page 28 of part 3 of this. More extreme expressions than usual here, a few of them justified. These imps think they are constantly in peril.

I feel like it is cheating to not draw dumb creatures in the windows but none of the windows here are visible enough for me to use window poses that I have not already used recently. “recently” in the sense of the last 15 pages, not necessarily the last three years of real time. I am reserving the right to show Squirb in full at another occasion and have it not be immediately apparent who that is, so showing just a scrap of it in the pertinent space here seemed undesirable, and i do not know what it looks like yet anyhow.

Two more 100×100 pixel animated icons, for Malkaiwot, showing Mallorie Koopa, who seems to be adept, possibly overconfident with unusually-sized carpentry tools. And also Goshi, who is purple. The official version that I post on other websites will have horizontal non-dithered background lines because they were requested when I showed this alternative but I am keeping the alternative for here in honor of I think I use those horizontal lines too often and also I uploaded it here before I asked Malkaiwot’s opinion on it. I tried vertical straight lines and they look awful.

These will be last such icons for a while, I think. The one on the right (or the one underneath depending on your view resolution) works better, even though i spent much less time on it. It works better probably BECAUSE I spent less time on it. I wish could say it was because I knew spending less time on these things was the secret to doing better with them but I am simply tired from not doing better!
Gosh there are five colors on the red side and only four on the blue side! Ordinarily such asymmetrical oversight would be unforgivable!
Elaborating on my reason for not accepting more general offers is not effective in my current state, so it might be better to wait until I am no longer thinking about it to think about it. I spend too long articulating depressing things about how I spent too long making dysfunctional things.

For the time being, it is better to get nowhere making a few big projects for myself than a load of small ones for other people that will not make a great difference in their lives.

an animated introduction sequence for www.twitter.com/alonzorion that hopefully is self-explanatory! It revealed to me that there are limits to what is reasonable to attempt to draw in the manner that I have been doing this, but it looks nice, I think, I believe. That was over a month ago! But it was not in fact done. I have to cancel doing these for a while. To give you a sense of why:

This is the next oldest version. There was three hours of fiddling between this and the one above. Can you see three hours of effort? No, nobody realizes how hard it is to make these so I cannot actually charge for the time they require. And if I did I would need to spend even longer on them to justify it to myself!
And… now that I see it here, I want to adjust the letters again to make the movement less jerky every tenth frame. But I won’t because they have been like that since I made them and was not asked to change their motion, though every requested change was related to them. I would estimate about 80% of the time spent on this was with the dumb letters. I did not charge for anything to do with the letters. because when this started, I didn’t know how I was going to handle the letters, declared it “experimental” and charged nothing for it. Likewise with the exit. Mr. Zorion had proposed just having the video fade out after the wave!
This isn’t even the worst example, but I mention it here because I like how this one turned out, overall. I have to expel the negativity in a positive context or else I risk transforming into a batman villain. And not a good one, one those thugs that appears without introduction on the first few pages for Batman to beat without any trouble just to establish how tough he is so it is more meaningful when he has difficulty fighting someone really scary like a guy who wears pajamas and tells riddles.

well since you mentioned it I went back and screwed with the letters some more anyway! They still look terrible but slightly less so than the last time I saw them. And now I am going to go and work on something for which I don’t have to worry about screwed up letters!

page 27 of part 3 of that, featuring a surprise guest: the rarely seen non-couch side of lope’s apartment’s non-kitchen zone.

one of an impressive variety of delays on the second comic book involved me abruptly feeling the need to reletter almost every dialog bauble in the 34 contained redrawn old pages (and two non-old pages) . I could not understand how prior to that point I thought any of it would be legible. I am reminded of that when I look at the NEW page I uploaded here last month compared to this one now, which is made to my new legibility standard-like-thing. Which consequently means I must reletter every dialog bauble I have ever put anywhere, including somehow the ones in the first book I have already printed and sold at least twelve copies of.

bow and arrogance
A rather large (230×230) pixel commission for Egger Righteous of a creature who believes that archery is not challenging enough.
(I also forgot to draw anything holding the quiver in place, don’t tell)

The last time I posted an unusual animated gif I made for somebody other than me, I mentioned that I appreciated the variety, ended up going on about how if I post too many drawings that are similar, people who are sexually aroused by it assume I also am and talk to me in an unpleasant manner and possibly send me pictures of themselves unprompted. I want to avoid doing that again because shortly afterward that specific person sent me MORE creepy pictures of himself or or somebody unprompted, and if I keep going I will actually show one and I don’t want to do that. It isn’t explicit but it is ugly and I do not want it on my page.

in fact I did not even want that person’s icon in my telegram lump so I added a bunch of fake drafts to other people I was NOT sending messages to just to scroll it out of view. I of course cannot remove the person completely since telegram deletes your message history if you remove contacts and I need evidence of the full story in case I am murdered and do not want to actually LOOK at that evidence for the purposes of making copies at this time.

