My friend and colleague, Julie McGalliard (a.k.a. mcjulie), just finished writing this fantastic series of essays on her take regarding religion. It's autobiographical and covers her history with churches, so it's easy and fascinating to see where she's coming from. I also relate to much of what she has to say. That last bit of her last post is particularly masterful, to me. This link will take you to her LiveJournal's "religion" filter.

Occasionally... Occasionally! Hugh still posts something worthwhile at gapingvoidtext:

http://syndicated.livejournal.com/gapingvoidtest/1005790.html

It's still a truism, but well done!

This looks hauntingly familiar.

It's the same place I've been this summer, and pretty close to the same action I've been trying to take. I'm maybe on the upward slope of that, headed toward recovery. I still don't see the beauty and purpose to my work that I used to, but I'm not feeling hopeless or overwhelmed today. I am seeing beauty and purpose in other things, maybe even in doing my work.

Can't say as there's much of a trick in there, though. I've always tackled my bouts of depression and anxiety by attempting to bootstrap myself back into the land of the living. And I've usually had to get some little help on the way back up. In this last case, I used the shoulder of my wife. Not something I want to repeat too often, because I fear that I've driven away many friends by doing that in the past.

Anyway, being in the depths of depression is forgivable. It's hard. Fighting it is noble, but exhausting. I'd almost call learning how to fight it fun. But I think I'm lucky in that.

I've got more thoughts, but I think I'm going to save them for a comic. I'm trying to do that more. It doesn't really make me feel better, but it does feel more constructive. Sometimes, though, making comics is more work than fighting depression, you know?

I'm hoping that this comic isn't a flash in the pan. It isn't, in my mind, or at least the flash is leading to other sparks. But if it is, it may have been just the thing I needed this week anyway.

Let’s keep this simple. I could put a whole lot of explanation behind this, but people would just focus on the explanation and not the revelation. And the revelation is this:

As charming as my comics have been in the past, they are not all that unique. There are other comics out there that deliver better. But I seem to have hit upon something I’m not seeing much of in my dragons!

Have you seen much like them these days?

It’s not that the images are of dragons, exactly. It’s more the media and presentation and purpose I’m talking about: clearly illustrated, wordless, single panel cartoons.

Even better, I think I am getting more ideas for this kind of project.

I will need to experiment and be patient and see what the process is before I can make any promises to myself or to others, but I haven’t been quite so happy with my drawings in a long time as I have with those dragons.

Anyway, if they do remind you of someone else’s work, no matter how old or new, please do give me links and/or names! I’d like to study what other people have done in the genre. Norman Rockwell is a given, and that guy on the back of Reader’s Digest, but my style and subject is definitely different.

This entry has been crossposted from Drawing Contraption. You may comment here or there, it\'s all the same!

Whenever I take a shower these days I notice this tube of stuff on one of the shelves below the shower head. It’s called Excellence Cream. And I keep dreaming that it’s from a Bugs Bunny or Roadrunner cartoon. Like Wile E. Coyote, I could rub it into something and that thing would become excellent! And the more I rub into it, the more excellent it would become. And then I’m stuck with this dilemma.*

If it really worked that way, what would I use it for?

Would I use it on myself and become the artist and writer (and some day father**) I continually strive to be? Or would I use it on one piece of artwork? You know, to finally get across that one thing that is burning in my heart to get out?

Or should I use it on someone else who is already truly excellent, in hopes that they can finally astound the world properly?

Instead, due to my distaste for creamy oily cosmetic substances, and the fact that “excellence” was a word used by my middle school administration to describe that ultimate goal that all the students should strive for (because it’s inspiring and presumably patriotic), I let it lie there, on the shelf in our shower, so that my wife can keep using it on her hair.

Maybe it does something.

I really like her hair. A lot.

* I seem to like dilemmas today. Are they fun for you, too?

** Yes, I’m deliberately trying freak some people out here. No, I have nothing to tell you. But also, the concept makes this dilemma more strident and dear.

