Cut Throat Apathy

Tuesday, July 7th 2009Revenge of Google Ads

Posted on Tuesday, July 7th 2009.

As I've noted before, Google Ads' "sponsored links" are either an implement of race-baiting antagonism, or proof that artificial intelligence has developed a sense of humor. But disgracing America's lightest-toned African queen is not enough for the cold machine brain of Google Ads. Its Nazi mechanisms are geared to separate the wheat from the chaff along racial borders, and no black star can be white enough to escape its slander.

Again, might take you a minute:



It would appear that nothing is sacred to Google Ads.

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Tuesday, July 7th 2009Straight outta Comp 4010

Posted on Tuesday, July 7th 2009.

Bored in Into to Poetry, so updating from class with a poem of my own writing:

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Wednesday, July 1st 2009Alert! Lazy comic guy is lazy

Posted on Wednesday, July 1st 2009.

More accurately, I somehow got myself trapped into the idea of doing a three-comic continuation (starting with "Super Fan") right at the beginning of an intense summer semester that I hadn't planned on taking at all. Usually instead of posting late comics I would toss up a quick doodle, but for the sake of continuity I'm not doing that.

I'm breaking my only rule (it's true, I actually don't have a rule about graphic nudity -- so stay tuned!) but somewhere along the line it turned from a useful guiding tool into a point of pride. Rather than updating regularly to make sure I made a habit of it, I tried to make sure I didn't miss a single update ever out of a desire to keep a kind of "perfect score". Or to spite cunts like Ryan Sohmer. Keeping the rule was arguably essential in the first few months to make sure I actually kept publishing comics without delaying indefinitely to make them perfect, and it'll be essential once again to make sure I don't sporadically update like VG Cats (or pick your favorite MIA webcomic).

But for the meantime it's just losing me sleep, so I'm going to only be posting new comics bi-weekly. As in every two weeks, not twice a week. It might be all summer, and it might be just until I've finished this chain of continuity, at which point I can return to tossing up some shit about doctors without medical licenses, or something.

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Tags: VG Cats, Least I Could Do

Monday, June 22nd 2009Feeling sorry for Sandra Bullock

Posted on Monday, June 22nd 2009.

New comic is up. It is two days late. I will muse on my own failings later; for now there are mildly interesting web pages to forward.

I was browsing Rotten Tomatoes and this article's title struck me:

Total Recall: Sandra Bullock's Best Movies

It's surprisingly free of the big movies I usually associate with Sandra Bullock. But the reason I'm point here is that I'm pretty sure only two movies of Bullock's career even register as "fresh" by RT's own grading scale. After reading a few of the early entries, I had to double-check the title to make sure it wasn't actually "Sandra Bullock's Worst Flops". It's hard to imagine why, after reviewing their material, Rotten Tomatoes chose to go through with this feature. Some choice quotes describing Sandra Bullock's Top 10:

"...critics weren't overly impressed with the results -- the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw asked 'What have we done to deserve this treacly, badly-acted nonsense? Whose children have we run over in a previous life?'"

"though it topped the box office during its opening weekend, Nature was released in the middle of March, when pickings are slim and moviegoers tend to show up for just about anything"

"a quick and ignominous defeat at the box office"

"With a cast that included Robert Duvall, Richard Harris, and Shirley MacLaine, Wrestling Ernest Hemingway should have been able to amass more than the paltry $278,000 it grossed during its theatrical run"

"not a classic by any stretch"

"TV Guide called it 'craven offal'"

That takes us up through Bullock's fifth best-reviewed film. Her sixth-best was Demolition Man. I'd recommend reading it, if you like the bizarre emotion of depressive glee. I'd kind of assumed she had a better career than this, or failing that, that Top 10 Best Of articles would be reserved for the kind of actors who had.

It should go without saying that her #1 film is Speed, which might be more to the point than anything else.

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Thursday, June 18th 2009SUPERBEAR RETURNS

Posted on Thursday, June 18th 2009.

Last weekend's comic comes once again from rogue cartoonist of Racer X-level mysteriousness, Ethan Thomas. He seems to have a savant-like ability to tell when I'm too swamped to update the site on time. Except for E3, obviously. But that's on me.

As I said, I was in Los Angeles for the E3 expo with N-Philes from the end of May until June 8th, and despite bringing along my laptop, sketchbook, and trusty Wacom, I failed to draw up even a shitty excuse for a comic by the weekend. Trust that it lay heavily on my brain.

Then why, a whole week later, did I update with another guest comic? You could chalk that up to me being a douchebag (and probably should) or to me being too "busy" (a.k.a. busy for a webcomic guy, so not very busy at all) with post-E3 N-Philes work. But I can't deny that it's as much a problem of motivation. E3 and all the videogamin' gave me a mighty distraction from my comics obsession, and K.C. Green ended Horribleville at the worst possible time for me to retain that obsession. I hadn't even realized how central that comic had become to my interest in being a webcomics artist. I didn't even read it when I started this whole thing. But now that it's gone, I feel unanchored and directionless.

Don't worry, I'll have a new strip up this weekend. Luckily I have a few weeks' worth of storyline-type strips to get through. All I'm saying is I can never forgive K.C. Green. Ever.

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Tags: horribleville

Saturday, May 30th 2009Electronic plug

Posted on Saturday, May 30th 2009.

Like I said, I'll be at E3 all week. So, for the few readers out there who are not already familiar with N-Philes (these people do not exist), you can follow the blogs at www.n-philes.com. Mine will be written under the ridiculous pseudonym Jared Thomas.

If you are more technologically savvy, you may want to follow my Editor's Log of N-Philes on Twitter. It will probably be hilarious since I have a dim grasp at best of how to work Twitter.

