You know, when I get a bit down, I can always count on Shing Yin Khor to do something awesome and give me hope in humanity — or possibly gnomity — again. Along with seeing people share their playthroughs of A Mending on social media¹ and wondering how many stories have been birthed as a result, I’ve been thinking back on their intent to make this experience as broadly available as possible.

Experience because everybody I’ve shared it with regards it as more than a game. It’s an invitation to creativity, a tutorial in storybuilding, and an act of self-examination all wrapped in the guise of a game. But it’s the broadly part that I wanted to talk about. Readers may recall that when A Mending was Kickstarting, we at Fleen wrote about Khor’s determination to make it both an open-source framework for the story prompts that others might devise, and especially in acknowledging that they might not see all the barriers that could prevent individuals from being able to participate:

I’m creating two $1500 grants for people who would like to adapt A Mending for wider accessibility. One grant is focused on visual accessibility, the other on range-of-motion accessibility. These grants come with a free commercial license, so they can take 100% of profits from work they choose to make commercially available (I will only need attribution). The non-exclusive commercial license includes my art, writing and game design work. What does this mean? Maybe it’s someone selling raised versions of the cloth map in high contrast colors. Maybe it’s porting the game to Roll 20. Maybe a website that produces randomized voiceovers for all the cards. I don’t really know but I’d like to find out too! [emphasis original]

Not only that, but Khor decided that they would license the game framework to whoever came up with those accessibility modifications, so that the modded versions would be sold for profit. It’s been a busy time getting the A Mending kits out to backers², so it’s only now that they have been able to take a look at those grants. From a backers-only update³ to the campaign:

I initially wanted to offer two accessibility grants of [US]$1500 each to two people or groups working on improving accessibility on my game, A Mending. However, instead of creating an formal application process (which in this particular instance, feels like it might be more gate-keepy than useful), I have decided to simply put aside [US]$3000 to properly compensate people working on accessibility issues if they choose to work on a more accessible version of A Mending, which can include smaller targeted projects. I will write more about this soon, but if you’ve been thinking about ways A Mending could be more accessible, and would like to work on that, let me know — I’d like to pay you.

Proposals(these do not need to be formal) can be emailed directly to me(shingkhor who has an account at the Google-hosted mail, a dot-com); please include your budget/pay-rate and an outline of what you might want to make or do.

If you are an independent designer and would like to self-fund a more accessible version of A Mending, and only need a commercial license to make money on your version, email me. The license will allow you to produce a commercial version of the game with your accessibility changes, whether digital or physical. If you would like to produce a non-commercial version of the game, you can already do so under its current license. [emphasis mine]

I suspect that more people will make more things this way than in the original two grants model. And more people making more things will benefit exponentially more people who otherwise would have missed out.

Khor tells me they will be making a more public announcement once A Mending is widely available, although that may be some weeks away. If you have ideas, contact them at the email given above.

Spam of the day:

After years of providing professional blog writing and other copy material, I have recently launched my own site. My mission is to write engaging blog posts to help start ups and small businesses build credibility, providing quality and value, at an affordable level.

Dude, I don’t get paid for this, you think I’m going to pay you to write a generic post that has nothing to do with webcomics?

Okay, even more nothing than one of mine?

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¹ Yes, I included myself twice. Deal.

² As to be expected, with more than 2500 due physical rewards.

³ I emailed Khor for permission to quote and share, and they graciously agreed.

Sometimes, you don’t realize what you’ve been missing because there’s something similar enough making its way into your eye-holes. Case in point: we haven’t had any Nedroid Picture Diary updates in a bit less than two years because Anthony Clark was knocking it out of the park with BACK, until it finished up at the end of April.

Today, he let us know what Them Boys have been up to in a Status Update.

Clark’s work is always so clean, with exactly the amount of detail necessary for maximum impact. If you had never seen Reginald, Beartato, and Harrison before, you would know exactly who each of them is — and at least 87% of their respective deals — from these four panels. Dare we hope that we will get more of Them Boys in the near future? We already know that Clark’s BACK partner, KC Green, is working on Pinocchio again, as he approached the end of Collodi’s very weird story.

And hopefully, we’ll see them working together again in the near future, because Clark + Green = Magic. Go pick out any of their individual or combined projects and start from the beginning and don’t stop clicking until you hit the end.

