Picked my son up from work the other day. Let me tell you about my eldest son, N. He is very smart – three A-stars-at-A-Level smart, on-track-for-a-first-in-Computer-Science-at-Queens smart, wanting-to-do-a-masters-in-philosophy-and-more-than-capable smart. He’s clever. Unsure where he gets it from.
He’s working for a fintech (financial technology) company as part of his computer placement year doing his degree.
Picked him up in the car and says “Dad, someone tried to phish me today and I can’t believe I let them” (phishing is the attempt to gather personal information about you in order to, say, gain control of your bank details by pretending to be from an institution you would use).
“Tell me more, son.”
“They said they were from Boots Opticians and phoned from a Belfast number, and I thought it was ok because I’m due a boots opticians appointment”
“Ok.”
“They set an appointment for me for 4:45 and then said they just wanted to confirm some details, so they asked my date of birth and my address and then they hung up – I CAN’T BELIEVE I JUST TOLD THEM THIS”
“so … wait… maybe it was just boots phoning to confirm an appointment?”
“NO! It was phishing! I can’t believe it, I’m so wary of stuff like this, normally I’d’ve just hung up straight away but because I was expecting a call from boots, I just… ugh!”
“Again, maybe it was actually boots phoning to confirm an appointment?”
“NO! It was phishing – I looked up the number and all the numbers for Boots were english numbers”
“I know Boots will phone you from a local number but if you want to phone them then they’ll have on central number that…”
“PHISHING! I CAN’T BELIEVE IT”
“Well, ok, but it seems like they didn’t get that much information from you?”
“I KNOW, I WAS LUCKY.”
Anyway, the next day I got a text from him:
“By the way, I actually wasn’t phished and I have an appointment at 4:45”
I laughed and laughed and laughed.
And that, ladies and gentlemen is the difference between smart and wisdom.
I bet you thought I forgot about you, and, well, you’ll be right.
Pretty eventful day, I mean it started stupid early when my ibs flared up with stomach pain at 3:30 am, finally got a sleep at around 6, but then had to take wife to work at 8. After that came home, went back to bed, and then was up again for 11 and a zoom conferance call on screen writing for film and tv (this was useful, and happily well timed). Then a did some thinking on doing a kickstarter to terran omega (result: I’m doing a kickstarter for terran omega) then did a food shop, then got an indian then sat down and realised it’s 8pm and I’m exhausted.
Sometimes the day just gets away from you.
Oh update on the printed comic – it’s due for arrival here on MONDAY!
Some other thoughts:
I’m coming around to a manifesto of sorts for where I want to be in the next few years ahead. Creating one book a year for me and trying to find a publisher as well as writing up a pitch for film and tv. I’ve lacked ambition for a long time now (A LONG LONG time), because it’s largely felt like my main ambition in comics was Draw Judge Dredd for 2000ad and when that happened I’ve largely been floating along on that and just stumbling into one comic book project then another (and I have been lucky, they’ve all been projects I’ve enjoyed and that were well written)
I mean nothing will change for me and what I’m doing day in day out, but focusing on one new project a year, like Terran Omega, which can be developed means even if NONE of them get beyond their initial story at least I’ll have a bunch of different creator owned projects that I own forever each with a foundation that can be built on if I ever want to.
Anyway that’s what’s what. If you want to find out when the kickstarter starts I’ll be letting people know on my email list first! SO SIGN UP NOW!
Make a business card(last time I did this was 15 years ago and honestly, I overprinted by a few hundred and gave away … like six… comics as an industry doesn’t bother itself too much with business cards) Print Business card (online service of some sort) Finish page 24(colours) and 25 (inks and colours) of Terran Omega. Edit Terran Omegaissue 1 for typos Send it to Mixam for print. (why mixam? I’ve used it before and know how it works and time is a big factor)
Typo edits! Ugh. Well, first I fixed all the stuff Ron and Scott pointed out (friends I used to do a podcast with, smart guys working in media in different ways)
Then I couldn’t decide on cross bar Is for small words (“IS”, “IT”) I’d make the case that for you could use them for two letter words, but the consensus is ONLY a crossbar I on first person single (or initial letters in an abbreviation).
