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The Art of
I've been pondering the two posts, on Ace of Spades, by Monty last month, the one about the business of self-publishing online ("All I want for Christmas is DOOM") and the earlier book-thread-on-Thursday one about content vs. format ("The Book Fetish"). The reader may want to go read those, before, or even rather than, this.
And pondering how digital media has changed everything, noting the passing of not just bookstores but places like PhotoMat and Blockbusters, even most LP/CD "record" stores.
Relatedly, pondering the question sometimes discussed on the book thread about why we create, writing for money vs. writing because we must or are inspired to do so. Thinking about Solzhenitsyn (I think it was) discussing "writing for the bottom drawer" when there is no actual market.
Thinking about how a creator may be able to create, but the creator who is able to self-edit and self-market is as rare as the self-representing in court or self-prescribing in medicine who doesn't "have a fool" for a lawyer / doctor. That's me.
Would I like to make money, even a living, off my creativity? Well, sure, but I'm just a schlub.
As a wannabe mightabeen cartoonist, I've been thinking about all this in comparing comic strips.
There's Garfield, the dull and repetitive and interminable marketing wonder, with worldwide distribution of the strip, TV series, movies, suction-cup car window dolls, and all manner of merch.
And there's the highly acclaimed, very artistic, totally-un-merchandized, and ultimately self-terminated Calvin and Hobbes.
Somewhere in between creatively, there's Kevin & Kell, the longest-runnning online comic strip, which has managed to survive for twenty years now. I recently marathon-read the entire strip from the beginning. I first ran into this clever and stays-fresh series on CompuServe. Good for the creator, keeping it going, making a living of sorts from it eventually. It's been an inspiration for my own online work. Creatively in the online medium, if not commercially.
In high school back in the late 1960s, I was encouraged by an English teacher to submit a lame story to a major magazine. (SF alt-history: Booth missed.) That major magazine's imprint was the first of several prestigious rejection slips from publishers and syndicates I collected before I quit trying. Girls, graduation, and thinking I really wasn't very marketable got in the way. "Write what you know," they told me. I didn't think I knew anything. No experience, no craft, no skills. Shrug.
Other than that teacher, I never had any encouragement to pursue my "art" side in any way. Even my flirtation with becoming an architect was squelched.
By college, I wasn't sure where I was going. I was supposed to be heading into some kind of career, by way of liberal arts. Meanwhile, I was always doodling and drawing. Just for fun.
During an extended college working break, I started my own true self-education, and it was at that point I first took up writing songs, learning music (still trying to learn), more serious cartooning efforts, and "funny recordings" on the reel-to-reel. Also, animations (live and drawn) and other fun work in super-8 film medium. (Noting I first did live-animated work when young, using Dad's 16mm film camera, alas long lost.)
If you put all that together, you see animated musical cartoons. I have a rudimentary one I've been working on since that early-1970s time….
Back to college, briefly, where I still didn't know where I was going, but did take a "creative writing" course where the professor led the class in mocking my efforts, one of several impeti to dropping out.
I headed for the country, to continue my efforts at becoming a creative type, except: I still didn't really think I was very good at anything in particular, not my writings, comics, songs, animations, or funny recordings.
I mean, I figured I might get better, but I just didn't think I'd ever produce anything popularly marketable. Too eclectic and varied in interest, mainly.
I had ideas about self-syndicating short radio programs to college stations, things like that. Maybe like the stuff you'd hear on Dr Demento. Trying to reach some kind of tiny-niche market.
And I had this wacky idea that eventually there would be a larger market for niche stuff, some kind of computer-based world network... Of course, there were no home computers yet.
I continued writing songs, making recordings for friends. Occasional cartooning with no outlet. Did some early "music videos" of friends (all lost). Dabbled with doing pro video work. Reality kept crushing my attempts at such things.
In the '90s, I was encouraged to self-publish in the mini-comic format by the master of quick-product stick-figure mini-comics, Matt Feazell (creator of Cynicalman). My comics tended to be more elaborate, but 8- and 16-page mini-comics was an encouraging format. I cranked out quite a few issues of various sorts.
Despite the overpriced 25¢ cost, I actually sold some mini-comics, somehow, but I made more on my "free" Urantia-Book-based "UB Comix," receiving several supportive donations of $5 to $20.
None of this was going to be a profitable career path, but it was fun as a hobby to get a little cash encouragement!
