I was recently interviewed for the comic-speciality blog Comixpedia. I talk about my new comic (which you should read) named Foxy Lollop, Gluemeat, the past, blogging, and tuberculosis. It’s more fun than you can shake a virulent infection at.
Fellow Gluemeaties, please welcome into your loving bosoms the man known as Scott Tribe, fellow progressive, progressivebloggers.ca moderator, Canadian extraordinaire, and lover of various things that go “ding” when you rap them with a spoon (Ed. note: sources needed on that last claim).
And why, pray thee ask, would you do that kind of service to this man? Because Scott is now part of the extended Gluemeat family.
Scott has been hard pressed to find a good, secure, and mostly respectable home for his new blog, but he ended up being hosted on Gluemeat instead. So after much toil and trouble, Scott’s DiaTribes (get it?) is now online and ready to change the way you see… um… Scott… uh, forever. Yeah. You can rest assured that piping hot social commentary will be served on a daily basis, topped with sweet, sweet political views and outlooks, as well as the occasional good word for Stéphane Dion as an after dinner mint.
Welcome, Scottie! I reserve the right to call you Scottie!
Fellow friends and well-wishers, Gluemeaties of all walks of life, I wish to take an instant of your time to remind you that there are ways to make your time spent here on Gluemeat even more valuable than it already is. Sure, there are already outstanding additions like Gabbly and the handy Comment Subsciption feature that make this webiste a virtual zen garden of oneness with the joys of cyberdom. But there is, still, another way for you to really take your Gluemeat experience to the next level.
Boggles the mind, doesn’t it? Yet, it is possible! I know what some of you are thinking right now: “Gluemeat is already so great, it would be hard for me to believe that there is a way to render my overall Gluemeat experience even more pleasurable without tearing through the very fabric of reality.”
Yet it is there. It’s called Gravatar.
Perhaps some of you have noticed, when you comment, that a little silhouetted icon that appears next to your writings. Perhaps you have even noticed that a different icon appears next to certain commenters. Favouritism on my part? Hardly; those who have an icon which isn’t the anonymous silhouette dude are people who have signed up for a Gravatar. In fact, these folks are recognised across the worlds of comment-dom as unique individuals, shining beacons of individuality across a sea of generic icons! So why could this not be you? Why don’t you stand out from the pack of silhouettes? Don’t you deserve that? Don’t you deserve to be unique?
This is all you have to do is get yourself a Gravatar: First, you need an image. It can be any square image you like, representing just about anything. Head on over to gravatar.com and sign-up. The Gravatar staff will then approve and rate your icon, and inform you of it by email. Congratulations! You have a Gravatar!
Getting it to work is simple: whenever you come over to Gluemeat to comment (or any other website that enables the use of Gravatars, for that matter) make sure you type in the email field of the comments section the same address you used to sign up for your Gravatar. Your own personalized icon will appear right before everybody’s eyes the minute you hit the “Submit Comment” button.
So come on. Get a Gravatar. You deserve it.
UPDATE: Turns out the Gravatar service is down for major server rehabilitation and sign-up has been disabled. Could be for weeks. Well, that’ll teach me to pimp out someone else’s good idea. From now on, I’ll only pimp my own. MINIVAN CABARET, PEOPLE!!!
Fellow folks and travellers of the Internets, I am pleased to announced that I have endowed my little corner of the world with Gabbly, a web-based live chat application which allows you to… chat… live… with all other people who visit the site and jump into the chat room. Only people who are on Gluemeat will be in the chat; so you’ll know you’ll have a bare minimum of one thing in common with everyone there.
It’s all in this web 2.0 rage that everyone’s going ape over, so you don’t need to download any software, nor do you need any plug-ins. All you need is an up-to-date browser like Firefox 1.5, IE 6.0, Safari 2.0, or Flock. The Gabbly FAQ says they’re working on Opera and IE 7.0 support.
So just click here to reload Gluemeat.com with the chat window, or click on the link I set up in the sidebar, pop in, see if there’s any folks, and stay a while for a chat. Meet new people. Make new friends. Bake me a cake. Who wants to bake me a cake? I like cake.
Enter Gabbly on Gluemeat!
A couple of weeks ago, I told you good folks that One Giant Jump had won the video contest on the official World Jump Day website. Well, yesterday, my prize arrived in the mail.
Should I be jumping on this picture? Yeah, predictably I’m not.
So, not that it’s my intention to exclude anyone here, I have to write up a quick article specifically for the Progressive Bloggers community. So if you’re a prog blog reader or member, I’m your Frank Sinatra and you’re my obscure audience to whom I say: “This one’s for you.”
Many Some A bunch A couple of you may remember coming to this place with a slightly different URL and a wholly different title. A little something called “Tasteful Future.” Ring a bell? If not, just keep scrolling down and move on, soldier.
As many of you know, I produced, directed, wrote and starred in One Giant Jump: The Mike Lacroix Story, a vibrant homage to the human spirit through the introspective look of one man’s personal involvement in an Earth-shattering event. It was stated that One Giant Jump had been “an acclaimed part of the World Jump Day celebrations.” Now, in the minds of some people, such a statement was considered as being unfounded, a self-promoting piece of copy without any actual facts or quotes to back it up. It was implied that I just “made it up” for my YouTube description box. So for those of you who need “facts” and “proof” to feel more secure about your existence, allow me to shove this one right into your unkempt, smelly face:
One Giant Jump: The Mike Lacroix Story has won the contest for the best World Jump Day 2006 video.
So yesterday I talked about the re-birth of Gluemeat in its new form and functions. But what good is a re-birth if there isn’t a re-baptism? As in a name change?
No, I’m not changing the Gluemeat monicker. That’s one which is sticking around. I changed the logo, which is enough dicking around with the name (I like the new logo; what do you think?) Actually, fellow Gluemeaties, what this re-baptism is all about is quite simple. Simple, yet shocking. Yes, it’s time you were all made aware of the the terrible, horrible truth: Case Yorke is an assumed name. A pseudonym, if you will.
Soul searching is quite the process, fellow Gluemeaties. Looking back on who you are, what you’ve done, and what will be next; it’s quite daunting. At times it’s frustrating. Sometimes it’s bittersweet, and on occasion it’s rather gratifying. But it’s always hopeful.
Thus, I hope this will be the best step Gluemeat can take.
I have to admit that back in March, I was beginning to feel tapped from doing Gluemeat. It was the first time I had felt that since I started in November 2001. It’s not because it was a draining process or because there was some kind of uncompromising pressure. I just felt tapped, like Gluemeat had run its course. Dare I say it: it had stopped being fun.
Anyone who has ever read the comic knows that I have always said I would stop doing Gluemeat the day it would stop being fun. I felt like that day had arrived. However, I couldn’t bring myself to ending it. It was almost like that family pet you can’t bring yourself to put to sleep despite the suffering in its old age. Although the spark was gone, I couldn’t bring myself to pulling the plug out of something I had poured so much of myself into and had shared an important fraction of life with.
So the simple realisation was this: I’m not done with it yet. I haven’t pulled off everything I could. I’ve barely scratched the surface. And the way technologies and accessibility have become since I started browsing the web almost twelve years ago, there’s even more to try.
That’s the new motto of Gluemeat: “Try.” Try to create and conceive new ideas, new experiments. No, it won’t be all about the comic anymore. It will be one part blog, one part creative outlet. Some would call this a tumblelog. I call it a more personal extension of myself.
Is the comic dead? Hardly, but I’m hoping that it won’t be the sole source of fun to be had on Gluemeat, for you and myself.
Next: online identities and the fatigue who loves them.
Here is the entire Gluemeat comic archive.
