ruin Everything coming out, uh, soon-ish. Ryan North has something he’s working on along these lines that I can’t talk about yet. And Jorge Cham beat them all to the punch by partnering with actual particle physicist Daniel Whiteson to produce We Have No Idea: A Guide To The Unknown Universe, out now.

Cham asked me if I wanted a copy for review and it showed up at my doorstep about 47 hours later; Cham and Whiteson may claim to not know about the wider universe, but heck if they haven’t mastered negative-time shipping. I’ve been digging through WHNI since I received it and it is one hell of a sticky book¹. It’s also weirdly encouraging, as I’ve never felt so energized by accepting how little I know.

There’s a hell of a lot of mystery out there, from the smallest subatomic particles (Why are there as many as there are? Why do some appear not to be used for anything? Are there smaller particles inside them?) to the grandest cosmic scale (Dark matter: What is it? Why does it not interact with us? Why is there so much more Dark energy than dark matter, and in turn much more dark matter than ordinary matter like we’re familiar with?). Each gets explored in turn, laying out the limits of what we know and how much more we don’t².

Even better are the really weird questions that make you think Whiteson and Cham are just messing with us. For example, What is space? Hint: it’s not just the lack of stuff; best guess is that space is, itself, stuff, but not stuff as we know it. Lack of stuff doesn’t bend, or stretch, or wobble like space does; if you’re starting to get a headache³, just take a look at Cham’s cartoon that analogizes space as being sorta-kinda like Jell-O (they call it “space goo”, perhaps to avoid any unpleasant trademark issues⁴), it helps.

All of the cartoons help, in fact — key concepts can be gotten across remarkably quickly with a scribble or two in ways that pages of explanation (or mathematical formulae) just don’t get at. They’re funnier, too. It’s been a while since I read as broad a general-interest science book that I felt goat both the details (as required) and the big picture (without losing scope) as right as this one. It’s probably my favorite since A Brief History of Time, which had about 100% fewer cartoons and terrible puns.

It’s also more hopeful; no matter how much I enjoyed ABHOT, you can’t get past the point it’s by Stephen Freaking Hawking, Smartest Guy In History, and when he talks about mysteries and unknowns, the immediate reaction is Welp, we’ll never know.

Cham and Whiteson are clearly super smart (and between them, have at least two more PhDs than I ever finished), but their approach is infinitely playful, leaving the reader with an optimistic outlook of Sure, we don’t know now, but look how much we’ve figured out in basically an eyeblink of human history and if these two goofballs can explain it to me, imagine what all the really smart people in the world can determine!

Go get We Have No Idea, and catch the book tour if you possibly can. It’s the most uplifting description of ignorance ever, because now we (the humanity-wide we) realize how much is left to discover. Discovery’s the fun part; it’s like playtime for your brain.

Spam of the day:

Better than_Viagra? Tell-us-Where-to-Send your_Bottle!

Your product is called Phallyx? For real? Little on the nose there, don’t you think?

_______________
¹ I’d plowed through the first 120 or so pages when my neck began to hurt from hunching over it at a table with poor ergonomics; it took a couple hours to realize it.

² And that’s just the stuff we know we don’t know, never mind everything that we don’t even know we don’t know. Nevertheless, it’s as stirring a call to explore and discover and learn as I’ve read in a long damn time.

³ Alternately, reaching for your weed card and getting ready to gesture wildly and mutter Whoa.

⁴ An avoidance noticeably absent in their cavalier use of Lego and Legos in early chapters, thus potentially angering the international corporation most interested in ensuring that their trademarked term not ever become generic.

When the Danish assassins come, Cham and Whiteson and their copy editor will realize too late they should have referred to LEGO bricks (possibly with a few dozen ® and ™ trailing along).

So that was fast. Tapa* backpedaled with great speed, although I have to say that their rationale for the change doesn’t pass the smell test:

The purpose of the Right of First Refusal is not to take any rights away or steal your content. The purpose is to help you. We’ve witnessed multiple creators on Tapas accept unfair, uncompetitive deals and sign away their rights for far less than their work is worth. Creators who should have been paid 10x what they were offered agreeing to terrible deals because they either did not know their market value or did not have any competing offers.

