very busy tuesday and wednesday. thursday should have a proper update with hopefully most of the text I fussed over on wednesday and tuesday when I was busy and boring not included.

comic page 53 of part 3 of this

as has frequently occurred, I came into conflict between wanting to be accurate with what i already showed years ago that i drew on a whim and what purpose I actually require the already established form to serve. one of the events that occurs at this location requires a hallway, which I wrote without considering I had already drawn a narrow tower. But I suppose it can work in a tower.

and even now i am not certain what sort of business goes on in this place. is it administrative offices? a shopping mall? a hotel? maybe it will never be important and I can avoid being clear. maybe these smiling morons are so dumb that they have businesses that don’t make any sense and I should not attempt to understand or explain.

a rather alarming series of email messages from an old foe. what could they portend?

a peculiar delivery seeming to correspond with the e-mail, but evidently from someone else.

oh no! RYGARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR! (the book)
Plus his assistant Rygarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr Junior.
to be clear, this guy looks like he is SAYING “Rygar,” I do not have official documentation proclaiming that he IS Rygar, but that seems like something Rygar would say if he spoke in words rather than disapproving game-over jingles.
I hid the smaller Rygar object that I thought was simply a little card with a picture of Rygar on it, because why WOULDN’T there be such a thing, in a stupid place before I went shopping last week, wondering how it would be received,

and it was stuck to a car when I returned. Which is probably for the best because I might never have realized it was a sticker otherwise, and if I had I might have perpetually imagined a superior place to attach it was yet to be revealed, and kept it unjustly out of public view.

The important matter here is that somebody did indeed write a book about Rygar and I bought one. FINALLY a book I can read in public, or at least keep at the ready to show how intellectual and absorbed I am until someone gets close and realizes it is about RYGAR. It is the perfect conversation starter, or if necessary conversation concluder. Perhaps Rygar was Ender’s game all along.

apart from providing more information than any sane person could require about rygar, it is also an effective tool for reminding various people you may know in your own life what rygar has done for them and how much worse off the world could be were Rygar not there to throw his trash can lid on a string at angry turtles.

as the back of the box states, now rygar is battling evil EVERYWHERE. I challenge you to identify a location not covered by that statement.

I became aware of the book when some months ago the author Brian Riggsbee asked if I would like to contribute this piece to the book, which was initially drawn in order to accompany my comments on the Rygar Racing phenomenon that is sweeping the one youtube video I saw several years ago. I certainly was not going to say no. I did however say just about every other thing I could think of about Rygar, and the author at one point thought he might be able to include some of those in the book, but I didn’t realize what a graphic-design intensive tome it would be, so I can understand why space for unplanned contributions from people nobody has heard of, especially ones which don’t take the subject matter seriously, would be at a premium.

It takes devotion to list factual information in the form of this CORNY rygar tower, complete with the creepy lines, those dopey gremlins AND the stupid island up there. I wish every book I bought had Rygar graphics incorporated into its layout. Although in fairness, so far every book I bought this year has. It reminds me of the magical, tragical period when I changed this website’s appearance every month.

Unfortunately there is no DOOR floating there with a ROPE going up to it, but considering how uncommonly tall this variant of the tower is I can excuse Rygar for not reaching the top and playing the dumb bagpipes yet.

excuse me the INSTRUMENT. You are never going to achieve your dream of hosting Jeopardy(!) with that “please be less specific” attitude.

it appears without context, and I wonder if it might be better for that. I WANT somebody to look closely at this and realize that it isn’t quite what the text says it is.

Initially I was a scrap miffed to have my picture that, contrary to what it may seem, I DID think about and work hard on, appear between several examples of people who just pasted or recreated existing sprites for easy internet forced retro-stalgia points, one of whom apparently SELLS them on merchandise by the hundreds through etsy as if that is “legal”. On closer examination the Kari Lyn sprites are retouched as if for a sega genesis release in the vein of Megaman, the Wily Wars and there is purplish gradient lighting on the scenery, neither of which are my particular cup of beans but I can consider some thought went into the presentation. And I don’t know enough about Mine Craft to say if creating an enormous Rygar even with instructions is a simple task, especially with a name like “Slugboi,” meaning a man who has not grown to maturity with the further physical and academic deficits of a slug, but I like the idea of it being visible to other players who weren’t expecting it. ALTHOUGH I think a wise adventurer should always allow and be prepared for such a possibility, but whatever the case people are celebrating the legacy of RYGAR who do not necessarily need to.
I still seem to take umbrage with the collage-person presenting the sunset mountains as awkwardly symmetrical. Maybe the lighting, at least for a still shot with no scrolling, matches where the sun is better, but it could have been done in a way that didn’t look folded down the middle. And besides the foreground pillars AREN’T mirrored to match the sun, even though by being far apart than the mountain graphics it would be less noticeable if they had been! OH!

