CSotD: Trust, verify, edit, rinse, repeat
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Dilbert expands upon one facet of my anti-cloud rant from a couple of weeks ago.
I'm not against progress. I'm against trusting.
I might use the cloud as a backup in case my laptop becomes toast and my hard drive ditto, which, given the floods and other plagues we've been unleashing on ourselves lately, isn't impossible. (If you want to skip that link, the bottom line is two inches of rain in 45 minutes.)
But I'm not leaving anything that matters very much stored entirely up there.
Oddly enough, though, while I hear all this praise for the new, wonderful cloud, there's some counter-pressure, too, which I find kind of funny.
That is, I hear that having my email in the cloud is risky. I hear this from people who hate Google, though, and that's like hearing how bad Windows is from Mac people or Linux devotees.
Which, in turn, is like hearing what a schmuck somebody is from his ex-wife. He may indeed be a schmuck, but you need to confirm it with a different source.
I do know this from long experience, however: There are a variety of things that come after "trust me" and most of them turn out not to be anything that you wanted.
And speaking of trust, but verify …
News has come that Matt Bors is now editing cartoons for NSFWCorp, a news magazine with both on-line and print editions, picking out altie panels for their monthly print piece.
I'm always glad to see a cartoonist get some kind of gig to keep beans on the table and ink in the pen, but, this being a subscription-only site, a suggestion: Offer one story for free, or at least let visitors sample more than the opening paragraph.
The sample for their current cover story, "Edward Snowden's Half-Baked Revolution" reads in its entirety:
Just six months earlier, Vasya had bailed me out of a surreal and
nerve-wracking brush with death-by-grupperovka, over one of the lesser
jokes published in my satirical Moscow rag, “The eXile.” Satire is not a
defense in Russia, as it is here, legally or otherwise. Russia’s
produced the best and most vicious satirists anywhere, and they’ve
traditionally been stomped on hard. Showing that you can “laugh at
yourself” and “not take yourself seriously” is not a popular social
convention there. They do take themselves seriously; they don’t laugh at
themselves, they’d rather laugh at you.
I'm aware that Snowden is in Russia, so this snippet isn't entirely off-the-wall-irrelevant, but I'm not coughing up $36 a year based on the fact that they have a writer who once lived in Russia. Or lives in Russia. Or knew some Russians. Or something.
The wallet doesn't come out until I see a little more.
But speaking of Matt, and editing, and the extent to which size matters, here's an interesting pairing.
Take a look at Brian McFadden's current NYTimes cartoon:
I don't disagree with his argument, and I like the cartoon, but check out this Bors panel that came of a collaboration between the two:
As someone who struggles to shut up while at least a couple of people are still listening, this may be more striking for me than for others.
And it's only fair to point out that McFadden's strip was created for a publication that operates on the assumption that their on-line readers don't mind getting to the bottom of Page One and seeing a line of next-page numbers suggesting that the remaining text is roughly the length of "The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire."
But the economy of the second piece here is extraordinary. Eleven words that cover two important topics.
Pow.
They should get together more often.
Jumping in points:
I think Pirate Cove is starting a new adventure. I'm only guessing, because the stories here wander on forever and don't have pat endings and obvious beginnings, and, while they do have numbers and titles, those tend to be updated sporadically if at all.
However, the hired killers are either dead or fled and the guys are stuck in Vegas with a forgotten baby and it appears a road trip is about to commence, so this would be a good time to jump in and start trying to make sense of things, and there is an FAQ. Which hasn't been updated in more or less forever, but the most recent blog entry is from 2011 and there ya go.
Someone out there has probably noticed a distinction between the artistic style of Joe d'Angelo and that of, say, Chris Ware or Hal Foster. Good eye.
But this is some seriously hilarious, demented stuff, and it really wouldn't work if the art were realistic. Maybe the guy has Edward Hopper chops and simply chooses not to use them for artistic reasons. Ever think of that?
I didn't think you had.
And also …
Daily Ink subscribers may want to add "Radio Patrol" to their current mix, since a new story — first run in 1943 — just started yesterday.
Or they may not. This is purely camp, with none of the genuine artistic or storytelling appeal of, say, Rip Kirby. But if you want to see what today's crop of 80-year-olds once found engrossing, there you go.
It's no worse than, from most reports, the new "Lone Ranger," which was also a favorite of the Radio Patrol crowd. The nice thing about the vintage strips at DailyInk is that nobody is "re-imagining" them.
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