Not sure what I was thinking. I signed up four months ago when I was getting Scribs into swing and had some fanciful notion that I was going to get more involved in the comics community, but now I pretty much don’t care.

Saying I had “plans” for Scribs is likely an overstatement. Probably more accurate to say that I had a certain mindset this time around that I thought was healthier. When I first started getting serious about Scribs four years ago, I sort of assumed that I’d just naturally get popular and such by virtue of making a funny comic and letting the fame pour in. I got frustrated with waiting for the inevitable rush of traffic, so I gave up on it. And then in the intervening time, I saw other comics that started around the same time get wildly popular, and then the frustration and the envy and the glaven.

But last year my more selfish mindset relaxed somewhat, and I decided to start up the comic again, but this time, I’d do it right — instead of thinking I’d let the world beat down my door due to my inherent assumed fabulousness, I decided to make an effort in getting involved in the community, get on some message boards, try to make a connection with some actual people. 

And that’s how I wound up signing up to volunteer for c2e2. Actually at first I thought about getting a booth, but 1) too damn expensive, and 2) nothing to sell. The way I pictured it, it was likely going to be less sales booth than performance art. 

But, dunno. Might have been fun, but in the intervening time my attempts to interface with the human-units went less than well. Tried getting on message boards, but ech, made some shitty entrances and tried to just bluster through, but my tolerance ran out. Tried Twitter, but ran out of interest for that and now my spinnwebe account is just retweeting my scribscomic account, which I’m sure is not going to get it much attention. 

And it’s not even about the comic, really. I was kinda hoping to get myself into a community with some cool people. Though even there I guess I’m failing, because what I really kinda want is a nearby group of people. One, I already know a cool group of people online, and two, getting involved with comic artists online is not really the correct target anyway. I’d like to know what it’s like to have friends that I would pick up a phone and call, you know? Or having a reason to have a phone other than my college to leave messages to try to get money from me. But on the other hand, I’ve seen get-togethers with some comics people and they generally look nerdier than I can deal with.

So, I dunno. Every time I think of c2e2 now, I just find it kind of depressing. I don’t much feel like being around people right now, especially seeing people that are living the kind of life I could be living if I’d properly applied myself.

Depressing on two levels, actually. The near-reality of its topic, and the simulation of the one-sided non-argument argument that typically happens in our national media.

ginandtacos.com » Blog Archive » A NATION OF WHINERS AFTER ALL

Could an author, one presumably raised by humans and not by wild bears, begin a serious, non-satirical story like this?

PRIVATE school: $32,000 a year per student. Mortgage: $96,000 a year. Co-op maintenance fee: $96,000 a year. Nanny: $45,000 a year.

We are 1/4″ into the column and already the premise is irrevocably fucked.

Wildfires in California are, of course, because of teh gay. Wonder where these guys are when, for example, Hurricane Gustav hits at the same time as the Republican convention.

Lieberman’s everyone’s best chum again. It’s actually this chain of events that made me get irritated in the comments of my last post. The Democrat personality type tends to be more reasonable and accepting, but you have to have the fortitude to say when someone’s wrong. Lieberman should be kicked the hell off whatever he thinks is important, and I don’t know why they continue to coddle this buffoon. Well, I have a guess: it’s because the Senate Democrats think “play nice” is more important than “do what’s right”.

And I can’t even read Glenn Greenwald recently, it’s just too depressing.

I am pretty sure Obama is going to disappoint me. This is the best time we’ve had in decades to push for universal health care, but I’m pretty sure that’s not what’s going to happen. We’re just going to be further locked into depending on employers, which further deepens the leverage corporations have over their workers. And Lieberman saying that Obama’s support was crucial, that just further gives me an idea of how things are going to go. I was hoping that all the idiots saying “Obama must act from the center, not the left” would not have an effect on him, but given he’s probably inside the bubble now, it probably is.

Edit: though, on the other hand, here’s Greenwald today talking about the probable new attorney general, and there’s the news that Tom Daschle will be Secretary of Health and Human Services. And nice words from Rahm Emanuel on health care, though of course they’re just words. I dunno, tho, what Obama was saying during the debates — “we’ll make your premiums lower” — doesn’t sound like the scale of things Emanuel’s talking about. If it turns into the kind of thing where they said one thing during the election so as to not make waves, but actually have bigger plans — well, that’s kinda a typical politician underhanded move, but at least if it gets us an actual working health care system, I might not care so much.

