Sunday, December 6, 2015

MurderEgg.com Is My Most Popular Domain Right Now


No, I don't know why MurderEgg.com has been getting so much unsolicited traffic. I'm not really sure what somebody would use the name for, but it seemed like a good domain to grab. Now I have it listed for $950, which is less than any of my good political domain names are listed for.

ClintonWebb.com and ClintonKaine.com somehow aren't even in the top 13. 


Monday, November 23, 2015

2016 Political Domain Squatting Update

Domains I've sold so far this year:

Cruz2016.com -- $1500;
BidenWarren.com -- $1500 (sold to Florida orthodontist and conservative activist Larry Kawa).

I still have many great political domains left, including ClintonBooker.com, ClintonBiden.com, ClintonOMalley.com, ClintonKaine.com, ClintonPatrick.comClintonWebb.com, ClintonWarner.com, and SandersBiden.com on the Dem side; RubioCruz.com, CruzChristie.com, ChristieAyotte.com, and Christie-2016.com on the GOP side, and many others on both sides. Buy them!

Tuesday, May 12, 2015

(Updated 5/25/15) RT Journalist Abby Martin Brings Attention To My Tourettic Sign At A Freddie Gray Rally

Former RT America host Abby Martin, now of Media Roots, took a picture of me with my sign at a rally for Freddie Gray in DC. The only person of color in the foreground of the picture is my friend Abishek.


I wrote the word "FUCK" on a big piece of paper because it expressed how I felt about the death of Freddie Gray. I'm white and I'm aware that I benefit tremendously from the problems we were protesting, so I feel guilty for grabbing so much attention at a rally that I was supposed to be supporting, not coopting.

As a person who suffers from Tourette syndrome, however, there might be nothing more cathartic than broadcasting the word "FUCK" to tens of thousands of people. I'm not being facetious about this. Most of my tics are physically painful and unsatisfying, but the words are a little better. Phrases like "fuck" and "I'm gay" are some of my least unpleasant tics, even when I'm just sending them to friends of mine in text messages. (Edit: This is called coprographia.)

I also figured that the risk of it getting media attention was low because conventional news media would have trouble publishing it, and it's true that it didn't make it into any actual publications, as far as I know. One thing I want to avoid more than almost anything when I go to DC Ferguson actions is being prominently featured in a photograph in a major publication and becoming a symbol of narcissistic white yuppies going to Black Lives Matter protests and treating them like pep rallies.

Regardless, I don't think I'll make any more signs when I go to DC Ferguson rallies in the future.

Friday, April 3, 2015

The Offensive AIDS Joke Made By Bill Maher That Nobody Knows About

A lot of people on the left hate Bill Maher these days for things he's said. Still, this particularly off-color joke he made back in 1993 near the beginning of the very first episode of his old show Politically Incorrect--with Jerry Seinfeld among that episode's guests--seems relevant to Trevor Noah's recent scandal and the conversation people are having about political correctness and public shamings in reaction to tasteless and offensive jokes.



Here is the relevant text from the transcription of his monologue (emphasis mine):

"Mankind has a long history of branding evildoers, starting with God marking Cain after the death of Abel, right through to Colonial New England, where they slapped a scarlet letter on your chest if you were guilty of illicit sex. Of course, nowadays if you have dangerous sex, they put on AIDS ribbon on your chest and you get to go to the Oscars."

I know this was 1993, when most people in the United States were first starting to learn about HIV/AIDS, but even back then this was not an acceptable thing for a left-leaning celebrity to say. HIV/AIDS shaming like this--whether done in 1993 or 2015--is fallacious victim blaming that also has obvious homophobic, racist, and sexist connotations. And in the video clip, most of the audience seems to be taken aback.

I've found nothing on the internet referencing the joke. If he had said this in more recent years on Real Time--particularly in the pilot episode--or in a tweet, many people would have written think-pieces about it in online publications like Salon and Mother Jones. Here's the clip, with the monologue starting at 2:57:


Thursday, February 26, 2015

NPR Podcast "TLDR" Interviews Me About My Political Cyber-Squatting

TLDR, On The Media's entertaining, internet-focused podcast series, interviewed me about my political cybersquatting. I start talking around 1:28 and my part lasts about two minutes. We talk about my Santorum food blog as well, which was the #1 Google result for "Santorum 2012" for most of the 2012 primary season.