We have connections in traditional publishing, merchandising, tv, and film. Our intention is to work with creators to bring additional offers to the table, and to create competition in the market so individuals get the best deal possible.

Go back and read that again, and then explain to me why a completely benevolent — caretaking, even! — change to the TOS was put through without any explanation, highlighting, or prior notice. Not buying it. So they put their TOS back to what it was before the change — we think; they’ve excluded that page from Internet Archive gathering, so there’s no independent way to confirm — but that in and of itself reveals a weakness. As always, one should listen to George

[long thread prior to this point … go read it]
They make an offer, if it doesn’t involve 6+ figures per exploitation right, decline. Then you’re in the clear. Kind of.

“Kind of” because Tapas can, at any time, change the ToS again and screw you over. You consent to that as item 2 in the ToS. [emphasis mine]

Yep, it’s right there in the TOS:

Although we will attempt to notify you when major changes are made to these Terms of Service, you should periodically review the most up to date version (found at https://tapas.io/tos). Tapas Media may, in its sole discretion, modify or revise these Terms of Service at any time. Modifications and revisions will take effect 5 days after they have been posted. Nothing in these Terms of Service shall be deemed to confer any third party rights. [emphasis mine]

Unilaterally creating a new claim on your IP seems like a major change, and to my eye Tapa* didn’t make any kind of effort to notify anybody, nor are they committing to any such notification in the future. Want to get back something like a measure of trust, Tapa*? Unilaterally change the TOS one mo’ gin to amend item 2 for the last time under the current rules.

Hold yourself to a requirement of proper notification and with a decent interval before changes take effect (30 days, minimum), and maybe you won’t get the stinkeye from the community any more. Short of that, you’re screwed as far as any creators who are serious about earning from their creations are concerned.

But, that ain’t happening, I don’t think, and Tapa* will pay the price. Nothing like finishing the week on a positive note. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m told that my copies of Wasted Talent books 4 and 5 have arrived, and I need to affix some bookplates. If you’re at VanCAF this weekend and see Angela Melick, toss her the engineer’s gang sign for me.

Spam of the day:

Record Thieves Around Your Office Wirelessly

Only thief around my office has four legs, a pointy nose and long tail, and sleeps with his eyes open until I’m sufficiently distracted that he can strike with silent quickness. Don’t think I need wireless capability to determine who stole my lunch that one time.

Things are racing to their logical conclusions (i.e.: overfunding) all over the damn place. Let’s have a looksee, shall we?

• Howard Tayler¹ has been grinding out a hell of a complicated Kickstart for just about two years now. The fact that it’s about a year overdue on much of its deliverables² would ordinarily make the prospect of launching another Kickstart suicidal; crowdfunding backers will turn on you when they don’t get what they want. And yet, that appears to not be the case.

  For starters, Tayler and his production team have been communicating with their backers on a regular basis, identifying where work is being done, advising early about hiccups, delays, and the reality of scheduling. In the two years since the Planet Mercenary role-playing game campaign wrapped, there have been 55 updates (call it every other week) to keep backers in the loop. That honest outreach buys a hell of a lot of goodwill.

  The update four days ago let backers know that non-paper items needed for fulfillment are either on hand or arriving within the week, and paper items would be going to print. This puts reward assembly in the late June timeframe, and shipping completion (by my estimates, there are about 3300 backers that still need stuff shipped to them) in July.

  Expectation. Communication. Modified expectation. Happy backers. ‘Taint rocket surgery.

  And that’s why the same day that We’ve gone to print was shared (that would be yesterday), Tayler, et. al., were able to launch a second Kickstarter campaign, for a game master’s screen. This one hasn’t been buried by a host of Oh, this one’ll be a year late too for an important reason beyond the accumulated goodwill: it’s limited. Much like the challenge coin campaign, it’s for a single item, designwork done, limited reward tiers, simple stretch goals, and nearly immediate shipping — in this case, the screens will be shipped in July (possibly concurrent with the PM fulfillment; I can see a lot of backers of the game wanting the screen), and backers will have ’em in time for GenCon.

