Fail By Fail

Blogging the daily failures of Chris Muir as a political cartoonist.

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I should turn this blog into the chronicles of Elon Musk’s management of Twitter.

#TwitterDown: Thousands of users hit with 'rate limit exceeded' error message | CNN Business

Thousands of Twitter users across several countries were unable to access the social media site, or faced difficulty and delays, Saturday.

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Tumblr is banning all NSFW content in a couple of weeks, so if you have a NSFW comic on Tumblr you better get a web site built ASAP. (If you’d like to hire me, I build comicpress websites and can provide a reference; I’ve been building the ReTale site)

If you have a SFW comic on Tumblr, be advised that this is probably going to be a hit to your traffic anyway as all the horny people leave.

This is why you shouldn’t host a comic exclusively on a platform you don’t control

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Tragically, as porny as Day by Day is, I can’t keep Fail by Fail up on Tumblr, and I don’t feel his foolishness is worth trying to find a host, and then reading the mess that is Chris Muir’s work. So, adios all of you people.

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I hope Tumblr solves whatever problem that caused Apple to pull their app. Because the version I have that’s still on my phone has problems, and Tumblr needs to be able to submit their app again to fix some of these bugs and dumb interface issues.

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My God, it’s full of fail!

Wow, I just looked at the last month worth of “Day by Day” and…. Wow!

In my last post, I wanted to point out some of various online reactionary eruptions that had occurred, which had been part of what lead to my burnout. I started noticing it with Gamergate (I can’t believe that was only 4 years ago), which metastasized into things like complaints about Star Wars movies and comic books (Comicsgate).

Fights against feminism have mutated into movements like “men going their own way” (MGTOW) and “Men’s Rights Activism” (MRA). You have this nutty and scary Reddit/Channer alt-right activism with ludicrous memes like red-pilling and “non-playable characters” (NPC). And looking over the back strips, “Day by Day” rings every bell on that list. It’s as though he OD’d on every mental poison from r/The_Donald and /pol/.

And he still fails at the basics of writing a comic strip, with artwork somehow worse than before. He tries to go for an ongoing storyline, but doesn’t seem to understand that the individual daily strips need to be a scene that can be understood on its own. The one-shot strips he does do either have punchlines that don’t make sense, or lack them altogether. His strip remains beholden to the format and structure of those for a newspaper, even though there’s no evidence it is syndicated in any, thus needlessly handcuffing him. He makes the stupidest fact-checkable mistakes I’ve seen. His Donald Trump looks like out-of-shape Paul McCartney.

I might actually have to buy myself a new computer and return to this failboat.

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The world’s gone crazy!

Where have you been, sir?

As I debate as to whether to resurrect our page here to chronicle Chris Muir tragic Doonesbury-type comic - where I see the art and comedy is still the same level of terrible it was in 2016 - I want to note we are living in the terrible snow globe of a Day by Day strip.

One of the posts I wrote here shortly before going on sabbatical referenced a Twitter nobody who posted conservative memes and threats to liberals. Late last month, a different Twitter nobody who posted conservative memes and threats to liberals was arrested for sending bombs to liberals. In that same week, another guy shot people in a synagogue because he was hopped up on anti-Semetic conservative alt-right conspiracy theories about how George Soros was paying migrants to come seek asylum in America in order to destroy white people somehow. Now, I haven’t looked at Muir’s cartoons in nearly 2 years (though I may look at his late October work out of morbid curiosity to see if he covered that), but as you can see, back then he was celebrating beliefs that led to this.

Not to say he is a leading light in this - I probably wouldn’t even put him in the top 100 - but even his slight assist is making this world more dangerous by whipping up frenzy of made-up demons. I don’t know if making fun of how terribly he draws things helps stop the world from descending into madness, or if it just distracts.

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I may return.

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Awwwww. This is gonna be a cute Fail by Fail.

Pretty much as expected by everyone who is not a political hack, the FBI decided not to recommend prosecuting Hillary Clinton over how her State Department email system was set up. This is likely because this was a similar set up that prior Secys of State had as well and that the relevant statutes was so overly broad that you could arrest everybody who served as Secy of State since email became popular.

But since this involves Hillary Clinton, part of the Clinton Crime Family that conservatives have wanted to bring down since 1992, the caterwauling is going to be loud and unbearable. And for that, I direct you to Roy Edroso this week. However, my concern is our cartoon today. As we learned six months (or three posts) ago, a little orange box with an arrow denotes a hyperlink. In this case, the link goes to the FBI’s tip form where you can, according to the site, “report suspected terrorism or criminal activity.” Now, the idea that he wants to equate prosecutorial discretion with treason is risible, but that he’d like to encourage people to spam the FBI with their rambling set of Clinton conspiracies could win him the Scott Adams’ Troll of the Day award.

