So yeah.. had a very weird day. Got good news and bad news - I'll start with the bad. Before you get too worried, it's not really directly involving me, let me start with saying that first.
On the Dutch comics forum Stripliefhebbersforum, where I've been posting rather enthousiastically the past few days, a message was posted about the comics in the Dutch edition of free news paper Metro. Seems the chief editor has some fascist ideas about its comics.. he first made sure the right technology has been implemented to enable Metro readers to vote away columnists they don't like. Doesn't sound too unreasonable at first glance, but it's in a columnist's nature to provoke and challenge, and usually that riles up the audience. This should be a good thing ! But of course, any bored person with a cellphone who takes the slightest offense in the collumn of today can get the author kicked out.
Now, whereas columnists in general write their columns freelance and don't rely too heavily on the money they make off it, this wonderful man now wants to tackle getting the same idea installed for the comics. Did that ever go down the wrong way with Dutch comics enthousiasts - he got quite a heated response in that forum. But what's worse is that he put on an arrogant attitude and wrote ON HIS PUBLIC FORUM that he would of course first let the artists know about this in a face to face talk. Yeah - nice going, dork, you just posted it ONLINE for the WORLD to read. A call to comic artist friend Jean-Paul Arends (responsible for the Scribbly cartoons in Metro) proved that he - and therefore likely the other comic artists either - had NO idea that this would be implemented. Way to go, mr. Dijkgraaf.
For four years Scribbly's been a popular (and, as always with popular things, equally hated) presence in this news paper and Arends, in sharp contrast to the collumnists, DOES heavily rely on his income for this. The Scribbly comics take quite a lot of his time and effort, and now he might suddenly find himself in an 'Idols' kind of situation. Imagine going to work but not knowing wether you have one tomorrow and that anyone on the street with a cellphone can just SMS a message to get you voted out of it.
Needless to say I'm very aggravated about this idea. So was JP by the way - he was heavily shook up.
At nearly the same time I got completely different news: seems I won the lottery. Which is good news but, needless to say, in the light of the above I wasn't immediately very enthousiastic about it. But it turns out I won a 3-day return trip, hotel stay, breakfasts and a little pocket money included, to my choice of the lottery's selected European cities. And there's a few interesting ones amongst them. I do have to go on this trip before March 1st, though, so I really have to consider this and decide on it soon - after all, you don't win something like this every day..
There was plenty more to today but I'll leave it at this since these were the major updates.. I'm tired now. I have to shower, shave, and sleep, because I have another working day ahead of me tomorrow and from the sounds of Gregory having tested the upload script on the site again, it looks like I have a few more headaches with the site's server migration ahead of me this weekend. Oh, the joy..
So yeah. Catch you later folks.
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