It reminds me when doom add-on authors would make the sky repeat like that since they couldn’t be bothered to match the edges of the graphic they wanted to use or because they are afraid of the doom engine’s sky-mirroring bug

in fact it may be ideally suited for that!
And anyway having my drawing in that position DOES help it show how I used the sprites for inspiration. Anyone who wondered why I would elect to show the right-most Rygar in such a stupid running pose need merely examine the image before mine to understand that ah of course, Rygar ALWAYS runs like that.

However the left-most Rygar may be in an unorthodox position because the in-game Rygar simply recycles the jumping pose for using the rope-attachment item,

and it only occurred to me this very week that the developers may have intended that to be not a hat but a hand-held object, and the pose may indicate a raised arm. Which is still impractical but a helmet wouldn’t hold up its wearer. UNLESS rygar has the arm up to grasp the helmet. The fact that in some stages he is content to walk into an instant death pit instead of grabbing the rope is just more proof nobody needs that Rygar’s ancient methods are mysterious and not always meant to be understood by us. I always thought of it as a hat because my cousin Patrick told me the item was “The Mickey Mouse Hat” and the game never definitively stated that it was not a hat, and so I continued believing it was one long after I became skeptical of Tecmo deliberately violating one of Disney’s most sacred copy rights. This is Argool, not Etsy! Shirts may not exist here but there are laws.
I was so CERTAIN it was a hat

that I prominently featured it in my extremely important hat video. I have to believe that if it wasn’t a hat the Washington Post would have awarded me four out of four Pinocchios by now, and then I would have had to replace Rygar with Pinocchio, and I can assure you that Pinocchio is battling evil in relatively few locations, and even a dedicated team of four would have trouble covering as much ground, much less groundless areas using their less-adequate hats.
Patrick also told me those red gargoyles in the tower area were “the guy who flies with his pants on” and I believed it, because why would such a guy fly with his pants off? Pants don’t always restrict wings the way shirts do, or would if they existed in Argool, anyway. You need not remark upon the great number of beastly creatures I have illustrated engaging in activities without proper clothing on because I never show them flying!
In those days I knew little of Rygar and readily accepted whatever I was told. But even in 2021, with a scandalous expose at last in print, there are a multitude of facts about Rygar that nobody knows.

For example, were you aware that Rygar started a deviant art account in 2002 and never used it at all? Undoubtedly he has the power to have illustrated the whole book himself but recognized that deviance is a step removed from evil and Rygar will have naught to do with that apart from battling it, but he reserved the account anyway so that no impostor could sully his good name. Or even his less-good name, Steve. I wish I had realized this back in 2010 when I was dwelling in New Haven and would occasionally place take-out orders at Modern Apizza under the name of Rygar. I could claim I assumed the pizza was a new kind of diskarmor but that would be disingenuous.
OR perhaps by being an undead warrior from millennia ago Rygar simply couldn’t figure out how to log in. You know, old people and computers and all.

I wish I had prepared a more interesting illustration (and incorporated more details from the official concept art items), since I certainly drew plenty of boring stuff (furries) for less interesting projects (getting $30) in the time between when I learned of the book and when it went to press. And I already had plenty of old, stupid rygar sketches which I had even scanned and uploaded to a page I don’t talk about earlier the same year in case I or anyone else needed them, and somebody making a rygar book and telling me about it so that I could contribute a drawing is undoubtedly the closest that would ever come to happening! However late last year I was very concerned with moving out of my old residence, which took months to execute on top of the years already spent nudging that process along, and by the time that was settled I figured the book was already being finalized and I didn’t have time to bring anything elaborate to completion.