Some comic book reviewing (the lowest form of writing - reviewing!) on CompuServe Comics Forum led to a few months' gig reviewing for a comics fan magazine. Actual paid published work. They fired me. Wasn't snarky enough for them. That's okay, I was burned out on reviewing before I started with them.
They still owe me for my last published work!
At the instigation of a friend, I finally made the jump from the warm, secure confines of CompuServe to some big, new, wide-open, wild space called the Web. I opened up my website on March 17, 1996 (although it would be many years before I wised up and got my own actual domain name).
Funny thing was, I first thought of it as a place to market my self-publications, like the mini-comics. I had a catalog page of my comics with ordering information. I created a 3-D comics spinner (if you could run VRML) for displaying them.
It was only after I put up a sample comic, in full color ("It's All in Your Mind"), that it hit me: this was not an advertising medium. The web was the "frame," the medium, for every kind of work I was doing. Writings, music, comics, animations, even virtual realizations. Potential world-wide audience with minimal production costs. I began dumping all my writings, lyrics, and cartoons into the website.
Knowing how easily anything digital could be bootlegged, I made the decision then, twenty years ago, not to try to put anything behind a paywall, but to put it all up for free. I asked for donations by mail, eventually adding PayPal donation buttons. And in twenty years, I have received not one cent from my colossal quantity of web efforts. (Doom indeed, Monty!) Sold a few items, sporadically, in my CafePress store, but no bleedover into the website from that.
Holbrook's quirky Kevin and Kell comic inspired me in a couple of ways. I did a series of "Daily Doodles," starting 1997 Feb 2, which ran for several months, with an interruption of a few weeks for sick leave. Inconsistent quality, rather crude in spots, but with some fun and funny stuff.
The Daily Doodles series was revived fifteen years later, in 2012, and ran for a full year then. Forcing myself to put something up every day did have its advantages. I did some of what I think of as my best art and cartoon work, although it was also while I neglected much "real life" work I should have been doing. That's another balancing act with which I've had trouble.
Another attempt at a daily strip, which ran less than two weeks, was "Mind Fuel", which began as a
comic strip rumination on creating a comic strip for the web, including on how it would be marketed. (Key line: "And the income comes in where, exactly?")
I have always been beset by technical limitations. In the earliest days, I had only a low-res hand-held grayscale scanner and the art programs were crude, and monitors (both mine and the "ordinary viewer's") were limited to CGA. All my original cartoons were 16-gray or 16-color.
Today, I have a bigger crayon box, a big color scanner and a big screen, but I still don't really have what I crave - art-input tablet or serious audio and video production and animation capability. I do what I can, always exceeding my limits, pushing the technical envelope in which I'm stuck.
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Ace of Spades blog has a marvelous community of commenters, and you are free to join in without any sign-up, and you may comment under any name you prefer. However, there are technical tricks and techniques that are handy, and sometimes necessary, to know, in order to fully enjoy the experience.
This guide is full of what I have discovered. There's probably more. If you know something I've overlooked, please let me know.
Revised 2015 Nov 6, see "info" box below post.
- Commenting
- Referencing comments
- Warnings
- Text enhancements
- Non-ASCII characters
- URLs (links)
- Smilies
- Amazon - Funding Ace
- The Port 1080 Glitch
- Webmaster
- Don't Worry, Be Happy
Commenting
Name and E-mail fields are required for commenting . Optionally, you may add a URL which will be linked from the name. Your name can be whatever you choose and you may change it any time. Your email ought to be consistent and valid (or so I presume).
If you add a URL, be sure it begins with "http://" or "https://" or other acceptable protocol. Without this, the blog will create a bogus URL that looks like a sub-page on Ace of Spades. [h/t Mama AJ] (I'm not sure what other protocols, if any, are acceptable.)
Note that if you have "cookies" active for the blog, these three fields, name, email, and URL, will be remembered for the next time you comment. So, if you change your name (a/k/a "sock") for a joke, the joke sock will stick. You must leave a new comment with your regular name to change it back. Without cookies, all fields are forgotten.
Note on Names: It is acceptable to use a different name than your usual, usually for a joke, but it is absolutely unacceptable to use another commenter's name. Pretending to be a public figure is a gray area, depending on who; nobody expects "Hillary Clinton" to comment on Ace of Spades, but others, well, you never know who might show up for real.
Referencing comments
Comment numbers may change, if the Powers That Be invoke the infamous "Banhammer." If comment #123 is removed, then comment #124 becomes #123, and so on with subsequent comments. So, if you refer to a previous comment by number, it might be off by one or more. This is not as rare as one might hope, with the occasional infestation of trolls.