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Not to mock a fellow when times are tough, I hope that Muir’s father’s surgery back in May was successful, but look at this art.

Does it really look much different than any time else in the strip? Shading and shadows are much flatter, but it’s still not like we were approaching anything that is pleasing to the eye.

But this comic is terrible for the reason a lot of his comics are terrible, a reference masquerading as a joke. Of course, the reference here is the scene from Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove where Maj. King Kong rides a nuclear bomb like a bronco to its target, because he believes we are now at war with the Soviet Union, thanks to a crazy Air Force commander. Now, this scene has been shown so often by itself, it’s been shorn of context. It’s just some crazy thing that happened in a crazy movie. So screw context, put Donald Trump on the bomb. There’s no commentary or connective tissue.

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Hi gang! Since I do have to log in to Tumblr once in a while and reset my password, lest they delete my blogs and we lose this valuable chronicle of right-wing descent into madness, let’s check in on Day by Day!

Fundraising nudity, poorly drawn. CHECK.

Incomprehensible joke. CHECK

On to that joke, where we have dialog balloons that are covered with censor bars, but with text written over said bars. The first possible reading of this is to portray that the text was clumsily edited replacing the intended dialog by our writer with what is more palatable by our unnamed censor. However, unless Muir has had a remarkable change in politics since I last read him, the dialog presented is exactly what Muir would have written. So, this either means he couldn’t trust his readers to make out the words if he actually did censor them, or he doesn’t quite trust his readers to understand a censorship premise, and decided to change halfway through.

(Quickly checks archives to confirm that -- yep -- Muir is still wingnuts.)

So, Incompetence in strip construction. CHECK

Highly dated pop-culture reference. 300! CHECK

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Well, I’m glad to see Muir is using hyperlinks (what is represented by the tiny orange box with the arrow in it) instead of placing the address of the website into the image requiring everyone to type it out. However, the link goes to a clip on YouTube of the Pirates of the Caribbean scene mentioned in panel three, so (a.) it’s redundant, and (b.) it probably should have been linked in panel three. Because (c.) I thought that link in panel one would link to the code of chivalry Zed is referring to, since (d.) in the real world, the codes of chivalry were more of “what you’d call ‘guidelines’ than actual rules.”

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New Year, Old Day

Well, it’s been a long time since I’ve last looked at Day by Day. Sorry, but I was very busy with a few much more interesting things than watching a failing pin-up artist fall deeper and crazier into wingnutdom, especially now that there are more extravagant and crazier people do it and draw larger audiences.

But I want to note this, when I came to visit this site yesterday at around 1pm MT, this is what I saw:

three house ads, with actual nudity, soliciting your sponsorship. If you didn’t realize DbD was full of nudity, you’re probably fired now even if you just showed up from a non-nude storyline day syndicated by some other site. (Does this comic even get syndicated anymore?) Brilliantly, the banners don’t link to his advertising broker but back to the DbD homepage. For that you have to click the Project Wonderful link on the very bottom. When I did click on the nude female torso and the page reloaded, a new ad did appear, purchased by another webcomic at the opening bid price of $4. Project Wonderful seems to work on an auction system, where the highest bidder gets the ad for the day. If no one purchases an ad for a particular day and that day comes, your “please advertise” house ad displays, until someone buys for the rest of the day. So it was tits right up until well past halfway through the day before someone spent the minimum to advertise here. For a Sunday comic. Which is probably the most popular comic of the week! Anyway, now a new comic is up, and boobs and ass are the only advertisers again. Which leads me to not think many people are reading.

So pulling up the Project Wonderful page for his site, it seems he averages about 5,000 and 12,000 views a day (the stats vary wildly for each ad), That seems to be incredibly tragic though given that according to Twitter’s analytics, my twitter feed gets 4,000 impressions a day. And I’m literally a nobody on Twitter. But I take some of the blame too. If I could bring some of my Twitter watchers over to his site, he could make one or two more cents a year on his comic which would be a huge windfall.

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Well, with today’s cartoon being entirely inscrutible without following whatever insane plot mechanisms led us here, I of course backtracked several days to see what fevered delusion Chris Muir came up to get “Mr. Z” put on the ATF enemies list and to have him victorious, I come across this:

I’m speechless?!

