finally

[davemerrill]

It's kind of a famous Stupid Comic and I'm sure that everybody was wondering when we were going to get around to it. Well, here ya go, kids. I give you... SKATEMAN.



I don't want to say that it's a solid ironclad rule that artists shouldn't write their own material, but sometimes it's a good idea to run these things past other people before you go through all the hassle of pencilling and inking and printing and distribution. Don't miss exciting hard drivin' roller rockin' SKATING today at STUPID COMICS!!

Been seeing comments here and there across my LJ friends page from people who have noticed things on LJ quieting down now that a lot of people have moved to Facebook or Twitter or whatever. And there are some who think it's a bad thing. Me, I think it's swell. A lot of the urgency and the drama has completely vanished from LJ. I'm not getting hostile anonymous commentary every time I post a political opinion. Things I write about anime conventions aren't being taken as Company Policy any more. LJ is calmer and less paranoid, at least from where I'm sitting.

I have a Facebook, but I don't use it a lot. The experience seems to be centered largely around the kind of meaningless trivia that used to clog up my LJ friends page - quizzes, games, that current high-larious video that fifty people have already embedded and fifty more people will be embedding - and I think it's great that there's a place for that kind of thing, but it's not something I need to check more than once a day, if that much. If I didn't have to keep updating my Facebook security settings every other day it might be a more pleasant experience.

One thing I like about Facebook is that you can block other users whom you don't wish to have FB contact with. That's a feature that LJ should have adopted on day one, would have saved everybody a lot of trouble. Another feature about Facebook I like is that it's blocked from my work, so the amount of time I'm going to waste there is limited.

I never in my life used IRC chat and have turned off the chat functions on both Yahoo and Gmail. I'm not a chat person. But Twitter seems to be filling that void in my life nicely; it's like a chat room for the whole world. It's fun to bounce stuff off people and see where it lands. Also it's limited to 140 characters, no quizzes, clubs, likes, presents, videos, macros, memes; the whole inarticulate cliche-driven doofus culture that has conquered wide swaths of online space is having trouble getting a foothold there.

So now that these other social media networks have taken some of the air out of LJ. Users are forced to face the fact that LJ isn't an attention-getting device or a lifestyle choice or an online replacement for their real life, but a journal - something for you to write your thoughts in. Hard to work up drama about that.

Comments

[hipsterdad.livejournal.com]

Oh, is that what happened to Neal Adams? He turned into Tom Grindberg?

[davemerrill.livejournal.com]

Well, at the moment Neal Adams is convinced that science as we know it is completely wrong and that the Earth is constantly growing due to matter being created in the core of the planet. I don't know Grindberg's thoughts on solid state cosmology, though.

[tochiro998.livejournal.com]

Oh, don't worry, as we get more smart phones (everyone rushing to re-invent the iPhone even as they mock it and say it's just a fad. cha-ching guys and Steve Jobs says suck it) there will be twitter linkbombing with the overuse of the tinyURL thing. Then it's endless trips to f'ing Youtube. Come on, you know who will do it. :)

I have a MySpace page I don't do a thing with, and I have no desire whatsoever to grab a Facebook page, even tho that's where some folk I know have migrated (and otherwise dropped off the face of the earth).

I really have to sit down and write that essay on how the current communication overload is actually causing LESS communication. Check that, say less MEANINGFUL communication.

[davemerrill.livejournal.com]

What I notice is that the people who have the time and the tech to stay constantly plugged in and constantly twittering and FBing and messaging, they're the ones who dominate every form of social media. I don't want to say they're ALL obsessive losers with too much time on their hands, but do the math.

So we have a discourse dominated by people who have, shall we say, a lack of connect with anything that isn't on a computer screen 24/7, and lots of free time to talk about their own pet obsessions.

And it's hard to get anything meaningful said in contrast to these voices, because they are always "on" and they will always have the weight of numbers of posts or messages. Because they NEVER STOP POSTING.

It takes a lot of self-discipline to walk away from the chatter and disengage, but you have to do it to get anything done. When the #animeconprotip thing was trending on Wednesday, I had a really hard time not hitting "refresh" every five seconds to see what else people were saying. It's addictive, it's a constant fix. Rat hitting the food button.

That's what I like about LJs and the Lets Anime blog; I can sit down and write something and get it into a finished form and then it gets 'published', it's done. It's not a process, it's not a dialog, it's not a viral anything, it's a piece of writing, a discrete thing by itself. FB posts don't feel 'discrete', they feel like one more murmur in a sea of murmurs.

FB's good for staying in touch with people, I'll give it that. Plenty of people whom I hadn't heard from in years, I get fairly regular updates about their life, that's kinda nice. Gotta keep it at arms length though.

[tochiro998.livejournal.com]

I would disagree to the point that posting on LJ or other blog can create dialog, such as this right now. Except for meaningless 'me too pay attention to meeeee' posts of course.

but it's interesting to see with Twitter the return of the 'post count internet penis', as it were. That sad holdover from R.A.A. Misc days.

I POST 200 NEW THREADS A DAY AND REPLY 500 TIMES BOW BEFORE MY MASSIVENESS! MY OPINION IS MORE VALID THAN YOURS BECAUSE OF THIS!!!

Yeesh.

Also, Skateman? That's a horrible, horrible logo there.

[sobieniak.livejournal.com]

ENCORE! ENCORE!

[cmndr-x.livejournal.com]

Oh god, this comic. It has stuck in my memory, if only for the line "What the sh-t do you care, pigmeat?" I mean, that is even more awesomely awkward than the "My foot and your face!" bit.

Funny thing, I saw a copy of this on sale at a comic shop and someone had consulted the Crazy Grandma Pricing Guide for apparently a creased and crinkled looking copy of Skateman complete with a cover that looked like silverfish had nibbled on the edges was worth $10. Of course, the people running this store had up on the wall a copy of the first issue of some "event" comic from one of the Big Two on sale for seventy bucks - and it looked like it had been stomped on a couple of dozen times, maybe run over with a car.