This little bit of Adventure Time fan art is my humble attempt at showing possibly the ONLY way that Finn & Jake could be any cooler.
This cartoon is seriously off kilter in the very best of ways. Thanks to this show, my son and I will now use the term “Boom!Boom!” and laugh hysterically. Thank you for this cartoon Pendleton Ward.
If your twitter account gets hacked and it has more useful tweets than what you normally post, has a crime been committed?
There are many accounts out there that could do with a good hi-jacking, if only for no other reason than to remind the owners that they exist. I am not referring to the thousands of abandoned accounts that exist on twitter.
I mean all the accounts that are used (primarily by businesses) basically as another feed channel for their blog posts or facebook page updates.
If you look around, you will find these accounts everywhere.
They get regular updates added to then, but they are always a link to the latest blog or update over on another site.
When you look through the stream on these accounts, you will not see one single reply. Why is this?
Because the account owners simply have it so that they can say “Oh yes, I AM on twitter too” but they never actually visit it to understand how to use it properly. For them, it is a marketing channel and it ticks another box on the Social media list that they feel they need to complete.
So, having an account like this hacked & getting some replies in the stream would actually be an improvement.
I am not condoning hacking in any way, but I can see how it could produce a good result at times.
For the eagle-eyed followers among you, you may recognise the guys in this comic. It is good to see that they seem to have finally gotten jobs after all.
There is a lot of debate out there, regarding the “future of webcomics” and how comic artists/illustrators can make a living from them. Especially with the current tools available, which let anybody with a computer suddenly become a publisher &/or a comic creator.
The ability to push out a webcomic, regardless of it’s quality, is within the reach of practically anybody.
(Side note – I dislike the term ‘webcomic’. In the present online world, there is a massive crossover between comics delivered in print format, or online. So, for the rest of this blog post, I am just going to call them ‘comics’. You will notice that it makes little difference, and is still relevant, despite the delivery medium)
For me, the answer to being able to make a living from just creating comics, is to do one of these things:
1. work hard and produce comics that are of great quality, which will then attract the readers/publishers.
2. create a great product, but pick a niche to work within, where there is less competition.
The first option is something you should do by default, as a comic creator regardless. It is the second option that I feel is the best path to follow.
The idea is nothing new, and smart artists have been doing this for a while.
Hugh McLeod talked about this approach in a recent article. He describes targeting the High-End Microaudience in order to make a profit from his art.
Very recently, I stumbled across this work by Carly Monardo. She has created a piece called Marc Jacobs In Space which I feel is not only great looking, but is also a very smart direction to take. The niche she has begun to target here is the fashion industry, and I can see how something like this could really blossom into a fantastic earning potential for her.
As artists, we should be thinking of the old adage “work smarter not harder”. In our case, this often means thinking about where we can apply our skills, rather than pumping out a heap of stuff that has already been done & hoping someone sees it after it has been tweeted, retweeted, voted up on reddit & facebooked to death.
So, why not take some time very soon, and think about how you are going to “work smarter, not harder’“.
It could really pay off for you.
In the future, you will be able to touch the internet directly.
As technology advances, we seek new and better ways to interact with computers and data.
The earliest method of interaction with computers was the mouse, and this is still the most popular way of working with a computer to this day.
Voice interaction has been tried with varying success.
Joysticks & control pads work well, but mainly for gaming environments.
But the “latest and greatest” method is via a touch screen. Users are able to almost touch the data that they want to interact with.
But soon, even this will be outdated.
The next stage is touted to be a fully immersive experience, such as virtual reality, or via holographic displays,such as those seen in movies like “The Minority Report”. Which, you have to admit, is pretty cool.
If the fun of a touch screen experience shows us anything, it is that being able to massage your data by actually sticking your fingers in, is going to be pretty fantastic. but only as long as the experience goes one way.
I would hate to get anything stuck on my hands after visiting a less than desirable website…