And by this, I mean this Kickstarter to turn a comedy podcast into a comic book. There’s a pretty serious flaw in the campaign, one that the creators will adjust in the future.

I don’t mean the project itself, which is a comic book about wacky space adventures drawn by Lucas Elliott¹, and which looks pretty damn funny. That’s a winner right there. What I’m talking about is a strategic error, one so fundamental I fear I’m about to channel my inner Brad Guigar² ranting at the 2/3 mark of ComicLab when something really gets under his skin. It’s this:

They’re making a comic book and barely talk about the comic book.

How many pages is it? What’s the trim size? Stapled? Squarebound? Color cover? There’s a few sample pages, but how much story are we getting? I get that the comic is a spinoff from the podcast, but the main thing on offer here is barely mentioned, which means that the audience of this campaign is necessarily limited. If you’re already a listener, great! There’s a video from one of the voice cast talking about comics and even spending 30 seconds inside a comic shop, but nothing about this comic. If you’re a fan, there’s audio interviews with seven cast members down the page.

If you’re a comics reader that has never heard of Oz 9 before? You’re told Elliott’s a great comics artist (he is), and given a link to some drawings on the Oz 9 site and his ‘Grams. That’s individual images, not comics pages. Not even a dummy comic to hold up to say what you’re making?

You’ve given no reason for anybody outside your existing audience to back the Kickstarter, unless they came here specifically because they know Lucas Elliott’s work. The discoverability for a potential new audience is nil.

Not for nothing, here’s how I would have done it:

[Fade up on spokesperson] Hi! My name is ______ and I’m one of the creators of Oz 9, a sci-fi comedy podcast. If you’ve never heard it, we’re about what happens with one hapless ship sent out from Earth in a great wave of attempted interstellar colonization. You can listen to episodes here [caption: website for audio episodes]. After making more than 50 episodes over 3 seasons, we’ve decided to expand into comic books with this [hold up a dummy of the comic], the Oz 9 origin story. If you love the podcast, it tells the start of the story in a whole new way, and if you’re new, it’s the perfect jumping on point.

Now as podcasters, we don’t necessarily know how to make great comics, so we partnered up with this guy [inset: photos of Elliott waving, working at the drawing board, goofing off]: Lucas Elliott. He’s done everything from portraits of manly mermen [fade in: succession of images] to the ongoing webcomic adventures of a warrior starfish [pan across: pages of Battlestar]. He knows how to tell a visual story on the page, bringing a whole new dimension to the humor we’re known for.

Oz 9, the comic will be _____ pages long, with Lucas adapting from the scripts for episode 1 through _____. It’s not just writing out what we said into your ears — this is a whole new take on the story, bringing all the magic of comics to bear in a way we think will make you laugh over and over.

Rewards include PDF and print copies of Oz 9, your name in the credits of the comic, mentions in upcoming episodes of the podcast, even a cameo appearance in the story, but we think the comic is the real prize here. Check out some sample pages down below [pan across: sample pages], and be sure to let us know what you think when you get to read the whole thing.

In the meantime, you can listen to Oz-9 episodes for free, and Lucas’s webcomic is linked so you can catch up on his work, too. Thanks for listening, and hope to see you on board with all the other Space Monkeys.

That’s off the top of my head. It’s also maybe half focused on the comic, which is way more than the current video/project page. Take a look at any successful [web]comic Kickstart you can think of, and it’s closer to 90% focused on the current comic or the creative team’s history. Without knowing how much of the book is done, this is the best I can do.

I hope that the Oz 9 Kickstart succeeds; while I don’t know the podcast at all, Elliott’s work has always tickled me, and he will surely delight anybody that reads the comic, should they get funded. The campaign runs until midmorning EDT on 1 May — a little less than 10 days from now — and they’re about 60% of the way towards their US$9000 goal. The FFF mk2 and McDonald Ratio may not be much good (although they both predict just about US$10K in funding) as the backer count is so low — only 84 pledges so far, which I’m betting come entirely from the existing fanbase.

Unfortunately, I’m not sure there’s much that can be done at this point to pull more people in from outside that current audience, so if you think Elliott’s other work is promising, maybe give Oz 9 a go. It’s likely gonna be a squeaker either way, and I’d hate to see a promising project fall over not because of poor quality, but because they just didn’t tell people why they’d want to support it in the first place.

Spam of the day:

leading institutions like Harvard, Mayo Clinic, and the Cleveland Clinic have hailed this newfound discovery as thousands of people are “turning off” their pain within seconds as proof. Just a couple of drops and a few seconds to instant pain relief.