This entry has been crossposted from Drawing Contraption. You may comment here or there, it\'s all the same!

I’m not drawing much this week, as I’m preparing for ValhallaCon, where I am an honored guest. But what I am drawing is turning out pretty cool! With luck, you’ll see it before the weekend (and thus the Con).

But what I am working on today is the one hour presentation I have. And I’m going over the lessons I’ve learned in trying to publish my own comic, and I’m struck by a simple one.

When you’re about to tackle a work of art, be it a comic page, a series of pages, a sketch, a portrait, or a presentation at a con, you have this one serious choice to make:

How much do you prepare for each step?

Basically, you can work on it on the fly, or you can sit and visualize for a bit, take some notes, outline it out, plan out your task list and then get to work crafting it. And there’s lots of levels of preparation in between, and it’s a balancing act, of course.

But what’s fun is what’s at stake in that decision. Take the simple act of cartooning, for instance. Bill Waterson has once said that he didn’t pencil Calvin and Hobbes, instead going directly to ink, so that he could preserve the energy of his first lines. On the extreme other end of that spectrum of that would be M.C. Escher, who mathematically planned out each of his drawings so that they were as perfect as they could be. Escher probably couldn’t have done what he did if he’d just “gone to ink,” like Waterson. But likewise, Calvin and Hobbes would have definitely lost something if it had been as planned out as Escher’s work.

But what I’m getting at is not so much about the finished product! It’s the process.

The first dilemma of any artist is completion. How do you persevere to a finished product?

A professional typically has this mostly figured out, and can muster the discipline to just sit and work. He has to, or he doesn’t earn his paycheck. An amateur can wait for the energy to arrive and let it carry him through as far as it will. An amateur often doesn’t finish his work, and knows that his work is good when he can finish it. One of the steps to becoming professional from the stage of amateur is to learn how to find that energy when it seems you don’t have it. Right?

So, for me, I get a great deal of energy from the process. If I’m wrapped up in the process of creating and making decisions on the fly, it tends to excite me more and can carry me right through to the end of the project. But the initial energy of getting started, putting pencil to paper, is sometimes more than I have, so a certain amount of visualization and planning is in order. The planning is to figure out how to tackle a task with the least expenditure of energy possible, to break it down into bite sized chunks, and to cut down on the amount of thinking necessary at each stage. But too much planning, and the later stages can feel like flipping burgers.

Instead of looking at this dilemma as an insurmountable problem, yet one more obstacle to creating art, I think it should be tackled as yet another exciting part of the process. You learn something about yourself every time you endeavor to start a project. And every time you start something new, you can try it a little different and see if that works better.

And maybe, more importantly, if you plan things out in minute detail in the beginning you probably should remind yourself that sticking to the plan to the letter is not the idea. You’re the boss, you can change it.

This seems obvious, but at even just nine years of working on projects (heck at year three) I could see that these are easy things to forget. Hell, I’m writing a huge blog post about it right now. To remind myself.

This entry has been crossposted from Drawing Contraption. You may comment here or there, it\'s all the same!

Sometimes I write something in a comment somewhere that I'd like to review later. Either it strikes me as decent enough of that I'd like to share it with my friends, or it strikes me as being on the edge of very good or very bad, and later refinement might be useful.

( I figured I'd save this one here. )

This is a little confusing, but bear with me.

A little over ten years ago, I composed Fenmere's Second Law and started using it as an email signature as a reminder to both myself and my readers not to take life (or my words) too seriously:

Irony is lost on the tired; if you're not laughing, go take a nap.

It's very '90s, I know. That's when I wrote it. I'm still very bad at following its advice myself.

A couple years later I wrote Fenmere's First Law, which is:

Never, for any reason whatsoever, discourage anyone from making a webcomic, ever.

It's not pertinent to our discussion, except that I think of it as an example of a good law. It's easy to follow. It has a corollary, too, which is to never make fun of someone for quitting a webcomic. But that's for another day.

Well, finally, after all this time, I've settled on Fenmere's Third Law. It's trite, and a quip, and about damn time:

Truisms are fun to say, but annoying to hear.

