CSotD: Pets, and pet projects
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First, equal time for Those Other Pets, courtesy of Dan Piraro.
Nothing much to add to this except "hahahahahahaha," which is almost always good commentary, if not terribly enlightening. But I've had plenty to say recently about dogs and the credulity of their owners, so there's no reason not to feature kitty cats, too.
I'm a dog person, but I've had a cat and he was very pleasant to have around.
However, I'm not a helicopter owner and I don't obsess over whether Vaska needs a gluten-free diet or is pleased with his new collar.
His chief value as a pal is that he gets me out of the house twice a day and those morning and afternoon trips to the park kind of frame my work schedule, breaking me out of the trap of the telecommuter, which is to completely fail to divide "work" from "life."
Vaska: Boss, ain't you going to the dog park?
Me: Not right now.
Vaska: Ain't you planning on going to the dog park in the near future?
Me: No.
Vaska: Ain't you ever going to the dog park?
Me: No.
Vaska: Then I ain't antsy either.
At which point guilt sets in. Well played, Vaska.
I'm sure cat people find the little interruptions of the cat walking across their keyboard or the cat deciding to race around the livingroom chasing nothing or the cat mysteriously becoming affectionate diverting. I always did.
But, if they are remaining sane while working at home, they must have some other insistent thing, like a jogging obsession, tugging at their sleeves and getting them up and away from work for sustained periods.
Oh, wait. They have spouses.
Well, as long as she doesn't walk across the keyboard, I guess that would work. The "mysteriously becoming affectionate" part was kind of fun, as I recall.
… and speaking of cohabitation
This is more live-in distraction that I could take, but it's fun to watch.
In the comments Saturday, Tim recommended "Strip Search," a reality show being streamed on-line by the guys at Penny Arcade. Nice thing about on-line TV is that it gets archived instead of simply drifting off into space, so you can always catch up.
Yesterday, I watched the first six episodes while doing some housework and I will eventually catch up — they're up to 19 episodes so far.
It's an interesting combination of Survivor, Big Brother and Mystery Science Theater, the last having more to do with the disembodied Penny Arcade guys who are running it. The premise is that they have assembled a dozen webcomic artists and are going to eliminate them one by one, with the survivor getting fifteen grand and a year with the company, during which they can develop their talent and presumably become independently successful on the web.
A large part of the appeal is in the frank admission within the premise that success in web cartooning goes beyond writing and drawing an appealing strip, and the way the competition rewards more than simply creating a fun strip and brings in those other aspects.
And so the first elimination contest (and this is not a major spoiler, so keep reading) is to create a T-shirt for the show, with the winner's "prize" being that it becomes the T-shirt for the show and that artist gets the profits from its sale.
Now, Bill Watterson famously stepped away from merchandising "Calvin and Hobbes," aside from reprint collections, but Bill Watterson lived in a world where newspapers paid to run comic strips and an artist could live on that income.
As someone who spent a decade nurturing that business model myself, I take no pleasure in the fact that it is crumbling. But the fact remains, it's crumbling, you can't count on it as a newcomer to the form, and, if you feel marketing is beneath your dignity as an artist, well, I hope flipping burgers isn't, because — web or syndicated — you're going to have to find a secondary income stream somewhere.
And you can't expect your spouse to become mysteriously affectionate very often if his or her role also includes providing a secondary income stream for a creative genius who hates plush toys and T-shirts.
On the other hand, much of what is going on in the show seems petty, including what I suspect is some editing to make one of the contestants appear so unpleasant as to either make elimination a moment for celebration or victory a major surprise.
And I kind of wonder how much of a stretch it is for the Penny Arcade guys to play the MST3K roles of Clayton Forrester and Frank, because there's a difference between the kind of social instincts that make a webcomic successful and the social skills that win popularity contests.
Howsoever, (and again, I think I can say this without it being a spoiler), the screwing-around disappeared when they evaluated the work of the first two people up for elimination, and they made the appropriate decision, based very much on who "got it" as a cartoonist and not who best qualified as a pal or a fun person to have around.
I want to see where this goes, but I also think I'll learn something about how a successful webcomic operates.
And, while we're on the topic of Penny Arcade, most days I find the strip either too geekily into gaming for me to understand, or too repellantly filled with f-bombs and generally nasty humor to appeal to me.
That's okay, because they have built an empire on geeky gamers who don't find that stuff off-putting, and they don't need my business, much less my approval.
But there have been some moments when a little humanity and mainstream decency oozes through, and it keeps me coming back. Today's strip is an example. I don't have to know the specifics of the game being referenced to get what is going on here:
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