I was having difficulty choosing a new solid state drive but I think all my problems are solved.


The mistake most manufacturers make is assuming i want to put the drive into my computer. They do not guess that I want to tape it over my eyes and punch the air with both hands at the same time like The Question.

If you are not familiar with The Question, the important things you need to know are

1: he ain’t got no face.

2) he is an expert at saving time.

3; he won’t give in to what is wrong and we refuse to stand up for what is right!

4, his best friend Prof is controlled by two puppeteers, one for his head and body and one for his hands, so he can perform coordinated actions, similar to Rowlf the dog.

this person is actually named “Tot” but I call him PROF because that is what his mug says and it appears like this is extremely important.

5? the answer is murder!

6! if he goes to Germany he HAS to dress like a nerd

Anything else?

I probably will not link to this post there!

the first version of this lame comic strip had chocolate, and a better explanation from the dog, since apparently nobody actually knows WHY grapes are poisonous to them. However, I thought my experience being annoyed and demoralized would seem fairly unimportant compared to the slave-like conditions in which chocolate beans are harvested by children in West Africa. Really, that is the reason I changed it! Not that I think anybody likely to see this would know or care that i was trivializing slavery, or that either way I am doing anything to improve that. But once that is in my mind, the whole thing seems meaningless. The primary thing in my life that is at all fulfilling is overeating, which frequently depends on my not thinking about how the exploitation of the world and its people is brazenly utilized by multinational corporations who operate in plain sight. And truthfully I can forget it pretty easily, but I made the connection when drawing the comic so it is fixed in place for me.

I keep seeing this at Stop & Shop and that is all I can think of. They aren’t just sweeping modern day inescapable servitude under the rug, they’re building a luxury hotel on top of the rug and pretending this is somehow pro-humanity and patriotic. Mars’ lawyers probably said “you can’t say made IN america but you can say made FOR america” and gosh that makes it seem like a selfless GIFT! And it IS patriotic in the sense that it puts casual thoughtless luxury of Americans ahead of basic humanity of anyone else. As they always have, but plainly crossing the line that even they have pledged never to cross. You might think one company could eliminate dubiously acquired beans from their supply chain and shame the others for not doing it, but if that actually happened they would all of course have to stop using slave beans, and none of them would benefit financially or publicly because they would also then be forced to acknowledge that they all have slavery in their past and present. What they presently do is put as many different companies and groups between bean harvesting and product selling as possible so it is very difficult to prove anything when somebody DOES speak up. When they do get called out on it, they make non-legally binding “pledge”s to stop using those beans approximately later, and by the time later comes they expect everybody with the power to influence their sales to have forgotten. Consider how long it took to get Bill Cosby in court, and he committed non-lethal crimes in this country against people who have access to means of expression.
It is not EASY to stop institutionalized, undocumented slavery, but obviously people making profits know it has been going ON for a very long time, and would never have made even the present vague show of trying to stop it had it not been publicized. They are morally comfortable with forced, unpaid child labor being step 1 in their product.

And it isn’t like chocolate is getting cheaper; the price goes up despite no sign that money is actually being invested in eliminating corruption. The people who gather the beans aren’t even allowed to EAT chocolate! They can’t even get ONE m&m while there isn’t a store in this country where there aren’t bags and bags and bags of the tiny little bastids. Because they are made for America! And I think trucker hats have finally supplanted cowboy hats as the worst hats. At least cowboy hats can look funny in the right context and provide adequate sun protection. Trucker hat just means “i am proud to pay extra to look ugly.” That’s the driving force between computer generated merchandising characters in general. They always look hideous and the fact that they are effective lets you, the company, know that the people buying your product have no ability or desire to scrutinize any aspect of it, much much less the incongruity between the frightfully specific list of ingredients legally required on the label and everybody involved claiming to not know where the actual chocolate comes from! We don’t know where it comes from but gosh it sure keeps coming at consistent, ever increasing levels and we own it. It must be magic! Magic for America!

