this sums up why i do not like or even think about the hotel transylvania film series enough to have previously acknowledged it. My picture is terrible and compiled from several terrible pictures since I did not want to look like I was photographing it, and also the stop and shop granola bar shelf is arranged like a mosh pit but this is all it deserves. “it” being just another bland story of pixar-derived normal boring people with a single unusual trait that happens to manifest itself in appearance + celebrity voices. Legally Adam Sandler still has more than enough money to be considered a celebrity and is not at risk of being called an actor. In fact the “moral” is probably don’t judge a book by its cover! Maybe the MONSTERS are not the REAL monsters! Like every computer movie that has ever come out. in fact pixar has a series that is literally also “monsters” that are just like “us.” And also the Addams Family did that half a century ago and the Munsters even used Frankenstein. I don’t know why the Sony corporation didn’t just brand Hotel Transylvania a Groovie Goolies reboot. I didn’t think Underdog had enough name recognition to justify a 3d animated point-missing remake, and the Goolies have even LESS.
Anyway I thought there was no idea to start with, but by 2018 they have run out of no ideas since the third installmeh has a “everybody takes a trip to the beach” theme, which puts it into Brady Bunch territory. That is even the premise of the third The Chipmunks bad computer animated movie. Apart from the mummy, these characters aren’t really recognizable as monsters now. They just look like slobs.

I might have thought the right side one was Shaggy from Scooby Doo if I did not see the Hotel Transylvania logo and there being a woman attracted to him. in fact there is a Scooby Doo “movie” called The Reluctant Werewolf in which Shaggy gets transformed into a werewolf and gets taunted by recycled Groovie Goolies animation.* he even has an inexplicable female companion named “Googie” whom to my knowledge was not seen prior to then nor afterward (and isn’t seen here either). I remember watching it at the age of 6-9 on the USA network at my grandmother’s house since she had cable. It took about two hours. The running time was insane for something that dull and crummy. And I watched it anyway because kids have no taste. The left character here, I guess is just some lady. These people are PERSECUTED just because they’re MONSTERS even though they keep up with contemporary American fashion and gender norms.

Or maybe these two are the “normal” normal people that are supposed to be like the viewer’s avatar, who start off AFRAID but realize eventually that some business man/ trophy hunter / scientist nerd is the REAL monster, even though they are the people actually making the movies. the trophy hunters are doing it in a sexual sense but otherwise there is no difference.
(then I drew this) I don’t know. and i can’t tell. And once i can’t tell, what even is the point? “it’s what’s inside that counts!” that’s true! as long as you are completely ordinary and submissive to commercialism inside, be as garish as you want. Eat up –it’s on food, even– the fake politically correct morality of the moment.
I don’t even know if Hotel Transylvania 3: Die Darkman Die came out yet, maybe it even came out last year; these things are preservatived enough to be legally edible for several years.

here is The Roughly Adequate Dinosaur branded consumable material in shop rite in 2017 despite a visible copyright notice identifying 2015. Of course to be fair it IS at Shop Rite. You can tell it is Shop Rite because there are bright yellow labels that say “SAVINGS” on items which are not actually on sale. And you can tell I took this picture two years later than the date on it because I just typed text saying so.

_{(emphasis mine)}
what on earth is “spooky” here? The five smoke stacks on the ship in the distance? The unsupervised child playing on a stack of abandoned cargo? That Quaker uses the iconography of a health food company while selling candy and corporate propaganda? I buy granola bars because I want to eat chocolate chip cookies and consider these marginally less detrimental to my well-being.
this is from the quaker website because the box with these characters on it was sold out when I finally decided to take pictures of them, not considering that I would postpone finishing what I was writing for another three weeks and would have ample time for the store to restock them even though I never finish one of these in under a month anymore.

*I mis-remembered this; recycled Groovie Goolies animation appears in a 1984 episode of The Let’s Go Ghost-Busters which I also have seen, but the production on Reluctant Werewolf is so shoddy and 1970s looking that this is plausible enough to leave in with a disclaimer. I was surprised just now to read it came out in 1988!

