Or I might just be reading too much into it. Tuesday, Feb 12 2008

See, this map is why Dorothy Gambrell is my favourite living female artist. I don’t really know what to say about it. It’s silly. It’s deep. It’s facetious. It’s true. It’s a whimsical. It’s sublime. As far as I can tell, no one else on the planet could do the same thing.

The laundromat and the public library are actual places that an artist might visit. Used mattresses, rice, bad coffee, utility bills and broken lightbulbs are the debris that make up an artist’s daily life. Obscurity, the train to nowhere and the road of false promises are all directions that an artist might go in their career.

All I can think of is that Dorothy dreamed this map and drew it when she woke up, because I have no idea how anyone could consciously think of it.

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Naturally I chose the Transformers example. Sunday, Feb 3 2008

I found a new webcomic I like. Yay! Truck Bearing Kibble. Similar to Perry Bible Fellowship. I prefer TBK to PBF, though. The characters seem to have slightly more of an identity; they’re not just blank images used for a gag. Sort of like in Far Side how characters always address each other by their first name, even though they only exist in one panel.

I love the idea behind this video clip, but really can’t stand the way they’ve edited it in the style of some sort of reality television challenge. 207 people standing on the spot for five minutes isn’t a challenge, it’s performance art. It kind of makes me angry that they’ve taken something as sacred as performance art and lowered it to the level of reality television.

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Dreaming and scheming. Sunday, Jan 13 2008

My sleeping habits aren’t very conducive to productivity. I go to sleep too late so when I get home from work I fall asleep again, then when I wake up it’s 11:00 so I can’t stay up for long before I have to go to sleep again. And then I’m tired again at work the next day because I went to sleep so late. I don’t think it’s fair, I get so much sleep and yet I’m still so tired and unproductive all the time. I’m just not sleeping at the right times. I really need to fix that this week.

I’m doing my periodical trawl for new webcomics to read. I think I’m spoiled by what I do read, because I’ve become incredibly choosy. There’s a phenomenal amount of material out there, but not much of it is worth paying attention to. I don’t think I bookmarked a new comic last year.

The best source of new webcomics is the links through other webcomics. Look at the Her! links for example. Cat and Girl and BOASAS are two of my favourite comics. Diesel Sweeties and Ornery Boy aren’t really my favourites, but they’re both comics I respect. A Softer World and Perry Bible Fellowship are reasonably noteworthy. Most of the other comics have names I’m familiar with. The ones I don’t recognise I’m highly tempted to read, just because Chris Bishop linked to them.

I think for me, an important milestone of success is if my Cosmic Latte webcomic is linked to by other webcomic creators. For that reason, I consider them to be my target audience…

I am such a schemer.

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Me, actually doing stuff I’ve talked about doing. Tuesday, Dec 18 2007

Thumbnails are easy – you just upload the picture and then send it to the editor as a thumbnail. On my interface, at least.

My new plan is to depict the progression of civilisation (as I understand it) using two men and one woman. The blonde guy is ‘the leader’, the other guy is ‘the worker’ and the woman (who doesn’t feature in this strip) is ‘the woman’.

I’ll do a couple more strips and then make a website for them. I’d use ComicGenesis but I find their system too complicated to work with. It’s not Web 2.0 enough for my convenience.

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Not genius. Saturday, Dec 15 2007

Of course, ideally I should be doing a lego cartoon for my ‘get people to bookmark my page’ tactic… but to be frank, I don’t have enough patience to do regular lego cartoons. All that fiddling about and photographing and uploading and fiddling about and twiddling about… drives me mad. It’s not like doing a web comic is my heighest priority. That would be writing books.

So I was trying to think of alternatives and I remembered my little oval people from aaages ago, and how easy they are to work with. Once they’re drawn all I need to do is copy and paste them. If I’m going to just copy and paste images I could draw something a lot better initially, but… somehow complicated images look worse than simple ones when they’ve been copied and pasted.

I also remembered the idea I had slightly less ages ago for a scenario for my little oval people, which is that they’re chatting in an internet forum. So something most people on the internet are already familiar with, lots of personality types and interactions they recognise. I was going to call it “FFF8E7” after the colour of the universe, but “Cosmic Latte” sounds better.

The really, really quick sketch I’ve done above features the ubiquitous guy who says ‘first post!’ whenever a new thread has been started. I wanted to see if the background looked okay if it was nothing but “FFF8E7”, and the answer is no, it doesn’t.

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Hint: Hovering the pointer will reveal additional data. Wednesday, Jan 10 2007

It depresses me quite often that people go to so, so, so much effort to write bad books, bad movies, bad television and bad webcomics and then someone comes along who is really very simple and honest and puts them all to shame.

This guy — from what I’ve seen so far, which is 16 comics plus the latest one — tends to do a lot of pointless sketches, and I really appreciate that. Good writing sometimes just seems like thinking aloud, and these pointless sketches are literally thinking aloud, which is fascinating. What the heck are the six-legged spiders about? Inquiring minds!

I’m wary of extremely basic stick-figure webcomics because they’re almost always done by people who thrive in vulgar scatalogical humour, people who think that the word ‘anal’ is funny merely by usage alone, so it’s nice to see an intelligent exception to the rule.

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