I mean seriously, what the what?

OK, I can see Chris Muir is still working on his breast obsession.

It’s pretty great that Sam and Skye’s mom is as body positive as they are, though it is oddly hypocritical she is asking her daughters to cover up when mommy-dearest is flaunting it.

But Muir, there is a bit more to drawing an aged person than just giving her silver hair. Generally there’s something of a twenty year age difference between parents and their children. You don’t get that my cloning the same body illustration and changing the hair color.

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I go and leave Chris Muir to his own devices for a couple of years and I come back to this!

What the hell?!

Why is Hillary Clinton being depicted by Roseanne?

Why can’t he figure out why hands work?

Why can’t he do research to discover that there were not fingerprints found on any documents?

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What is this... I don't even...

Chris Muir, I have a suggestion for a new button for your site's fundraiser:

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I honestly do not know where to begin on this cartoon. Do I comment on the standard mediocre art? That Zed is again wearing the single suit Muir knows how to draw, yet Sam is again wearing something that exposes her breasts to all? I've said this all before, so I guess we move into the curious choice of subjects to tackle.

Who the fuck is Tom Francois?

From his Twitter page, which appears to be his main outlet to the internet, his profile reads:

One day Obama will be dragged kicking+screaming Allah Akbar like a little bitch for Treason [sic], while his Sasquatch wife pounds on the agents screaming racism!

The only actual reports about this Tom Francois I've come across come from posts on Examiner.com. This site is not to be confused with the various Examiner newspapers that used to be published across the country, of which only the Washington Examiner remains. Though it shares the name and is owned by the same company, Examiner.com publishes user-generated content with very little oversight. Think of it as a very fancy Tumblr, but with a name designed to confuse people into thinking it is major media.

Anyway, according to this post, Tom Francois was visited by Secret Service because of what he posts on his Twitter account, which includes hopes of Barack Obama being sentenced to death, though the post glosses over this with one of the more disingenuous quotes I've read: "I wish him no harm. I disagree with his policies and actions and I make no bones about it. It's my First Amendment Right and I intend to exercise it".

His cartooning -- which consists largely of captioning photos or manipulating them in a paint program -- is entirely incidental in the situation. He's not even described as a cartoonist in the articles, not the impression you'd get from Muir when he places him in the same frame as the Danish cartoonist. Hell, he's not even a cartoonist in the same vein as Chris Muir -- which, from me, is saying something.

More likely than not, someone reported Francois to the Secret Service, which has to take every reported threat seriously. And given that Francois believes that Barack Obama is a Muslim, and believes that Muslims all want to kill Americans (much like Muir, according to the final panel), the Secret Service would be derelict of duty if they didn't make sure all he does is run off his mouth.

That said, what's remarkable about Francois is honestly how unremarkable he is. His Twitter feed consists of pretty much of the wingnut paranoia, conspiracies, hatred and loathing that is pretty much tracked professionally by PFAW's Right Wing Watch, The Village Voice's Roy Edroso, The Southern Poverty Law Center and who knows who else. (Well, in addition to repeated posts about how the Secret Service harassed him, which -- as far as I can tell -- happened several months ago.) Chris Muir, because his art is much more polished and is packaged in the guise of a traditional comic strip, can fool you into thinking he's close to mainstream public thought, when in reality his sympathies lie with the demented.

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Ah, we have ass now. Nice to see Chris Muir switch things up a bit.

I don't believe this. We have what amounts to a real and an interesting scandal in the Obama administration with what could possibly be the NSA casting a huge dragnet and spying on everyone and everything, or it could possibly be a snow job by the whistleblower Edward Snowden, but yet after three incredibly lame strips on this, Muir falls back to "How dare the Obamas send their kids on vacation!"

It actually makes me appreciate yesterday's out-of-nowhere book recommendations. I guess it was foreshadowing his intent on quitting -- excuse me -- going Galt.

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There's something rather funny by a guy who is begging for money on the internet trying to promote the idea of rage-quitting society because he's not getting his way. Still, there's something curious about the modern conservative mindset of how everything is so much worst today than it was in some unspecified period in the past, how everything is doomed -- whether because of "socialism" or "feminism", how Barack Obama, or Islam, or Bill Clinton, or Gay Marriage is the greatest threat to our way of life since the last greatest threat to our way of life.

Still, it's rather funny that today's comic is about quitting, while his donation spiel is about fighting to save freedom of speech. (We should note, Muir is at no risk of losing said freedom of speech.)

(And, of course, we have our pledge-week breasts.)