This may be more important to me than is reasonable!

I am glad to know I am in good company.

Despite primarily talking about ME, I do think that all in all it is a fascinating, well-designed book that I might have even bought if it didn’t have a picture that i made in it and I appreciate that Brian Riggsbee permitted that to occur! I could probably write a book about Rygar, and it would have much less justification to exist than this one, and it is fortuitous that I shall devote that energy into other endeavors.

some of which may even have nothing to do with Rygar.

The might of his diskarmor ranks second only to his guiltarmor.

welcome to stop and shop

It is being reorganized; the one nearer to my previous location went through the same screwy phase last year, but this temporary sign is showing the obsolete 2008-2018 logo from when Stop and Shop was merged with the Mid-Atlantic supermarket chain “Giant,” which it no longer is, so I don’t understand why it is considered preferable to the logoless, proper sign that had been here two weeks ago.

it is a dinstinctily nonsensical logo, reminiscent of the incoherent mass of shapes beside the “L” in the dangelogo, so i noticed immediately when it stopped being used, and again with it reused.

I am getting mixed messages at this store. Or maybe just a mixed mess.

Despite the arrows, or perhaps to spite the arrows, people would blatantly walk the wrong way into the narrowest aisles and then just stand there like The Zax until *I* turned around and go out the opposite way I came in because I want to avoid a fight, which is the only reason I follow the arrows to begin with. I will obey a rule that makes no sense in order to prevent hypothetical conflict but I won’t hold up such a rule when conflict picks a fight with it. I will walk the wrong way over an arrow to get something at the end of the aisle and if nobody is facing me. Overall I want to not do anything that will get me faced.
Yes I drew that stupid header picture for this one bit. I initially intended to put the drawing with this section but I also don’t want a boring photograph of a shoddy storefront at the top of the website I provide to people who ask about my art drawings since somebody did recently and I would prefer such a person to be put off by an actual shoddy art piece.
I postponed finishing this for 2 weeks since other stuff kept happening and the store went and got rid of the stupid arrows and mask policy but the aisles are still a mess, and people are just as inclined to go full speed in a one-cart-wide space and not care if someone is in front of them facing the opposite direction. AND with the mask mandate lifted it did turn out that the person opposed to me was masked and I wasn’t, though I also wasn’t wearing an ugly baseball hat with a stupid slogan on it. Additionally I was not naked, sticking my posterior end out needlessly nor standing in a Charlie Chaplin pose, so disregard the rumors.

What kind of loser would drink this?
I couldn’t tell if twitter people who saw this a few weeks ago thought I was legitimately accusing seltzer drinkers of being losers or they simply don’t think napoleon jokes are funny. I do share a home with two seltzer drinkers and I greatly prefer when they DRINK the overpriced, fouled bubble water rather than pour a little bit into another drink and leave the cans all over the place.

Charmin is great toilet paper if you buy that for companionship
and for bad math but that seems to come standard at this point.

dumb fact: I have had charmin toilet paper in my house approximately one time, last april, at the height of the bogus toilet paper shortage when that was the only brand left in the store because everybody in town recognizes it is inferior at its primary stated purpose and also thoroughly incompatible with all the septic tanks common in a seaside locale that used to be all farms. Supposedly it was “septic safe” and my guess is they determined that by flushing one square and observing that the house didn’t explode. I likely used most of it for blowing my nose and diverted my strategic toilet paper for nose blowing reserve to active restroom duty.

apparently plumbers have particularly heavy excrement which makes them ideal test subjects

hey you want chips? you’ve come to the right six different places

two of which even say “chips” on the aisle markers

you want 50 percent discounts that don’t register when scanned, that the service desk will say will register at checkout, which don’t, which the attendant will key in an exception for but that the actual store manager won’t see the big deal about leaving mislabeled and having less-attentive customers pay full price for? apparently I do because I still shop here and simply took two and unscanned one the last time this happened because I didn’t want to need to show anyone that I was buying hamburger helper, much less making a fuss about not saving one dollar on it. It usually happens on stupid products, like 2 pound bags of york peppermint patricias or cans of cat food. The latter of which isn’t inherently embarrassing but I don’t want anyone thinking that I personally approve of the cat’s actions.