  And it’s working; we’re in Day Two of the 19 day campaign, with 85% of the US$19.4K goal in hand. More interestingly, as of this writing there’s a significant phenomenon in the reward tiers: 438 people have backed an early bird tier that gets you three big things and three little things (details aren’t important, work with me here) for US$20; 10 people have backed the non-early bird equivalent tier that gets you three big things and one little thing for US$25.

  Either Tayler’s backers aren’t good at reading (which is not characteristic of his demographic) or ten people just wanted to give him more money. That can’t be explained by short campaign lengths, simple reward structures, or short fulfillment times. That’s entirely down to goodwill, and it’s worth more than any six-figure campaign of the past³ or future4.

• I’ve lost track of how many Kickstarts C Spike Trotman has run by now5, but in a lot of ways she runs hers the opposite of how Tayler runs his — there’s a template there, one that she follows every time, tinkering around the edges but not messing with success6. The latest project to get the Spike treatment went live last night, and about sixteen hours later is closing in on US$10K of its US$25K goal.

  As The Crow Flies by Melanie Gillman is about a queer, black teenage girl at an otherwise all-white Christian summer camp; if you’ve not read it, you can get a flavor of it from an autobio piece Gillman did in The Nib last year about her own experiences at Christian summer camp.

  It’s the sort of story that it’s hard to imagine finding a foothold at a publisher other than Iron Circus; queer themes, POC protagonist questioning faith, cast dominantly made up of teen girls, but no magical destiny or powers or adventure? All done in colored pencils, with whole pages given over to wordless (sometimes characterless) landscapes, as many as it takes to set the mood? It’s a damn good story, one that deserves to find an audience, and thanks to Gillman and Spike now it will.

  As The Crow Flies: Volume One will collect the first 270 pages of story (Gillman’s on page #286 now), which constitute approximately the first half of the story’s weeklong structure. Backers can get physical and PDF books, signed bookplates, and for the ridiculously low price of US$100, original story pages. There were commissions available, but they’re gone; but if you’re looking for a speaker, US$1000 (plus travel and lodging) gets you a visit from Gillman, a full day of instruction, and 20 copies of ATCFv1. At US$30K (only US$5K over goal), Gillman adds a side story to the book.

  That’s it — simple, straightforward, the material is all produced and it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that the book layout is all done and just waiting for a number to be attached to the print run. Oh, and one other thing — this is only the second Iron Circus Kickstart of 2017; Spike’s gonna have plenty more for us before the year’s out.

Spam of the day:

Get up to $15,000 Overnight!

Yes, “ZippyLoan”, borrowing fifteen large from unknown persons in Nevada is absolutely something that does not make me think I’ll end up owing The Mob an extortionate interest rate and possibly a kneecap.

________________
¹ Evil twin, etc.

² A major component, the 70 Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries books, has shipped, albeit about nine months late.

³ The challenge coins funded at US$155K, the PM RPG at US$349K.

4 By the FFF mk2, the game screens are heading for US$40K +/- 8K.

5 Eleven as of about 9:00pm EDT last night; number twelve is now live.

6 And for five measly bucks, she’ll tell you how to do it, too.

Endings and beginnings today, my friends. Let’s see what’s up.

• It has been some time since we checked in on PostScript, the webcomics that asks what happens after Happily Ever After?, by brothers Graham and Neal Moogk-Soulis. Wonder what’s going on over there …
  

  We are proud to present Testing Day. Testing Day is simultaneously the final PostScript story we are posting here online, and the first of the larger PostScript stories we will tell.

  Testing Day is but a taste of our future plans. You can expect further projects with greater narrative and visual complexity than the online strip format allows. They will not all be in the PostScript universe, they will not all be comics or picture books, and they will not all be funny, but they will be stories we hope you will enjoy. We know we will enjoy them.

  Sounds like it’s time for an archive binge; there’s only about eight years worth of stories there, you can knock that out in a day or two¹. Coincidentally, that’s just enough time to get prepped up, as Testing Day starts this Wednesday, 17 May, and runs weekdays until 1 June. After it wraps, The Brothers Moogk-Soulis will keep the site up, and you can follow news of their projects at PostScript, their twitterfeeds, and various other sosh–meeds.