Which makes sense, I guess. So I decided I’d go with the consensus, but it turns out I had, like a rank amateur, also included crossbar Is and non cross bar Is.
For those not in the know, Blambot explains it thusly:
Having done that, I then had to wrestle with bloody colour profiles.
From the get go I started colouring the comic with a CMYK profile, but just using one that clip studio had. In the past when I’ve done colours, I’ve done that an exported to rgb or cmyk and sent it to publishers and found that… well, they know what they’re doing and it usually turns out ok. But dealing with colours is a headache. I mean look at these two IDENTICAL covers:
CMYK Export with CMYK ProfileRGB Export with RGB Profile
You see the weirdness. Those pages are the same. It just comes down to how they were exported. Colouring in cmyk tends to make colours more muted, because print is more muted, but to compensate, you tend to sue brighter colours, more vivd colours – these come from using Cyan Magenta Yellow or Black since they’re purer. Green is a mix, on the computer RGB – RED GREEN BLUE – green is a pure colour. So you end up with here where the cmyk green is a nice muted green and the rgb green is a weird mutant green.
Anyway, I had to faff around with colour profiles and hopefully I got it right. Certainly the proofs looked good (but I’m looking at proofs for a CMYK printer on a RGB screen)
Then I discovered one of the golden rules of print (well, RE-discovered because I did know this) is that print books have page counts that are always multiples of four.
I’d figured this out ages ago, and then set my page count to 32. (25 pages for this strip plus four for cover – front and back – brought me to 29, next multiple of 4 is 32).
Then… started putting the document together and by the time I did that I was staring at three blank pages and thinking “why do I need those two blank pages” and deleted them.
This was, of course, stupid.
Mixam’s very impressive auto set up didn’t like it at all, and it took me a good few minutes to figure out why, and once I did I smacked myself in the head, called myself an idiot and inserted two new pages.
Mixam tells me the printed comics will arrive tomorrow – I remain skeptical but we’ll see.
What’s interesting is this feels like a real objective of the whole process. I wanted a print comic, and now I’m getting one. Done it!
I haven’t lost any money (assuming you ignore the time and effort to make the comic, which I don’t) and the cost of printing was easily covered by the relatively small patreon income.
Post Rendr I’ll have a think but I’m nearly tempted to not bother doing a kickstarter for the issue, because… we’ll … I’ve already printed it. But then a kickstarter would be so easy, but it would also be an insane amount of work for something that will not really earn a lot of money.
These books cost £2 to print, assuming I sell for £6 per copy, that means I’m making £4 profit per copy. So I need to sell 50 to cover the costs of printing 100.
If I sell 100 of them then I’ll have spent £200 to make £600 – which gives me a staggering £200 profit. (But now I’ve got to spend four days packaging and posting things and figuring out kickstarter – what a nightmare)
And actually you take something like 10% off for costs for kickstarter and it quickly looks like a lot of effort for not much reward.
I suspect the best bet is to skip that format for kickstarter and go to the graphic novel format where the profit makes more sense.
Anyway, look, I’m not making decisions right now. Post Rendr I’ll see how many copies I’ve got left, they’ll go to my patreon follower first. Could be this 100 copies might be the only print of this run that will ever exist.
Make a business card(last time I did this was 15 years ago and honestly, I overprinted by a few hundred and gave away … like six… comics as an industry doesn’t bother itself too much with business cards) Print Business card (online service of some sort) Finish page 24(colours) and 25 (inks and colours) of Terran Omega. Edit Terran Omega issue 1 for typos Send it to Mixam for print. (why mixam? I’ve used it before and know how it works and time is a big factor)
Right now largely going through the final version of Terran Omega and correcting/editing. Thanks to Scott Ferguson and Ron Abernathy for editorial notes.
Should get this to mixam this afternoon.
