THIS MODERN WORLD

… we’ve just added the remaining stock of 25 YEARS OF TOMORROW to the TopatoCo store.

The final stretch goal on the Kickstarter campaign was a book party for backers at the historic Mark Twain House in Hartford. We’ve had some last-minute cancellations, so the Twain House is making those seats available to the public, if you happen to be in the area. There will be a reception, onstage conversation and slide show, and booksigning afterwards.

UPDATE: It was an amazing evening, and a fantastic conclusion to the long road of this Kickstarter campaign. Many thanks to Jacques at the Twain House for hosting the event and Gil Roth for acting as master of ceremonies. Thanks also to the Make That Thing team, without whom these books would never have been published, and to all of you who backed the campaign and made it such an overwhelming success.

With friends Tony Ortega, Maggie Renzi and John Sayles

I brought some thank-you gifts for the MTT crew.

If you’d been there, you would have seen the big unveiling of the promised stretch-goal tattoo.

Chatting with podcaster Gil Roth. Audio of this part of the evening will be up at his site soon.

And that’s a wrap … a journey that started with a crazy idea for an entirely implausible book ends in the house that Mark Twain built.

When I had lunch with Barry Eisler in San Francisco a couple of weeks ago, he didn’t mention that he’d named a character in his new book after me. (Spoiler: my namesake doesn’t last long.) It was kind of surreal to discover this after getting about three hours of sleep before a very early morning flight.

The God’s Eye View works on multiple levels — as a straightforward spy thriller, and as a critique of the surveillance state. You can get it here.

One of the drawbacks of the digital age is that you no longer get physical letters to save as mementos (like the postcard from Kurt Vonnegut that I have hanging on my dining room wall). Nonetheless, I just got a very nice note from my friend John Sayles about the 25 year compilation, and he gave me permission to post part of it here.

I always feel like culture is a very crowded conversation, and that without stuff like Tom Tomorrow there would be only two voices heard- right-wing dingbats and liberal apologists for the fucked-up status quo. In filmmaking post-production we do a sound mix, in which a technician uses band-pass filters to separate signal from noise, allowing unintelligible street dialogue to make sudden sense. This is the service I think you’ve been providing for so long. Though satire rarely ‘changes’ things right away, it is needed to keep the sepsis from spreading- the fall of the Soviet Union was not caused by the CIA but because they kept lying to themselves till the cynicism- and real despair- among the people left nothing to prop the rotting edifice up.

Anyhow, the strips are a pleasure to look at (I love all the marginalia) and really funny and appropriately critical of an American public that can make anything but a bad joke out of Donald Trump. I’m always struck in Britain how clever and snarky the humor is without ever being for something (caring, of course, leaves you vulnerable to either counter-attack or just being thought hopelessly uncool) and have always valued the humanist core running through your work. Hope you continue to whack away at it, and when you finally decide to hang up your digital art tools, I look forward to Sparky Died for Your Sins (most likely barbecued and served on toothpicks at the Washington Press Corps gala) when the remainder of your strips are collected.

Two One weird tech problem — I’ve Googled fairly extensively but can’t find an answer. (Solved the other, I think.)

I’ve been using Chrome on my desktop, but it’s developed this weird glitch where it won’t let me type into the reply field on Gmail. You’d think Google would have that one sorted out. I have searched online and found various suggestions to either check or uncheck various preferences, none of which have solved the problem. Right now it looks like the solution is “switch to another browser.”

Suggestions welcome: tomtomorrow at gmail.