At my one art show in 2017, I wanted to put out a bowl of wrapped candy for people to take (and they did), and somehow ended up at wal mart hastily trying to determine, on my terrible telephone computer, which major chocolate company used the “least” amount of slave labor. The simple fact is that if it is at walmart, it abuses enough people that it doesn’t matter that another company is more abusive. Even the dumb phone which I have also called terrible is an absurd convenience that we as society have been groomed to think is fundamental to our being, and contains components from rarely identified, exploited African sources. My device’s manufacturer, Motorola, is not implicated in that, but IS named as a company that benefits from dubious prison labor. And the computer I am typing this on now, who knows what is in it? I sure do not!

Anyway I bought kit-kats. You know, I didn’t get to eat any of this chocolate.

In other news, to start me back on the path to not thinking about where mass-produced cheap chocolate comes from, the dog is based off Scruffy, who used to live in my (and several other persons’) old house.

Seen here visiting my present house, before it was my house, and therefore much classier. Scruffy could in fact stand up and photographs exist proving that, but I sure could not find one.

On other websites and the side-bar here, at least until future entries scroll the text out of existence, I identify this comic strip with the title “the grapes of asp.” I initially titled it “the grapes of rasp,” not realizing that “rasp” was not actually a snake, but merely the name of a snake-headed rulon crony in Dinoriders, and also the name of a robot I and Jerry Caro came up with in first grade that we imagined traveled around stealing chocolate brownies while saying “RASP…RASP…RASP…” Rasp as in “I have you in my rasp” instead of grasp because kids are dumb. Then (now) I remembered that “asp” was a snake, and it seemed odd that asp and rasp would be near synonyms. This is a pointless bit of trivia. There is a more poignant bit of trivia about this comic page that also concerns chocolate, but it is depressing and I will defer it to a future posting, which means I will probably never post it, which theoretically suits me, who can only survive by not being aware of things I know that bother me.

A highly not-yet-finished picture called “hats coming to visit.” there is an accompanying music piece… or rather i made some stupid minimally remarkable music, absentmindedly named it that, and then constructed a picture of a literal interpretation of those words. It is easier to post unfinished drawings and not feel bound to them than it is with unfinished music. The only reason the music is unfinished is because that dumb comic book is also destroying what little life i have unfinished and if I turn on the music program that will be an all day matter, potentially. Which apparently I do not want to risk, when there are so many totally meaningless tasks I can be doing for other people that are not satisfying the slightest bit and will take many days or weeks to finish.
I have a heap of resentment for people that I don’t consider to be “real artists” who post loads of drawings with minimal thought, effort or restraint on to the internet. By perhaps not chance, several of them play musical instruments or engage in digital audio tomfoolery. Sometimes I wonder if I am a hypocrite, for being a visual artist and occasionally pretending to be a musician. But I’m not because I assure you I spend loads longer on my noises than they do on their scribbles. You can’t be a popular music artist just by having an ugly squirrel/raccoon/dog thing for a mascot.
No actually probably you can; if you buy the expensive version of fl studio there are enough default filters that sound exactly like trash off the radio with minimal user input that an actual squirrel could probably design a hit track but I am obviously not doing that because those are all marked “demo” (and rather difficult to purge from and wholly unwelcome in my USABLE instrument list) in my version so it isn’t the same.

I do not mind there being demo versions of fancy music effects; I object to them not being able to be removed from a version of the program that is NOT a demo.
Try to imagine a middle finger in my face that cannot be removed from the vicinity of my face, that I paid $160 for, dangling a sign that says “gimme another hundred!” If you successfully imagined that, you may have a future in software development.

This is also the one year anniversary of my father’s demise, and the ten month anniversary of my not finishing the second post I wrote about that. although that isn’t really significant for an unposted piece around here until it reaches the ten year mark. In any event I think he would be glad to know I am just as unaccomplished and unfocused in my pursuits and just as inclined to blame people who did not cause my problems as when he was alive, were he alive, because that would mean he proved the impermanence of death, a matter sought after and never attained through the entire known existence of humanity, if not all life as we understand it. Of course THEN I would be disappointing by comparison to THAT, but everybody else would be, also, and my shortcomings would be less acute.

Look, there! He is imploring us to look there at a windmill. How could he do that if he were dead? The crushed ant corpse that I evidently neglected to notice was stuck to the photograph until a year after scanning it, THAT is what a dead being looks like.