I think I can get some mileage out of it if I never recite or write it again.

Playing devil's advocate in a class discussion is useful. Done right, and lightly, it can bring a discussion to a new level.

Unfortunately, when someone is being particularly passionate and emotional about something, I get this strong "morally righteous" urge to tear their argument apart, even if I agree with them!

But what makes it deliciously funny is when I find that I'm playing devil's advocate with another devil's advocate.

Again, unfortunately, I'm usually the only one to find it funny.


I have this weird ability, or disability, to distance myself from certain things emotionally. I still get emotional, angry even, but it's fleeting and it's about what I perceive at the time as the truth. I get angry that it looks like someone isn't seeing something that is important.

I often find that I'm making a bad assumption when I do that. But I'm having a really hard time training myself not to react in that way.

Part of it is that there are a lot of people in this world that are astoundingly ignorant. And they tend to use a certain kind of language that is kind of a flag for their ignorance.

It's kind of a wake-up call, though, when someone reacts to what I'm saying or writing as if I'm the ignorant one.

In fact, it's totally flabbergasting!

I'm not stupid! I'm really not! I just act like I am sometimes.

Anger and fear. Every time they trip me up, it reminds me that I shouldn't fault other people for the same thing.

It's one of the reasons our justice system is supposed to punish the act, not the intent.

You can measure an act.

But sometimes an act doesn't measure intent, it measures clumsiness.

I love people who disagree me on the internet these days. Most of them haven't been insulting me, or outright denying my arguments, and even if they did they generally have been helping me to test and articulate my thoughts! It's nice, if time consuming.

An interesting* discussion on that editorial cartoon from earlier in the week, and whether or not it's racist.


* I am, admittedly, most of the conversation at this point. I'd like others to chime in, perhaps. Reasonably, if you will, with brilliantly insightful new perspectives. I think I may have reach the limit of my points.

edit: It started to get heated, but I think we disengaged appropriately in time.

This is such a damn fun conversation! But now I've got to go govern my own B.S.

See you all down at the Drop!

Sorry, never mind the B.S. Please do attend if you are interested in comics in Bellingham, but I will not be there today. Events and this morning's headache have conspired against me.

As a responsible blogger and friend, and a fellow business owner, I must make amends. If you are a shop owner, manager or employee, I apologize to you.

In yesterday's post about earworms, I heavily implied that I was angry at and laying blame upon the people who run my favorite coffee shop for playing music that annoyed me. I cannot be angry at them, and never once did feel that way. The post was very poorly worded in the heat of the moment, though I did my best to hide the identity of the business. After all, all businesses play Christmas music this time of year.

The background music is always tertiary to the more pressing concerns of providing good service quickly, and should be. And I find the whole thing is certainly worthy of chronicling carefully in a comic, but I'm going to save it for next year as it'll fit better in my series then, and the season's almost over anyway.

However, even this morning as I felt yesterday afternoon I do find myself unreasonably angry at the Chrismas music itself, at the people who wrote it, at the people who performed it, and at the top 5 radio station that played it. I'm mostly appalled at the concept of a radio station (internet or otherwise) with such a limited selection.

As to the music itself: This was some of the nicest Christmas music I'd ever heard. I wouldn't at all mind hearing it Christmas morning. I think part of the reason that it was OK was that it was sacred, basically. They were carols.

Most sacred Christmas music is focused on retelling the stories around the holiday and expressing the jubilation and joy that is supposed to be represented by it. It's hard to be annoyed at that. It's a purpose that deserves respect, as it would be expected of any holiday or religious music from anywhere.

Now, I don't consider myself to belong to any religion at all, really, but it's the secular stuff that's the worst. Almost all of it seems to be written as propaganda. If you're not good, Santa won't come. If you don't celebrate, you're an ass. Or it reflects the writer's (and therefor the singer's) own shallow values.

