There’s a fascinating interview on Splitsider with Matt Klinman of Funny or Die, who recently had to lay off its entire editorial staff due to Facebook’s devouring its entire revenue stream from their video shorts. He’s very candid and forthcoming about what it’s meant for the company, in a way I’ve seen few publishers be:

The whole story is basically that Facebook gets so much traffic that they started convincing publishers to post things on Facebook. For a long time, that was fine. People posted things on Facebook, then you would click those links and go to their websites. But then, gradually, Facebook started exerting more and more control of what was being seen, to the point that they, not our website, essentially became the main publishers of everyone’s content. Today, there’s no reason to go to a comedy website that has a video if that video is just right on Facebook. And that would be fine if Facebook compensated those companies for the ad revenue that was generated from those videos, but because Facebook does not pay publishers, there quickly became no money in making high-quality content for the internet.

Now this is true for news organizations as well as comedy sites. Klinman has some interesting insights on the way that Facebook has a flattening effect on the sites that we view: so that a link from a Macedonian content mill looks very similar to a Washington Post front page story.

I hope this heralds a move more generally toward the open web, although, as a proprietor of an independent site on said web, I am not a disinterested observer. Still, I see in pieces like this and elsewhere, a general realization that Facebook is not an ideal way to experience the internet, and may even be harmful. That this idea is moving beyond technical elites (who had always been snobbishly skeptical of it) is heartening to me. Does it mean a return to the open web, as I hope? Likely not as a mass movement, but as an underground movement of people moving back to feed readers and blogs and away from over reliance on social media, perhaps.

Micro.blog is an interesting initiative from Manton Reese, who is dissatisfied with the way that conversation on the Internet has been captured by a few private social media giants. Brent Simmons, inventor of NetNewsWire, describes it like this:

But if you think of the years 1995-2005, you remember when the web was our social network: blogs, comments on blogs, feed readers, and services such as Flickr, Technorati, and BlogBridge to glue things together. Those were great years — but then a few tragedies happened: Google Reader came out, and then, almost worse, it went away. Worse still was the rise of Twitter and Facebook, when we decided it would be okay to give up ownership and let just a couple companies own our communication.

Simmons is currently working on an open source feed reader that will incorporate support for a bunch of different feed formats, and will perhaps have support for Micro.blog as well. I’m still trying to wrap my head around how it would tie into existing modes of web publishing (like WordPress, as I do here). I don’t know if something like Micro.blog would solve the many discontents of social media, but it seems like a step in the right direction. Then again, it may be something that appeals to a small subset of the Internet community; techy members of Generation X who look back fondly on the early days of the open web and are interested in setting up and managing their own web sites. But I do fall squarely into that subset, and I am looking for ways to communicate on the Internet without the toxicity of Twitter, this may represent a way out. It’s worth a try.

Hope you are all having a happy Thanksgiving, or if not in the States, a nice normal Thursday. We baked an apple pie for after dinner, decorated by my daughter, who is really into Hamilton (obviously):

Went for a walk this morning, over by the Gore Estate in Waltham. Here’s the old town line marker, with a W for Watertown, I’m assuming.

And here’s the Gore Mansion itself:

Enjoy your day!

You are not your train of thought. The mind is constantly thinking. If our minds are not thinking, it’s either because we are at rest, or we have allowed something else to do our thinking for us. I do not mean this in a pejorative sense, just that when we read, or watch a video, we are allowing our minds to go along for the ride, to allow thoughts to come into our heads that our minds did not create. Which is sometimes good. But not all the time, which is where we are today. We have a surplus of content and entertainment that our ancestors could only dream of, such that at any time, we can outsource our thinking for a while to an external provider. The Internet, for example.

If you have used Twitter or Facebook at any real volume, you will be familiar with the feeling that you are being carried along by a torrent. It is very unlike the feeling of reading a novel or other lengthy text. New and surprising and punchy tidbits are coming at you constantly, at just beyond your ability to keep up. They hijack your train of thought. In a very real way, when you have been reading Twitter for too long, it becomes your train of thought. If you accept that you are your train of thought, then your social media stream can become wrapped up in your identity in a very real way. You find the thoughts of others triggering emotions in yourself, and you internalize the turmoil and commotion.

