I need to stop writing things like this and forgetting them. I like this one, and its references are not completely out of date yet. I no longer have my father around watching network television all night; in fact I no longer have satellite dish “service” and the local reception here is awful, so I am drifting back into complete unawareness of what goes on the air. I am not glad my father is dead at all; I look at the box of ashes every day and keep thinking about the day he went to the hospital and I couldn’t even get him into the bathroom since I was so sick, but there are some habits that I am relieved to be without. My own habits do quite enough damage on their own.

I am so glad “Uncle Buck,” the 2016 tv series, got canceled. Every idea there is terrible. The initial movie was mediocre, the worst example of John Hughes’ fondness for dumping comedy in favor of desperate sappiness pretending to be comedy. And then you changed all the white people to black, which is always a desperate, cynical grab at looking hip and socially conscious. And you make Buck himself skinny instead of fat, bearded instead of shaven, and wearing a dorky hat, so it is a totally different character. Then you switch the time period ahead thirty years, and switch from a stand-alone premise, Buck looks after the kids for a week, to the standard continuity-less sitcom format, so that Buck’s role is necessarily different, so apart from the name “Buck” there is really nothing in common. The film is hardly regarded as a classic by anyone except extreme doofuses, so you wouldn’t have people under 30 generally aware of the source material, so they wouldn’t care about the allusion. And people who were aware, and also actually would want more Uncle Buck der film, would be offended that you changed so much stuff.

And it bothers me that this series was conceived by Steven Cragg, who was the head writer on Mad TV in 2005 or thereabouts, its least-completely misguided late season. Cragg is only credited as writer on 3 of the 8 Buckisodes but that should be enough if it was a good idea.
wikehhpedia cites a rotten tomator who says

not enough laughs for what? To be true to the legacy of the film? Because the film is only marginally funnier than Ghostbusters, which is only marginally funny, but has other elements apart from that to keep it interesting and me from dwelling on its social implausibility.

no it hasn’t! The cited article is just an interview with two of the actors saying how great John Candy and John Hughes were. Not every mediocre movie from the 1980s is a “cult film!” Uncle Buck was, by the preceding statement’s own admission, a mainstream box office success during its initial release.
I would believe Canadian Bacon, also starring John Candy, is a cult film, because it flopped on its initial release and has truly bizarre elements to it, but since it wasn’t written or directed by John Hughes and came out in the 1990s it doesn’t fill in enough of the corporetro buzzword bingo card and actually gets correctly identified as a dumb old movie that may safely be not-cared about.

And a few months ago the cast of Blackish was the cast of Good Times! (and DIDN’T get cancelled) Everybody programming at abc is a brain-robbed twit stuck in the 1970s, except they think they are smarter and edgier than the 1970s. With “new” versions of 25cent pyramid, match game, muppets, battle of the network stars or whatever else, I swear every ad for Goldbergs or Blackish just shows them homaging this or that old intellectual property. Hey look they’re talking about THE BREAKFAST CLUB! Hey look they’re dressed like BATMAN AND ROBIN from the 1960s! Who cares? How is that funny?
I remember The Wonder Years… I also remember hating The Wonder Years, but the premise was never Kevin busting into his house and telling everybody about this great new movie PLANET OF THE APES! and then his family act like they have never heard of it and ha ha! this is FUNNY because EVERYBODY knows what planet of the apes is! And then Charlton Heston shows up but NOT playing himself but that’s the JOKE and everybody falls asleep and dreams about being Apes on the Planet of the Apes.
As a child of the 1980s, do you know what my favorite movie was? Robin Hood, the Disney version from 1977. And Disney even owns ABC but wouldn’t make an episode about that because it doesn’t tie into their contemporary marketing since they have no live action adaptation of it planned and their version never thoroughly supplanted every other version of the character in popular culture. My older brother liked Transformers: The Movie, but the Goldbergs can’t talk about transformers because a rival conglomerate is making billions with that. My younger brother liked The Land Before Time, and the Goldbergs can’t talk about Don Bluth dinosaurs because a rival conglomerate is making surely tens of thousands off of that.

