Where to start, where to start, on this drear and wet Tuesday (there are worse things, certainly), oh but where to start?

• How about here: KB “Otter” Spangler is perhaps the person I’ve met via webomics who has had the greatest influence on me; she was the first to ask me to contribute to a print collection (the forward here), the first to threaten me with horrific violence, in many circumstances has been the first to console me on loss, congratulate me on good fortune, smack me when I need it, and generally be the retroactive weirdo best friend from high school that movies and TV tell you you’re supposed to have¹. She also weathers house-related horrors that would crush an ordinary human.

  I’ve been an early reader/kibitzer on each of her novels, and on occasion my nitpicking has been mildly helpful (or at least not actively detrimental). That habit continued with the latest novel — the fourth (of seven) in her Rachel Peng series — which is out today; my involvement in the creation of this latest book may affect my impartiality, so take it with a grain of salt when I tell you that I love her words², unabashedly, and want the entire world to enjoy them.

  Said latest book — Brute Force, available today in a variety of formats — has been somewhat delayed by actual life catching up to what’s supposed to be a contemporary slightly SF plotline, where technology, media, sociopaths, nationalists, and authoritarians blend in ways that society and rules couldn’t predict³. Bad situations and poor alternatives lead to sometimes terrible decisions, and consequences echo both to early books and are left to be resolved in later. There are also dick jokes.

In other news:

• Holy glob, KC Green warned us he was taking a week off of He Is A Good Boy to catch up with other things, but never hinted it was to drop a new chapter of Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio on us! Oh, Pinocchio, will you ever stop making bad decisions?
• Interesting! Kel McDonald has a new Kickstart going — nothing unusual there, this is her tenth after all — with a couple of interesting things I’ve not seen before: a) She’s working with an art team instead of drawing things herself with Kara Leopold on pictures and Whitney Cogar providing colors; b) And this is the really interesting part, the rewards for this campaign are entirely digital.

  [Super]Natural Attraction is described as a digital comic series, with the US$5000 goal dedicated to paying Cogar and Leopold for the first 22 page chapter of the story; each additional five grand will provide for another chapter, with ten chapters agreed to by the creative team. With nothing to ship, nothing to manufacture, and the high-tier rewards adding in PDFs of McDonald’s earlier work, this is as close to a no-risk situation for a creator as ever I’ve seen. It’ll be interesting to watch if other creators get on the digital-only bandwagon, and if Luddite obsessive dead-tree collectors (cough, cough) can ever be convinced to join up. If nothing else, it makes the reward structure far more affordable for backers.

Updating the charity contributions matching drive: we have our first suggestion for an improved name for this thing. The Fleen Future Fighters Fund is much better than my initial thought (Welcome To Screwtrumpistan⁴, Population: Us). Anybody else want to chime in?

Spam of the day:

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¹ Her love of bad movies is so legendary, I made her a plush sharktopus for her birthday. It was supposed to be for her wedding, but you now how long it takes to sew tentacles on a plush shark?

² Not her writing, mind, but her words. What she does it beyond the mechanical act of arranging words in a particular order according to rules of grammar and syntax; she is closer to retaining the power and might of capital-w Words like might be found in some great wizard tapping into forces primordial and/or primeval. I love your words is a nearly unique sentiment, one that I’ve only ever expressed to one other person, who likewise languagebends in ways that make me swoon.

³ I know, far-fetched, right? Leave out the one bit of implausible technology and the rest is still so improbable it would never happen.

⁴ With a node to KB Spangler of A Girl And Her Fed, which nicely brings us full circle.

Oh my, but things happened during the extended break time for the blog; the American version of Thanksgiving, of course, but also the travel associated with same (ugh), a birthday of note (that of Jon Rosenberg¹, who is killing it with the Trump comics these days because you have to laugh), some weekend EMT duty, pie, and the gift of a really excellent book that I am enjoying the hell out of.

Oh, yeah, and some webcomics things happened since we last saw each other. Let’s do it.