I have also been told by my own nagging need to sabotage my efforts by looking things up, that the completely ordinary looking woman here is Dracula’s daughter and the conflict is more of an obnoxious sitcom sort of deal with Dracula being overprotective of his daughter from this human who isn’t even a vampire and hanging out with his oafy friends who can’t stand their nagging wives. The nagging wives bit is extrapolation by me based on them being portrayed by Fran Drescher and Molly Shannon, them being absent from the plot description and my memory of commercials for Father of the Pride (that page is from 2004, when my parenthetical asides spanned whole paragraphs watch out). I was thinking: more Shrek, with all the annoying Saturday Night Live crummydians in the place of actors but really it’s more Shrek 2, with annoying pop singers added in to raise the marketing value among kids who aren’t yet old enough to think they are smart because they watch Saturday Night Live. In any event everybody’s just a slob at the beach by now and that means this completely ordinary-looking woman standing in direct sunlight is supposed to be a full-blooded vampire, so plainly it doesn’t matter that she IS a vampire. They probably try to play it like “look at this allegory about social harmony ho ho ho we’re so positive and messagey even though we just likened Jews to vampires.” Mel Brooks was even hired to voice Dracula’s father in the sequel (but not to write the screenplay). What’s even the point of calling him “Dracula” at this point? Dracula is only interesting because he does evil things while seeming pleasant and welcoming. A Dracula that is just an average nice guy –Adam Sandler isn’t a credited producer or writer but his wife and his daughter portray his wife and his daughter so one assumes he dictated how his character came across– and doesn’t kill people to keep himself alive or even kidnap them just to amuse himself isn’t Dracula!

It isn’t even Duckula because Duckula’s attendants legitimately want Duckula to start killing people, are disappointed when he doesn’t, and he is usually suffering most of the time. It’s more like Count Chocula: The Movie, especially considering the sugar-loaded rubbish component. Everything I see about Hotel Transylvania makes it seem like it is only as interesting as a two hour episode of Scooby Doo. Which regrettably is enough.

this trashy video is meant to display some stupid yellow creature that throws a bowling ball, but since I have not yet made level spaces well suited to that, I ended up using non-ideal sample areas that happen to also be the ugliest areas i have yet made.
I am quite sad to say that as lame as i imagined this looked, i imagined i was exaggerating to try and set myself up to feel better when it actually does not look so bad, but this does in fact look quite bad. even in these brief samples meant to display a single object, that I admittedly have not yet made appropriate landscapes for, I see an inordinate number of unchanged graphics from the original Doom game and amateurish non-original game graphics that I mean to remove.

The original “plan” called for the bowling imps to be placed beside stacks of bowling balls but I discovered that it did not look terribly “wrong” for them to just grab the balls out of the ground so that is how things presently are.

I show it here because I spent so much of the last two weeks getting this to work that I have nothing else to show! it feels like too mundane a creature to spend that much time on, but the time has been spent. I drew it throwing the ball from 8 angles, when most people would just do five, even though that motion takes 15 frames. and STILL is somewhat jerky. that is 15×8, 120 frames, not including the just standing there and “hey stop shooting me” frames, ALSO drawn from eight angles instead of five. I merficully allowed to accept a single angled “death” animation because it just turns into globs that would not necessarily be noticeably not rotating when walked around.
None of the monsters die, they just fall over and look sad, unless they melt. The few non-goop monsters that actually can bleed still have their eyes open when they get disemboweled. I want to hurt them, not to kill them. I want them to think about what they did.

