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.

three substitutions occurred:

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

2024 in pictures
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.

janiaury 2 updorf:
the video is done-ish but the higher bit rate or whatsit picture is taking substantially longer to render which means I can’t check it and notice stuff wrong with it as quickly and then try again and notice more stuff wrong with it. indeed much of today and yesterday was spent dealing with capturing moving bits of “watch out for dopes” in Open Broadcasting Software, and it still looks bad. I may need to revert to recording gzdoom at 1024×768; (I tried 1280×720 for this) and rendering at 1280×720 (this time was 1920×1280) until some point that will not occur when I have a more powerful computer since I am not interested in windows post-7 and having a non-portable computer is not an option under my general circumstances. fiddle deep feep. for everything else I do it is plenty capable enough.
obviously i don’t need the final render size until it is the FINAL render but part of my personal broken process is continually thinking I am done when i am not. It doesn’t work if I KNOW i am not done.
and at this point it doesn’t reduce the render time much, if at all, since I have used larger input files that in the past due to my expectation of exporting larger, so they still struggle to get squeezed through the mixer.
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january 1 2025: ah noip i definitely did not finish, but it turned out to only be about 87% my fault
if I work on something for too long, the task becomes somewhat abstract and i forget what my goal is. in this case it is, or SHOULD be, to show what i already made, not to show anything new. but since i put new stuff in it previous years, i thought if I can’t put something equally interesting in here it should at least be equally new, and then i have spent too long on that even though it isn’t impressive, just new.
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december 31 2024 updeh: my year end video definitely will not be ready before the year handover, and far too much of the contents are garbage, but it would be culturally inaccurate otherwise.
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a rather annoying picture featuring characters that I historically have not exhibat here but also have decreasingly put effort into distancing myself from, considering their regular, if hurried appearances in my last few year-end “art” videos and being directly visible in a recent pathetic snake comic strip based on an absurd event that might have featured different heap leaps of logic than it did if I had still cared about hiding them.
As I have mentioned in the past, and which is still true: my “normal” characters are agendered, not male; gender doesn’t necessarily exist where they come from, and neither does christmas, so my winter-themed images lack specific allusions to it. People assume those beasts are male since they have been conditioned to see male as default in the absence of any specific labels, and I do not take enough actions to distance those creatures from normal expectations. And i surely do not help that perception with this mob of heavily stereotyped figures. However I have created the problem of pictures of them existing and this one is almost socially acceptable despite that and I have nothing else new since I have set to assembling my year-end video (which will, as before, featured hurried glimpses of these leg-emphasizers) so there is little sense in not using it. Likewise, my previous areligious winter gathering pictures are presumed to be christmas themed, but that is not a problem I invented. Or if it is, I do not remember it. It may even be the case that I have received money for pictures featuring half of these characters, which isn’t necessarily true of individual drawings of my once regularly-appearing weirdos. And it would be more if I included similar “characters” here that only got drawn once. Which doesn’t mean it is right, but does prove that I can get away with it. The me of 2006 would be ashamed, but the me of 2006 also could not drive a car and assumed it would be famous by ten years before now doing what it was then doing, and was just as likely to be told it was sexually attracted to something that it wasn’t and unworthy of life on account of that by sociopaths sometimes not even over the internet.

page 4-1 of this. fewer panels than on previous pages, which seemed necessary to have the fewer, consequently larger panels that are here make any sense due to how many characters I found it necessary to cram into them. They may not make MUCH sense but I have options for dealing with that once I figure out how at a later point without having to disrupt the layouts of subsequent pages as was usually the case with altering earlier sections in the four row format.

The next page will probably also be like this one, as I initially set them up as a single four row page, but after that i have no idea about the shape of to any degree, including the future of the pointy pog-lookalike whose origin is in my terrible old 1995 comic strip. i needed something to incapacitate the gnomes here but did not decide what until i drew it, as the “plan” only concerned the aftermath of them being incapacitated, not the incapacitator.