I went with Vistaprint for business cards which somehow will arrive after my comic will. Weird eh.
250 cards. I’ll need 20. But they shouldn’t change much in next 20 years so maybe I’ll keep using them for ever.
Here’s the introduction text for this issue of Terran Omega
Terran Omega is the last human in the galaxy.
Given godlike powers to fight in mankind’s battle against an alien universe, she was placed in suspended animation to be woken when humanity needed her most.
The call never came.
Ten millennia later, mankind has vanished.
She is alone.
Faced with the existential crises of being a weapon built for a long forgotten war, she makes a different choice:
She chooses life.
Now she travels the galaxy trying to right mankind’s wrongs, collecting the destructive remnants humanity’s final war. A war that, like her, has passed from history into myth.
At the edge of the galaxy, she is about to encounter one such relic.
A weapon abandoned for ten thousand years, left to fester, grow stranger, and become far more powerful than ever intended.
Now I’ve gotta go, still got a lot of editing/exporting to do!
Got an email yesterday with a ticket to the Rendr festival in Belfast. This is a big cgi animation festival, pulling together film, tv and games. It’s a surprisingly big event for Belfast, and is largely about networking.
So that has necessitated and all hands on the deck approach to this week, out goes the old plan, in comes the new one, by the end of the week I want to have a print ready version of Terran Omega issue 1 ready to go to mixam for printing.
So blogging this week will also be curtailed (takes about an hour every day!)
Will keep you in the loop, but you can expect it to be short and sharp!
You can read more details about the Terran Omega issue 1 stuff over on my patreon
Big shout out to my chums Ron and Scott from the days of Sunnyside Comics podcast who are helping me proof this thing in quicktime!
So my to do list this week looks like:
Make a business card (last time I did this was 15 years ago and honestly, I overprinted by a few hundred and gave away … like six… comics as an industry doesn’t bother itself too much with business cards) Print Business card (online service of some sort) Finish page 24 (colours) and 25 (inks and colours) of Terran Omega. Edit Terran Omega issue 1 for typos Send it to Mixam for print. (why mixam? I’ve used it before and know how it works and time is a big factor)
Well, I did it. I finished page 24 of Terran Omega. Scripted as a single 48 page story, I spotted early that there’s a good halfway plot point – albeit on page 25 – so I’m largely finished with issue 1 of a two issue series.
Things I’ve learned: colouring is time consuming. But worth it. Sometimes I rely on the art to do the heavy lifting of the script (bad writer!)
It’s totally worth writing and drawing something of your own. Nothing feels better than knowing this is mine from soup to nuts.
Clip Studio isn’t perfect, especially for things like logo design, so I’ve been chipping away at affinity for that. And actually I may switch to affinity for lettering too (once I figure it out)
And that’s it. Small well done to me.
PJ’s Progress and Start the Week
Ok, last week –
Planed on inking 8 pages and doing two pages of Terran Omega. Well, got 5 inked and did two pages of Terran Omega. So Ok.
This week
Mon – Three Inks (F&McB 6,7,8) Tue – Run Inks (F&McB 9,10) Wed – Ink Covers (war story 5 & 6) Thur – Pencils (F&McB 1,2) Fri – Pencils (F&McB 3,4) Sat – Terran Omega Page 25 Sun – Put together pdf of Terran Omega issue 1
Weekends never work out for getting the amount of work done I’d like, so instead I’m focusing on creator owned work at the weekend. But that means doing a certain amount of paid work through the week.
This month
F&McB ep4, Start #5 of War thing (get it pencilled at least)
And let’s see…
Yesterday In Social Media
There’s a lot to great in this, so I’m only go do some highlights today…
My guilty secret is I quite enjoy Fesshole – where people leave anonymous confessions (that aren’t ALL about sex stuff, many oft hem are in fact about one person in a couple clearly hating the other one). Anyway this was posted
Each night I bid my daughters (5 and 8) goodnight with "goodnight, sleep tight, don't let the rats eat the skin off your face". In my mind I'm being a silly "fun dad", but part of me wonders if I might actually be a daft cunt who shouldn't have been allowed to raise children.