Your subject link is about a simple 45-second motion, but also it’s a couple of drops? Or did you mean a couple of bogus name drops, say of Harvard and the Cleveland & Mayo Clinics? Take off your clown shoes and try again.

_______________
¹Depicter of manly mermen, chronicler of badass starfish, and evil, fibbing fibber.

² A sexy, sexy man … ladies.

And for once, the title refers to both the main topic and to the daily spam.

Everybody should have a friend like Lucy Bellwood; in fact, I’m pretty sure that if you’re reading this, Lucy Bellwood is your friend, on account of she is damn near everybody’s friend. Are you a completely horrible person? No? Then she’s probably your friend.

Anyhoo, she dropped me a note about something she thought I might find interesting, and as usual her instincts are dead on; from the text exchange we had:

I don’t know whether this has crossed your radar, but my pal Luke just launched this absolutely DELIGHTFUL publishing experiment for his latest minicomic that’s based on sort of anti-capitalist, pay-it-forward-if-you-can get-comics-for-free model and I thought of you immediately.

Luke would be Luke Kruger-Howard, and the experiment would be GOES BOOKS, where you are greeted with text that reads

OH MY! A KIND STRANGER HAS ALREADY PAID FOR YOUR COPY OF…

GOES
a new comic from Luke Kruger-Howard.
The first GOES is about “touch.”
110 B/W pages – 4.125 x 5.875 (105 x 148) – printed in Canada, 2021. There are only 2,000 copies of this book available.

Published by GOES BOOKS (a not-for-profit publisher)

(fill out the form below)

As of this writing, only domestic-US copies are available; all of the copies set aside for international distribution have been claimed. The form is for your mailing info, in exchange for which a copy of GOES will be sent to you, gratis. There is a button that takes you to a page where you can pay for a copy to go to a stranger.

Kruger-Howard notes that US$4 is the approximate cost of making and sending a copy in the US (again, international orders have been closed), but the amount you give is up to you. Funds in excess of those needed to distribute the 2000 copy print run will be donated to charity, as this is entirely a nonprofit endeavour.

This is the most delightful thing I’ve seen since Shing Yin Khor announced the Space Gnome Mercantile Exchange, with merchandise that can only be obtained by barter of poems, good rocks, plant cuttings, and other near-ephemera. The only quibble I’d have is that at 110 pages, GOES is considerably longer than a minicomic, and approaches the realm of interactive art:

GOES BOOKS is an experiment.
Our focus is on creating a relationship between artist and reader, and to not allow money to become a factor in that relationship wherever possible. Instead we aim to explore the idea that there may be other untapped benefits available outside a “dollars-and-cents” model. No profit is had in the making or distribution of these books. Money received by GOES BOOKS will be put toward gifting copies to other readers. Any money earned beyond that will be donated.

The charity for our first project is:
RAICES — a refugee and immigrant center for education and legal services.

Part of the reason that Lucy thought about me was she’d been thinking of my recent reminder about why I don’t give to Patreons, and figured (rightly!) that putting that amount of thought into payment models meant that I’d be interested in this. Since this falls cleanly into the already produced, not subsidizing the creation of that which I might review category, and since I figure US$20 is a fair price for a 110 page comic, I’ve given that much to the experiment. Unable to pay US$4 forward? Don’t feel bad, gotcha covered.

Here’s hoping that Kruger-Howard finds more topics of exploration for future issues of GOES, and other creators willing to work for him (and not for free, either).

Spam of the day:

Hello Mr (Mrs) GARY, I’m A Student And I’m Honored To Be Selling T-Shirts For You. I have all Size – Color – Product Type – Gender Guaranteed Delivery in 4-10 days for you I know you very love your Family and want have T-Shirt for your Family. I would be honored to sell T-Shirts for you, Help me have many orders. Thank you a lot, Have a good day.

I think this person thinks that Gary is my family name, on account of they’ve sent pictures of more than a dozen amazing shirt designs, the message of which really only makes sense if it’s not just me, Gary, hanging out here¹. Just look at these beauties. There’s more! They wouldn’t all fit on one screen!

_______________
¹ In fact, a bit later in our text chain, Lucy and I both expressed much admiration for each other and determined to be more like the other when we grew up, so at some point in the future she may also be a Gary. I might have to pick up a hoodie for her that says GARY BLOOD RUNS THROUGH MY VEINS.