• Honestly, I expected to see a lot more of this in the cultural media, or even more in the comics media: Alison Bechdel updated Dykes To Watch Out For for the first time in forever. Cultural touchstone, Eisner laureate, National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, creator of the source material for a musical that’s garnered literally dozens of awards, and — oh, yeah — MacArthur Fellow, Bechdel was a self-syndicated cartoonist for two and a half decades with DTWOF, which for at least a third of that time meant puttin’ ’em up on the web, which means webcomics. It’s a shame that the prompt for the strip was an act of collective national insanity.
• We mentioned Evan Dahm’s Kickstarter for an illustrated edition of Moby-Dick ’bout two weeks back, and we’re happy to report that he’s about 65% of the way to goal with 15 days to go. We’re even happier to note that he spent some time to share with us his process of typesetting the text, to honor the original material while matching with the illustrations. If you’re a type geek, this is the sort of stuff that makes your heart sing.
• For those of you looking to get books for the younger readers in your life in the upcoming gifting season, Gene Luen Yang (best selling author, MacArthur Fellow, Library of Congress National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature) has you covered, bucko. Thanks to the twitterfeed of Yang’s publisher (and all-around wonderful people) :01 Books, we can all check out a list of five recommendations that Yang made adjacent to an interview in the Washington Post (Post staffers add another dozen-plus, both illustrated and not).
• From over the long weekend, there’s a damn good interview with Sophie Goldstein at Paperdroids. It’s deep on process and light on fluff, so dig in.

Updating the charity contributions matching drive²: as of today, you have donated more than US$1200 towards a US$10K goal. Donations will be matched through 20 January.

Spam of the day:

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¹ Okay, and me, since Jon and I share a birthday. I may have been born six years earlier, but somehow he’s the grumpy old guy and I’m the grumpy moderately younger guy. Proof of my theory that kids age the crap out of you.

² It needs a catchier name. Suggestions welcomed.

So Unshelved wrapped not quite two weeks back, and if there’s one thing both nature and webcomics abhor, it’s a vacuum. You can’t have the world go on without a daily (mostly) library comic written by a librarian, not while Gene Ambaum is drawing breath, by glob! Thus, Unshelved finished on Friday the 11the, and on Monday the 14th Ambaum and Chris Hallbeck launched Library Comic¹.

It’s not Unshelved. It’s a completely new comic written by the same guy, and drawn by the same guy that did the last significant chunk of Unshelved. It’s set in a library, it features overworked, underfunded library staff including cranky reference types, nerdy types, childrens librarian types, all interacting with patrons. None of this is in any way familiar or what you have seen before. These are not the librarians you’re looking for. Move along.

Okay, look, it’s a workplace; there’s only so many character archetypes you get in any workplace, much less one as specific as a library. Is Martin the Mirror Universe Collen? Is Dewey reborn in Esther, Mel in Lucy, or Tamara in Laura? No, no, maybe. Look, Ronald D Moore took the grittiness and moral ambiguity of Deep Space Nine and mapped it to another set of pre-existing characters and ideas to produce Battlestar Galactica; similar themes, similar tropes, in service of a different story. Same deal here.

Ambaum will have ideas from the day job for approximately forever, and Hallbeck will infuse these characters with their own quirks; the are professionals, dammit, and as long as a community (that would be librarians) is looking to see their lives and experiences in comic form, A&H are going to meet that need². And given that libraries are meeting so many needs in so many communities, giving the selfless people that work in them their own laugh-chuckles seems like a pretty fair tradeoff.

NB: This will likely be the last posting of the week; I’ll be in transit or in a pie coma for the next several days, in observance of American Thanksgiving. If you celebrate (or don’t; lookin’ at you, CANADA), please go safely and enjoy the respite (from life, from me, from whatever).

Spam of the day:

Let’s talk!

Over the past few months the written-in-Portuguese, originating-from-Russia spam claiming to be from a frustrated woman neglected by her husband who wants sexytimes from me has undergone a slight but noticeable change: the age of the fake woman in question has been adjusted downwards from 47 years, to 37 years, and now to 27 years. Spammers, no 27 year old woman has ever been referred to as a MILF, just a suggestion. Oh, yeah, and the woman in the photo is maybe 23, so there’s that, too.

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¹ Whoa, guys, don’t give away the story with the title! Spoilers!

² The fact that said community temperamentally inclined to buying a metric squatload of books I’m sure has no bearing whatsoever on the choice of topic and audience.

Re: me playing Soros, minus a few orders of magnitude.