Once told my youngest - who loved wheetos - they he ate so many wheetos that he could turn in to one. Anyway a decade later found out this was a source of genuine fear for him.
Tread carefully.
This link will take you to that bluesky post and you’ll see people who’ve replied to me with their own little stories on that front.
I love RPGs1, I love making stuff, and I love weird constraits that force creativity, which brings me to …
I haven’t looked, but I just love the conceit, and you might too.
Went to the game of thrones experience. Way better than I was expecting. Though it has a slight whiff of “oh please god this place better make money soon or we’re in trouble”
Actually, it was pretty impressive. Bloody massive. Maybe a bit smaller than similar sized experiences like Harry Potter World (yes, I know, but she hadn’t gone fully terf at the time)
Here’s me and Wun Wun – you know I can’t resist a photo beside a giant.
You wanna see the next faceless Doctor Who monster freak?
Robots are roaming around the Main Media Centre here in Milan.Organizers continue to finish construction — and program the robots — ahead of the throng of media expected throughout the Olympics.
If you’re interested in making comics, and they pay (not a lot, but if this is the beginning of your comic making journey this is a great way to get published)
Submissions for BOXES Comic Magazine Vol. 5 are now OPEN!We are looking for short comics and articles about comics from a diverse range of UK based creators.Have a read of the submission guidelines here for more details: thirdbearpress.com/submissionsIf you have any questions, please ask!
It’s odd that some things lock memories in your head, unexpected things, small things. Every day things.
I have two very distinct memories of drinking water, once when I was 11 years old and was on a school trip to Europe – my parents had gone from having no money to suddenly have little bit of money after selling our house (facts I’d find out much later) and thought the best way to integrate me into my new school was to send me on the school’s european school trip.
It was an all boys school (and in fact it’s a school that doesn’t exist any more) and it was hellish. I hated the school. I hated most of the people in it, I didn’t enjoy travelling (I’d get travel sick) and we travelled everywhere by coach. I had no friends on that trip – it was a fortnight long (maybe it was a week? it turns out I have a terrible sense of time when it comes to holidays, every week feels like two) – stopping for a day in various european countries. Paris, Amsterdam and Switzerland where the three I have distinct memories of, Paris because we drove through the red light area (with a bus full of hormone raged teenagers, though I was 11 so it was all just very confusing), Amsterdam I remember people buying clogs for souvenirs and Switzerland for the water.
We had stopped in some sort of camping site in Switzerland which had a communal entertainment room, and me and a bunch of us where in there, they had a pinball machine (I can’t remember what the theme of it was) I do remember someone convincing me if the ball was stuck you could just lift it up a bit to free it – which, of course, wasn’t true. But I’d gotten thirsty, and asked someone in charge (a local) where I could get a drink of water.
“In the toilets” “The toilets? Is there a water fountain?” “No – just from the tap” “The TAP??” “Yeah… it’s piped in from the mountains”
And it turns out the best water I’ve ever tasted in my life was from a toilet block in a camp site in the Swiss mountains.
It was crystal clear, cold and refreshing. Never had water like it since.
My second strong memory of drinking water is so intrinsically linked to my mum and this house it both makes me sad and makes me warm inside. I’d walked home from work, to the family home (which this was) had gone in to the kitchen and poured a pint glass of tap water and just necked it in one.
My mum watching this just said “You’re just like me, I love water too”.
I think I would have been 19, my mum 36. I think now I have adult kids of my own I understand that moment better.
You spend all your time raising kids and when they’re little their language, their habits and their interests are a reflection of yours.
As they get older and exposed to more people in school who they are encompasses more, things you’ve never seen or heard before (I remember the first time my eldest said something and I thought “oh that’s weird, I don’t remember me or my wife saying that”)
Then eventually they’re fully formed humans, independent in thought and deed, and so you start noticing where they have commonolity with you or your wife or their grandparents or cousins, and it’s a moment of wonder. A moment where you go “oh wow, you’re just like me”.
