I'm an internet millionaire, so fuck you!

Bad Choices Make Good Stories: Going to New York, Chapter 9

"Formal education will make you a living; self-education will make you a fortune."

Jim Rohn

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"Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex, you thought of nothing else if you didn't have it and thought of other things if you did."

James A. Baldwin

I used to draw cartoons all the time, even when I drove a cab at night.

But this job as production manager was so stressful, I had no energy left when I came home at night. There was no way I could be creative after work and come up with new cartoons.

For the first five years I had lived in the States, I did not even have a computer at home. Hacking is addicting, and now that I was over the age of 18, and I would be tried as an adult if I got caught, and law enforcement had finally caught up with hackers, I was scared to get in trouble again. Because I knew this time I would really go to jail.

The best way to avoid the temptation of doing something with a computer that I shouldn't be doing, was not to have one. But after five years of living in the States, and not having had any contact whatsoever with the hacking scene for that whole time, I figured I was ready to own a computer again. So while I was the production manager at the newspaper in Brooklyn, I finally bought a PC.

This was during the early days of the Internet revolution. My hacker friends and I had grown up on the Internet. To us it was an old hat. It was our home. But now finally the rest of the world realized that there was a virtual online world.

All these huge corporations wanted a piece of the pie and they all tried to figure out how to make money on the Internet. They knew there was money to be made, they just couldn't figure out how.

They spent billions of dollars on Internet start-ups that really had no business plan, and who were bleeding cash like crazy, instead of making a profit, until they all ended up crashing and burning. All these huge companies lost billions of dollars during the days of the Internet bubble.

Meanwhile I had been playing around with my new computer at home, and I figured out how to put my cartoons online, by building a very primitive little website. I hadn't drawn any new cartoons in months, but I put my old cartoons on the web. 

Up until then I had relied on sending my cartoons to publishing houses, hoping that an editor would pick some of my cartoons for a new book or the next issue of some tabloid.

And many did. I had a whole bunch of cartoons published in all kinds of magazines, and in over a dozen different books.

Some of my cartoons were even hanging in museums for cartoon art or modern art. I was making a name for myself as a cartoonist, just like I had made a name for myself as a hacker a few years earlier.

But as a freelance cartoonist, you never know how much money you are going to make next week or next month.

Some magazines, like the New Yorker, were paying $500 for a cartoon back then. Other papers, like the SUN supermarket tabloid with all the crazy headlines, only paid $5.