• Molly Ostertag is making quite the lot of comics these days, what with her art contributions to Shattered Warrior, due out tomorrow from :01², and her ongoing at duties on Strong Female Protagonist and her day job at Disney animation. All that life surely explains the delays on the second volume of SFP, which was supposed to Kickstart last summer, but you know what? I’ll take comics that are done and good looking at whose production isn’t grinding the life out of their creators over comics that are delivered according to my preferences.

  And the wait has paid off: Book Two, y’all. The campaign’s actually been running since I was in Alaska, but it’s still got ten days to go, which means you still have ten days to get in on this. Book One ended on an emotional turning point; Book Two is only going to get deeper into that particular narrative well; even better, this volume will feature Ostertag’s art in full color, which was always necessary to let her bring life to Brennan Lee Mulligan’s words. And if you’re like me and can only read SFP in big, chapter-sized chunks, getting this book will be a particular treat.

• Hey, you know what today is? The first day of Octopus Pie’s eleventh year. Yep, yesterday marked ten years of Everest “Eve” Ning’s evolution from moderately adrift twentysomething to reluctant adult; ten years of watching characters grow (up and together and apart again) and change, never in a contrived way, every last damn strip better than the one before it.

  And the strippiversary is just in time for the big wrap-up and whatever Meredith Gran has cooking in her brain for the next project. I loved Octopus Pie from the first strip, and considering how much better it’s gotten in the past decade, I can only imagine how good future comics from Gran will be, but that’s for later. For now, send her some good wishes if you haven’t already.

• And, because in any list of [web]comickers Jim Zub always comes last³ what might otherwise be the lead story today: Zub’s Wayward — although he’ll be mad at me if I refer to it as solely his, what with the contributions of artist Steven Cummings, colorist Tamra Bonvillain, letterer Marshall Dillon, and cultural commentators Zack Davisson and Ann O’Regan — has been optioned for TV.

  We’ve mentioned the rules of options here at Fleen before … this doesn’t mean that Zub is suddenly fabulously wealthy, or that anything will happen on a set schedule. Manga Entertainment gets the right to try to develop a series (live action or animated, it appears to not yet be determined) for Japanese TV; they may or may not accomplish this.

  What is unusual about this announcement is that Zub and Cummings are specifically named as creative consultants on the project, including development of the initial story treatment along with character and creature designs. That doesn’t happen so often, and say that Manga Entertainment may be more concrete in their plans than many option deals turn out to be.

  Congrats to Zub, Cummings, and the rest of the Wayward crew; it’s always great to see good work recognized, but it’s even better to see good creators rewarded with cash money.

Spam of the day:

Extra 70% Off Ends Soon

Curiously, I am not much in the market for women’s casual wear from Polo Ralph Lauren.

_______________
¹ Assuming you don’t sleep or go to work, that is.

² Short review: it’s good; writer Sharon Shinn has done something pretty amazing in making you understand what leads an ordinary person to become a revolutionary (or, depending on your point of view, a terrorist), as well as making the point that entitled PUA Nice Guys™ aren’t restricted to the human male.

³ Damn you, alphabetic norms!

Oh my, so much has happened since I went to Comics Camp. The obvious is that TCAF happens this weekend and everybody will be there ‘cept me, but let’s not ignore other things going on:

• Erika Moen & Matt Nolan are Kickstarting the latest OJST collection (number four!), hit goal about 12 hours in, and are well on their way to rewarding their guest artists beyond their original contracts. At US$50K, each guest artist will receive a shipping box’s worth of free OJSTv4 copies (to sell or otherwise dispose of); at US$65K, their page rates get retroactively bumped by $20/page. Since, as in prior volumes, about a third of the book is guest artists, that’s a pretty significant chunk of wealth-sharing for Moen & Nolan.
• Hope Larson moved cross country (from LA to North Carolina), turned in a book (she’s got one a year on deck for the next few years), and restarted Solo. Busy lady. BTW, I didn’t get Larson’s Compass South / Knife’s Edge collaborator Rebecca Mock to give me any juicy details on the latter book, due out in about six weeks time, despite us being cabinmates at Camp. Journalistic laziness or respect for spoilers? You decide.
• The Eisner nominations are out, Sonny Liew appears to be nominated in every possible category for The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye, and there are now two categories for the comics that appear courtesy of the nets and lasers and electrons: Best Webcomic and Best Digital Comic. The confusion of the Eisner organization with respect to webcomics appears to be as deep as ever, as I couldn’t tell you what qualifies a work in one category or the other¹, and there’s a distinct lack of recognition of ongoing strip-type work that forms the bulk of webcomics. Nevertheless, there’s some good candidates there:
  Best Webcomic
  • Bird Boy, by Anne Szabla
  • Deja Brew, by Taneka Stotts and Sara DuVall
  • Jaeger, by Ibrahim Moustafa
  • The Middle Age, by Steve Conley
  • On Beauty, by Christina Tran
  Best Digital Comic
  • Bandette, by Paul Tobin and Colleen Coover
  • Edison Rex, by Chris Roberson and Dennis Culver
  • Helm, by Jehanzeb Hasan and Mauricio Caballero
  • On a Sunbeam, by Tillie Walden
  • Universe!, by Albert Monteys

