“The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.” – Oscar Wilde

Another beautiful comic, Dorothy.

Paranoia in the digital age: Not that someone is there, but that they aren’t.

Love the cartoon eyes in the dark.

Yesterday I was the victim of a complete stranger taking my photo for no reason I was aware of. I just heard a shutter sound and looked down to see a camera pointing at me from waist level. Then the guy went away. Thinking back, he’d been waiting for his opportunity to take the photo for some time.

It’s a level of personal violation I hadn’t been familiar with until now. I didn’t do anything to solicit this intrusion, and now a complete stranger has a photo of me for reasons I will never be aware of.

There is nothing in my established coping mechanisms set up to deal with this sort of thing.

Sometimes, when I think no-one’s looking, I untag myself in other people’s photos.

Great comic!

I really have to say, every comic you do is fantastic – Cat and Girl are the best!

but… you ARE everyone else’s raw material. that’s what ‘society’ is, no, has always been about. human fuel for group dynamics and social architecture. is it so frightful that it’s spinning into ‘new’ (not so ‘new’, but still…) territory? *shrug*

Candid photos of public strangers is as old as photography itself. Of course, now that image is uploaded to Facebook and tagged rather than printed in a fancy art book or displayed in a gallery (or pasted into a creepy album.)

I admit I take photos of strangers all the time. There is an art and technique to not coming off like a creep, and I will delete photos upon request.

The best way to take candid photos of strangers is to make sure you don’t look at them directly in the eye and grin like a tickled baboon. That tends to make them feel uncomfortable, I guess.

Wonderful!
You rock, Dorothy.

… That is all.

@David, you don’t update yourself for reading 3 days a week.

Is this about everyone, or about Cat?

i so shared this one on my facebook XD

I manage to have a low profile… is that good?

David Thomsen: There are blogs like this one: http://boyculture.typepad.com/boy_culture/2009/12/guydar-x-8-1.html :that specialize in this sort of violation.. Sad but true.

@Harry, I don’t understand your comment. I assume ‘3 days a week’ refers to the frequency of Cat & Girl. And that for reading Cat & Girl 3 days a week, I do not update myself. (?) I’m not sure if this is something I should not do, or something I already do not do. Perhaps by ‘update’, you are referring to my social network status. (??)

My interpretation is that you have been monitoring my social network status, and have observed that I do not update it for ‘reading’ every time there is a new Cat & Girl strip. Yes?

That is excellent!

Oh, you inner-conflict half-narcissists. When someone takes an unauthorized picture of you, pull out your willy, scream at the top of your lungs, and casually move on.

That was my first impulse, of course, but workplace propriety prevented me.

You have a JOB? Well, no wonder you and your ego haven’t made peace. Still, what’s Cat’s excuse?

@David, I was talking more about Cat, and the comic in general. Cat is worried about being taken out of context and used as someone else’s material.

I don’t think this is so much about facebook or twitter, but about Cat and Girl the webpage, no? At least, that’s how I read it.

@david: the same thing happened to me, on the train to work. some teenage guy took photos of me. he used his camera phone, i thought he was just texting someone but he was like angling the phone to get better shots. i dont know why. that was exactly what i thought, that nothing in my education and upbringing prepared me for that kind of thing. he could have asked my permission. im used to people asking to take my picture because i cosplay, but to have someone snap my picture, maybe while i was staring off into space with my mouth partly open, and maybe post it in a website somewhere. thats disturbing. i have relatives! lolololol

@David, as we (or at least those my age) used to say as kids, “Take a picture. It lasts longer.”

Which is OK with me. When I’m out in public, anything I do is fair game. I’m nobody important, but if you see something about me that’s so interesting that you want to shoot a pic of it, why should I care? Even if you post it somewhere in public, it’s not likely that I’ll ever see it, or that anyone I know will.

Everyone I have ever seen and known has been the basis of a character in some piece of my writing or another.

*someone else’s

Any photo taken from a public location (street, subway) is by law a legal photograph and violates nothing but your personal bubble if you happen to be the subject of said photo. If you don’t like it, don’t go out in public.

Admittedly, I’ve never used the defense for taking photos of people, but it’s just as good for photos of buildings. (Refineries and power plants are so touchy about photos!)

Just found your blog as I was searching about this subject on yahoo (funny how it sometimes brings up good websites too lol) and now I’m hooked. Spend the entire last hour reading all your blog posts. Can you clean up the spam here please though?

This strip reminds me of the Player’s speech in “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead” — the one that starts, “Don’t you understand? we’re actors1 We’re the opposite of people!”