So yeah, I’m fully with the argument that “he’s not even President yet, let’s see what happens.” But I’m not going to reflexively believe him just because he was elected, and I will admit I’m cynical on the activity of federal politicians. And the market forces involved, in the form of health care companies, drug companies, and the like — are massive and glacial.

Well, now, through the miracle of modern technology, your childhood memories can be pre-ruined for your convenience.

Scan-It Operation Checkpoint Toy XRay Machine

Boss Not Boss (BNB): Not my boss, but plays one on TV. My actual boss does something or another, but I rarely ever see him these days, so my co-worker got a kinda implicit, non-pay-increase promotion to tell us what to do. He’s a nice enough guy, but he frequently has a disconnect between what he is thinking and what he thinks he’s explaining, which makes information transfer a tricky and unreliable process. This extra sucks when it comes from the guy who’s telling you what needs to be done.

The UK guys: our company is owned by a company in the UK, and despite the fact that we are their largest, most profitable company, they tend to forget we exist. A year or two ago, we took their treatment of us and turned it into paranoia: most of the people in my group were convinced that the UK was taking on all our work in preparation for calling our jobs redundant. After two years of not being laid off, though, we’ve settled into a sort of dull acceptance that they just don’t care about us a whole lot, and we pick up the dregs of whatever mind-numbing work they don’t feel like dealing with.

Each of those items is worth a story in itself, but nevermind for now. That’s the setup for last week:

Tuesday: There’s a problem with a promotion process; marketing people can’t get their content to the live server. The promotion process was written by UK guy #1, but he’s on vacation. BNB tells me that UK guy #2 was working with UK guy #1, I should talk to him. BNB is going to be out for the rest of the week, so I’m going to take care of it. I make plans to call him the next day; it’s too late to call him, and I don’t bother with e-mail because we’ve essentially been told that we have to call people in the UK if we want their attention, and not expect them to reply to e-mail (not in so many words, but that’s also another story in itself).

Wednesday: I call UK guy #2 (hereafter “UK2″). Or try to. I call their receptionist, who then transfers me to UK2’s desk, which just rings 20 times or so. (Yes, receptionist; no, they don’t have direct numbers; no, they don’t have voicemail. And they’re 6 hours away, so we get a two-hour window in which we can work with them, because we can’t rely on e-mail.) I hang up and call back, but now the receptionist isn’t answering. I try a couple more times, no answer at the front desk, so I give up. I break down and send him mail, since by now it’s 11am my time and 5pm theirs, so he’d be gone, anyway.

Thursday: No answer to the email. I try calling again several times, but no answer at either his desk or the receptionist’s. I try picking other random UK names that I know, just in hopes of getting a warm body over there that can track down UK2 for me, but every call I make is not answered by whoever I pick, if I can even get a hold of the front desk to try transferring me to someone. I send him mail again, not really expecting anything will come of it. One of the marketing people is getting antsy, so I fill him in on the situation, and he sends email to UK2 himself, and cc:s two VPs on it. I don’t partake in that sort of fuck-you-cc:ery, but yay him.

Friday: No response to email. I call the marketing guy; no response to his, either. I figure I’ll give them another round of calls. After the 4th or 5th or so, I finally get a hold of someone!

Me: [Uk3]! Hi! Wow! A Person!
UK3: Er, hello?
Me: You know where [UK2] is?
UK3: Oh, he’s out today.
Me: [pause while I absorb this]
Me: Was he in this week?
UK3: Oh, yeah.

I hang up, and literally close my eyes and count to ten. It’s not something I really ever do, but the rational part of my brain saw the alarms coming in from the rage center, and cast about wildly looking for anything that could prevent me from becoming the next Guy Freaks Out At Office viral video. Requests down to Memory/Processing sent back the cliché with a note saying “here’s the best we got on short notice”, which was enough to distract Adrenaline Production so I could make some reasonable calls to marketing and let them know we’re screwed on the automated process, but I’ll get someone to move their files manually.

