Personal – Page 20

Black t-shirt insecurities

tom-falco I normally dress in a t-shirt and jeans, unless I’m going to a meeting or wedding or something a bit fancier than just every day stuff.

And that is how I want to dress daily – black t-shirt and jeans. Didn’t Steve Jobs dress like that? I think he did it because it was easy to just wear the same thing and not think about what you wear, although when you wear jeans and a t-shirt every day like I do, there really isn’t much to think about – green, red, black?

I like the black.

The only reason I don’t do it is because I don’t want people thinking I’m wearing the same shirt every day, even though I have so many black t-shirts and they are fresh when I put them on. I’m not sure why I care, all they have to do is sniff me to see the shirt is clean.

I literally have my finger on an Amazon order now, ready to hit “send” for a package of black t-shirts, but the thought of being seen as dirty is stopping me. The ironic part is that I wash my hands 20 times a day. I’m not neurotic, it isn’t that. I just do it when I enter the house or when I throw out the trash or before I eat, you know, things like that.

I do love my Batman/Starry Night shirt, so I’ll wear that once in awhile and I have plenty of other t-shirts that I like. When I go out to dinner or meetings, etc., I wear a dress shirt. But I like the black t-shirt and jeans look as my every day uniform. What do you think?

It’s funny, after I wrote this post I came upon this story on the CBS website called, “Should you wear a work uniform?” referring to wearing the same thing every day. It’s a growing trend where people voluntarily wear the same thing every day! The lady in the CBS piece says she was exhausted every day trying to figure out what to wear, I don’t feel like that I just feel like wearing the same thing because I like the look. No other reason.

Rejection

Michael Maslin has an excellent article in his blog about constant cartoon rejections. He shows an image which is a foot high of his rejected cartoons.

I sometimes equate cartoonists with actors. Actors have that cattle call lifestyle where they go from audition to audition and rejection to rejection and it’s hard not to take it personally.

So much of it has to do with personality I believe. You may remind the person making the decisions of someone they don’t like and you are in their gun sites forever for that reason. It may have nothing to do with your work.

But of course most of it is just too much competition. Too many people out there do the same thing and it’s easy to put others down. Art is subjective, so I may not like someone’s drawing style, but that doesn’t make it bad and I may not understand a comic gag line, but others do, so that doesn’t make it bad.

There was a time when I sold a lot of my work simply by submitting it. I would sell cartoons to magazines, books and newspapers. I was part of King Features’ “New Breed” concept, where they published various cartoonists in the newspapers, grooming us for better things to come. I stopped after a bit to start a business and have always regretted that.

I would send them maybe 20 comic panels and they would purchase maybe five of that lot. Not bad. I would sell a lot to magazines, too. They would buy what I sent them.

The good part about the internet and social media is that you can do your own thing and build your own audience. If you have good content, it’s not that hard to build an audience; making a living at it is another story.

Patience; patience in adversity

Guess the pink moon is not working in my favor. I reached out to three people this week for 10 With Tom interviews and was blown off by all three. Well, one never answered me. The other two told me they weren’t ready, one asked me to wait a few weeks and one asked me to wait six months!

The problem is they are hot now and in a few weeks or months the bloom will be off the rose. I’m feeling a bit dejected.

On a happy note, one of my favorite blogs, The Daily Cartoonist is back in action, having been on hiatus for almost two hears. In fact, tomorrow, May 2, will be exactly two years since Alan Gardner put the blog on hold. Now Andrews McMeel/GoComics owns it and has started it up again under the aegis of John Glynn the main man at GoComics and comic junkie D.D. Degg will be running daily operations and providing most of the posts.

On the first day cartoonists were popping up out of the woodwork. It’s amazing how much the blog is loved. It really covers the comics industry excellently. It’s mostly aggregating stories about comics and cartooning, but it’s the one stop shop for that info. I was thinking of hitting them up with some of my comic strip and cartoonist interviews that I do with 10 With Tom, you know, fresh content.

I’m still working on getting my Tomversation comics published at GoComics.com, too. It’s amazing to me that I’ve been published in books, magazines and newspapers for years, but I cannot break that bubble.

Patience. Patience in adversity.

I finally cut the cord

phone

I finally pulled the plug on my house phone, the land line. I don’t know why I kept holding onto it, for 10 years or so I had it forwarded to my cell phone, so I never used the house phone. But boy, was it a bitch getting AT&T to release me. They gave me the run around. One guy refused to pass me onto the correct department until he looked at my account and tried to stick me with other services.

Then he passed me to another department and then they passed me to another and then I was on hold for a long time and then the lady who came on could barely be heard. It was some game they play in order to get you to give up. AT&T are bastards.

I finally went to the website and chatted with a guy and he did it within few seconds.

I then asked him about my very high cable and internet bill. He gave me a lower rate and gave me a faster internet speed, which I thought I was paying for all the while. I’m not sure why they just don’t give everyone the fastest internet, why would you not want that?

I want to learn what Sling and Hulu and all those anti-cable tv things are about so I can just tell the cable tv to take a hike.