I wrote most of this last October, but literally last week, May 2017, the Goldbergs episode was about Back to the Future. And presumably involved dressing like the characters and acting out scenes from it with a forced-jewy spin on it. They would probably have Christopher Lloyd pull up in an actual DeLoreon but I think Big Bag Theory owns the current rights to having every nerd celebrity guest star as themselves acting like the characters they are associated with and in reality probably spent years trying to get disassociated from. Whatever the case, our tv writers seem to have been replaced by automated trend aggregators.

This headline I found while searching a for a background to draw behind the unspeakable dope on this page, and somehow just having read it made me feel dumber than drawing the dope did, and I declined to investigate further.
Literally Sheldon Kuper is the rudest most entitled jerk on earth and it is supposed to be entertaining to watch the world bend over backward to allow him to live out geek fantasies even though he is implied to be rich and appreciated for his skills already. Also, there are about five women in all existence and one of them is in love with him??!
You used to have to watch Nick Jr. to see plots this contrived, and you could accept that programming for toddlers will err on the simplistic and predictable side. The comedy on Peppa Pig is more sophisticated than network sitcoms. I almost ended that statement with “now” but then I remembered Full House and Growing Pains. Maybe knowing I was writing this killed Alan Thicke. And also Kevin Meaney, who starred in a different failed sitcom remake of Uncle Buck at the same time Full House was airing and became dead less than two months before Thicke did.

Getting back to the Buckture, plainly the point is that Buck is a darker skinned gentleman, and I should be interested in this revived concept based on that. Can you imagine if the ABC network put on a TV series based on The Color Purple or Roots in which everybody was white? No, they wouldn’t do that, because everything that exclusively features black characters has blackness as a central component to it, and they emphasize that. John Hughes stories have whiteness as a central component. Steven Cragg is very white. Loading black people into white concepts to make the cast seem “diverse” just makes trouble.

I can understand doing this in the recreation of an old theatric play, if it was lacking in elements tied to race and presented initially during a period in which only white people were permitted to audition or perform. That was not the case in 1980s film. In my limited period of access to plays, I have seen productions of Richard III, Three Musketeers, Romeo AND Juliet, plays written by and about white people, but staged with black actors in leading roles, and it worked because the scripts weren’t messed with with to try and draw attention to the blackness of the actors. But if you set it in contemporary society and are changing the personality and ethnicity of a role heavily associated with an actor still presumed to be in collective social memory, because you wouldn’t be remaking the film if it wasn’t considered heavily recognizable, you try and force people to accept how “real” it is, and it isn’t any more real like this! White people really do exist! And they really do occur in quite large numbers in this country. I don’t care if you make a cartoon series about an anachronistic stone age society that fixates on a dark-skinned family that is written to act like contemporary people act. But don’t call them The Flintstones because the Flintstones are a specific group of characters that act like middle-class white people from the 1960s.

I remember when Cedrick das Entertainer was doing a publicity tour for the completely needless and cinemized remake of The Honey-Mooners, how self-congratulatory he was for having recontextualized everything. How Ralph Cramden’s outburst “to the moon!” was no longer an insincere yelled threat of violence said in frustration but a calm and sincere statement of love. Which means he was playing a different character, and telling a different story. Cram Ralphden is a frustrated low-class oaf. If you are worried he will offend contemporary advertisers, you shouldn’t put him in a movie!
The play “Annie” was remade as a film, with all the white characters played by black actors, but since the original story is set in the 19th century and the show a musical-type anyhow, it is already somewhat abstract, and the character personalities already removed from reality, assuming the songs weren’t screwed with to seem more sassy and hip-hoppety. Whatever the case, don’t call it “color-blind casting” when it is deliberate. You want me to think that skin color played no role whatsoever in filling the role, which is a lie. You wanted me to notice the blackness, just like you wanted me to notice the ladyness of the more recent Ghostbusters. And people did, and you pretended it was their prejudice that made them notice. Please stop doing that!
I accept the idea of remakes, taking a functioning concept and putting it into a fundamentally different context, but without trying to obscure the original from existence. I don’t accept replacement characters with the same names who behave in fundamentally different ways.

