Wrong on the Internet

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This is how I draw when my head hurts. 

Generally speaking, I do my research, and look up new or confusing ideas, and maintain a healthy sense of skepticism toward concepts that seem unlikely to be true. Usually, I try not to say anything unless I’m 100% certain it’s right, and will make a persuasive contribution to the discussion will be. usually, I know what I’m talking about. Usually.

I can admit when I’m wrong. I might not choose not to verbally concede minor points when arguing with strangers about larger issues, though. There is no way that you can reframe the discussion to persuade me that the American military budget is not bloated, monstrous, and an offense to humanity. And then right after learning the difference between discretionary and mandatory spending, I had a nice chat with a lawyer friend about why the first amendment doesn’t prevent rabid lunatics from screeching that you are going to hell while you attempt to enjoy yourself at happy, peaceful, family-friendly events. Because community standards only exist at Antioch. In the real world, jerks have a protected status to continue their jerkiness.

Ultimately, that’s the problem with any system of governance: the jerks. If people could just wrap their minds around Wheaton’s Law, we literally wouldn’t need any other law. People would just think about how their actions would affect others before they did them, and then they would choose not to do jerky things. Even if bad things happened by accident, Wheaton’s Law would persuade those with the power to fix the problem to the best of their ability. Even if people didn’t like the outcome, they would accept that they needed to work toward their own goal without being jerks about it.

But I’m just being silly. If human beings could wrap their minds around any of that, we wouldn’t need laws, or government for that matter. Sometimes I’m a jerk on the Internet, too. So, it’s all just a fantasy.

At least this comic got done. It looks simple, but it’s taken several days, primarily because every time I sit down to work I get a migraine. I have a migraine now, but I was determined. Clearly, I need some kind of course in cartooning, like The Trickster’s Hat, with a couple month’s worth of exercises. Even though I love how easy they make it, the tablet and Photoshop alone can only take me so far. Only a lot of hours of sketching on paper will take me to the next level.

 

 

So Fancy Mandala

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Put that on your hair ornament and wear it. 

There’s a nice string of pretty fancy mandalas coming up. I must have had a great run of calm focus and serenity a couple years ago. Trying to remember what that’s like.

I thought I’d start a Tumblr to promote my blog, but not that I’ve poked around Tumblr, I realize that I should have just started the blog on Tumblr. Oh, well. Too late now. Still, having your own website is useful, too. Twenty-six dollars a year isn’t that much.

It’s full-on springtime, edging into summer, around here. Winter usually breaks by mid-February around here, but still. This el nino global warming weather is getting ridiculous. The man commenced to showering outside in the unheated garden shower last week. Anyway, with springtime in the desert comes an explosion of wildflowers, which inspire a lot of macrophotography. You can see some of it on Imgur: here’s a tiny fleabane wearing a tiny insect as a hat, and here’s a red poppy stamen.

That’s about it for art this weekend, although I scripted some comics. Not really feeling the Wacom tablet right now. Maybe it’s time to switch to pencil and paper.

 

The Other Side

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The playing field is actually pretty equal when you consider that real men are a lot more dangerous to women than bots are to real men. 

It seemed only fair, after 3 days of online dating for women comics, to show the flip side. Here’s what online dating looks like for heterosexual dudes. As far as I can tell, anyway. It’s rough out there for people looking for love. It seems difficult to believe that anyone could be desperate enough to fall for any of this, but people do, all the time. I personally witnessed a guy falling for it to the tune of about $7000 despite his roommate and I providing plenty of evidence over the space of several weeks that he was being taken and begging him to be rational. He was living on hope, I guess.

Look, the human reproductive strategy is ridiculous from start to finish. Finding love and companionship is not for the faint of heart.

I Have Seen Things

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When Google achieves sentience, how is it going to judge us in the future?