Some commenters use the name and time-stamp to refer back to a comment. While it is possible that a commenter left two comments within the same minute, this at least puts your reference in the ballpark.
A third, cumbersome, way to refer back is to copy and paste the actual permanent comment URL linked in the comment number. I say this is cumbersome because it's not clear which comment you're referencing just by reading, and they're kind-of long (but not too long, see URLs below).
My thinking is, the best way to reference comments is usually to simply include the commenter's name and a snippet of the comment itself. This allows for easy searching, and if you snip the bit to which you're replying, can make looking back unnecessary.
Warnings!
- Technical warnings
- DO NOT COMMENT on old posts. Your IP will be banned. How old? A few days? A week? No one knows!
- No message, URL, or signature may contain the word BLAZER.
- "How do I embed a picture or a video in a comment?" You can't.
- Content warnings
- Ace asks that you avoid profanity, especially the words f*ck and c*nt. The latter, especially. These are not, necessarily, bannable offenses, depending on which side of the hayloft Ace got up that morning. Be creative in your language; you'll look smarter anyway.
- Ace warns that personal attacks will be cause for permanent banning (for certain values of "permanent").
- Don't quote trolls! Troll comments may be deleted, but quoting them perpetuates their trash, and may end up with your own comment getting deleted. Best habit: Starve a troll. Don't even acknowledge their spew. [h/t Milady Webworker]
- If you read something and don't already know what it means, for Heaven's sake don't look it up!
Text-enhancement
Text enhancement option ("tags") are limited to four. Unlike regular HTML which uses a letter or word inside <angled-brackets>, Ace commenters must use a single character between [square brackets] to start an option. To close the option, use square brackets with a slash before the letter. [x]enhanced text[/x]
For x, substitute one of the following:
i - italics
b - boldface
u - underline
s - stikethrough
Be VERY sure to use the close-tag or you may be consigned to "the barrel." What's that? You don't want to know.
Anything else inside square brackets will be displayed normally, including the brackets.
Non-ASCII characters
As a rule, characters above the old ASCII set will not show up properly on comments pages, neither in the post nor in comments. ASCII is regular English alphabet, numerals, basic punctuation, and spaces. Anything else will show up as black diamonds or squares.
If you try to leave other characters, as often happens when cutting & pasting from other sources, you will encounter the infamous "500" error.
To leave a comment with other characters, you must convert them to acecomments.mu.nu-acceptable code. You can do that here. A shortened link to the same page is http://bit.ly/pixyize.
Note: For some people, ampersands ("&") are not available in blog comments. Since these substitute HTML codes require ampersands, if you can't use ampersands, you are out of luck on substituting codes.
You can see the characters instead of the black diamonds by changing the encoding on a page, but then any comments you leave will be rejected. In my experience.
URLs (links)
Depending on your browser, URLs in comments will not be "active." It's not you. It's the blog. You must highlight, copy, and paste the link.
Some long URLs may not break across lines. Use TinyURL, Bitly, or some similar service for creating shortened substitute URLs. Otherwise the blog may be w-i-d-e-n-e-d and you may find yourself in the barrel.
By the way, longer YouTube URLs can always be shortened to the form
https://youtu.be/xxxxxxxxx
where the x's are the video code.
For example:
https://youtu.be/kJJotGlHaHI
You cannot put YouTube links nor most TinyURL links in the link accompanying your name.
If you see a URL with three underscores ___ in it that seems to be a bad link, it's probably masking out the letters i m g. Copy and paste the URL, substitute the letters "img" & go.
Smilies
A list of available happy, sad, and other faces available on Ace of Spades, and the codes to use them, can be found at http://smilies.mee.nu/.
Be aware that smilies may be posted unintentionally. For example, if you try to type an 8 followed by a close-parenthesis, you will get a grinning smiley. To avoid this you must leave a space between the two characters.
Amazon - Funding Ace
If you shop at Amazon.com, you can help fund Ace of Spades, without additional cost to yourself. Click on "The AoSHQ Amazon Store" link or use the Amazon search box on the top of the right column on the front page.
