Robert Khoo on what PA want to accomplish with the Diversity Hub & Lounge.

tl;dr: It’s being headed up by one of the founders of GaymerX.

Oh my stars and garters, The Boy! Neil threw me a bit there, what with identifying Eustace Boyce as 25, but then Bad Machinery has been running more than four years now, and that was three years after the end of Scary Go Round¹, and I guess you leave school around age 18 in Britain, so yeah, 25. Looks like since breaking up with Esther, he’s moved well onto the Susan end of life. Still, good to see him again.

• It’s been a while since we at Fleen have mention Matt Lubchansky, which is Our Bad, because he keeps doing good comics. For just about exactly one year (the first strip dates from a year ago yesterday), The New Amsterdam Mystery Company by Lubchansky and Jaya Saxena has been bringing the mystery, and yesterday the first NAMC collection, The Curse of the Dying Dutchman (which coincides with the first NAMC story arc) went up for pre-order. You’ve got two slim weeks to get in on a story that’s part supernatural mystery, part love letter to New York.
• Hat tip to Ryan Estrada (or at least, the twitterfeed of The Whole Story): Jerzy Drozd² of Comics Are Great!³ is now offering a course in comic-making; okay, lots of people do that, even people that make (and promote the art of) comics as much as Drozd. What distinguishes this one (and makes sense, being linked by The Whole Story, the name your price publisher) is that Drozd’s course is being offered on Gumroad, pay what you want:
  

  In this four-part series we’ll explore how to build a comics story from the ground up! There’s a lot to consider when making a comic: developing a dynamic cast of characters, defining your world, devising visually exciting pages, and more. And what about figuring out your options for getting your work to your audience? This series of interactive presentations will provide you with some context and options in navigating those waters.

  Name your price for seven hours of comics instruction! You’ll be able to download the DRM-Free videos or stream them from Gumroad.

  So that’s seven videos, seven hours, for free? Well, yes, but only if you’re a chump. There’s a lot of knowledge and work there, so if you decide to download, don’t leave the price set to zero, ‘kay?

• I expected to wake up this morning to a bigger than usual backlog on Twitter, what with the last episode of The Best Show, but I didn’t expect to see a new Penny Arcade/PAX controversy. Here’s the short version: Indie Statik broke (and Kotaku confirmed) the story of a new offering at future PAXes: a diversity lounge. There’s been a lot of back and forth about segregation and I’ve seen the word ghetto used more than once; I think that a lot of the reactions have come from people that read the Indie Statik and Kotaku stories, and more of the reactions have come from people that read the first reactions.

  I also think that a lot of people aren’t discussing things so much as they’re projecting assumptions on on each other. We’ve got one set of primary source material here, the document describing the lunge in question, the originals of which may be seen at Indie Statik (image 1, image 2). I think that everybody that’s got an opinion on the matter might want to follow those links, because they might not say what you think they say.

  Most importantly, a lot of people I’ve seen have been describing the lounge as a designated safe space and getting angry that all of PAX isn’t likewise. Thing is, my reading of the document doesn’t indicate that’s what’s planned at all. I do see indications that it’s a place that people can come and learn, and that part of what can be taught is how to establish safe spaces.

  My reading of the description is Hey, want to learn about people who aren’t like you but play games anyway? Willing to pry yourself away from demos for half an hour, maybe? Go here. Implicit in that is a subtext: Everybody that’s always complained that you get jumped on for being oppressive and wondering what you’re doing wrong and why won’t anybody teach you? This is what you’ve been asking for, so avail yourself or shut up.

  What I didn’t see anywhere in the description is All minorities go here so the rest of us don’t have to think about you, which is a pretty close paraphrase of one of the criticisms I read earlier today. But you know what? It hasn’t happened yet, and whether or not it’s well-executed will be determined months from now; whatever aspects of it aren’t done well at PAX East, will they be done better at Prime and Aus? Will the PA principals be involved in curating the content, or will they be delegating that to somebody else? How credible will the content slate be? Crucially, will Mike and Jerry be spending some learning time in there?

  What we’ve got at the moment is a two-page outline, vague enough that it could have come out of a corporate mission-statement generating workshop. It’s not a blueprint, it’s the brainstorm that will build the structure that will eventually be used to define the blueprint. Maybe nobody avails themselves of it and it fails spectacularly. Maybe it succeeds to the extent that the hub and lounge grow and assume more floor space at each subsequent show. Maybe it’s an expression of Mike & Jerry’s parental concern that their kids come up in the hobby they love, but without absorbing the worst parts of the culture that surrounds it⁴.