the first frame (of the new page, not the grey mess above here that I cannot attempt to explain) also made me consider that i showed a bunch of “gardening robots” an entire numeration ago but never bothered to draw in any garden.
I was gladdish to see that apparently i did bother to add in some mild shrubbery at whichever page this is but i have no recollection of intending that as the “garden.” Brubaglid, the landlord or custodian or angry parking lot person of otherwise non-specific role could simply have a screwy concept of what a garden is but the presence of numerous robots should at least suggest some task for which they are used, however poorly.
i also never drew the robots again. i intended to have a scene where they had a meeting and complained to each other about their circumstances but i either never wrote it down and forgot it or wrote it somewhere that i never found again.
I drew them in here, THEN remembered that they would still be broken so I removed them, THEN i saw that one of them escaped mostly intact, so that one I unremoved. But it ends up being so small here that its nature is unclear.
Anyway brubaglid may go around to other properties than this one and may have more robots than the ones elpse damaged, so so so so sudio i hate that song. I heard that at the supermarket once in 2022 and it is about 95% studio production. A towering heap of 80s noises and reverb effects loudly fighting each other trying to cover up a terrible song. I was offended by what utter dreck and a waste it was. Phil Collins contributes almost nothing to it. Any name brand dorko singer could take his place there. And the album cover is literally just Phil Collins’ face. Not even his whole head. It should be producer Hugh Padgham’s fingers and a bunch of dials on the cover. And the SINGLE cover is literally the same picture of a face again with different text and with the face colored blue, as would eventually occur to any mass of body parts that you severed from the circulatory system. Friggidee diddledee feep.

ADDITIONALLY I have crammed in some vegetation here and augmented at least what was on the linked old page. i can’t do anything about the pages in books that have already been printed though knowing me i will probably attempt to update them to some degree regardless, even though the shape of the building also changed and maybe the less i try to retroactively bring into coheesion, the more what I don’t bother with is excusable.

The important thing is that I got this out before the year changed. I don’t have time to think about why that is important. Now I have ten days to make a dumb video that hopefully amounts to more than the absence of what I didn’t do this year, and will still take longer than that even if it amounts to less.

Chen Gong, I would feel a lot safer if you stopped shouting at me

chen gong was fairly reasonable for most of existence but once he touched that pile of scrolls he lost his mind

yes, maybe you should TALK to them instead of what you are presently doing! or even better ask someone else to do it.

Pang De was also fairly reasonable for most of existence but then lost his own mind after considering he is perpetually living and reliving mostly the same role in the bloodiest civil war in history for the entertainment of others

why is this fried chicken bag commanding me to love “those” points? They only exist to confound the fact that

it now costs more money to buy ten pieces of chicken and five biscuits than it did to buy fourteen pieces of chicken with five biscuits a few years ago before points were introduced. And this is the COUPON; the regular menu price is worse. And consider that biscuits are essentially just a glob of dough with salt that they tossed in a microwave for 20 seconds and probably only cost them two cents to make. That is the nature of inflation; prices go up and never down. I accept that it happens but I ought to have a choice about whether i LOVE it.

I also guarantee you the re-election of trump isn’t going to make points or anything else any more lovable.

some things are destined to be hated

12-7-2024 i have made this dice matter far too complicated. maybe i should just post the graphics!
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12-6-2024 i am doing something with dice that I thought would be ready within the fifth of december but that did not occur
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a commission drawing for division71 (from reddit of all places) in which a roommate (who might be called magikdragon) stays behind and abruptly transforms and eats a bunch of snacks, and then becomes transfixed on a fishtank.
I do not totally understand but it was within my capabilities to draw. I was also asked to treat it as four separate compositions, hence the file size is much larger than usual and the detail level possibly looking especially mushy when scaled down

I absentmindedly titled it “snackin’ dragon” and am not sure if I named it after the worrisome arcade game “Snacks ‘n Jaxson” or the totally horrid unlicensed nes game “Tagin’ Dragon” but neither way is it good. Also the internet is so full of people with no value to their lives who deliberately seek out and record themselves playing the worst video games, sometimes not even poorly, that there are plenty of pictures available of both and thus I do not need to put any here, mercifully. I need only say what is necessary to get through this.

life is complicated enough!

no sir, I do NOT

11-29-2024 oh flops I forgot to update this two days ago
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a questionable flying beast has a new slime it would like you to try

a long time ago I completely disregarded and forgot about this ugly monster sprite in dragon quest 5.

more recently I noticed the 3d version from the playstation 2 remake, and tried to draw one, and then the picture went screwy so i added some slimes to distract from that, but then they went screwy as well. And then this week I needed a website entry but was too mentally drained to prepare one, and so instead tried to force out a completish version of this drawing and pass the mental drainage on to someone else.

i wonder why these slimes are always professing their lack of badness, and I now must consider if it is because of the profound horridity of dope slimes.

you should have thought of that before you were blue and perpetually smiling! about 17 years before, by my reckoning.

it must be said that despite all that went wrong with Tecmo Secret of the Stars, at least its slimes own their badditude and don’t try to emotionally manipulate me with their facial expressions, even if they aren’t sure what color they are.

While this dragon quest 6 remake slime APPEARS to confess to being not good, it STILL has a BIG SMILE, as if it THINKS it is good, and EXPECTS me to reassure it! I shan’t! It also self-narrates its own sound effects. Verily this slime is awful.