The new law could see citizens stoned for adultery or having a limb amputated for theft. Lesser offenses, such as drinking alcohol or abortion, could result in flogging and/or caning. In addition, the law imposes harsh laws with regards to women and allows for child marriage.

However, common sense didn’t get in the way of this obvious made-up story resulting in thousands of phone calls and emails to the Dearborn City Hall.

Also, for bonus fun, the mayor of Dearborn issued a statement blaming National Report for the calls and emails. A big goddamn shame that someone writes a joke saying “Dearborn is cutting off limbs for stealing” and “allows for child marriage” and it’s called their fault when people take it seriously.

All this Sharia law dumbfuckery reminds me of that comic I drew that I’m quite proud of, which I’ll repost here — except this one has a different third-from-last panel which I think I like better.

The following is a dramatization of how all that happened, probably.

I like the varied-line feel of brush markers, but only started using them recently (in fact that’s half the reason the comic started at all, not for doing a comic but for having something to draw with them). But clearly I’m not really using them properly for the comic. I wanted the art to be different from my usual style, something tactile and organic — probably why I decided on the heavy paper, actually, because it’s heavy and textured and makes itself known as part of the process more than standard paper would. But really, for the comic, I seem to be using the markers less as brushes and more as felt tips that get mushy quickly.

Part of the problem is that I can’t really draw. I mean, I can draw comics okay, and when I stay within the boundaries of my ability I’m able to put lines together such that the intended shapes are generally recognizable. But I feel like the potential of these markers is much greater than my ability to draw it out. It’s like sitting in the pilot’s chair in a helicopter — looking at all the dials and controls and things, you know there’s all sorts of awesome stuff you could do with it, but with no idea how it’s done, exactly.

So I can’t really draw volumes and objects the way I’d like, but I do like drawing lines and patterns. Still not with any real art, but enough to make me happy. So I sat down with a notebook and decided I’d do a page of lines with a brush marker to play with its widths.

I decided the pattern would be: draw a diagonal line going from narrow to wide, then draw a line next to it going from wide to narrow.  Continue layering and repeat until done. In the corner of the page I did this:

And would you believe at this point I was already getting bored with it. I felt like the lines were getting too long to maintain a full narrow-to-wide progression for the entire length, and I didn’t really have a plan for what to do with long lines, so I tried breaking them up.

I looked at this and felt it was pretty much crap, so I decided to give up and go do something else.

And that right there summarizes about 40% of my life. I do have some raw, above-average talents for a few things which started at a fairly early age, and I think when I was young, my brain turned that into  you’re pretty much good at whatever you want. And for much of my life I’ve operated under the assumption that all it takes for me to do something great is to sit down and do it, I just have to get around to it sometime.

This has long been a source of frustration for me. With drawing, with music, with whatever — I subconsciously assume that I should be able to sit down, get started, and maybe an hour later — two hours, tops — ta-daaaa! Masterpiece! And when it doesn’t work out like that, I wander away, bored and frustrated.

The thing is, sometimes I really am able to pull that rabbit out of the hat. I knock something together, it all goes according to plan, and in fairly short order I have something that really makes me proud. But I remember the hits much more than the misses. Or not remember exactly, but the emotional footprint of the pride stays with me. And that footprint bleeds out to the rest of my memory, painting over all the times I gave up too easily.

So I’m left with the feeling that I can do pretty much anything well. But it’s taken me a long time to learn (and I’m still learning) that my efforts have been self-selecting. I feel like I can do anything well, because challenges I’ve completed, I have been proud of. However, I tend to forget all the false starts — the things I started and got “bored” with, because it wasn’t suddenly and evidently magnificent. It’s not that I’m great at everything, it’s that I’m good at the few things I’ve persevered through to completion that made me happy, and constricted my universe to those few things. Everything outside that universe, you know, I’m probably pretty much great at, I just haven’t had the time for it.

That last sentence is probably best read as Bender.

So that all flashes through my head in less than a second, and I say to myself fuck that, man, you are gonna fill this page.

And, you know, not too bad. I’m really not happy with that row of Ss, partly because it doesn’t look like it belongs, but mostly because it was kind of a mini-failure, I was getting bored again and wanted to give up on it, but I pushed through. And the whole page is neat in its way.

That went okay so I decided to do another one.

That one I like even more. Which of course is the point — I was learning how to control the pen more, and had a bit more of an idea what I wanted to do, etc. It’s pretty basic “if you want to get better you have to practice” stuff, but it’s something I’ve never really learned and has messed me up for a long time. The meta-problem being, if I haven’t learned this lesson by now I won’t properly learn it at all, but hopefully I can use little experiences like this to bootstrap a wider understanding of the perseverance necessary to make myself better.

Back in 2006 I wrote a jingle for The Ninja Zombie Show, which was inspired by a Scribs question, the particulars of which currently escape me.  I also drew this about that:

Fast forward seven years holy Christ seven years already where does the time ahem.