this discount was also fake but fortunately the math still worked out.

there are occasional “random” audits triggered when attempting to check out, which prompt an employee to approach your purchases and rescan them until the computer says they can stop which fortunately hasn’t bumped up against my personal manual override of their broken pricing system yet.
at the TIME i was buying these in single serve containers because I kept making the 64 ounce size go bad prematurely by chopping up bits of lemon and dropping them into the bottle to improve the flavor which I didn’t immediately realize was responsible for spoiling the fluid early. I have a great many personal tricks that don’t actually work because I do not know how to do proper research. For example, I have on occasion considered that the creature nemitz, while an inexcusable crumbum, might be compatible with the concept of plush toys, but imagined mits possession of horns would be a problem. However some time in 2019 my then four year old neice violet showed up with a stuffed animal that appeared to be a mixture between unicorn and octopus and it had a horn which looked rigid but was collapsible and i tried to poke my own eye with it and it didn’t hurt, and was difficult enough to seem like it wouldn’t happen by accident, which would presumably not-hurt slightly less, which meant an accurate doll nemitz was perhaps feasible, if not at all justifiable. I am inclined to believe there was a better way I could have determined how safe it was to jab my own eye without actually doing that.
Also the reason I didn’t post this two weeks ago was because I meant to find that unicorn octopus doll in this house so I could photograph it, and I didn’t, and then I forgot. Absolutely nemitz’s fault.

ALSO even that iced tea purchase is also outdated, because I have lately been so inclined to augment the iced tea I buy with additional lemon or additional tea I decided to just make my own full pot of it, today. Eh my concoction needs some tweaking, and I don’t think i saved any money yet either because it meant I had to buy a pitcher, I found one here, for $14. When I went to remove the internal components to wash it before using it, I discovered they were broken. When I went back to return and replace the item, knowing that the longer I put off doing that the more it seemed like I broke it, I found the four of the remaining pitchers ALSO had the same part broken.

However Stop and Shop is still a better store than Shop Rite, a substantially better store than Price Chopper, has very good deli meats and self-scanning machines that greatly improve the overall experience. I just like to complain.

There is always someone to blame.

ah ha 18 hours later I thought of a purpose for this scene while sketching out the next nemitz-lope-elpse page, as it helps set up something else “story”wise that I was not certain how to set up, so I likely will include it or a piece of it. Kumquat WAS the original main character, and it seems to me now bizarre that I would consider omitting a scene containing that character when they are already in short supply simply because it contained no action, but I don’t like when people in fictional media stand around talking for prolonged periods, even if it has some amount of relevance, . i prefer for information to be delivered while something else is happening. This was hardly kevin smith “characters in movie talking about another movie” level unnecessary but if I were close to that I would quit making this comic strip and simply go partake of whatever commercial item i was having the characters talk about, because it would mean my passion lay elsewhere and passion is what keeps a slow, free, silly project like this going.

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The past year ish, apart from the dumb virus and dumb trump club has preferred me to spend time on things other than the bimshwellian comicoid, which itself is sending me mixed messages about how to complete the next section. Sometimes i have characters theoretically argue with each other and that gives me clues but this one doesn’t seem to be reaching a conclusion. at first I thought it was a needless exchange that didn’t necessarily need to be included, then it seemed like it might go somewhere, then it didn’t. I definitely don’t want to draw 40 consecutive panels of just kumquat and yibric talking about nothing, but also sometimes additional details that come to me while drawing the panels help point me toward a more meaningful version of the exchange. I can postpone this part since it is separate from what other characters are doing, but I am also postponing the next part with the gnomes in the lizard’s apartment, because I am not sure which or how many to draw in there, and if there should be a neutral page of them in there before what I want to happen to them in there occurs, and that can’t happen until after the next dumb things that the lizard does.

I colored yibric’s lines but not kumquat’s because the html code is tedious and if you had difficulty visually distinguishing colors there is no way you would have been able to follow my pictures-in-boxes mess up to this point.