  Penny Arcade is too big to do anything quietly — or subtly, for that matter; they’ve got a load of momentum to shed before they can chart a new course. It will take years to work past some of their mistakes (if in fact they ever completely do) and to be known for more than their worst behavior. Maybe — just maybe — this is where it changes.

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¹ We’ve actually seen The Boy within the pages of Giant Days, if memory serves, but that’s from the early days of university and thus seven years ago in story time.

² Improbably enough, there are two Jerzy Drozds out there, the other being a bass luthier of some repute. Odd, but no odder than there being two Gary Tyrrells, I suppose.

³ Word.

⁴ Mike and Jerry have not always been wise in picking which fights to have or how to have them. I suspect that like all conscientious parents, they want their kids to be wiser, smarter, kinder, better people than they themselves have been. Or maybe I’m projecting because my parents and grandparents taught me to be better than the prejudices that they learned and didn’t always grow out of.

Well, that’s my holidays all cheered up — the inimitable Tom Spurgeon¹ decided that his year-end interview schedule needed a hack webcomics pseudojournalist for balance, and we just had a delightful talk. Assuming you don’t get enough of my semi-abusive opinionmongering here, I’ll be sure to let you know when that goes live. And may I say, this was the first time Spurgeon and I have interacted person-to-person, and he’s simply a terrific conversationalist. In case you still need a little something to cheer up your holidays, there’s places out there that would provide you with gifts for the comics center of your brain; let’s go check ’em out.

• Via the tweet-feed of Mr Scott C, I see that Gallery 1988 will be holding the latest iteration of its Crazy 4 Cult show in New York this year, meaning that I get a shot at Scott C art without having to fly to LA. Opening is tomorrow night, at G1988’s Manhattan space, 355A Bowery (at 3rd), from 7:00pm to 10:00pm. Past experience of gallery openings suggests that there may well be snacks and booze available. There will be an associated signing event on Sunday, from noon to 4:00pm, and the show will run each day from noon to 7:00pm, until Saturday, 21 December.
• Word is appearing online that the 12 Days of Holiday Bullshit packages o’ fun are arriving in mailboxes. I, alas, missed my chance to get in on the gifting extravaganza, despite the exhortations of people like Rich Stevens and Dylan Meconis dropping broad hints on Twitter that I really should be signing up.

  There are still nine days to go according to the official page, and given that they’ve commissioned a Molly Lewis song about Hawai’ian detachable-vagina gods, I’m guessing that when the Stevens/Meconis thing drops, we’ll all recognize it immediately. If one of you who are in the lucky 100,000 subscribers would let us know when that happens, that would be awesome.

• This page is well known to be in the tank for K Brooke “Otter” Spangler, creator extraordinaire of A Girl And Her Fed, and aside from the fact that she regularly gifts us with one of my favorite webcomics for free, she’s decided to up the ante somewhat. Take ‘er away, Otter [no direct link]:
  

  How would you like the first nine chapters of MAKER SPACE?

  Maker Space would be the second of Spangler’s AGAHFiverse novels; the first, Digital Divide, was terrific, and the second looks to be even better. Disclaimer: Otter asked me to do a reality-check on a plot point involving a branch of engineering I’m not trained in, so I’ve seen a snippet of the book and loved it, even though I was spectacularly useless with respect to the technical check she was seeking².

  How would you like them for free?

  Now we’re talkin’. Spangler is offering approximately the first third of her next novel for the princely sum of zero dollars because she’s awesome. Also because when the book actually comes out in March, some of you will want to see how it turns out and might pony up more than zero dollars for the ending. In the meantime, if you haven’t taken my advice on how good a story-wrangler Otter is, this is your no-risk chance to check out her stuff, in PDF format here or Kindle-style MOBI here.

  Those links will take you to Gumroad, where you’ll be asked for a credit card number — don’t provide one. As soon as you enter 0 in the price box, the request for your plastic will go away; give ’em an email address to send the link to, and get to downloadin’ and readin’ and enjoyin’. Oh, and be sure to leave out a plated of cookies and glass of milk for Otter Claus³.