Monday (today): I get mail from UK2: “oh, I don’t know why people were looking for me for this, I don’t know anything about it.” I tell BNB this, he says “uh, yeah, I don’t know how you got that idea…I meant that he might know something about it, he sits next to [UK1].” Typically at this point I would question my own perception—maybe he told me the guy might know, but I misheard the guy actually does know?—but no, I’ve been in this situation enough times to know that he was thinking one thing and told me another.

Recently I’ve been lamenting my lack of interesting titles for my blog entries, and generally not being happy with my absent creativity. But in this case, it fits. This was just another work week.

Work is “teh sukc”, as the kids say. The whole week’s been a reminder of how little they regard me and how little they need me. There were times in my job here where I said “if I left, it’d be a real problem for them,” but not now. I’m pretty sure they’d barely notice, as far as work scheduling goes. I’m a problem solver by nature, and work’s just giving me nothing. And even my fallback position, “invent projects for myself and improve things on my own,” is getting nowhere, because each time I try to get something done I get resistance from other people, and I have no authority to actually tell people to do things. So I’m feeling pretty goddamn useless right about now.

So, blah, I’m now in a position where I’m wholly working for the money, which I used to say I wouldn’t do, but here I am. And the way I feel now, I have no interest or ability to try to explain to someone else (e.g., interviewer) why I’m worth hiring, so I’m pretty much stuck. And it’s dragging me down something awful.

But, aside from wallowing, I wanted to post about this because I’ve learned something over the years that may help others who got depression. When I mentioned it to my therapist, she took a note to pass it on to other people, so I figure maybe I thought up something good.

Anyway, it’s this: don’t let depression depress you. I used to feel bad about being depressed, or I’d figure there’s more going on that’s making me depressed that I don’t even know about and go looking for other things that could be wrong (and usually make things worse), or feel generally inferior for being depressed. Or I’d realize I wasn’t doing anything to improve my situation, and “if you’re so depressed, why don’t you do something to fix it?” but I’m just in no state to do so, but given I’m generally a troubleshooter I’d feel like a failure for not fixing my problem. Which would be additionally depressing.

But now, I mean—I really feel like shit. My limbs are weak, I don’t even feel like sitting up, I honestly wanna find a dark corner and curl up on the floor. But at the same time, I’m like, so the fuck what. It’s just a mood, it’ll pass. No, I’m not being productive about myself right now, but screw it, I’m just not in a mood to do it. Eventually, my core goofiness will kick back in and I’ll work something out and be fine, but for now, I just gotta accept it and ride it out.

At that point, depression gets relegated to the level of, say, you wake up and your knee really hurts. You limp around for the whole day, and it’s painful and annoying and makes everything you do more difficult, but eventually it’ll pass and you’ll be fine. That’s kind of how I approach my depression these days: I woke up with a hurt in my brain, but I know that in a couple days it’ll smooth out. Even when I’m in the depths of my grandest mope, coming to understand this has provided me some real perspective and comfort.

He made this point by sending e-mail to the facility’s “Everyone” mailing list. These days, if you’re a corporate employee, you already see the problem. But this was, oh, maybe 1994 or 1995, the early days of modern corporate e-mail, so it wasn’t understood that this was an easy way to make a mess of the e-mail system. But that’s fine, pass that part over, because here’s the kicker: he started the mail with something like, “there’s something bothering me, and I have to get it off my chest or I’m going to go postal.”

That certainly got everyone’s attention. In tech support, we all got the mail, read it, and said to ourselves, “ah geez Joe, what are you doing now.” We knew him; we knew he wasn’t seriously contemplating picking up a gun and shooting random employees; in fact the phrase “go postal” did not even register with any of us as a problem. We had a sorta “ah, crud, people on the network are going to complain about this useless email” reaction. Joe wasn’t in our building at the time, so we couldn’t go to his desk and tell him not to be an idiot with the mailing lists, but for my part, I read it and processed it and forgot about it.

So we were sort of surprised to learn later that Joe had been escorted off the facility in handcuffs while people determined what kind of threat he presented. I couldn’t imagine why, until I heard from people in other buildings that the “going postal” references actually scared a lot of people, to the point they were too anxious to leave their offices until the threat was resolved. They had no idea who this Joe guy was or what the hell he was talking about, but they sure saw that he was thinking about going postal.