Here's the full list of Clinton domain names I own. Besides those, I own around 165 other 2016-related political domain names:

CLINTONBIDEN.COM
CLINTONCUOMO.COM
CLINTONFITZGERALD.COM
CLINTONGRIMES.COM
CLINTONKAINE.COM
CLINTONLANDRIEU.COM
CLINTONNAPOLITANO.COM
CLINTONOMALLEY.COM
CLINTONPATRICK.COM
CLINTONSCHWARTZ.COM
CLINTONVANHOLLEN.COM
CLINTONWARNER.COM
CLINTONWEBB.COM

Email me at jeremypgreen@gmail.com if you want to buy any (or all) of my domains. It's pretty early in the cycle, things are uncertain, and I don't have much money, so I'm willing to sell them fairly cheap.


Friday, January 30, 2015

Scanning, Editing, and Coloring a Hand-Drawn Webcomic


First, if you care about whether the gag is spoiled, look at the full cartoon before you read this post.

A lot went into making this cartoon. That's mostly because I'm just not a good comics artist yet. I started teaching myself almost exactly three years ago during law school, sitting down and practicing about once a month since then. If you look at the crap I was drawing then, you'll see that I've come a long way for somebody with such a terrible work ethic.

As I get better, I'll start drawing full pages and scanning them in, rather doing the different parts of the cartoons piecemeal, spread out onto several pages, the way I have with most of the cartoons I've posted. 

However, I still believe this walkthrough of my editing process will be helpful to cartoonists interested in digitally coloring and editing their hand-drawn webcomics.

Scanned linework of a plane before editing it into the final cartoon. Tools used include the Pentel Pocket Brush Pen and Pigma Micron 03 and 05 markers.

This most recent F-The-Cat post involved maybe eight to ten scanned pages for what amounted to a page-long gag cartoon. Everything was arranged and colored afterward in Photoshop.

A scanned page with an early version of Rick the baseball player, floating miserably in the upper left corner.

While hopefully I won't be tweaking my cartoons so much on my computer as I get better, I'll still be scanning them in black-and-white mode (rather than grayscale or color) and then coloring them in Photoshop, like most people who hand-draw their webcomics.

This involves a lot of layers.

As shown above, even though most of the foreground objects in this cartoon were black-and-white, I still had to use the magic wand tool to get rid of all the non-black parts of the cartoon scans, and then color everything in using a "coloring" layer below the ink drawing.

Additionally, if any of my line-work didn't scan perfectly, or was weakened by erasing before I scanned it, I'll fill that in with black as well:

Shown above: Glaring white speck in Rick's hat.

The single biggest change I made to the cartoon, however, was removing the other baseball player. That's right, there was a second baseball player in the cartoon, telling Rick he should lay off the steroids. Ultimately I decided it would be better for a reporter to ask about steroids, which makes Rick's defensive reaction more realistic.


That other baseball player was cool with his cigarette and all, but I had to cut him from the team in order to make my "Not Another Baseball Metaphor" strip a home run.

For this cartoon, I decided to keep the foreground almost completely black-and-white and have the colors be behind the characters. The color blobs in the background were all painted with the brush tool on layers that are beneath the foreground layers.

One thing you may not have noticed is the lack of pure black in most of the foreground objects. To make the linework and blackspace of the drawings go better with the colored backgrounds, I made duplicates of the line-work layers, colored each foreground figure a shade of purple that I felt looked good with its corresponding background color, and then set the opacity of these colored duplicate layers to about 30%, in order to give the linework and blackspace a subtle purple tinge. I did not make copies of the whitespace, which I left pure white.


As far as I can remember, I didn't apply any special properties to the layers like "multiply," so you don't have to worry about that.


Oh God, the lettering. I wrote most of the words out by hand several times and then painstakingly Frankensteined everything together in Photoshop. Again, as I get better at lettering--using an Ames Lettering Guide the way professional comics letterers do--I'll actually draw the words on the same pages as the corresponding pictures, and scan everything together, rather than having to combine everything later.

I'm not going to get into what specific tools or what kind of paper I use before I scan things here, as those things require their own posts. Hopefully this post was helpful to some people. Stay tuned to Feldman the Cat as my work habits improve and I start churning out comics at a regular rate.

Follow me on Twitter or email me if you have any questions.