@mcc AI sort of ate their business, so I guess they are returning the favor by feeding themselves to it. (I don't think LLMs provide an accurate alternative to Stack Overflow, but I think Code Pilot and other stuff shunted a lot of traffic.)
@jeff@WarnerCrocker The judge make it clear he would have fined the bejeesus out of him had he the right in law to do so. Instead, he said, one more slip up and it’s the pokey, bub.
@thomasfuchs I wonder if there's something about him that makes him stand out as a target to them hmmm hmmmm hmmmmmmmmm. I can't put my finger on why they would single his review out instead of other ones that were far more brutal hmmmmmmmmmmmmm.
@thomasfuchs@aleen I am hoping that I will get to learn more about newspaper cartoon culture elsewhere—there are precious few materials I’ve found in searching. I have some Swedish ones and I saw some in Paris as part of an exhibition of an amazing publisher/designer/store last year.
One of the stories I’ll tell in *How Comics Were Made: A Visual History from the Drawing Board to the Printed Page* is about a sheet of Doonesbury printing molds (called flongs) from 1973 that I purchased from eBay a few years ago. In fact, these strips are probably the precipitating act that led to this book—and the current Kickstarter campaign!
This is a sheet of six dailies (Monday to Friday) a syndicate would send out to newspapers (see book excerpt as image).
When I looked up these Doonesbury strips, I found an odd situation: they hadn’t run on the week in question. Somebody at the Hartford Courant (see penciled notation on sheet) had pulled them when replacements were sent and then held on to the sheet. Eventually, it seems like an estate sale or other transfer happened to the person I bought them from.
These were strips for May 7, 1973, and Garry Trudeau told me via an email interview that up until that point he worked with a six-week advance schedule. “To avoid another Ehrlichman incident—and to enhance timeliness, I started cutting it closer and closer until the strip was finally distributed only one week in advance,” he wrote. He says he would have tried to salvage any storyline he could from material he had to dump. In fact, you can find a few of these reworked later in the year.
If you are too young to remember Ehrlichman or never studied Watergate in depth, he served a couple of roles in the Nixon administration and was convicted of several charges in 1975 related to the cover-up of the Watergate break-in, serving about 18 months in prison.
Trudeau told me something fascinating about Ehrlichman: the guy would write cartoonist asking for originals of strips about him, even excoriations!
Ehrlichman wrote two letters to Trudeau that are preserved in Trudeau’s archives at Yale. This letters from May 18, 1973, on White House letterhead asks for the original of a previous strip (which one is unclear). The handwritten note says:
“I hear my resignation fouled up your following series – Sorry – Next time (!) let me know whaty ou’re planning and I’ll try to cooperate – JE.” He was convicted 19 months later.
Glenn researches and writes about the history of printing, focused particularly on newspaper comics and printing molds. Pre-order his book How Comics Were Made. He’s a long-time technology journalist, who contributes regularly to Macworld and TidBITS and writes books in the Take Control Books series. A former Amazon employee (1996–97) who used to eat burritos with Bezos, Glenn is more interestingly a two-time Jeopardy! winner.