Well, that’s for damn sure a Big Round Number:

Welp, that’s 5,000 comics.

The very sexy R Stevens did 4000 comics in the first incarnation of Diesel Sweeties and 1000 since — not counting his foray into newspapers for a year and a half. Now those 5000 comics weren’t all on consecutive days, what with weekends, and the occasional MWF update weeks, but imagine they were. How much is 5000 days?

5000 days ago, they were still doing primary cleanup from Hurricane Katrina. Donald Rumsfeld was still committing war crimes, Windows Vista didn’t exist, Mooninites hadn’t sparked the stupidest terrorism panic ever, and Bob Barker was waiting for you to come on down.

And by complete coincidence, today has a second Big Round Number, as David Morgan-Mar (PhD, LEGO®©™ ^etc), without fanfare, hit Irregular Webcomic number 4200 today, which also makes you wonder about the confluence of the two. It would make no sense to add those two, very large numbers together, you end up with 9200.

9200 comics, at one per day, would take you back more than a quarter century, you’d find Calvin & Hobbes on the comics page, Christopher Reeve walking around; it was world with no Pixar movies, no understanding of what it would sound like to introduce Oprah to Uma, or knowledge of who Kevin Mitnick is. Then again, you wouldn’t be able to learn most of that because there was also a near-total lack of search engines worth anything.

Heck, that takes you back far enough that my evil twin had only been cranking out daily comics for a little more than four and a half years. As of today, that makes for 7021 consecutive strips, but it’s not a Big Round Number so we’re not talking about it. We will, however, wish Howard Tayler a happy birthday tomorrow, his 13th since he made his appearance 52 years ago on Leap Day 1968. 13 and 1968 and 29 aren’t Big Round Numbers either, nor is 52, but believe me — when you’ve lived for 52 years, it’s feels like a big number.

Spam of the day:
Spammers don’t get to share the day with Rich, David, and Howard. Buy their stuff.

I got an email t’other day, one that I can’t say I ever expected to receive. It’s worth quoting in full:

This coming Friday, February 28th, marks fifteen years of the venerable Daily Grind Iron Man Challenge. Michael H. Payne’s Daily Grind and my own TRU-Life Adventures are still updating every weekday. Thought it might make a nice bullet point for you, maybe down in Spam of the Day.

That from Andrew Rothery, and therein, friends, lies a tale. If you’re new around here, you may not recall the Daily Grind Iron Man Challenge, a thing so old that its website has long since lapsed and been staked out by domain squatters¹. A thing so old that our first, offhand mention was in 2007, when it was assumed anybody reading this page would just know what we meant. Since that was a long damn time ago, let us recap:

In February of 2005, the denizens of a message board decided to see who could maintain a Mon-Fri daily webcomic schedule longest. There were rules: No posting of sketches, two panels minimum (but you could do a single-panel update every ten strips), your update must go up by midnight PST, and if your hosting went down you had to post somewhere by deadline and let people know where to find it. The contest would start 28 Feb 2005, it cost US$20 to buy in, and the last person standing got the pot, which amounted to US$112 (next to last would get the money raised from site ads, last thought to be about US$135).

There were names that you’d recognize in there: Natasha Allegri, Jennie Breeden, Tom McHenry, Scott Kurtz, John Campbell², Phil McAndrew. People that were prominent webcomickers and then weren’t and then were again: Steve Troop, Greg Dean, DJ Coffman. Ed Brisson, who is writing at half the comic book publishers, was one of the referees. Ali Graham does media marketing now; Dean Trippe teaches kids how to make comics.

By the time this blog started, half the field had been eliminated; heck, even Chris Crosby, who is presently on year twenty one of Superosity, was out by November of 2005. Seven remained at the five year mark; there were only three remaining at the end of 2014 (among them the very sexy Brad Guigar³) and only two on the 10th anniversary (Guigar ran three days worth of single panels close out the old year and ring in the new).

And there they have sat for the past five years: Payne and Rothery, here on the last day of Year Fifteen, ready for the first day of Year Sixteen tomorrow, continuing on out os a sense of pride and sheer cussedness. At this pint, I imagine it’ll be one of the two claiming the big purse and the estate of the other getting the small purse. Or, alternately, they both decide to celebrate having reached the milestone by getting blind drunk tonight, and both accidentally sleep through updating tomorrow, leading to a dual disqualification; after all, you can’t spell irony without Iron.

