I really didn’t think, when I started writing this blog¹ nearly twelve years ago, that I’d spend one particularly year wrangling no fewer than three philanthropical fundraisers for political disasters².

Looks like it’s time for round number four for the Fleen Fight For Fungible Futures Fund. The utter dearth of official federal response to Hurricane Maria, particularly in Puerto Rico, means that it’s time to step up again. There’s essentially no power systems, no water, no agriculture, no functioning economy on the island right now. So if you have it in your means (and I know, this is the fourth time I’ve come to you in less than a year), please donate.

Because of the uncertainty about which organizations are going to raise money and not spend it on the disaster they’ve promised/implied (lookin’ at you, American Red Cross), I’m deferring to America’s cultural conscience (and grandson of Puerto Rico), Lin-Manuel Miranda, who’s been doing a lot of work rounding up info on reputable organizations to donate to. He’s put his trust in the Hispanic Federation and that’s good enough for me.

The need is acute right now, but this one is going to last a long time, so we’ll set a deadline of end of the month; send me a receipt of your donation before the calendar flips over to October, and I’ll match it. If you can provide me with suggestions as to organizations that are getting money/supplies directly to PR (and the US Virgin Islands, and everyplace else in the Carribean), I’ll add them here.

Spam of the day:
I’ve got to say, I’m pleased that I’ve not received any scammer spam purporting to collect money/goods for the Harvey-Maria confluence of weather crises. Maybe they have a conscience?

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¹ Or got roped into it by Jon Rosenberg; tomayto, tomahto.

² Hurricanes and other large-scale weather events result in slow disasters that reveal the resiliency (or lack) of our systems and infrastructure. Collapsing dams, neighborhoods under water in floodplains, and petrochemical plants dumping their poisons into groundwater are absolutely situations driven by human decision (or at best, failures of imagination). Listen here for more.

Things don’t always work out for the best, but that doesn’t mean that they’re completely unworkable.

• For instance, Thought Bubble — a weeklong celebration of comics in Leeds, UK, that culminates in a weekend comics convention — lost its traditional November dates and had to relocate. Unfortunately, that puts it in close proximity to SPX, which led more than one creator to tell me that they had to choose between doing one show and the other. Thought Bubble’s made the best of the situation, though, and will run their comics show with an impressive list of guests and exhibitors, from both sides of the Atlantic.

  On the Guests list (which is helpfully divided into Writers, Artists, and All on the website), you have webcomics luminaries such as Jon Allison, Darryl Cunningham, Marc Ellerby, Cameron Stewart, and Spike Trotman. The page is laid out with nice big images and names, and each links to a page about the guest — easy to navigate and intuitive to use!

  On the Exhibitor front, Thought Bubble did something I’ve not seen before that I really liked; the show is spread out across different venues, and thus there are multiple exhibitor pages, one per venue.

  Unfortunately, the layout of the pages requires a good deal of effort to decipher — exhibitors are shown by an image, which may be a character, a scene, or a photo. Names are sometimes present, sometimes not, and they’re seemingly arranged alphabetically by URL of all things. As a result, it’s tough to pick out who’s attending without clicking through to every website, which I’m not gonna do. I can tell you that Tom Siddell will be at the Cookridge Street Marquee, and that by chance the comiXology Marquee has a significant number of avatars with names on them.

• In a completely different kind of unfortune, A Girl And Her Fed creator KB “Otter” Spangler has a dying tablet, which makes it hard to draw stuff. By good fortune, however, she was putting the finishing touches on a new novel last week¹, so she’s got a new thing to sell and hopefully get back to the art game. Stoneskin is Hogwarts in space (cosmic beings beyond our ken performing the stand-in for magic) meets trade empires, and it’s a hell of a good read.

  It’s completely different from her other books (set in the world of a single near-future technology, and the societal and political upheavals it causes), but it’s unmistakably Spangler’s writing. Even better, it’s a preface to a planned trilogy, which means I (and you, I suppose) get to read another 750 to 1000 pages of her writing, so yay. It’s entirely worth your five bucks, is what I’m saying.

