as usual, based on a few different people who remind me of each other. and as usual the snake is meant to be laughed at rather than with. I thought that was obvious, but I have very little grasp on what is obvious, “obviously”
another item based on my experience of not feeling like i belong anywhere. I shoddily added the first “frame” after the other two when i felt like, as usual, I was failing to put forth the intended point with the initial upload, but that the layout for a change allowed me a chance to also fail at rectifying.
the POINT: is my taste too old? No, because taste older than mine is still being imposed both by the same entities who did when i was a child and also by newer ones now younger than me, and sometimes even are paid to do it. Taste is subjective and can be neither “correct” nor “wrong.”
maybe THAT should be the comic strip, but that sort of thing is not funny to me! Stern didacticism pretending to be comics is something that I make more annoyed comics about that i have to over explain afterward.
as often happens, i am not entirely sure who i am angry at. actual personal acquaintances? contemporary media saturation? magazines publishing pompous lists to proclaim that human creativity peaked six decades ago? internet dorks my age or less? but complaining, even in a way that appeals to no one, theoretically helps me be less bothered, at least for a little while.
point of view: being kidnapped by Mr. Clean
“loving hands” refers not only to his love of using hands to commit crime, but also his strong platonic fondness of a clean getaway
does it really count as a “recipe” if the instructions are essentially “follow instructions?” If they can be summarized by “see title?” Is it just not permissible to have blank, nonsense-information-free space on a product label?
I have beef stew
I have biscuits
but how can i get beef stew OVER biscuits?
WELL it goes like this:
get your beef stew
get your biscuits
put the beef stew over the biscuits
I refuse!
several page bits of this
the comic strip prologue sketched in 2016 i finally took the effort to sort out and place in the actual comic strip section
there are probably yet details to be cleared up on it. Do let me know if anything seems particularly objectionable and I will be sure to leave it unchanged.
steve moraff’s vision comes ever closer to reality. In a sense we are all “super entrap”ped by our kind’s environmental ravaging and pillaging.
a stupid video that wasn’t supposed to take me hours to assemble.
i knew higher quality samples were IN the rom i just didn’t realize they were so accessible until recently when i tried to look it up and came across this page from a forum. i assumed there were already videos exhibiting this since that forum post is from 2011, but there weren’t, at least not under the search terms i tried.
I tried to explain within the video how to pull these sounds out of a rom, since it isn’t complicated, and in fact can be easier than that page even says, but it did not fit gracefully into the first few
seconds and looked worse than what I replaced it with. maybe i will try to add more information to it later before un-unlisting the video, or maybe I will just forget it for another week.
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eh no I just added the words “straight from the rom” and hopefully implied the simplicity of it without saying much. most likely nobody cares whatever the case and this is a non-issue!
2-22-2025 oh borf was that ten days? too many dumb projects, i lose track of days.
there is a weird crisis in my house right now, someone else’s problem for once.
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They don’t make ’em like they used to
maybe you even think pit fighter makes it redundant oh ho ho ho
i realize it has been common for cleaning products to label themselves as “grease fighter” or “stain fighter” for a long time but I feel like this presentation would have neither been approved by the product company’s own research much less the primarily FOOD-selling store displaying it on shelves in the not terribly distant past. I suppose that is pre-emoji thinking; visual depictions of it have been on adhesive bandages for over six years by now. ALSO apparently one of the pictures on that site entry has been broken and not showing up for an equal length of time and my comment about “spot cleaning” beneath it totally incomprehensible, and nobody noticed despite this site actually having a few readers I hadn’t personally alienated back then because my comments have always been incomprehensible.
[more] Useless information! the “pit fighter” image is seemingly randomly mirrored depending on the whim of its user/no reason. so i wondered: which version is forwards? Assuming the money hands weren’t digitally inserted, the more common orientation seems to show BACKWARDS vintage $20 bills!
It is hard to tell since the picture is somewhat blurry, US currency tends to be symmetrical in layout and a backwards 2 can resemble a 5, or even itself when the slanted part is obscured. However only $20 units have the column/scroll effect on the left and right.
Proving the foreground hands are part of the original photograph rather than added and possibly cloned later is more complicated since Pit Fighter is so cheap that it can be difficult to believe the set director had TWO handfuls of twenties lying around
I forgot I made this stupid rom hack and consequently assumed I had no kid icarus screenshots whatsoever rather than pictures from this one and was about to look up a youtube video from which to take a picture of this text. It still looks better than most ports of pit fighter. I have a stupid life.
there isn’t enough bad news in the world so i made some of my own
you can click on it to try and get a better look if you need one, but you probably do not need one
sometimes i worry that it is not my place to criticize contemporary entertainment offerings since that is not made for me. But a long time ago it WAS, ostensibly, made for me, and i STILL didn’t like it
A scene perhaps not a whole lot more inspired than the envelope art sections in the magazines where I used to see these characters but probably more ambitious
If you recognize all or most of these there is something seriously wrong with you, but hopefully not enough for you to draw a similar picture.
i thought about having a contest to see who could name the most, but no reward I can offer would make up for the trauma you would have to go through in order to be able to do that
I had to exclude humans and post sega-saturn-era characters to ensure that I could eventually stop, though a few mild exceptions may have slipped through anyway.