It must also be noted that “The Great Outdoors,” another thoroughly unremarkable John Hughes/John Candy feature, is also being remade, and while I admit I haven’t seen it, and that Kevin Hart is certainly uninspired and irritating and coasting on an inexplicable media-wide assumption that he is funny so-that-he-needn’t-attempt-to-be enough to replace Dan Aykroyd, you could easily make a movie about two families going camping and coming into conflict without anybody saying “hey, isn’t this a ripoff of that all-time cinema classic The Great Outdoors?,” even if you hadn’t taken the precaution of making sure the cast had fewer white people in it. There is just no reason for any of this, I don’t get it, I never got it before, and I expect I shall continue not to get it.

I thought I had griped about John Hughes in the past, but if I did it isn’t on this website. without even remembering that he was responsible for Baby’s Day Out.
I remember seeing promotion for a video game based on the movie before I even heard of the movie, and then the game didn’t actually get released, but the movie did, and somehow I saw it.
Oddly enough, the titular baby has just the sort of aristocrat entitled parents that Hughes always shows ostensibly-relatable schlubs triumphing over in his other movies. And now I suppose they all have jobs producing lame movies and tv shows that reference his lame movies.

page 24 of part three of whatever this is
shortly after I drew the scenes with kumquat’s komputers, it struck me how mundane and obviously based on contemporary computers they were, and I imagined I should have gone bigger and more old fashion,ed and stranger. but ten years on, and one more day on in the strip’s timeline, this computer now looks huge, bizarre and outdated.

An unnatural consequence of sharing a residence with compulsive television watchers of disparate ages. Apart from that it is perhaps not worth thinking about at length, nor explaining in brief!

Gosh I am not good at drawing this badly on purpose. The peppa pig program is extremely badly drawn, but in a very specific way. I spent two days! somehow getting it just right. So then I HAD to shade the background like that just to not feel dead inside, even though that ruined the desired effect of drawing poorly so specifically, to make it look JUST right. Because it sure doesn’t, now! This doesn’t help me toward my goal at all, doing stuff like this, and spending that long on it. But once these ideas get in my mind I have to do them as soon as possible; elsewise they eat away at me like everything else. there are boneheads out there who do NOTHING BUT asinine cross-over fanart. Really I should leave this to them. When I do it I just look like a goon, and I haven’t cultivated a goon’s audience. Still I think this is funny.

My father might have appreciated this. He was there for all of that. Fictional British fathers that bad things happen to remind me of him, apart from that, especially if they wear glasses. I had meant to draw it back in January but ehh well hm.

I had placed this illfrustration at the end of the “video” I posted last week without realizing I had not prior to then exhibited it on this website, even though it seems to originate in August 2015.
Initially inspired by editing wordpress themes (what this website runs on), but it could as well apply to trying to use hulu, trying to use linux, trying to install windows over linux, trying to use a Hewlett Packard printer, trying to use toon-boom software, or any number of things that don’t work while priding themselves on how well they work.
This may have been the first middle finger on the deviant art website not being directed at the viewer.

This goes back to 2006. What have I done with my life? And how is it that many of the artists I have observed these from over the years have done more with theirs?

Additionally, this image and

this image appeared, for a deliberately short period of time, because they are pretty bad if you have time to analyze their details, but I did not have any other “character” for which drawings existed both of wearing earphones and of pressing down on a ridiculous cartoon detonator.

Cake Roll, a bit of moderately strange wordless music just under three minutes in length. Theoretically it can play on a loop but that does not quite occur here. I had thought it was pretty good, but kept finding slight problems to repair, theoretically making it better, but I had to hear it so many times amitz this that I subtly got tired of it and started to believe that nobody else would possibly like it. But consciously I would not put it on the internet at all if I thought it was bad. And so I did put it there, but not before spending several hours yesterday adding in additional insults from it toward itself, which makes no sense. I worked even harder on it in an attempt to communicate that subconsciously I don’t think I worked hard enough on it, thereby possibly diminishing the integrity of the product so that it comes across as worse than it truly is. Livin’ la vida bimshwel.