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¹ So don’t even try to imit him!

² Not that that kept me from commenting on almost every other aspect of what she sent me. Pedantry, thy name is, uh, me.

³ If anybody wanted to draw a sketch of Otter Claus, well, I wouldn’t say no.

Several repeat visits today; sometimes that’s just how things reveal themselves.

• Speaking of Penny Arcade, Child’s Play, etc: The progress graph on the main page is a little out of date, as the recent formal dinner/auction raised more than US$250,000 and have brought the year’s total to the neighborhood of US$3.4 million. This brings the ten-year total to some US$21 million, and there’s still US$1.6 million to go to pass last year’s total (CP have always grown in absolute terms, year-on-year).
• Speaking of The AV Club and their year-end best-of lists, today they tackled Graphic Novels and Art Comics¹ wherein they recognized Emily Carroll’s Out of Skin and Gene Yang’s Boxers & Saints, all of which also count as “speaking of …”. One should note as well that another of their recognized graphic novels, while not strictly webcomic-related, does come from :01 Books (speaking of, once more) — namely, Paul Pope’s Battling Boy.
• Okay, this might stretch the limits of “speaking of”, since we have to go back exactly one year when A Lesson Is Learned By The Damage Is Irreversible returned for what was claimed to be a one-off. They have since released a second new comic within the past five weeks, meaning they’re only now restarting the hiatus clock and will have to go more than six and a half years to equal their previous absence.

  It actually makes sense that they’ve produced but one comic since their return for hiatus, as it would seem that significant amount of time would be needed for them to put a collection of their past strips as prints up at TopatoCo, seeing as how they’re all different sizes and degrees of complexity. Those factors mean that not all ALILBTDII strips are available, and that those that are will have prices varying from US$14 to US$60 (for a single-piece humongous print of I Name Thee Annihilator, which is 190 cm tall, or nearly one Ryan North in height).

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¹ To distinguish from yesterday’s list of mainstream comic books, the boundaries being somewhat arbitrary.

Hey. How are you? Good, good. There are some things coming up that you might want to keep an eye on.

• T minus 10 days That’s when the latest iteration of The Whole Story finishes up its Kickstarter campaign, and truth be told, it looks like it might be a squeaker. The last release of The Whole Story handily cleared its goal, but this one is presently predicted to hit around 95% of goal, and that is just heartbreaking for a couple of reasons:
  1. Ryan Estrada is trying something really audacious here, where the main reward is an e-comic sent to you every two weeks, and the stories are interlinked. The hero of the first installment of Broken Telephone (for that is its name) has a villain to defeat, but that villain doesn’t know that he’s the villain — he’s the hero of his own story, which will be the second installment. Each antagonist gets a turn in the spotlight, through an 18 part epic by 19 creators.
  2. Those that go above the bare minimum of one stinking dollar will get more comics, including a 24 page bonus story at the US$18 level, 160 pages of various stories¹ added to your fortnightly subscription at the US$24 level, and a mind-boggling 850 pages from various creators² delivered this month before the Broken Telephone subscription even starts. That would be nearly 1050 pages plus the BT subscription (18 chapters, each 12 – 24 pages, call it 300 or so as a round number), or a whopping 3.3 cents per page.
  3. All the money goes to the artists. Estrada, maybe more than anybody, understands that working for exposure is a vile, filthy lie, so aside from postage costs for some top-tier backers getting originals and such, everything raised goes to pay the people who are drawing the comics. Go take a look at the list of names that Estrada’s posted — I’ll wager that there’s at least one person there whose work you enjoy. That person gets paid if The Whole Story makes goal.

  Do it for the children.

• T minus 15 days The Beguiling’s annual comics-funtimes party will be on Wednesday, 18 December, starting at 7:30pm, mere steps from the famed comic shop at Pauper’s Pub where there will be plentiful adult beverages and webcomics superstars. Kate Beaton! Joey Comeau! Ryan North! The launch of Midas Flesh! And I don’t want to make it sound too enticing, but we have been promised both Surprise Mystery Guests and shenanigans. There will be signings of all their various booklike creations, and a Secret Santa gift exchange.

  Also do this for the children.