I like a few of the characters and a few of the games even, not necessarily at the same time, but by and large they deserve what they get. They probably have some extra lives lying around anyway.
globmeister is easily the dorkiest claymate but i swapped in the mouse, instead since the only reason it exists was so the phrase “faster than a hedgehog” could be used in promotional material, Despite this speed being about as practical as a hedgehog’s at best, and usually less so. The gopher’s fire power is much more useful, from what i recall of claymates.
still i should have approached this with the expectation that most people who see this will not know most of the characters, and yet less will they know the hokey calculations behind any of the worthless beasts’ creations.
Initially I included both the terrible 1993 skunny that i wrote an appropriately terrible 2003 webpage about and also the 1995 “special edition” skunny that i did not learn of until years later. eventually i merged them into the left side figure so there would be space to draw in aero the acro bat. i decided that despite having insulted aero on previous occasions, again any person seeing the picture might well never see any other picture i ever made, and my disdain for aero and its games soars above most of the other characters, especially when i was refreshed on how much aero 2’s cut scene artist wanted aero to look like mickey mouse. and is certainly more LIKELY to be recognized than either skunny, so why have two of them? i also shortly afterward remembered that donk the samurai duck bears a D and that i could place it beside the other two to spell SAD. wonderdog has a W but while i can spell SAW and the stupid puppet from saw looks SORT of like one of these characters, I do not know it from its association with video games and so it would not qualify to appear.
bronkie health hero/the bronchiosaurus looks like croc because both of them are bare minimum creativity character designs. bronkie came several years before croc but who else knows that? the second health hero character “trakie” looks less like other better-known characters and so is more difficult to be mistaken for one, and so I added that one instead. In addition to removing the floating eyebrows from radical rex. As awful as they are, they interfere with the next lame dinosaur’s space.
i also used the blue character the one time that i played the game. i think the game is substantially better than aero the acrobat and the protagonist much less loathsome, even the one which looks like croc. Though it raises the question what my criteria is for inclusion, if I put characters I hate everything about amidst ones that I think were just stuck with a crummy company or set of directives. I didn’t add the cool croc twins either, and their game is probably worse than aero’s. Not because it is too limited in scope, as “zoom” also has extremely little for the player to do and I tossed that game’s moron in as soon as I remembered it existed.
And it wasn’t about space constraints because I added in billy the shell (Rmadillo), spanko, sally the blind cave salamander, who doesn’t even star in its own game, and psycho fox AFTER that. The only thing I can say for certain isARRHRHRHRHRGHH I’VE BEEN OUTFOXED
It is funny to think of people who never heard of me (or it) trying to identify the dope. All it does is cause problems.
this is not funny at all!
and LATER i added those dumb crocs anyway. it probably doesn’t need BOTH but I couldn’t choose one and had gotten it into my mind that they were really small so they seemed to both “fit.” Quik the Thunder Rabbit, while looking rather inflated in game still probably shouldn’t be so LARGE but its oversize was less apparent when there were fewer characters. Curiously i made both Brian the Lion and Oscar the [thing] smaller to accommodate WHIZZ, yet didn’t think of reducing quik. until now. oh fiddle dee dee.
after this i look forward to drawing more characters who do not have clown noses, buck teeth or eyes that touch
i suppose heart throbs is a better name than heart stabs, or myocardial murder munchies. Maybe “bleedies” would have worked
wah calm down please don’t shoot me with your alien ray gun, unfamiliar shouting person. This seems to indicate that your name is “Coco” but were that the case I can think of numerous other cereals that ought to have offered you endorsement deals.
not this one, though i would certainly welcome it if it meant keeping that creep bee away from My Kids.
i saw this plush effigy of the stop and shop “marty” robot in a bin with horrible elf legs decoration and thought they deserved each other.
apparently i have only mentioned marty one time, which may be too many. It is impossible to go to a stop and shop and not see one. what it does is slowly roll around the edges of aisles to try and block potential shoppers from entering or exiting. it searches for the tiniest, least consequential scraps of paper on the ground, then stops in place and starts calling out “Hazard, detected” forever until someone comes along and presses a hidden button on it that makes it shut up until it encounters another such obstruction. It is also able to trigger “clean up needed” announcements throughout the whole store if nobody presses the button soon enough. I presume its deployment has been used as justification for terminating employees. But fortunately these cheap pieces of trash ensure that a few additional sweat shop kids can earn three cents a day assembling them in the nearest country with no child protection laws. I think that is Trickle Down Economics.
I was surprised to see one in a half price bin since they tend to linger on designated shelves at full price after other similarly-themed merchandise would have been shuffled out of there and replaced with the next seasons’.
I call them “cheap” in the metaphorical sense. These full price pumpkin martspawn being from november 3 doesn’t PROVE my statement but apart from them christmas merchandise was already being rolled out in this section and there was no apparent inclination to get these out of there. They seem to be vying for the title of World’s Most Notorious Pumpkin
OH well pardon ME
other less prestigious positions may yet be available
these are going to be collector’s items one day. specifically, on wednesday, when a big truck drives around town gathering things like this, provided they have been deposited into the appropriate curbside vessel.