• From now until 20 January 2017, show me a receipt that you donated to any of the organizations below, and I’ll match it, up to an aggregate of US$10,000. If you’ve made repeating donations, I’ll credit you for the November, December, and January amounts.
• If any of the organizations ceases operation in the meantime (practically speaking, only the GoFundMe page is a possibility for discontinuation, given that GFM has yanked funding pages with regularity in the past), I will find the closest equivalent source for matching donation. If I can’t find one, I’ll redistribute to the other organizations on a proportional basis.
• If total donations from you guys exceeds 10K — please, exceed! — I reserve the right to increase my giving. If you absolutely demolish the 10K goal, matches will be made on a proportional basis so that I don’t spend my retirement years eating the generic dog food; I want the premium brand.
• If you don’t see your favored organization here, it’s not that I don’t approve! I looked for a variety of non-overlapping groups fighting in different areas; I have a preference for those with proven track records of effectiveness and favorable reports in Charity Navigator.
• Email me (gary at the name of this here website dot-com) or DM me on Twitter with your receipts; I’ll post occasional updates of the totals here. I plan to run a list of names of people who contact me; if you don’t want to be credited, just note that with your receipt.
• Creators who have run your own fundraisers — that counts for matching! Send your numbers in!
• Oh and one last thing: all donations will be made in the name of Donald Trump, with the exceptions of Planned Parenthood and The Trevor Project, which will be made in the name of Mike Pence.

American Civil Liberties Union
Brennan Center for Justice
Campaign Zero
Electronic Frontier Foundation
International Rescue Committee
NAACP Legal Defense Fund
National Resources Defense Council
Planned Parenthood
Sacred Stone Camp’s GoFundMe
The Trevor Project

Spam of the day:

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Unless one of those products is his balls back, I’m pretty sure my dog don’t care.

We all do what we can; the way forward seems fraught and full of those who would harm us for who we are, but forward we go. Two people doing their damndest to find that way forward today.

• First, Jaime Noguchi of Yellow Peril, who sums it all up beautifully in today’s panel one:
  What to do if you see a swastika. Because that’s where we fucking are now.

  Which follows with handy tips how a hateful symbol can be hidden, its intent to intimidate and oppress turned into a delightful kitty or turtle or corporate logo. I suspect that this is the sort of thing that fucking Nazis will hate more than anything else; they’re so convinced of their superiority and the purity of their philosophy, message, and iconography that to see it subverted is likely to make them sputter But, but … my mighty swastika¹.

  Fat Tardises. Super Triforces. Pixel hearts. Screw the cowards, screw their message, put ’em in the ash-heap of history where they belong.

• Secondly, when we have (eventually, and I have no illusion it will be quickly or easily) fully populated the ash-heap of history², the task will remain to ensure that this crap doesn’t happen again³. That’s going to require a population that’s far more rigorous about sifting actual information from propaganda, reality from falsity, facts from lies. Learn well we will have to tell future generations or repeat our folly. One of the people on the front lines of that learning is the semipseudonymous Dr Dante Shepherd.

  Today his photo-webcomic, Surviving The World, celebrates 3000 entries with an observation that an exercise meant to help deal with the stresses of graduate school has turned into a professing career, and also:

  I am very pleased to announce that I have been asked to make science comics for the quarterly scientific journal Chemical Engineering Education over the next year, and will have the first comic released in the spring issue next year.

  For those of you wondering how that teaches the next generations to not be fooled by charlatans, let me assure you that chemical engineering does not care if your pet theory comes from your preferred Weltanschauung⁴ or not; if the equation that keeps the chemical reactor from blowing up in your face came from a person that you consider beneath you and you disregard it, it’s gonna blow up in your damn face.

  Honestly, a stronger grounding in the scientific method (which pits ideas against the test of reality) over the past three decades could have saved us all a lot of problems. In the meantime, send your youngsters to Shepherd and others like him; the vaccine of knowledge is armor against the plague of ignorance or some other similarly mixed metaphor.

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¹ Any coincidence with Randy Newman’s pondering as to Why must everybody laugh at my mighty sword? entirely intentional.

² And, hopefully, found a way to re-burn things that have already been burned.

³ One of the most astute things I’ve read since the election is the observation that this rising tide of authoritarianism is occurring as living memory of World War II is lost. Dunno about you, but my grandfather would not have put up with this fascist posturing. As he was the biggest man in the world in all of my memories pretty sure he would have fixed it all by his lonesome.

⁴ Look it up.

I may have opinions (oh baby I got opinions) on which previous works of comicdom nominated for the National Book Award should have received the honor without doing so.

