Hello Everybody,

I hope you guys are having a great time receiving the newsletter. I’m sure having a blast sending it out!

Obviously, as a cartoonist I like people reading it. So equally obviously, I want to grow the list.

In terms of growing it, I’ve got my own ideas, certainly. But then I thought to myself, maybe it would be more fun and interesting to reach out to you instead. This is “social media”, after all. And even though I’ve doing it for years, this “open source” stuff is still REALLY interesting to me.

So here’s what I’m asking: You guys receive the newsletter. You guys are a savvy crowd, and you will have plenty of opinions of your own.

So what do I need to change? What could I do better? How could I improve the layout? What new ideas or tools could I be using? And perhaps most importantly, what could I do to make it easier for you guys to share it with your friends?

If you’re already a subscriber, feel free to leave a comment below of send me your feedback at gvdailycartoon@gmail.com. Thanks a lot!

UPDATE: Since I first posted this an hour or two ago, the comments have POURING in below. Thanks, Guys, this is REALLY helpful!

March 10th, 2010: Brad took the Qwantz Corpus I linked to the other day to help the efforts to solve my yet-unsolved anagram, threw in some Markov chains, and used it to write a program that generates new Dinosaur Comics automatically! He's posted some results and they're pretty awesome. And there's more of them today!

– Ryan

["Texas", which I sent out in the newsletter recently. You can buy the print here etc.]

Tomorrow I head for Austin, for the annual 5-day drunken orgy that is South By South West Interactive. Here are some thoughts:

1. SXSW is the only “MUST ATTEND” event on my calendar. It’s the one show I never miss, ever. Unless you’ve already been, it’s hard to convey JUST HOW MUCH more fun, interesting and full of business opportunities it is, compared to other shows. I can’t emphasize enough, if you’re into the Internet, just how much you’re missing out if choose not to attend. Sure, the price of going [entry fee, plane fare, hotel bill, taxi rides etc] might be quite daunting for some of us, but compared to the business and networking you could EASILY end up doing there, that cost is minuscule.

2. So you thought last year was crazy? Last year had ten thousand attendees. I heard on good authority from somebody inside the org that this year’s numbers have doubled. Hope you got a good hotel booking.

3. I’m on a panel on Monday. I hope you’ll come see us. All the other panelists are good friends of mine, so it should be fun…

4. I’ll be signing books. Barnes & Noble will have a little micro store on the fourth floor of the convention center, selling books written by some of the attendees. I’ll be there to sign copies of “Ignore Everybody” on Monday, March 15th at 5.20pm. My signing will last for 30 minutes.

5. Free Booze! Free Sex! A lot of companies sponsor parties, so as long as you have a pass, it’s pretty easy to go the entire five days without ever paying for a single drink or meal. Plus with all the young singles everywhere, everybody’s trying to get laid. X-thousand geek twenty-somthings trying to hook up en masse is pretty entertaining to watch. By Sunday or Monday everybody’s a basket case. Which is why the veterans are always telling the newbies, “Pace Yourself”.

6. Creating an island of calm in a sea of bodies. It’s going to be a madhouse this year, so to make ourselves easier to find,  gapingvoid has hired a trade show booth for the event. If you want to meet up, that’s where you can find me. I’ll be selling art, doing business, signing drawings and exchanging business cards. My focus this year will be much more about business, than my usual hallway wanderings.

7. I’m better organized, this time. Pretty much all the parties and events I’m planning to attend are already in my calendar. In past  years I just turned up and went with the flow. It was exhausting after about three days. Never again.

8. Follow me on Twitter if you want to see what I’m up to on the day. Heck, that’s what everybody else uses, too.

9. SXSW makes me proud to be Texan. I’ve seen this a lot: People come to Texas for the first time to attend SXSW, and “fall in love with the barbecue”. Texas has always been a very misunderstood State, if you ask me. SXSW does a great job of helping to fix that, at least with my crowd.

Do any websites garner your support?

Click here to visit the comic.

["Hugged", which went out earlier this morning in the newsletter. You can buy the print here etc.]