The brain is a thinking organ. I realize this sounds almost absurd, but bear with me. The brain thinks in the same way that the heart beats. It’s just what it does. If you are still for long enough, letting your thoughts emerge and float away without clinging to them, you’ll find that after a time, things slow down. We tend to give our own thoughts a lot of weight, and invest them with a lot of importance  for no other reason than we thought of them. So the brain is thinking all the time, sending out thoughts in a constant stream. But these thoughts are not you. They are just notions that your thinking organ is throwing out there because that’s what it does. You can let these go. Just as The lungs breathe, the heart beats, the brain thinks. Just because you think a thing doesn’t make it true, or even important.

So I’ve been working on the iPad recently and have tried out some different apps for making art. I figured I’d get my thoughts down and give my impressions of the drawing apps that I’ve used. Also, I’m hoping to get some feedback on other apps I could try to achieve the effects I’m looking for. I’m using a 10.5-inch iPad Pro with Apple Pencil.

The Adobe apps: Adobe Sketch and Adobe Draw

These are both free apps and very full-featured. I can only guess that Adobe is starting us off with free goodies to get us hooked as these are not “lite” apps by any stretch of the imagination. Perhaps someday in the future, Adobe will drop the hammer and make use of the apps dependent on subscription, but for now, they are free. Both apps have a similar user interface, with brush selection along the left and layers along the right. Sketch is pixel based, Draw is vector.

Adobe Sketch:

Adobe Sketch has a good assortment of brushes and drawing tools. It doesn’t have a particularly good pen tool however (perhaps they expect you to go into Adobe Draw for that) the pen tool just below the pencil in the screenshot is more like a marker, and doesn’t really allow you to do crisp variable width lines of the sort I’m partial to. The pencil effect is not as sensitive or variable as it is in Procreate or the Apple Notes app (which has a really excellent pencil effect.)

Adobe Draw:

I really like the way that Adobe Draw allows you to create just incredibly complex, sharp and clean vector images. The resulting image is very clearly a computer generated artwork, and in that it’s very true to itself and its nature. So I’m philosophically quite partial to it; it’s not trying to be something it’s not. That said, I’m still enough of a traditionalist that I prefer my images to look like ones that were drawn by my hand on paper.

Procreate

Yes. That’s really the name. I think of all the apps I tried (admittedly, only a few so far) Procreate may be my favorite. Although I like Adobe Draw’s extremely clean, sharp lines, Procreate is the app which has allowed me to approach my own personal style most closely. Fans of Machiavelli will recognize the doorway to Machiavelli’s Albergaccio, where he wrote the Prince and the Discourses. The UI is a bit more complex than Adobe’s, but there are a lot more (and better) types of tools to use.

Zen Brush

Here’s a bit of a fun app. If it had layer support and support for image resolutions other than screen res, I’d rate it higher, but it does a really excellent job of simulating sumi ink on paper, with options to use black, gray or red and wet or dry ink. There are a number of traditional papers, textures and backgrounds you can select. It’s quite nice:

Please feel free to direct me to any good drawing apps you feel that would be good to try. I’m still trying things out and experimenting. Although I literally stood on a stage and promised to make my next book entirely on paper, even doing calligraphy for the text, it looks like I may be moving in an opposite direction entirely. Who can know what the future holds?

In 1512, when the Medici returned to power in Florence, they banished Machiavelli to his villa in Sant Andrea in Percussina, a small hamlet in the hills a few miles south of the city. There Machiavelli wrote the Prince and the Discourses while in exile. He called his villa his “Albergaccio” self-deprecatingly, as it was and is extremely rustic and somewhat run-down. It’s currently the home of the Chianti Classico Association and a houses a small museum to Machiavelli. I visited in 2003 when doing research for my graphic novel Machiavelli.

