The Last Lie

"I'll have something more interesting up tomorrow." Said in the previous post. Two weeks ago.

Occasionally, I might be delayed by technical difficulties, but there's no excuse for this kind of failure to deliver. I have to hold myself to a higher standard than that, going forward.

I'm taking some important steps to make sure I can meet that standard. But I won't tell you what those steps are until they're made. Well, I will tell you that one of those steps is the decision not to tell you the rest of those steps.

Webcomics.com Update

Progress... major progress. One step back and ten steps forward. The one step back is a temporary suspension of the Webcomics.com forum, which will be moving to Webcomics.com instead of remaining at the Penny and Aggie site.

Lookin' like we'll have something to show you before the end of the month.

Hopefully, The Last Word on John Kerry's "Online Comic"

Revised completely in light of new information.

For actual webcomics-related things, see the next post. Honesty obligates me to lead with this for the next 24 hours.

There's no getting around this: I was naive in the last draft of this post, and I was wrong. The police action taken against this "online [comedian] comic" on campus was indeed inexcusable, there has been an organized protest from hundreds of students, and the officers in question have been placed on leave.

This video makes it pretty clear that the audience initially applauded his removal, because he was being kind of a d**k. [Asterisks because you never know when my mother will be reading.] Their applause gradually dissolved to mostly paralyzed horror as his attempts at resisting arrest were met with increasing and unnecessary brutality.

So, an open and shut case, right? Rodney King for YouTube? Eh, I'm not satisfied.

It should be disquieting that people were viewing this video with amusement, as the latest entry in the questionable genre called taser porn. And it would be disquieting, except that evidence is mounting that Meyer planned all this as a form of performance art (see the end of this piece). So is amusement actually the appropriate response? I don't know. But the more I think about it, the more I feel Meyer is manipulating me. That's a feeling I don't like.

Does that excuse the police officers? No, provoked brutality is still brutality. But it does make Meyer less of a victim... and let's not call him a hero. Attack questioning in a public forum may make you feel good and produce a rush of attention, but it's an ineffective way to provoke real change, because it makes people dismiss the source. For examples, I refer you to 90% of all Internet forums in existence.

Oh, and a few words about John Kerry. I can forgive a group of figuratively stunned students for not knowing how to react to this situation, but Kerry-- this would have been a good time to show some leadership skills, instead of clucking his tongue in disapproval as Meyer was carried off, and jetting off to the next event without checking up on the civil rights issue developing right under his nose. [Yeah, I don't like linking to Fox News, but those are Kerry's own statements they're providing.] Cripes, no wonder we ended up with four more years of Bush. Kerry's gonna get a lot of blowback from this, and you know what? He deserves every foot-pound of it.

Well, whew: That was a lot of writing about a subject that I initially mentioned as an example of something NOT appropriate for this blog. Sorry about that, folkses, we'll be back to our usual format after this.

9/13: Wow, Do-Over?

I tend to write posts just a little rough and tweak them with a quick edit or two afterward, but I really went overboard this time, with both the "rough" and the "tweaking." If you're getting this via RSS then please just consult the previous post here, with my apologies.

No-Flame Zone

I am slow to think the worst of people. I may not like the things they do, but that's not hating who they are. Others do not share this policy. This has given me problems.

Things have gotten mmmmildly controversial on this blog lately, and they may continue to be. I don't actively seek out "drama," but I'm tired of ducking it just to be polite, especially when things like Wikipedia vandalism and the talent-farm business model start working on me. So I'm starting up the same two rules here as I have on my forums:

1) No completely irrelevant comments-- I'd probably mistake them for spam.

2) No personal attacks on me or anyone else in the thread.

Comments that call me on what may be my B.S. are different-- those are encouraged. I make mistakes aplenty, and I'd be a lot worse off if my friends (and sometimes, my Internet enemies) hadn't pointed out my errors. Again, difference between disliking what you do and who you are.

But as I start to find myself getting a wee bit controversial again, I think about what I hated most the last time I did so, and it was the ad hominems. The ones against me that I left on my blog pages in the name of honesty, and the ones that well-meaning friends made against my detractors. I'm just not gonna put up with that any more.

There's a whole Internet out there where you can call anyone an asshole whenever you want! But if you comment on my blog or in my forums and you want your comment to stay around... play nice. Mah house, mah rules.

Most Popular July Posts

You Couldn't Pay Me To Deal With Certain Megatokyo "Fans"

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Penny and Aggie Alignments

Temporarily Out Of Service Due To Mechanical Failure.

Comic-Con has been a lot of fun so far, but it started out with some bad news. My Blackberry's charger had some unanticipated requirements, and then my cell phone broke, not long after I took this picture with it.

This has blown my blogging plans for the next two weeks completely out of the water. Sorry, folks. I'll catch y'all up August 6.

Done!

Widened everything else a bit, too. If you hate it for the next couple of weeks I'll see about changing it in early August.

Adding A Banner

Back at the keyboard for a little while. Time enough to pimp this blog out a little.

My Blog Can Be Everybody's Blog!

Thanks to RSS2HTML, I can syndicate my blog posts on other PHP-enabled websites. And soon will. I love this tool!

Testing...

New blog header. May look odd for a bit. Stand by.

Slowwwww w w w w w w

On an older computer today, one which does everything with great reluctance. Perhaps it will train me to ration my words more carefully.

