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.

Spam of the day:

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California is not local, but thanks so much for thinking I’d be interested in buying a house — pardon me, an estate — in Beverly freakin’ Hills.

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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.

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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:

Get New Cloud Computing Listings

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!

So I’ve seen two separate (and yet similar) webcomics go up this week from veteran creators, ones that involve a healthy dose of reader interactivity. Since we could all do with a good distraction, let’s take a look.

First up, David Hellman (of the still-revered A Lesson Is Learned But The Damage Is Irreversible launched They Always Die on Monday — an improvised fantasy adventure that relies on reader feedback to determine the action. It actually started at the end of June over Twitterward, with an explanatory post on the site. Updates have occurred at intervals since, and what Hellman actually launched was a summary of what’s happened before — twenty or more updates all put up on the 7th, and providing a wide-ranging and fairly loopy story for your enjoyment. Get caught up and keep an eye out for the next installment.

The second (and somewhat more immediate) iteration went up Tuesday morning, that we might all tolerate Election Day more easily. Randy Milholland dropped the announcement and then the sole rule: turns last thirty minutes, with voting to determine the next action. At the conclusion of the poll, Milholland would draw the scene and set up the next poll. It was a bloody, funny, failure-filled affair and it was enjoyed by all.

Enough so that today Milholland announced a new Twitter account, with a more-than-slightly disturbing name: Uncle Randy’s Game. The first poll (running until tomorrow) will determine the genre of the game and this time the character will have stats and hit points, also to be determined by poll.

It’s that last that sets the next Uncle Randy’s Game apart from They Always Die, an earlier locked-room puzzle from Jon Rosenberg¹, or Ryan North’s occasional forays into crowd-driven Shakespearean choose your own adventures (most recently also on 8 November via Twitter poll) — stats! There could be dice. Instead of a path inevitably leading to disaster², there is now an element of randomness that could shift defeat to victory and back again.

Unfortunately, I’ve got work on Monday (and pretty much every Monday), so y’all will have to tell me how the game (at present, the most votes are for humor/scifi) goes. I’m betting there will be Space Marines and Facehuggers.

Spam of the day:

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Unless this is about giving me laser eyes, I don’t care.

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¹ Running on 5 September, it involved a featureless room, a table, a lightbulb, a pile of cocaine, and an increasingly bizarre plotline.

² Milholland listed eight different ways you could have died in his first game.

So in the election last night….

Aw, Gary, no, don’t talk politics, this blog is about webcomics!

Wow, that’s a pretty harsh start to our discussion, random straw person, but I’ll remind you that reading my page isn’t mandatory, and let me tell you a bit about why what I’m about to do is webcomics.

I’m an upper middle class, straight white guy, of Anglo descent as near as can be told¹, brought up in a professional family (my father and his father both being engineering professors; my mother being a church musician more to keep busy than to bring in an income), raised mainline Protestant (which I’ve since shed). Growing up in suburban New Jersey, I had a fairly diverse peer group (among other things, it was the early hotbed for Indian immigration; I’ve being hanging with people named Sunil and Amit for about four decades) but very little outside of a cultural medium that was mutually agreed upon. I’ve had two large-scale shifts in the people I’m exposed to.

The first was college; as I’ve mentioned before, my alma mater didn’t admit women into the undergraduate program until some years after I’d graduated (and mostly because the economic giving of young alumni who thought it was stupid finally outweighed the giving of old alumni who remembered how it was shiny and wonderful without any dames around thinking they could be engineers; the longtime president was instrumental in forcing the change), but more importantly was located in rural Indiana.

Most of my classmates were the first in their families to go to school; few of them came from the socioeconomic background I had; they were far more religious than me; I was the closest thing many of them had seen to an ethnic minority, in that they had grown up in very nearly entirely white surroundings. We didn’t know what to make of each other at first, but we figured out how to learn from each other².

My long professional career in the greater New York City area kept me exposed to lots of nationalities and religions³, but still a fundamentally shared outlook on life.

The second shift came from webcomics.

The creators whose work I fell in love with are further afield in their backgrounds and experiences than I’d ever encountered. A lot more women, gays, lesbians, trans people, non-binary people, ace people, people that had grown up in different countries or religions or circumstances or socioeconomic categories. People with considerably more melanin than me, whose pigmentation and hair and dress marked them as different in a society whose willingness to tolerate their existence varied widely from theory to practice.

People who, despite having popular and quality work, needed food stamps or lacked affordable health insurance. People whose families spoke entirely different languages from each other and still fell in love. People who made stories that reflected their own existences and, as a result, forced me to expand my understanding of life beyond that enclave I’d grown up in and returned to. My appreciation for their work — especially for inviting me into their lived experiences, that I may learn — knows no bounds.

And last night a significant number of them find themselves on the receiving end of a message that it’s cute they thought they mattered for a while, but things are going back to the old ways. Time to stop thinking they’re real people.

Fuck that.

So I thought on it this morning, and I mentioned it on Twitter. It’s not enough for me to say I’m with you. I’m putting my advantages into action, I’m going to be shifting my charitable giving in favor of organizations that will fight to preserve the gains that the disadvantaged (basically everybody that didn’t grow up like me) have made, and to continue the process of making ours a fairer society. I suspect this will take a lifelong effort, but between now and when Donald Trump is inaugurated, I’m pledging US$10,000 with the goal of matching donations from any of you.

At the moment, I’m gathering suggestions as to what organizations I should concentrate on this time around; I’m trying to avoid overlap in mission, so it may come down to deciding between support for, say, the Southern Poverty Legal Center and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. The only ones I know I’m going to be supporting right now are Planned Parenthood, the ACLU, and Campaign Zero. I’d like to choose six to ten in all.

This may change between now and 20 January, but right now I see one of two directions:

• If the total giving to organizations from all of you adds up to less than US$10K, I’ll match dollar-for-dollar.
• If the total giving from all of you exceeds US$10K, I’ll determine the percentage each organization contributes to the total, and give that fraction of the 10K. I’m going to figure out those percentages anyway, as some people have asked me if they can join in on the matching. Damn right you can.

The organizations I’m investigating (and please, send suggestions) are below the cut; kindly spread the word, as I’m going to be disappointed if I don’t have to spend all of the money. Oh, and I’ve been in transit all day and I’m hungry, so no links.

In the meantime, draw comfort from art, learn from art, get inspired, be better than those who only see safety and security in denying it to others. I’ll try to get my head back into webcomics tomorrow. Right now, I’ve got work to do.

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