I know I have that sales slip here somewhere…
Posts authored by rob
Cold feet in hell
“Evil™: Like good, but without the guilt.”
The Internet is a series of entrails
For a lot of folks, the Internet is pretty much synonymous with the dark arts. Not because it’s evil, but because it’s arcane and obscure. Tell them “Enter these twelve numbers in the ‘DNS‘ field,” and you might as well be saying “Spin three times widdershins and recite the words ‘Anál nathrach, orth’ bháis’s bethad, do chél dénmha.'”
I don’t blame them. Peel back the net’s shiny veneer, and things get user-unfriendly awfully fast. As Alex often says midway through a marathon trouble-shooting effort with our home network/entertainment empire, “How do regular people do this?”
Answer: they don’t. And so they’ll just have to wait to see Iron Man 4.
The high cost of connectivity
We’ve all been there: WiFi that defies connection, usually at the very moment you need to post, edit or delete something right now.
If you’re a professional communicator in the digital age, Internet access is non-negotiable. You can’t leave yourself (or your employer, or your clients) to the tender mercies of coffee-shop connectivity.
For employers of professional communicators (and for freelancers), that means springing for whatever added cost your mobile teleco charges for tethering and a decent data plan. It can be pricey, but so is being unable to deal with an online firestorm until an overworked barista is able to restart the router.
The devil you (now) know
I love drawing Aileen et al. Love it.
But when it comes to my own cartooning, I can be a perfectionist. That nose doesn’t look quite the same from frame to frame? That hand isn’t working exactly the way I’d like it to? Put on another pot of coffee: it’s gonna be a long night.
Which means I’m happy with the artwork… but not with the fact that it’s taking so long to tell the stories I want to tell. The perfect isn’t just the enemy of the good; it’s the enemy of the GTD.
(Yes, I’m planning on turning that into a meme image. Probably with a cat. It’ll be ready in three months.*)
Meanwhile, a Canadian service called Bitstrips is enjoying some startling success, after years of slogging in the trenches. It lets you crank out a cartoon mighty quickly, once you take the time to design your sets and characters. And I’m taking it for a spin with DC.
Now, nobody’s going to mistake this for anything that’s been touched by human hands (and Cassie’s hip flask from the previous strip wouldn’t be an option)… but compared to never telling the stories I want to tell here at all, or telling them at a pace that gets “Would you hurry up?” messages from glaciers, I’m willing to put up with it.
(Set design, by the way, is currently on the fritz… hence the sparse minimalism of today’s backgrounds. Bitstrips’ sudden surge in popularity means the usual growing pains as a small company tries to scale up overnight.)
Let me know what you think!
(Hmm, Cassie has that damn “begging hand” thing going on. And I should have varied it from panel 3 to 4. Geez, did I get the colours right? Because the palette seems a little hot. Hang on, let me start again from scratch…)
