#Freelancing Courses 2023

[checanty]

Fish Wife (personal work)

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[kamrulislamsakib]

The Ultimate Debate: Graphic Design or Digital Marketing? Insights from Two Experts

Azizul: Yo, Abubokor! I’ve been thinking a lot lately... I know I’m all in on graphic design, but I’m curious. With your expertise in digital marketing, do you think it’s the better choice career-wise? Abubokor: Haha, I see where this is going! You know I’m all about digital marketing, but graphic design is a huge part of it, right? It’s tough to say one’s "better"—they both have their ups and downs depending on what you're looking for. Azizul: True, but I feel like digital marketing is kind of everywhere these days, especially with how businesses are all pushing for online visibility. But I love the pure creativity in design. I don’t know, sometimes I wonder if I’m missing out by not exploring marketing more. Abubokor: I totally get that. Digital marketing definitely has more “range.” You can do social media management, SEO, email marketing, and more. It’s all about driving results, and it's super dynamic. But here's the thing—every single digital marketing campaign relies on great design. Graphics, ads, videos—it's all about catching attention, and that’s where your skills come in. Azizul: Yeah, that’s true. Marketing needs design to grab eyeballs. But if I’m being real, I still enjoy the freedom and satisfaction that comes with making something completely from scratch—like logos, illustrations, and brand identities. You can’t really do that with marketing, right? It’s more about strategy and measuring outcomes. Abubokor: For sure, design is more about creating something beautiful and original. That’s why I respect your work so much! But digital marketing gives you that constant “rush” from seeing results in real time—click-through rates, conversions, engagement. You’re not just making things look good; you’re making them work for a brand. Azizul: That’s true. I guess marketing feels more numbers-based, and I’m not sure if I’d like that part. The idea of diving deep into analytics and figuring out which ads perform best… sounds like a lot of pressure. 😅 Abubokor: Haha, I get it! But honestly, once you learn it, it’s pretty satisfying. You get to experiment and see what clicks with an audience. It’s like finding the perfect formula for success. And the cool thing is, all your design skills come into play here too. You need good design to make your campaigns pop and connect with people. Azizul: Yeah, that does sound pretty cool. It’s like a full-circle thing. But at the same time, I don’t want to lose my focus on pure design. I mean, I could always work with marketing teams, right? I could bring my design skills to the table without diving fully into marketing myself. Abubokor: Exactly! That’s one of the best parts of digital marketing—it’s such a collaborative field. A lot of marketers need designers for their campaigns, and having both skill sets could make you even more valuable. Plus, you could take your designs and apply them in ways that help the marketing strategy succeed. It’s a win-win. Azizul: I love that idea! I could be a designer who works alongside marketers, understanding the full strategy, while still doing what I love. 🤩 Abubokor: Exactly, and if you ever wanted to dip into marketing, having that design background would set you apart. You’d already understand the importance of visuals in campaigns. Honestly, the two fields complement each other way more than people think. Azizul: That’s a solid point. Maybe I should consider learning more about the marketing side of things. Not as a full-time shift, but to expand my skills and work even more closely with marketing teams. Abubokor: That’s the spirit! And who knows? You might find a way to blend both worlds. It could make you unstoppable. 😉 Azizul: Haha, I like the sound of that! Thanks for helping me see the bigger picture, man. You always give me the best perspective. 🙏 Abubokor: Anytime, bro! Whatever path you take, I know you’ll crush it. Let’s just keep pushing the limits together. 🙌

[chsalm]

CLIENT HUNTING PAID UPDATED COURSE 2023 FOR FREE😍.

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[jcmarchi]

The Post Holiday Rush Backlog Episode | GI Show

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/the-post-holiday-rush-backlog-episode-gi-show/

The Post Holiday Rush Backlog Episode | GI Show

The year is not over yet, but arguably its biggest rush of video game releases have completed, which means now we actually need to play all of them. Or at least play as many as we can. On this week’s episode Marcus Stewart, Kyle Hilliard, and Charles Harte discuss the games they’re trying to catch up on including The Talos Principle 2 and Dave the Diver, and of course Kena: Bridge of Spirits, Batman Arkham Knight, and Grounded. We also answer questions from the community and reflect on our 2023 Thanksgiving meals.

[embedded content]

Follow us on social media: Marcus Stewart (@MarcusStewart7), Kyle Hilliard (@KyleMHilliard), and Charles Harte (@chuckduck365).

The Game Informer Show is a weekly gaming podcast covering the latest video game news, industry topics, exclusive reveals, and reviews. Join host Alex Van Aken every Thursday to chat about your favorite games – past and present – with Game Informer staff, developers, and special guests from around the industry. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app.

Matt Storm, the freelance audio editor for The Game Informer Show, edited this episode. Matt is an experienced podcast host and producer who’s been speaking into a microphone for over a decade. You should listen to Matt’s shows like the “Fun” And Games Podcast and Reignite, a BioWare-focused podcast. 

The Game Informer Show – Podcast Timestamps:

00:00:00 – Intro 00:06:33 – Thanksgiving Dinner Favorites 00:32:26 – Super Mario Bros. Wonder 00:37:11 – The Talos Principle 00:44:45 – Dave The Diver 00:49:57 – Inscryption 00:53:46 – Kena: Bridge of Spirits 00:59:29 – Grounded 01:05:05 – Batman: Arkham Knight 01:10:28 – Housekeeping and Listener Questions

[dragon-in-a-fez]

actually every time I post some small component of The Deep Lore from my 2020-2023 tumblr hiatus all y'all's "um what the FUCK" replies genuinely do my mental health some measurable good so I think I'll make a deliberate point of doing it occasionally. I'm gonna tag it "deep fez lore" if you want to blocklist my trauma dumping which is totally understandable.

anyway today's entry is about the time I challenged my boss on his transphobia and the company fired me for it, which of course in addition to being evil is super fucking illegal. my whole brain was pretty fucked up by this incident, folks. depressing as hell in both an "I have suffered great personal injustice" sense and a "jesus fuck this world sucks on so many levels" sense. then there was the long-term stress of sudden unemployment. this was at like, the exact moment Liz Truss killed the queen and crashed the economy, so hunting for a new job was a nightmare, and meanwhile my ex was contributing fuckall to our finances so I was borrowing money from my parents and taking underpaid freelance gigs to keep us from losing our house. it was a bad fucking time.

circling back around to the "super illegal" part though, like a year later my employment tribunal case finally got settled and I got enough money to go to Antarctica for two weeks lmao

[yvanspijk]

How did you get into linguistics? What was your education in it like?