People used to say that “like a business line” before trump’s first presidency. Even though Trump’s businesses all failed and he didn’t pay employees, and only he himself profited since the APPEARANCE of success made it lucrative to license his own name to other businesses. I don’t know that anybody said that this time, but I also gave up on trying to find any nuance or value in the words of people who attempt to praise this guy.
The idea is less “everything was fine until last week!” than “the president didn’t decree that this was ideal and legally permissible until this week”
This won’t help me at all or change anything but it seems improper to post comic strips complaining about people who mean well when we have a new government that transparently does not mean well and is really just looking to hurt people. At least not without doing both. Big T has issued executive orders to do the stuff twitter addicts convinced themselves he was going to do back in 2017 and that I tried to assure them at that time T had no legal authority to do. Apparently he could have granted himself the authority all along. Maybe republicans weren’t sufficiently cronyized even by then to be presumed willing to let it happen. I certainly don’t have any reason to believe that Trump was NICER eight years ago. Maybe just less focused on who he wanted to hurt. Maybe just less worried that he will actually ever be punished for any malicious deeds he commits while president. He has become the cartoon figure
I would PREFER to make comic strips that have nothing to do with any of this since they tend to deal with topics no one else cares about or that or plenty dealt with by others who can reach their audiences better than i can and without needing hours or days to draw it, and surely I could be working on something with marginally more lasting value than this.
Initially the right side snake was the orange one that frequently appears in these pieces. Generally it to some degree represents me and i am not immediately at risk with any of trump’s first week policies, since my personal identity goal has always been neutral rather than trans genderm since i never expected to be accepted as fully transy, and i have never been targeted by nazis except on their own dumb nazi forum and by extreme lightweights when I posted protest comic strips like this one on art sites. And so i changed it to a different generic snake with colors similar to one of those trans flags but I never understand the whole deal with flags. I AM part of the freshly-reoppressed section of the population, i just mostly experience it internally, following non-aggressive acts, so far.
“radicactus” directly quotes “frumpald” on that old page from a comic strip i would better devote my energy toward, but i didn’t realize i had used “gollyo” there also. i wonder why i didn’t include “stringbeans” at that time, since i know i have put those two together, even if not in anything that got to the internet. there used to be a terrible commercial for a product called “polly-o string cheese” which i always thought was an extremely stupid yet memorable name. It also supposedly still exists, and the pollyo company is even rather large, but I have certainly not noticed it in a long time. It originally was “Pollio” but unlike Chef Boiardi, whose name was dumbed down to appeal to the lowest rung of consumers, Polly-o just wanted to distances itself from Polio. They never changed back which is good because we now have a Department of Health leader who may well preside over the resurgence of polio through canonizing rubbish paranoia about vaccines.
arrrgh i want to eat pizza
to follow up on my very timely critique of Phil Collins’ Sussudio a few weeks ago, today at the same supermarket I heard what turned out to be “Abacab” by Genesis four years before Sussudio, and while it could certainly be a better song it sounded less hollow than Sussudio and I was intrigued enough to try and find out its name later despite never turning off my headphones while I was amidst it.
Generally I like Collins in Genesis better than Collins with his own band but they definitely have a few mopester songs that I can’t stand.
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There was a time when this was said to me regularly! Though not recently;
the script for this is old enough that the snake had ears and I stopped drawing it with ears rather a while ago. Unfortunately it still somehow knows what I am up to.
with that dorky facial expression and yellow helmet Dong Cheng seems more like Bong Cheng. I am not entirely surprised that his belt-inspired assassination attempt failed.
also it took me over nine years to mention this. despite a more html-named and internet-shrunken version appearing in the offline “nev” folder that i used in 2018, It is not in the online “nev” folder! What are you hiding from, Bong Cheng? nothing is beneath me now
ah ha sometimes i forget that a few other people still have standards
fortunately i do not feel like giving any right now!
elsewhere, Romance of the three kingdoms 8 is channeling my old phonics book
coincidentally, Lu Bu met Cao Mao in China, the same place where
Monki met Popeye, an event whose depiction may as of 2025 may no longer be considered bootleg, though presumably will continue to be nipple-legged.
also I at last have uploaded and placed the remaining pathetic snake-and-miscellaneous-topic comic strips on the website section which i set aside for that some time ago. the layout is still horrible but i like to fantasize that i will fix that. maybe at the same time that i replace the twitter link icon with a bluesky link icon. the important thing is that I do incredibly unimportant things
january
february
march
april
may
june
july
august
september
october
november
december
that is everything which happened last year, thankfully.
will 2025 be better? I set the bar low in 2024 to guarantee it. In fact it may be lower than I expect since the video stops hard at 1 minute whenever i try to test to make sure it uploaded properly and that i didn’t accidentally break something right before the final save.
I will probably be having that stupid music echoing in my mind for the next few days. the dopey sound effects help a bit but I only added those in the last few hours and almost certainly in excess.