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Tuesday, March 01, 2011


First things first. There's a Mugwhump update today at ACT-I-VATE - please check it out.

Done that? Grand.

So I had a drink with Faz Choudhury last week. And he made a persuasive case for Twitter, which I'd previously gone to great lengths to avoid. And I thought I'd maybe create an account and just stand at the back of the room and watch how it worked for a while... give it a fair chance, kind of thing.

What happened was more like an ambush. I mean, honestly, you people terrify me. It's overwhelming, completely overwhelming. I basically shut my computer down for the rest of the day, hardly went near the thing unless I had to. Because every time I turned it on it was just a wall of noise. How can anybody actually think in that environment? I eventually figured out how to switch off notifications when someone follows you and that calmed things down a bit. But still.

Now what?

I admit I signed up partly for cynical reasons. I have an upcoming project that I want to give every promotional opportunity possible (soon, grasshopper, soon!).

Also, I've become reeeally out-of-touch with the UK cartooning scene over the last couple of years, and I thought Twitter was probably the place to find out what's going on, what the UK conventions are now that people are most excited about, that sort of thing. (I've avoided going to any local conventions lately because I was drawing a book you couldn't actually buy in the country in which it was drawn, due to Disney regional licensing arcania - seemed a bit pointless trying to promote it).

So I'm hanging in there. For now. There are things about it that bother me (not least the word "followers", which just makes the follow-ee seem too grandiose for words - you're not friends, you're not fans, you're "followers". What?!).


I'm doing a lot of actual, physical, get-your-fingers-dirty drawing right now, so I'm not near the computer a whole lot anyway - probably a good time to acclimatise nice and slowly.

You still terrify me, though.


  1. You don't have to do anything you don't want to, some folks tweet a lot, every day, all the time. Some rarely tweet, maybe they rarely lurk/read stuff. Most of the non-comics friends I follow have drifted away from it. Tom Spurgeon uses it to point out new TCR articles and not much more.

    Also -- the fewer people you follow, the less you have to see/fear. I follow 32 folks and most of them barely/rarely tweet, which is a-okay with me. I dunno how anyone follows scores to hundreds of people. IIRC there's a tweet deck of some sort which can further control the noise, separate out incoming info based on how you organize the folks you follow, publishers, family, collaborators, a band you might like, nimrods, etc.

    You can ignore most/all of it and just drop plugs/announcements and walk/run away. It can be fun and you can learn things (Dave Gibbons tweeted a link to a blog post which showed how to extend the life of Pitt brush markers, for instance) but there's nothing that forces you to do anything, of course. It's not something to fear, it's something to utilize.

  2. Thanks. The final "you terrify me" was more rhetorical flourish than heartfelt cry for help (though I still stand by the first one). But as I say, I'll give it some time.

  3. You are not alone in your fears Roger. I think you have fairly well summed up why I have never signed up for Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, etc.

  4. Here's the thing that took me longer than it should have to realize about Twitter: it's like the radio; you turn it on when you want some background noise, and--more important--turn it off when you don't. Welcome to Twitter, the "pet rock" of the 21st century.

  5. its worth persevering with. I signed up and then went away for six months. then there was an author i'd heard of. I saw he was followed by someone else I liked the writing of. Then there were some pretty shapes and I thought I'll see who this is (it was Andy Diggle). Then I found out that comics existed, like I'd never seen before. You never know what you will like, you don't know what you have not yet found out about. You can take it or leave it, but there's something in there for you somewhere. You just don't know what it is yet.



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