Hi! It all started in secondary school. I found an etymological dictionary in the school library and I was hooked! I think I read it from A to Z. xD My grades for the languages (Dutch, English, French, German, Latin) skyrocketed because I started to see all kinds of connections that helped me learn them better.

After graduating, I did one year of Ancient Greek and Latin at university in Nijmegen, after which I switched to Italian in Utrecht. Why not historical linguistics? My teachers from secondary school warned me I wouldn't be able to make a living as a historical linguist. 'You should become a teacher or a translator.'

During my Italian studies, I took every optional linguistics class I could. I loved them - no surprise. :) I also bought books on historical linguistics courses that didn't fit into my programme. I wrote my bachelor thesis on the birth of the compound tenses in Romance (like Italian ho visto, French j'ai vu, Spanish he visto, 'I have seen').

After my bachelor's degree I decided to do a master's degree in linguistics, where I specialised in dialectology. My master thesis was about the changes the Brabantian languages underwent - regional languages spoken in the south of the Netherlands - during the 20th century due to influences from Dutch, the dominant standard language.

I finished my studies in 2015, after which the head of the Italian department asked me to become a teacher of Italian and linguistics. In 2017 I left university because of the job climate: due to the university policies, they could only give three years' contracts, after which you were expected to find another job for six months (courtesy of the Dutch law) and then reapply. -_- I had a brilliant Italian colleague who even decided to go back to Italy because of this.

While I found another lovely job, I kept studying historical linguistics in my free time. Eventually, I became a freelance linguist in 2023. It's the best decision I've ever made. It turns out you can make a living as a historical linguist (at least here in the Netherlands). :)

[risoria]

Art raffle for Hanaa's fundraiser

Hello everyone! I am holding a raffle for art commissions slots!

The raffle is to raise money for @enghanalulu's fundraiser, linked below. It has stalled and is very low on funds - currently only 290€ have been raised.

Her fundraiser has been verified by 90-ghost here, and again here. She also has an instagram account where you can see her old posts from way before october 2023. It is so surreal and awful to see her normal ig stories laughing with friends and going to cafés, etc...

You can of course also speak directly to her on here! Every little bit of help means a lot, I'm sure!

Here is a little bit of Hanaa's story. "Hello, I am Hanaa, a graphic designer from the southern Gaza Strip, Al-Bureij refugee camp. I work as a freelancer with agents from the Gulf and Europe to generate a simple source of income that helps and assists my working father who owns a small car workshop." Both Hanaa's office and her family's house have been destroyed in the bombings.

Here's how the raffle works: donate a minimum of 20€ to Hanaa's fundraiser and send me proof of the donation (a screenshot, which must be taken today or after today, until the raffle ends) on here, and I will enter you in the raffle for a halfbody commission (usually 35€). Every 20€ is one "ticket", so 40€ would be two entries so double chance to win, etc. You can also choose to donate 10€ if you want, and win a bust commission (usually 25€). So, if you do donate 20€ and win, you could choose between one half-body commission, or two busts. (I hope this makes sense... I tried working it out in my head but I'm sure when the winners are drawn we will be able to work it out!) The raffle will be going for two weeks, so until October 22nd, and I will randomize 3 winners.

Please share this post, so more people see it! <3 (and also please be a bit patient with me as in the past seven days i've moved to a new house and started a new job so it's quite a Lot but I want to help in any small way i can...)

fundraiser link:

[wirewitchviolet]

It is absolutely ridiculous that I have no way to contact people I care about in 2023.

So I got up today, and saw a big announcement about a certain particularly large company in the games industry did an absolutely massive round of layoffs despite an amazingly good year. You know, as they do. As it so happens, this is a company that, last I checked, employs several people I consider to be pretty good friends, and I feel compelled to toss them a quick message asking if that affected them, ask if poke around on their behalf for freelance work or slap a project of my own real quick they can collaborate on, or whatever.

And it's suddenly sinking in to me that I can't actually do that.

Tabletop game work is writing work, and that means 90% of the networking for most of the past decade or so happened over Twitter. Someone announces they're working on a thing, you message them, e-mails get traded to formally send stuff around. I was on there until I wasn't, so normally, that'd be where I'd be doing my checking in. But that of course is off the table. And like, I don't even have read-access to the site to check if anyone's announcing anything there.

Well, we've traded e-mails, right? We absolutely have. Back when everyone I'm worried about was at this other company, which let this same pile of people I care about and then some go several years ago now. So... those e-mails are no longer valid.

Well, what else is there? Oh right, the one friend has a discord server. It's been super dead for years now since he stopped doing the big weekly social thing it was there for, but it's still - oh, no. It's actually closed out. Same with the one for this freelance artist in that same general orbit... and oh Discord redid usernames and forced everyone to pick new ones. Damn.

Well, there's tumblr here, maybe? Like, there isn't really practically any direct messaging on here but... no, no wait, none of them have posted anything on here since bad policies drove a bunch of people out years back.

There's Facebook? But no, I don't have an account, they're all real legal name focused, and for personal security reasons, I never actually use my legal name anywhere even if I could make one (see, they also insist my name "sounds fake" over at Facebook). Well surely I can just find people's personal websites and send an e-mail but... no, people just don't have personal e-mails anymore, and spam got so bad decades ago now that I can't remember the last time I saw ANYONE post a personal e-mail address anywhere visible. Used to be phonebooks, but I don't think they really adapted to everyone just having a cellphone, and even if they did, they're a local thing.