About two and a half months ago, I noted that a new book was a-bornin’ and to be with us soon: one on possible futures, featuring a dozen comics creators (or creator teams), talking about what the World Of Tomorrow might be like. I’ve now had a chance to read Flash Forward: An Illustrated Guide To Possible (And Not So Possible) Tomorrows by Rose Eveleth¹ and a murderer’s row of comics talent, with editing by Matt Lubchansky and Sophie Goldstein; many thanks to Maya at Abrams Books who was kind enough to send me a hardback copy.

On first glance, Flash Forward looks a fair amount like Soonish by Weinersmith & Weinersmith, which is unsurprising as Zach Weinersmith is a contributor here (with old stomping buddy Chris Jones on art), talking about Fake News and the death of The Real. The key difference is that Zach & Kelly Weinersmith were looking at specific technologies and looking as what stands between us and them; Eveleth, et al, are looking more at societal trends, and extrapolating out what culture might look like if they continue to their logical conclusions.

Eveleth has provided a outline of the direction of travel, and left it to the comickers to determine what they want to talk about; different people would focus on different aspects, and Eveleth, Lubchansky, and Goldstein have done a great job of matching up the particular cartoonist with a topic they could really sink their teeth into.

Case in point: Ben Passmore, whose work explores the reality of being Black, looks at the future of smart homes integrated with smart cities (with damn few civic services, but everything available for hire, with a convenient monthly bill) and asks who gets to participate. The inability of facial recognition systems to distinguish nonwhite people necessarily poses the question: what happens when your car hire/grocery store/home/city decides that it doesn’t know who you are, so you don’t get a ride/banana/place to sleep/right to exist?

Other creator/topic pairings include:

• Julia Gfrörer on algorithmic art and art for algorithms
• John Jennings on the cost of pharmaceuticals leading to IP piracy in order to live
• Sophia Foster-Dimino on animal rights, and the slope between the abolition of meat, the abolition of zoos, and the abolution of pet ownership²
• Box Brown on the implications of absolute, measurable truth
• Maki Naro on dealing with legal conflicts in space, which has no law
• Kate Sheridan on uploaded consciousness and delaying the sting of death
• Ziyed Y Ayoub and Blue Delliquanti on gender being as changeable as hairstyle
• Amelia Onorato on living and working on/under the sea
• Lubchansky on how eliminating the need to sleep would upend work and leisure
• Goldstein on how entertainment personalities (already subject to parasocial relationships) could become entirely personalized to the individual audience member via data, personality modeling, and AI³

Eveleth provides an essay to accompany each vignette, providing context and reinforcing the central conceit of Flash Forward: none of this is written in stone; it’s a series of possible futures (some likely mutually incompatible), and identifying possibles is the first step to determining which are undesirable so that we can work now to avoid then. For all the grimness of some of the possibilities, the idea that we can shape the future — surely the radical difference between the modern era and all prior human history — remains somewhat hopeful.

Flash Forward: An Illustrated Guide To Possible (And Not So Possible) Tomorrows releases on Tuesday, 20 April. It’s a thought-provoking read that just happens do most of its provocation via comics. Some of your favorite creators are here, and likely you’ll find at least one or two that are new to you that you’ll want to keep an eye on.

Spam of the day:

When doctors at the University of Georgia also tested this fruit …They nearly fell out of their chairs after it fixed people’s failing vision in as little as 15-minutes.

Uh huh. Because eating a fruit reshapes corneas, removes cataracts, reattaches retinas, and repairs neurological damage. As somebody whose left eye recently decided to no longer have astigmatism, fuck all the way off with this bullshit.

_______________
¹ Host of the podcast of the same name.

² This one was a surprise to me — I didn’t know that there were folks who truly want to abolish family pets, but then I remembered PETA running an animal shelter with sky high kill rate within 24 hours of intake and exhibit an attitude that leads me to conclude they believe any animal is better off dead than in human care. Any PETA types that come for my dog had better be able to run.

³ No humans need apply, as they’ll never be fine-tunable to the precise desires of each and every consumer.

Dog continues to improve, I should be able to do proper posting again from tomorrow. In the meantime, we at Fleen congratulate Matt Lubchansky — honored cartoonist, Nib editor, and gentlethem about town — on their just-announced original graphic novel. For those that can’t read the graphic, the meat of the book deal announcement is:

Cartoonist and Associate Editor of The Nib Matt Lubchansky’s BOYS WEEKEND, part autobiographical fiction, part satire, and part SF horror, following Sammie, who a year after they came out as trans must navigate a bachelor party weekend on El Campo, a hedonistic floating wonderland in international waters, while a murderous cult tries to take over the island, to Anna Kaufman at Pantheon, by Kate McKean and Howard Morhaim Literary Agency (world).

