During the silence while I was finishing the A+M comic, I forgot to mark the occasion of the blog making it through a full year. Hooray. I still think it was a good idea.
So what now, in year two? More new pictures, hopefully, and maybe more personal stuff beyond the new years cards. But since new work doesn’t exist until it’s complete (I have by now finally learned not to announce anything except in retrospect), today a few more bits from the archive — one of the many obsolete versions of a next thing.
All the posts and files and comments have been moved, and everything seems to be up and running at the new place smoothly, without locking me out whenever I want to upload more than five pictures.
Ideally, this is the only post you were notified about if you’re using a reader, but I’ll give it 24 hours to settle and then post more pictures.
(I will be moving the blog to a faster and more reliable host over the weekend. Ideally everything will be done by tomorrow, and just keep working — but there’s a chance some (or all) old posts show up again in the RSS feed. Also, if you don’t hear from me in months, maybe you’ll need to re-add the blog — same address, tozo.today — to your reader. But fingers crossed for the transition being invisible.)
The other day I got really fed up again with only posting covers, them being the only new material to put up here.
I had this sketch around which seemed like an easy candidate to finish and make into a stand-alone picture: just two guys and a robot. You know, the sort of thing people post. Free-floating art on the internet. “Warmup” drawings. What ifs. Ads for more substantial things that don’t exist and probably never will.
I didn’t need it to mean anything, I didn’t even need to particularly like it. Just something small and sort of finished and new to put up1, a throwaway image.
I’ve been thinking if there’s a way to replicate some of the good parts of the scattershot mosaic we get on Twitter and elsewhere – “here’s a few of the things looked at, things worked on, scribbled, noticed, etc.” – not strictly chronological and not meant to be comprehensive, just a slice through someone else’s moments. So here’s an attempt at a condensed version of it. Feels like it might work?
note: I suspect RSS readers will strip it all and just give you a bunch of images in a row; I was considering removing these posts from the RSS feed altogether, but I’ll just say the blog presentation works a lot better.(and it also shows the picture captions when you click on them)
(Maybe it’s fine as long as I don’t go overboard with twenty pictures every time.)
When I set up this new blog six months ago, I made a very conscious effort not to start with a big statement of intent. No manifesto about Why Blogs or I’m Leaving Social Media For Good or anything like that.
I just posted a current thing — a photo I took from the window of a moving car — and then posted a few quotes next, and didn’t make it a big deal in any way. No big plan, no attempts at comprehensiveness. I just needed it to exist without needing it to be anything in particular just yet.
What I was looking for was a better way of being online in some approximation of “real time.”1
Twitter is no longer an acceptable option, if it ever was. Its alternatives, even the good ones, all have the same problems — while they still serve some of the social functions, I need a better way of sharing work and pictures and thoughts in progress at my own pace, with more continuity, more permanence, and more depth (when needed)2.
The blog did already survive the threshold of “two posts, then a three year gap, then an apology for not posting, then death” that most blogs don’t, but now it feels like I do need to decide on -some- approach to it before it sort of peters out.
For artists and creative people, the easiest, go-to model for an “online presence” is to share “process.”