• T minus about 90 days, dang Hat tip to Kean Soo who pointed me to an amazing new webcomic, Maralinga 1956, which launched a story of post-apocalyptic survival and monsters about a week ago. Good news: there’s ten pages of very good story there. Bad news: the creators will be updating with ten-page chapters on a quarterly basis, meaning that:
  

  Maralinga will be a 200ish page graphic novel posted in quarterly 10 page installments, so should be wrapping up in around, ulp, 2018.

  I’m annoyed because I want more of this story yesterday, but waiting for few-and-far-between updates in longform stories is nothing new. No RSS, but there is a form to sign up for email notification when Maralinga updates in, I’m guessing late February/early March.

  You’ll have to do this for the children, since children have no concept of in three months.

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¹ Including one of Estrada’s true-life adventures, The Bear From The Bear And The Beach From The Beach, wherein Estrada gets close to the movies and nearly dies a lot.

² Including more true-life adventures in Estradavision and Dean Trippe’s Something Terrible, which is going to appear on a lot of best-of lists this year and awards ballots next year.

It’s a time of landmarks and new beginnings.

• Yesterday marked ten years since a fit of annoyance resulted in a an impromptu charity drive that then turned into a repeatable event, a worldwide effort, and a year-round process. The eleventh iteration of Child’s Play is at US$2.5 million dollars and counting which means given the efforts of prior years, the cumulative effect since Mike and Jerry’s decided that radio jock was getting all up in their business is now over US$20 million. The big dinner auction hits in ten days and in advance of that event I’m giving it 50/50 odds that they hit US$25M cumulative by the time 2013 ends.
• On the far side of the longevity divide is a webcomic that launched today, which you are going to want to read. We’ve spoken before of Jeff Smith, indie comics mastercrafter and perhaps nicest guy in the world. We know that BONE and RASL are as different (and excellent!) as two creator-owned comics projects could be and still come from the same mind and hands. We know that Tüki Save The Humans will absolutely be the worthy next step in Smith’s career trajectory, and that today’s prelude and first page are just the start of a ride where none of us can predict the twists and turns.

  On the logistics side, Smith’s wife and publisher, Vijaya Iyer, told me back at SDCC that the plan is to have multiple months worth of updates ready to post at launch, so that Smith’s schedule has plenty of buffer to withstand interruptions and emergencies. Tüki will update MWF for eight weeks to make up a major story arc (or “season”), with downtime between seasons to build up the buffer again.

  Three a week for eight weeks is 24 pages — or about the length of a comic book¹ — which suggests a beginning-middle-end to a story in that period of time unless Smith is feeling really evil and makes us wait out a cliffhanger. The plan right now is for Season Two to start in mid-April 2014, giving Smith time to work on all sorts of projects in and around Tüki, which means more Jeff Smith in general. All right-thinking people should be ready to approve of this plan, along with the thought that an announced start date for Season Two means it’s likely done or nearly so.

  Make no mistake: this is a big shift for Smith, Iyer, and their company, Cartoon Books — they’ve alternately been indie comics publishers, trade publishers, and owners of IP reprinted by major publishing concerns³, but they’ve always been exchanging story for upfront money. Giving away comics and looking to make money on the back end involves a leap of faith that they can still make a living; once Tüki starts producing merch, do remember that fact, please.

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¹ Anybody complaining that Smith should be able to crank out two dozen pages quicker than that should remember that a big part of the difference in the production schedules of BONE and RASL is that the former was all made up in his head², while the latter involved research.

Smith spent a long damn time researching Nikola Tesla, weird physics, and the southwestern desert so that he could get the details right in RASL; with a topic as broad and deep as human migration out Africa, he is without doubt buried deep in continental drift, paleobotany, physical anthropology, primatology, climatology, and likely a dozen other -ologies. Look for the sources of that research to be listed here once he’s got a free moment.

² Granted, there were plenty of influences, and he took a side trip to Nepal to get visual inspirations for some of the architecture and cultural designs of the third arc of BONE. My point is he didn’t have to spend months reading up on subspecies of dragon or the organizational structure of stupid, stupid rat creature tribes.

³ Sometimes more than once. The only thing smarter than Scholastic deciding to reprint the entirety of BONE in trades aimed at the YA market was to reprint it again with Steve Hamaker’s colors added to Smith’s B&W art.