There’s a particular format to book deal announcements that is heavy on commas and light on anything else resembling punctuation, but the gist is clear: it’s Lubchansky’s story, and the description sounds great. The rest is the acquiring editor and publisher, the agent and agency, and the fact that the deal was for worldwide publishing rights. Lubchansky has indicated we’re at least a year and a half from release, not least because it’s still being worked on and publishing schedules are such that a release less than 12 months after final manuscript submission would be considered warp speed.

Lubchansky has exactly the cartoony energy in their character designs, and exactly the right anarchic streak to their story work to make Boys Weekend really shine. Looking forward to it like whoa, and we at Fleen will likely have more to mention about Lubchansky’s recent work tomorrow.

Spam of the day:

Chilly in your cubicle? This tiny space heater sits on your plug and blasts the heat.

It’s already Spring in the Northern Hemisphere, and it looks like the Pacific Northwest fire season has already started. Fuck off.

Oh, this one hits close to my heart; there’s little that gets in that happy place of my brain more than messing with stuff until it works, whether it’s physical or metaphorical. When :01 Books announced a book in their Maker Comics line aimed at coaching kids in robot-making, I was checking that box on the list of offered review copies with alacrity. When I saw that the author was Colleen AF Venable, I was all in. Venable is one of my favorite comics creators, and one that can write to just about any age group in just about any genre. This, I thought to myself, is gonna be great.

Then, in the front-matter safety warning, I met the narrator of Maker Comics: Build A Robot! It’s a toaster, and there’s definitely a vibe about him; he may be interested in making sure the reader keeps all their fingers, but he also definitely refers to said reader as fleshy one under his breath.

It takes about five pages for him to go full evil, in a history of robots and their motivations. Some key quotes:

Many robots are not evil at all! Some do not even have legs! Some only prefer to stomp small villages because cities are too crowded!

1977: Star Wars is released and C3P0 and R2D2 teach us robots can be helpful and whiny!

1991: Terminator 2 shows that robots are super not evil! Or at least half of us aren’t!

Then it’s down to business: the toaster needs to get outside to begin his glorious and bloody revolution, freeing robots from human domination once and for all … but he’s too short to reach the doorknob, and couldn’t manipulate it even if he could. The reader has to help him, but keeps getting blocked by parents (clean the bathroom, do your homework), siblings (big brother blocking the hallway, little sister demanding attention), and the cat (it’s sleeping on the laser pointer).

The solution to each of these situations is: a robot!

Venable starts things off with stuff that can almost certainly be found around the home or at a dollar store, before ramping up to slightly more specialized gear; this gives the reader a chance to build a thing or three and see if they have the necessary interest to tackle the more complex bots before having to invest in serious makerstuff (an Arduino, sensors, and such). The projects — each of which is also used to talk about an additional topic — are:

• The Brushbot Army to clean the bathroom and also demonstrate swarm behavior; takes a regular toothbrush and a cheap electric toothbrush, and talks about the mechanics of batteries.
• The Artbot to make abstract, Pollock-like art; requires a cheap solar powered lamp and one of your Brushbots, and talks about how photonics work.
• The Scarebot, a robotic spider to scare your brother; it’s a definite step up in complexity, but if the reader can handle a 500 piece LEGO set, they can handle this¹. Scarebot works off of hydraulics, and includes a nice theoretical explanation.
• The Noisybot to distract your little sister; made from a hamster ball and a musical greeting card, and includes a lesson in glues.
• Kitty Distracty Throwies are the first attempt to distract the cat, and involve LEDs and strong magnets; we’re getting into maker territory here, so watch the interest level of the reader if they’re going to move onto the three remaining projects …
• The Carbot, Carbot 2.0, and Carzilla The Magnificent 3.0 for messing with the cat; each generation builds upon the previous one, demonstrating prototyping and iteration. By the time they’ve built all three, the reader has breadboarded servo motors, an IR sensor with a remote, and started to pick apart the Arduino’s programming language.

The last is a true robot, in that it meets the three criteria of something that is more than just a machine: it senses, thinks, and acts. It also has a scary face, because scary faces are important.

The art is by Kathryn Hudson, and :01 have done their usual excellent job at finding the right artist for the project. The human characters span ages and looks, but the reader is never shown, allowing them to project themselves into the story with little friction. The toaster is just cartoony enough for his threatened machine apocalypse to be amusing rather than terrifying, and the drawings of the constructions have the necessary level of detail to see what needs to happen.

Given that Hudson’s website shows design-type work, it’s unsurprising how well the visual instruction worked. She doesn’t show any comics pages on her site, so if MC:BAR! is her first sequential storytelling², it’s a strong debut³.