So yeah. I've got nothing here. Uh... on the off chance anyone's reading this who I'm concerned about, hey, I hope you're OK? I'm still at least periodically checking the e-mails you last used to send things to me? Feel free to reach out and let me know how things are going?

But yeah this just sucks.

[dizzybunni]

⋆˙⟡ 𝐌𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐚𝐤𝐚 𝐃𝐫 𝐂𝐚𝐫𝐞𝐞𝐫 𝐓𝐢𝐦𝐞𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐞 !

⋆｡°✩

— Asahikawa, Japan circa . 2019

; 3rd year highschooler , begins posting sketches / artwork and short fan comics to social media under a faceless account.

— Asahikawa, Japan circa . 2020

; Graduates school and begins doing small freelance art jobs to make an income.

; Starts conceptualizing my first manga ( characters, world, plot, etc ).

— Asahikawa, Japan circa . 2021

; Finishes the final version of the one-shot and submits it to a manga competition, later announced that I am one of the winners.

; A couple of months pass after that until an editor reaches out to me about the possibility of professionally publishing my work.

— Asahikawa, Japan circa . 2022

; After a lot of drafting and planning and work, my editor and I decide to start presenting the drafts to publishers.

; Eventually, and to my ecstatic joy, it was picked up by Viz Media and placed in Shōnen Jump Weekly.

; Being well performed and widely popular, it was then serialized.

— Otsu, Japan circa . 2023

; After my first manga ran its course for a year, ending in 6 volumes / tankōbon, I moved to Otsu, away from my home city of Asahikawa and bought a house.

; After a week or so of settling in, I continued working on ideas for future projects and manga, landing on one idea in particular, and I reach out to my editor again.

; Without a doubt, the draft is picked up again towards the last of the year and is even more popular than my last.

— Otsu, Japan circa . 2024

; The manga becomes serialized ( this one ends in about 21 volumes, so it is actively being published for around 5-6 years ).

; This is around where I scripted I shift in, and I really just want to go with the flow of things from that point on �� so I don’t have the rest scripted besides general things.

— ✦ ⌇ Manga Publication Order！

: After Afterlife !

: Menagerie Syndicate !

: Etc ! ( Future publications )

꒰ᐢ. .ᐢ꒱/ . . .

[davekat-sucks]

I started Homestuck a few months ago, yes i began reading it for the first time in the year of our lord 2025.. And i've been scrolling thru a lot of HS posts lately, so of course i ended up discovering that John Egbert is apparently a trans woman ? I tried to do my own research but i literally don't understand, someone asked for this because of a tablerone? (for some reason), but what was the reason for that person asking? Did they just want a trans character for no reason? Doesn't that diminishes the point of representation if there's no real motive and sentiment behind it? I'm in act 5, and atleast where i am now, i've never read John that way, i swear i'm not trying to be transphobic, i really don't understand, i just hope that doesn't ruin his character, John is by far my favorite and i relate to him so much, i hope they can give a good reason a good development to that.

Im sorry for sending an ask about this topic, im sure you're tired of it already, i just feel kind of alone in a pit fire lol, i started this year so it just feels like im alone in a city everyone moved out of.. And i feel confused about so much stuff

It's fine. Parts of Homestuck's controversies or events that happened within the fandom aren't documented or recorded compared to other fandoms. Most of it has been lost to time or purged with only archived links and screenshots surviving. Some had think John is trans because of one glitch that happens in a flash called Alterniabound where we can see John looking like Vriska. Note however, it's part of a glitch that is called TRICKSTER MODE only in Karkat's section.

Despite being just a resprite or joke of John looking like Vriska, people took it a bit seriously and want John to be a girl. But genderbend in an alternate universe and timeline is out of the question. They want the base webcomic John character they have seen in Act 1 to fully change himself. Some also interpret Dad forcing in toxic masculinity onto his child is the reason why John couldn't connect with Dad Egbert, forgetting that most of John's life, he was mostly BRAINWASHED by Gamzee's chuckle voodoo to like clowns. As well as fans portraying Dad, one of the good guardians left, as an evil person since all the other parents like Bro, Mom, and Grandpa, were all portrayed in some negative light. Bro being an abuser, Mom being alcoholic, and Grandpa having flings with other women prior in his life (with Hiveswap implying he had left his other kids behind) before settling down with just Jade. The person who had wished for it only wants that trans representation, just like others have before her. They don't really care about John as his own being from his arc and personality. They just want a label to feel good about themselves. Despite the wish having been made in 2019, it has yet to become real compared to other wishes like Vriska being trans happening in Pesterquest within the same year (Vol 6 Pesterquest feat. Vriska was released on October 30 2019). James Roach claims that John becoming trans has been planned all along prior to the wish on a Reddit AMA years later on December 2023 after James Roach and his team took over HS2, renaming it Homestuck Beyond Canon. Aysha, another member of WhatPumpkin under Andrew Hussie's team, claim June was also planned all along in a tweet years before Beyond Canon was a thing.

The latest and closest we get to see hint of June Egbert in recent times is only in a glimpses of flashing images after Vriska Serket became Helltier in Homestuck Beyond Canon, where John sees a flash image of himself as a woman aka June Egbert.

However, HS2 would then be revealed to be part of a money laundering scheme. Andrew Hussie fell into debt with Viz Media due to underperforming sales in Homestuck Epilogues. He basically lied to freelance writers and artists that he would make a new Homestuck project. And when that failed too, he gives it all to James Roach and resigns himself from any Homestuck related projects, including HIveswap, which was a Kickstarter game he had made years back that made 2 million dollars. You can see its history here on Gio's blog.

