Apathy Sketchpad

I can’t be bothered digging out the old template and doing it on the mouse. I’d much rather draw it and scan it. If it doesn’t fit with the others, screw it, why should it?

Earlier today I went to the pub to meet a friend. I was a few minutes late, but he’d said he’d perhaps be “a bit late”. He turned up fully one hour late, to the wrong pub, and then texted my housemate, whom he hadn’t invited, to explain this. After I’d left. Having assumed I wasn’t going to have finished having dinner yet.

I looked up the lyrics on a website just to be sure. And it had Google ads, which offered to sell me almost all the items I’d lost. How lovely, in a misguided kind of a way.

A while ago I was bullied into joining Facebook. And I’m glad I did, because it’s fantastic.

Facebook, for those who aren’t members, is a “social networking” site. You make a page for yourself, then you add friends to your list. In that sense, it’s just like MySpace, but the difference is that MySpace is shit and Facebook is fantastic. MySpace gives you a little page to write on and a way to send messages, and a contact list, and that really is it. That’s just called “the Internet”. Google give me all that, with nicer layouts, and don’t try to play Slipknot at me every time I visit a page.

Facebook is more for Real Life Friends. If you tell Facebook you’ve got a new girlfriend then it’ll tell all your friends for you. And you can put your address and phone number on it and be sure only your friends can see them. It’s very useful, and it’s been great for my social life because I get invited to more things through Facebook. Mostly I think this is because it gives you a list of all your friends when you make an event and lets you choose who to invite. My last party I invited people I’d never have thought (or been able) to invite without it, and consequently had a fantastic time.

Some people say Facebook is a privacy concern. Some people are idiots. They’re mostly the same people who say Google are a privacy concern. (Not really sure why I’m hyperlinking Google, but it seems polite since I did MySpace and I hate them.)

I can see why people might be concerned about Google. They have all my emails, via Google Mail. Doubtless these contain my address, bank details and so forth somewhere. (They know my bank details anyway because I use AdWords, but let’s pretend I don’t.) They also know what things I’ve been searching for, my favourite websites (via Google Reader), my web history (if not by Google Web History then by AdWords tracking cookies), and so forth. And that concerns people.

I’ve never understood the problem with tracking cookies. They don’t know who you are; they just know that this particular computer has visited website A and website B, and if that lets them know that the person sat in front of it is more likely to want product A than product X then that’s good, surely? It means I’m more likely to see adverts for things I want, which is good for me as it lets me know about awesome things I might want to buy, and it’s good for the advertisers as it means they get more clicks, and it’s good for me as it means I have to see fewer adverts to keep my favourite sites in profit. Everyone wins, and nobody has any significant privacy concerns.

And sure, Google index all my emails, but all email providers do that. And sure, a computer scans them for advert-inspiring words, but it’s a computer. It can’t read; it just executes its little programme. The only valid concerns with any of Google’s services are what happens if they get hacked, and that they have the capability, just like all search engines, browser plugins, ISPs and email providers, to monitor your Internet use. But really, don’t you think they have better things to do than spy on strangers?

Much the same is true of Facebook. People say it’s creepy having all that information about yourself on the Internet, but it’s not really “on the Internet”, is it? It’s on one server, which nobody can access without your express permission. And Facebook only knows what you tell it, and only shares what you let it. If you know what you’re doing with Facebook then it’s of no concern, and if you don’t know what you’re doing with something, learn before you use it.

One thing I do really like about this format is that I can write a strip and just keep changing it until the last minute. The Health And Danger executive was never originally in this one, and honestly I don’t think it would have been funny without him (any debate as to whether it’s funny with him there notwithstanding).

As you may have gathered, I’m still experimenting with how best to produce these strips. I’ve got the production time down pretty low now.

Here, for the benefit of anyone who had already seen the last batch of Henchmen comics (which I’d posted here in January) are two new strips. Luckily I have found a much faster way to produce them which gives almost exactly the same result, so with any luck I might actually draw some of the other scripts I have stored on my Google Notebook soon.

Here are some comics I did for a new project called Henchmen. It follows the lives of the employees of Doctor Malevolex, a supervillain bent on world domination. It’s an area of the classic film genre that’s always intruiged me; how do you hire people to be henchmen? How do you keep them onside when your mission statement includes the word “overthrow”? How do you run an organisation with all the little faults and clichéd mistakes that all supervillains have? It is, with any luck, somewhere between Dilbert and Evil Inc., (although I don’t like Evil Inc. very much so hopefully it won’t be much like that). VillainSupply.com had a good take on the same kind of idea, but they seem to be defunct. (Presumably someone found the large, obvious self destruct button.)

To be honest, I’m not massively satisfied with the first three, but there are a couple coming up that I’m rather looking forward to drawing, and I do think the first three are necessary to explain the setting, which I think should be done in the comics themselves regardless of whether I’ve explained it here or not. It’s the principle of the thing.