Spam of the day:

Stop taking the wrong blood pressure drugs and try this out

124 +/- 4 systolic, 80 +/- 4 diastolic, bitches. I once had a cardiologist tell me that I will obviously die of something, but it won’t be heart disease.

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¹ At least, it was a little less than two weeks back when she asked if I wanted to be an beta reader for it. As has been well-established on the page previously, Spangler is a very close personal friend, I love her work, and I wrote the foreword for her first book. I believe that’s us sufficiently disclaimed.

Wow, I missed a lot in a week; let’s jump in and see what’s up.

• SPX Occurred to the usual great acclaim and positive feelings. Fleen congratulates the attendees and exhibitors on a great weekend, and the Ignatz Award winners in particular. Representatives of webcomics in the winners circle include Der-shing Helmer’s The Meek as Outstanding Online Comic, Yuko Ota and Ananth Hirsh’s Johnny Wander: Our Cats Are More Famous Than Us as Outstanding Collection, Taneka Stotts (editor) and the contributors to Elements: Fire — An Anthology by Creators of Color as Outstanding Anthology, Jess Fink’s Chester 5000 XYV as Outstanding Series, and Bianca Xunise for Promising New Talent.
• Still at SPX, various attendees at the show have stuff to share, now and in the immediate future. Lucy Bellwood¹ released a detailed public accounting on the Kickstarter campaign for her 100 Demon Dialogues book/plush. Sharing numbers like this makes it more likely that newer creators dipping their toes into the Kickstart waters will succeed not only in funding, but in not bankrupting themselves on the expenses post-fundraising.

  As of today, Bellwood is up about US$3500 on US$50,000 raised, an amount which could be shaved down further by unexpected circumstances. But even if everything finishes exactly as measured today, be sure to pay attention to that US$3.5K number, not the US$50K. It’ll be half a year’s work or more by the time Bellwood’s done, and while 50 grand for half a year’s work is a comfortable living, 3.5 grand is not even subsistence living. Anybody inclined to sneer about the huge amounts of dough Bellwood’s rolling in, do have the courtesy to know what the hell you’re talking about.

• Speaking of both SPX and Kickstarter, C Spike Trotman and Danielle Corsetto took time from the show to announce they’re partnering up to bring a comprehensive omnibus printing of Girls With Slingshots to Kickstarter. Corsetto’s got the 2000+ strips, Spike’s got the Kickstarter process down to a science, and later today when the campaign goes live we can all get in on what’s sure to be a handsome volume featuring color strips. Those of us that have all ten GWS books, the first five of which are in B&W, will get to decide how much we need everything to match. Damn you, Corsetto! And damn you too, Spike, for enabling her!
• Missed like a week ago: The 20th anniversary of David Willis’s comics, which started on 10 September 1997 in the Indiana Daily Student, starting a run that would continue through four strips until the end of Shortpacked! in January of 2015. The rebooted version of the Willisverse, Dumbing of Age, launched on 10 September 2010, and continues to this day². If you feel this accomplishment merits some in-person congratulations³, you can see him at Bloomington, Indiana’s Vintage Phoenix Comics this coming Friday, 22 September, from 5:00pm to 7:00pm. Give him a Damn you, Willis! for me.
• Missed last week: The Homestuck videogame came out and people really love it! It was near five years back that almost 25,000 backers raised almost US$2.5 million to make the game, which has surely been through many design changes and mutations in the time since. But with Homestuck creator Andrew Hussie aided by past and present webcomic creators like Ryan North, Christopher Hastings, Tauhid Bondia, and Kris Straub, it’s not really a mystery that people are very happy with the outcome.

  Even better for those put off by the infamously dense and deep Homestuck, consensus is that you needn’t be familiar with the epic to play the game. Hiveswap is available via Steam or the Humble store with blessedly modest system requirements.

• And finally, Kelly and Zach Weinersmith announced their Soonish book tour; at present, dates in Seattle, Denver, New York, San Jose, Dallas, and Austin have been announced. Check the map and get your tickets now — it’s the first time Weinersmith’s been seen in public outside of BAH!Fest in years, and no guarantee after the book tour he won’t scurry back into his dank cartoonist’s lair, never to emerge into sunlight again.