Once the week is through I'll probably round up all the best photographs and make a little scrapbook of the trip and post it on the website in the delusion that someone would actually give a shit. I'll link to it here when that happens. So if you happen to not give half a fuck about N-Philes or video games in general or my cross-country trips (what kind of a monster are you?) then these next few weeks are really going to suck for you. But you deserve it.

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Tags: n-philes

Thursday, May 28th 2009Comic update: "Bum"

Posted on Thursday, May 28th 2009.

Today's comic is a real piece of work. By this I mean it is a real shoddy piece of work, like many of my comics, but you might enjoy it nonetheless.

This might be the fastest color strip I've drawn so far, which is sad because it still took be fucking forever. I tried to punch this one out pretty quickly because I'll be in LA for the redundantly-titled E3 Expo (A.K.A. "Electronic Entertainment Expo Expo") from tomorrow until the following weekend. I'm bringing my laptop, Wacom and sketch pad with me, but... well, don't be surprised to see a doodle strip about psychiatrists or some other profession come next weekend.

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Sunday, May 24th 2009Guest comic week!

Posted on Sunday, May 24th 2009.

Yes sirs, you read right. It's Guest Comic week here, and the first submission is Superbear from Ethan Thomas (no relation). Of course, I only update once a week, which means this is also the only submission. I'd actually never considered the idea of posting guest comics before, but when he sent it in I thought it was so funny I had to post it.

There's no Superbear website to link to (as this is as far as I know the only Superbear creation), but Ethan seems pretty excited about drawing more of this shit so it's probably not far off. Expect a deluge of Superbear adventures and wacky T-shirt designs before summer's end.

If by some happenstance you, faithful reader, happen to have some kind of hilarity comic lying around then sure of course I'll post it, too. That would totally be cool with me. As long as it makes me laugh.

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Wednesday, May 20th 2009This is the weirdest fucking thing I've ever read

Posted on Wednesday, May 20th 2009.

I spent today reading the detailed story of Velocity Gnome, the hapless target of a three-year Interwebs prank:

There's Someone At the Door, He Says He's From the Future

In 2002, Dylan Reiff and Joe Korsmo began tracking the internet activities of Kolin, aka Velocity Gnome, an 18-year old computer gamer. They monitored and recorded Kolin's AOL instant messages and gathered information about his friends and family from other sources on the net. Blending this data with scenarios from videogames and sci-fi films, they developed a mythology in which Kolin is "singled out as the savior of the human race." The story is told in Gem Missile: A Tribute to Velocity Gnome, a 40-page book that incorporates photographs of Kolin and excerpts from his personal correspondence. In August 2003, Reiff and Korsmo showed up on Kolin's parent's doorstep in Chicago. Reiff introduced himself as "Z. Figiam," Kolin's "mentor from the future," presented him with the book, and left without further explanation.

The plot thickened several days later with Kolin posted a detailed description of the encounter to an on-line gaming forum, along with digital photos of every page in the book. Members of the forum quickly added their own theories and responses, which ranged from close readings of the text and speculations about the gender of its authors, to admissions of jealousy and accusations that Kolin had invented the story in order to get a high rating for his thread (which in a few weeks had received over 40,000 hits).

A year passed after this initial contact. In August 2004, Reiff and Korsmo mailed Kolin a package containing a photograph of their meeting a year earlier, along with a note, a certificate, and a plane ticket to Minneapolis. Kolin was met at the airport by a man in a beat up Lincoln Town Car who identified himself as "The Gatekeeper." For two days, Kolin was lead around the city in search of robots, buried treasure and information needed to save the future. Reiff and Korsmo involved numerous actors and another on-line gamer who, equally baffled, was driven with Kolin to a forest and abandoned there. At some point, Kolin noticed that his new friend had mysteriously disappeared. "I stood there alone in the woods, in Minnesota, with a shovel and a large black locked box, more confused then I have ever been in my life." Kolin survived the trip and posted a detailed account of his adventure, concluding, "it was a great experience, and I would not hesitate to save the future again, if the chance ever arose."

The Future Shock is the bizarre and somehow extremely gripping story of Kolin Pope's adventures that resulted from this ominous prank. It's basically like every "chosen one" type movie (i.e. "The Matrix") if it happened in real life with college student-level production value. It plays out a lot like an Alternate Reality Game focused on a single unwitting player rather than a larger community.

If you're interested at all in alternative/experimental narrative, you'll really like this. Even simply reading about the account is a bit of an alternative narrative adventure, involving photographs of key items, a tailor-made comic book, and several videos either recorded by Kolin during his adventure or sent to him by his future stalkers. Take a day off work and give it a read.

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Monday, May 18th 2009Oh nO!

Posted on Monday, May 18th 2009.

Looks like Horribleville is finito. I think that's Spanish for "finished" but it's possible I spelled it wrong, as I only took about eight fucking years of Spanish throughout high school and college.

KC Green still has his other projects but Horribleville was the only comic of his that I kept up with regularly. Out of all the billions of self-aware 4th-wall-breaking non-canonical meta-comics out there, Horribleville is my favorite. Actually, Horribleville is one of the only comics of its type that I like, because it's a very annoying type of comic and Green is one of the only artists good enough to make it work.

So... this is a bummer.

Three things I like about Horribleville:

1) The entire strip is a joke, rather than simply the punchline (which I try to emulate).
2) The ever-changing art style (which I would emulate if I had the skill or balls to attempt it).
3) I can't think of a third distinct trait and that makes me feel awful. The manic style is a plus but a lot of comics are this way.

As popular as Horribleville is (and this is the case with almost every comic I write about) it's likely that if you read this comic you already read that one. But if for any reason you don't, read through the archives. It's a better comic than mine is likely ever to be.

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Tags: horribleville

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