  And there’s lots of your traditional webcomickers in other categories: Raina Telgemeier for Ghosts in Best Publication for Kids (ages 9-12); John Allison, for Bad Machinery Volume 5, Chip Zdarsky/Ryan North/Erica Henderson/Derek Charm for Jughead, and Ryan North/Erica Henderson for The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl in Best Publication for Teens (ages 13-17); Zdarsky/North/Henderson/Charm for Jughead and Lisa Hanawalt for Hot Dog Taste Test in Best Humor Publication; Box Brown for Tetris in Best Reality-Based Work, Jason Shiga for Demon in Best Graphic Album — Reprint; and Brown and Tetris for Best Writer/Artist. Best of luck to all the nominees.

• Los Angeles resident Dave Kellett has added DRIVE: Act One to his store, now available in handsome hardcover and slightly less handsome softcover. Honestly, if you’re gonna get this book, spring for the hardcover (because it’s friggin’ gorgeous) unless your name is Mario from Lisboa, Portugal, on account of Mario won hisself the extra copy I had in the Drive Giveaway Spectacular.

  International shipping on this beast (more than 1.25 kg!) is somewhat less than purchase price, and while I may restrict future giveaways to the US only, I’m glad Mario is going to get to enjoy this tome. Unless Customs steals it, because did I mention it’s friggin’ gorgeous? Pretty sure I did. Send us a photo when you get your book sometime between next week and never, Mario!

Return Of The Son Of Spam of the day:

File Your Tax Return for Free

I’ll note that this particular spam (and likely scam) was received the day after taxes were due. Way to be proactive, spammers!

_______________
¹ The latter appears to allow for longer form stories, where the former appears to be for single-shot (but sometimes lengthy) presentations. For example, Bandette and On A Sunbeam (fiction stories) are digital, but On Beauty (which is more reportage/editorial in nature) is webcomic.

I’m knee-deep in laundry and photo review and getting caught up on webcomics, so things will resume properly on Monday, y’all. I have lots to share with you, and probably even more than will never be known except to those that were there. Don’t make it a weird thing, it’s just that some things only existed — and only should exist — in that time and at that place.

In the meantime, this will be the final reminder that you (yes, you!) can win a FREE copy of Los Angeles resident Dave Kellett’s DRIVE: Act One. You have until the end of 30 April wherever you are to send an email with the subject GIMME BOOK to me (that would be gary) who has an account at the name of this here website, which is a dot-com.

By my count, there are presently but twelve entries in the pool¹, which means you’ve got a better chance of getting this book than you do of rolling a critical failure on a d20. Let’s get on this, shall we?

Spam of the day:

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Oh, you fuckers. You are ruining my post-Comics Camp high.

_______________
¹ Technically, eleven — one sent an email with an incorrect subject line, but I’ma let it slide.

The chief — perhaps only drawback of the Alaska Robotics Minicon and Camp Weekend Extravapalooza in (duh) Alaska is that Alaska is very far away from my beloved New Jersey, and thus requires long travel days to get there and back. I shouldn’t complain too much about my pre-7:00am departure tomorrow; my return flight from Juneau features a departure time of (meaning I must be at the airport, luggage checked, through security, and seated prior to) five friggin’ thirty in the morning. That’s gonna hurt, but it’s not for another week.