Page 23 of part 3 of this.
When I made page 22, I said I would try and reuse the backgrounds because they took so long to make. That really didn’t work! I can’t help but do everything weird every time so that it does not match anything from before. This kind of page takes so long that I forget what the actual story is. I will go back and populate more of those bottles and supply the tengu creature with legs and proper proportions relative to whatever doctrel gorp is in more frames if I feel suitably uninspired at a point in time when I have nothing better to do.

This identity-concealing criminal who escaped from a 19th century chain gang wants ME to be safe and obey the rules?
Steal all the hamburgers you want from the corporate clown who’s the only person keeping you out of jail but don’t you dare jump in the ball pit. Of note is that this guy is actually over the limit , and would have to violate the law to enforce it

This is literally visible from the same point as the rule chart. He is kidnapping eyewitnesses and eating them. What a monster!

Is this amusing you, Ronald? Why are you protecting this scoundrel, and letting him “run” your playplace? What dirt does he have on you? What is this a front for?

Concurrent with the 512×512 pixel matter, I offered drawings at smaller sizes, with 100×100 resolution being the most common request. I did not realize what a big deal it was to be able to draw like this until I realized how many people could not. Eventually they started paying me to do it. Not enough that I could feel like I had done something with my life, but at present I can buy more pizzas than I can eat, which feels important.

Icons that I initially used for myself. None is especially excusable.

Fastest gun in the wasp, November 2013
A character called Miso for a person called Miso but who presumably does not look like this, stuffed into a tiny 100×100 pixel box but not at all deterred. This was before I gave people many/any options so theoretically I could come up with a better pose than this.

You shall meet with my raccs, 2014 or sooner
Relaxingdragon wanted these at some point. Rare examples of the 200×200 size, which is still small enough that I do not totally lose my mind with it, although I did not develop the habit of losing my mind on pixel-level work until 2016, so that may be a presumptuous statement.

Icon see you’re upset June 9, 2016
pengosolvent recently inquired about a new representative 50×50 pixel symbol but something alarming has occurred. These are smaller, only 50×50 pixels, because the deviant-art website restricts user representations to that size. And I drew four because I usually give people 2-4 different layouts to choose from, but need to color them in, to some degree, for them to be legible, and on this occasion colored in all four fully without being asked to.

The pickax papers, December 17, 2015
A newer Miso, also for Miso. I had been asked to make an icon similar to the old one, and took that as permission to be equally boring with the poses. And again I could not restrain myself from finishing all example versions! The upper left is the one we went with, and therefore it is slightly more “finished” than the others. Appropriately enough it is considerably more proud of itself. The creature this is derived from is called a tawny mining bee, and I took THAT as permission to add mining implements, including an all important flannel shirt, even though those are more stereo-type associated with logging, because it seemed unlikely somebody would send a logging bee my way any time in the near future.

Clippity-clopsicle October 20, 2016
For kinn-katze, a horse creature named Ryno ponders something likely unrelated to being named after a different species, since that is the type of thing you generally have to sort out early in life.

who do lu think lu are? November 17, 2016
100×100 and 50×50 pixel icon robisions of a flagrantly asymmetrical creature called Lulu known to Fairyartery
I just realized I use that “finger touching mouth” gesture way too often. Although I always give people the opportunity to request a different gesture!

is that who i think tiz December 8, 2016
Ah yes, ’tis Tiz, from something called Bravely Second, for boooey.
After this I decided every icon I make should have something resembling a backdrop, even if the buyer personally uses a version that doesn’t, because some sites are very stupid about transparency. And some sites aren’t but stuff looks bad on them anyway, hint hint.

robb from the pix to give to the four, December 22, 2016
a hoofless yet horsely creature named Robbie, unrelated to Ryno’s horsely creature, in fact for boooey again. The hair changes its mind based on whatever eye it feels is more fashionable to show at any moment. Also, after examining the previous two items, it became conscious of the possibility for vision problems resulting from prolonged obscured vision of a single eye.