Anyway, those are my memories of water.
PJ’s Progress
Weekends are turning out to be NOT great for getting work done. I gave up improv this year thinking it would return my weekends to me, but that’s not how it’s gone. I did get most of one page inked yesterday, but today I’m off to the Game Of Thrones exhibit and won’t get much done today either.
Yesterday In Social Media
Over on reddit in the r/scifi forum I posted the latest Terran Omega page. I’ve somewhat steadily been building upvotes up there, couple of weeks ago asking my bluesky audience to go upvote and it really boosted the numbers. Yesterday though, wow. Not sure what happened. I SUSPECT it was far more to do with the fact the page was practically a single illustration with a very high scifi concept on it, and thus catnip for the r/scifi audience. But the upvotes hit a high of 57 (doesn’t sound like a lot, but honestly previous pages where hitting 2-3) and 17k views.
Will this translate into patreon subscribers? I have no idea. I think it might translate, eventually into a tiny bump in kickstarter numbers, but still, a pleasing result.
Read this delightful review of the new muppets tv show episode. Worth the read if only for the last line.
The Muppet Show: this thrilling return is so great I can’t even count how many times I laughed
A thing called Moltbook burst into existence yesterday. A social network like reddit for Ai agentic chatbots (I promise those are real things) I have no idea what to make of it. It’s very easy to see it and think “Oh wow, this is it, this is the start of the singularity – the beginning of skynet – it’s the tronverse – the matrix – the end” and also to look at it and think “wait… is this like looking at static and seeing gods face?”
I have no answer. I guess we’ll wait and see, and maybe, hopefully, it’ll turn out to be the face of jesus in some toast.
All the gen alpha are confusing the crap out of the bar staff
‘It’s ridiculous’: publicans bemused by rise of single-file queues to get served
Bar owners say they struggle to dissuade people from forming a line as behavioural experts point to post-pandemic ‘new norms’
You have to have strategies as a freelancers. Ways to make some of the inevitable parts of a difficult job easier on the psyche. I have one call “fire and forget”. I mean I suspect we all do it but giving it a name has helped me deal with it. It’s basically about sending out emails to editors or prospective publishers.
Cold emailing is hard.
Just getting the courage up to sit up and type up something to send to someone you don’t know where your brain is going “come on dude, you’re not good enough for this!” but if you manage to get over that hurdle, then you’re on the spiral of waiting for a response and putting everything you have not the expectation of that response.
So, Fire and Forget are a kind of missile control system used on fighter planes (I found out via the game F16 Multirole Fighter which came out in 1998) you lock on to a target and fire your missile and move right on to the next target. Your original missile in the meantime just tracks and eventually destroys the enemy.
And that’s how you should treat cold emails, not that you’re going to destroy the enemy, but rather send them off and move on to the next thing. Keep moving. Keep looking for targets. Don’t worry about it. If you get a response? Great! Wasn’t expecting that, follow it up – and then … forget about it. Until another and another and a relationship builds and you’re on to doing something.
But fire and forget really helps prevent that sort of confidence spiral, I mean a big part of it is that the people you’re emailing aren’t your goals, it’s been much easier, for example, with Terran Omega to know my plan is to do a kickstarter, if it finds a publisher before hand? amazing – but if it doesn’t? No matter, I was always going to self publish anyway.
I’ve three missiles out there, the first missed its target. Two more still to find it. Let’s see.
Wipeout
I mostly took yesterday off. Recovering a bit from IBS, just wasn’t feeling up to much. Though I did a bit of writing (a new thing, I think it’s a great core idea but lacks a story and the follow up to terran omega). I also did a bit of colouring on page 23 of Terran Omega. Will upload that to patreon for paying subscribers over at my patreon.
Yesterday In Social Media
I love The Detectorists, by Mackenzie Cook – I’ve written essays on its cinematography (annoyingly, those essays are long since lost to twitter)
His follow up, Wurzel Gummidge, was a too-short absolute delightfully charming magical show.
