I used to make comics. I know that because strangers would look at my work and immediately share their most excruciatingly banal experiences with me:

— that time a motorised wheelchair cut in front of them in the line at the supermarket;
— when the dentist pulled the wrong tooth and they tried to get a discount;
— eating off an apple and finding half a worm in it;

every anecdote rounded of with a triumphant “You should make a comic about that!”

Then I would take my 300 pages graphic novel out of their hands, both of us knowing full well they weren’t going to buy it, and I’d smile politely, “Yeah, sure. Someday.”

“Don’t try to cheat me out of my royalties when you publish it,” they would guffaw and walk away to grant comics creator status onto their next victim.

Nowadays I make work that feels even more truly like comics to me than that almost twenty years old graphic novel. Collage-y, abstract stuff that breaks all the rules just begging to be broken. Linear narrative is ashes settling in my trails, montage stretched thin and warping in new, interesting directions.

I teach comics techniques at a university level based in my current work. I even make an infrequent podcast talking to other avantgarde artists about their work in the same field.

Still, sometimes at night my subconscious whispers the truth in my ear: Nobody ever insists I turn their inane bullshit nonevents into comics these days, and while I am a happier, more balanced person as a result of that, I guess that means I don’t make comics any longer after all.

  • 4 Posts
  • 41 Comments
Joined 11 days ago
Cake day: November 23rd, 2024
  • haverholm@kbin.earthtoTechnology@beehaw.org•Eurocops red pill the Matrix 'secure' criminal chat systems • The Register
    42·
    14 hours ago

    The Register failed in their due diligence by not clarifying from the beginning that this is a different Matrix chat than the open standard. They amended the mistake with an update to the post (quoted here in OP), but that is placed at the end of an article that not everybody is going to read all the way through.

    IMHO this needs a rewrite to make clear from the outset that the Matrix protocol and matrix.org are not affiliated with the criminal chat service. As it stands, even with the correction, it looks like character assassination of a perfectly legal open source project.

  • haverholm@kbin.earthtoTechnology@beehaw.org•Bitcoin man sues Newport council over '£600m fortune lost in tip' - BBC News
    8·
    16 hours ago

    Let’s just consider what a decade in a landfill will do to a hard drive.

    It’s not just a big pile of trash you could rummage through, according to the site manager

    things that were sent to landfill three or four months ago could be three to five feet deep

    So there is a good deal of waste on top eleven years later, which means

    1. the layers get compacted, things break, under the weight and pressure of heavy machinery crisscrossing the site.
    2. other waste gradually dissolves into who knows what kinds of chemicals. I can’t tell what kinds of waste exactly is deposited there, but clearly electronic parts among others.

    We’re talking about a hard drive that was removed from the computer, so it only has a thin aluminium casing for protection. Chances are it’s crushed beyond recoverability.

    Also, in 2013, this would have been a mechanical drive. Even in optimal circumstances, there are a bunch of ways they can fail, leading to data loss.

    The spinning disk inside the casing is fairly fragile. One scratch on its surface could render it unreadable, as would, say, spilling a sugary drink into it, which our unfortunate bitcoiner already did. Now imagine the drive buried in an environment full of debris and potentially corrosive chemicals.

    TL;DR — At this point, even if a major excavation was undertaken and the drive was located, there is barely a chance that any data would be retrievable from it.

    It’s dead, Jim. Bitcoin man is chasing a dream long past its sell-by date.