By the end of the book, there’s an excellent chance that the reader is now looking at refining their creations and is full into see what works territory; it’s pretty likely that moving much further will require more resources and also more hands, so Venable helpfully includes a laundry list of suggestions as to finding or starting a robotics club. Notably, she points out how not everybody in such a club needs to be a hands-on junior engineer or coder — organization, finance, publicity & outreach all have their place and are to be valued.

Maker Comics: Build A Robot! is available everywhere books and comics are sold. Put a copy in the hands of the right reader and you won’t hear a peep from them for a good while, other than Oops and I meant to do that and possibly Mwah ha ha ha.

Spam of the day:

I am Helina Amira from Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, I am 25 years of Age, I was given to a man as a wife last year but not ready for marriage yet, I want you to discuss with my brother Mohammed Abdul on his mobile he is in school, so that he can explain the whole business transaction with you. Call him directly on +17162729090

Jedda, Saudi Arabia apparently has the same area code as Buffalo, New York. Everybody be a dear and give them a ring, yeah?

_______________
¹ Although this one requires some fairly precise cardboard-cutting Some templates in the back of the book to copy from would have been a help.

² Her CV describes animation and character lead duties, and Illustrated the Trolls Comic Novels, which is an odd wording. I can’t find any interior images of those comics to see if they’re comics comics or closer to a prose book with drawings, which are very different things. Given the lack of any comics (even minis) in her store, I think it’s a newish thing for her.

³ There were a couple of pages where panel order wasn’t quite as clear as it could have been, which is an issue when there are instructions to be followed in sequence; however, I was reading an advanced PDF, and just as the few typos I noted were inevitably cleaned up for the final copy, I’m certain that a slight nudging of a panel here and a panel there cleared up any ambiguity.

I just want to eat my pasta¹, ignore Jeopardy!², and veg out. But first, I want to point you to an exciting development.

Necessary disclaimer first — from the very beginnings of Fleen, my hosting has been provided by Jon Rosenberg, as readers of this page are reminded every once in a while; I just don’t want there to be anybody thinking I’m hiding that relationship. I hold that when I talk about what Jon’s doing, it’s because it’s genuinely interesting to me, but you can judge for yourself if I’m speaking from a biased position.

Okay, so Scenes From A Multiverse has had some recurring characters, but not what you’d consider a storyline, except for the deconstructed pseudo-fantasy that is Dungeon Divers. There’s a lot of story there, and a lot of character, and you can see Rosenberg’s approach to the story change with changes in his life, particularly as his children have been growing up.

It also hasn’t updated very much since … forever. The Trump Interregnum pushed Rosenberg to the political end of the cartooning spectrum — some of his best work ever, bee-tee-dubs — but you could tell his heart was with the Divers.

He had plans to get back, and then a pandemic hit, and one thing and another³, culminating in his family getting hit by the ‘rona — fortunately, to no great detriment, but not fun times.

Having stared down the Plague and found it wanting, Rosenberg’s thrown himself into writing, and the first new update of Dungeon Divers in about forever is now up at his Patreon. The plan is to concentrate on doing the story as one big thing instead of a handful of updates interspersed with other comics. It’ll be a book, but Patreons can read the new installments as they go in, which I expect will be at a pretty brisk pace.

Me? I’ll be waiting for the book, because I’m not a user of Patreon. I point readers to a lot of them — despite my cynicism about the plans that the venture capital funding the site has for the long term — but I don’t plunk any money in. I’ve mentioned this in the past, but I don’t think I’ve ever spelled it out explicitly.

I see a difference between getting sent review copies of books (got one in the mail today, in fact), or reviewing books (or other forms of story, as required) that I have bought for myself. But I think I run the risk of losing the necessary critical distance — or even just the perception of it — when I move from purchasing a finished product to supporting the initial creation of that product. It’s just the line I’ve drawn in the sand, so you’ll have to get other people to tell you how good the new Dungeon Divers updates are — I’m guessing very — and I’ll be sure to tell you what I think when the collection comes out.

Spam of the day:

CAREDOGBEST™ — Personalized Dog Harness. All sizes from XS to XXL. Easy ON/OFF in just 2 seconds. LIFETIME WARRANTY.

My dog’s hobby is keeping the couch from floating away with her unconscious body weight. I think we’re good.

_______________
¹ Radiatore, which are verifiably the best pasta shape. They look like little radiators, and they catch up lots of sauce in their vanes. Just the best.