Spam of the day:

This coming Friday, February 28th, marks fifteen years of the venerable Daily Grind Iron Man Challenge. Michael H. Payne’s Daily Grind and my own TRU-Life Adventures are still updating every weekday. Thought it might make a nice bullet point for you, maybe down in Spam of the Day.

We aim to please.

______________
¹ The oldest instance of which was April of last year with an asking price of US$1888. Today’s asking price has gone up to US$94,888 which seems a tad unrealistic.

² That’s a sad story, one of bad choices and brain chemistry gone wrong.

³ At the start of the IMDGC, you’d have been hard pressed to find a stronger advocate of regularity in posting schedule than Guigar. Take a listen to him on ComicLab these days, it’s the furthest thing from a priority for him. Time changes us all.

I think we could use a little chill these days; what with the world’s single most gleefully vindictive ignoramus in charge of our country’s response to an incipient pandemic, chill sounds like a good idea.

• Few people that I’ve met are on a more even keel, less perturbable than Scott C; very nearly all of his art conveys a feeling of just take a deep breath for a moment, no need to get all excited, even when the topic is the most spectacular of spectacles. Mr C’s been working on several projects for a while now, we haven’t seen as many Great Showdowns as in the past, and fans are hungering for another collection.

  So Gallery 1988 (which, along with Nucleus, is the place for modern takes on pop culture) is have a weeks-long celebration of Scott C:

  With the HIGHLY anticipated return of the Great Showdowns exhibit from @scottlava opening on March 6th, we’re excited to share the calendar of events for the show. It’s action-packed and unlike anything we’ve done before. Get ready for the true Showdowns experience!!!

  Events include an opening reception on the 6th from 7:00pm to 9:00pm, complete with a mystery Showdowns trivia contest, a Scott C painting for the trivia winner (livepainted on the 7th at 1:00pm), limited edition toy and print releases, a daily scavenger hunt, a drawing party with pizza, and a closing party. Whew! See the graphic up top for all the stuff going on, and keep an eye on the exhibitions page at the G1988 site for details.

• Know who else just surfs through a sometimes turbulent world on a wave of comics, sometimes from one far corner of the globe¹ to another? Eben Burgoon. He was the inspiration of one of our earliest running gags here at Fleen, he holds down the fort of comics-making and evangelism in the Sacramento Sector, and he makes a habit of not only keeping me up with his goings-on, but also those of current and former collaborators. To that end, I received an email:
  

  D.Bethel — the illustrator and co-creator of Eben07 — has been making his opus of a webcomic in Long John. It’s a western-genre comic that focuses on a revenge story about a gunslinger left to die in just his long-johns by his former gang.

  Burgoon undersells the premise a bit, but he’s absolutely right that Bethel has constructed a slow-burn story that reveals itself in a deliberate manner, much like a classic ’60s splatter Western. And Burgoon himself is collaborating with Dean Beattie on Tiny Wizards, about french-fry sized wizards doing their wizardly battles as they struggle to survive in a sea of fast food joints in a road-side truck stop in the middle of nowhere.

  Remember what I said about mundane magic in a regular world yesterday? Magic hidden in the most ridiculous way from plain sight is also a great premise, and I’ll be interested to see how it turns out. In the meantime, I’ve seen a sampler that Burgoon sent along, and Beattie is channeling Skottie Young’s work on I Hate Fairyland; your enjoyment will depend on the answer to one question², which if you opt for the affirmative, you should definitely check out the Kicker³.

Spam of the day:

Military Source Exposes Shocking TRUTH About Coronavirus And The “1 Thing” You Must Do Before It’s TOO LATE

Hey. Emergency medicine/public health source here. The “1 Thing” is wash your godsdamned hands, stay out of public if you feel sick, and vote for somebody that will implement labor law/healthcare systems that allow people to go to the doctor and stay home from work when they’re sick. Everything else is bullshit.