If you don't see "aoshq-20" in the URL of an Amazon page, Ace won't be getting paid. You can add that bit to an Amazon URL if you know what you're doing modifying the URL. This can be complicated, and is beyond the scope of this guide (translation: I don't want to explain all the various details). [h/t Mama AJ]
The Port 1080 Glitch
This is complicated:
Due to a long-ago server crash, comments on Ace of Spades were moved to addresses using port 1080. They look like this:
http://minx.cc:1080/?post=359942
This was later corrected so that instead of minx.cc:1080, comments were on the domain acecomments.mu.nu, like this:
http://acecomments.mu.nu/?post=359942
Not all the links have been changed. As of this writing (2015 Nov. 5), the link to comments from individual pages (posts, not on the front page), have not been changed. Some folks may have problems with the port 1080 form. Use the "comments" links from the front page, or manually re-type the URL.
Webmaster
The Blog Webmaster is "Pixy," an entity as mysterious as Ace himself. In case of serious problems with the blog, Pixy is the person to contact, not Ace.
Best way to contact me is
help@mu.nu.If I'm alive or not too seriously dead, it will reach me.
Posted by: Pixy and the Hamsters at October 27, 2015 02:02 AM (2yngH)
Don't Worry, Be Happy
Don't worry about all this until you run into a problem. Have fun and enjoy being one of the "Moron Horde" of Ace of Spades commenters.
All of these difficult tricks will be made moot when the blog software is revised in… #twoweeks. (Ha!)
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Hollywood Reporter Headline: "Tilda Swinton is in talks to play the Ancient One in Scott Derrickson's Doctor Strange"
For those poor folks who don't know about the comic characters spawned by Steve Ditko, who also created Spider-Man, here's the background: The Ancient One in comics was an ancient Tibetan-styled reclusive monk who was the mentor of Doctor Strange. For those like me who don't keep up with modern Hollyweird, "Tilda" is apparently female.
This caused the Hollywood Reporter's Graeme McMillan to gush, "Marvel appears to be finally making a welcome step in a direction that other comic book movies have been moving in for some time." Swapping a woman out for a man. Graeme thinks it's long overdue to eliminate more longstanding white male role models. Because, diversity.
I don't know Tilda. The accompanying photo shows someone who seems appropriately ethereal and could with makeup make a great old weirdo mystic. By the way, it's not until the comments that I read "So this article is POC trash instead of talking about they got a oscar winner in a lead role." Fine reporting there, Graeme,
I almost left a comment on the article. I wrote it up. Then I saved it to a file instead. When I thought about the blowback I might get from social justice warriors who might be irritated by my comments, I thought, in the immortal words of Sweet Brown, ain't nobody got time f'r that.
The article was repeated by Jay Jayson at ComicBook.com. I was tempted to leave my comment there, among readers more comic-book aware and maybe less left-leaning on the whole.
Instead, I'm posting my unposted comment right here (with amendations and links, and re-edited shortly after publication, because I can):
Hello, Hollywood. I know you won't believe this, but out here in the Real World, this push for "diversity" seems to have mutated (and not in an X-Men way) into a serious mental disease, one in which people attempt to bend media to inappropriately reflect some minorities as far more prevalent than they really are, and eliminate perceived unfair "majority" figures.
It's really too bad Hollywood has to do-over the Big Company superheroes when there are comic-books, and superdupers, about and by ethnics, that deserve to see the big screen, but alas they're not guaranteed-success Marvel-DC properties.
Trans-racializing has been going on aplenty. Black "James" (don't call me Jimmy) Olson has already appeared in the new ("bootlegged") Supergirl pilot, Black Nick Fury is of course in all the modern movies, but I think they did that in the comics before the movies. In the current Flash TV series, Flash's future wife, Iris West, and her father, are black — and besides that, semi-orphaned Flash-Barry was raised in their house, so the Iris-Barry relationship is as uncomfortably incestuous as step-siblings can be; extra special "diversity". There are surely even more superheroes affected by revisionist revitiligo, as The Boondocks' Uncle Ruckus might put it. (Noting especially that none of these blacks sound or act "black" anywhere near as much as gangsters on Gotham sound Italian, at least we don't need Ghetto-English subtitles.) If this trend increases, ABC will have to merge with BET. Oh, c'mon. That was funny. Maybe you have to be White.
Okay, but that's merely race-swapping. We need more gender-swapping, right? Right? Amirite? Amirite?