Spam of the day:

Neck Relax is a cutting edge neck massage machine that will relieve the pain in your neck and upper back by releasing the tension held in these areas. It relaxes your cervical spine

Stop right there. Never let anybody near your c-spine, people. It’s kind of important.

There was a lot of it built up in the filters. Two brief items for you today:

• Readers of this page know that we at Fleen are big fans of Oh Joy, Sex Toy by Erika Moen and Matthew Nolan; it’s by varying degrees educational, hot, informative, hot, funny, hot, an invaluable resource for people learning to be better partners and better human, and also super hot. My favorite part of OJST is all of it, but my favorite favorite part is the small gags that Moen and Nolan toss in almost at random.

  Case in point: throughout the going-on-a-decade history of OJST, Cartoon Erika and/or Cartoon Matt will show up to the side of a scene featuring Masturbateers to transition from the narrative part of a strip to the informative part. Nobody ever questions it (or the fact that CM and CE may not be regular human size, or in the weirdest possible locales) until today. That bit from today’s strip¹ quoted up above? How long has she been there?! left me giggling out loud. Well done, Matt and Erika. Well done.

• Readers of this page also know that Ryan Estrada is possibly the most multi-hyphenated creator in all of webcomics, and one of the things that we at Fleen admire most about him is his inescapable drive to make the world better. When he sees something wrong or stupid going on, he is not one to let that shit slide:
  

  Terrible new laws are banning too many teachers from teaching about race, sexuality, or queerness. Teachers have long had to teach the past to say things they cannot say about the future. Sadly, that has not changed.

  In the 80s, Hyun Sook and friends were banned from reading Brown Bear Brown Bear What Do You See? because the Chun regime confused kids book author Bill Martin Jr. with socialist author Bill Martin.

  The Texas Board of Education did the exact same thing in 2010.

  History repeats.

  If any teachers want to say something to their class that they are not allowed to say, feel free to invite us to do a free virtual author visit and we’ll say it and then you can be like “MY WORD! Those uncouth authors! I had no idea they would say that!” We’ll cover for you.

  Estrada’s been willing to take on terrible people doing terrible things (including telling the story of one person targeted by terrible people at Oh Joy, Sex Toy) even in the face of a legal system that sides with terrible people, so he’s serious now:

  This was a joke until halfway through the tweet when I decided I would legit do it for any teachers who asked. These laws keeping teachers from teaching make me livid.

  Teachers looking to get around gag laws can contact Estrada via the email link at his website.

Spam of the day:

If you ever need Negative SEO to de-rank any site, you can hire us here

If I didn’t think you were full of shit, I certainly know of some MRA and white supremacy sites that could use some trashing.

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¹ Which is on dirty talk, but like 90% of OJST is really about communicating with your partner. Erika and Matt are so good about wanting your communication skills to level up, I almost can’t stand it. They seriously deserve one of those MacArthur Fellowships for what they’re doing.

… and with a long-delayed reckoning on the horrors of colonization and settler states, I’m not sure that Happy {Canada | Independence} Day is in any way warranted. We’re probably well past the point where maybe we should just say Yeah, okay, day off work and no mail today and avoid the rah-rah celebration that always had a foundation of We’re the best, fairest, most awesome people ever and not looking behind the curtain that’s in front of the people whose land we’re on¹.

So if you’ve got today off, or Monday, maybe join me in some of that reflection. We can talk webcomics another day.

Spam of the day:
Nah. They don’t get today.

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¹ In my case, the Lenape. They were the other party in the first written treaty the United States ever entered into, which it should not surprise you to discover did not last.

On the one hand, I hear that Donald Rumsfeld is dead, which means that Death is walking his shots ever closer to Kissinger. On the other hand, it is hot as balls out, miserably so. On balance, I’ll call it a net positive. Let’s move on.

Remember about five-six weeks back and how the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum is hosting a retrospective of dog-themed cartoons? There’s been some events added to The Dog Show for next weekend that you might want to look at:

• Saturday, 10 July at 2:00pm EDT, Nomi Kane will be hosting an online seminar on pooch drawing. What are the basics of cartoon dogs? What details can be added to make your best friend’s doodle different from all other best friend doodles? If you’ve got a computer and an hour, you can find out! Have paper and pencil ready, and families are urged to attend together, with advance registration required (hit the link).
• Sunday, 11 July from 1:00pm – 4:00pm EDT, if you’re in Columbus, you can come down to The Billy, where Hilary Frambes will be doing sidewalk chalk art of very good dogs (who are welcome if on leash). Register here so they have an idea of how many folks to expect, and if you’re outside, The Billy’s galleries will be open until 5:00pm, just saying.