But it hard to hold the contrary opinion that the March trilogy — the story of the civil rights movement as recollected by Representative John Lewis and realized in comics form by Andrew Aydin and Nate Powell — is anything other than a towering achievement of remembering our history lest we repeat it. And it is equally impossible to say that March: Book Three is anything other than a wholly deserving nominee for the National Book Award.

So it’s pretty fitting that it won last night in the category of Young Peoples Literature.

In the words of Congressman Lewis:

This book is for all of America. It is for all people, but especially young people, to understand the essence of the civil rights movement, to walk through the pages of history to learn about the philosophy and discipline of nonviolence, to be inspired to stand up to speak out and to find a way to get in the way when they see something that is not right, not fair, not just.

It’s been five decades since the years that John Lewis put his body and his life on the line to ensure that all Americans would be recognized before the law as equal. It’s been 35 years since he ascended into political office in Atlanta as a city councilor, and this year marks the 30th since he was first elected to the House of Representatives. I’m certain he had hopes that some fundamental questions about the nature of our democracy were settled. I’m pretty sure that he’s got a close eye on current events and keeps a well broken-in pair of shoes ready for the next march he needs to make.

Congratulations to Congressman Lewis, Aydin, and Powell; I wish that we had learned your lessons better.

Spam of the day:

From: Gliceria Tyrrell
Your message is ready to be sent with the following file or link attachments: 20160831_104911
Note: To protect against computer viruses, e-mail programs may prevent sending or receiving certain types of file attachments. Check your e-mail security settings to determine how attachments are handled.

You’re going to send me an email from a fake relative with a Harry Potter first name and I’m just going to click on your virus-laden attachment because you put in a sentence about being safe around viruses and implying I should disable safety measures? That’s just insulting.

So the questions have been coming, and I’m getting ready to announce the structure of my matching-gifts against totalitarianism (better name needed), but in the meantime literally more people than I can count are doing similar things. Let’s do a rundown:

• Ursula Vernon¹ has been through a couple of rounds of commissioned pendants and prints, benefiting the ACLU and Planned Parenthood. Keep an eye out for what she does next.
• Rosemary Valero-O’Connell is running proceeds of her prints and shirts to CAIR, the SLRP, and MuslimARC.
• TopatoCo, where you were gonna do all your holiday shopping anyway, will be directing a portion of profits from all sales to Planned Parenthood and the ACLU. Reminder: TopatoCo is a powerhouse that has spent an estimated seven figures on postage in its history.
• This one’s great: Gumroad wants you to know if you’re doing a benefit for PP, ALCU, the NAACP or the like and using their platform to distribute the merch? Let them know and they’ll donate their fees as well.
• Sophie Goldstein and Jenn Jordan have declared that all profits from sales of the Darwin Carmichael Is Going To Hell print collection will go to the ACLU from now until 15 December; since the print run was paid for by a long-concluded Kickstarter campaign, they’re only keeping enough of the US$20 purchase price to pay for shipping.

There are more, more than I can keep up with. It’s trying times, but we’re holding the line and will continue to do so. These organizations are established, scrappy fighters, and are going to shove a full dose of be a goddamn human and not a monster, you dicks where it’ll do the most good. I am proud of our weird little community.

Spam of the day:

[not in English]

I’m certain that it’s completely a coincidence that the amount of Russian-language spam I’ve received since the election has exploded.

_____________
¹ Obligatory disclaimer: I loves me some Digger. You just know that wombats don’t put up with any fascist nonsense; they meet oppression with pragmatism and pickaxes. Remember Tunnel Seventeen!

It’s been a week, that’s for sure. A week of feeling alternately on edge and sad and defiant and angry and depressed¹. We can’t let unprecedented evil become normalized, but we also can’t let ourselves be on edge 100% of the time. No kidding, that’s where PTSD comes from.

So while we plan for a long struggle to not lose the societal gains that have been made in our lifetimes, while we plan our warnings to future generations just how fragile those gains can be, we do have to find happiness where it presents itself. And today’s got a double dose of such, as we are reminded by two of the exemplars of [web]comicdom from Toronto.