I think that’s everything caught up. Come back tomorrow, and we’ll have news from across the Atlantic/Atlantique courtesy of Fleen Senior French Correspondent Pierre Lebeaupin.

Spam of the day:

Bad news is, I must have underestimated the amount of people who wanted to get in … because Ted’s server actually fell over.

This is the most astounding spam of apology, as somebody from “Ted’s Sheds” is making amends for traffic problems by extending for one day only their amazing offer of 16,000 woodworking plans (presumably including plans for the eponymous sheds) for the low, low price of … they don’t actually say. Too bad I don’t need a shed.

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¹ Adventure Cartoonist!

² Seven years in, I don’t think we’ve made it as far as midterms in the first semester of freshman year; by the time they graduate, these characters will have changed even more than Willis himself.

³ And heck if there are many webcomickers that have been as consistent as Willis for two damn decades, which include such life upheavals as throwing off a fundamentalist upbringing, a marriage, and the birth of twin sons.

For those who were intrigued by the early descriptions of SPX panels, I should note that the programming schedule is now posted, with speakers including Jillian Tamaki, Eleanor Davis, Tillie Walden, Gene Yang, Keith Knight, and Shannon Wheeler.

Of those, Tamaki and Walden will have book debuts; it’s not listed on the site as a debut, but the English-language edition of Alex Alice’s Castle In The Stars: The Space Race of 1869¹ is on Tuesday and I say that’s close enough.

And then, of course, there are the many, many exhibitors who’ll be in the Marriott Bethesda North ballroom; in roughly geographic order, you should keep an eye out for:

Green Zone
Top Shelf (wall 64 to 67), Iron Circus Comics (wall 72 and 73), Kel McDonald (wall 74), Ananth Hirsh and Yuko Ota with George Rohac (wall 81), Ngozi Ukazu and Mad Rupert (wall 82), Ru Xu (wall 91A).

Blue Zone
Drawn & Quarterly (wall 1 to 4), Miss Lasko-Gross (table H10A), Whit Taylor (table H14B), Tony Breed (table I3B), Ross Nover (table I10), Natasha Petrovic (table J6), Adam Aylard, David Yoder, Joey Weiser, and Drew Weing, Eleanor Davis (tables K12 to 14), Cartozia Tales (table K8), Lucy Bellwood (table K9), Retrofit Comics (tables L2 and 3), Nilah Magruder (table L6), Shan Murphy (table L10B), Koyama Press (tables M1 and 2), Dustin Harbin (table M4), Carla Speed McNeil (table M7A), Sophie Yanow (table M12A), Toronto Comics Art Festival (table M14), MK Reed (table N1), Gemma Correll (table N2), Sophie Goldstein (N13B), Ed Luce (N14), Fantagraphics (wall 56 to 61).

Red Zone
School of Visual Arts (wall 7 to 8), Colleen Frakes (table B5), former Fleen scribe Anne Thalheimer (table B6A), Liz Pulido (table B8), Zach Morrison (table B11), Jamie Noguchi (table B9), Barry Deutsch (table C13), 2dcloud (tables D1 and 2), Evan Dahm (table D8), Becky Dreistadt and Frank Gibson (table D9), Penina Gal (table D13), Carolyn Belefski (table E4A), Carolyn Nowak (table E6), Carey Pietsch (table E7A), Natalie Riess (table E7B), The New York Review Of Books (table E13B), Liz Prince (table E14A), Falynn Koch and Tucker Waugh (table E14B), Rebecca Mock (table F3A), The Center For Cartoon Studies (table F4), NBM Comics (tables G1 and 2), Tillie Walden (table G3), Alex and Lindsay Small-Butera (table G4), Kori Michele Handwerker and Melanie Gillman (table G5), Adhouse Books (wall 53 to 55).

Yellow Zone
Sara & Tom McHenry (wall 25), Jess Fink and Eric Colossal (wall 28), Danielle Corsetto (wall 29), TopatoCo² (wall 31 to 33), The Nib (wall 34), Meredith Gran and Mike Holmes (wall 35A), Out Of Step Arts³ (wall 44 to 46).

The Small Press Expo runs on Saturday 16 September (11:00am to 7:00pm) and Sunday 17 September (noon to 6:00pm). Admission at the door is US$10 on Sunday, US$15 on Saturday, and US$20 for the weekend.

