Ted Lasso

I’ve been thinking about this twitter thread by Frisco Uplink about the Apple TV+ show Ted Lasso for more than a month now.

Go read the whole thing. The show is wonderful. I love it. But this thread made me realize a few things I felt about the show but couldn’t put into words.

  1. Ted Lasso actually makes me feel hopeful. Which I’ve been short on.
  2. Over the last several years I’d lost something that I hadn’t realized was gone. Something about the way I want to interact with people, with a certain kindness. Seeing it again in this show is like running into an old friend who I haven’t seen in years and discovering you get on as though no time has past.

Austin Kleon: on 15 years of blogging

I love it when Austin Kleon writes about blogging.

Every time I start a new post, I never know for sure where it’s going to go. This is what writing and making art is all about: not having something to say, but finding out what you have to say.

Austin Kleon

Three reasons he keeps blogging:

1. To leave a trace

2. To figure out what I have to say.

3. Because I like it.

It’s a good post.

“Incredible Doom” is being published by Harper Collins

I haven’t talked much about my comics for the past few months, because I’ve been harboring a secret that I can finally tell everyone.

The first six-issues of Incredible Doom, Jesse Holden and my comic about ’90s teens making terrible decisions over the early internet, are being collected into a giant 288 page paperback and hardback published by Harper Collins, to help launch their new imprint Harper Alley. It’s coming out on May 11th.

Over the last several months, the editors at Harper Alley and I have been getting the book ready. We’ve enlarged the pages to full graphic novel size, tightened drawings, added a ton of detail and tones, and even a few new scenes, all to make things look as good as possible.

THERE’S MORE!

Harper is so enthusiastic about where the story is going, they signed us for a second volume as well, which Jesse and I are already hard at work on. We expect to have another 288 page book completed in just 13 months. By comparison, the first book took three times that! We can do this thanks to your support here on Patreon, which has allowed me to hire an art assistant to help speed up the production time.

I can’t tell you how excited we are about this. Like so many things, this was not the plan at the start of 2020. But unlike most news this year, this is great.

There’s so much more to tell you about—like how this came together, and what it’s been like working for a major publisher. I’m going to be posting about that both here and on Patreon. So make sure to subscribe to those.

Until then, thank you so much for sticking with us while we had to keep this a secret. (It killed me, but they insisted.)

Daring Fireball: Online Privacy Should Be Modeled on Real-World Privacy

John Gruber of Daring Fireball, regarding Facebook complaining about the new privacy features Apple has built into iOS:

Just because there is now a multi-billion-dollar industry based on the abject betrayal of our privacy doesn’t mean the sociopaths who built it have any right whatsoever to continue getting away with it. They talk in circles but their argument boils down to entitlement: they think our privacy is theirs for the taking because they’ve been getting away with taking it without our knowledge, and it is valuable. No action Apple can take against the tracking industry is too strong.

I’ve tried to be mindful of my privacy choices, but one of the things on my to do list for this fall is to revisit this topic and make even more conscious decisions about what I allow these companies to know about me.

I’m not sure about the choice of the word “sociopaths”, I’m sure there are good people that work at Facebook, and in advertising. And, in general, I’m pretty open online. But, I’d like a say in what strangers do and don’t know about me, and I get the sense the strangers at Facebook would rather not respect my wishes about that.

Watching the wildfires.

A handful of stops on the light-rail away from where I’m writing this is a county that’s preparing to evacuate due to Oregon wildfires.

State of Oregon Fires and Hotspots Dashboard Map
Clackamas county, in green, a couple miles south of me in Portland, is prepairing to evacuate.

I’m tired of new reasons to be terrified.

Covid-19, police brutality, climate change. I want proof that the needle can be moved.

So, I donated money to Biden / Harris, and I’ll be voting for Sarah Innarone for Portland mayor.

A thought about getting to know each-other on BBS vs twitter.

I’ve been reading and loving Cyberville: Clicks, Culture and the Creation of an Online Town by Stacy Horn, a 1998 book about her BBS “East Coast Hang Out” or “ECHO”. A BBS that is still running today.

“It’s the access to them, the line I have straight into the hearts and minds that keeps me calling back. But the key is repeated access. To really know a person you have to talk to them again and again. Like when we were kids.”

I love that idea. That even if people are trying to be private on the BBS, it’s inevitable that folks get to know them. Like many of us were stuck with the same group of kids day in / day out in school. Love them or hate them, you were for the most part stuck with these people. So, more often than not, you didn’t have a choice but grow to love some of them.

By contrast, in a community like twitter, where I interact with more than a thousand people, I get a sense of what my existing friends are up to, but I don’t think I get to know them any better.

By the way, I found out about Stacy Horn from an excellent talk by Claire L. Evans at XOXO in 2018. Claires book Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet,  it is next on my list.

Last December I left the job I’d been at for a decade, to give one final go at my lifelong dream of being a full time cartoonist.

I set a date to review my progress, to decide if I should keep going or retreat: July 1st.

Low and behold, I’m not looking for a job.

Wow.