haverholm
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.
It’s fairly dire to assume that people in this community will read this comic and go “Oh snap! Why didn’t I think about this before?”
As I just posted in another comment, my read on the comic is that the person we see in the last panel is intentionally depicted as psychotic, and not an aspirational figure… but yeah. Don’t blow up people to prove a point about infrastructure.
I think you’re the only one taking the comic this literally?
The top two panels do have some !fuckcars energy, but the lower half about the bombing is about a delusional and/or haunted guy who is spurred on by a ghostly woman. Not exactly a call to action against private motorists.
I agree that the tone of their articles helps push the quality above some other tech blogs. At the very least they’re sincere!
Windows is no longer an option for me either — I had made a conscious effort to use FLOSS apps even before switching, so there wasn’t much holding me back. And, as you say, once I’d started modifying system settings to disable Microsoft telemetry, I was already at Linux tinkerer levels…
Thanks for this, and the repost of postmarket OSes for Android phones! One reddit community that I used to frequent was r/androidafterlife, and I’ve tried to find similar here. I’m glad that !zerowaste@slrpnk.net offers some of the same advice 👍