Spam of the day:

Search for the best gas cards Compare for the best features

What features? You put money on the card, you give it to somebody, they get that much gas. Done.

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¹ Imagine a Miyazaki story with a male protagonist, set in Jules Verne’s Europe, against a backdrop of Prussia’s quest to unify all the German states under their banners (and the threat of an unstoppable fleet of near-space ships as the Romantic period wound down and the Belle Epoque got underway; also, Mad King Ludwig is in it).

It’s a lushly-painted story with a tight story that will be concluded in a second volume; the hdardcover itself is in the dimensions of a children’s book, but clocks in at 60 pages of gorgeous bandes dessinées. Get it for the airship fan you know.

² Including Kate Leth and Abby Howard

³ Including Andrew MacLean, Paul Maybury, Rosemary Valero-O’Connell, and Neil Bramlette.

Yesterday afternoon, the contributions to four Houston-area charities for Hurricane Harvey-related relief stood at US$175. Overnight, additional donors brought that up another two hundo for a final total of US$375.

As it turned out, everybody who donated gave to the Houston Food Bank, so that is where my US$375 match went; by donating through my employer, another US$375 was matched, bringing the total impact to US$1125 in American cash money to help those whose lives have been disrupted, in both the short and long terms.

The Fleen Fight For Fungible Futures Fund wishes to thank Ben Cordes, Pierre Lebeaupin, Mark V, and multiple people that wish to remain anonymous. Based on HFB’s ratio of one dollar = three meals, you’ve been instrumental in ensuring 3375 people get something to eat. There’ll be more to do tomorrow, and for many days after, on all the atrocities that 2017 seems to be throwing at us¹, but for now you all get to think Today, I damn well did something.

Spam of the day:

Tower usually cylindrical in structure that can go up to 275 feet; made of fit in your files and folders

That’s a lot of files and folders.

_______________
¹ It’s even money we’ll be back here next week, thanks to Hurricane Irma.

But I will point out that there’s still a few hours to contribute to the F-Six Hurricane Harvey fund-match giveapalooza. Contributions currently sit at US$175, which is less than I’d hoped, to be honest. I realize this is the third time I’ve come to you for the year, but the year continues to be garbage in ways that money will help with, so….

In the meantime, anybody want to watch Ryan North get totally smashed and recount the plot of his favorite episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation? And then for a bunch of loonballs wrangled by Jon “Ferocious J” Sung re-enact said drunken recount? North’s contribution was recorded at San Diego Comic Con 2016¹, so I’ve been waiting quietly for this for more than a year, and it was worth it.

Good thing, too, as J is (as listeners to his regular podcast, Idea Factory Giveaway well know), he and his wife are expecting their first child around Halloween, meaning the time he has to don the ol’ Picard bald cap and engage in his other frivolities for our entertainment will soon be greatly curtailed. Dive in now while you can.

Spam of the day:

This article is great. It is very nice to read it. I want more. I cordially greet you.

If you can tell me one thing that post said, I will give you a dollar.

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¹ Fun fact: J had to obtain a better microphone for the interview portion, and one was lent to him by Isaiah Mustafa, aka The Old Spice Guy. That’s right, this whole ridiculous situation just got even sexier.

Another webcomic announced forthcoming retirement, but it’s more like a beloved sports figure having a farewell season. Today is the start of September and in many parts of the world, that’s as close to the start of the academic year as you’re going to get. A number of Fleen’s readers and subjects are academic, and so they’re thinking of this as back to work season. For one of them, it’s the last season before retiring:

[T]his is the time that feels most appropriate for reviewing the past year and preparing for the oncoming year, setting what your goals will be and challenging yourself to do what you want to, as well as figure out where everything should be when the Academic Year is over.

So with that in mind, I’ll be ending Surviving the World on June 1st, 2018.

I started Surviving the World because I needed it, and it was crucial to my happiness and success through the end of grad school and through my post-doc. It started off my professorial career on just the right note. And then in what has been my dream job of being a teaching professor, not to mention the raising of two awesome kids, STW slowly became less and less important in my life and to my happiness. And while I still love STW, I know this should be the year that STW graduates, if you will, if I want my love for it to persist. So I’ll pack away the chalk at the end of the Academic Year.