hotel kotel holiday inn, January 5, 2017
for Kotel First is a bat creature also called Kotel, with and without wings, and a more opussummy figure called Obeah whose enthusiasm has been taken out of context to pertain to the winged bat’s error, potentially a consequence of trying to escape from a 100×100 pixel space.

therefore four hares, January 19, 2017
100×100 pixel icons of a hare creature named Lewis for Arito, who was pleasant to work with; I wish I could say the same for this devious dirt-dweller.
After THIS point I realized that flat colors were inadequate for “something resembling a backdrop.”
A progress video of a sort, showing approximately how I colored this

goat tell it on the mountain, January 26, 2017
A goatly creature called Lutka, pixel-styled for trufours. Seems to be having a rough day.

let that synx in, January 26, 2017
another pixel drawing for :icontrufours: of Xiu, who is a synx, and apparently there are more synxes in the world than I thought! Initially there was somebody called Chimerasynx who came up with and drew these things and they have no spines and can twist in silly ways and have more teeth than is reasonable, and at some point they got franchised out, I suppose. This one looks friendly enough, fortunately.

I hope you are not getting sick of these; there is another bigger one coming!

well-financed flop, February 2, 2017
More pixelry for arito, this time of Shani, an apparently easily-worried saber cat. Plus a rinkity dinkity background I added quickly at the end for reasons already cited! Of course I don’t have a video showing this, the one part people have expressed to me sincere bafflement at how to produce.

do the rat thing, February 16, 2017
For kjorteo. There looks to have been some disconcerting events recently! And then this happened.

rats and beans, February 16, 2017
also for kjorteo, whose requests’ shape necessitated separating it from the other one! This looks to be alarming news for the protagonist. Although clearly it had been seen from quite a way off!

tanuki tea look-see, April 20, 2017
For perikaryon, showing a raccoon-dog investigating a hot drink. It is probably coffee but there is a chance it is tea. Possibly there is a better tool to use in determining the drink’s nature.

Amitz all this people started asking me for animated icons, which take 4-8 times as long to make, but I can charge 3 times as much for them without potential buyers recoiling in horror and abandoning the idea! That is real progress. Still less time than it takes to put one of these website entries together, but nonetheless I am done with this one for now, and hopefully for some time afterward, and so I shall exhibit those here on another occasion.

My father James Thomas Cunningham is dead. And has been for a month. Well it was supposed to be a month, which actually would have been marked yesterday. Well WELL at first this was to be within the first week but hrm hah urm. I had difficulty writing something readable on the topic. Nonetheless I have embedded appropriately inappropriate messages within the images for if you hover your mouse cursor over them, like always.

Ever since it happened, or at least the first two weeks, I occasionally wrote a little note about it, in the hope of making a proper public post on the topic. But it never came together, because I did not want it to be depressing. I already make the positive updates depressing! But I do not feel like this was a good death, either. He deserved better, from me most of all. From November 1998 onward I did not speak to him, or in any place where I thought he could hear me. Not out of hatred, but simple, or rather complicated psychological blockage. And people generally did not accept this. I could not explain how it worked, and how their suggestions for how to fix it were totally non-applicable. And I would say now, looking back, it drew directly from the absence of fundamental human decency I experienced at the school I attended at that time, Cedarhurst in Hamden Connecticut curse them to heaping heck. Initially I stopped speaking there, and my father had the job of bringing me to various doctor appointments and one hospitalization that those monsters forced me into under threat of custody revocation, and without deliberately meaning to I transferred my speech prohibition to any time I was in his company. And gradually through the years following, owing to one illness and illness treatment side effect after another, the quality of my father’s life declined. It was only after I returned from an apartment I had in New Haven, and became his more or less constant in-home companion that the guilt from not talking began to overpower whatever force kept me from speaking, succeeding at last maybe in mid-2015. He did not even have two years remaining. And by that point he was almost more obligation than parent to me. Our relationship was healing, finally, after far too much sadness, but I do not feel like we finished the job. It was hard to be with him without resenting the job to some degree. I tried to ask him things nobody else would ask, and understand what he went through, and do things for him that nobody else would think to, assuming he had little time left. But I thought I would have more notice than I did, since the reduction of his physical abilities had always been gradual. One day he could speak, eat and move through the house with some level of assistance, and the next he could do nothing at all, confined to a hospital bed with tubes down his throat, on account of his myocard infarcting. Not even related to the prostate cancer, cerebral ataxia, immobilizing tremors, rib and spine injuries, but those things meant that he was not expected to survive heart surgery. There was no chance to take inventory of what we never got to and deal with it. No time to do something as simple as ask what his favorite movies were so that I could get copies of them and let him watch all that stuff instead Bones and Law & Order reruns he had already seen 4 times apiece. He was legally alive another two weeks, but not in a consistently coherent state, owing to more weird medications and stress, presumably, and not in a place that I would call comfortable.