i made this one into a goop monster that melts rather than an “organic” one that simply falls over and looks sad since it is uniform of color and unclothed which suggests goop compatibility, even though I only have three non-goop ones so far, and two, based on lope (pathetic blue lizard) and nemitz (incorrigible orange imp), have to be redrawn to NOT look like them since the theme has become more specific than “weird junk in doom” since I first implemented them roundabout 2003-4ish,, and I cannot imagine lope being any good in a fight anyhow, assuming it would ever be even willing to fight. Also, chronologically speaking, nemitz should not be present at this point. Yes you will believe I have a serious timeline for this “story” even though it is ludicrous broken garbage that will always be somebody else’s game even though I guarantee you I wasted more time from my life than id software collectively did while developing doom and the predecessors it follows from. I MUST justify the time spent, by spending yet more time on it. I might have justified this paragraph better by actually including those two IN the video but I mean to assure you that they are nearby since I can hear their noises.

This is an exaggerated garbage idea that would be funny if i drew it like garbage instead of spending hours trying to draw it above my level, even though it still isn’t drawn particularly well.

additionally, the earliest saved sketch i have of it still is not funny, because I cannot draw badly in a way that looks functionally deliberate.
Such is the bimshwel existence.
The guy with sunglasses is not part of my initial pitch to myself, and that might also be a problem. If the idea works at all, that guy is not a part of it and explaining this makes it even less funny, but the rubbish I was writing that led me to think of this as a way of illustrating instead of spelling out, now plainly needs to be written anyway since this picture didn’t work so when I write that I will have no choice but to explain it. If necessary, I may even explain the previous sentence.

The sea captain’s choice! or rather, I think, the sea captain’s choice of what not to eat since it looked like cat food. Why should I assume that somebody who works on a ship is an expert on fish as food? There isn’t a culinary standards component of the officer training, is there? I once knew a US Marine captain who told me he had to learn how to waltz to complete the certification, which DID strike me as somewhat out there, but his favorite food was gummy worms. However, a captain in the marines is a lower rank than captain in the navy, even though navies operate in marine environments, so maybe things get more specialized as you go up. Maybe to become an admiral you need to be able to knit your own socks.

on that topic (cats, not socks): are cats really PROUD that they defecate into a box in my house?

They would make much more money doing it in public places of business.
I remember when it was considered SHOCKING for the tv show south park to have a smiling, talking, singing, anthropomorphic lump of excrement, and now this is something you are allowed to display in a place that sells food.

That is just unsanitary. I saw them on adhesive bandages also. I cannot find the picture I took. Probably for the best. That seems like the opposite of what you want to do to disinfect a wound.

Where I really want to put that: my mouth.

how can you even tell when this is clean? When there are no worms crawling through it? The captain will be especially worried if they are gummy.


Made in china. this is taking jobs from American toilets. I call on consumers to stop buying Chinese sh|t.*

Wonderful now i feel ill. Why is there no smiling lump of dried vomit emoji? There is nothing so gross that you can’t put a a face on it and make it grosser. Or grocery, even.

*Astute readers will see that I did not actually put an i in that word and therefore have not officially “said” the word that it looks like. My friend and colleague ms-dos will attest that all i committed was a syntax error.

page 29 of this. i do not like to spend this much dialog on explaining things that i thought could be determined by paying attention, but since this concerns parts that happened much earlier in the “story” that i certainly did not write with this part in mind, it seems justified to a degree. Also I do not know when kumquat will be able to meet elpse again to potentially explain these things. Which means I also reserve the right for elpse to not be completely accurate in its assessment.

I like the color usage here. it does not look like it is from the same story as “page 1” of this “story” but that could be a good thing, apart from the hassle of making them consistent at a later point. The less obligation i feel to keep backgrounds consistent, or even draw them at all, the more pages I can make, and the less fight i will put up when i realize i have to scrap parts of them!

I wondered if I could work six unrelated sketchbook creatures into one coherent finishedish digital piece. I could not!

