Digital Sketchbook

Made a card for a co-working who found a new job, simple.

Hated what I was doing, I actually came close to throwing it away multiple times but I needed to give them something.

Every one loved the card, honestly caught me off guard.

According to The Calvin and Hobbes Wiki, this is the last of Tracer Bullet's three appearances, so here are his first two.

The very first is a single day's strip, part of a larger arc involving a Really Bad Haircut, hence the hat.

The second strip is a week-long story about a Maths problem.

Remembering my own mathematical ineptitude, with 'O' Level results to prove it, one sympathises.

Shee you 'round, shweetheart.

A maquette of the invisible id monster from Forbidden Planet (1956).

US: 2,959,064.44 square miles (7,663,941.7 km2)

Australia: 2,969,907 sq mi (7,692,024 km2)

And the person above has the impact of the Mercator projection completely backwards: North America and Europe appear much larger than they actually are due to their latitudes. Most notably Greenland looks like it is bigger than Africa! (It isn’t.)

In the picture below, the pale blue is Mercator and the dark blue is actual size:

And here is Africa vs Greenland:

For the public domain, time stopped in 1998, when the Sonny Bono Copyright Act froze copyright expirations for 20 years. In 2019, time started again, with a massive crop of works from 1923 returning to the public domain, free for all to use and adapt:

https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2019/

No one is better at conveying the power of the public domain than Jennifer Jenkins and James Boyle, who run the Duke Center for the Study of the Public Domain. For years leading up to 2019, the pair published an annual roundup of what we would have gotten from the public domain in a universe where the 1998 Act never passed. Since 2019, they've switched to celebrating what we're actually getting each year. Last year's was a banger:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/20/free-for-2023/#oy-canada

But while there's been moderate excitement at the publicdomainification of "Yes, We Have No Bananas," AA Milne's "Now We Are Six," and Sherlock Holmes, the main event that everyone's anticipated arrives on January 1, 2024, when Mickey Mouse enters the public domain.

The first appearance of Mickey Mouse was in 1928's Steamboat Willie. Disney was critical to the lobbying efforts that extended copyright in 1976 and again in 1998, so much so that the 1998 Act is sometimes called the Mickey Mouse Protection Act. Disney and its allies were so effective at securing these regulatory gifts that many people doubted that this day would ever come. Surely Disney would secure another retrospective copyright term extension before Jan 1, 2024. I had long arguments with comrades about this – people like Project Gutenberg founder Michael S Hart (RIP) were fatalistically certain the public domain would never come back.

But they were wrong. The public outrage over copyright term extensions came too late to stave off the slow-motion arson of the 1976 and 1998 Acts, but it was sufficient to keep a third extension away from the USA. Canada wasn't so lucky: Justin Trudeau let Trump bully him into taking 20 years' worth of works out of Canada's public domain in the revised NAFTA agreement, making swathes of works by living Canadian authors illegal at the stroke of a pen, in a gift to the distant descendants of long-dead foreign authors.

Now, with Mickey's liberation bare days away, there's a mounting sense of excitement and unease. Will Mickey actually be free? The answer is a resounding YES! (albeit with a few caveats). In a prelude to this year's public domain roundup, Jennifer Jenkins has published a full and delightful guide to The Mouse and IP from Jan 1 on:

https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/mickey/

Take a moment and ask yourself, a project like this requires a lot of time, money and dedication of resources, why would scientists dedicate that time to something that could just be done by a tree?

The answer is they wouldn't. So that means this claim requires further investigation!

This project is called LIQUID 3, and it's not meant for cities with wide open spaces, it's meant for cities like Belgrade in Serbia. These cities are densely populated and heavily polluted, to the point where pollution actually chokes out current trees and makes creating green spaces difficult.

Liquid 3 was a PhD scientists answer to these problems. The microalgae tank is intended for spaces where you either:

Don't have enough space to plant full trees, or

Don't have enough time to plant trees and wait for them to grow up.

The tank is extremely efficient when you consider the amount of space needed compared to the amount of CO2 turned into oxygen. The tank can operate throughout the winter. And most importantly, it can be quickly set up in areas that desperately need relief from air pollution NOW not in 10 years when trees are done growing. Children currently suffocating on polluted air can't wait for trees to grow, they need to be taken care of now, and Liquid 3 is one of the ways to take care of them. Depending on the species of microalgea used, a number have shown a pretty amazing capacity to pull heavy metals out of the air which is something trees can get choked up by.

The tanks aren't just tanks either! Liquid 3 have solar panels placed on top, they have lighting and mobile phone charging, and they work as public benches. The designers of it want to encourage green spaces where there's room, but where there isn't room or time, Liquid 3 can step in. Realistically, this isn't a replacement for trees. It's replacing boring metal city benches with new, cooler benches that also clean the air (and have at least some heating during the winter).

Not only that, but the microalgea that grows is native to Serbia and all that microalgea has a ton of great uses! It makes for great fertilizer, compost, wastewater treatment, cleaner biofuels and even for helping create new tanks for further air purification. They only require a quick algae divide once a month, and the produced algae can be carted off to where ever it's needed. This makes them effective solutions for areas that can't sustain complex installations.

