With my blood pressure spiking over the news described in the article on Salon (above with my augmented image) and my fear Trump would probably skate on this outrage (probably by blaming and firing DNI John Ratcliffe ) I figured correctly that there was no sense in writing about it on Daily Kos since others would already have gotten the jump on me and made the trending list.
Yesterday I vented my anger over the Russia story by making a couple of images adapting caricatures by DonkeyHotey and tweeted them:
I am a frustrated cartoonist. I can’t draw. My ideas aren't as clever as those of, say Pulitzer Prize winner Tom Toles of The Washington Post who also posts his cartoons on Twitter, Rubin Bolling (aka Ken Fisher) who posts his Tom the Dancing Cat cartoons on Daily Kos (he was a Pulitzer nominee), and other political cartoonists we see in the major media.
A few years ago I learned to use a couple of programs which are easier to master than Photoshop (InPixio and BeFunky) and since then I make them, often either just amuse myself by making images to post on Twitter or to use to illustrate diaries here.
I have no idea whether anyone notices them let alone appreciates them. I like to think they augment whatever opinion I am expressing. (Let me know what you think in the poll.)
Yesterday, for example I used this to illustrate my diary.
I put together this for a story about William Barr being like a fox in a henhouse:
In what is probably my least seen diary I spent about an hour making this image.
Below: A few days ago it took many steps to get enough piranhas in the illustration took me as long to make as it did to write this diary I explain the meaning at the end. I considered applying the metaphor shark infested water and making an illustration for this, but I decided on piranhas since I thought the imagery of being eaten alive by a school of them was more apropos to what Covid-19 does when it ravages the body.
One of the major progressive websites which uses numerous created images to illustrate stories is The Daily Beast. Sometimes more than half the “above the fold” stories have them. Today there are only two.
Daily Kos rarely uses created images for their articles or has diaries posted using them. The diary below has one, although it isn’t clear who made it.
I am going to keep making for them to tweet and, unless I get a resounding “STOP” message on my poll I will keep using them for my diaries.