• From Christopher Butcher, a reminder that today is Heidi MacDonald’s birthday. Heidi Mac has been in the comics journalism game longer than most people have been in comics², and the day that I knew I wasn’t just spinning my wheels was when she first said something nice about something I’d written over at The Beat. Cheers, Heidi.
• From Ryan North, a reminder that today is Anthony Clark’s birthday as well. Anthony Clark is one of those rare people about whom nobody can be found to say anything bad. His colo[u]ring work enhances and enriches many a comic, and his own Nedroid Picture Diary is a font of pure, unbridled joy.

  When I talk to friends from outside my webcomics circles and they bring up the topic, saying that there’s one webcomic they love more than any other, it’s invariably Nedroid. Good job, Anthony, and please consider this to be my occasional plea to get hold of Emmy Cicierega and revive Laserpony Studios.

Spam of the day:

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Everything about this sentence makes me want to travel back in time and punch the child that will eventually grow up to write it.

_______________
¹ For some, that describes every week; for those of us that find this to be a new experience, welcome to the lives of the institutionally disadvantaged. Hi, my name is Gary and I go through life on the lowest difficulty level. I thought I was pretty empathetic before 8 November 2016 but was fooling myself. I’ll try to do better.

² Alternately, longer than most comics people have been, period.

Actually, I have to give it to my power company; browsing to their website on my phone and zooming in, there were little triangles around my neighborhood, and within half an hour they’d coalesced into one at the center of disruption (about 50 meters from my front door), which listed the number of affected customers (117), the cause of the outage (tree), and the estimated restore time (12:00 noon). The fact that they got power back hours ahead of schedule indicates that either they were on the ball, or they follow Montgomery Scott’s rule of estimated repair times.

Still: my job requires computing. Computing (and networking) require power. So it’s been a rough day; had to have a colleague start my class for me, and I’ve been running to catch up ever since. How much running? It’s past 3:00pm (EST) as I write this and I have yet to put on pants. Then again, I do work from home about half of the time, meaning that the tyranny of pants is entirely optional for me on a frequent basis. So let’s look at something that involves, in large measure, only half pants¹.

Evan Dahm did a beautiful illustrated edition of The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz, and not long after announced that his follow-up would be an illustrated edition of Moby-Dick. He’s done more than three dozen gorgeous, woodcut-looking illustrations (most recently noted here over the summer), and the long prep has now finished — the requisite Kickstarter to print handsome hardcovers of Moby-Dick, or, The Whale is now up.

It’s going to be an object of beauty and heft; as noted before, I have not ever desired to read Moby-Dick, but now I want to. The early bird discounted book are snapped up, but even at US$45 this is bargain and a the epitome of craft and care. Grab one, put it on your shelf, pass it down to your children.

Spam of the day:

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Hey, know when cloud computing don’t work? When my power goes out!

______________
¹ Because Ahab only has one leg, see.

It’s been a shit week, but at least one thing happened as expected … even if it’s a bit bittersweet.

Unshelved, written by actual (if pseudonymous) librarian Gene Ambaum, drawn originally by Bill Barnes and more recently by Chris Hallbeck, has finished. The concurrent Kickstart to print the remainder of the very long running strip (nearly 15 years!) wrapped up a week ago, sitting at roughly five times goal. Barnes (who stepped back from cartooning to return to the exciting world of software industry project management) returned to draw the final week in which the question is asked What if you try to rage-quit and nobody cares?

A patron is trying his damndest to indicate that he’ll never come back to the Mallville Library, never I tell you! Don’t try to beg me to stay (totally beg me to stay)! the staff and library-goers are unperturbed. Today it all comes to a head — he announces he’s going elsewhere, branch manager Mel recites a litany of challenges faced by the library, but it’s no stirring call to action; it’s just facts. Dewey gets in the final word: See you all tomorrow!

The challenges never end. The work never ends. The lives go forward without us getting to peek in any longer. Ambaum and Barnes and Hallbeck likewise move on, to be seen other places, launch other projects (creative and not), some of which we’ll be privy to, others not. Ambaum, at least, will continue to speak and appear at library conferences, where he’s a rock star

And somewhere, it’s always the middle of the afternoon and a library-loving kid is assembling a stack of books, looking forward to the chance to read them. There’s worse places to be.

Spam of the day:

MAINTENANCE-FREE TO FULL-CARE LIVING OPTIONS

I thought this meant maintenance in terms of maintenance fees, but nope — turns out it’s another spam that thinks I’m old and need to live someplace where they’ll take care of me. Still in my 40s, spammers!