[kukichart]

hey, do you have any tutorials on your art progress? like maybe a time laps? i'm suuuuuper interested in that. :o

ohhh, so it's a pretty long story lol, first of all, thank you very much for your interest!!

actually I/ve been drawing for my whole life as long as I remember myself :D but I became a digital artist about 7 years ago and as I didn't used to draw on a computer really, my arts looked somewhat like that (just now that I'm feeling super shy at the moment lol)

this is 2018:

a little later I got my very first job as a 2D artist but as a freelancer and I also started attending some courses, lectures and practice and some time later it turned already into smth like that:

(this is 2019-2020 i think)

(I'm extra shy at this moment already lol)

also, my nickname as the artist used to change from time to time until I got to the current one but nevermind

after that I got my very first "real" job as a 2D artist at a gamedev company and I started working on some real games hehe

that was the point when my art development got waaay quicker and I started drawing something like this as I worked with some more experienced artists

(this is 2021)

for the past couple of years and till 2025 I guess I used to draw a lot of fanarts, got into anime since the Covid started and drew lots of different game characters, props and other stuff like this:

(these are arts from 2023-2024)

but I also used to burn out a lot and drew rarely because of that and closer to the end of 2024 I started experimenting with renders a lot and finally realized the artsyle I really enjoy a lot, which bring me joy while drawing

(I knew it waay earlier but somehow I felt that if your art is not "fulle rendered" it's not cool, you know, and I stopped myself from drawing in a more comic-like line art style that I loved)

but finally I decided that art is all about comfort and enjoyment and since winter I guess I found the artsrtyle that I love and can develop and aalso I've got the craziest hyperfixation on Baldur's Gate 3 (and all the dnd related stuff unexpectedly) and now I draw stuff like this really a lot and also started learning more about comic panels, storyboards and so on to turn my illustrations into the short stories as well:

(this is 2025 already)

well, it got waay longer than I expected lol

not sure if you gonna read all of that really, but at least there are lots of pictures to represent my artstyle development in general haha

[puroresu-musings]

NAITO LEAVING NEW JAPAN. TAKING BUSHI WITH HIM

Well, whilst this is somewhat of a surprise, it’s also kind of not. Naito is one of NJPW’s biggest stars of this era. He’s one of the most over guys they’ve had since the 90s, and at his peak was a spectacular, charismatic worker. However, over the last 5 years or so, it’s been painfully apparent for all to see that his body is failing him from years of crazy bumps, and he just couldn’t go like he used to anymore. In 2023, he was still having some tremendous outings, namely carrying a broken down 60 year old Keiji Muto to a storytelling masterpiece, and had a ***** match with Will Ospreay in the G1, despite being legitimately knocked out on his feet. But these were the exceptions to the rule, it seemed, and the last year has been an especially tough watch. His knees have been giving him problems since 2012, and this, coupled with years of taking unhinged drops onto his head and neck have left him an obvious physical wreck. He’s only 43 years old, but moves like someone in their 70s nowadays. His WK match with Hiromu on January 4th was an especially sad sight.

Where Naito goes from here is uncertain at this point. It’s rare that major homegrown stars choose to leave New Japan, and if he was planning to retire soon, I reckon NJPW would’ve tried harder to keep him a little longer, but I’d say it’s likely he does what Minoru Suzuki does nowadays; freelance everywhere, and do mainly comedy stuff, getting by on his charisma. And there’s always NOAH. It’s already a wrestling equivalent of a care home in some respects, overflowing with guys who are physically way passed their best, so he likely will be ok there. He famously doesn’t enjoy working in America, so I’d say we can probably safely rule AEW and WWE out. He has fellow Animal Hamaguchi/Keiji Muto disciple BUSHI with him too, so they can do some LIJ style team. BUSHI of course, is not so shocking an exit, in fact it’s more shocking he was still there given his job these days was pretty much exclusively to eat pins in multiman tags.

Regardless of where Naito goes from here, I wish him the best. As sad as it’s been the last couple of years, he’s still an all time great, and wherever he ends up, I hope he finds the time to rest and heal his body, as opposed to continuing to feel like he has to push himself to carry a company. This obviously leaves a big hole in the New Japan roster, and his exit will no doubt hurt, but they’re stacked with great young guys to build around. Of course, that won’t be a quick process, and with Tana retiring too, the company is pretty much out of guys they can just throw out there to pull in a big crowd at this point. It’s an interesting time, but we’ll see how it all works out.

NDT

[mostlysignssomeportents]

A link-clump demands a linkdump

Cometh the weekend, cometh the linkdump. My daily-ish newsletter includes a section called "Hey look at this," with three short links per day, but sometimes those links get backed up and I need to clean house. Here's the eight previous installments:

https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/

The country code top level domain (ccTLD) for the Caribbean island nation of Anguilla is .ai, and that's turned into millions of dollars worth of royalties as "entrepreneurs" scramble to sprinkle some buzzword-compliant AI stuff on their businesses in the most superficial way possible:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/08/ai-fever-turns-anguillas-ai-domain-into-a-digital-gold-mine/

All told, .ai domain royalties will account for about ten percent of the country's GDP.

It's actually kind of nice to see Anguilla finding some internet money at long last. Back in the 1990s, when I was a freelance web developer, I got hired to work on the investor website for a publicly traded internet casino based in Anguilla that was a scammy disaster in every conceivable way. The company had been conceived of by people who inherited a modestly successful chain of print-shops and decided to diversify by buying a dormant penny mining stock and relaunching it as an online casino.

But of course, online casinos were illegal nearly everywhere. Not in Anguilla – or at least, that's what the founders told us – which is why they located their servers there, despite the lack of broadband or, indeed, reliable electricity at their data-center. At a certain point, the whole thing started to whiff of a stock swindle, a pump-and-dump where they'd sell off shares in that ex-mining stock to people who knew even less about the internet than they did and skedaddle. I got out, and lost track of them, and a search for their names and business today turns up nothing so I assume that it flamed out before it could ruin any retail investors' lives.

Anguilla is a British Overseas Territory, one of those former British colonies that was drained and then given "independence" by paternalistic imperial administrators half a world away. The country's main industries are tourism and "finance" – which is to say, it's a pearl in the globe-spanning necklace of tax- and corporate-crime-havens the UK established around the world so its most vicious criminals – the hereditary aristocracy – can continue to use Britain's roads and exploit its educated workforce without paying any taxes.

