You may have noticed a couple of clangers in the final Lithium comic, hopefully they didn’t get in the way of your enjoyment of it. And as someone commented; “What happened to you? There were never such serious mistakes in the last 54 comics.”
Well … it’s a good question. What did happen to me? I’ll tell you. I went through some really good, hurty, life-changing stuff, and I no longer give quite so much of a shit about my mistakes – particularly if they don’t hurt anyone else! Hooray! I could re-release Lithium #14 with the errors corrected, but … I’m not going to! Yay!
If you look at the rest of my comics, you’ll find mistakes everywhere …
… no matter the extreme levels of my attempted perfectionism …
… little errors just keep creeping in …
Historically, the problem for me was that when we handle our own mistakes, we grapple with our own perfectionism – we really address our sense of self-worth.
- If I get everything right, I will be enough / worthy of love
- Ergo, if I get one tiny thing wrong, I will not be enough / worthy of love
- Gotta hide every mistake.
… that is the issue with perfectionism; it’s really about self worth.
Why does everything have to be perfect? Sure, we should try our best at things, but in my 20s I was definitely more concerned with this than I am now. So what has changed? If you’ve read my comics, you’ll have a good idea – I’ve obviously been on a bit of a journey, delved into my shame, my family issues, delved deep into self harm and self worth. Here’s a clear blog post about that journey, if you’re interested in the topic. And another one. And another one. And another one … yeah, I’ve put some thought into it over the years hehe.
And on this journey, just as Odysseus found, we learn peace within ourselves, with all our crap. With our warts and all. Weird, odd little organic creatures, trying and failing to be perfect. And still worthy of the gift of love, it just takes a bit of a journey to really accept that gift.
And with the errors in Lithium #14, I could re-release it and try and cover all my tracks, but … nah. It’s more important to come to terms with them. Let’s have a quick flick-through of some random comics in the STFW universe … see if it’s just me …
… yeah. There’s tons. Distributed about the internet and translated into umpteen different languages for **literally millions** of people to read and enjoy. Do the mistakes matter? Not really.
And if a carefully-made body of work distributed to ACTUAL MILLIONS of people can calmly contain mistakes and STILL be f*cking excellent … perhaps so can we.
I accept myself as I am , every oart of me right here and right now.
There is great power in acceptance.
Some look for flaws in others so they don’t have to acknowledge their own. But you can’t find your light unless you are willing to sit with and listen to your darkness.
Your creative work is wonderful!
Sit with and listen to your darkness! Agreed!
I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to put you in a difficult position or upset you with THAT comment. The “mistakes” you list above are not serious mistakes, they are more like your trademarks, or Easter eggs. 🙂
By serious mistakes, I meant the 300-year date change and the missing comment on page 176, because these detract from the readability and enjoyment of the comic. The other “mistakes” just spice things up and make the whole thing more interesting and fun. 🙂
I like you, Sindy, and your comics, I did not write these lines out of malice or any other evil intent.
By the way, I corrected typing and other written inconsistencies in my translations. I wrote my own mistakes somewhere else…
Lol, thanks for the half-apology SAJ Fan – “I’m sorry you took offence, but it was an unacceptable error” – haha cute try 😂
The blog wasn’t about your comment really, it was about how we handle perfectionism, and what it might mean in our lives – as BobC goes into his own experience rather nicely below.
Don’t worry babe, we’re all on our funny little journeys 🙂
I used to fear making mistakes to the point where I felt everything I did either was a mistake, or at least contained mistakes. I used to dread correction, feedback and criticism as if they were existential threats, the world proving to me just how little I can do right.
This would lead to “analysis paralysis”, where I’d do nothing until I was certain I had found a way to accomplish it without errors or mistakes. However, once I had enlisted in the military, the need to both do my job promptly and effectively while also minimizing gross mistakes forced me to categorize and prioritize my mistakes, both their sources and effects.
