Dirty
Jobs
With
the perspective of having lived 167 years I
seem to have been blessed with the undeniable ability of
gaining employment within industries doomed to the tar pits
of history.
For instance, my first real job was working at a drive-in
theatre at a time when virtually every major or minor American
city had at least one,
and
probably several, within their borders keeping the local
populace happily munching popcorn under the stars. These
things are mostly a memory now.
Not long after that found me operating a turret lathe in
a large machine shop that manufactured butterfly valves for
the oil
industry.
Cheaper-made
off-shore
versions
closed that shop, and many others like it in this country.
During college I worked as the resident artist for a large
record store chain. They and their competitors all eventually
faded
into
the colored-vinyl sunset.
I then became a free-lance illustrator, the profession of
which I'd always dreamed. This was the greatest job ever
until a
combination
of easy-to-use digital
art tools,
internet-driven global competition, and a severe decline
in available magazines and periodicals left too many talented
hands fighting for too few jobs.
I then jumped headlong into Flash animation. I made a
good living there until Macromedia introduced Actionscripting,
to which
malware
coders from around the globe said "Oooh! Thank you!".
Apple consequently banned the plug-in from its OS's and
that
was the end of that.
As frequent visitors to this site know I decided to dip my
cranky toe into editorial cartooning waters in 2006 which,
of course, means that
industry
is now doomed.
Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonists are currently being
shown the door from newspapers nationwide. The owners maintain
that it's a budget issue but I tend to think/know that it's
a bad case of
vulture capitalism with a side of order of oppressing enlightened
dissent.
Be that as it may, I'll keep at it because it's fun and I'm
my own boss. Thanks for coming along for the ride and, if
you
can,
please support
your local Lefty via Patreon. (This naked plug for alms was
not my idea. The cat has promised to suffocate me in my sleep
if I don't start buying better brands of cat food.)
Excelsior!
---------------
Two semi-related notes:
1: Raging Pencils going forward will be ad-free. No more
Google ads offering guns or boner-pills. I also removed them
from the Poozycat Project.
2. For the first time this year I created a full allotment
of thirteen new Raging Pencil cartoons for the month. This
is a big deal for me as I'd been feeling
"fog-brained" for some time. Maybe I've dispelled some
Covid remnant or maybe I'm just pleased that Trump may finally
die in jail.
=Lefty=
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