This is the "finance curse," and there are tiny, struggling nations all around the world that live under it. Nick Shaxson dubbed them "Treasure Islands" in his outstanding book of the same name:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780230341722/treasureislands

I can't imagine that the AI bubble will last forever – anything that can't go on forever eventually stops – and when it does, those .ai domain royalties will dry up. But until then, I salute Anguilla, which has at last found the internet riches that I played a small part in bringing to it in the previous century.

The AI bubble is indeed overdue for a popping, but while the market remains gripped by irrational exuberance, there's lots of weird stuff happening around the edges. Take Inject My PDF, which embeds repeating blocks of invisible text into your resume:

https://kai-greshake.de/posts/inject-my-pdf/

The text is tuned to make resume-sorting Large Language Models identify you as the ideal candidate for the job. It'll even trick the summarizer function into spitting out text that does not appear in any human-readable form on your CV.

Embedding weird stuff into resumes is a hacker tradition. I first encountered it at the Chaos Communications Congress in 2012, when Ang Cui used it as an example in his stellar "Print Me If You Dare" talk:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njVv7J2azY8

Cui figured out that one way to update the software of a printer was to embed an invisible Postscript instruction in a document that basically said, "everything after this is a firmware update." Then he came up with 100 lines of perl that he hid in documents with names like cv.pdf that would flash the printer when they ran, causing it to probe your LAN for vulnerable PCs and take them over, opening a reverse-shell to his command-and-control server in the cloud. Compromised printers would then refuse to apply future updates from their owners, but would pretend to install them and even update their version numbers to give verisimilitude to the ruse. The only way to exorcise these haunted printers was to send 'em to the landfill. Good times!

Printers are still a dumpster fire, and it's not solely about the intrinsic difficulty of computer security. After all, printer manufacturers have devoted enormous resources to hardening their products against their owners, making it progressively harder to use third-party ink. They're super perverse about it, too – they send "security updates" to your printer that update the printer's security against you – run these updates and your printer downgrades itself by refusing to use the ink you chose for it:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/ink-stained-wretches-battle-soul-digital-freedom-taking-place-inside-your-printer

It's a reminder that what a monopolist thinks of as "security" isn't what you think of as security. Oftentimes, their security is antithetical to your security. That was the case with Web Environment Integrity, a plan by Google to make your phone rat you out to advertisers' servers, revealing any adblocking modifications you might have installed so that ad-serving companies could refuse to talk to you:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/02/self-incrimination/#wei-bai-bai

WEI is now dead, thanks to a lot of hueing and crying by people like us:

https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/02/google_abandons_web_environment_integrity/

But the dream of securing Google against its own users lives on. Youtube has embarked on an aggressive campaign of refusing to show videos to people running ad-blockers, triggering an arms-race of ad-blocker-blockers and ad-blocker-blocker-blockers:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/where-will-the-ad-versus-ad-blocker-arms-race-end/

The folks behind Ublock Origin are racing to keep up with Google's engineers' countermeasures, and there's a single-serving website called "Is uBlock Origin updated to the last Anti-Adblocker YouTube script?" that will give you a realtime, one-word status update:

https://drhyperion451.github.io/does-uBO-bypass-yt/

One in four web users has an ad-blocker, a stat that Doc Searls pithily summarizes as "the biggest boycott in world history":

https://doc.searls.com/2015/09/28/beyond-ad-blocking-the-biggest-boycott-in-human-history/

Zero app users have ad-blockers. That's not because ad-blocking an app is harder than ad-blocking the web – it's because reverse-engineering an app triggers liability under IP laws like Section 1201 of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, which can put you away for 5 years for a first offense. That's what I mean when I say that "IP is anything that lets a company control its customers, critics or competitors:

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

I predicted that apps would open up all kinds of opportunities for abusive, monopolistic conduct back in 2010, and I'm experiencing a mix of sadness and smugness (I assume there's a German word for this emotion) at being so thoroughly vindicated by history:

https://memex.craphound.com/2010/04/01/why-i-wont-buy-an-ipad-and-think-you-shouldnt-either/

The more control a company can exert over its customers, the worse it will be tempted to treat them. These systems of control shift the balance of power within companies, making it harder for internal factions that defend product quality and customer interests to win against the enshittifiers:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/microincentives-and-enshittification/

The result has been a Great Enshittening, with platforms of all description shifting value from their customers and users to their shareholders, making everything palpably worse. The only bright side is that this has created the political will to do something about it, sparking a wave of bold, muscular antitrust action all over the world.

The Google antitrust case is certainly the most important corporate lawsuit of the century (so far), but Judge Amit Mehta's deference to Google's demands for secrecy has kept the case out of the headlines. I mean, Sam Bankman-Fried is a psychopathic thief, but even so, his trial does not deserve its vastly greater prominence, though, if you haven't heard yet, he's been convicted and will face decades in prison after he exhausts his appeals:

https://newsletter.mollywhite.net/p/sam-bankman-fried-guilty-on-all-charges

The secrecy around Google's trial has relaxed somewhat, and the trickle of revelations emerging from the cracks in the courthouse are fascinating. For the first time, we're able to get a concrete sense of which queries are the most lucrative for Google:

https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/1/23941766/google-antitrust-trial-search-queries-ad-money

The list comes from 2018, but it's still wild. As David Pierce writes in The Verge, the top twenty includes three iPhone-related terms, five insurance queries, and the rest are overshadowed by searches for customer service info for monopolistic services like Xfinity, Uber and Hulu.

All-in-all, we're living through a hell of a moment for piercing the corporate veil. Maybe it's the problem of maintaining secrecy within large companies, or maybe the the rampant mistreatment of even senior executives has led to more leaks and whistleblowing. Either way, we all owe a debt of gratitude to the anonymous leaker who revealed the unbelievable pettiness of former HBO president of programming Casey Bloys, who ordered his underlings to create an army of sock-puppet Twitter accounts to harass TV and movie critics who panned HBO's shows:

https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-features/hbo-casey-bloys-secret-twitter-trolls-tv-critics-leaked-texts-lawsuit-the-idol-1234867722/

These trolling attempts were pathetic, even by the standards of thick-fingered corporate execs. Like, accusing critics who panned the shitty-ass Perry Mason reboot of disrespecting veterans because the fictional Mason's back-story had him storming the beach on D-Day.

