zole.org

Back when I was a little bolder, and perhaps a little less ashamed to be a blubbering fan, I used to email people whose Internet work I enjoyed and pimp out my little comic. Here are some of the responses I found while I was recovering some of my old mail archives. Hopefully these people won’t mind the violation of their privacy, but I wanted to boast and didn’t feel like I could wait until after I die.

Dorothy Gambrell of Cat and Girl

I used to like to ask people how they drew their comic, as if I could somehow relate. Years later Dorothy and I were interviewed in the same book, but she’s still more talented than ten of me.

Date: Tue, 07 Aug 2001 17:23:49 -0400 (EDT)
To: Zole
From: Dorothy Gambrell
Subject: Re: That comic you draw

oh, well thanks. i had no idea i was still in the planetcartoonist list, actually.

i draw with the olde-timey (and time-consuming) pencil, pen, eraser, white-out method. After I scan it in I clean it up a bit, and the word bubbles/panels/greys are all done in photoshop.

so, yeah. glad you like it. especially as you’re a fellow member of the burgeoning marginalized interweb cartoonist association.

dorothy

Matt Groening’s assistant

From what I’ve heard Matt goes to Comic-Con and regularly buys books from up-and-coming talent, so maybe I should have aimed higher. But I couldn’t afford to go to San Diego.

Date: Wed, 27 Mar 2002 21:48:13 -0800
To: Zole
From: Sondra Gatewood
Subject: Re:

Hi Michael-

Thanks for your interest in Life in Hell.

And yes, sadly, the last Life in Hell book published was The Huge Book.

More sadly, there is no Official Life in Hell website as of this moment. I have been nagging Mr. G. for several years to let me get one going, but we are at an impasse — if we do one Matt wants it to be spectacular (which means expensive.) I’m willing to settle for less just to have one.

And there you have it.

I’m trying to put some ideas together for the next book — so there is nothing in the works as of this moment.

Thank you for your interest in Life in Hell.

–
Sondra Gatewood
Executive Hellcat and Proud Peacenik
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes,
but in having new eyes.” - Proust

Tycho of Penny Arcade

Some early validation, on this strip.

Date: Wed, 1 Aug 2001 13:51:50 -0700
To: “Zole”
From: “(CW)Tycho Brahe”
Subject: Re: That Linux craziness!

your comic for today is a god damned riot.

Everyone has their pet peeves, things that drive them crazy more than they can justify rationally. Mine is when people say “jive” when they mean “jibe”. What’s the difference? From Common Errors in English:

“Jibe” means “to agree,” but is usually used negatively, as in “the alibis of the two crooks didn’t jibe.” The latter word is often confused with “jive,” which derives from slang which originally meant to treat in a jazzy manner (“Jivin’ the Blues Away”) but also came to be associated with deception (“Don’t give me any of that jive”).

Seems pretty straightforward to me, but I see people saying “that doesn’t jive with X” on the Internet fairly often. So following the old adage “it’s better to start a microblog than curse the darkness”, I bring you Jive Suckas on Twitter, a catalog of jive sightings in the wild. (You can follow it there or on the sidebar of this blog.)

I should clarify that I’m not trying to shame people who get it wrong (maybe just a little). I don’t mind when it crops up in somebody’s personal blog or a forum thread, but if you’re getting paid to write for a blog, or trying to produce professional-quality writing, you are fair game! In fact, what bugs me is that smart people who are good writers make this mistake all the time. So I’m doing this to Raise Awareness, like all those people I went to college with who never changed squat.

Why does the jive thing bug me so much? Definitions change, after all. Someone on the Joel on Software message board pointed out:

I would guess that “jibe” came first (with this meaning), and people started mis-hearing it as “jive”. In fifty years, the dictionary will probably define them as synonyms. Words do change their meanings, and this is one way it happens.

OK, sure, but in the meantime I think we should use agreed-upon definitions for words and call things what they are. I’m not a “grammar Nazi”, I’m an accuracy enthusiast. To quote Common Errors again:

You have the right to express yourself in any manner you please, but if you wish to communicate effectively, you should use nonstandard English only when you intend to, rather than fall into it because you don’t know any better.

That’s my deal, basically. If you really have a good reason for saying jive when the word is actually jibe, go with God! But if you’re going on a hazy understanding, then come on, pro bloggers — we can do better!

While we’re at it, for a far broader examination of this sort of thing, check out The Eggcorn Database, which catalogs spurious expressions like “for all intensive purposes”, phrases which ought to get you suspended from the Internet.

I hope to avoid using this blog to gripe excessively about things that annoy me, because a lot of things annoy me, and I no longer have a comic where I can get it out of my system in a potentially funny way. But this is something that needs to be brought up, so we of the blogosphere can talk about the blog issues that affect our blog community. I’m talking about the increasing use of irrelevant-ass pictures in blog posts. Take a look at this post from Gizmodo:

It’s a post about a site that helps you find radio stations or, if you are using an iPod FM transmitter, unused FM frequencies. OK, cool. Why the hell is there a picture of Candace Cameron as DJ on Full House (from the show’s Big Hair Era, no less)? Oh, because it’s about a site you might need if you’re DJing up some tunes in the car. Get it? Of course you do, but it’s still not funny. This is what we in the business refer to as a “reach”. Sometimes we just refer to it as “not funny”. The DJ/DJ joke was funny when Homestar Runner made it in 2002, and you could probably still get some comedy mileage out of it, but you’d have to not want it so bad.

You see this in more subtle ways, too. Sometimes Gizmodo will be talking about an unreleased MP3 player or something. Lacking a picture, they’ll include a picture of another MP3 player by the same manufacturer. This seems more useful than slapping up a picture of John Stamos, but in some ways it’s worse, because seeing the picture provides you with negative information; the text of the post then has to inform you back above zero, or the blog post will have been an unmitigated waste of your time. Not unlike this one.

But there’s a bigger problem at work here. I realized, looking at DJ’s expression of possibly-Gibbler-induced dismay, that the good people of Gawker Media feel like they have to be funny, in some token way, every time they write a post. And it’s not even really humor: it’s more like snark, which is funny in the same sense that pictures of food are delicious. Why do they do it? I think the dirty secret of Gizmodo and other blog empires is this: they don’t really know anything we don’t know. They aggregate links on a particular topic and add their reactions, which generally line up pretty well with their reader’s reactions. Then a fight breaks out in the comments section. Recently I started pointing my RSS reader at Engadget to see if it would be any different, but nope, basically the same blog.

I don’t mean to come down on professional bloggers; no doubt they take their blog jobs very seriously, even when they use the word “jive” when they mean “jibe“, which makes me fly into a homicidal rage. But I think my personal preference is to read blogs written by a particular person, rather than blogs on a specific topic with a rotating staff of contributors. What do you, my handful of readers, think?