Fast forward seven years and I was feeling spendy on Fiverr over a bored weekend. If you haven’t been, it’s a site where a bunch of people offer to do a bunch of little things for five bucks. I’ve said before it’s an allegory for the Internet at large: great mountains of crap with an occasional interesting thing.

There are a number of people who will do music stuff for you, but I found this guy who interested me more than others I’d seen. So I sent him a gig to do an unplugged version of the song. My direction was: “pretend this song was popular, and then the artist is on MTV Unplugged doing a way-too-self-important version of it, you know? Like it’s saving puppies in Uganda with this song, or something.”

And I think he nailed it. The singing is a bit rough but I think it fits within the context — you can almost see the barstool, the single spotlight, kids sitting on the floor looking adoringly upward and knowing that yeah, we are gonna solve this thing. Hunger or whatever.

Ninja-zombie-unplugged.mp3

That “brains” at the end kills me. Anguished. I could see him doing a whole post-show interview about how he wanted to get into the heart of the zombie, the motivation, really explore what drives him.

(Turns out it’s brains.)

I started thinking about how I could put it online, and I liked the continuous presentation idea in my head — not a strip per page with the usual forward/back navigation, but one big page that you scroll through everything. One of my pet peeves about having a comic per page is that I feel like the person dropping in the middle of a story arc might not go back, and miss context. Or if they do, they step back one at a time, which gives them the story arc exactly reversed. The continuous format doesn’t solve it, but it makes it easier to slide around the timeline.

And I pictured the lazy load effect in my head as well, which I thought was pretty cool. Those images can actually load a lot faster, I have the javascript slow down the image views so you can see the animation. I think it was the idea of the image animation that actually pushed me into creating a website for it. I laughed at myself — ah Christ I’m buying another domain apparently.

But what to call it? I engaged the random generator in my head and “sswhat” dropped out. That dude I’m drawing started as a margin doodle in college, and has kind of an unfortunate name I don’t like anymore, but his initials are S.S. So “s. s. what” is kinda, “okay, this guy, and what the hell?” I was surprised to find there was a six-letter domain still available (even if it is basically nonsense), so that pretty much sealed it.

At the moment it’s on a M-W-F update schedule, and right now I have enough drawn to go through to mid-August. I am tempted to make it a weekday update thing, but…ugh I just don’t trust myself being able to continue making them to keep up with five updates a week. Though if I switched to that right now, it’d be enough updates til July 10…mm. Don’t know. Still pondering.

Here’s the puzzle again, with all the hints:

The idea is: the bottom part is the maze, and the top part is the rules that tell you how to get through the maze. I did a few things to try to point towards the solution:

• The ^3 inside the maze is the only thing that’s green. So I was hoping it would be clear this was a different thing than everything else.
• I hoped that this would suggest the “arrow, number” pair is meant to indicate a direction and distance to move.
• I wasn’t sure whether to make the .com green as well, but I figured the nature of it made it unique enough.
• I placed the hints for entrance/exit at about their vertical levels, so putting those together shouldn’t have been too bad.

But how to traverse the maze was apparently the difficult part. The top part is the rules, and I should say it’s three rules. Some conjectured it was 12 separate rules, or that it had to do with specific letters, but no. My responses to these would have been: if they are 12 separate rules, I don’t think the arrows make sense for traversing them. And there doesn’t seem to be any good correlation between specific letters in the rules and letters in the maze.

It’s basically this: each letter inside the rule represents a class. For the first two I alternated: items 1 and 3 have the same direction and number. So for the first we see “J” and “B” are down 1, and “f” and “r” are left 1. The most immediate thing that differentiates those letters is upper/lower case.

If we’ve gotten this far in working things out, we know that up 3 in the maze starts us on “s”. That’s a lower, so following the first rule, we go left 1, and land on “S”.

Next rule, “e” and “I” are up 1, “H” and “m” are down 2. In that case it seems to be vowels/consonants. We’re on “S”, so go down 2, and land on red W.

The third rule is the trickiest, because I don’t have any two the same. I was hoping by now you’d be able to build on knowledge of the previous — and anyway you’re standing on a colored letter at this point, and the rule is clearly about colored letters, so that might have helped feel like things are working to this point. I see now that the red samples were vowels and blue samples were consonants, but that would not likely be the thing, because what would you do with a red consonant? Which is what we have here, so the rule must describe it somehow.

In this case it’s: red lowers go down 2, red uppers go right 3, blue lowers go right 1, blue uppers go up 1. We have a red upper, so we go right 3 to “H”.

Then the arrows in the rule loop up back to the first one again, which take us to “a”, “t”, and “.com”.

All of which spells out sswhat.com, which apparently is a new site I’ve created. Hope that’s not too terribly anticlimactic, but there it is.

As I forgot to ask them how I can refer to them publicly, I’ll say that Sam solved it on Friday, so he gets the mug. Cryptique solved it about a half hour later, but I think I’ll send him something else as well, as soon as I figure out what that is.