The pushback against corporate bullying is everywhere, and of course, the vanguard is the labor movement. Did you hear that the UAW won their strike against the auto-makers, scoring raises for all workers based on the increases in the companies' CEO pay? The UAW isn't done, either! Their incredible new leader, Shawn Fain, has called for a general strike in 2028:

https://www.404media.co/uaw-calls-on-workers-to-line-up-massive-general-strike-for-2028-to-defeat-billionaire-class/

The massive victory for unionized auto-workers has thrown a spotlight on the terrible working conditions and pay for workers at Tesla, a criminal company that has no compunctions about violating labor law to prevent its workers from exercising their legal rights. Over in Sweden, union workers are teaching Tesla a lesson. After the company tried its illegal union-busting playbook on Tesla service centers, the unionized dock-workers issued an ultimatum: respect your workers or face a blockade at Sweden's ports that would block any Tesla from being unloaded into the EU's fifth largest Tesla market:

https://www.wired.com/story/tesla-sweden-strike/

Of course, the real solution to Teslas – and every other kind of car – is to redesign our cities for public transit, walking and cycling, making cars the exception for deliveries, accessibility and other necessities. Transitioning to EVs will make a big dent in the climate emergency, but it won't make our streets any safer – and they keep getting deadlier.

Last summer, my dear old pal Ted Kulczycky got in touch with me to tell me that Talking Heads were going to be all present in public for the first time since the band's breakup, as part of the debut of the newly remastered print of Stop Making Sense, the greatest concert movie of all time. Even better, the show would be in Toronto, my hometown, where Ted and I went to high-school together, at TIFF.

Ted is the only person I know who is more obsessed with Talking Heads than I am, and he started working on tickets for the show while I starting pricing plane tickets. And then, the unthinkable happened: Ted's wife, Serah, got in touch to say that Ted had been run over by a car while getting off of a streetcar, that he was severely injured, and would require multiple surgeries.

But this was Ted, so of course he was still planning to see the show. And he did, getting a day-pass from the hospital and showing up looking like someone from a Kids In The Hall sketch who'd been made up to look like someone who'd been run over by a car:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/53182440282/

In his Globe and Mail article about Ted's experience, Brad Wheeler describes how the whole hospital rallied around Ted to make it possible for him to get to the movie:

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/music/article-how-a-talking-heads-superfan-found-healing-with-the-concert-film-stop/

He also mentions that Ted is working on a book and podcast about Stop Making Sense. I visited Ted in the hospital the day after the gig and we talked about the book and it sounds amazing. Also? The movie was incredible. See it in Imax.

That heartwarming tale of healing through big suits is a pretty good place to wrap up this linkdump, but I want to call your attention to just one more thing before I go: Robin Sloan's Snarkmarket piece about blogging and "stock and flow":

https://snarkmarket.com/2010/4890/

Sloan makes the excellent case that for writers, having a "flow" of short, quick posts builds the audience for a "stock" of longer, more synthetic pieces like books. This has certainly been my experience, but I think it's only part of the story – there are good, non-mercenary reasons for writers to do a lot of "flow." As I wrote in my 2021 essay, "The Memex Method," turning your commonplace book into a database – AKA "blogging" – makes you write better notes to yourself because you know others will see them:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/09/the-memex-method/

This, in turn, creates a supersaturated, subconscious solution of fragments that are just waiting to nucleate and crystallize into full-blown novels and nonfiction books and other "stock." That's how I came out of lockdown with nine new books. The next one is The Lost Cause, a hopepunk science fiction novel about the climate whose early fans include Naomi Klein, Rebecca Solnit, Bill McKibben and Kim Stanley Robinson. It's out on November 14:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865939/the-lost-cause

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/05/variegated/#nein

[davidmariottecomics]

Goodbye IDW! Hello Something New!

Hi there! 

After seven years and some change, today, 12/22/2023, is my last day at IDW Publishing. It's for good reasons. Things just timed out that my last day could be the last work day of the year for IDW and in the new year, I'll be starting a new job elsewhere. I'll still be in comics and once I can talk about the new gig, I'm really stoked to be letting you all know. So, today, I want to say my goodbye to IDW. 

But first, before I get to that, I did have something else notable happen this week. I sent my last tweet!  I'm officially shutting down my Twitter at the end of the year and if you see a Twitter account claiming to be me after January 1st, it's an imposter. If you'd like to keep up with me, however, I've got good news! There are lots of other ways to find me still. Here are a few! 

Check out and bookmark my website! Get access to my blog, plus lots of behind the scenes stuff and new projects at my Patreon!  Subscribe to a newsletter version of my blog for free at Buttondown!  Follow my blog on Tumblr!  Keep up with my main socials: Bluesky and Instagram (I'm @davidmariotte at both)! 

Okay, with that out of the way, let's talk about it. This is not my first time saying goodbye. In fact, almost exactly a year ago, I said my farewells to Transformers, one of the hallmarks of my IDW run. I don't want to revisit that too much, so if you want to read about my early days at IDW or that part of my career or a big list of thank yous to my collaborators, you can! And while I've had significant runs with other books, most notably Sonic the Hedgehog which with January's Sonic: Fang the Hunter #1 will mark 100 issues of Sonic at IDW under my editorial eye, or my personally exciting, if shorter runs on stuff like Godzilla, Samurai Jack, the Hasbro Action books, Canto, Scarenthood, The Kill Lock, The October Faction, Wynonna Earp, Brynmore, Atomic Robo, or literally so many other books, I don't want this to just be a retrospective on the work. In fact, I'm largely not interested in talking about the past when I say goodbye this time. 

IDW has afforded me a lot. They've helped me find my place in the industry. They let me do some writing. They let me do a lot of editing. I learned various other skills both through directly on the course of the job and through my own interest because of what I was doing and seeing there. I have made true lifelong friendships. And I have made comics. So leaving feels weird. I'm very bummed to be leaving a place that really has been my home (and for the past couple of years, has quite literally been mostly at my home) for so long. But I am even more excited about what's to come. On my side, I can't announce it just yet, but watch this space for some big news soon (after a couple weeks of much needed vacation). 