And his new show – Small Prophets, looks fantastic too.
Here’s an interview with him from the Guardian – I do think him and Stephen Merchant are the best things to come out of The Office.
Actually, speaking of the BBC (which I was because all of the shows above are ALL BBC shows, which is why I’m largely in favour of it)… today (Saturday) there’s a bunch of good TV on, including:
Ignoring Rick Stein for a moment, any one of those would make a great Bank Holiday viewing party, so why they’re all on on Saturday is a baffler, still, they’ll all now be on the iPlayer. And the Man Who Would be King is fantastic.
Gathering of Giants. Super Sculpey #shiflettbros #claysculpture #claysculpting
Look at those goofy giants, aren’t they fantastic. It makes me want to break out some modelling clay, get frustrated and put it back in the box vowing to never try it again (until the Shiflet brothers post something else)
Also, this is the sort of stuff I see now and my brain things, oh wow, imagine Terran Omega encountering those guys (or guys very much like them) giant dumb humanoids, what would their story be?
The Flip Side Of Dominic Hyde
I saw this in 1980 in b&w aged 10, while the threat of nuclear war was ever present and Belfast was in the throws of the troubles, and somehow it’s stuck with me. It was a time travel tale (and with the fairly obvious trope of “he’s his own grandad”) but I dunno, just the idea of their being a future beyond that present, maybe? It stuck.
Anyway, hence the expression… See you on the Flip Side.
Well, it’s hard to get conclusive proof for anything that causes IBS – irritable bowel syndrome – I mean it’s by definition unknown what’s causing it (it’s the fall back condition when everything else has been ruled out)
But through diet changes it was obvious that wheat was a big trigger for me, and now, I think, I can also add chocolate to that list.
And I know that because.. well, a few weeks ago after my last attack I went off chocolate and I’ve been symptom free then day before yesterday had a twirl (a lovely lovely twirl) and immediately rushed to the loo, then Yesterday had some more chocolate and last night was pain. Lots of pain.
So that’s it, me and chocolate are no more. Slowly. Little by little, every pleasure becomes a pain point.
Anyway, that’s why the blog is late today!
PJ’s Progress
Pretty good day yesterday work wise, for F&McB ep 3 pages 3,4 and 5 finished in inks. That’s a good day. Three invoicable pages! (I mean I think page 5 needs some more background so will get to it. This is a 10 pager (I only send an invoice when a page is complete), and if I hadn’t been knocked on my ass by IBS I was hoping to get another three pages inked today. With a plan to finishing it all for Monday. But we’ll see.
Oh I need to do about 18 invoicable pages of work per month to earn a living. Not a massive living, just enough to cover bills and things. No luxury dining for me. And this month I’ve done … 13. Ok. It looks bad. Not all pages are created equal and I did four pages of Terran Omega this month too, which doesn’t count because I earn nothing from that. But still. Need more.
Oh, yesterday I realised I needed a new nib and I haven’t been very good at tracking my nib usage, so I ordered 20 nibs – £25 on ebay. G Pens. Never order one thing of a thing you use in physical tools. Always order as many as you can afford.
On Comic Artists maintaining Newsletters and Social Media
Was chatting with John McCrea today about the merits and difficulties and purposes of things like newsletters, and patreon and social media.
Sometimes talking to someone helps me coalesce my own thoughts around these things.
For artists, I think you need some sort of motivator to get a newsletter and patreon up and going. The barrier to starting talking on social media is far lower. You can quickly find the people who want to find you on bluesky (and previously twitter, and facebook and instagram) and that becomes a motivator, plus it’s so frictionless – you can just pop in whatever random thought you have. No need to worry about marshalling your thoughts into a paragraph or two – you can’t.
But, as we’ve all seen social media come and go, I’m not entirely sure it’s the right answer.
There’s a philosophy of post once publish everywhere – and tools that can help, but it’s not the same, it just feels like now you’ve got to do more work.