1 Hey kay kay, the stuff’s not here. I found the darts but no glob.
I warned you never to call me that!
2 is that your prime concern about this?
should I be concerned?
3 you said to deal with “the rest,” I figured the absence of the rest would mean something
it may mean that elpse has reabsorbed the material
4 and…?
we therefore need not clean it up
5 i think you are being deliberately silly in an attempt to antagonize me
hm hm hm the tables have turned!
6 if elpse reabsorbs the material then your antidote failed!
OR you sabotaged my antidote!
7 why would I do that?
I do not know why you would do that
8 there fore, lacking evidence, you have no foundation to accuse me of having done that
I did not accuse, I merely supposed
9 well suppose you hurt my feelings, would you like that?
I have feelings! You have schemings! And you brought this up anyway!
10 fine then I drop it! let’s go!
FINE then! We will go!
11 then we are harmonious!
then why do I feel so sad?
12 (because I actually DID sabotage the antidote! Tee hee heap!)
you had better not be think-laughing at me!
13 hey look it’s the dope
indeed
14 don’t you think it is strange to find the dope out here?
not exactly. It probably climbed out of the goop pool on my partially submerged chair and followed elpse thinking elpse was a dope because I injected elpse with with the same material from which dopes were made.
15 you have a strange perception of what isn’t strange
AND as I also inject myself with dope material I much prefer it to follow elpse, which it should continue to do following your meddling.
16 you COULD just blast it with its yellow antidope. why were you keeping it?
I was keeping it away from me!
17 OKAY BUDDY then why bother trying to uncurse elpse if you don’t care that you failed?
I was testing my creation, and that concluded the test! Your deed has foiled elpse, not me.
18 pog would see it differently
pog is ignorant of the specifics and will see what I show.
19 pog’s judgement matters to you! Why not my own?
because YOU relish it! Pog suffers from compassion.
20 I may tell pog
to spite me?
21 pog will regard me as morally superior to you
you are not
22 hence why I can do that without any psychological consequence. What is your excuse?
I do not need to explain myself to you!
23 how do you explain you to you?
I avoid doing so.

I don’t much know why I bother counting because it is the amount of dialog and the complexity of the drawings that dictate how many panels should [reasonably] be on one page, not simply how many times I require myself to draw each set of characters. In the past I have mentioned that planning for 16 frames consistently fails because I always want to cram in more than I initially expected and planning for 12 is safer. And also I have had to re-edit plenty of too-cramped pages into slightly larger numbers of slightly less cramped pages already. And ALSOer when reviewing other RECENT pages, to try and re-determine where I was in this and which lines from the terribly disorganized script document i had already made use of, the ease with which I could read the dialog varied considerably, despite my belief that I had greatly increased the clarity over what was acceptable to me back when I had the first comic book made. These pages were made fresh AFTER I had broken up earlier crowded pages, meaning I carried the awareness that such a situation should be avoided going forward, and I plainly have failed to avoid it! I shall need to break up and re-compile many more. 16 may simply be too many panels for one page, even a well-planned page, if I insist on hand-lettering them, and obviously I do. I could stand to fuss less over varying the letter styles because I lack proficiency in that despite nearly 20 years of experience. I may need to limit how many strange things that nobody else does that I do in order to have any hope of making this production coherent outside my mind. And once in while I even do break some of the obsessive compulsive habits that drive this forward without sending it off the road to its death. Instead it comes to a solid halt in the street. Nobody else drives on this street. It is lonely but it means I have time to fix this atrocious metaphor.

I was stabbed in the left shoulder today and so far all I have to show for it is this shoddy video of the shoddy video on display at the place where it occurred.

The only good thing about this is that since it is government and local whoever made this was probably paid little to nothing for it. OR some money laundering firm was paid way, way too much for it.

there is a belief among some highly dubious people that the only thing stopping us regular folk from getting vaccinated in larger numbers is a lack of empty, cutesy encouragement from casual acquaintances and commercial entities.