This one’s a bit rough; there’s something very wonky about the perspective on the desk. I have a massive migraine right now. It’s frankly astonishing that I even managed to draw a comic at all.  How that weird skewed computer even came to be is a mystery.

So, something about artificial intelligence, and the role of technology in society, and the number of single dudes in San Francisco, and the creepy things that women who visit online dating sites are used to seeing on a regular basis. And good night.

Something Fishy

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Seriously, what is that supposed to be? A nudibranch? A sea cucumber?

Sometimes people ping me to talk about their problems–OK, pretty often people ping me to talk about their problems–and I couldn’t really say where the advice that moves from my brain to my finger to the keyboard comes from. But the bit about the pickled herring was an actual sequence of words that I typed in response to a discussion of inappropriate men making inappropriate overtures through dating sites.

Let’s face it: dating is gross.

Another friend mentioned “ghosting,” which is obviously a lousy way to dump someone, but in the case of inappropriate men making inappropriate overtures, I think no response is the most powerful one. If he’s gross, you don’t have to exist for him.

Only once in my odyssey in dating did a guy ghost on me. Very frustrating and confusing. But I got the last laugh, because a year later, he sent me this email recalling how much fun we’d had together and asking me to spend a month at a beach house in New Jersey with him. The simple solution seemed à propos. Now you know how it feels when someone disappears, sucker.

Not sure I can find the humor in it, though. Maybe tomorrow.

Sure, Eros, whatever you say

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Giving gentlemen everywhere the benefit of the doubt, I didn’t send the Rabbit any really indecent proposals or ::ahem:: intimate photography.

Dating is the worst. You get to meet dozens of people you don’t like to find one person you do like, but who, most likely, won’t like you back. If you don’t handle rejection well, it’s a constant stream of disappointment. And that’s if you’re lucky enough to be conventionally attractive enough to persuade a substantial number of other humans to meet you in the first place.

Yet, even the most introverted among us can fall prey to the desire not to be alone. Online dating is such a boon to us; at least we can weed about 90% of unworthy candidates without having to go out in public or speak to anyone.

So, the Rabbit is throwing herself back into the fray, and we had a funny conversation about that. There was actually another punchline, which could be another comic. Also: same scenario as this comic from the hetero dude’s perspective.

Anyway, I was happy to find The Man because I didn’t enjoy the process of looking for him. But I’m sure it’s going to be all rainbows and unicorns for the Rabbit.

Crystal Rainbow Mandala

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I know the title sounds like what a 12-year-old girl wants to be called when she decides that her given name is too prosaic, but it’s an accurate description.

Another weekend breezes by. I’m finally feeling slightly better, but I didn’t get anything meaningful accomplished. I did make this Valentine for The Man. I can’t tell how he felt about it. We spent most of Valentine’s Day cleaning, because that was the most loving thing we could really do for our family at this particular moment in time.

Here’s hoping that this coming week will be super productive, because last week was unbearable. At least the script for tomorrow’s comic is written already, thanks to the Rabbit, who is adorable. And available, if you’re a skinny nerd-boy who lives in the Bay Area. Contact Dragon, via this blog, for further details.

Perfectly Wonderful

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I’m a tasteful nude.

This week has been pretty rough. Chronic pain is kicking my backside and I’m half the dragon I used to be. If that. It seemed like it would be fun to just color tonight but this took me 3 hours and the only part I like is the socks.

So, you know, art is about constantly exposing yourself. At least what I do is. Every night I sit here and ask myself, “Are you really going to share this with the world?” Yes. Yes, I am. That’s why I wear socks: so as not to get cold feet.

Here is the thing I drew tonight. People need to know that they’re OK the way they are. Exactly who they are. Dragons too. Even when they don’t feel OK.

Dr. Morimoto, for the Future of Mankind

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You can ride a quantum sledge through space-time because space time is low friction. 