And really, most artists just want to post their silly fun pictures and get on with things.
Patreon
For me, I think what really helped with patreon was having a project to do – a one year long graphic novel allowed me to post properly to patreon three times a week – once the b&w, second the colour and third the artists edition (and colour and artists edition are for paid members). So far, that’s helped me build up 360+ patreon followers in a decent amount of time.
And so, if I want to keep patreon I’m going to have to come up with the next project and the next, etc. Which is good, because I’ve no hit a reasonable feedback loop of doing something and having the readers to justify it.
Newsletters
I think there’s probably a sweet point of readers on a newsletter to justify its existence, but talking to John I feel like the problem with a newsletter for an artist is … what do you put in it to make it worth reading? Especially if you’re already posting this stuff all over. That said, I think a newsletter (and a blog) may be the only independent ways to connect to your audience. In the “post once publish everywhere” your starting point should he the blog or the newsletter. And I suspect the newsletter needs something unique in it to guarantee it’s worth looking at over and above the blog/patreon.
So that’s something I’m going to work on figuring out. Maybe exclusive monthly sketches? That might be the thing to help. Maybe allowing the readers to suggest the sketches? Yes. That might do it. That at least will make it worth while looking at the newsletter… hmm.. ok. That might be the plan for me…
Anyway you can subscribe to the newsletter at pjholden.kit.com and if you get in touch and ask me for a sketch, I don’t care what it is, I’ll pick one at random and you’ll see it in the NEXT newsletter. (These sketches won’t be for sale, I mean, unless you want to buy one… but if I pick your suggestion it doesn’t mean you’re getting a free sketch – only that I’ll draw it, I’m not made of money, or sketches)
Social Media
You know, I’m really coming to think of social media as the least important part of a comic artists outreach. Once upon a time it had the biggest audience, the widest reach but now … well… algorithms throttle the outreach favouring posts that encourage activity – and the posts that encourage most activity (a fact I think we’ve all known since the very early days of the internet) is outrage. A nice picture of Judge Dredd? Not much traction, the president who shall not be named ai altered into a Dredd outfit, shooting someone in the face? Boy I’d expect that will travel pretty far and wide. But for what?
And the thing is, the answer to non-nazified-algorithems isn’t no algoritehsm because now the reach is much more like standing in a crowd and shouting – sure the people who hear you at that moment will react but also there’s thousands of people (and often your followers) who might hear it faintly as background noise. You need large numbers of followers to get that to have any traction.
And any that sits in between that … along will come Zuckerberg, or Musk to buy it up before it becomes too popular (that’s how instagram went and how whatsapp fell)
So I have a very different attitude to social media. It’s my thought collection bucket and I’ll gather them up and post them here.
Which neatly brings us to …
Yesterday In Social Media
So I’m tired and don’t have time to do the screen grabs I’d normally do so instead I’m going to embed some stuff, with the caveat that that makes these things brittle. If bluesky stops working, if their profiles become hidden, if the delete their profiles, then these embeds stop working.
'Hand Made Art Is More Important Than Ever' – new blog post! buff.ly/bkDgJMX #handmade #createdontscrape #createdontconsume #makeart #art #hobby #fantasyart #unicorn #blogpost #artblog
Way back at the very early dawn of what I laughinly call my career, I’d done some work on a small press fanzine called the Class of 79 – created by much missed super dredd fan (and my mate) Stewart Crofts-Perkins, Stu went under the nom-de-plume of Logan, anyway, on the fanzine I first met Rufus Dayglo who would go on to do great work for 2000ad, among other things, and Jake Lynch – who cocreated the Co79 fanzine with Logan. Jake was, for my money the best artist in those early issues (no mean feat, Rufus was incredible and Henry Flint – at the time working for Tharg’s mighty organ – also made an appearance) but Jake’s art held so much promise. Somehow I broke in to 2000ad before Jake, who had real life stuff to do before he could really return to comics. But he did return, and for my money one of the best on Dredd, a unique voice too – which is damn hard to pull off on Dredd.