I did not attempt this previously since in most past years I used such large sketchbooks, 11×14 inches, that attempting to use EVERYTHING was infeasible and I did not attempt it. Now I use sad little ones and still barely have time enough to fill them, much less draw well in them.

here is the actual bad camera picture i used of the sketchbook page to draw over for the digital version. Notice first of all that the lighting on display is so bad that I cannot increase the contrast without whiting out the one on the upper right nor reduce the brightness without blacking out the lower left item. Even isolated without the other ones, I had to GUESS at the nature of my initial last-November intent with that one. In fact, months after taking this picture I had to dig out the pertinent book and find this page because I could not tell what that thing was supposed to be. And still afterward could not!
Even worse: I had to MIRROR one of the creatures! What scandal and horror. Consequently I like this better than most other drawings I put on the internet in the past year.

a july 17 update: it appears that this mallard matter will not reach its funding goal, which means something I thought was dumb will not go forward and be rewarded, for once, but I wish dumb stuff would be prevented on a grander scale; I would have traded letting this happen for ensuring the computer animated Lion King replacement celebrity voiceover remake film did not!

No.

I would not even pay $1.29 Canadian to relive duck hunt, and I have no particular fondness for ducks.

I had hoped it would be sufficient for me to say that much but I foolishly had to read the page and now must comment on that.

Modern televisions do not flash light in the way that is necessary for light gun games, such as duck hunt, to work properly. And people know that because they have tried to play Duck Hunt on modern tv screens. The solution proposed here is to buy a kit of things called “Modern Mallard” with which to make the game work on a modern television, at the price stated. No other things are included. This means you need to already have a working original Nintendo Entertainment System or the redesigned version from the mid 1990s, a working light gun for it, which were NEVER reissued, a real duck hunt cartridge, which admittedly were manufactured in great amounts, the desire to PLAY the duck hunt cartridge, the willingness to do technical manual labor on it, and 129 dollars with absolutely nothing better to spend it on. Such as apparently a device that puts BLACK LINES on your screen!

We get to pay 300 dollars to make our screen dimmer and blurrier! What a world we live in! back in the soviet union, the screen puts scanlines on YOU Since the original screens that old games played on had these lines, that means those lines are MEANT to be there! They weren’t just a side effect of outputting graphics at a lower resolution than screens could show which created an idiosyncratic appearance that was retroactively associated with video games, they were part of God’s Plan.

Also: you have space enough for all that stupid retro purist garbage that it has not gotten shoved around or stepped on at all in nearly 30 years but NOT a cathode ray television set even though those are physically sturdy and are perfectly capable of receiving modern television signals and people who never played video games in their lives owned them. I had a cathode ray television in my house until just yesterday and I fervently believe in console emulation. I have emulated video games off my hard drive without having to assemble and preserve clunky fragile obscure peripherals for eesh twenty years now and I had no idea I couldn’t play NES Duck Hunt because I never had any reason to care enough to try.

You could probably acquire an original duck hunt arcade cabinet for the same accumulated amount of hassle as getting and installing this product and you can actually shoot the jerk dog in that version, because you are just going to shoot every fictional animal you see. Either way you will probably realize after about 3 minutes what a boring game it is. But since the Modern Mallard system patches the light gun itself that should make it work on other gun games, right? No, it literally only works on Duck Hunt (AND apparently has a chance of STILL NOT WORKING if you have an orange gun like I did, and like THEY do judging by the header graphic, instead of a grey one which I have never even seen in person). The manufacturers do not rule out the idea of patching other games in the future but grips then suppose you want for some reason to play Gotcha! The Sport! instead of duck hunt, would you still have to buy the duck hunt version to get the gun alteration kit? Or if you wanted to play both, would you have to possibly buy two sets of the gun attachment since none of the game patches are sold separately?