A frame isn’t going to ‘inspire’ anybody. They either want to be vaccinated and are waiting or don’t want to be vaccinated and would need a chain of miracles endorsed by current US president and alt-right pope Trump to change their minds and still might not if they hear George Soros got a vaccination too. In fact this sort of wimpy-appeal peer pressure is much of the reason they are so obstinately anti-everything courteous. You need to employ sarcastic macho bully smirkle-jerk peer pressure to convince them to get vaccinated, and you won’t, because those are the people with a financial stake in sowing distrust for science and or social decency.
If the latest center for disease control guidelines stating that masks are no longer necessary after vaccination aren’t in error then that is all but validating anti-vaccine, anti-mask advocates who said it wasn’t necessary to begin with since the plandemic was started on purpose by China and also a hoax and imaginary. Just because the new mask rules only apply to people who have been vaccinated and only two weeks afterward mean nothing because you can’t distinguish those who have from who haven’t without enacting the sort of measures that Trumpian sorts have been warning their congregants about “liberals” imposing ever since ever. Even if there was a vaccine to help prevent further ideological disease you would never get anyone who needs it to take it. I suppose that gets a bit into the same sort of realm as people with autism objecting to it being called a disease and not wanting it to be “cured.” Which is ironic because anti-vaccinators believe it would be totally eradicated by not vaccinating anyone against it.

Also, my profile picture has a dope in it and at best will only ever inspire any friends to re-evaluate our friendship. I would approve of framing this only in the sense of blaming the dope for someone else’s crime but there are few crimes it is smart enough to plausibly be accused of doing, apart from possibly acting as a consultant for the decision to implement animated anthropomorphic vaccine bottles, in the form of not saying “no” when asked if it was a good idea.
I other newts I have yet to experience any negative side-effects from either vaccination dose, even though I have seen remarks and memery bordering on fetishization of the idea of experiencing such effects. And I certainly had people worrying on my behalf about the immediate consequences of my second dose. Having to drive to, from and in Old Saybrook on multiple occasions has been the worst of it, and was so before I even got the shot. I think a lot of this is like msg-paranoia, in that the more people fear it the more susceptible they become to it. Which is preferable to fearing the vaccine entirely I suppose. Being afraid of dumb things and expressing those fears makes people feel important and helpful, I suppose.

I do not at this time require the assistance of cowboy birdmen.

I do have a bit of a headache, which IS one of the stated side-effects, but headache is also a side-effect for everything else, among them typing in a bright white text window in an otherwise unlit room for several hours. I also have more vaccine-related remarks and pictures to show and hopefully won’t.

//an addendor, I have had a steadily increasing ache in the targeted arm, and did also the first time, but I consider that less of a side than a direct effect of having a metal spike plunged directly into a muscle.

///addenorior: almost immediately after disabling the computer and going to my bed (an actual bed as of early march and I am yet uncertain if I prefer it to the mattress lump) I developed fever-like symptoms, but nothing I would have mentioned under ordinary circumstances. Including vague, uncomfortable body temperature and dreaming about lying in place precisely where I was while thinking about lying there, at best, and otherwise believing I was in an incredibly tedious factory facility dedicated to endlessly sorting the contents of my nasal passages. I was several times jolted awake by the imagined sound of non-existent text messages. Now six hours after the initial illness I feel relatively un-ill, and my arm doesn’t even ache anymore. However I am re-experiencing a general difficulty sleeping that was occurring months prior to the latest shenanigorps and is closer to being a matter of personal concern. Now I just want to eat until I get tired enough to fall asleep again and ideally do so properly. I won’t but I sure could.

I personally liked it better in a square layout but then i had too much extra space to fill, and social media websites are lamentably kinder to vertically elongated images. i initially planned it with two additional frames that i realized were irrelevant, and then thought of a new one to add in, but that still messed with the negative space. in fact i could probably still eliminate three more to aid in clarity for anyone, probably most people, who have not had this particular problem.

I found that when i tried to invent a car suitable to the creature’s proportions i lacked the skill to make individual parts of the control mechanisms apparent as what they were intended to represent, and so used direct photograph references. the more realistic car may produce an amusing contrast relative to the blatantly fake driver, anyhow.

a commission drawing of a fancy phoenix for twitter.com/spongbros, because I have nothing special to say about it which means I can post it much faster than what I was trying to do otherwise.

no no no, I already did THAT last week! That took even longer!