We could even have finished watching Breaking Bad; we had the dvds, and had started to watch it, with my mother, also. But eventually their schedules diverged, and by the time they verged again we also had the Game of Thrones dvds and those had the higher pointless death to minute of airtime ratio and therefore took precedence.

Yes so we shared that, but the show wasn’t finished, was it. Presumably there will be closure in that somewhere, eventually.

Somebody in East Haven, Connecticut, actually wanted to pay my father to make methamphetamine. He was a chemist who could make stuff other people couldn’t. Certainly I don’t think he aspired to be a Walter White sort of person but he appreciated the subject matter –he liked to identify the element symbols used in the opening credits– and to some degree I have to think related to the character more than most people would, including having cancer and not being appreciated for his skills; he started a business with a partner who eventually cheated him out of it, and there are ASPECTS of the television character which might be seen as fantasy fulfillment.

I wondered if I should mention this on the internet at all. It is important to my life, and affects, and has affected what I do, but I hate dealing with people reacting to it in a rote manner. At the funeral wake thing, one after another people I barely knew approached me to say “sorry for your loss.” Why? Who are you? Why are you sorry for MY loss? The poor man whose crushed bone dust is in the box over there lost more than I did! I do not know what to say to people except “it is alright, it was not your fault.” Or “eh it is part of life. And death, I suppose.” Most of them probably did not want to say the line to me, but they SAW me, and thought: “oh pringles we made eye contact. if I don’t say ‘sorry for your loss’ to THAT one now it will blab to the people here that I actually need to like me.”
I appreciate that persons want to be helpful, but I think very few of them sincerely do.

It is the same reason I keep my birth date a secret on the internet; I hate dealing with rote reactions from those whom I barely know, and then feeling like I owe each of them a unique, non-rote response, and then worrying that I now owe them unique birthday wishes when the time comes, and I do not have the energy for it. And I would be even worse at condolence-issuing. Fortunately in person nobody can see that I already gave the same reply to the person before them, so that at least I kept under control. The funeral scene is not for ME. The death was six days ago by that point, and I had grieved before then, before the death occurred, even. Afterward, getting the funeral to happen and visitors coordinated and met and all that, plus local family grieved with and reassured and all that, I was gosh darn exhausted by the time of the semi-public event. And then that was not even the end of it since there was a large dinner gathering following it, and people who had traveled to attend all this were still around a few days following that. However much I surprisingly enjoyed their company, it was tiring. I do not want condolences, just a break.

But until then wishing me well is meaningless, especially if it comes, as it did plenty, from somebody whose life would be no different were it me who was dead. And I am not demanding special attention, either; I just wish we all could spend less time pretending.

And less money on mopey parties for people to pretend at. Did you know that even a non-frilled cremation costs over three thousand dollars? And somehow having a little ceremony for it, a newspaper notice and a box to put the bone dust in costs $2000 more. And it isn’t even a FANCY box. We could have bought a fancy urn but there was concern about being permitted to bring it on an airplane if we wished to transport the ashes someplace else. Obviously this is because you could easily hide three ounces of water inside one.