It feels weird now not having a home land line, but like I said, I never used it anyway. It would just forward the calls all to my cell phone, which all were telemarketers anyway.

I also cancelled four websites I had with Earthlink. I had moved them long ago and was still paying for them. Earthlink is expensive and for almost 20 years I paid those rates!

They too tried to give me the run around. I kept trying to explain to the guy that one site was only $13 per year on WordPress, yet Earthlink charges me $45 per month. Why would I stay with them? My main biz site is now only $150 per year with a new provider, as opposed to their rate of $45 per month, which is $540 per year! At one time I had a lot of websites with them and I paid through the nose. I also had them return the $139 they charged me for SSL service which I never used. I got it free from my new web host.

Loyalty has its price. So does stupidity on my part. I’m glad I finally wizened up.

How do I raise my Uber rating?

uber

My Uber rating is 4.82, I’ve been trying to get it up to 5.0, which is was for a long time, but about a year ago it dropped and I don’t know why.

I don’t know why I care either, but I’m just wondering why it went down.

I always tip, I over-tip. But am I talking too much for one driver and not enough for another? Should I sit in the back seat or the front seat? Do I remind a driver of someone they don’t like? What is it?

I never check the driver’s ratings, I just hop in the car and we’re off and I suppose the drivers don’t really check most ratings of passengers, since it’s numbers game and I doubt they can be that picky.

One time a driver got mad because the address given on the system was next door to where I was. But for some reason, I couldn’t get it to put my exact address in. Now it uses a GPS that does it for you so you don’t have to punch in the address.

But he was upset. Not sure why, I was literally 10 feet away early on a Saturday morning, there was not another person on the street and there I was standing there, holding my luggage waving at him.

But I want that rating up to 5.0. Maybe I should offer them chewing gum and bottled water when I get into the car, rather than the other way around.

Maybe I’ll try Lyft. I think I have a few free rides coming with them.

I’m learning WordPress

code

I’ve been rebuilding my business website. Yes, while I would love to draw comics and write about art and comics all day long, I do have a real job.

I’m not very familiar with WordPress, although this blog is on the WordPress platform. But for the business site, I’m using WordPress.org, rather than WordPress. com (there is a difference).

What happened was, I am using an ancient program now called FrontPage 2003, which is obsolete, my web host, along with almost every other web host in the world will stop supporting the program, most have stopped already and mine is ending it all in May, so I’m scrambling to get the new site up and running.

I would prefer to pay someone, but I am willing to sit here for 12 hours to get something done while I know if I paid someone, that 12 hours would turn into weeks for them. I know from experience. So to get it done fast I am plugging away, literally with all the plugins I’m using.

I did spend one full day doing something only to realize that I could just copy and past a lot of the old site to the new site, which sort of wasted the previous day. Live and learn.

I do like learning new things. I was very proficient in HTML and this new way of doing websites is a lot of plugins and CSS, which I am learning. I must say, I have a very high regard for people who write code every day. I would jump out the window if I had to do this daily, it’s not for me. I prefer drawing and writing.

I’m excited to “go live” as they say. It’s the first reboot of the site in almost 20 years! Scary and exciting at the same time. When it’s done I’ll share it with you.

Picking fights on social media

I usually ignore people on social media, what I mean is I ignore it if someone says something about me that I don’t like and I also ignore things that bother me, like plagiarism, unless it’s my own work they are stealing.

I got into an altercation with two people yesterday on Facebook and Twitter. One guy attacked me on Twitter about my Ten With Tom interviews on Huff Post and here in this blog, saying, “You can speed answer the questions. I don’t mind. I give my interviewee’s time to think up good answers.” And “They [meaning me] only do 10 questions. We do 20. They only do half the job on the Huffington Post.”

He sounds like a jerk and quite amateurish, I don’t know of many people who attack people on their non-confrontational interviews. Guess his handful of readers prefer his 20 questions over my millions of readers at the Huff Post who prefer my 10 questions. Who knows. I like the sound of “Ten With Tom” rather than “Twenty With Tom,” plus I know the readers and the person interviewed are really not into 20 questions – too long and boring.

The other guy I had the altercation with posts comics on Facebook and they are Peanuts characters, you know, Charlie Brown and Snoopy. He does this all the time. I mean, every time he posts a comic, that’s what it is, Peanuts, only his version.

I told him I thought that was copyright infringement, he says it’s a parody, but I don’t know if a parody or fan art could be considered that if it is every single one of your comics that you post. I know I wouldn’t like it if it was my work being “parodied” every single time. I thought it was daily, but he says he doesn’t post daily. I’m not a fan of his so I didn’t know. But every time he posts, it’s Peanuts characters which I think are being stolen and breaking trademark and copyrights.

So anyway, we got into an altercation over that. What do you think about this?