If you don’t know what license fees I’m talking about, see yesterday’s post where we learn that boilerplate approaches to convincing somebody that your endorsement is really, really essential went wrong. Now, hold on to your (metaphorical, physical, doesn’t matter) hat, because it’s about to go extraordinarily, amazingly wrong.

Yesterday we introduced the idea that Ziff Davis (no link for them!) wanted webcomickers to pay a license fee for the privilege of quoting a listicle about their own comics. The creator who shared that email back-and-forth didn’t get around to asking what that license fee might be but another one did, and gave me permission to share the number if I kept his name¹ out of it. Ready? Here it comes:

Apart from the quote “PCMAG Best Webcomics” you can use the following quotes from the feature:

“[removed for anonymity]”

“[removed for anonymity]”

The fees vary depending on if you want to use the logo and quotes on just your website or on all digital media platforms (social media, emails, etc.) The fees are about $1,000 for a feature like this but I am willing to work with you on figuring out a fee that works for you. [bold added for emphasis]

So that’s a cool thousand dollars for the privilege of using a logo and two pull-quotes for a year. Now you know why defender of the realistic sense of artistic worth Ryan Estrada got all incredulous yesterday. I can scarcely believe it myself.

Let’s end on an up note before the weekend, yeah? By the time you do something official and public twice, it becomes a tradition, which means that The Toonseum is well into beloved, longstanding tradition territory, as they’re releasing their fourth edition of Illustration Ale in conjunction with East End Brewing. Two things of note:

• The launch party for Illustration Ale 2013 is at 7:00pm on 5 December, and as is traditional will feature six labels from six Pittsburgh artists.
• This launch is coming months later than expected, as East End Brewing takes some pride in their craft.

By that I mean that the beer was due in August, and the brewmasters made a tough call:

My apologies for the late notice on this, but based on what we’re seeing with the bottles of Illustration Ale we’ve been sampling here, we will not be doing a release at the Toonseum for bottles of this beer as we had planned this Saturday August 3rd.

We had hoped the bottles would come around (which is why this notice is so late in the game), but they just aren’t up to snuff, so we need to make the call to POSTPONE this release, until we can get a re-brew into the tank and subsequently into new bottles.

It’s one thing to have 1,500 bottles of unsaleable hand-bottled beer on our hands, but it’s another to… well, yeah. In all honesty, this is about the only thing we’re thinking about today. But you can’t sell GOOD BEER every day if you aren’t willing to make the decision to pour some not-so-good beer down the drain. It doesn’t make it any easier though.

Well done, East End Brewing, and well done The Toonseum — you’ve chosen your partners well, and I expect to hear that this year’s vintage is spectacular.

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¹ Side note — of the 25 webcomics on the list there are a total of 33 creators if I counted all the creative teams correctly; 7 of them were women, which is less than I would have expected. Where on earth were Dylan Meconis, Erika Moen, Dorothy Gambrell, Yuko Ota, and Magnolia Porter, just for starters? Okay, Hurricane Erika gets left out because of the sexytimes, fine.

Still, that 21% representation blew away the gender imbalance I noted in their list of best digital comics (that is, regular print comics also available via comiXology and the like). Over there it was ten comics, 14 creators, and the incredibly skilled Fiona Staples the sole lady for a whopping 7% representation. I’m starting to get why so many ridiculously talented comics–making ladies are in the original graphic novel end of the industry, where they seem to be more welcome.

A couple of quick thoughts for you today, as we careen through space on an improbably-small hunk of rock with an impossibly-narrow band of gases that somehow sustain all the life and — by extension — webcomics that we know to exist in the infinite universe. You know … Tuesday.

• One of the smaller-scale, highly regarded comics shows takes place this weekend in Leeds, UK, as Thought Bubble Comic Con participates in the week-long Thought Bubble Festival. There are symposia and screenings in the festival all this week, and the convention itself at Clarence Dock on Saturday and Sunday. Indy- and web-comicky types in attendance will include John Allison, Kate Beaton, Becky Dreistadt & Frank Gibson, Jeffrey Brown, Darryl Cunningham, Meredith Gran, Nicholas Gurewitch (!), Olly Moss, Ethan Nicolle, Ramón Pérez, Tom Siddell, Cameron Stewart, and Maris Wicks, in addition to the British Comics Awards. Tell everybody I said hi.
• For those not able to make it to Leeds this weekend, one might make plans to check out Evan Dahm’s new e-book, Lacunæ. The word lacuna (lacunæ is the plural) refers to a gap, missing section (as in text) or silence (as in music); Dahm’s book refers to the latter definition as it’s a collection of 18 “quiet places”, taken from a series of drawings of remote dwellings on remoter islands.