We should not force ourselves to be sad because we think etiquette dictates it, and we certainly should not dive deeper into debt for the opportunity. I am terribly fortunate that whatever arbitrary force made my parents feel like they had to put all their children into Catholic schools was not in effect by the time half of them were dead and it allowed us to have a traditionally incongruous karaoke conclusion.

This is the picture that got placed on the ash box. It is a good picture, and it occurred during our 1989 visit to England, my father’s native country, but I have no idea whose dog that is.

Perhaps my foremost regret is that I never communicated how important he was, or had been, in introducing me to some of my favorite things.

Even if I did not always like the same things; I never liked futbol, Harry Potter or fish+chips, but definitely stuff that I knew of on account of him stuck with me my whole life following their introductions. For example, Rupert Bear books had been sent by my English grandmother to my family for several years in the 1980s (and for longer to my father’s brother’s family, who were a bit older), and I never got rid of them. I enjoyed John Harrold’s artwork, and it inspired how I drew a few things, long after the books’ initial acquisition. I am told I even once had a sweater with Rupert pictured on it that this grandmother made for me, but I have no evidence of this.

My appreciation for classical music started with my father. And I hate to condense centuries of artistic expression and styles into a single “genre” but that is beside the point for now. On his last day of open communication, Friday the 21, when he was done with life support and yanked all the tubes out, so at least he could speak and take liquid sustenance again, I quickly set up a playlist of music that he had used to listen to that I had always kept track of –he asked only for “Beethoven” and I knew precisely what he meant, and he seemed glad to hear it, and sadly I did not get through the list before Jeopardy came on

(Jeopardy! I still watch that), and he was still calling out answers to the end, and afterward he preferred the quiet. But being able to share that back was meaningful to me. I didn’t get to Smetana’s Moldau, one of the primary pieces, with Beethoven’s sixth symphony and Holst’s Jupiter, among others, that remind me of my father. Or rather I started it, but since the beginning is so subdued I think he didn’t recognize it, or maybe he did, but it reminded him of the Canals of Mars level in the NES version of Toobin’. So rather than try and jump to the distinct part I skipped it entirely.

That was a joke, but my appreciation of certain video games, Dragon Warrior and Romance of the Three Kingdoms foremost, two of the slowest, more inaccessible titles on the NES ever to be localized, I saw my father playing first, and eventually took a liking to, and I thought I was quite a bit smarter than anybody who thought those were boring, and this led to continuing fascination with that sort of thing. I even at some point read the original [translated] Three Kingdoms novel that inspired the video games, which is to date the longest thing I have read. I believe I also first saw him playing Landstalker (or trying to), my perhaps favorite sega genesis game, but that is only appropriate to mention with regard to a screenshot I ended up putting in this entry too late to be relevant to this paragraph. My father’s general Britishness struck me, as a small child, as being in some way superior to common American habits, and even if that was not accurate, it helped me to look outside a box I might otherwise not have. I even said so on one of my earliest terrible but preservable web pages back in whenever that was.

And I have alluded to all these things on numerous occasions throughout my years of frivolous website production, and I think my father, of all people, might have appreciated it, especially when I was not able to speak to him –So many of the strange quotes I adorn my entries with and that surely confound of those who attempt to read the dumb things, come from strange old movies that my father would have on the television, or the stranger advertising– but by 2001 or so, before I was writing regularly, and long before I was writing half-competently, he no longer wanted, or no longer could use a computer and certainly would not have had time to read my rubbish weekly. And it was never my way to impose nonsense on others. I wouldn’t go and print out pages and pages of this and assume it had a purpose. Occasionally when I had art prints I might show those, but a great majority of my drawings have never been printed, and my sketchbooks are messy and incomprehensible, even for me, who does not require spectacles.
Indeed for the most part my father probably had no idea what I was doing. And he was supposedly proud of me anyway. That does eat at me inside: He was content with me being totally worthless and I never got to prove that I wasn’t!