Our yearly block party

We have this great block party in our neighborhood once year in March. Everyone comes out and shows and sells their art, there is live music and food and everyone knows everyone. It’s a lot of fun. It’s on Gifford Lane, hence, it’s called the Gifford Lane Art Stroll.

giffordlane1

Out with Huff Post in with Medium

I’ve started writing for Medium, moving away from Huffing Post (here is all my work there), where the stories get jumbled too much with politics.

thinker

Not that I’m against politics, but I don’t write about politics, I write about art and culture. So I’ll be writing columns for Medium now. But interestingly enough, politics is the number one subject read about on Medium, but I think with Medium, you can choose the type of stories you would like to read so if you don’t want to see politics, you don’t have to.

I like that Medium is easier to navigate and it has more of the subject matter I like.

I will have two columns on Medium. One will be stories, articles and the other will be single-panel cartoons. I’ll let you know when I start publishing those.

At the end of 2016 Medium’s audience grew 140% to 60 million unique readers a month!

I have carried my 10 With Tom column there, I reposted the Stephan Pastis piece on Medium, which drew more readers than any one of my other columns at the Huff Post, about 100,000 people read that piece – my most popular one. That says a lot about Stephan.

I have been posting my stories under the “Medium Partner Program” where people who subscribe to Medium for $5 per month receive these stores. Not that they cannot be seen by everybody, but with the partner program I get paid each time partners read my stories.

The majority of Medium is free to read. 90% of the stories are free, it’s just the partner program stories that are not, well, they offer three free views per month, sort of like a newspapers’s paywall and I liken the partner program to a Patreon account where you receive some free goodies for subscribing.

But the majority of the same stories are posted here on my Tomversation blog, so you don’t have to go there to read my stories, but I would like you to maybe check them out just for the hell of it.

Here are three that have run in the past, but I have now had published on Medium:

10 things you didn’t know about cartoonist Stephan Pastis

It’s an underground world that’s full of history (lots of pics of the NYC Transit Museum

7 Reasons we’re addicted to HQ Trivia. Do you play this live trivia game?

I’ll start posting new stories at Medium and I have to start interviewing people for 10 With Tom again. You can see my past 10 With Tom’s here on Tomversation.

And when I start publishing my single panel cartoons, I’ll give you the link for that.

I was ghosted by a mentor

hal-paper I was looking over Facebook friends, deciding whether to dump people and I came across this lady who works at one of the major newspaper syndicates. She and I met by accident through social media and she was going to help push me and my comic strip through the syndicate process as she has with others only I screwed it all up. She has ignored me ever since. And I think she would like Hal (shown here) from my new comic strip “Hal and High Water.”

What happened was I did a bunch of 10 With Tom interviews with cartoonists and I happened to interview one of her favorites. She helped get this particular cartoonist published and syndicated and she seems like she is in love with him, at least it appears that way from her Facebook posts, but she did fawn all over him in an online chat.

Well, she saw the interview and asked to befriend me on Facebook. I wondered, “Who the hell is this person wanting to befriend me?” And then I looked her up and saw she worked at the syndicate. I got all excited. I approved her friendship and that was that.

But as I do too often, I’ll approve a friend, someone I have not seen in years, and we don’t interact. We are just there. So I said to myself, “Let me say hello and introduce myself so as not to just have our ‘friendship’ linger.” I sent her a direct message and for the next hour, we had a conversation back and forth on Facebook Messenger.

She asked about my own cartoons and offered to help! She and I spoke about that bitch who works at the syndicate who I told you about before, the one I confronted at ComicCon, and lo and behold, she hates her and she called her every name in the book, using some filthy language! I was shocked and excited. I had an ally. She told me all sorts of gossip about the syndicate and she told me about all the famous cartoonists she has known and I thought, “This is it, I reached my tipping point.” I truly wanted to meet her.

She then told me to send her my comics, printed out in hard copy form. She said she was going on vacation the next day and she would look at them upon her return. So I agreed.

The next morning, she checks in on Facebook in Islamorada, one of the Florida Keys, which is basically in my neighborhood! What should I do? Invite her and her husband for drinks? Coffee? Lunch? I wasn’t sure how to approach it. I had only “met her” online the night before and anything I did or said would obviously look like me reaching out to use her influence. Should I bother her on her vacation or what? I wanted to, but I respected her privacy.

I decided to not say anything. And all that week she posted her adventures on Facebook, she was in my neighborhood for lunch, she went to a museum, they went fishing, they really did it all and me, I stayed silent. I didn’t even “like” her posts. I just stayed silent.

I guess that was not the thing to do because she has never said a word to me again. I did reach out and ask if she received my comics and I got silence back. I was ghosted by her, a potential mentor. To this day, which is almost a year later, she has not said a word to me on Facebook and we do comment on common posts. We agree with things politically and we enjoy the same comic artists and we have so much in common.

I do see from her posts that she travels often and likes to get together with people. I didn’t know. I honestly didn’t mean to offend her. I truly wanted to meet with her and pick her brain, but I guess I wanted to respect her privacy, too and therein lies the rub, I ruined my chance of what could have been something so great. Now I’m on my own again, pushing my comics and trying to get noticed.