This had the very interesting effect of building my self-confidence, starting at a low level, to be sure, then watching it rise as my knowledge and experience grew. I would still occasionally fail, and sometimes I’d be punished for it, but I also always received the input I needed to reduce future occurrences. This helped me realize I had never really trusted advice from others, that I only trusted those things I could trace back to “first principles”, as I was also fearful that any trust would let others’ mistakes become my own. The military had its “Do it or else!” authoritarian structure that forced me to act. In time, this helped my build limits for my distrust, to balance input from others against my own ignorance.
These nascent skills served me well through my enlistment, as well as during my university education after. Then all the wheels fell off when I graduated and became an engineer. Project reviews were pure torture for me. I started getting panic attacks while preparing for them. My attempts to cope became increasingly futile, until one day my boss found me crying at my computer because I wasn’t able to solve a “simple” problem I’d been chasing for over a week.
When he asked why I hadn’t come to him for help, I blubbered my way through sharing my fears, my shame, my worthlessness, and my dread of failing and my inability to accept feedback. He listened patiently, then scheduled 3x daily checkins with me, to get me used to more feedback more often. Then he shared something I clung to for dear life: “We can only grow through accepting and acting upon feedback.” To me, this meant my solitary success in academics couldn’t fully translate to the real-world engineering environment and processes, which are primarily team-oriented.
But it went further than this. I immediately reinterpreted this as a mantra: “I *need* feedback to succeed.” At first, this made it easier to accept feedback in meetings, as I’m screaming to myself “I NEED THIS!” to keep my fear and dread at bay while I’m listening to the feedback and taking notes. In time, it developed into a hunger for feedback, where I became able to REQUEST feedback, and also to do so by targeting the parts of my work I was least sure about. Intentionally exposing my weakness before others pointed them out to me, to ensure nothing was missed, and my work was as good as it could reasonably become.
In time, I came to realize I had been creating distance between myself and some of my coworkers, specifically those who had ever given me “brutal” feedback. Many engineers are “on the spectrum” and may lack emotional intelligence or social graces, myself included! I had to learn to set aside any and all emotional interpretations and reactions to “brutal” feedback so I could joyfully obtain and benefit from the objective gem within. This, in turn, helped me better phrase my own feedback to others, particularly to those who seemed overly sensitive like I had been.
My “breakdown” as a new engineer, and the valuable realizations that followed, FINALLY let me know, in no uncertain terms, that it was time for me to get very serious about therapy. My progress in one small area of my life had ignited a hunger for similar progress in ALL other areas of my inner and outer life.
Preventing mistakes is a sane thing to do. But doing nothing in order to avoid mistakes seldom is sane, especially when the option exists to ask for help. However, we must also accept that we are inherently subjective when it comes to our own work, meaning we can suck at seeing our own mistakes, and the eyes of others are our only paths to improvement. That’s why writers have proofreaders and editors!
It’s also why it is important to always consider the content and context of mistakes, both our own and those of others. A misspelling is nothing, as it is often close enough to the intended word that our built-in autocorrect can often catch and fix it, often without raising conscious awareness of the mistake. The same applies to 3D modeling errors, where we know what the artist intended, and don’t need to sweat the pixel-level details.
It used to be, when I caught such minor mistakes, I’d rush to be the first to publicly report them, which was actually my twisted way to justify my own mistakes, or to boost my ego at the expense of another. It rarely was about making the product itself any better, as I seldom actually cared if the mistake was addressed or not.
Now, I first share them (semi-)privately, with at least an attempt at sensitivity, such as, “If you ever revisit this, you may want to add this item to the to-do list”. Or, when the mistake is more meta, such as something plot or dialog related, I’d share my observation as a question, to seek understanding and clarification before identifying something as an error.
I’m so glad I’m doing this. More than once I’ve identified what was actually an easter egg as a mistake, because I was clueless about the implicit reference! Talk about getting (easter) egg on my face.
Sometimes, “mistakes” are intentional, meant to either aid the story or prod the audience. My favorite example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgXhLeXof3k
Hehe, thanks BobC, yes I think it’s something we all need to learn as we exit adolescence, our own crystal towers of self tend do to get a little shattered!
Love the Chapin reference 👍
Let’s go from the bottom up (giggity)
The Mike part isn’t a mistake, he’s sweeping with it to make sure he gets a spot and is bringing it back to make sure it doesn’t go UNDER the Swiffer. Easy fix.
