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Made this today. There's 33 seperate entities that you can identify. Try and find them all :)

We're Not Gonna Make It, No No...

It wasn't just Monday morning grumpiness that caused me to write my last post. It was something much, much more substantial. I've come to the conclusion that it's time for me to make some drastic changes. I need to lose ballast and spice things up with completely new challenges and directions, or I'll go nuts. That's the short version. Now follows the long version for anyone who cares to read about it. Which, most likely, is just me. But hey, at least I always like reading back what I wrote. So that's fine.

My past, especially my childhood, left me with a very specific kind of personality. My strengths have always been in stubbornly overcoming the worst kinds of odds. I can't become a comic artist or webdesigner because of colourblindness ? Watch me. I can't pour a glass of milk because of no depth perception ? I practice until I can. I walk around with the firm knowledge that if someone else has archieved something, I can archieve that same thing. When I draw, I don't sketch, I just jot everything straight onto paper. And when people tell me that something (like, say, a webcomics convention) is a bad idea or would never work and would never be able to be set up, well... let's just say I'll be the first to attach wings to pigs and to turn up the AC in hell if necessary.
It turns out I'm fairly good at getting the right people together and enthousiastic about the things I truly believe in. And my stubbornness gives me plenty of strength to pull the cart when things are facing impossible odds and it seems like too much needs to be done. I'm the right kind of guy when things need to start up and there's just no way it'll make it.
That said, there's a downside to these traits. A huge one. I can't handle success and I suck at maintaining things. I always need to go up, further, bigger, more, or different, change, move forward in that direction. I can't handle things when there's no current to fight against and all that is required is to maintain the status quo. It's a very serious flaw - I'll lose all focus, I'll become sloppy, I get insecure about the whole project, I very slowly start to lose interest, or worse, I start considering destroying it all and seeing wether or not I could rebuild it again. I can't seem to overcome this effect. It works like that everywhere in my life, down to the smallest things.

Over the past half a decade, I started two huge projects. Huge for me, at least. Probeersel.com and ClickBurg. Both have grown to a fairly stable, successful position where a better leader than myself should take over, given the previous section of this posting. I'm trying. Honestly, I am. I'm doing my best to maintain everything, and to ignore all the effects my personality traits are unleashing on it. With ClickBurg, I still have a big fight left to go, so that's easier to maintain. But Probeersel.com is starting to suffer from my sloppiness. There are a few links here and there that don't work. For four months already, there hasn't been a half year report yet. Staff members' verdicts on new members auditioning aren't being chased up by me with the same vigour anymore as I used to. It may all be fairly small, but the signs, to me, are very clearly there. To make matters worse, I'm growing exhausted. Trying to maintain these projects takes more and more effort, and the fact that their successes makes them grow more also increases the work load.

Thing is - I never wanted to be the head honcho of Probeersel.com or the president of the ClickBurg foundation. I'm an artist. Several people in remote and recent past have claimed otherwise, but it's who I am. I need to create. I can't help creating. When my last relationship ended, I returned to creating, which I'd partially sacrificed for the sake of the relationship. It felt like coming up for air. No matter what people feel about what I create, I need to create it. And exactly the way it comes out.
My biggest fear of recent times, with all the effort that the two projects take, is that they will come in between me and my comics. That at some point, I'll have to really choose between drawing or organising. And that if I'm not careful, the only way to opt for drawing comics is to utterly destroy the things I'll otherwise have to organise. A nearly impossible choice: either give up on drawing and focus entirely on organising, or focus on drawing and let the things I put so much organisational effort into fall to peaces and be for naught. I know several people who've had to make this decision at some point in their lives and I see the very scary road ahead through them.

And I know what I'd choose. I'd choose drawing. Always. There is no doubt in my mind that I would. I need it. Without it, I'd whither away. But I don't want the things I've built over the years to just fall apart either.
Which is why I need to start taking a bit of action now. Start letting go of some things. Start saying 'no' to new things. Focus more on drawing, and make sure to have more time available for that than just the weekly Grim DotCom episode. For experimental projects like The Artificial Real, or just drawing and doodling and coming up with things. Because I already lack the time for that and it's eating me up. It's one of many things contributing to my becoming overworked: I don't have the time anymore to do the thing that got me into all this in the first place.