Below: Machiavelli’s studio. The location is just as he describes it, however, I’m not sure how much of the furnishings are authentic. The desk looks like it could be. There is a nearby chest, not pictured, which is almost certainly from his time.

Exterior. Note the Machiavelli arms above the door (in the center): four nails and a cross.

A panel from Machiavelli. As you can see, I used the photo above for reference.

New work. Here’s another view of the front entrance, drawn digitally:

If you’re interested in seeing more of the Albergaccio, I’ve created a Flickr album of all the photos I took while I was there that will give you a more complete sense of the village and the building itself.

Hi all,

I have one box of the Machiavelli signed and numbered limited edition left. The Machiavelli ebook is for sale on the site as well, if you prefer your comics that way. See the order page for info on how to buy.
If you’d like to read an excerpt, check out the heart-pounding prologue featuring the Pazzi Conspiracy of 1478.

Cheers,
Don

I’ve been meaning for a while to do a process post about how I go about making a page of comics. I’ll do a separate post about my research process, as that deserves its own section. Let’s assume for this post that research is mostly done (it’s never entirely done) and I’m ready to begin making pages.

I usually work in batches of four pages at a time. This allows me to focus on one task at a time (rough pencils, finished pencils, inks, wash) and keep a certain flow and coherence between pages.
First, I do a thumbnail outline. Something like a script with little boxes and hieroglyphics, drawn on copy paper and put into plastic sleeves so I can reorder and add pages if necessary. This example is actually from Marlowe, as I don’t think any of the Machiavelli thumbnails remain. Perhaps in my attic somewhere, where my kids will discover them after I’ve passed.

The next step is rough pencils. I typically work on cold press watercolor paper with a hard 3H pencil: light and easy to erase.

I will usually do the pencils in two stages: first, a rough blocking out, then a second pass with more detail added. At this point I scan the page and insert it into an inDesign file, adding text so I know how big to make the text. It would look something like this:

That lets me know how much space I need to allow for text. In this page, I let the text at the top float free and created a large text box between the panels:

When I ink, I use a Hunt 102 nib pen and Higgins Black Magic ink. It needs to be waterproof to survive the wash I’m going to subject it to next.

Finally, the wash; I use watercolor paint (Winsor & Newton ivory black) to finish the page.

I scan the finished page and replace the FPO image in the inDesign file. From start to finish, I can usually produce 2 pages a week if I’m firing on all cylinders (this rate presumes, of course, that the research and thumbnailing is done).

History podcasts are, in general, far superior to their technology counterparts in that they usually consist of more than a glorified phone call between a couple of dudes about their new phones. I’m sure there are some history podcasts like this, but I haven’t listened to them and won’t be talking about them here. History podcasts tend to be better prepared, better researched, and more tightly focused on topic. If you like history, I highly recommend giving podcasts a try. Here are my top four, with the caveat that this is not an exhaustive list. There are certainly some great history podcasts that I haven’t heard yet because I haven’t had the time. Feel free to reach out to me on Twitter @don_macdonald with your suggestions.

The History of Rome

Mike Duncan’s History of Rome is where you should start. Kind of the gold standard for history podcasts, Duncan’s History of Rome blends rigorous attention to detail with a garrulous and engaging speaking style and a wry sense of humor that doesn’t grate. The first 5-10 episodes are a bit rough around the edges as Duncan finds his voice and upgrades his audio equipment, but he very quickly does so, and by the time of the Latin Wars, the History of Rome is going full speed.

Duncan does a great job of putting historical details into context, making sure the listener doesn’t lose sight of the bigger picture while at the same time not glossing over historical detail and texture. I truly admire his keen editorial sense of which names and dates can be omitted in the name of clarity. He’s a gifted raconteur and this doesn’t hurt his cause either. If there is any criticism I can make, it’s a mild one: I wish he had spent more time on the early history of Rome. But honestly, I can’t fault him too much for this; the historical record is sparse and as I mentioned, he was still just finding his feet.