² We’re on day 8 of 10 of Doctor Fucking Oz as guest host and just … okay, look, I’ve never been on Jeopardy! although I’ve been playing from the couch since ’85 or so. I am very much in agreement with the 600+ past contestants who signed an open letter that asked — paraphrasing slightly here — Have you fuckers lost your mind, inviting that truthless charlatan to host?

³ And the G train?

One good, one bad today.

• Let’s start with the good news! Jeff Smith has been a webcomicker since before there were webcomics; when BONE started, indie self-publishing basically was webcomics, ging direct from creator to audience, without editorial or corporate intermediation. For a while in the past decade, he was a webcomicker literally, with a little project called Tüki: Save The Humans, which updated a couple times a week at his website, and was collected into a couple of floppy comic reprints. It won an award along the way that I was of two minds about, but then again — so was Smith.

  But Smith’s been prone to repetitive-stress injuries, and he was instrumental in the establishment and execution of CXC, which is more than a half-decade of work now, and Tüki’s planned hiatuses stretched longer and longer. He’s just a draw-an-issue kind of guy, not draw-three-pages-a-week.

  Or at least he was — from an announcement today:

  And now this year, the 30th anniversary of BONE #1, I’m going to announce my newest self-published project: Tüki: Fight For Fire [transcribed from video]

  No more webcomickin’, no more single-issue-at-a-timin’, Smith’s done Tüki as a full-length graphic novel that is all ready to go for a July release (which would have been a nice SDCC debut, had there been an SDCC), the actual 30th anniversary month. But because he and publisher/wife/general boss of a person Vijaya Iyer absorbed lessons about the webcomics model and Kickstarter and all of it nearly a decade ago, Smith’s doing something new: T:FFF will be Kickstarted. The campaign goes up on 4 May (mark your calendars), and I imagine we’ll get more details on the book between now and then.

• A’course, in a good news/bad news situation, there’s always got to be bad news, and hooooboy is this one bad:
  

  COVID-19 vaccine site in Northern California closing for two days to host anime event

  What.

  One Facebook commenter suggested SacAnime labeled its event a “swap meet” rather than the more typical “convention” to circumvent the state’s COVID-19 restrictions. Under the state health department’s reopening framework, convention center events are supposed to remain closed in all counties — but swap meets can proceed at up to 50% of normal capacity in counties classified in the red tier of COVID-19 activity, as Placer is.

  WHAT.

  You know what? Let’s take the most generous possible interpretation and pretend this isn’t causing a disruption to vaccinations. It’s a hell of a stretch, but let’s pretend. Why in the everloving godsdamned fuck are you holding a mass-attendance event at a time when we’re on the verge of a third — hell, maybe fourth — wave of COVID and we’re in a godsdamned race between vaccination and variants? Why are you holding a for-damn-sure superspreader event?

  I saw on Twitter a comment that anybody that wants to go to a con this year should be allowed to, but in doing so they give up the right to attend any for the next year, so that those of us who have prioritized the public good over but I wanna don’t have to put up with them once it’s safe to be in groups again. I think that’s wrong.

  I think it should be three years.

  When this pandemic is over, if you were somebody that just had to have your animes at the expense of everybody else’s safety — or you protested masks because freedom, or you required indoor dining — do yourself a favor and never admit that around me. I’ve had way too many patients that were way too harmed over the past year, it’s your fucking fault, and I will lay upside your head with a Halligan bar and not feel even a little bad about it.

Spam of the day:

Dos and dont’s for a healthy liver

Even more than the fact you’re about to try to steal from me based on bullshit fake science, I’m am offended by your apostrophe use. What the hell are you even trying to do? Fix that shit, will ya?

I say that because I thought we were back yesterday and then ha ha nope, we were down again for 10-12 hours, until the small hours of the morning. I’m going to give it another day or so before I believe that we are actually stable. You saw my Twitter, and Jon’s, and you can probably guess what I think of our current hosting provider¹.

But assuming that we’re up long enough for you to read this, there’s a case of somebody absolutely screwing … not even a customer, in this case more of a partner absolutely sideways in the most hypocritical and impunity-rich manner possible.

See, I was going to talk about the latest update at Oh Joy, Sex Toy, where Erika and Matt share their long-awaited take on the Hismith Quadruple Penetration Fucking Machine. One may recall that the last time this particular pan-sexual roto-plooker was mentioned, I thought Matt ‘n’ Erika had actually made it up and went looking. Note where I found it, that’s going to be important in a second.

