SCAD is an amazing school, but all that education and opportunity comes at a price. If you want to go there, you'd better be prepared to work for that education and take those opportunities. It's very, very hard and demanding, but quite rewarding if you have the strength and drive to keep pace.

While I seriously messed up my education, I don't bear any ill will towards the school. It was all bad luck and my own failings.

Even if you were right, and I had torrented something, what does that prove? Do the two wrongs somehow make a right? Does it make my statements about torrenting less true? No.

If I have ever downloaded something illegally in the past, it was the wrong thing to do. It was me making the wrong choice and doing the wrong thing. It was wrong. I never have justified anything--there is no justification. It is misappropriation of other people's property, and it deprives them of money.

And if someone were to say "Hey, you downloaded such and such album, and that band did not sell enough and no one will distribute their albums now" I would feel like a total asshole because I contributed to putting a band I liked out of business.

Comics are not a huge medium, and with the economy down, they sell less than ever. And we see online torrents of comics claiming to have been downloaded WAY more than all the copies we've sold. Sure, some of those are bots or whatnot, but if every person who read them paid cover price, it would be a HUGE BOOM in the industry. We're talking about an industry where the top selling book of the month is lucky to break 100,000. If a big Hollywood studio's biggest summer movie sold 100,000 tickets, people would lose their jobs. A network TV show whose pilot was only watched by 100,000 people would be cancelled before episode 2 aired. Yet, in torrent land, some of our BOTTOM selling books have more downloads than that.

I usually don't swear much, but come on. Downloading comics is an asshole thing to do, and it doesn't matter if it's a hypocrite saying it or Charles Manson. It's wrong, it hurts the medium, it hurts creators, it hurts fans of low selling books. You can call me whatever you want--if you download comics illegally, you are an asshole.

I think I heard something about it, but I don't know what to think other than, it must be pretty good.

I think it's not very nice, it's profiting off of other people's creative property. I wouldn't want someone to do it to me, which is why I don't sell fanart prints of things. The only place I ever would accept money for fanart drawings/ commissions is at somewhere like Fanime (because I am bad at saying no to people's faces) but I don't do it otherwise.