I mention all this because I’m trying to use my first “eh, so what” reaction to Joe’s e-mail, and the pointless panic that ensued, as a guide to understanding how Boston could’ve gone so apeshit insane over a couple cartoon Lite Brites.

Boston devices a cartoon marketing ploy – Yahoo! News

If you haven’t heard about this by now, here’s the gist of it: there’s an Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie coming out soon, and to promote it, Adult Swim had a guerrilla marketing campaign in which lit LED boards with ATHF characters were placed in different areas in ten cities around the country. (The photo of one of them at left is, presumably, the scariest one Yahoo could manage.) They were in place for a couple weeks. Suddenly–I hope I find out what sparked the “suddenly”, I haven’t heard yet–Boston goes insane about them. Roads are cordoned off, bridges are closed. Bomb squads are called in to use water cannons to destroy them from a safe distance. When Adult Swim finds out this is going on, they immediately contact Boston law enforcement and let them in on it. In the aftermath, the Boston mayor is outraged, says their actions were criminal, and the two guys who are directly responsible for placing the signs are arrested for “causing a panic” by placing “bomb-like devices” around the country. (Apparently the batteries and wires were what made them look bomb-like, which is why I say this must be the scariest photo.)

Originally I was going to write this shorter and lighter, and say that this has a “chilling effect” on goofs everywhere, because geez, if this gets you arrested, then a guy who tapes post-it pads to the outside of a vacant building would get an FBI file. But the more I thought about it, the more depressing this whole thing is. Why did this happen? How can some lit signs–which nearly everybody under the age of 40 looks at and calls a Lite Brite–put a whole city into panic? It happened because we’ve lost the war on terror. If a whole city can be plunged into chaos because of some silliness, then the terror has already won.

The country’s been sold on fear by a government that uses it as a big stick to attempt to keep us in line. After it came to light, the mayor of Boston, Thomas Menino, was livid. Police were merely investigating the issue, but apparently he’s pushing for stiff penalties against them, and ultimately Adult Swim. “It’s about keeping a city on edge. It’s about public safety,” he said. And the Governor of Massachusetts said, “It’s a hoax — and it’s not funny.”

Hoax? Man is that making me angry. Even Crooks and Liars, a liberal blog I read quite often, called it “Boston Hoax“. A lot of the media is labelling this “hoax” or “bomb scare”, but this wasn’t a goddamn hoax or bomb scare. It was a hoax inasmuch as they were not actual ATHF characters stuck to walls, but merely representations of them. It was a bomb scare inasmuch as you started calling them bombs. It’s why I’d like to know what sparked this, or more specifically, who–let’s find the guy who freaked out about them and arrest him.

And the anger afterward is really what bothers me. The mayor says that it’s irresponsible and they should have known better than to do that, and pursues criminal charges. Blames them for putting the city into a panic. Them! If they were putting the city into a panic, how come they existed for two weeks before this happened? If it were an actual bomb hoax–if they made dynamite-looking bundles of packages with big alarm clocks on them, they’d be putting the city into a panic. They put blinky cartoon characters around the city, how about you, mayor, what did you do to panic the city? The blame and the anger and the calls for punishment, ugh. Yes, it went badly, and yes, I’d agree that Adult Swim should take some heat here, but certainly not to the extent the mayor is insisting. His reaction makes me think of a mob of prisoners beating up a fellow prisoner because he’s being too loud and they don’t want to upset the guards.

And why are we keeping our fellow prisoners in line? The terror. As with so many other things, this administration takes on a monumental task and accomplishes the opposite. It’s been pointed out elsewhere that you can’t have a war on a state of mind, or a concept, and thus conducting a “war on terror” is impossble and meaningless; yet despite this, and ironically, the administration has found not only a way to make it possible, but to accomplish the opposite. Terror invaded the ports and infrastructure of Boston, and terror struck at the economic heart of the city, costing it at least half a million dollars in equipment, manpower, and lost business. And thanks to the people who have relentlessly told us that terror is everywhere and terror must be defeated, the terror has won.

I’d give you details, but I’m not the kind of idiot who gives specifics about his job in a blog. Just mentally put “dear diary” at the front of this and some frowny face dots over some I’s and that’d probably make the context more appropriate.