Humorous Christmas music, that makes fun of these things, usually tends to be a blast and a relief the first time I hear it. But almost all humorous music tends to have an extremely short shelf life with me. It gets boring and insidious fast. Partly because it often has the same terrible tune as the thing that it is parodying, and partly because the lyrics contain imagery that I really don't want in my head.

But whatever the content of the songs, either by virtue of being repeated to us every year since we are born or by the very nature of the tunes themselves, Christmas songs all seem to be earworms, capable of getting stuck in the head for days on end. And that is really what I'm angry about.

And I'm angry because there is nothing reasonable I can do to stop it. All I can do is lock myself up in my own room and play music that I like.

Let me be angry. It's natural. It usually tends to go away by Christmas Eve, anyway.

I never thought I'd see the day when a man who can say this would be elected to a national office:

As I said before, in my own public policy, I'm very suspicious of religious certainty expressing itself in politics.

Now, that's different [from] a belief that values have to inform our public policy. I think it's perfectly consistent to say that I want my government to be operating for all faiths and all peoples, including atheists and agnostics, while also insisting that there are values that inform my politics that are appropriate to talk about.

The whole interview is bringing me to tears of joy. It's by Cathleen Falsani.

It remains to be seen what he'll actually do once he takes office, and some of his apparent planning seems worrisome, but as a representative of this type of thought, I'm glad he made it.

Here are the givens as I see them:

With the looming economic disaster unfolding and a historical election in sight, my community is undeniably on the verge of dramatic change and possible a difficult trial or two.

Prior to all this coming to a head, I've been reading up on all sorts of ideas for heading off disaster. This is, in part, because it seems to be a favorite passtime in my community to talk about looming disasters and how to try to prevent them! (Global warming, nuclear war, economic depression, etc.)

It hasn't, up until now, generally occupied our daily lives, but it has been there in our fiction, our political discussions, and in some of our nightmares. We do have many distractions, otherwise, including the struggle to make a living with what we've currently got.

A lot of this discussion is also about how to improve our abilities to survive in the world as it is! You know, to gain a little more slack, at least, to discuss future problems and/or to simply entertain ourselves and relax.

Finally, I seem to be better at being an artist and a writer and a daydreamer than I am at most other things I attempt to accomplish.

Therefor I postulate:

Since I am better at being an artist and a writer and a daydreamer than I am at most other things I attempt to accomplish, I should probably contribute to the discussions in that manner. In fact, as a student of cartooning, I may be able to help translate the discussions into something people not normally used to participating in the discussions can understand.

In other words, artwork that would probably be of most use right now might be stuff that conveys solutions to the problems we perceive.

I'm skipping a bunch of logic there. It's easier to write comics that present problems from different angles, and lead people to solutions, inviting the reader to donate some of their own cognitive power to the problems. But sometimes, I'm witness to some really good ideas presented by other people, and I think these ideas should be spread about more. I can do that, too. Either way, the effect is the same, if I'm good enough at doing it.

I already do this with HFR.

The next trick is marketing. Harmless Free Radicals only reaches a certain number of people. I want to improve the number of people my work reaches. In fact, I want my work to be able to speak to what my community largely considers the opposition. People with money.

I have some thoughts on how to do that, but they are half formed and I need the time to work on them.

Unfortunately, I'm out of time for today. Gotta go work!

Over the past eight or so years, I've had a lot of lofty ideas for what I could do with my art. I'm not particularly high on the rendering skill scale, and my concepts are plebeian at best. Yes, my work can be impressive at times, but honestly my discipline sucks and there are other artists out there that knock off stuff in their sleep that make my masterpieces look like scribbles. But that's not the point. It's just the groundwork. Where I stand.

I've made a post like this twice before, I'm sure of it.

I have an idea. I've had this idea on and off for about nine years, actually, maybe a bit more. I've never actually achieved the goal of this idea, or I would be making a living off my art by now. So I've always felt like a failure at attempting it.

But I don't think it's fully formed yet, either, so that mitigates the failure. I can't really succeed at it until all the pieces come together and it can run. I might never succeed at it, and instead pass the germ of the idea on to someone else, who'll make it work.