_______________
¹ This mixed metaphor is here only to annoy flat earthers.

² Do I feel that tiny, pink, derptacular unicorns should sport visible buttholes?

³ Which is a bit more than 50% of the way to goal, with 16 days to go.

We’ve got two kinds of embarrassment to talk about today. Buckle up.

• Here’s a rule that I live by: when Sophie Goldstein emails to ask if you’d like a PDF review copy of her latest full length graphic novel, you say yes. When she clarifies that it’s her first collaboration with Jenn Jordan since Darwin Carmichael Is Going To Hell, you say yes, please.

  Not long after, a 200+ page high-res PDF hit my inbox, titled An Embarrassment Of Witches (from Top Shelf next Tuesday), and I’ve been stealing bits and pieces of time since, seeing how much I can get read in and around work.

  Much like DCIGTH laid out it world-with-magic-critters milieu in the opening pages, we get some framework for the rules of AEOW pretty quickly. Rory is an at airport, being dumped by her jerk boyfriend (fiance? husband) immediately prior to boarding. He doesn’t know why she’s so upset, since she gets earaches when she flies he couldn’t very well dump her in the air, which means he’s really being the mature, courteous one here, why can’t she see that?

  Flashback twelve hours, Rory and Dickly O’Smug (okay, his name’s actually Holden) are revealed to be heading to Australia for several months, doing important work on dragon conservation. Her familiar is being a pain about not wanting to go. Magic exists, witches do important work (in between the rest of their grad studies), and bad boyfriends are a multiversal constant.

  This is not a review; reviews take time and multiple readings. This is me sharing my excitement with you about something new that I think it pretty awesome as I dive in. There’s a million little details, and like DCIGTH, it’s all in service of some real adult-human drama that’s belied by the loose, cartoony style that Jordan uses. I’m ready to dive into this world of mundane witchery and beasties and see what I can learn about myself on the journey.

  And I’d be lying if I didn’t expect at least one line to match my absolute favorite jawdropper of a dirty joke, which was in DCIGTH and for which Jordan (unnecessarily, I thought) apologized in the endnotes; I have every faith that the trash-talking unicorn declaring that another unicorn’s pure maiden companion was the wet slut double penetration queen of virgins will be surpassed in gross-out giggles somewhere in AEOW, and I can’t wait to discover the degree to which it does.

• Now, for the sake of balance, some grossness of the non-amusing variety. Blue Delliquanti’s twitterfeed is where I first caught word of Patreon’s latest foray into either fundamentally not understanding their users and why they’re on the platform, or fundamentally not caring:
  

  I’m getting tired of Patreon finding creative new ways to make its service worse and think it’s doing users a favor.
  Here’s an email I got telling me what a great idea it will be for me to unpublish my $1+ tier, cutting off new $1+ patrons and disincentivizing current ones.

  It’s accompanied by a screenshot of the email, and I’d encourage you to go look at it.

  I’ve been pretty consistent in my opinion of Patreon every since they started their back-and-forth dance with ToS changes, depublishing naughty content, shifting payment rules to favor large creators, opinions that were absolutely cemented last year when they started engaging in the naked pursuit of pumped-up quarterly numbers.

  Patreon has now officially ceased to even pretend it cares about its user base; it’s trying to pump revenue because the VC money backing them is doing what VC money always does: demanding a fuck-all huge payout in return for their earlier funding, without giving a single shit if that leaves the company with a viable service. None of this is to make you, the creator more money. None of it.

  Unfortunately, my thoughts about Patreon being Uberlike are looking more and more true — they can’t make money in a sustainable way, so they’ll squeeze the people that create value (that’s everybody with a Patreon) to make the money guys happy. And since the attempt at making a Patreon killer didn’t pan out because The Andys were unwilling to create an unsustainable platform that would screw over their users, there’s not much that can be done except to find other revenue streams and not put your eggs in the Patreon basket.

  Because they not only don’t care about you, they never did, and it’s embarrassing how much they’re trying to pretend otherwise.

Spam of the day:

Karl Budd wrote:
Hi, Could you direct me to the person that handles your online marketing?

Hi Karl, that would be nobody. Does that work for you? Works great for me.

