When Social Network Stuff Is Fricking Awesome

For some goofy reason, I was sick as a dog last night and still haven't recovered. Don't know if I ate something that disagreed with me, or what. But I went to bed feeling rotten.

Woke up this morning and remembered why I love social networks, sometimes, holy cats.

First, last night, some of you may have seen this…Twitter has an account, a real douchecandle, called #lgbtfacts, who posts horrible, awful bullshit about the 'abhorrent gay lifestyle.' Because it's called @lgbtfacts, some people might stumble onto it thinking it's a positive account, at first, in the same way that some religious adoption services pretend to be Planned Parenthood-style clinics.

It's gross, full of the usual lies and bigotry.

So, some people decided to 'borrow' the #lgbtfacts hashtag and fill it with fricking HILARIOUS 'facts' about lgbt people, along with some REAL facts and some heartfelt positive sentiments. I was invited to participate, some other comics writers did as well, like Rucka, Fraction, Doran, and Busiek. It was really, REALLY funny, but the best thing was once again seeing bigots outclassed, outwitted, outfunnied, and out-truthed by the very people they were trying to insult. It was absolutely hysterical, some of the tweets people posted, and you couldn't help but love that this guy's hashtag was absolutely flooded with positive messages, saying, basically,  "You lose. You so completely lose."

Huge fun, just a pleasure to watch take place.

Second, wow!

I posted here about book I really want to see published, the true experiences of an artist named Al Davison, and what happened to him when he experienced six months of complete blindness a while back. The book is called the Alchemist's Easel, and you can read my post about his efforts here:

http://gailsimone.tumblr.com/ post/16375278236/ important-book-thingie

He's trying to raise just 3500 dollars to finish the book, he's raised the other required funds, so he's using indiegogo.com, which is similar to Kickstarter.

After I posted about it here on Tumblr, he went from having just $150 in donations to nearly a thousand in donations OVERNIGHT.  That is purely on you, Tumblr. I can't thank you enough. This is the kind of book that the industry and the world sorely needs, and you got him that much closer to publishing in just a few short hours.

Not just that, but a friend of mine is posting my Tumblr post on the WIRED website, which should generate some huge traffic, and hopefully get him much closer to the goal.

It makes me really happy. You see so much negative stuff online, so much sad news, so much fighting and all that, it gets wearying, sometimes.

But here we have a bunch of people, lgbt and not, banding together to throw a party at a bigot's expense, and people digging into their pockets in uncertain times to fund an artist's vision.

I kind of LOVE THAT SO MUCH.

Also, I am just going to add that a reader went and bought the Doctor Who role-playing game, the deluxe boxed edition, and sent it to me, just to be nice, this morning. I know it's not QUITE the same thing as this other stuff, but it's a pretty dang kind gesture that put a huge smile on my face.

So today, if people say bad things about the internet, I will kick them with my fist!