Am I a jerk, making fun of a niche enterprise so soon after I expressed my own frustration with being niched? I do not think so; this is not somebody creating an original product, this is somebody trying to milk the supposed nostalgia of others to justify a hobby, and isn’t even going to make this thing for you, in the event you want it, unless nearly a thousand other people also do, so it isn’t like this is a work of passion. If you are the only person in the world who wants this, you can’t have it because the unpopular thing you like isn’t popular enough. And if there ARE others who would buy this but they don’t learn about this scheme fast enough, then they apparently don’t count even though the game is probably older than they are. Whoever runs the page claims in the comments section that a thousand units is the minimum amount at which this endeavor makes financial sense. Maybe they CAN be made individually but would cost even more than the already ludicrous sum pitched here, but then why put the one month time limit on it? You probably need a system of smoke signals to reach some of the people who still give a quack about playing Duck Hunt. This really can’t go very far before any attempt to explain an odd aspect of it seems even odder because this is not something that anybody remotely needs. I doubt the onceler could sell a thneed for $129.

I have been told by people off the internet who don’t realize that not only have I never had any clout online, I have less than I did ten years ago, that I “should” make a kickstarter page for my comic books. I don’t think I would do that. That means if I fail to generate an arbitrary amount of interest, I don’t get to make my comic book, like that’s the only reason I thought of making one. And then I would look like a bigger doofus than usual when it flops. There are apparently a decent amount of people willing to pay obscene money to buy and rebuy crummy old nintendo games but this one seems like it is overreaching.

Hey partners! A conglomeration of people trying to resell a ludicrous childlike urge to you. No they’re not crazy! They’re shrewd and calculating looking for a guaranteed financial profit off of someone else’s 30 year old bland game! There is probably more text on that kickstarter page than there are bytes of code in Duck Hunt. I prefer people admitting that they are calculating compared to the “welp i think i made a thing guys?” scumbags but in the end they are all charlatans.

I say all this as somebody who can’t tell a playstation 2 game from a playstation 4 game, or a $50 million dollar 1998 movie from a $200 million dollar 2018 movie. I think a lot of the “progress” in electronics is frivolous and potentially imaginary, just to keep people employed, and I think the mass commercial media’s co-opting of “social media” has homogenized a greater quantity of people into infantile dolts than ever before, but I don’t believe in hiding in a fake wood-paneled bunker and pretending it is still 1994 either. I think people will pay a lot of money to prove they are at an extreme edge of technological belongingness. Just playing old video games isn’t enough; you need to be willing to spend as much money going out of your way to make to make it totally authentic and de-enhanced as somebody at the other end gets talked into by Best Buy representatives to prove they are totally enhanced beyond human perceptibility. And then you have to up/downgrade everything else you use to be compatible with this fringe ability/inability. I was trying to figure out what software I used to record video a few years ago and came across

which can record at 144 frames per second. I didn’t even know you could put that many frames in a second, much less determine you have seen less than that to be willing to pay extra to ensure that it doesn’t happen again. And there is 4 scale high definition! Who is that for? Who has a screen so big that you could even tell the definition was that high? Alex Trebek?

I tried discussing this matter with somebody else recently and I think this created an unpleasant mental state

[1:50 AM] pookydooks: well then how about tht
[1:50 AM] frabaginarf: game recording software for gamers
[1:50 AM] pookydooks: I assume the U in UHD stands for ULTRA
[1:50 AM] pookydooks: I mean it pretty much has to
[1:51 AM] frabaginarf: i might have said it stood for unnecessary. or maybe “uhd” is just a noise i make when i hear about 4k video
[1:51 AM] pookydooks: it seems like the sort of thing that strains your eyes and gives you a headache after watching it for too long
[1:51 AM] pookydooks: 144, how overkill can you get
[1:51 AM] frabaginarf: that car is coming OUT of the screen! that would create a number of health risks
[1:52 AM] pookydooks: it’s a crummy TV that can’t even contain its images
[1:53 AM] pookydooks: you wouldn’t buy a fish tank that won’t hold water, wouldja
[1:53 AM] pookydooks: 144 FPS, that’s fish per second!
[1:54 AM] pookydooks: and that’s a lotta fish to be breaded and fried!
[1:54 AM] pookydooks: in oil heated to 4K degrees, naturally!
[1:55 AM] frabaginarf: this is more serious than i thought
[1:55 AM] pookydooks: Don’t forget to stream it in UHD! Wait I think we caught the fish in a stream! WOW
[1:56 AM] pookydooks: we’re steaming while we’re streaming before we even knew we were streaming, intense! awesome! tubular, dude!
[1:57 AM] pookydooks: I’m leaving before I find out what such a beastly boob tube costs! Cowabunga!