Duncan keeps his podcasts short, well organized, and information rich. It’s a good sign when you find yourself wishing the episode were longer rather than praying for the sweet release of death that the two-hour phone call format can produce. For this reason, his podcasts are great for binge listening. I listened to all 179 episodes of The History of Rome in a three month period without ever getting sick of it, which is incredibly remarkable when you think about it. Sadly, The History of Rome is completed, but do not despair too much, for next you can move on to

Revolutions

After finishing The History of Rome, Duncan took a break and then dove into a new podcast called Revolutions. Unlike the earlier podcast, Revolutions does not focus on an individual state or era, but as the name suggests covers various revolutions through history. The podcast is divided into chapters, each about 50 episodes long, covering a different historical revolution. He begins with the English Civil War, then moves on to the American Revolution, then the French Revolution. All of my praise of Duncan’s ability to present rigorous research in an engaging style is in full effect here.

I especially loved the English Civil War episodes, because it’s an area of history I’m not very familiar with. My areas of expertise are the Renaissance and the History of Art in general, so Duncan’s tour through the 17th century Civil War was new and fresh to me. He also deserves plaudits for making some sense of the French Revolution (well, as much as is possible). I’m eagerly looking forward to the Haitian Revolution, which is next up.

History of English Podcast

Kevin Stroud’s History of English podcast takes the listener from the Eurasian steppes and Proto-Indo-European right up to The Norman Conquest (where we are as of this writing) with attention to detail and gives the listener an excellent sense of larger historical trends. It’s a great companion to The History of Rome because it covers a lot of subject matter that is out of scope for that podcast, like the details of pre-and post-Roman Britain and the prehistoric Indo-European migrations. Stroud’s work on the migrations and his analysis of Proto-Indo-European is spectacular. I cannot overstate how awesome the early episodes of this podcast are. Stroud gets into details of individual words in the language, how they changed in the Latin, Greek, Celtic, and Germanic branches while never losing sight of why this is important for the understanding of English.

Stroud’s podcast is well-researched, concise, and bursting with information. That said, the History of English Podcast is not ideal for binge-listening (this may actually not be a criticism). I find that there’s so much to digest with each episode that I’ll need a break because my brain is full.

The British History Podcast

Jamie Jeffords covers similar territory in his British History Podcast, although in greater detail. The podcast begins around 50 BCE and the Roman invasions and is (understandably) less concerned with prehistory. The greater detail can sometimes come at the cost of concision and focus, and I often get the sense that the podcast would benefit from stricter editing. Jeffords has an informal, gather-around-the-fire speaking style which is engaging, but his dad jokes and puns frequently elicit audible groans from me as I listen in the car. That said, dad jokes are a matter of taste, and Jeffords’ research is unimpeachable. What I find cringeworthy, might have you laughing.

Jeffords also seeks out subject matter experts to interview in the podcast, which I think is wonderful and I wish more people would do it. When covering Anglo-Saxon history, he interviews the archaeologists and curators of the Staffordshire Hoard and the Sutton Hoo burial. It’s a wealth of information from the very people working on these Anglo-Saxon treasures, and Jeffords does a great job bringing it to us.

Others

I know Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History podcast is hugely popular, but I didn’t include it here because I haven’t had a chance to properly evaluate it. I listened to part of one episode, found it to be bombastic and overdramatized, and didn’t listen further. But that’s not really giving it a fair shake. I may return to it, we’ll see, but I’m hoping this post will elicit some more suggestions from Machiavelli readers that I hadn’t considered yet. Cheers!

Thank you to everyone who participated in the Kickstarter, it was a huge success and all the rewards have been mailed to backers. Did you miss the Kickstarter? Fear not! I have a limited number (about 100) of signed and numbered books for sale. Or, if ebooks are more your speed, you can pick up the book on Comixology.

So hop on over to the page I’ve set up, where you can see e-commerce in action and buy the book.