It's since been pointed out that while Lichtenstein did copy one of Russ Heath's drawings of an airplane getting hit, the painting depicted above was actually copied off Irv Norvick, because Lichtenstein did this so many times to so many comic artists.

In Lichtenstein's defense, he was doing this in a time when comic artists frequently weren't even credited in the issues themselves. In his condemnation, he never even tried to check, nor has he made any move to pay or credit any of the comic artists who recognized their own work later on. Rather than elevating the "low art" of comics, he was widening the gap of financial success and respect even further.

The Hbomberguy of this story is art historian David Barsalou, who has now spent decades tracking down the original art and the names of the original artists used in Lichtenstein's most famous output. Here's the full flickr gallery for the Deconstructing Roy Lichtenstein project. Frequently copied were Tony Abruzzo, Ted Galindo, Mike Sekowsky, Joe Kubert, Jerry Grandenetti, and dozens more Golden Age artists who aren't very well known in comics circles, let alone art history books. Many of them died in poverty. That's something that the Hero Initiative, mentioned in Russ Heath's comic above, aims to prevent.

In a massive stroke of irony, the commercial artists he copied from display much higher classical technical skill than his enormous-scale paintings. There's a delicacy to the brushstrokes, a level of expressiveness, and a clear understanding of form and shadow in those tiny newsprint originals.

The changes Lichtenstein made often omitted or simplified backgrounds and text, used garish primary colors, and—later in his work—undressed the women in the panels. Central to his "iconoclasm" was depicting comic art as even more simplistic and culturally shallow than it already was.

Copyright law offers no help to the original creatives, freelancers on exploitative short-term contracts. Russ Heath explains, “I couldn’t do anything because all the characters that I did draw for comic books were, at that time, owned by the comic book company. So, if they want to sue, they could sue and have a legitimate reason to sue. But they wouldn’t make enough to bother having a suit.” Most of the writers ripped off by Somerton, too, were on contracts which meant they do not have the rights to their own work.

My dads coworker is at the front and this man comes Up and hands him a document.

The coworker took a Look at the document and while he couldn't read the things written by Hand, because he wasn't wearing his glases, he did notice the Logo of a different Bank so he's like:

"Oh, sorry sir you can't do that here! You have to go to the other Bank for this :)"

The man, visibly confused leaves, but dosen't take the document with him.

The coworker, now just as confused as the Guy actually Takes Out his glases and reads the hand written part:

So our branch had had a big takeover robbery as well as a note one. We also had a teller that had transferred to our branch after having been through a robbery. She was sweet as apple pie, hair up to the ceiling, southern lady who had just been through multiple robberies.

A guy comes in and hands her a folded note. Her immediate thought was “this guy needs to learn you don’t hand bank tellers notes. I am just not going to read that.” So how the conversation goes:

Her: how can I help you today?

Him: I’m here to get money

Her: great *hands him a withdrawal slip*

Him: all the information is on the paper

Her: to process the transaction I need you to put it on my piece of paper

SO HE FILLS OUT A WITHDRAWAL SLIP. Meanwhile another coworker is looking at her latest robbery notification email thinking the guy at the window looks a lot like him but the teller is calm and seems to be following standard transaction.

Back at the window the teller notices his name on the withdrawal slip doesn’t match the name on the account so she asks for his ID. He once again tells her all the relevant info is on the folded note but also gives her his ID and says it is his dad’s account. She tells him he will need a check from his dad to get cash. He grabs the note and leaves.

ONE HOUR LATER

Two new robbery notifications hit our emails, both branches within a mile. It is our guy. Teller goes over to the manager and sheepishly informs them he was here and the time. Security department is notified as are local police and the FBI. The FBI comes over believing that these poor tellers had been robbed for the 3rd time in a month and take her statement. She is completely embarrassed telling them how everything went down and he kept signaling to the note and telling her to read it but she was just done.

To which this FBI agent of 40 years who has been to the scene of many bank robberies (several at this branch in recent weeks) says: Ok. Let me see if I got this right, he came in fully intending to rob you. He gave you the note and you just…refused to read it? So he left and went to the bank literally across the street, handed them the exact same note, and they just handed him five grand? Do I have that correct?”

Her: I am so embarrassed

FBI: this is best thing I have ever heard. He even handed you his ID! Holy-

Her: I feel so dumb!

He was working at a 7-11 that got robbed a lot, working nights. And he was bored and read though his entire contract and learned if you're shot at work you get $200,000. Also, he hated his boss and the job.

So when a guy came in to rob him at gunpoint he got excited and was able to hatch the plan he had been pondering while dealing with a Shitty Boring Job.

"Dude. Shoot me in the leg. Right here- it'll go through and not hit anything vital and I'll be able to quit this fucking job. I'll give you fifty fucking grand to shoot me in the leg then you can take everything in the register."

One day, this guy came in and announced he was there to rob the place. This man was smoking a cigar with one hand and had a gun in the other.

My uncle pointed at the "No Smoking" sign and told him in no uncertain terms, "Put that cigar out, or finish it outside first."

This guy, bless his heart, went back outside to finish his cigar.