  The rain date is Saturday, 17 July, same dog-time, same dog-sidewalk (yeah, okay, that sounded better in my head).

Oh, and because the folks at The Billy want everybody to be able to participate, a reminder: If you require an accommodation such as live captioning¹ or interpretation², please email libevents, which is an account at the Ohio State University, a dot–educational institution, as soon as possible. Requests made less than a week in advance will be more difficult to meet, although they’ll make every effort; if you give them enough notice, you’re pretty much assured of the assistance you require.

Spam of the day:

Hi there are many girls here https://[nope!].co/fN5R

As of 1 December 2020, there are approximately 488 people in a square kilometer in New Jersey³, 23.5% of which are under the age of 18, and 51.3% of which are women. There are many girls everywhere I look, and that’s without clicking on your virus-riddled link.

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¹ More for the Zoom event, you can’t really caption somebody drawing on the sidewalk.

² I imagine they’d be able to work that for either event.

³ Which is also home to more scientists and engineers per square kilometer than anyplace else in the world. In your face, rest of the planet!

Hey there. Want to find something cool to read in the not necessarily immediate future, but pretty soon nonetheless? Something in the sci-fi comics domain, mayhap? Then read on ’cause that’s what we’re talking about today.

• Word came back in November that one of Jim Zub’s creator-owned tales would be making the leap from comiXology¹ to print, and now we have a release date. Stone Star Vol 1: Fight Or Flight (discussed previously) comes out from Dark Horse a week from tomorrow at your preferred comic shop, with words by Zub, pictures by Max Dunbar, covers by Espen Grundetjern is US$19.99, and absolutely worth a read.
• You’ll have to wait a while to read it on paper, but Los Angeles resident Dave Kellett launched the Kickstart for the Act III² print collection of Drive, and you absolutely want in on this one. Yes, the price point for a physical book (US$55) is steep, but the previous volumes have been hefty, beautiful hardcovers jam-packed with extras. Sure, you could get the softcover for US$35, but you’d miss out on the dustcover, the ribbon bookmark, the endpapers, the spot UV … which technically the hardcover doesn’t have yet on account of they’re stretch goals, as are the various Tales From The Drive stories³ that have released since the Act 3 book came out, but history suggests that they’ll be unlocked as that’s what happened with the prior two books.

  Look. Campaign went up yesterday with a goal of US$45000 (a high goal, to be sure). As of now, it’s just shy of US$60,000, about US$5000 from stretch goal number 1 (the Gurihiru Tales story), so I’m highly confident the others will unlock. There’s potentially 90 pages of Tales in addition to book upgrades to go, before the campaign ends in a month.

  Storywise, it looks like all the pieces are finally on the board, as LArDK once described Drive as being a three-act story and he’s now upped that to five acts. Oh, and no FFF mk2 predictions on this one, as LArDk has a habit of stealth launching to this Patreonistas, and that throws things off.

• About a month ago, Doug Wilson (about whom we had some discussion back around ’09-’10, and again regarding an unsuccessful Kickstart around ’15, and one mo’ ‘gain in 2017 about a new project, which is immediately relevant) sent along a PDF of his now-completed story, Jack Astro (told you). The story starts as a subversion of the old Heinleinian eleite super-soldier story, and turns into a fairly familiar bumbler-out-of-their-depths story, albeit one that ends a bit abruptly.

  Wilson’s Kickstarting the full story starting Thursday, and while I don’t have any details to give you yet (that whole not yet launched thing), a) it fit the theme today too well not to mention, and b) it’ll certainly be worth your perusal at the end of the week.

Spam of the day:

I am currently running a PR campaign for my client and I would like to request you to share our website [nope!].com on your social media, bookmark it and give us a backlink on your blog fleen.com I will check in a few days’ time and if I do not see a backlink to our site and social signals, I will spam fleen.com with a whole load of toxic link farms that will inevitably drag your site down the rankings.

