Tag: comics

Moebius

“In the supremely unstable universe of Moebius, characters exist and abruptly change in accordance with their creator’s fluctuating whims, an aspect of his art that became a central premise, to great comic effect. (It is awkward when one’s body suddenly shifts its form, improbably and ridiculously, a point that became the hilarious core of the early story “Shore Leave on Pharagonesia” and remained a reliably satisfying spice throughout the later works.) And Moebius, who liked to abandon himself to the flow of improvisation, produced a steady rhythm of surprises in other ways. Le garage hermétique, composed as a serial with very short chapters, reflects an anarchic authorial game in which its creator deliberately introduced new and abrupt conceptual complications each month to destroy the story’s coherence and give himself problems to which he would then have to invent solutions in the subsequent month’s installment—at which time, of course, he would also introduce further complications to destroy the coherence he had just achieved, to pose a new challenge for next time. As he later explained, this state of “insécurité permanente”—the desire it inspired in him to re-create consistency and the satisfaction of then doing so—brought him “un délice absolu” (“absolute delight”)….”

moebius is my favorite comic artist. his stuff is absolutely fantastic.

Social media

2022-10-05: Social media as we’ve known it is probably doomed

Whether a decline in social media would on balance be good or bad for society I’ll leave to another discussion, but the handwriting is on the wall for a major decline in social media overall.
As with most predictions, the timing and other details will surface in coming months and years, but the overall shape of things to come is not terribly difficult to visualize.
The fundamental problem is also clear enough. A vast range of entities at state, federal, and international levels are in the process of enacting, invoking, or otherwise planning a range of regulatory and other legal mandates that would apply to social media firms — with many of these requirements being in direct and total opposition to each other.
The most likely outcome from putting these firms “between a rock and hard place” will be a drastic reduction of social media services provided, resulting in a massive decrease in ordinary persons’ ability to communicate publicly, rather than the increase that various social media critics have been anticipating.