I hope to make good comics straight through the end of STW. I hope you’ll enjoy them. I’ll try to crowdfund the one and only STW book (finally) early next year, and hopefully that will be successful. I don’t know exactly how well it will finish up, but I never expected many of you to be along for this ride in the first place, so I guess we’ll find out together.

So let’s roll into this last Academic Year together. I hope you liked what the class has been so far. I hope you like what’s left. Thanks for being here, either way.

(Also, June 1st will be one day past the 10th anniversary of STW, so I’ll be able to honestly claim that STW ran for 10+ years! It’s a small and ridiculous detail, but STW has always been about both small and ridiculous details, so it feels appropriate.)

That would be Dr Lucas Landherr of the Chemical Engineering faculty at Northeastern University, in his alter ego of Dante Shepherd, chalk addict and labcoat aficionado. What he doesn’t mention in his essay is that he will no doubt keep the comics coming in other forms, as he’s received both grants and significant professional acclaim¹ for his innovative use of comics to teach complex STEM concepts [PDF].

What I am saying is that it’s been a fun ride, and things are only likely to get funner as the year wears on. I hear during Spring Break, he’ll be naked, drunk, and cavorting with dry-erase whiteboards for the whole week. Scandal!

Now get out and enjoy the long weekend. As a reminder, the F-Six matching campaign for Houston flood relief continues until midnight on Monday, so don’t forget to give even a little; as mentioned earlier, your contribution will be tripled.

Current fundraising for Houston total: US$175

Spam of the day:

Start fresh this spring – consolidate your debt

No foolin’, I have no debt to consolidate. My debt is negative.

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¹ American Institute of Chemical Engineers 35 Under 35 Award, 2017;
American Society of Engineering Education Northeast Section Outstanding Teacher Award, 2016. Not to mention awards for teaching at Northeastern, all within his first five years of teaching. For a person at the start of his professing career, this is an amazing track record.

Here’s some fine folks that want to help you make your life in the creative end of things just a bit easier. They’re great.

• Katie Lane¹ reported t’other day that her How To Read A Contract free e-course got an overwhelming response from fine people such as yourself. So overwhelming, in fact, that it broke the email system she’s using to deliver the lessons. It took a day or so to resolve, but the emails are going out now, and Lesson One is a counterintuitive doozy.

  For a course on How To Read A Contract, it seems a little weird to start by saying don’t read the contract yet; however, readers that are familiar with Lane may recall that her chief objective in contracts is to reach a place of mutual understanding. The key to that is to first understand yourself and what you want the contract to reflect. So before you read it, think hard on what it is you want to see in the contract — what terms, what guarantees, what understanding.

  Only after you have that worked out do you have the framework to evaluate if the contract reflects what you want the agreement to be. Then you’re in a position to say This is not going to work for me, where do we go from here? Focusing on the language of the contract too soon means you’re already dealing solely on the terms and conditions that whoever wrote the contract considers important, which may not address everything you find to be important. It’s a neat way to look at things, and I’m guessing that the next lessons will build on it.

• On a related note, those that follow the small press that serves independent creators will be familiar with Koyama Press and its founder, Annie Koyama. She’s got her own opinions on how creators need to develop business skills and the ability to evaluate contracts and proposals; to help them protect themselves, she’s looking to hold a Toronto-area workshop along those lines:
  

  I’d like to gauge interest in holding a 2 hour workshop with a pro at KP headquarters to teach artists some of these basics. A full course is taught at OCADU and Sheridan College so if you are enrolled in those courses, this is not for you.

  It would be a one time thing unless there was a ton of interest to follow up with other topics. Probably to occur in late fall.

  Preference would be given to KP published artists initially but anyone is invited to attend.

  If there is enough interest, say ten people, Koyama Press would subsidize the cost and the artists could attend free of charge. If more than ten people wanted to attend, I’d look at repeating the event later.

  If interested, please comment here and send me an quick email at: anne at koyamapress dot-com. Thanks!