Talking about the future I actually can say a little more about, I wanna tell you how excited I am for IDW. Yes, I'm leaving, but IDW remains home to so many people--both at the company and our freelance creators--and so many projects that are close to my heart. Next year is their 25th anniversary. That is an impressive feat in not just the world of comics, but any industry. For the milestone, they've got a lot of cool stuff planned. 

I'm not going to blow up IDW's spot and say anything about what's coming up too early. Just to talk about the things that are already public knowledge, you've got things like the new TMNT: The Last Ronin sequel! The TMNT ongoing on it's road to issue #150! There are cool new originals like Golgotha Motor Mountain! There's the launch of the aforementioned Fang the Hunter which is IDW's first Classic Sonic mini-series and sees 100 unique issues of Sonic at IDW and is just laugh-out-loud funny and full of such good action! And I'll tease this, when the Sonic ongoing is back with issue #69 in May, you'll be in for an absolute treat as that series runs up to #75! 

I know some readers of this blog don't read a ton of American direct market comics. You aren't "Wednesday Warriors" who go to the comic shop every week. You like the comics you like and I've been graced to be a person working on those comics. If you aren't as familiar with how these comics work, let me assure you of a couple things. The books I was editing and many unannounced projects that I set up will still be happening. Because of the timelines of comic production, you'll still see my name in IDW books for a few more months and, at the same time, you'll see new credits creeping in. And if we've done everything right, that'll be about the only thing you'll notice is different, at least at first. As the editors really take the reins and take over, we'll both be in for the treat of the unknown! I'll be reading them with a good sense of professional jealousy. 

Now, there's one other book that has been announced for next year and I wanted to do a special call out for. Godzilla: Valentine's Day Special went to press this week. It's the last IDW book I saw all the way from inception to completion. And, in many ways, it's kind of a really good analogy of a comics editorial career. I think, genuinely, this may be the book that went from conception to reality the fastest in my career. I think it took... less than a week from a half-joking suggestion of doing a Godzilla Valentine's Day book to getting Zoe Tunnell's pitch in and approved by Toho and getting it on the publishing schedule. Usually these things take a bit--people are working on other projects, licensors need time to review things, whatever other bumps happen along the way--but this was like lightning. Everyone just got it instantly. And then Zoe turned in the script and it was great! Things continued, as they do, and then... we got a curveball or two. I won't go into too much detail, but major thanks to Sebastian Piriz and Rebecca Nalty for getting it done and having a book that we were all so proud of that I could send to press this week. And it struck me on that final press day that despite the curveballs we had been thrown, when it came to actually getting it approved, everything was so easy, straightforward, and smooth. When you read it in February, if I've done my job right, maybe you'll remember seeing somewhere that there were some curveballs. But mostly, you'll just have a really good book in your hands. (BTW, you did JUST MISS the final order cutoff on that, so do check in with your shop about still trying to get you a copy!) 

Most of the time, after a book like that goes to press, an editor gets ready to do it again--maybe in a few minutes or days or the next week. For the first time in a long time, I won't be getting ready to do it again at IDW. That's a complicated feeling, but I'm so excited for the future. 

The best metaphor I've been able to come up with for what is happening is it's like I've been working in a one room office constantly for the past seven years. It's got that dull office lighting, you know the kind. Each day, projects come and go across my desk, and as they otherwise disappear into the world, I put up one of those glow-in-the-dark stars as a memory of it. And each day, I work with so many people--my coworkers at IDW who've helped foster my growth, my collaborators as both a writer and editor who have made so many stories with me, all the folks where things never quite lined up but we kept trying, and the readers who are an inherent part of the ecosystem, the reason we make what we do. And so, for each of those people, I put up a little glow in the dark toy. 

Now, for the first time, I'm going to get up and leave the office. As I flick the switch behind me, everything in there that has been soaking up light for years now glows. Some of the glows are slight. Some are so fantastically bright, it feels like they're drawing attention through the walls of the room. Together, they make the room brighter than it was when I left. Now, sometimes, I might sneak in to borrow a toy--make a copy of it for the new office I'm doing the same thing in. Other people will certainly do the same and make they've got their Evan Stanley figure on their shelf. If I ever return for a longer time, I'll be so glad to flick the light back on and let them all absorb even more light to glow an even longer time. If I don't, I rest happy that the glow goes on and forever people will be able to come back and discover some part of it. And I'll start working on a new office soon. 

If I keep going,  I'm a little afraid that I won't be able to stop. So, for now, I'll just say again, thank you. The future is about to be very exciting. Next year is for the creators you love or don't know you love yet, the books that are going to light you up that you've come to expect and the ones that will catch you by total surprise. While there are a lot of things I'm going to miss deeply and books that I'm going to wish I had gotten to do more on, I also have the really exciting experience of getting to see this stuff as a fan of IDW, just like you. And, hey, I hope you'll be a fan of the stuff I do next too! 

As for next steps, like I've said, I'm not going far. I'll still be in comics. I'll share the news when I can.

Before that, I'm getting a little break. Not too long, just a few weeks, and obviously the holidays are part of those, but in my time between my jobs, I'm going to be working on some personal projects. I put together a little tracking list recently and I have something like 40 projects in various stages of gestation right now. Obviously, I'm not going to be working on all of those at once, and chances are, some of them will never see the light of day, but I'm going to be working on trying to bring a couple of them to you in the new year (and beyond). If you're an artist that I've had the pleasure of working with in the past and you think you might be interested in peeping the list and seeing what we could do together, let me know. You can reach me on my website contact page, through my email, or through Discord (feel free to ask if you don't have it!). 

And if you read this blog, you'll see me hyping my last IDW projects up until we run out of what I left behind. Simultaneously, once I've got stuff to start hyping up for my personal projects and for the new gig, you'll see those start to pop up here too! I'll also keep talking about making comics and my thoughts on the state of the world and whatever else it is I blog about here on a regular basis! 