a video compilation of animated icons, mostly (but not entirely) commissions, that I spent entirely too much time on irrelevant aspects of. The music is an acquired taste that you will probably want to misplace.
I had to stop doing commissions entirely because THIS really is what I have to show for it! As I have become more obsessive compulsive I have run out of time to do anything else. The only real animation I have done in a year is that irrelevant bit at the end.

a strange comic strip

initially this was the sixth frame. it reminded me too much of “reaction memes.” That is a picture that somebody with no sense of humor posts in an effort to indicate the opposite. I like those people even less than furries, when they aren’t furries.

This one was funnier to me and more like something i would actually do when frustrated but i could not get it to work. then i went back to it and made it work, even though i had already posted the other version on some websites. But it still seemed like it went against my actual intent, which is to show confoundment rather than contempt. Then i looked up my scripts for the first, unproduced strip about a conversation between these two (in that one the non-pathetic character is based on multiple people) and realized it actually calls for an angry reaction so this might suit that better. Although I know from experience that trying to incorporate an old drawing into new material consistently takes longer than just making a new picture, the way I do things, and i already spend ages on that!

This just seemed rude! –It does not even say hello. Of course in reality it would type “howdy” which was no longer available– But also too mopey. The revised dialog is more truthful, probably, even though the end result is meaner. Hence the need to reduce the amount of unfocused spite in the last frame. Way too much thought and effort for something this dumb. I wondered why I would publicly post a strip implying that I don’t greet people and immediately complain about my life. I complain about my life because I don’t have anything else to talk to about with the people who ask me how I am doing and do not see any point to lying and claiming to be fine. If that was my only other option I would not respond at all, which is also rude. So I ought to put that in here. It seems unfair to the actual person this is, on this occasion, solely based on, who probably did have good intentions, and in fact was the sole person from the science fox crony cult to acknowledge me after I was edged out of that, But the net result of this and similar relationships was, by 2016, not positive. In fact ironically somewhat emblematic of the overall set of problems. Not exclusively of how people treated me, but also of how I clung by a thread to a system that didn’t work for me and kept pulling myself back into it, with ever diminishing returns because of course the former supporters I scared off through my increasingly regular outbursts of frustration were not coming back.

Viewers who commented still managed to misconstrue this comic strip as nothing beyond me complaining about pornographic fanart, like I think that demeans the characters. No I don’t care about fanart in GENERAL. If I was just going to list all the things I thought were gross and boring about furries I would have gotten much more specific than that and wouldn’t have wasted four frames before doing so. The POINT is that I resent having my material treated as if it is more maladjusted than a huge collection of odd behaviors just because there isn’t a community for mine. I suppose I could have gone totally abstract but again this is based on real conversations from years ago, exaggerated somewhat to seem outwardly as unpleasant as I mentally interpreted them. Don’t aspire to much since you’re unusual without being in a normalized unusual person club. Maybe we even addressed that I took issue with that, but the feeling of being annoyed at it lingered more prominently, in addition to some other typical exchanges which made this course of action seem more justifiable.

Ironically the person I am griping about in the comic here claimed to particularly enjoy this series and probably got the idea better than some others, but the comic’s goal if it has one is to help me out of this box and the whole furry mess is part of the box. Even though I have to explain what they mean afterward, it is a harder to miss prompt for the providing of explanations than just words without pictures.

I have regrettably much more text on this topic! And since I also have more comic strips on the topic that text may even be seen eventually!