That’s my dog, Thyla¹ Squirrelbane², who is normally very mellow after her breakfast, but who this morning was yipping and stomping her feet at me, demanding attention now now now now before sulking off to the couch. I couldn’t figure out why she was so cranky about needing pets and scruffles and skritches when normally breakfast is followed by a hearty 3-4 hour nap, a brief stretch, and then another 3-4 hours snoozin’.

This makes it easy to work from home (lot of remote class teaches), but today she was low key demanding and vocal all through lecture, and bouncy up in my face Hi hi hi look at me look at me LOOK AT ME every break I got — which is when I normally write these posts, which is why we’re late today.

Thing is, according to her registry papers — there’s an extensive paper trail on retired racing greyhounds, from a 55-point physical description to verification of her ear tats — today, 24 February, is her birthday. I’d forgotten until halfway through the day, but somehow she knows and needs to have it explained why she is not being spoiled rotten³ on her Very Special Day. None of this has anything to do with webcomics, but we can always use a dog story to keep the day lighthearted, right?

• Speaking of something that will lighten your heart, Magnolia Porter Siddell is having a good day, one of a string of good days for the past 10-11 months since she and Tom Siddell got hitched⁴. Specifically, she announced today that she and Maddi Gonzalez will be publishing an original graphic novel, Tiffany’s Griffon, with :01 Books. The deets:
  

  The book, set for 2022, is, the publisher said, “about a girl whose favorite fantasy book series comes to life, leading her to lie about her identity in order to steal the destiny of the Chosen One from a popular girl in her grade.”

  So teenage girl social hierarchy story à la Mean Girls, mixed with a Chosen One fantasy? That sounds brilliant, and I am entirely here for it. Congrats to Gonzalez and Porter Siddell, who will have the good fortune to be working with :01’s Kiara Valdez (who’s been doing good work in her time with the imprint, despite being tragically young.

• And since we’re here, Zach Weinersmith announced the next BAH!Fest dates in comic form today. Houston will be 7:00pm at Rice University (where Kelly Weinersmith — who will be hosting — does her teaching) on 8 March, and London will be at 7:00pm at Imperial College (where my wife did a semester abroad way back when) on 21 March. Those links will take you to ticket-purchasing options (the London show is being held adjacent to the Ig Nobel Prize recap tour), with a sliding scale for student/nonstudents/etc.

Not kidding — Thyla just harrumphed her way into the room and is giving me the stinkeye. I have to pay attention to her before she expires from lovelornness like a Dickensian character with consumption.

Spam of the day:

UecJtsjWFzRB wrote: zCAwIfEnrRqJNd

I affirm most solemnly, that is the actual text of a spam I got and not my dog pounding her nose on the keyboard to encourage pets. At least, it was this time.

_______________
¹ Name courtesy of Yuko Ota, who was the first to comment (when we posted pictures of her from the greyhound adoption event where we got her) that she looks like a thylacine. She’s got these stripes down her tail that really do look that way.

² One so far, snagged in midair as it leapt from branch to branch. Coupla close calls with bunnies, too.

³ Or, to be fair, rottener.

⁴ I’ve never met anybody so overjoyed at the thought and reality of being married as Mags, except maybe Los Angeles resident Dave Kellett, who happens to be celebrating his 19th wedding anniversary today with his adorable wife, Gloria Calderon Kellett. Dave and Glo are awesome, and we at Fleen wish them all the happiness on their Very Special Day.

Because we can all use some positives in our lives these day, yeah?

• Something I neglected to mention yesterday in our discussion of the forthcoming movie musical adaptation of The Prince And The Dressmaker: Kristen and Bobby Lopez do not, at this stage of their careers, embark on poorly-planned or speculative ventures. There will be some money behind this production, and presumably Jen Wang is getting a chunk of it and that is an absolutely correct outcome.
• TCAF has started to announce their featured guests for this year’s show (9-10 May, mostly at the Toronto Reference Library), and they sent around an email to make sure we knew about their first announced guest from Japan. Kamome Shirahama is the creator of Witch Hat Atelier, one of the best manga to get an English translation is I’m not sure how long. It’s one that you can give to anybody, of any age, and it will appeal — there’s adventure, world-building, deep character development, a bit of danger, and a hell of a lot of heart.