• Let this serve as a reminder, then, that over the next week I’ll be in transit for significant parts of three days, and in a place with no network for three more¹. And as long as we’re reminding things, let me remind you that the giveaway of a copy of DRIVE: Act One by Los Angeles resident Dave Kellett — a US$50 value, if there are any left over after fulfillment; US$25 in softcover once they go up in the store — is still ongoing.

  To enter the giveaway, send an email with the subject GIMME BOOK to me (that would be gary) who has an account at the name of this here website, which is a dot-com. Entries are due by 30 April, and I’ll pick a winner at random after that.

• And as long as we’re throwing out reminders, let this serve as the periodic reminder that the Cartoon Art Museum of San Francisco is closer every day to the time when they open up dedicated gallery and education space again. In the meantime, they continue their programs and involvement in the cultural life of San Francisco, with the latest announcement regarding their participation in the annual Queer Comics Expo:
  

  The fourth annual Queer Comics Expo will take place on Saturday and Sunday, 8-9 July, from 11:00am to 5:00pm at the SOMArts Cultural Center. This year’s QCE will be expanding exhibition space and programming², and will serve as a part of the Queer Cultural Center’s annual National Queer Arts Festival.

  Those interested in exhibiting, volunteering, or presenting programs at QCE, the application is here. You’ll be part of a San Francisco tradition, and help raise funds for CAM at the same time.

Spams of the day:
Gonna clear out the spambox before I head out, so that I’m not overwhelmed when I get back.

Someone may have ran a background check on you
This single nightly routine is killing you slowly and silently
Bags Lovers: 12 Hours To Save
Melania …
Pure Colon Detox

Oh no, they’re gonna find that dead guy in Reno; we humans call that sleep; this is a bunch of fancy designer purses and not laptop-protecting backpacks you guys are way off in your choice of topic; nnnnnope; and no way in hell I’m enabling images on that one. Thanks for playing!

_______________
¹ Y’all behave while I’m gone.

² The increased space means the programming tracks are approximately doubling over previous years.

I can’t believe I missed talking about this earlier, and here’s April more than halfway over. Okay, enough recriminations, just listen up, ’cause a genius is talking.

No, not me; not even vaguely me. Gene Luen Yang — MacArthur Fellow, current National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature — has declared April to be the time for everybody (okay, it’s really aimed at younger readers, but let’s make it everybody) to Read Without Walls. Declaring things is one of the things you get to do when you’re an ambassador, along with getting out of parking tickets and getting to go through the quick line at Customs.

Actually, Read Without Walls has been Yang’s mission statement since he was inaugurated in January of last year, but now he’s making that aspiration into a specific challenge, with the help of the people at Macmillan (parent company of :01 Books, his longtime publisher).

Yang’s three-part challenge to you is to do one of:

• Read a book about a character who doesn’t look or live like you.
• Read a book in a format you don’t typically read — graphic novels, poetry, audiobooks, plays.
• Read a book about a new subject you don’t know much about.

And after you’ve done so, pass the challenge on to others. And hey, why should kids have all the fun? You’ve got time in April still (and if you watched Yang’s video, you know that he’s urging you to do so every April, so make plans for next year now), not just to encourage the young reader(s) in your life, but to spread your own wings a bit.

I’m going to interpret the challenge to say that the pass-along may include specific recommendations. So here’s mine: I’ve been digging into the collected writings of Ta-Nehisi Coates; yeah, it’s not a book, but Coates has written a hell of a lot of essays, and reading through them is the equivalent of a book.

I’m not sure that any piece of writing has had a more profound wake the fuck up effect on me than The Case For Reparations¹, so that’s my recommendation. It’s nearly 16,000 words, so set aside an hour and take your time with it. And if you want to share what you’re reading, the comments are open down below.

Spam of the day:

Pentagon Insider’s Secret IRA Technique Exposed

When I think, Gary, where are you going to get solid information on how to save safely for your future, well-deserved retirment?, the answer is usually not, The Pentagon! So unless your Pentagon insider is recommending a systemic, long-term, dollar-cost-averaged program of broad-based, low-load index funds, I don’t wanna hear it.

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¹ Even more so than Between The World And Me, perhaps because the shorter length lent a sense of urgency to Coates’s argument.