Just to show you that I am dead serious, please take a look at the backlink profile of this url and note all the spam links being created 24/7. The same destiny awaits your site: [nuh-uh].com

Please do not try to report me or try any monkey business as this will only piss me off and increase the severity of spam going to fleen.com Should you comply, I will reward you with a link on our site.

Thanks in advance. Kind regards

It’s the Kind regards in a blackmail attempt that’s really pissing me off. So, two things:

1. This was sent more than two weeks ago and gosh, I don’t see any drag-down in the search rankings, and 2. Do fuck off. The bitcon-seeking liar threatening to release video of me watching porn, hacked from a webcam that doesn’t exist, was more convincing that this horseshit.

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¹ Occasional reminder that they don’t get links, on account of Amazon’s terms & conditions mean that you don’t actually own any of the comics you purchase from them and screw that noise.

² Which wrapped up just about a week and a half back.

³ The most recent of which, Motherbear, from LArDK assistant Beth Reidmiller, wrapped up just today.

No image up top — it would give away too much.

It is a central tenet of this page that lots of things are webcomics; if you’re an independent artist, and have a website somewhere, you’re webcomics in my book¹. Keep that in mind, because this is going to wander a bit.

Dale DeGroff is a name some of you may recognize; he’s not the only reason we have high quality cocktails in this country after the disastrous post-Prohibition period, but he’s a big part of the movement, and taught or inspired a lot of people who helped make the revolution happen. His wife, Jill DeGroff, is a painter of no mean skill, one who has spent the past forever of her career portraying the cocktail bar world in her work.

A couple of years ago, I was lucky to purchase a portrait she did of Damon Boelte², purely because I looked at it and said, I know exactly that guy’s whole deal from the picture. It’s a fiction that just sprung into my head like a reverse Athena but it is absolutely true. My wife kinda hates it.

Yesterday, my bar had the DeGroffs back to celebrate (in no particular order) the end of capacity controls in New Jersey, Dale DeGroff’s latest experiments with bourbon, and Jill DeGroff’s latest paintings. And in the corner where I found the Damon Boelte two years ago was another painting that immediately spoke to me.

Because over the long period of quarantine, there was a person who didn’t make his name in cocktails, but who did short videos and shared them online, making favorite drinks for himself and his wife³, and Jill took it as inspiration.

Which is why I now have a portrait⁴ of Stanley Tucci in my home.

The Tooch and Damon The Cowboy Bartender now flank my bar, each looking over it at each other. I wanted to share it because maybe it will make some of you as happy as it made me. If you’re somebody I’ve shared a drink with and you find yourself in the middle part of New Jersey, drop a line. We can go visit my bartender, or we can stay in and experiment, and we can call it Webcomics.

Spam of the day:

FIND YOUR PERFECT PARTNER IN THE USA

Imagine my surprise when I found out this particular spam is not a hookup scam, but rather a “nutritional” supplements scam. Very confusion subject line game, spammer!

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¹ There is no book at present, at least not by me; Sean Kleefeld has a book titled Webcomics that is up for an Eisner this year, and I am carefully making my way through the PDF copy he kindly provided me. If I ever do a book about webcomics, it will likely be called I Have The Best Friends In Known Space.

² Who does not look in the painting like he does in any photo you’ll find of him. When he started in the high end cocktail game, he looked fresh from Sunday School, or like Kenneth the page from 30 Rock. Now he looks more like a guy that’s been hanging with ZZ Top for the past couple decades. For about two weeks, he had an in-between look and that’s when DeGroff met him and decided to immortalize him.

³ Also attracting controversy. A Negroni that that was shaken? Saying it’s okay to sub vodka for the gin? Look, people like what they like, but that should really have been dubbed a variation and okay! Fine! I’m over it, promise. The guy who made Big Night will not ever made me permanently angry.

⁴ Furthermore, Jill DeGroff has corrected the Negroni to be in its proper tumbler and okay I am done now, really this time.

But on the other hand, I’m not saying I don’t have nemesis, either.

See, it all comes back to Ryan Estrada, comicker, language demystifier, raconteur, [radio] drama impressario, shamer of cheapskates, and oh yes, Eisner nominee in the inaugural year of the Best Graphic Memoir category (alongside wife Kim Hyun Sook and artist Ko Hyung-Ju) for Banned Book Club. It’s the last item we’re concerned with today.