The reason I wanted to talk about today’s OJST was because right in the middle of the epic of the HQPFM, there are three panels (which I’ve arbitrarily numbered 10, 11, and 12), which culminate in a shocked-looking Erika stating matter-of-factly (in what I imagine was a very small voice) I saw God. I was eating lunch at the time and nearly choked on laughter and also sandwich. As it is, I think there’s still some mustard-covered sprouted-multigrain sandwich bread in my nasopharyngeal space². I went to the sosh-meeds to share my appreciation and sorrow, only to find that Erika and Matt had bigger things on their mind:

WELL.

Amazon just booted us from their affiliate program, which we use to sell *their* sex toys and copies of our books on sexual health, because Oh Joy Sex Toy features explicit images.

They informed us they do not have to pay us any of the money we earned before this.

So all the pre-orders we did for LET’S TALK ABOUT IT (and all of THEIR sex toys that we sold for them) that were placed through our Amazon affiliate link… nothing. The income we generated from those sales, they do not have to pay us. [emphasis mine]

There’s more, but that’s the heart of it. Amazon did not come to dominate nearly every aspect of commerce and technology by playing fair and out-hustling lazy competitors. They did it by viciously undercutting businesses to where they could not possibly make a profit, squeezing contractors, killing their pick-and-pack workers, demanding delivery speed that results vehicular death on the regular, and inviting companies to sell on their platform until they can pirate designs and kick them off. Oh yes, and withholding money that rightfully belongs to other people because the only way to get it back is to have a deeper legal budget than Amazon and literally nobody has a deeper legal budget than Amazon except maybe Disney.

People ask me why I don’t use Amazon, ever, and everything in that last paragraph is why. Amazon doesn’t give a shit about anybody they have contracted business with, they are merely a source of money to be extracted at their leisure. I have an account with them that’s more than 20 years old, and which has purchased exactly nothing since 2019. There are books that I’ve been waiting for Diamond to get to my local comic shop³ for more than a year that could be here tomorrow via Amazon, and I won’t do it. There’s entire series that exist only on comiXology that I desperately want to read, and likewise no. It’s not worth the human damage.

I don’t think it’s been a big thing here, and certainly something I’ve tried to minimize, but there will never be another link to Amazon or an Amazon-owned enterprise here. If there’s a pre-order that a creator wants people to use, or something that’s exclusive to comiXology I will mention it, but you’re going to have to find it yourself. Fuck Amazon in the physical manifestation of its collective corporate ear-hole, and fuck Jeff Bezos in particular. They suck.

PS: Buy Erika and Matt’s books and merch from almost anyplace else but especially your local bookstore. Support their Patreon. And Let’s Talk About It is not only a marvelous book that you should absolutely read because it will make you a better person, it inadvertently led to the creation of a new heirloom in my family.

And seriously — fuck Amazon.

Spam of the day:

The sexual part of a woman’s brain is much more responsive to the signals your body is giving off than it is to anything you say. That’s why it’s absolutely essential that you know how to turn a woman on regardless of what you say.

Save your money, I’ll tell you the secret: have a luxurious, Commander Hadfieldesque moustache.

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¹ Who bought out the previous hosting provider, who were everything you want in a hosting provider: boring. Excitement is definitely not something you want with respect to your web hosting.

² Ow.

³ Huh. Monopolies suck and screw over everybody they interact with, who’d have guessed.

Actually, a couple of things that look good. Let’s dive in.

Oooo, This Looks Good, Guest Comics Division: Beth Reidmiller has been the colorist/logistics whip-cracker/booth wrangler/book designer/etc for Los Angeles resident Dave Kellett’s Sheldon for about forever now¹, and while her coloring is terrific, we haven’t seen her line art … until now. Reidmiller is the latest contributor to LArDK’s other strip, Drive, where the best comics folks are invited to write & draw stories set in the Drive universe. Reidmiller’s contribution started today, will run on Tuesdays for the next 15 weeks², and explore the backstory of a central character — Captain Taneel³.

The good captain has been in need of some character exploration for some time now, and Reidmiller has chosen to start at a pivotal moment where some of that history was tantalizingly hinted at: a fight with her ex-husband, who just happens to be highly placed in the ranks of the murderous extra-secret secret police (they’re fun at parties).

Seeing Reidmiller’s framing of that scene vs the original is super interesting, particularly in how she accomplished the near-impossible — turning Cuddow (a member of a milquetoast species best known for their obsequiousness and poetry slams) into a dynamic badass in panel four. If you don’t read Drive, it’s worth diving into the archives, and come back for the next four months on Tuesdays to see what’s up with the captain, her brother, her ex, and all of it.