These days I’m finding myself writing less about my usual sex/angst/alienation shtick, and more and more about business and entrepreneurship, hence the cartoon above. As my interests evolve, so does the subject matter. It’s really that simple.

I want to draw cartoons that entertain people, sure, but perhaps more importantly, I want to draw cartoons that push people in the right direction; the direction they wanted to go in, anyway.

That’s what all my favorite artists have always done for me, after all. Their work always gave me a wee nudge etc. I’m just trying to follow their example.

Whether we’re talking Rembrandt, Shakespeare, The Rolling Stones, Charlie Brown, or the unknown graffiti artist from the wrong side of the tracks- that’s what “Art” is really all about, at the end of the day. The Wee Nudge.

And even if you’re not an “Artist” per se, whether you’re a techie, salesman, consultant, plumber or whatever, surely the work you do should somehow give people that same “Wee Nudge”, in your own unique way? If not, what’s stopping you? What’s stopping anybody?

I think it’s career suicide not to, frankly…

March 9th, 2010: Brad took the Qwantz Corpus I linked to the other day to help the efforts to solve my yet-unsolved anagram, threw in some Markov chains, and used it to write a program that generates new Dinosaur Comics automatically! He's posted some results and they're pretty awesome. Enjoy!

– Ryan

KarmaMedia is a communications shop in Hungary. As it was first explained to me:

Karmamedia is a communication shop with an emphasis on P.R.  (whatever that is), and on doing things online (wherever that is).
We started out as a blog three years ago, working at various big agencies, and jumped ship to become independent and happy about six months ago.

Our name was selected intuitively because it sounded good and because the guy who started it all wanted to use a picture of Buddha sitting with a notebook – but since then we found a fitting explanation for it: online, what goes around comes around. We don’t believe in karma in the religious sense but we do know it exists online – Google makes sure of this. So we try to help companies do good and meaningful things and make sure these things get noticed.

To celebrate their six-month anniversary, they threw a big party. The local trade press gave it nice coverage. They commissioned me to draw something for the event. I think the motif of “Karma” pointing to itself, a play on the Eastern symbol of the eternal snake eating itself, worked out well. Straight and to the point.

Thanks to Balazs Lovenberg and his colleagues for such a great assignment. I had a lot of fun. Rock on.

[Commission your own Cube Grenade. The Cube Grenade archive is here.]

This one is called “The Intense Longing”. The latest from the “Moleskine” series [Click here to enlarge etc].

Friday night I was in Marfa, hearing my favorite local band, The Doodlin’ Hogwallops, play a gig at Padre’s. Because I was driving, I wasn’t drinking any alcohol, so I just stuck to black coffee the whole night.

Once the caffeine started kicking in I got out my drawing pen…

“Longing” is a lovely idea to wrestle with, because from the moment we become sentient beings, our lives are utterly saturated with it.

The longing to be closer to God. The longing to be closer to Nature. The longing to feel more alive. The longing to love and to feel loved. The longing for truth, beauty, goodness, sex, experience, poetry, art, strength, music, friendship, family, affection, desire, magic, power, laughter, joy, meaning, resonance…

It never goes away, no matter how smart, sexy, witty or successful we become. It’s the broth we spend our whole lives stewing in: The longing to touch that which can never be touched.

Which is why I think it’’s a REALLY good idea try to express it somehow, even if the results will be invariably mixed…

March 8th, 2010: Guys, remember Adventure Time? IF NOT THEN CLICK THAT LINK FOR AN AMAZING VIDEO. Anyway it turns out Cartoon Network has made a whole series out of it! There's a trailer here. I am the excited one!

– Ryan

Abductions just aren't working like they used to.

Click here to visit the comic.

March 5th, 2010: If you're working on the puzzle (qwantzle?) here are some tools to help automated analysis! Paul Stansifer has released Qwantzle Data, which scraped the OhNoRobot search engine to gather Dinosaur Comics text, and then converted it into ngrams, 2grams and 3grams. Nice! I've also released the Dinosaur Comics text as XML, which might help you, though it's pretty redundant given the work Paul's already done! I haven't cleaned the XML so there's some duplicate entries, etc.