  The comment here bit refers to the Facebook posting, where she’s posted in the past hour that there’s definitely enough interest and the workshop will take place. But! All communications about the workshop and logistics will be email-only, so if you want to attend be sure to drop her a line. Anybody that attends, do let the rest of us know how it goes.

• Hey, you know who’s great? Lucy Bellwood (Adventure Cartoonist!), that’s who. I don’t know if you followed her artist’s residency in Iceland on Twitter earlier this month, but there were many majestic vistas featured, and more than a few really lovely paintings that she shared². But consider: a berth on a tall ship (or even a modern research vessel) may only offer a very small space for stowage and personal belongings; trekking across the blasted heath of Iceland, you ain’t carrying a full Cintiq rig with you (and there’s no place to plug it in if you did).

  So how art? Today, she’s done a writeup of how she manages to go to the far ends of the land and water and get all of the visual sketching and painting and such done; it’s at her Patreon, but it’s open for anybody to read:

  There’s a lot of bluster around asking artists about their tools. On the one hand, newer artists can become needlessly hung up on shortcuts, prying into artists’ toolkits to try and find the Magic Paintbrush that will grant them the power they desire. (Bad news: it doesn’t exist.) On the other hand, asking about people’s tools is a GREAT way to discover new materials and techniques.

  When I think about tools I picked up because artists I admire used them (Windsor and Newton Series 7 No. 2 Sable Brushes, Pentel Pocketbrush, etc.) I realize that they were neat to learn from, but ultimately didn’t stick around. When I found something that really worked for my tendencies and preferences (Kuretake’s felt-tip brush pen, for example) it felt right. However, like choosing a college major or a life path, that rightness is generally only attainable after a LOT of experimentation! [emphasis original]

  Her conclusion: trial and error is how you put together your travel art kit, but she’s helpfully included hers. It’s pretty compact! I’m guessing that all the stuff she’s included is super-neat for artists to ooh and ahh over, but I’m not qualified to judge. I can tell, though, that the tone of the post is pretty identical to when I talk about emergency kits with fellow EMTs and we have Opinions; whatever the tools of your trade, there’s always that discussion to have.

  Oh, and in case you think that your art isn’t good enough, regardless of the kit/tools/travel/whatever? She’s got you covered there. Punch your inner demons in the face when self-doubt strikes.

Current fundraising for Houston total: US$150
Come on, people! We’ve stalled since yesterday.

Spam of the day:

We are ready to offer a free accomplishment of written work hoping for further cooperation and honest feedback about our service.

Here’s my feedback: I have no idea what you’re trying to say by offer a free accomplishment of written work. I will not be buying the writing services of people who cannot write clearly.

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¹ Light-ning Law-yer!! I need to write a macro to set up that footnote automatically.

² There were also boats.

Here we are a little more than two weeks out from SPX — to be held 16 and 17 September in Bethesda, Maryland¹, and I’m eager to talk to you about the programming slate, which is always well-curated and humanely paced. Unfortunately, it’s not posted yet.

More precisely, the schedule of events is not posted, but SPX did give us a fairly extensive list of highlights. Traditionally, SPX runs two programming rooms, one panel in each, on offset schedules. Maybe six events per room on each of two days, for a total of a two dozen or so panels (plus the Ignatz Awards and dance party on Saturday night). And at least eight of those two dozen or so panels have had descriptions released. Highlights include:

• Last year’s multiple honoree and current hot creator du jour Tillie Walden talking about her new book, Spinning, with SPX executive director Warren Bernard.
• Perennial favorites Jillian Tamaki and Eleanor Davis in conversation with Jim Rugg.
• MacArthur Fellow and National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature Gene Luen Yang discussing his Reading Without Walls initiative with Johanna Draper Carlson.
• Political cartoonists Ann Telnaes (current NCS honoree for political cartoons, plus a Pulitzer), Matt Wuerker (also a Pulitzer alum), Keith Knight (Glyph and Harvey awards), and Ben Passmore talking with The Spurge the reality of political cartooning in the current climate.

Plus Sikoryak! Heidi Mac! Shannon Wheeler! 2dcloud! Jeremy Sorese! And many more! I’ma guess sometime between now and this time next week, we’ll have the proper schedule, until then, prepare for your time in Bethesda, and don’t forget to stock up on Faygo.