Thanks for reading. Bye-DW! Next week, I'll be doing a little Best of 2023. But for now, onto our regular features. 

What I enjoyed this week: Dungeons & Daddies (Podcast), Reverse 1999 (Video Game), Nancy (Comic), Lego Masters (TV show), Out There Screaming: An Anthology of New Black Horror (Short story collection), Yu-Gi-Oh: Duel Links (Video Game), Cunk on Earth (TV show), I'm a Virgo (TV show), The Boy and the Heron (Movie), an easy last week at IDW, all the well-wishes that've already poured in, leaving today to celebrate Christmas with my family and then have some downtime to work on my stuff, signing the paperwork for the new job, not being on Twitter anymore, getting all of our mail out in a timely fashion for the holidays, Chainsaw Man (Manga), I picked up Superman and Hawkgirl, so excited to get caught up on those, and knowing that in leaving this job, there are certain folks I just get to deepen my relationships with as friends, instead of co-workers. 

New Releases this week (12/20/2023): Godzilla: The War for Humanity #3 (Editor) Godzilla Rivals: Jet Jaguar vs. Megalon (Editor)

Announcements: The Cartoonist Cooperative is still doing E-Sim cards for Gaza. You can donate a digital sim card so that residents can get access to the internet and have more functional phones and, in exchange, get some comics or a drawing or whatever else is available from the many participating artists. Additionally, the CC is hosting their mini-comic awards! It's a cool way to maybe get your mini-comic recognized and make some scratch!

You can also give more directly. If you don't have money, and I get it, you can call or fax or email or show up at the offices of your representatives. Keep your eyes open for actions too, whether they're another general strike or demonstrations and marches in your area. Given the nature of the things, they often come together fairly quickly, so do exercise your due diligence. Also, of course, being informed and just giving your time to Palestinian journalists and writers is incredibly valuable. 

While Becca has got some things brewing for next year (and now on a schedule), you should reach out if you'd like to work on comics with them! You can find their gallery on their website and also, y'know, maybe pick up a few things for belated gifts while you're there!

Finally, I called out my Patreon earlier. You can support me (and boy, that would be cool during the time between paychecks because vacation is nice, but living is still expensive) and get not just this blog, but a lot of cool special features like extra posts, comics, infographics, and more! At the $10+ levels, you can also access stuff like a holiday gift guide I made, a podcast pilot for a spicy show with Becca, and a ton more! 

Pic of the Week: Happy holidays from Becca and me! If you wanna full card in your inbox, lemme know! 

[marlshroom]

going to art school at this specific era of the art community is a little crazy. id say i started my course in sequential art when NFTs and AI art were on the rise, and by my second year we started actually talking about them in class. in 2023 i asked my professor, an established, freelance comic book artist, where he thinks all this AI stuff is going to go in the next few years and he told me too start looking out for lawsuits and strikes, and this was before i was made aware of the animation guild.

on the other side i have professors who are either required to tell us about the new AI features coming up, in classes where i am learning an adobe program their new AI features are baked into the book, or the professors ourselves are telling us this themselves unprompted! i just got off a meeting for my capstone class and i joined in the middle of my professor telling us how there is now a tool that will take a back side and a front side of a character and generate a full 360 for them, and talked about how much time it would save.

i can see my peers faces get kind of tense when these things are brought up and the atmosphere changes a little bit. i wonder if anyone else is going through this.

[risunsky]

2023 review

So, was it a good year ?

I think so, I've enjoyed challenging myself, I've tried Beksinski for a second time, Klimt twice, I've done a crossover hellraiser which I'm quite happy with… I made cement for the first time and it was great!

At the 2022 review I said I wanted to do more horror, so I went for gore with all my emaciated skeletons and I'm very happy with that.

September is my favorite of all.

Outside of my fanart world, my biggest freelance achievement has been completing a big comic commission on time and now that the book is out and I've had good feedback from both commissioners and readers I'm relieved and quite proud. It's been a stressful time so it's nice to see that it hasn't all been for nothing. So, even though I'll never stop considering myself as a learner and experimenting with new things, I think that this year I've finally managed to settle on a style, or a range of styles, that I like and that I think I'll stick with for a long time. I've been drawing for a very long time but this is the first year I've felt so strongly that I've found MY style. As for my universe, it seems that somewhere in the horror area of dark fantasy it is my home.

What's planned for 2024?

In terms of priorities, the gift commissions, yeah.... I'm soooo late. I've finished one, but two are still on hold, and have been for at least a year now. I'm terribly sorry about that, because I haven't been overwhelmed like that for a long time, and I intend to sort it out as soon as possible.

It should also be the year I finish the Goya remake. Ideally, I'd like to finish in February because that's my birthday month, or March because that's the anniversary of my discovery of Ghost.

For the rest, don't take it as a promise, because I tend to let myself be carried along by my desires and they are constantly changing. For example, I was planning great things with Nunussy but the poor thing was left on the side of the road. My interest in it just died. it seems that shipping characters and writing an alternative universe for them is not my thing. I have at least 3 shorts comics ideas, more or less ghost related but always mixed with something else. I really really want to work on it but it's a lot of work and this year I need money, like more than usual so I don't know... I also want to do Bloodborne fanart.

The fails

I haven't kept to my plan to draw the other characters in the Ghost lore, oopsy. I still haven't had the time to open any commissions, but last year was really special, working on a big contract that kept me busy for months and that was something new, it was stressful enough. 2024 should be different. I had to show a bit more of my traditional technique, let's say I do it with the Goya project, it's a semi-failure.

Not really a failure: I still haven't come up with a design for an official t-shirt. I think that's because I'm more of an illustrator than a designer and for a good design I need to find a special thing. It's not a big deal for me, just, if it happens it's cool, if not, well, not the end of the world.

To finish

I'd like to thank all those who follow me and who like and share my drawings, including those who remain silent in the shadows - I'm myself a lurker so I understand! Of course, a huge thank you to those who have supported me on ko-fi, it's the first time I've tried this system and I'm happy to have had some support pretty quickly!

my apologies if there are any English mistakes in this text, which is still too long

Have a great festive season!