Look at that sexy Lawmaster design. God Jake knows how to draw vehicles.
I spotted this and thought “I WOULD READ THIS COMIC – assuming all the nazi’s get their comeuppance in the end”
And I guess that’s all the news fit for print (on my blog, which isn’t print). See you on the flip side! (tomorrow I might even tell you why I keep saying that phrase, maybe you can guess!)
How many best friends in the whole world have you got? I often feel like I miss having a best bud. Someone I could scheme with. I suspect it’s more a reflection of getting older, the intensity of those friendships and the excitement of the future bound together. Of course you don’t have a chum to scheme with, you fool, you’re 56 not 16. Or maybe it’s a reflection of how my brain chemistry works.
That’s not to anyway demote the great friends I have now, but certainly the spending every minute of free time cheek by jowl and talking nonsense about the world and how you’re gonna do great things is a joy that leaves as childhood does.
In my childhood my best mate was GIGO (the nickname only a seven year old could come up with) that friendship was intense and sacred and lasted with that intensity until I moved school. Every day was a new way to play war. Rather pleasantly he got in touch a few years ago and we’ll still chat. But conversations now are about work and kids and the only bright future is retirement.
In my teens I went through a few best mates, Keven in first year (modern day year 8 I think) I don’t remember that we had a great deal in common only that he was a fairly big lad and I was and remain not. and then Walshie and I were inseparable. Though none of these friendships overlapped with all of my interests. I think walshie was also in to computers but we walk around school and the get our lunches and we’d be happy kids (doesn’t sound like much but our school was hell on earth)
We moved when I was 16 out from belays to Strangford and new school in downpatrick were I knew no one and suddenly I was no longer part of any double acts. I made plenty of friends and some of those had the promise of being co conspirators but really we were only there a year before we boomeranged back to Belfast and suddenly I knew no one.
One anchor to Belfast was working in a computer shop and I became best mates with a guy there Karlos. This is right around turning 18 and so that friendship was cemented in booze and parties. And what a great time that was.
At 19 I think, I met JT and we were that tight co conspirator team. He wanted to be a writer. And I wanted to be an artist. But journalism was his future (and mad stories of the war in Bosnia were ahead of him whereas I liked my war stories safely on paper)
Later in my 20s I didn’t have one close friend but I did have lots of friends and that was great. Then I met my wife and none of it seemed to matter much because this was my future.
I think I just miss my youth.
Anyway that got melancholy faster than I’d intended!
On to…
PJ’s Progress
Finished one page of F&McB inks (most of had been done the previous day) and completed a page of inks and then started and left unfinished another page. So, actually roughly speaking two complete page of inks. Not bad. Not bad.
Yesterday on social media
This might just be a lot of embeds, let’s see…
More space stuff! This is fascinating, no?
that's 25-28 km. which is not very thick at all. right now, space is about 100 km above your head, and there's molten magma about 20-80 km below your feet
Turns out a lot of my yesterday was taken up with screaming into the void about AI.1 I have a lot of conflicted feelings about AI, best summed up with “I wish it would go away”.
I think it has no business involving itself with creativity of any kind. Art and culture come from a human place. We replace that with machine learning, civilisation becomes a grinding spiral, lacking any forward movement. Not just for creatives who are the engine of the possible, but for people who like to read and watch things. All art is a communication between the creator and the person looking at it. If you replace the creator with AI, what then?
I suspect that the problems we all have with Ai in its environmental impact will eventually be solved – like many computer problems moores law will probably kick in somehow. (When China released their Ai model that had slurped up open ai’s model and somehow had become more efficient, stuff like that I suspect will keep happening)
It’s copyright slurping – too late to fix it. We’ve all been stitched up on that front, but legislate to keep it out of creativity, or delightfully, ensure anything with AI can’t be copyrighted.
But, I dunno, to quote Lord of the Rings:
“I wish the ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened.” “So do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.
