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.
My first impression was the lead developer calling a PR for gender neutral pronouns in the documentation “personal politics”. Pardon me if I’m still underwhelmed, no matter the state of the project.
I’ve used Matrix for a long time, both on desktop and mobile, and although I’d rather be rid of electron Element is pretty hard to beat…
One issue I hadn’t foreseen with Element is that it only supports one account. I recently started a new one on a non-matrix.org server, and until I’ve figured out how to migrate, I use Fluffychat on mobile instead.
Fluffy is real smooth too, but has its quirks that make me kind of long for Element again.
Oh, I’m not even after specific styles per se, just… modern, capital-a Art. 🤷
On Twitter and later Mastodon there were artbots that posted images off WikiArt, and a good bunch of those were at least from post-WWII, so modern enough if not contemporary. That would really scratch a lot of my itch, but the devs went all in on one crypto scam or other…
…the joke being that according to their own image caption, they apparently published a publicity photo a week and a half ahead of the BBC’ clearance date 😄
It’s all good, I’m sure! It’s a long standing business relation between the two institutions, and the photo doesn’t seem to spoil anything important…