I do not talk about “commission” much around these parts because I have surmised that the people who want to see what typically comprises that don’t want to see things other than that from me, so there would be little purpose to advertising or placing most of them here where I primarily do things other than that! Most of them are fairly stupid and it would be imprudent to say that about them until a few months or years later when the buyer realizes how much stuff I think is stupid and would be less alarmed by my saying as much about their own drawing had they not ceased all awareness of my deeds before or on account of that. But I think this one here is largely lacking in aspects that I would feel inclined to pass remark upon and so I can display it without issue or deliberate delay.

still friday, and I should have put a dope in there. even with peter the phoenik bird fulfilling a dope-like role I think that would help me feel better about it. it would mean one more dope that is there and not here.
I keep forgetting i put that dumb texas belt buckle there. I feel reassured whenever somebody acknowledges it. There is a tendency for fan-art to be very reverent and homagey without having anything to say beyond “hey! a popular thing exists! and I have tied myself to it!” The Texas isn’t making a point at all but it is distracting enough to keep the piece from drowning in self-indulgence. I indulge myself to include Texas belts but most people don’t konw that.
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Friday now! The picture is “finished” enough to post on websites where I cannot replace the image but I still think I have better avoid looking at it since there is definitely stuff still wrong with it. There will always be stuff wrong with it but I have dealt with all the wrong stuff that is at my level and within the range of what I can tolerate without taking a prolonged break from it, but I already put off dealing with the sketch for several years and I most certainly do not want to be putting this away until 2024 and having nothing at all to show for whatever the heap I was doing the past four weeks.
I cannot help thinking that the real value was forcing myself to learn a faster way of changing layers and controlling transparency because ultimately this doesn’t look a whole lot better than the awkward garbage I was doing 10 years ago. Individual bits are more skillfully done but the whole looks like an inorganic mess. Spending weeks making pictures like this will not get me closer to out of the hole! It was not supposed to take weeks or have hole-rank-improvement as a goal, but anything that does take that long needs to pay off in some way that a product this irregular cannot. However the RELATIVE payoff of not working on it any further should be fairly pleasant.
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I forgot to put out the trash for wednesday but I did poke away at this picture some more. It still needs help but less help than it previously needed.
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not really complete but the areas in massive trouble are by now largely localized to the lower right corner and I can fiddle with that some more and probably update this before anyone apart from me is realistically likely to see it.
It is based on a scene in the video game “Shining Force II: Ancient Ceiling” with an attempt at analyzing and adhering to the concept art far in excess of my organic capabilities or what anybody else would notice or care about.

i should have a drawing to post on tuesday. I should also have had it on sunday but it is a tricky drawing. everything is tricky these days! even that nemitz picture which was simple became very tricky and unpleasant once I attempted to talk about it so ideally i will say very little on tuesday.
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a needlessly nemity variation on a widely circulated image of uncertain origin

I am fascinated by this image, and plainly a lot of other people also are, often altering it to suit their needs. The envelope is apparently from 1895! I found this using the tineye reverse image search. Once in a while that actually works, yes. So I presume the picture is from before then, though how much before then I am unaware.

At my home from 1985 to 2001 this game was in a bathroom closet that never seemed to be closed, maybe it couldn’t be closed. I never saw the game be played, in fact I don’t believe I even saw the back of the box until I found it for sale on e-bay, but I always remembered the drawing.

I see now that Word Of Mouth’s is the only version to have a hat and non-clenched hands, and after comparing them I saw that its hands indeed had a more casual 1960s low budget school house rock animation sort of style to them than the rest of the drawing.

It was only years later, some time after the feature film was released, that I became aware of Sweeney Todd using a very similar drawing. I was only able to compare them recently, and saw that Todd’s is drawn by a different hand. I appreciate that Frank Verlizzo’s Sweeney Todd version redrew it outright to make the alterations less out of place and to match the Angela “Murder She Not-Yet Wrote/Did” Lansbury mutant that had to be drawn fresh. Also back in the 1970s fewer people assumed you could just change something on another person’s drawing or song and copyright it exclusively for yourself forever.

Another odd bit is that the one on the left was drawn to resemble Angela Lansbury but obviously the one on the right just is that same guy it was before. He does VAGUELY resemble the drawing but only as much as any other large 19th century man with his hair parted in the middle would, and yet that was enough. Verlizzo didn’t even incorporate the suspenders and nobody ever thought to ask: does this drawing actually look like the character?