But looking back at my eight year and counting run of comics, I can see it at work. I've been doing it, subconsciously, by continuing to do something that I thought I loved at one point.

And now I can build on it.

Keep in mind, I know I'm definitely reinventing the wheel here. So much so that this idea will seem like nothing to you if I mention it. Nothing at all. But the idea is to manufacture the wheel using contemporary materials, instead of stuff from a century ago.

I'm being obtuse, because I'm telling you how I'm thinking, and not what I'm thinking about. That will be the next post. You know, to keep things clean.

Apparently, there were too many footnotes to include in his latest work of fiction that Neal Stephenson put them all here:

http://www.nealstephenson.com/anathem/acknow.htm

What. A. Nerd.

Occasionally (like once every five or so years), I'll dream that I'm a girl or a woman. Three of those dreams involved looking into a mirror and seeing myself as such, and my reaction to it. Almost always, the change of gender is part of the dream. Once, it was one of those really embarrassing dreams where you've gone to school in your underwear, only on top of that, I found myself sitting on a bench telling one of my old friends why I had gotten the operation.

Usually these dreams are weird, enlightening or kind of fun, though one was disturbing to the extreme and I only tell it when I'm expected to tell something embarrassing. It doesn't go in print. I do sort of feel like I'm expected be socially embarrassed about these dreams, but they're just dreams. I'm ultimately comfortable with where they are coming from, and more and more with how I present myself to the world (which is to say, honestly). Anyway, most of my friends would probably be just as amused and interested in them as I am. But as you can tell by my extra long introduction, I'm not really sure about that.

People really do like to read between the lines of all sorts of things and ascribe motives to people that are often completely opposite of the truth. They do this for politics, sex, and just about every other minute social interaction in between. And frankly, I'm really tired of it.

However, when I dream something very clearly, with amazingly strong visual detail, I often take that as a challenge to remember it and draw it. I can usually get pretty close, I think. As an artist, I've got to share this! Also, this whole train of thought as spawned an idea for a story.

Anyway, last night I dreamt that I had shaved the evening before, and when I got up in the morning, I saw this in the mirror:



I have to say, I was nonplussed. In both the traditional and in my sense of the word. While I've been curious what it would be like to pass as a girl, that image represents one of the phenotypes I find least sexy to me (pretty, but not my type or what I admire). Also, I was still clearly a guy and definitely married to the extremely sexy woman I call my wife. I thought this new situation would cause problems, but Julie didn't seem to care or even notice. Which kind of made me feel worse. But I also somehow knew this would happen, hence that expression.

Anyway, thinking about how and why my brain came up with this situation and visualized it so strongly got me to thinking about dreams and their apparent purposes.

( story idea behind a cut )

I tend to agree with q13_exe on this. Specifically, this point of his is important:

'It is my honest opinion that, if you are staunchly and unapologetically certain you "Know how things work" and that everyone else is an idiot, you look like a fool.'

But what is interesting to me is that while I'm reading his article and writing this post, I'm hearing a radio host talk about how people seem to be looking up and fact checking the details of the whole bail out deal instead of just sticking to their convictions. Normally, this talk show host tends to fail in precisely the way q13_exe describes, but I think she's doing it because that's the formula of the show.

I think that even though on the media and in the comment forums you'll find arrogant dickheads, the pervasiveness and power of the internet also amplifies the intelligent. At least enough that an otherwise oblivious radio host has noticed it. On the other hand, she might have been mentioning it just to make the listeners feel good.

Anyway, do go and read what he has to say about conviction.

I only really have to add to it this tempered thought: It's OK to be who you are and to have opinions and conviction, it's just also smart to allow a doubt, admit that doubt and to listen to what others have to say.

Or rather, it's important to realize that this isn't about correct behavior, but rather smarter methods of thinking and more effective ways of communicating.

Most people seem to take pleasure in feeling superior to someone. I'm not like that, which pleases me because it makes me feel superior.

- Vlad Taltos in Steven Brust's Jhegaala