Weekend Question

From about July 21 to August 5, I'll be on the road. My current (borrowed) laptop doesn't travel well (yes, ironic, yes, yes). So I'll be working via Blackberry and cameraphone. (No iPhone, not yet. Might purchase in early 2008, depending.)

I'll be traveling to Washington, D.C., Baltimore, San Diego, Wilmington, Figure Eight Island and the Research Triangle. Attending Otakon (briefly), Comic-Con International and Trinoc*con. Beachcombing with extended family for 4-5 days. Jotting down ideas for comics in 2008. Accessing the Web very little except to do e-mail and post.

During that time, would you rather see this blog become:

1) A notebook of sketched concepts?
2) A scrapbook of photos?
3) A travelogue?
4) A journal of freewriting?
5) All of the above at least once a day?
6) Something other?

Go nuts in the comments. I'll leave this at the top until Monday.

Farewell to Favorite Advertisers!

Penny and Aggie, Cool Cat Studio and Fans are trading out all but a few of our Project Wonderful ads-- the really small ones-- for ads from other advertising networks. More money for us in the long run, which is good!

But I can't help but be a bit sad that those sites will no longer be so involved with such a webcomics-friendly service. There were a couple of comics sites I was especially happy to receive bids from recently, and since I can no longer display them on those sites, I figured I'd just show them here. Lunchbox Funnies is a nice kid's-comic collective, and Dresden Codak is one of my ten favorite comics right now. So click those ads!

RSS Follies

I'm currently in the midst of trying to create a more streamlined RSS for the comics and an RSS-to-HTML solution that'll help broadcast these posts through the network. Many thanks to Zachary Lewis and the FeedForAll folks for their help so far.

User-Generated Blog Header

Yes, more blog changes.

Gisele and I are looking at adding at least one ad to the blog, and she figured we could pretty it up a bit while we were at it. She threw two designs my way, one with a close-up and one without. I nixed the 160x600 ad, but when it comes to the headers I could go either way. So... U DECIDE.

Click your favorite.

Supposedly This Will Give Me A Million More Readers

Technorati Profile

Most Popular Posts of Last Month

Heart of Hearts: Concluding Thoughts

Foobetter 'r' Foowurse

Comapnies Are Not Moral

P&A Fanart

Yu-Gi-Oh: The Abridged Movie

Thanks to Nicolas Juzda...

From Nic: "Do you realize that your redesigned site/blog has a dropdown menu of
things you've written at the top of the page that, at least in
Firefox, actually doesn't *do* anything?"

Yeah, let's fix that, eh? Should work now.

@Work

Posting will be light until I get caught up.

Site Feed Link Fully Functional.

Blog reader "polsy" writes:

fwiw, the link rel="alternate"s are pointing somewhere strange, but the feed itself (.../rss.xml) is ok now.

Took me a while to figure out this problem, but now it's fixed too. Feed away!

I Need Time!

(This post is dated yesterday 'cause that's when I made it, but it didn't go up til Thursday for the reasons spelled out below.)

Sorry if you've been trying to reach me but my Internet connection isextremely spotty and my #1 priority is finishing up my financial studies, which goes a lot slower when the Internet goes down for hours. I'll be rushing to catch up in the next couple of days, so... patience, please. :-)

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Post Operations Recovery... (BF Mission Statement, 4 of 3)

Thanks to the concerned friends who've provided some support during the last difficult week. I'm sorry if it made this blog a slightly depressing read! Occasional crippling self-doubt is a part of the writing life.

At least one person pointed out to me that it probably isn't wise to use one project, which was so ambitious it was almost designed to fail, as a measure of my overall abilities. I'm feeling a lot stronger about my future in nonfiction-- in fact, I've got at least one nonfiction project in the works now, outside BF. I think you'll be interested.

Other than that, though, I think the mission statement still holds up. Just because periods of self-doubt feel crappy, you can still learn something from them. The hard lessons are supposed to be humbling.

So, let's put that nonfiction-writin' confidence to the test, shall we? And let's get back on track. Coming up later today, three make-up posts originally intended for Thursday, Friday and Saturday.

Stuck In The Mud!

Okay, make-up post next weekend. Sigh. My box is running slow and Internet is spotty... still making some adjustments to the new place which should fix things. I'm also scrambling to make a couple of deadlines for Tokyopop and CAN'T TELL YOU YET, plus business classes want everything done this week, plus everybody wants to talk about the Wikipedia interviews, so that's about all the bloggin' time I have gone, right there!

But I will have some Broken Frontier stuff to tell you about. After the Wikipedia interview, the next few days will get a bit more... fannish.

Merry Christmas!

To one and all.

I'm going to take at least the next three days off from blogging, possibly as much as a week. See you all soon!

Mobile Discontent

The tests I mentioned yesterday were successful.

Effective now, I'm a part-time professional blogger! I was involved in an initiative to bring comics to mobile phones for about four seconds this year (don't bother Googling it), time enough to develop a keen interest in the field, seasoned with a healthy skepticism for its hype.

Catch the rough, unofficial version of the resulting blog, Mobile Discontent, here. Coming soon to a corporate webpage near you! (Which, technically speaking, they all are.)

Time For A Fresh Start!

I've been threatening to do this for so long, actually doing it should blindside everybody. Here it is: T Campbell's Blog, 3.0. "Starting from zero."

No big promises or grand content schemes. Let's just say I'm gonna try to make this worth reading every weekday.

(The blog probably looks a bit "rough" as I type this. Will fix it up as the day rolls along.)