  He shared some of the drawings on Twitter as he worked on them, and they put me in mind of the further corners of Le Guin’s Earthsea, and that’s some damn good company to be in. It’s two bucks for nearly twenty pages of intricate, mood-setting places, and if I don’t see at least one of them stolen for either an album cover or a mural on the side of a van by this time next year, it’s only because we’re too far from the 1970s¹.

• For the past few years, webcomickers have been molding the next generation(s) of comics artists, as diverse creators have presented workshops and lectures at various colleges or taught full-semester programs. To that number we’re about to add one Bradley² J³ Guigar will be teaching at the Hussian School of Art in Philadelphia. Lots of predecessors for teaching a class, but this is the bit that I think is unique — Guigar won’t be teaching drawing, or story, or joke writing, he’ll be teaching how to make a living in the arts:
  

  In January, I will be teaching a senior-level course on Arts Entrepreneurship … For a long time now, I’ve argued (sometimes loudly on Webcomics Weekly) that art schools need to do a better job of preparing their students for the Real World they’re being thrust into. And that means an overwhelming probability of freelance work and running a small business centered around one’s craft — not the studio jobs and staff positions that were prevalent decades ago.

  Hint for those Hussian students that end up sitting class with Professor Guigar next semester: he’s got a lot of Dad Jokes, he’s not embarrassed to drop them on you, and if you can make him laugh, you’ll get 30 to 90 seconds to check your email or texts before he’ll be able to continue. I encourage you to learn all you can from him (he really is frighteningly smart), and also to keep track of how many laugh breaks you get out of him before graduation; I’m going to place the over/under at 75, but would be thrilled to hear that I underestimated.

  Oh, and if you’re going to try to bribe him, learn how to make a proper whisky sour. Just sayin’.

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¹ Not necessarily the worst place to be too far from.

² Bradford? Bradmark? Bradbourne? Bradburn? Braddock? Bradon? Bradshaw? Bradwell? Brady?

³ It is my firm belief that the “J” doesn’t stand for anything, but is in reference to Bullwinkle J Moose and Rocket J Squirrel. Whatever the truth of the name, he’s dreamy.

I have to wrap up things with the client and then head to the airport, which means I am missing pretty much all the ComfyCon events (which are kicking off about now) for the day. Don’t be like me.

The easiest way to derive some webcomic-related joy out of a ComfyCon-less existence is to obsessively re-read the long-awaited Monster of the Week update dealing with the greatest hour of ’90s television, Jose Chung’s “From Outer Space”. I managed to mis-calculate when this would appear by two months and one week on past occasions, but it’s here now motherscratchers, and it’s glorious. Realizing that no one person could do justice to JCFOS, MoW creator Shaenon Garrity has turned curator, inviting thirteen comickers to each take a panel and get to the emotional heart of the episode. Lord Kinbote, Alex Trebek, Jesse “The Body” Ventura, Scully’s many great lines, Mulder’s pie rampage, and the bleepin’ sheriff with the bleepin’ vocabulary all get their due. It was worth the wait.

So many Things!

• New Thing! ComfyCon is go!
• New Thing! Kel McDonald’s previously-mentioned African folktales anthology is now on Kickstarter! Kel! Cube! Becky! Faith! A dozen stories that you haven’t seen a thousand times before!
• New Thing! Frank “The Voice Of Wallace The Fish” Gibson will be one of the writers of the new Bee & PuppyCat comics alongside B&P creator Natasha Allegri and the always-awesome Madeleine Flores!
• Thing Wrapping Up! The Bee & PuppyCat series Kickstarter has just wrapped with more than US$870K, meaning nine episodes of cosmic ennui!
• New Thing! Ryan Estrada’s latest comics collection, Broken Telephone, is now live! That is to say, you can now subscribe to all-new digital comics, from nearly 20 artists, arriving every other week for up to a year. To be precise, Estrada’s using the Kickstarter campaign as a funding backbone for his usual Pay What You Want model, with certain funding tiers getting you more and more and more comics, from so many creators, all of whom were paid for their efforts. Rockin’. Go get it.