Ironically, the Johnny Depp Todd DOES look like the drawing, wearing a vest and striped pants with messier side hair but the film never used that artwork in promotion. Presumably there was concern that Helena Bonham Carter looked less realistic than the cartoon Angela Lansbury.

unlike Todd’s, the collective soul version of the very angry man edits the an imprint directly and poorly and it is obvious (and the print itself is somewhat shoddy, as if somebody scanned a t-shirt that it had already been printed on). The whitish glow and white (or actually green)-tinted shadow against an inappropriate-colored backdrop resembles a vintage geocities gif and the mouth looks like somebody drew it with a mouse in GIMP. However, gimp and geocities didn’t exist then. Somebody had to work much harder to make an edit this bad in those days.
My older brother Colberon had this album and I had to ask him what album it was that had the Word of Mouth man on the cover, and fortunately he remembered. I don’t know what the MUSIC sounds like; it probably isn’t good if they think this cover looks good.

ohhhhhh it’s THAT song, the heaven let your light shine down band.

neh nehneh nehnehneh nehnehneh nehneh neh

yeah

I forgot Colberon used to listen to slightly more palatable garbage off the radio before he was actually in bands. I figured it was some mopey cheaply produced garbage like I used to find in our shared Kazaa folder years afterward. “Sparta’s” singer sounds like a sick puppy and the music sounds like what I hear while passed out when I am sick myself.

ehhhnyway, wikehhhpedia sez:

The title is claimed to be just lines lifted from that annoying Paul Simon song about wanting me to be his body guard. Why name your entire debut album after irrelevant lines in somebody else’s song? How can you have any respect for a band about which you believe that? That would mean the bums weren’t even trying. And the “fact” has been on the page so long that obviously loads of folks are quite willing to believe it is true, while I seeing that statement for the second time knew I needed to look it up. AND the actual Simony lyrics, apart from being fairly strangleworthy, don’t include the “and things left unsaid part.”

I am tired of garbage like this. I used to think it was funny when I found dumb lies on wikipedia but now it just makes me mad because people who know nothing will paraphrase those lies to prove they are smarter than and dismiss someone like me when they don’t know a ding dang thing, and then hundreds of other fandom wikis and automatically generated clickbait landfills will copy all the same junk and then after being established long enough each can be cited as sources by any other.
I don’t even care about this album and I easily proved both these statements to not be provable. I went there because I was angry about one thing and then became angry about something else in the same paragraph.
I don’t need my edits to be permanent, but I like knowing that anybody who goes to revert them will have to become aware of how annoyed I was. I was in a bad enough state to not realize I derisively used the word “bit” twice. I haven’t been that angry since somebody claimed [adventures of] Lomax was voiced by Kath Soucie, even though Lomax has the exact same voice as every other character in the game and only says things like “oh no!” and “let’s go” that sound like the same pitch-shifted probably sound-effect guy voice samples used in Lemmings 2.

I was kidding, sort of, with the manner in which I present these objections, yet this sort of thing really is a problem.

Soucie is an actor popular for squeakily voicing female often animal-based cartoon characters that became the target of lascivious affections from viewers, some of them extending their taste in animated wank fodder on to soucie herself. I don’t know WHY such a person NEEDS her to be Lomax’s voice, but now it is phrased countless different ways out there, so that each is harder to identify as copied from a casual falsehood on wikipedia, and I doubt Soucie remembers every single character she has given a voice to and every name that character has been known by, and maybe eventually she will also believe she voiced something called “Lomax.” But she didn’t! True enough, real lemmings don’t voluntarily run off cliffs to kill themselves, but 70 years ago Disney’s crew filmed some lemmings being deliberately shoved off a cliff just because they thought that was interesting, and real people younger than me still believe that happens so in comparison the lomax matter perhaps seems like a relatively benign invention.
Some people just NEED trash like that to be true for their lives to have meaning. And I get angry about it because my life also has no meaning because everything is run by imbeciles who trust fiction written by nobody to dismiss real people in their own orbit. msg, gmo, qanon, nft, sjw, inherited lies and stupid abbreviations everywhere. Even over stupid inconsequential trivia. Perhaps especially over that. I am a pariah across all the lands because I don’t trust anyone who tries to tell me who to trust, and that is typically a condition for peaceful coexistence.

I of course blame nemitz.