Questionable Content

My comic is starting to gel and I'm working on it substantially. It's something I've been trying to figure out for probably somewhere between fifteen and twenty years.

Today I updated the About page. The previous About page mentioned Questionable Content and its author, Jeph Jacques. 

The details are fuzzy and I can't really get the tidbits I recall to make sense. One memory says someone online recommended it to me because of the mention of Indy bands and I want to say that happened on Metafilter, but I'm pretty sure I was reading it long before I ever heard of Metafilter.

I wrote to Jeph Jacques at least a couple of times and he never replied to me. I had some vague hand wavy idea that I would make friends with the right people and it would help me figure out how to find a path forward on this comicking thing.

Someone on Hacker News told me once that networking is about getting your work in front of people. I'm fairly confident most women don't understand THAT.

Women are raised to be more socially oriented than men. Men typically self identify by career or work or hobbies. Women typically self identify by their relationships, such as "I'm so and so's wife/daughter/mother."

There was at least a question or two on Metafilter by someone trying to network with a member of the opposite sex and it had led to him hitting on her. I think in one case it was the guy saying he really wanted to get romantically involved and in another it was a woman saying "Yikes! He's hitting on me!"

So I'm apparently not the only woman who tries to "network" by acting like we are FWENDS! And then it not doing much for my work goals.

I'm certain that at least three or four married men from Hacker News exchanged emails with me knowing my goal was networking to try to further my goals concerning work and income and intentionally abused the situation to make friends with a woman platonically while contemplating leaving their marriage.

I believe two of these men were "all hat and no cattle." I think they inherited their money and NOMINALLY fit in on Hacker News with real movers and shakers, but weren't actually meaningfully qualified to help me with my career goals.

One of them appears to have gotten a real business out of his previous dumb hobby because of MY feedback and then did NOTHING whatsoever to help me turn my skills into improved income though he knew I was homeless and trying desperately to improve my income.

He never gave me a dime. He NEVER thanked me. I found out inadvertently my feedback turned his hobby into an actual business. And I let him know indirectly "Don't email me again, asshole."

Another guy was less of an ass and his feedback on my work was moderately useful. I think he figured out I couldn't pay his bills like his current wife and probably threw in the towel on fantasies of leaving her for me and stopped writing me.

Probably his inheritance paid for a house and her job paid the rest of the bills.

No harm, no foul. I don't think he was really trying to shaft me. Women face challenges trying to make the career thing happen. Men face challenges trying to make personal stuff work. 

I don't think either one of us knew what the hell we were doing. I'm fairly confident women are ROUTINELY way overly personal when talking to men and trying to figure out the business thing and the men honestly believe we are hitting on them because they don't talk that way to people unless they are looking for sex, basically.

I've tried to joke "Jeph Jacques is clearly a jerk!" or whatever for not replying to me. I've never figured out how to say what I'm really wanting to say.

If you are a woman trying to "network," men don't want to be your FWENDS and talk to you for hours because we enjoy each other's company until it leads to some useful crumb. If they are successful in the field you are interested in, rest assured a ZILLION people want to pick their brains with nothing in it for them.

I wasn't trying to be abusive of his time and industry insider knowledge. I had a history of having genuine friends via Internet and I was trying to figure out how to make my life work and stumbling my way forward as best I could.

I mean I guess if I ever got famous and he wanted to talk to me for some reason at that point, that could be awkward, but other than that highly unlikely scenario, I don't really care that he ignored my emails when I no doubt sounded like a ditz and was almost certainly wasting his time.

I really liked Questionable Content at one time. It is still described as a slice of life comic and that's probably not really accurate anymore.

It always had robots in it and steadily got more techy and futuristic and gradually became completely ridiculous and I don't think he really knows what he's talking about in that regard, which isn't necessarily anything most people care about, but I didn't like it.

At some point after he moved to Canada, he had a strip where a character on their phone on the toilet accidentally dropped the phone in the toilet and apparently grabs a pile of poo while trying to fish it out. I noped out right then and there and never read it again.

I have a very serious medical condition and germ control is my life. If you are talking on the phone while on the toilet: Ewwww!

Are you AWARE women's purses typically carry horrifying things like E coli? WHY? Because women put them on the floor in public bathrooms if there's no hook available.

A LOT of infections enter your body via the EARS and nobody seems to know that. We have EENT doctors because eyes, ears, nose and throat are ALL interconnected, BUT the entire planet seems to believe you get infected via your nostrils ONLY.

I'm some nutcase thrown off multiple forums for trying to TALK about health stuff in a socially unacceptable fashion and Jeph Jacques was at one time the highest paid webcomic artist in the world and he's promoting horrifying germy practices with the enormous influence he wields globally and I am sick to my stomach just thinking about trying to explain my objections here to most people.

He's putting that out there for laughs and because it pays his bills. And I just don't know where to begin with expressing my outrage and concerns.

That's very much not something I want to do with my comic. I'm not even trying to write something remotely intended to be "realistic," but I'm putting links to REAL resources in the footer to make sure people don't imagine my crap drawings and crap jokes are remotely accurate depictions of reality.

Because I have strong views about the enormous power visual media and popular works have to promote ideas and how that's mostly not treated with respect. It's mostly not treated like a form of playing with knives where you have an obligation to protect your audience from getting hurt by it.

People just post seemingly ANYTHING oblivious to how they are playing with knives and getting other people hurt. And if you are not comfortable with that, you have a personal problem and should STFU.