One tribute to him, in a sense, that I am sad to say he did not know about, and that to my knowledge nobody else did either, even though I drew it just over ten years ago, is the way the creature “kumquat” types on its computer device is based on how my father did back when he could still use a computer. One finger at a time, alternating. Even by early 1998 (prior to my problem) when we first had home internet, my father’s coordination was not stellar. It was not long before he was asking me to type out replies for him when another user of the AOL trivia whatsit accused him of lurking in the game for long enough that the questions looped around. He had me explain, in considered detail, that while he had observed that behavior in others, he would not do such a thing, and he knew the answers he knew because of this this and that, but the person had already logged off, not concerned with whether they were actually right (and, I have to think, probably lost the trivia game due to THAT tendency) and in those days that meant you just plain could not send a message to the person. Argh what a scumbag! My one opportunity to fight for my father’s trivihonor and I wasn’t fast enough. My only hope is to make that incident into a bit of useless trivia itself.

In fact, that I recall, I do not think I ever drew anything for my father, except a really crummy photograph imitation watercolor painting of a pelican. In 2012, before I could speak to him in person, I had become able to speak over the telephone, and I asked what his favorite animal was, thinking that I could imitate photographs of animals in physical media in a way that is pleasing, and that would be easier than any other thing my father would possibly want art work of,

based on my experience with this manner of product. I had not considered that I chose this picture not due to there being birds in it, but rather to its suitability to the task of imitation by me, due to an abundance of vague but colorful details. The pelican scene featured complicated but specific feathers, a limited range of colors and a view of the sea where the light reflection made it seem mostly white, but the imitation to look like I have a fundamental, pre-school-level misunderstanding of what water looks like.
It was so bad that i never showed it to its intended recipient until that last Friday, in the hospital, since I had such massive guilt about what I just told you. A bit later somebody had propped it against a wall in the room with the wrong side up. That is how bad it was. I became the classic delusional artist joke, where two people take turns turning the canvas around to try and determine which orientation is correct. The stuff that I knew how to draw well I was always embarrassed by. Nobody in my family has a “fursona.” And thank goodness but for people who do, it is at least much easier to figure out exactly what to draw, and usually not very difficult.

February 26 of this year, the last time my father went to a restaurant. Zhang’s Madison, the closest restaurant to our home, since he did not like to travel at all by this point. But his sixty-fifth birthday had been on Tuesday, the 21 of February. “Oh two, two one, five two,” as I heard enunciated as clearly as he was able in countless doctor waiting room visits. often multiple times the same trip since the people in that building don’t communicate, and don’t realize you already proved your sanity once to them today. Anyway, something moderately special seemed called for. He is seen here drinking his customary “Coke…. NO ice,” with the latter part usually appended just as the server is leaving. In fact he preferred Mountain Dew, but through the magic of corporate contracts those two are mutually exclusive offerings in any food service establishment. I think he possibly learned that habit from me. Before I stopped speaking, he took me to and from therapist appointments, and I remember stopping at the McDonalds on the highway and ordering the then new “crispy chicken deluxe,” and with none of the customary unspeakable goop on it, which the employees could handle, and a large coke with no ice, which they could not handle. With no ice because nobody can drink ice, but I could drink a lotta coke, and you can fit more in there without the ding dang ice. Presumably the ice is to save THEM money on soda, even though that is probably the cheapest to produce thing in the entire store, a category in which there is fierce competition at a McDonalds. And sometimes servers aren’t mentally equipped to process “no ice” and assume, through what seems to me a more strenuous stretch of logic, that I must have meant “no sugar,” and I end up with a huge undrinkable cylinder of diet coke, just about as undrinkable as the ice in there with it. This all seems to be mostly about me, but I have few coherent memories from when I was on good terms with my father and he could actually do things. Everything afterward has regret attached, so I will take what i can get.

I am fortunate that the recent deceased got to 65 years; many people lose parents at younger ages, and without even the little amount of awareness that it is coming which I had. Not everybody has a father, and some have no parents who love them at all. This could have been worse. Much as this entry could have been much longer; I removed or did not attempt to implement several parts that seemed attached to a different narrative, and perhaps I will see those later.

But right now I need a break! Preferably to do something non-depressing in.

Thank you for your time and consideration in these matters.