I've taken several steps lately to work on this. Today I took a bigger one. It's still no final step, but it'll help me resolve what I should be doing and why. So I can take well-considered though drastic steps. And avoid that big dillemma for now. Because I'm still much too young to be faced with such a dangerous fork in the road. Rather take a few steps back and avoid as much as possible having to choose a direction. It should still be possible to have some of my cake and eat it.

Poof!

You know the feeling you get when you've spent a lot of time and energy on something and it just -poof !- explodes into nothingness ? I kind of have that now. It's not entirely fair that I'm writing this, but it's how I feel right now.

I wanted to write that I'd had a pretty good weekend. Yes, it was also my birthday (I know all two people who read this blog) but I got to avoid celebrating that as much as possible. I'm talking about being interviewed by le Figaro first thing after work on Thursday, about webcomics and ClickBurg. Then installing Probeersel.com's fourteenth member. Then taking care of a few semi-urgent things on Friday, after which I went out with friends in a city where they don't know me. Despite the hangover the next day (not to mention the fatigue from barely sleeping for two weeks straight) I managed to produce a Grim DotCom episode and to only be an hour late publishing it online. After which I also helped launch Michiel van de Pol's new website, CartoonDiarree. The latter despite Space1 having moved servers on Saturday, thus throwing ClickBurg and CartoonDiarree offline all day. All in all, this would have been a good weekend.

Except ClickBurg and CartoonDiarree are offline again. And the whole 'drawing comics live at the fair' thing isn't getting picked up by the media nearly at all. Some media have picked up the story of us slaving away, and those media mostly write about fairs, so that's a nice big, completely different audience, who have been alerted to the existence of webcomics. Yay for us there ! But the other media, especially the (web)comics media, are mostly ignoring the story. And that ticks me off. Both the sites being down and the complete ignoring of the press release. Makes me wonder why I put in the effort at all.

It's just Monday morning grumpiness, I'm sure. Probably also due to being congratulated with my birthday a lot this morning n stuff. I did get more sleep than usual, so my morning mood isn't so bad, but still. Hrmph.
Webcomics media, I know the wussy webcomics drama in the States are great soap writing material, but god damnit, here in the Netherlands we slaved away, live, for 11 days, produced 233 comics in that time, and introduced the phenomenon of webcomics to a new audience over 1 million people in size. Notice that ! And Space1, get off your ass and get that server back online.

Slackers.

Commerce lacks the element of taste... CLEARLY.

This is going to be a short and bitter post.
What is wrong with the companies that release DVDs ?! They have a reputation for releasing the most obscure movies and series on DVD with little care for the commercial success, and don't even get me started on all the contemporary pulp that fills up the shelves. But god damnit, there's some quality stuff out there that isn't being released, even though enough people are calling out for it. And I know of at least two, which means that if a barely-cultured schmuck like myself knows of two, there must be thousands !
I know this blog is read by nobody and their dog, but hey, it's one of the very few places where I get to send this message out and by Jonathan Livingston Seagull's wings, I'm gonna do it. I can only hope the message reaches someone who can do something about it.

I'm talking, first of all, about Harrison Bergeron. Yes, Harrison Bergeron (different link). It's a TV movie from 1996 based on a Kurt Vonnegut story, and definately one of the most accessible and thought-provoking movies in the collection. But is it out on DVD, despite a worldwide cry out for 'why not ?!' ? Nope. Just on VHS, and only within the US territory. I've seen the movie, it was done great, and practically everyone I know, from philosopher friends to barely-educated friends, will greatly enjoy it or have already greatly enjoyed it.
Why the hell is this not out on DVD ??

And the second.. Manchild. A series still broadcasted on quality (often public) channels here in Europe. BBC released the first series on DVD but now even that is gone. And series 2, which was a lot better still, never even saw DVD daylight.

I ask you, where's the justice in this world ?