Also! In doing this I noticed there were transcriptions missing, which led me to discover I'd messed up the ONR code on this site for like a month! So that's fixed now, although this little bit of added data won't really make that much of a difference for puzzle solving.

Finally, a lot of the entries I've seen are getting closer! People have hit on some key phrases that are in the solution, though of course with anagrams it's impossible to tell whether you're close or not. So here's one more hint: there's only one sentence in the solution, so the two exclamation marks appear right after each other. And don't forget the clues I gave earlier!

– Ryan

["Successful", which I sent out recently in the newsletter. You can get the signed print here etc.]

While writing the first draft of EVIL PLANS, I wrote about “The Hunger”- that primal drive we all have to do something meaningful with our lives.

The Hun­ger will give you everything. And it will take from you, everything. It will cost you your life, and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it.

What do I mean by “Everything”?

Well, pretty much what I said. Anything worth doing takes forever. And if time is all we have have, then QED, time is “Everything”.

Only you can decide if it’s worth it…

Apple puts the squeeze to HTC.

Click here to visit the comic.

["Cross", which I sent out in the newsletter recently. You can buy the print here.]

With the deadline for the finished draft only a few months away, I’ve started working again on the next book, “Evil Plans” in earnest.

Everybody needs an EVIL PLAN. Everybody needs a way to get the hell out of the RAT RACE. Everybody needs to get away from boring, dead-end jobs that they hate, and start doing something they love, doing something that matters. Life is short.

Every person who ever managed to do this, every person who manged to escape the rat race and start doing something that matters, started off with an EVIL PLAN.

My EVIL PLAN for the next couple of months is to work on the book first thing in the morning, 500 words a day. Afternoons I’ll work on the Cube Grenades. Evenings will be drawing new cartoons for the Newsletter.

From my end, it’s pretty sustainable, so I’m happy.

Let me tell you a story:

About twelve years ago I was living in New York City, busting my ass, working in an ad agency. One day I decided to go down to Houston to visit my family. While I was there, my sister and I decide to drive up to Austin to visit some old college buddies.

Instead of our usual route via I-10, we decided to take the slower but more scenic Route 290, through the Texas Hill Country. A lovely drive of about 150 miles.

At about the halfway point we pull into Chappell Hill, Texas, a sweet little town of maybe three hundred people. We stop for some gas.

Right next to the gas station is this wee building, not much more than a shack, called the Chappell Hill Meat Market & Cafe. We go in.

Turns out they sell some of the best Texas brisket, sausage and jerky you ever did come across. They have their own smoke house in the back, and everything is prepared right there on the premises. My friends in Austin are having a barbecue that evening, so we buy about forty dollars worth of sausage, brisket and jerky for the party. We eat some of the jerky in the car- Outstanding!

We have a great time in Austin, seeing our friends. Everybody LOVED the meat we brought for them. On our way home to Houston, my sister and I like the Chappell Hill Meat Market so much, we decide to stop in again, and buy some more sausage for my dad and his wife.

As I’m paying for the food I compliment the person serving me, the owner, a nice lady named Sissy.

“This is a great little place”, I say. “I LOVE your jerky.”

“Why, thank you,” says Sissy, in her very polite, Texan way.

“I bet you sell a lot of this stuff,” I say.

“Sure do,” says Sissy. “About a thousand pounds of meat…”

“A week? Really? That much?”

“No, Darlin’. A thousand pounds, every day.”

BOOM! Moment of clarity. A tiny little shack-store in Nowheresville, Texas. Making probably somewhere between twenty and forty thousand dollars a week, pure profit. That’s a lot more money than me or any of my other New York cronies were making (or probably ever going to make). For a lot less hassle and overheads, to boot.

Now, I never wanted to go into the meat business, but since that day in Chappell Hill, Texas, I have always aspired to have a business model as simple, elegant, profitable and low-key as this one. I’m not quite there yet, but I’m getting close…

And that, My Friends, is what “EVIL PLANS” is really all about. Exactly.