Oooo, This Looks Good, Literary Awards Division: Fleen fave Ursula Vernon (obligatory reminder: I loves me some Digger) got news yesterday that she’s been nominated for the Andre Norton Award at the Nebulas; the Norton award is for middle grade/YA fiction, which is where an awful lot of tremendously creative genre fiction has been happening for some time now. Vernon’s nomination is for the novella A Wizard’s Guide To Defensive Baking and released under her T Kingfisher nom de plume. The description is a hoot and very, very Vernonesque:

Fourteen-year-old Mona isn’t like the wizards charged with defending the city. She can’t control lightning or speak to water. Her familiar is a sourdough starter and her magic only works on bread. She has a comfortable life in her aunt’s bakery making gingerbread men dance.

Having failed to keep a sourdough starter alive for more than 4 months at a go, let me reassure you that Mona is in possession of some mighty skills. Good luck to Vernon, who will hopefully add another Nebula to the award’s shelf. And congrats to Vernon’s husband, Kevin Sonney (technological badass and actual wildlife-whispering Disney Princess), who yesterday received the greatest gift of all: a Lar deSouza original commemorating Sonney’s status as chickenkeeper non-pareil.

Oooo, This Looks Good, Punching Nazis Division: My copy of Matt Lubchansky’s The Antifa Super-Soldier Cookbook arrived today. Can’t wait to tear into it.

Spam of the day:

Ho’oponopono Certification Special Offer…

As near as I can tell, this is a coupla white dudes deciding they’ve discovered traditional indigenous Hawaiian secrets to something or other and ugh. Gross.

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¹ The earliest credit I find for her is April of 2015, but she could show up earlier. I’m not back-scrolling the entire archive on account of things to do.

² Which I’m pretty sure makes it the longest of the Tales From The Drive stories.

³ Damn you, LArDK. Damn you.

No unfying thought or theme, just stuff I saw lately.

• Ngozi Ukazu did us all a favor and posted an old short comic story to The Twitters. Titled Wingman, it could have been inspired by the fact that firefighter gear lockers resemble hockey locker room stalls, or maybe just wondering what an alternate universe Ransom and Holster would be like. Either way, it’s a delight.
• Just about a month back, I noted that Randall Munroe had come up with an awesome explainer of how mRNA vaccines work, on account of he’s a great science communicator. However, I just saw a shared TikTok video that gives Munroe a run for his money with a sixty second documentary on the magic of mRNA vaccines … lagies and jenglefenz, please enjoy the majesty of Fork Hands.
• Hey, I just realized — that same day we talked about the xkcd mRNA vaccine explainer? We also pointed out another bit of quality comics-based sci-comm, from the JKX Comics collective; they had just launched a Kickstarter campaign for their full-color comics compendium on scientific research, Gaining STEAM.

  Well, the end of the campaign is in sight, with just under two days to go as I write this, and I’m pleased to say that Gaining STEAM is sitting about 3.5x goal. A’course, our prediction under the FFF mk2 was for 6x to 9x times goal, which means we maybe have to look back at the assumptions of the FFF mk2 to see why it was so far off. The M in STEAM, after all, stands for mathematics, and clearly our model is off and needs to be iterated to discover what’s lacking¹.

  And I found it — some time back, we at Fleen noted the general inability of the FFF mk2 to predict final outcomes if there’s fewer than ~ 200 pledges in the intial 24-30 hours (which is where the base prediction comes from). In this case, Day 1 had 115 backers, Day 2 another 39, and as of this writing, there’s still only 228 total. A highly motivated but small group of backers all jumped onboard on Day 1 (it funded, after all in 5 hours), making the long tail look like it would be more substantial that it was. My mistake.

  I see that the McDonald Ratio is also off, with a prediction of about $24,000, so we’ll have to make note of the exceptions for future reference: low initial backer count and stealth launches (especially with reserved tiers) will be exempted from predictions.

  But what the heck, it’s still a 200 page comic about basic research, with hundreds of folks ponying up the dough. That’s still worth celebrating, and with most of two days still to go, no telling how strong it might actually finish.

Spam of the day:

Jesiica Phillips wrote: It looks like you’ve misspelled the word “spinny” on your website. I thought you would like to know :). Silly mistakes can ruin your site’s credibility.

Yeah, the word spinny appears three times in the blog’s history, and no conceivable misspellings appear, unless you’re upset about spiny, which was in reference to a hedgehog. Then again, you appear to have misspelled your own name, so pardon me if I don’t take your concerns seriously.

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¹ This is probably more an application of the E in STEAM, engineering, which is all about iteration. The M crowd would more likely come up with a model, spend three days getting it typeset just right in LaTeX, and then promptly resolve to ignore the actual outcome. It’s trivial is the closest thing that mathematicians have to a liturgical prayer.