Geo above is right on in his comments BTW. Dittos on all.

I am an emerging artist (from a sales backbround), mother of two sons (so I get the get the guy stuff however gross at times).

Just wanted to say, as a fan, Hugh, please do not Ignore Everybody but it may make sense to Ignore Some!
Consider to not even publish comments meant to bully as they not NOT with the program here!

They are the boring ones– Forgitabouttit–

Hugh: Fair enough. Here’s a blog I kept from May 2003 until October 2008, when I got tired of it: http://informationbureau.wordpress.com/

Note: A lot of the images and such are broken links; I had my own domain for a lot of that time, then migrated the posts over to free-parking WordPress when I shut it down. Nonetheless, all 964 posts are there.

For the record I don’t see these as stereotypes. I just figured these are cartoon manifestations of people Hugh has dealt with, overheard, or even been at times. Am I wrong?

Everyone knows, on some level, that one generally gets the kind of response one invites. This is an obvious rule of life that even children instinctively grasp. Civility invites civility, and hostility invites hostility, and the same is true for everything in between.

But the troll, like MM here, expects others to treat him better than he treats them. He expects a completely different set of rules to be applied to others versus himself, an ethical scheme that is, in may ways, exactly inverted.

MM introduces himself with comments consisting of dismissive sarcasm (the Apple store post) and hostility (“boring,” “cheap” and characterizing social satire as an incipient form of racial bigotry, of all things). Then, when he gets the obvious response that such comments call for, he makes a fuss about how unfairly he is being treated, how he only offered “constructive criticism” and resents the personal nature of the antagonistic response. Suddenly, he only wants to talk about the subject matter, in an academic and constructive way, you see, and lectures us by telling us that getting personal is out of bounds.

And then, after having invited hostility and received hostility, and after acting surprised and offended that hostility should invite hostility (a social reality that even children understand), he offers the final parting shot that we (meaning me, in particular, I suppose), lack “conversation skills.” See? A neat inversion of the usual social rules.

In light of all of this, which is repeated a million times a day all over the internet, there is only one reasonable conclusion — people like MM are looking for a fight. They want it. They create it, if they have to. The get the response they invite, because they like to be yelled at. They have some psychological need for it. They prefer it to other modes of conversation. One can only assume that people like this feel anxious and lost when they find themselves being engaged with people in a less antagonistic way.

I think this phenomenon has something useful to teach us about marketing — how a well-=crafted marketing strategy can invite the desired consumer response, depending on the mindset and social expectations of the consumer group in question.

Yes, this is where a blog (or online identity) comes in handy…

If people know your work and know you, then you can can contextualize your thoughts against what you have done… with skin in the game.

Posting an opinion as an anonymous person, however valid the intellectual reasons, makes your case weaker at best, makes you seem a troll at worst.

Like Jeff Jarvis says, “Identity Matters”.

“1. A few deca­des of matu­rity and real-life expe­rience, it seems.”

I’m almost 40. I’m a lawyer in a large Southern city. In the past I’ve been an Internet journalist, English professor, short-order cook, and construction worker.

“2. The part where YOU pro­duce something crea­tive that is bet­ter and more popu­lar than what you see here, if you know so much about it.”

I’m also an award-winning independent filmmaker. I didn’t claim that I could make better cartoons than these.

“3. The whole rest of the inter­net, if this part of it dis­tres­ses you so much.”

Distresses me enough to take two minutes to post a comment?

I’ve been subscribed to this site’s RSS feed for a while, because I stumbled across it somehow and liked the cartoons. When I noticed a pattern I thought I’d offer some constructive criticism. Most of the responses, including Hugh’s, completely ignore the points I tried to make and go straight for ad hominem attacks.

Nice conversational skills, y’all. Adios.