  Oh, and it’s gorgeous. Every line is where it needs to be, every face is unique, every posture, every drape of clothing, every magical effect, all perfectly controlled — hardly surprising given the story is about magic brought about by precision in drawing. Those with an aversion to manga may be convinced to give WHA a try based on Shirahama’s extensive collection of DC and Marvel covers, for titles ranging from Squirrel Girl to Wonder Woman.

  Shirahama’s schedule is still being kept quiet, but is expected to include a live-drawing session, feature interview, autograph sessions, the debut of Witch Hat Atelier’s sixth English volume, and a month-long gallery showing of her work at The Japan Foundation Toronto. While TCAF remains free, tickets will be required for some of Shirahama’s events. All sounds good to me.

Spam of the day:

Pay A Ridiculously Low 1-Time Price to Create Stunning websites

Got one already, thanks. Jon built it.

I’ll be honest, I’m of at least two minds about this:

“Our next movie musical project is with Marc Platt and it is a musical version of a graphic novel called The Prince And The Dressmaker.”

The team is working with Pulitzer Prize finalist Amy Herzog (4000 Miles) to adapt the graphic novel by Jen Wang.

That from Kristen and Bobby Lopez, who you may know from a catchy tunes that they’ve penned. My thought processes run roughly in the following directions:

• Curiously, I haven’t seen anywhere if this will be animated or live action. Not important, just something I noticed. Moving on.
• When paired with the right material, Jen Wang is one of the finest graphic novelists working today. Koko Be Good remains one of my all-time favorites, and last year’s Stargazing deserved all of the near-universal acclaim it’s received.

  But, like any graphic novelist, masterful visual representation can only do so much when paired to a meh story (like her adaptation of Cory Doctorow’s In Real Life), and cannot make up for a story with severe structural problems.

• I am on the record (and pretty much alone) in saying that The Prince And The Dressmaker is in the latter category¹. As a fairytale, it’s at the extreme Walt end of the spectrum that runs from Cautionary Tale to Disney Fluff, treating those who most need to comfort of the story to an implausibly optimistic promise of how awesome life is.
• Then again, the Lopezes have worked on projects that have a bit more growl and earned heart to them; the protagonist of Coco has to struggle harder against a worse outcome than Prince Sebastian ever did², and the big I Want song in Frozen — the biggest every kid knows it song of the decade — went to the antagonist. These are not folks that keep too-neat resolutions in their creative toolbox.

  And that’s before you consider that Bobby Lopez was also a co-creator of Avenue Q and The Book Of Mormon, two musicals that and know how to balance optimism with the crappy end of life. If the Lopezes come up with even one moment with half the emotional wallop as There’s A Fine, Fine Line, the adaptation could resolve one of my biggest problems with the graphic novel³.

So as I said up top, cautiously optimistic; if anybody can produce an adaptation that makes me re-evaluate my stance, it’s the Lopezes.

Spam of the day:

Our licensed health insurance agents have helped tens of thousands of Americans work through Medicare over the years, and now that expertise is available to you in one convenient publication.

Godsdammit, I am not old enough for Medicare. Buy better lists of marks for your bullshit, spammers!

_______________
¹ Although, too be fair, the absolute critical flaw has been corrected, so you don’t have to wrestle with crimes against humanity being adjacent to a story about gender expression and acceptance. Respect to Wang, editor Calista Brill, and everybody at :01 Books for recognizing and owning the mistake and fixing it in subsequent printings.

² In comparing the travails that I’m-not-a-princess Moana or Miguel compared to those of Sebastian, I am reminded of the old Simpsons gag, Marge, I’m asking for white-hot rage and you’re giving me a hissy fit.

³ The other I’m less hopeful about — I didn’t have room to address this in the original review and only hinted at it in the alt-text of the header image, but the book was mis-titled. Given the relative number of pages each gets the respective character journeys, it should have been called The Dressmaker And The Prince. Alas, the Playbill story describes the book as:

Set in Paris, the story follows Prince Sebastian, whose parents are scouring the country for a bride for their son. But Sebastian leads a secret life. By night, he dons spectacular dresses and goes out as Lady Crystallia, a Parisian fashion icon. His best friend, dressmaker Frances, is the only one who knows the truth, and she doesn’t want the credit for her creations to be secret anymore.