Estrada is doing something you don’t always see — openly posting on the sosh meeds about who can vote in the Eisners and imploring folks who can to vote for Banned Book Club, and he’s doing it for the best reason of all:

Spite.

Or at least comeuppance:

Time’s running out to register to vote!
You may wonder why I’m so insistent.

Well, a middle schooler named Jerry told me I couldn’t win an Eisner.

It was on the zoom in front of everybody.

Now my whole 6th grade ESL class is following the Eisners to see if Jerry was right.[Fearful face emoji] [Face with open mouth and cold sweat emoji] [emphasis mine]

Oh you did not, JERRY. You did not tell a man who has been thrown from a train, wandered through a drug war, dragged his ass up Kilimanjaro, lit himself on fire twice¹, and slept on a public bench in a gosh-darned typhoon that he is incapable of anything.

Especially not when such a man is unfailingly generous to you, JERRY:

Jerry is actually the cool, smart kind kid in class so he’s not trying to be a jerk he just DOESN’T BELIEVE IN ME.

I stand by my assessment of Jerry and encourage everybody that is eligible to vote in the Eisners to vote for Banned Book Club, so that Jerry can get his head right. Do it for Ryan, Hyun Sook, and Hung-Ju. Do it because Banned Book Club truly deserves both the nomination and the award. Do it to prove a middle school kid wrong and in so doing, strike back at every Jerry that’s not believed in you when he should, as well as everybody in middle school who was so damn certain about something while being so damn wrong.

Do it for spite. Do it so that I, a grown man, do not need to have a nemesis that is in middle school².

If you make, publish, edit, or sell comics, or if you are an academic or librarian that works with comics, you are eligible to cast a ballot for the Eisners until 30 June.

Spam of the day:

Give with Crypto Currency? Why Yes! We are adding it!

This from what purports to be a Christian crowdfunding site, making the claim that they’re emailing me because of my past contributions to somebody raising money to assuage their hurt feelings that they can’t be utter shits towards everybody that isn’t their exact flavor of white supremacist evangelical without getting some mild rebuke for their actions. Or, as they have it, being persecuted. I am very tempted to respond with a hearty Hail, Satan! instead of sending them to the spamhole and reporting them for phishing.

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¹ So far.

² Correctly identified in an old Life In Hell strip as existing only to separate out kids in their maximally snotty years, both to protect the younger kids they would torment ceaselessly, and to spare them from the high schoolers doling out beatings they would so richly deserve. Matt Groening had your number in like 1987 when YOUR PARENTS were in middle school, JERRY.

Hey. Work’s a little weird, and my dog’s a little needy, and Diamond’s not shipping books I was hoping to have for review, and I’m recognizing I need to take a day away from writing today. Nothing bad, just need a skip to reset and also it’s really pretty out right now. I’ll make it up to you, promise.

It’s a dreary day here today, and I’m behind on nearly everything I could be behind on, but I’m in a good mood because sometimes, others go out of their way to give you something awesome. I’d like to pass those somethings along, if you don’t mind.

• Firstly, you should be able to still get in on the pre-order for Meredith Gran’s limited-run, full-color printing of the recent Octopus Pie coda. I say should be because in the literal, single minute after Gran announced they were for sale, the Bigcartel store was insisting they were sold out. Too many of us trying to buy at once, I guess!

  As of this writing, it’s still available, but I wouldn’t sit on this until tomorrow if I were you. Valerie Halla’s colors are always great, and the cover colors by Sloane Leong look amazing. Finally, Gran will be signing every copy.

• Secondly, you don’t have to spend anything to get a perking-up today, if you wander over to Oh Joy, Sex Toy for a completely safe for work meditation on embracing the ridiculous in life from Erika Moen’s Patreon. It’s about kohlrabi, and the twists and turns her life has taken by embracing the weirder option at certain key times.

  It’s affirming, uplifting, joy-bringing, and exactly what so many of us need to hear as we slowly wake up to a world where things are necessarily worse than they were yesterday. Plague Years will wear you the fuck down¹, but there’s always room in them (and before, and in the days yet to come) for some Ridiculous in your life. Go read it and feel better about everything for a little while.

Spam of the day:

He decided to go public and his video went viral in record time … People testified this method cured toenail fungus forever after just of couple of days …

Is this the bit where you pee on your feet because ew.

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¹ Moen’s strip may be entirely safe for work, so I have to make up for that here just to create logic.