Know who else you’ll find in Maryland, on account of he lives there? Jamie Noguchi. When you see him at SPX, he’ll be halfway done with his Tokutember project, about which we now have some details. Check it:

Starting September 1, I’m going to kick off a little art project called Tokutember. It’s like daily drawing or Inktober or any other drawing challenge, except it’s tokusatsu themed! I’ll be posting my daily creations here as well as twitter and instagram with the hashtag #tokutember. Please feel free to join in on the fun!

That link takes you to the main Tokutember site with the details: from now on, September is Tokutember, and every year will have an appropriate theme. For 2017, the theme is insects, so draw something (in the theme or not, he’s not your boss), post it, and repeat at whatever interval you desire.

Noguchi will post his contributions at the site, and he’s included handy sosh–meeds links to tags so you can find all the best kaiju, rangers, and other effects-heavy Japanese entertainment tributes.

Current fundraising for Houston total: US$150

Spam of the day:

Get up to 1200 as soon as tomorrow

Up to 1200 what? Is this one of those over 9000 deals?

_______________
¹ Coincidentally, the same weekend as the Juggalo March on nearby Washington, DC.

Update to add: My employer will be matching donations to the Houston Food Bank; if you want your effort to be tripled (you give $1, I match $1, my employer matches my $1, total of $3 donated), there’s the place to give.

It was twelve years back that Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, and that being some months before this here page launched, we didn’t talk about the impact it had on webcomics — a number of hosting and colo facilities were in the Crescent City, and they failed as the floodwaters rose.

Actually, we wouldn’t have spoken about that regardless, as Hurricane Katrina was a bad time for me personally; I’m not sure I’ve ever mentioned it here, but my wife’s parents lived in New Orleans at the time, and we lost contact with them about 9:00pm Monday night¹. We didn’t hear back from them until the wee morning hours of Saturday. It’s a terrible thing, not knowing.

Anyway, they called us around 3:00am from a Red Cross intake center at an Army base in Texas (they got to ride in a helicopter!), and then their time at the phone was up. In the meantime, I found a hotel in the same city with vacancies, and when they got their next shot at the phone eight hours later and were still waiting their turn at processing (there were a lot of displaced people there), I told ’em to sign the We’re Leaving release, hop in a cab, and head to the Marriott. An hour later they’d had their first showers and hot food in days, and the luxury of talking to us without anybody waiting their turn.

We told ’em to stay there at least the weekend and were never so glad to get a higher than expected Visa bill that month. They did return to New Orleans, but only briefly to gather their things; they wound up in West Virginia, close to one of my wife’s sisters (the surgical nurse, which was helpful when their health later took downward turns).

Houston, and its metropolitan area, is much larger than New Orleans. It is not conceivable how many people will have to be rescued as the waters are — as of this writing — still rising nearly three days after landfall; it is not conceivable how many will have to be evacuated from homes and neighborhoods that are no longer structurally safe or provided with the necessities of life; it is not conceivable how many may never be able to return. Some of them were probably chased out of NoLa in 2005 and wondering which deity they pissed off to go through all of this again.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying that there’s going to be a continuing need for help down in Texas; the immediate rescue-and-recovery will last for the next couple of days, but the rebuilding will take much, much longer.

Fleen readers have proven themselves to be generous in the defense of others, and I’m asking you to help once again. Material goods are not as helpful as cash, so any contributions to any of the local charities called out by Charity Navigator as being well-regarded, we’re going to match them until the end of Labor Day.

Those organizations are:

• Houston Food Bank
• Food Bank of Corpus Christi
• Houston Human Society
• San Antonio Humane Society

Remember: a lot of people that don’t evacuate make that choice because they can’t take their animals with them; add in the animals that have been separated from their people, and you see the need.

If there are webcomics down that you learn about alternate posting locations for, we’ll run a list; otherwise, let’s be patient, and let’s do our best to help².

Spam of the day:
Not today.

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¹ Exactly twelve years ago tomorrow.

² On that note, there is a nonzero chance that FEMA may ask my town’s EMS to send ambulance and crew to Texas; it happened after Katrina. If that happens, I’ll be away. I trust you’ll deal.