Even from a bipartisan standpoint, I think most people would agree that the impeachment of Bill Clinton was nothing but an embarrassment for America, a colossal waste of money, and wholly counterproductive to the effort of running the country. Yeah, he shouldn’t have cheated on his wife with an intern, but the fact that he did so actually had zero bearing on his ability to do the job for which he was elected. Personally, I feel more comfortable knowing the commander-in-chief has adequate release. Uptight, unsatisfied men tend to make angry decisions.

More importantly, I think the ripples from the impeachment and the Starr report were far-reaching. Would Al Gore have won the election if Clinton hadn’t lost so much face? Would Gore have invaded Iraq and Afghanistan? Would Trump be running for election in 2016? It really seems to me that a lot of world issues were negatively affected by Monica Lewinsky’s decision to confide in Linda Tripp.

For Monica personally, it would have been better to stay silent as well. Some people accuse her of wanting the attention, but based on the course of her life and things she’s said recently, I bet she wishes she hadn’t said anything either. She could barely leave her house for a decade, and she was still the butt of 1000 jokes even after it all blew over. In 1999, I visited Jordan by walking across the border from Israel, and while waiting for border control to deal with my visa while simultaneously being subject to the type of low-level sexual assault that large-breasted young women experience frequently when certain dudes figure they can get away with it, I also failed to enjoy a tiresome litany of broken English jokes about the woman who shares my first name. Border guards half a world away were making jokes about her a year after the impeachment trial. That kind of infamy doesn’t lend itself to a successful adulthood.

It’s especially sad, because even though she made a string of bad decisions, she really liked the guy. I can’t fault her. The universe knows I made some terrible choices about men. I’m just lucky mine weren’t so high profile.

So, after my last Dr. Morimoto comic I worked out that there are rules to her time traveling. She can only stay for the space of 4 panels, and she can only visit the person for whom her message is intended, and maybe she can only travel within the span of her lifetime, say, 41 years. So, if I could only tell 1 person 1 thing in the past, for the sake of making the world a better place, I think this would be a good one.

Mildly Unsettling Macros

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There will be no trigger warnings. This post encapsulates my mood right now with a fair degree of accuracy.

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Here’s a momento mori for you. We all die. Tomatoes sooner than humans, usually.

Feeling positively nasty today, a fine combination of chronic pain, sleep deprivation caused by chronic pain, and that weird, crusty, dirtiness of a day-old tattoo that begs to be washed but at the same time prevents you from taking a good shower or hot tub soak, because you spent a lot of money on that tattoo and you need to baby it if you want to keep it.

So, even though I had a comic idea, there’s no way I can use the tablet tonight. I can barely type. So, here are some macros. The first one is a dead leaf from last year’s tomato plant. Not my plant even; I’ve never successfully grown a tomato bigger than a marble out here.

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Yech. Blech. Meh.

This is an aphid infestation on a bean plant. They are fava beans, to be specific, but I hesitate to mention that fact, because the second you say “fava beans,” people’s brains fall out of their ears and all they can do it babble on about a nice chianti. This picture isn’t even that great, but it makes me kind of itchy.

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No, thank you. Feel free to leave at any time.

Finally, this is a mouse that The Man found inside his gym shoe. Apparently my cat was losing her freaking mind over it. Most likely, she brought this little vermin in the house to play with and then got annoyed when it didn’t want to play. I didn’t want to play with it either. I wanted The Man to remove it from the house. He wanted me to photograph it, which is why it’s in a mason jar here instead of a shoe. He thought that he should put a mouse inside a vessel I use to store food.

Hopefully I sleep tonight, because 3 days without sleep renders me pretty useless. And allow me to point out that yesterday I was so tired that I literally forgot my car. I mean, I left it downtown and came home without it and then realized well into the night that my car was very far away, which would have a large impact on my day today. So, if yesterday I lost my car and today I was unable to go to my volunteer job or draw a comic, just imagine how hilariously I’ll screw my life up tomorrow if I don’t sleep again.