Frances should be the center of the story, but the title reduces her to afterthought, and I fear the focus will go entirely to Sebastian. Frances struggles, achieves, loses, and re-estabishes herself based on her skill and determination. Sebastian is indulged, privileged, briefly inconvenienced, and returned to his rightful place of high-born status. His is a character journey on a glass-smooth autobahn with a traffic bump at the end.

Hey, how you doing? I’m a little slow on the uptake today. Remember how I got no sleep across the weekend and didn’t really post on Monday as a result? Turns out sleep is important! Once again I’m short hours of sleep from last night’s regular EMS duty night because (and I swear this is true) I had to haul my ass out at 3:15am to deal with a patient who was experiencing visual and auditory hallucinations because he hadn’t slept in three days. I’d totally nope out on you again, but I can’t do that twice in one week, so let’s do this quick and then I’m takin’ a nap.

• TCAF announced that volunteer signup for this year’s show (9-10 May, at the Toronto Reference Library¹ and other locations around Toronto) is now open. As well, they are looking for a new Volunteer Coordinator, an October-May gig of varying intensity; if you have strong people organizing skills, familiarity with conventions (especially TCAF), excellent communication skills, the ability to wrangle crowds, and open time across half the year, read the description and maybe apply.
• The Fourth Annual Prism Award nominations are now open, recognizing the best in queer comics (that is, queer subject matter and/or queer creators). The three nominees in each category will be announced at the Queer Comics Expo (16-17 May in San Francisco, presented in conjunction with the Cartoon Art Museum), with the winners announced at SDCC (23-26 July).

  Categories include Best Short Form Comic, Best Webcomic, Best Comic From A Small To Midsize Press, Best Comic From A Mainstream Publisher, and Best Comic Anthology; descriptions, requirements, and submission form may be found here, with a deadline of 18 March.

Okay, that’s it for now. See you tomorrow.

Spam of the day:

Bye Bye Barks incorporates an ultrasound system that prevents your dog’s woofing.

My dog is a greyhound and thus very quiet. She has these little snuffly sighs, and occasionally lets a yawn turn into a classic greyhound rooooo, and you are monsters for suggesting I should punish her with your sonic assault devices for being herself.

______________
¹ Although they aren’t happy about it, it’s too late to change venues for 2020 to someplace that doesn’t host open TERFery. If TCAF 2021 is held in a different main venue, it’ll be a momentous change, but very likely a necessary one.

Approximately half an hour ago, Kickstarter United won their election for union representation. I’m doing something I never do an posting this in an incomplete form, so I can get the word out but also go and think about the broader implications. Update to come.

Okay, update time. Things that have occurred to me since the news broke:

• This is a foot in the door; Kickstarter’s a small company¹, but one with an outsized brain share in the public mind, largely because Kickstarter (uniquely) has a direct relationship with people that much of tech doesn’t.

  With the big internet companies — Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google — you end using their services because they’re unavoidable, not because you want to. Other tech behemoths — your Microsofts, Oracles, etc — are at a remove, with your usage of them typically intermediated by somebody else that gets your ire when things don’t work². Tech companies related to the gig economy have lots of act-alikes (if Uber’s too creepy for your liking this week, there’s always Lyft — and your opinion on them will probably reverse in another week), and/or they only offer a service that already exists in the real world, but may be marginally more convenient.

  But Kickstarter is a tech company that people deal with an intermittent, voluntary basis; when you can afford something that looks cool, you go for it, and they’ve got a reputation for at least trying to get the most obvious scammers out, whereas their competitors either let in bullshit unbuildable projects³, or allow for less-than-goal funding, which practically invites cash grab scams. People use their discretionary income for Kickstarter, and have a relationship unlike any other tech company.

  So over the next year or so, as Kickstarter and the Kickstarter United reps hammer out their new relationship and find new ways of moving foward, as tech workers across the country start to see how their labor and interactions with the money end of things can interact in new ways, where will this spread? How many new startups that hit a certain size will have to factor in this is how large we think we can get without a union forming as part of their due diligence with venture capital?