Kal’s just trying to hold in a sneeze. Not a mistake. It’s like when you’re watching a video and you pause it and someone looks like they’re being stabbed in the bumhole with a screwdriver. It happens.
Charlie’s hands aren’t going into Jack’s back, she’s trying to get a grip on his pants and/or shirt and can’t see what is happening so she’s readjusting so she isn’t firmly grasping (FIRMLY! GRASP IT!) both articles of clothing and instead is going to readjust her aim to go for the shirt and not the pantaloons.
You were just using Karen’s height to see if we were paying attention enough to notice the deception: Clever girl.
Okay…Kal’s nose in that one seems a bit “off”. Mistake check #1? Check.
Kip is rolling over and his hand hasn’t QUITE hit the pillow/bed just yet. Again, great timing to be between it all.
Zan’s knockers is a happy accident. Not a mistake. She was imagining herself with larger sweater puppets and had them, noticed them, went to go get someone’s attention and completely botcher her concentration save. It happens.
Space lingo. None of us really understand all of it, but we try to pretend that we do. Sometimes someone’s just gotta drif…
Box was too close to a heating coil, started to melt and not melt into the wall. Space boxes on another planet. Shit’s weird. Gotta accept it.
Window pane isn’t missing, the sun is just really bright in that spot to make it SEEM as if it is missing. Hey, if people can forget that they’re walking directly into a window pane or a sliding door without opening it? This, too, can happen.
Noddle? Yeah. It’s a space soup. We don’t know for sure if they have noodles, but they most DEFINITELY have noddles.
All in all I only see 1 mistake. Period. But he gets to be with his hot auntie and her insanely amazing antics. So we can let that one slide.
Enjoy your day! 😉
Hehe thanks Mike, yeah I actually wondered about writing Noddle Soup into the script later, be an easy one to cover hah!
I just figured it was bad camera angles…..
Except for Mike,,,,,, he wrote a book on it.
We are always our own worst critics. Just trying to share that 99% of us would’ve never noticed it and there can always be another way to look at it. 😉
Yes sir…. I was poking at ya.. all good fun, and the stories!
Let’s be honest… It’s your drawings, your feelings, your story to tell. You can tell it like you want. Make the gras blue, the sky green and the clouds pink. The only realy important thing is if you are proud of your story?
When little mistakes bothers you, then you can correct them if you want to. When they don’t bother you then everything is fine.
I like the storys you are telling and i like to read them. With green or blue gras. You did a realy good work and i hope to read more of your storys.
Cheers Chrno, yeah I’m happy, v proud of Lithium tbh – I’m pretty proud of One Human, Being series too, interested to see what happens next 🙂
I sincerely hope the translators take the time to misspell the words you misspelled.
Hehe. I think a lot of my ‘misspellings’ are probably differences between UK and US English anyway – most of my readers are American, but it’s written in British English.
The last pic is not a mistake. That’s an electrostatic broom, the newest invention of… oh shit, Umbrella Corporation… it’s going to eat us…
Hoenstly? Yeah, I’ve noticed a few misspellings in your comics – so what? I’ve also noticed a few misspellings in “official” subtitles on Blu Rays of Hollywood movies. If the professionals can’t reach to 100%, why should we expect that from you?
As for the other ones – I’ve never noticed a single one of them.
Seems to me the that attention to detail and the effort to get things right are perhaps more important than them being “perfect”, whatever that may be. Unintended sloppiness connotes a lack of commitment and effort, and as such, tends to diminish the value of any work, both in the attitude of the creator and in those for whom it’s created.
None of us is perfect, no one can be, but the old adage of “… do your best …” will benefit us all.
I’m convinced that Sindy has always given it her best shot — and the fact that her work affects us as much as it does is proof of that.
Yeah I mean I give it a pretty good shot, for sure. Never gonna be perfect, I think for all of us there’s a bit of a balance between churning out a bunch of crap and never releasing anything because it’ll never be ‘good enough’.
Maybe my next comic should be called that – good enough hehe
Only God can be perfect. More power to your elbow!
Agreed.