Bring Your Dad To Work Day

This week’s new Dustinland comic is a true story about what happened when my son joined me for a work meeting a couple of weeks ago. It’s funny — he really did a great job and enjoyed it… so I’m trying to encourage that initiative while simultaneously ensure he doesn’t follow me into advertising (in case you weren’t aware, that’s what I do to make money because it sure am hard paying the bills with comics).

Not that marketing hasn’t provided me with a wonderful life I appreciate every day. It’s just that the kid has his whole life ahead of him. I think my reco for him — or any young person — is to strive for a career where you care about the end result. And I mean you care because it means something to you as a person, your values, your artistic sensibilities, your vision of how earth and mankind can be — not because you want to succeed or make money or you simply have self-respect that requires you to do a great job at whatever you do. Now, of course most of us don’t get to do what we want and get paid for it… but that’s what being young is all about. You have the chance to strive for something special, and if that doesn’t pan out, you can fall in line like the rest of us and still have a satisfying life.

Technically Speaking

This week’s new Dustinland comic is about the wonderful perfect tech paradise we’re all currently living in. It’s actually more of a series of vignettes around this theme rather than the usual strip that’s essentially one continuous “story.” That’s because I decided to ideate on this topic and came up with all these little thought starters and was originally going to make each its own comic, but then felt that these themes didn’t deserve 8 weeks of content, plus then I’d just turn into CNET or something.

But yeah…I think we’ve all read about the promise of the smart home and this Jetsonsesque connected future, and yet we can barely get two or three devices to connect seamlessly. Not to say I’m a total ungrateful skeptic — I mean, right now I’m sort of beaming my thoughts into your brain and we live possibly thousands of miles apart and have never met. So that’s pretty cool. If only they could get my robot vacuum to not break after 6 months, we’d be good.