  Nor will this necessarily stop with what we think of as pure tech workers. Once the coders behind — let’s say GrubHub as an example — unionize, how long before their very put-upon gig workers get the idea? How long before games companies can no longer persist in their cruel march of years-long crunch followed by mass layoffs when their two nearest analogues — tech companies like Kickstarter, and artistic endeavours like unionized animation shops — show that there’s another way?

  How long before the FAANG Five can’t come down on employees who object to their involvement in undermining democracy, caving to totalitarian regimes, enabling ICE, selling garbage facial recognition to the Pentagon/law enforcement, undermining efforts against climate change, and other things that offend the most basic ethical framework?

  And how long after the high-income coder population is even partially unionized before people making a hell of a lot less money start wondering why they don’t get to have a union? I truly believe that this could be the turning point that starts the overall levels of union membership in the country towards the first upswing since the ’50s.

• On the flip side of all those rosy futures, PR and law firms that specialize in union busting are celebrating today; they just got to up their rates because a bunch more employers are calling them in a panic.
• Creators can breathe a sigh of relief. A lot of them were fully prepared to walk away from Kickstarter as a platform, and some were holding off on starting projects, waiting to see how this went. That last probably wasn’t necessary (see the next item), but I’m sure it was noticed. Given the failure of Drip 2.0 to launch, there really isn’t an alternative to Kickstarter.
• Everybody that announced you were boycotting Kickstarter (despite the fact that the union organizers specifically asked that you not do so unless they deemed it necessary to bring management to the table), you’ll be coming back now, right? I’d hate to think any of that was performative outrage.

Spam of the day:

Magnetic GSM Mini SPY GPS Tracker Real Time Tracking Locator-Device

As I am neither an evil obsessive, nor a potentially murderous, controlling partner with a restraining order on him, I have no use for your stalker wares. Kindly go away, dispose of all your inventory in a large fire, then sit in the corner and think about what you’ve done.

_______________
¹ Fewer than 90 employees took part in the vote.

² What up, Tech Support?

³ At least in our universal of physical laws. I swear, it’s only a matter of time before somebody on Indiegogo promises an inertialess drive or overunity power generator.

Today is the lamest holiday on the Usian calendar, Presidents Day (New Jersey), and Washington’s Birthday (federal). I had work today, but the banks are closed, the mail isn’t delivered, and also I am still super tired from the weekend¹. So not a lot of webcomics sleuthing going on around here, but I bet with the footnotes I can stretch this past 300 words. Betcha.

Spam of the day:

The coronavirus has reached US shores with 6 confirmed cases in the United States. While there is no known cure for this virus right now You could also consider using this… destroying free radicals as if putting an ‘off’ switch to diseases. Debilitating diseases such as diabetes, chronic pain, and even cancer isn’t something you have to ‘put up’ with.

1, see footnote #2 below. 2, fuck all the way off into the sun, and when you get there fuck off some more.

_______________
¹ Not from anything fun, either. It was EMS duty weekend, a 24 hour shift that served to illustrate that people always have their cardiac arrests at 3:00am and their strokes at 5:45am², instead of 3:00pm and 5:45pm, respectively. Not a lotta Saturday night sleep for Gary is what I’m saying, and while last night was ordinary, I am still yawning and occasionally slow on the uptake today.

² I should clarify that these were not the same patient. Also, one of them answered the routine question, Any overseas travel in the last three weeks? with My daughter and mother-in-law returned from Chengdu on January 15th, which is the closest I’ve come so far to COVID-19.

That being said, take the approximately 70,000 cases reported so far in China, and divide by a population of approximately 1.43 billion, and you’ve got odds that are somewhere between three white balls + the Powerball and four white balls, and ain’t too many of you reading this that have hit that partial jackpot, I’m guessing.

Here in the US, the odds are even longer: 15 confirmed cases out of 330 million people, you are as likely to get five white balls (but no Powerball) twice, meaning two separate million dollar jackpots. Stop being crappy to the people that live and work in your local Chinatown, please.