Weirdest thing about diversity for diversity's sake is, people you meet who are brown, red, yellow, Jewish, Mormon, male or female — they are whatever they are and where they are for real reasons. One might cast a black man as Romeo on-stage, where there's a different level of suspension of disbelief than with a screen portrayal; it's simply not historically sensible for a serious historic portrayal of 16th-Century Verona. This current pattern of substitution based on race or gender is done without any sense of such background. For advancing awareness, it's not per se so very harmful. Play with themes. Create alternate universes. It is seamless sometimes. Other times, it's just painfully obvious someone said, "Hey, we need an ethnic here!" or "Can we make Testosterone Guy into a Woman, just because, Diversity!"
It's true non-Europeans were under-represented in comic books for a long time, as superpowered women were also relatively few, but why does every damn movie-ized role have to include a flaming transgender of color? Yes, for emphasis I exaggerate, but, really, we've gone 'way past reasonable "inclusion," and deeply into "in-your-face" overloading. It is especially jarring to see a former brother and sister be of two different races in the new Fantastic Four. There will be some explanation, but who cares? It was obviously just done "because diversity." I think that actually cheapens the whole purpose; I'm offended by this triggering microaggression, for the sake of women and ethnics.
Why not make the brilliant Reed Richards a Korean? Because that's not PC in the right way. T'challa "The Black Panther," Kirby's great first black superhero, King of Wakanda, will not be made over into a white African, I'll bet. Why not, in the name of random "diversity"? Will the Ancient One even still be Tibetan? "Free Tibet" is still PC, right?
Commenter DBZ *King Goku* put it all more succinctly than I have. :D
Whoops! Excuse me for speaking. Being a male-identifying Anglo-Saxon Protestant conservative, nothing I have to say is of any value. Carry on.
• Salon.com Wants Marvel Comics To Change The Race Of A Jewish Character Because - DIVERSITY! -Miss CJ, Chicks on the Right
• Marvel comics rebooting ENTIRE universe with more diverse Muslim, black and female superheroes by soopermexican at Right Scoop
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Another personal message from the ol' webworker instead of actual content.
So this happened:
I hope nobody was expecting anything special.
There's no indication in Google stats why pageviews suddenly rose from about a dozen a day, holding steady for the past several years, to this one day at nearly 500. There wasn't any particular page that was getting the hits, but there were 200+ on the main page. I'll see what it looks like the next couple of days. Probably just some kind of data glitch.
I haven't been much of a webworker in the last half year. Got sick. Got out of the groove. Technical difficulties; please stand by. Dog ate my webwork. Chrissy at PoliNation has dubbed me "webslacker." Hmph; deservedly, I suppose. There's lots of stuff heaped up, dating back months, much of which just needs a little polishing and then they could be called webworks. I suppose I should start mining that heap.
Speaking of heaps, one thing I have started doing again for the past month is the Blog Heap o'Links (the world's greatest blog name). News and general stuff, quoted, linked, and with some commentary I'll probably regret later. No embedded videos, no big graphics, just hypertext. Some little icons, just to break it up. 
Oh, yeah, and today is the 19th anniversary of the web debut of Mindful Webworks. Let's look at the ol' Alexa rankings for this site. Hmm. World ranking = 10,706,372, but that's changed by 5,503,036 over the past three months — whether up or down, I'm not sure. Looks like an up-arrow, but the hover text says "declined." Or does declined mean went up in the charts? If I'd known, nineteen years ago, how much trouble this website was going to be... I'd've got started sooner?
The first mindful cartoon webwork posted on the web, adapted from the mini-comic of the same name, with heroic coloring work by young daughter: It's All in Your Mind!
Not that much went up the first year. In February of '97, I initiated a daily one-panel, which lasted for several months. Here's the first sketch, The Clubhouse Front Door. They got better, some of them. The second daily panel attempt, which started in 2012, managed to run for a year. Some good stuff came out of that.
Mostly, it's just been whatever I can throw into the mix. Still lots of stuff, old and new, not online yet. More than is already here. So, I guess I should get busy.
Maybe after a nap.
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a flock of goose is geese,
but more than one house is not hice,
nor a flock of moose known as meese.
You might have a couple of beers,
you might wish a hundred wishes,
but you can't see a couple of deers,
and a hundred fish are not fishes.
Yet if I have two scissors, and I give you one,
each now has scissors. English is fun!
mindful webworker: Erm, heh - bits of it from childhood, inspiration in previous comments, a touch of research on invariant nouns et al., but just baked originally at #177 on AoS.
Insomniac: In that case, I tip my hat to you sir. Very well done.
anon a mouse: Very cool. Of course, you'll be receiving the usual AoS accolades...
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