20160702 - Vlog (Patreon)

Oh hey look, a custom thumbnail for my vlogs! Finally! haha

*** Transcript ***

[horns in the background]

I started this exactly at noon. That's the harbour centre, I don't know if you can hear that in the background, but..

Hello Patreon! It's Saturday and it's an okay day here in Vancouver. Yesterday was a bit overcast and today is kind of still cloudy but nicer than yesterday. It'd be cool if I could go outside today but I don't know if it's really cards. I was kind of planning on just hunkering down and getting some work done. I was out a lot last weekend and just early last week so I went on a really big ride on Saturday-- did a lot of uphill riding-- and then shortly after that on Monday I did a really big hike that took a lot out of my legs. It took forever for my legs to recover, I was having a hard time walking up the office stairs or actually... I had a harder time walking down the office stairs... Anyway. "Hermit Cartoonist Goes Outside - Has A Bad Time: Reel at 11."

Anyway it's another month! Thank you guys so much for supporting me we have a couple of new patrons and I'm really excited for you to join us!!Welcome! I do this vlog thing every week where I update you guys on what's been going, on how I'm doing, what I'm working on.

So this last week I've still been... just head down in book mode. I'm working on bringing out the next collection of Wasted Talent and focused on creating the interstitial artwork and bonus artwork that supports that transition from gag-a-day to more of a collected work. The other big milestone that I hit his I hired a new designer last week! Very exciting. I'm really excited to work with someone new... I've had the same designer for the last three books and thought it was just time to try something else which will come with its own pros and cons of course but she's very talented and she's excited to work with me which is exciting and I'm pumped up but it we'll see how that goes.

Hopefully I can get a payment to her because Canada Post is going on strike supposedly... Should look that up. If the post goes on strike that'll be a huge pain in the butt in a lot of ways. My office gets parcels delivered 3-4 times a day when projects are active and ongoing... And a lot of it that we do get is FedEx / Purolator/ UPS but we do get a lot of stuff in the post in terms of correspondence, letters... and myself, I ship all my product... well that's not true. A lot of my books go out from the States but whenever I have a print that I have to get printed and signed I ship that out Canada Post. So if the post goes on strike I will have to figure out what to do about that but it's kind of out of my control.

The post is a struggling institution-- it's a crown corporation which means that it's run by the government similar to the United States Post Office but it's very different. I think a lot of people take for granted the fact that Canada is so large and spread out. So the United States obviously is very large and serves a population 10 times as large as ours-- 10 times I think it might even be greater-- but the United States is considerably more dense with the exception of Hawaii/Alaska, everything is very centralized and easy to get to. Whereas if you consider Canada there are large regions that are very spread out and they still have to get served by letter carriers. Everyone has that as a right. It's something that they use to live their lives. So it's true that the post is had challenges and it needs to restructure perhaps but ...like I said, it's out of my hands.

Probably the biggest thing that happened to me in last week was my comic getting a little bit ripped off.

So this is something that happens very commonly to people in my field -- the ones who put silly JPEGs on the Internet-- and it certainly has happened to a lot of my friends and will continue to happen. And it's a transitionary thing I feel. In the past it wasn't so easy to share images as widely if you think back 10-20 years, maybe you could take a picture from Internet and email it to your friends... But Facebook shares certainly weren't a thing, social media wasn't a thing... And now that that's true... I'm trying to think back of what it what it was like 10 years ago... I think certainly you could put it on an image board, there was piracy but it wasn't as fast. So I think what shocked me about it is-- well the story goes: I put my comic up on Monday. Someone cropped the last two panels and put it on Facebook later that afternoon and somehow for whatever reason that one took off and it got like 16,000 shares. And the person did contact me which is good and ended up getting a link back to my site which did make a difference I was checking my stats and having that link attributed really did make a difference in terms of people being able to track it back to me. But once it's cropped -- once it's divorced from its source the first time, it makes it so much easier for it to go somewhere else.

It got then reposted without credit onto Twitter and got thousands of retweets there... And it will go forth from there. That's not the last of it. I've only seen the first two links in this chain but I have every confidence that it will show up later on in ways that I do not expect. And because it's removed from my credit I don't really have a say in how it's used. I don't really have control over that.

And I spent Ithe beginning of the week being really furious about it... Obviously I don't want to rant to you guys about it because you're the ones who are supporting me you're the ones doing the right thing and at the end of the day I think I was just really pissed off because it's rude. It's rude to take something that someone has made and post it without credit. That's all I really have to say on the matter.

I look forward to the day when this is a little bit more taken care of in an automatic sense. So I'm not a fan of DRM... You know, I'm not a fan of DRM and I don't like other software methods of controlling information in a way to source or to police ownership and make sure the financial compensation happens or whatever but... Tracking the source of something I think is is important and if there was a better way to automatically generate that metadata... We're getting closer to it for music. So more often than not if you have a music track you can analyse the ...you can fourier transform it, right... you can analyse the waveform and it creates a signature which you can then cross-reference with a database. And so if a browser finds this-- ok so I'm kind of explaining something where I don't really know how works but -- YouTube certainly does this. If they's if they detect music in the background of your video they will retroactively assign credit to the person it belongs to. Which is good! I think it's good, it takes the hard work out of the person being... like "I have to dig up this credit and I have to put the link and make sure it's all listed correctly"... the algorithm does it for you and then it automatically attributes the credit to the right person. It automatically forwards a little bit of that credit and attention where it's deserved. I think that automatic generation is a better way to do that and I'm looking forward to the day when that can happen for images as well. I don't necessarily want to see a cut of revenue although certainly if something gets 16,000 shares on Facebook... I wish Facebook would pay me a cut... Facebook....ha I don't like it much.

I guess tha't s all I have to say. I have to set up to stream today it's time for my monthly Patreon livestream and I'm little bit confused about what to do because I don't really have an idea for comic yet. So what I've decided I'm gonna do is a couple of drawings which will be going in my next sketchbook collection which is super late but you know what-- faster I work on it the faster it'll get out so that's what I'm going to do. So I will see a few of you in the livestream hopefully and if not I will catch on the Internet and I hope you have a lovely week! Later!