not falling down

It occurs to me that all known arguments for censorship–in fact, all possible arguments for censorship–are logically rude.

That’s just one example–not all arguments for censorship use such flagrant circular logic (but the FCC certainly does). I’d have a more powerful argument here if logical rudeness were inherently invalid, but unfortunately, it’s not. Then again, if one’s going to be logically rude in the first place, one isn’t terribly likely to mind being invalid too, is one?

I’m going to Minnesota with Maria and her brother Michael! I’ll be back Monday! That’s four capital Ms in a row!

Actually I’ll be back Sunday, but I think you saw what I was trying to do there. Anacrusis will hopefully be updated as usual.

“So let’s say it does wreck newspaper comics. I’m on board with that. I want to punch a hole in the boat. I want to see the whole thing flush like an animal carcass down a toilet bowl, and the carcass is on fire.”

Matt Boyd

Brouhaha brews between the big and the bitter! Tycho actually has the best summary of the whole thing, so read that too, but here’s the bullets:

• Scott Kurtz has a very popular daily webcomic, PvP. Not the most popular strip in existence, but vastly more popular than most other webcomics–popular enough that he lives on its ads and his print deal with Image.

• Now, he wants to see his comic in newspapers.
• Many newspapers aren’t doing that well, because not as many people read newspapers as used to do so.
• To reduce costs, these newspapers are continuing to cut print space and funding for syndicated comic strips, something they’ve been doing aggressively for over a decade; some newspapers (like the Philadelphia Enquirer) have asked syndicates (like Universal Press) for a year of free strips, or demanded (like Knight-Ridder, which owns 31 large papers) a price reduction in strips across the board.
• Scott has siezed on this opportunity to leverage his strip’s popularity, offering PvP, free of charge, to multiple newspapers and newspaper conglomerates. It’s a smart deal for him–he gets huge exposure, and he’s already doing the strip anyway–and for them–they get a new-to-them comic with an established audience for free.
• Newspaper cartoonists who are aware of this are rabidly hating on Kurtz, while secretly urinating in their Depends.

Now, Scott’s success in this arena is hardly guaranteed. Newspapers are paranoid about comic strips, generally preferring the most sanitized, humorless pap available, as a sop to their demographic (which, I’m sorry to say, skews more and more to “old” and “boring”). This is why things like Cathy and Marmaduke and (hideously) Family Circus continue to exist. PvP has cussing and violence in it sometimes, and it might get angry letters, and it’s four inches of column space that could be used to squeeze in another ad.

Regardless, there are going to be alt-weeklies and college papers that take him up on it. They’re all going to profit from the deal. And Kurtz won’t be the first webcomic to jump to newspapers, but he will be the first one to do it for free, and bigger papers are going to look at that and start asking questions.

“Hey,” they’re going to ask, “why are we paying thousands of dollars for comics that could be generated by a monkey on lithium? Why are we getting exactly the same comics as everyone else, when we could be making exclusive deals to get a comic nobody else in the region has? Now that the Interweb allows millions of people to read any paper they want, can we use comics to leverage our success in that arena?”

The answers might be “because, because, and no,” but they will ask, and that’s a change. You remember the last time things changed in the newspaper comics industry? In a good way?

Me either.

Hell yeah Downhill Battle!

Ever wanted to kill somebody and get away with it in the Empire State Building? Tonight’s your night!

I have had occasion in four separate instances, lately, to play with a new baby puppy. It’s a girl puppy, a Yorkie, who has recently taken up residence at Maria’s family’s house to keep her mom company. Her name is Sadie. She is very small and not at all yappy. We are napping buddies. How it works is this: I pick her up and put her in my lap, and then we both fall asleep almost instantly. This is basically the best of all possible worlds.

In the midst of the most recent puppy-time but one, I got an unexpected phone call from Jon, which at first I believed to be the unintelligible noise of somebody who has accidentally called you by not putting on his key lock. After a moment, though, I perceived it as actually a live bootleg from the BNL concert he and Amanda were attending at that very moment. It was the sound of our collective favorite band playing “Lilac Girl,” which they never play because nobody but us three and Canada knows it–it was on their first release, The Yellow Tape, and nothing else. So it’s a rarity and a great song, and I was really gratified that Mr. and Mrs. Brasfield thought to call and share it with me.

Sometimes I write scary stories. Sometimes those stories, scarily, come true.

The Interweb journals ostensibly written by the characters of Achewood are funny, but I think it’s odd that half the humor in them relies on the fact that they don’t read each other’s blogs.

Rick James was the the original Super Freak.

Saying “thinking outside the box” hasn’t actually been a way of thinking outside the box for quite some time.