Some weeks ago, not long in the present, a person, known as Runde, who I happened to be in occasional contact with, suddenly proclaimed that he would accept artwork subject requests from ten people, no more, no less.

There’s a lot of request requesting in the field of deviant arts, but like any other noticeably non-journalistic task the journal construction tools are used for, usually peculiar demands are made in return which seek to have other people imitate the deed and more importantly bring glory to the person who ordered the imitations, and occasionally whoever first ordered it as well. I will probably explain this in detail some other time. I actually already did but it’s… painful. I am trying to separate my annoyance at the system in general from my lack of annoyance at a situation which came up once. That means I took out the bit about “stamps,” too. All the mood-swinging was disrupting my ear-fluid.

Runde, though, not only cast out the free request line, but decided to break the indirect validation chain by dropping any arbitrary complications as well, in a display of selflessness and humility I’d rarely manage, simply stating “I would like the practice.” I bean if it was me I’d be getting all up in them journals like “Behold, my might, fools! Look at what I am doing for you! Ten silly beasts for the price of none! You now bear the weight of my eternal curse until you pass it to ten others! Is that what it is worth to you?” Runde is not a wicked sorcerer in these matters. There still was one problem, however, also me.
The wicked thought came to me what an opportunity I had to get someone else to draw a nemitz without being expected to embarrass myself beyond my usual quota at a later date (as I am no good with public displays of anything). But why? I’ve drawn probably thousands of them already, typically to a standard I regard as adequate. Any significance to having one made by someone else is lost if I have to ask for it, right?

And yet…

And so, not incredibly long later,

I suppose it’s good to know that nemitz, at least, is better at making friends than I am. Also that it’s possible for the creature to be drawn with more reasonably-exposed eyes without looking creepy[er]. I have tried and failed, but this Runde person seems to have figured it out, and without any apparent hint of resentment, either.

If some weirdo (“some weirdo” referring to a person like myself, just not specifically me for the purposes of this hypothesis) I hardly, if at all, knew, responded to an offer I surely meant for someone else and said “eck! draw this thing you likely never wanted to be drawing and for free,” the chance is that I’d find some awkward way out of it or do it poorly or in such a way that it no longer fully resembled the thing. Yet that there is unmistakably the nemitz. Indeed, I suspect that a couple of the ten were only taken on begrudgingly, but I cannot tell which, looking at the results. That is good. If you want to have actual art-work, that’s pretty much all it is. Drawing things you hate but making it look like you don’t necessarily hate it, meanwhile wondering how The Wizard of Id could possibly have required the contributions of two people. By the basket, did you know both Parker and Hart have been dead for a year? I thought they had been murdered and secretly replaced by a jealous photocopier twenty years ago.

Rundeh is one of a small unaffiliated group of persons who for whatever reason found and left positive remarks regarding stupid junk I had made, with the effect of altering my perception of community art website users as terrible people terribly obsessed with terrible things. I still think a lot of them are, but I don’t see why you have to be so negative all the time. As you know, I only made a deviant-art page at all because some yahoo dared me.

This was a strange situation. The figures from the previous group, at least by their default arrangement on the gallery page, seem to have taken a distinct dislike to nemitz. I’m sure they have a perfectly good reason. I speculated that they may be gods, due to the immense size suggested by not fitting their entire selves on the page, and also the general influence of the devilish being lurking in the back. And… have you ever seen a happy god? They’re always mad at something. And in this case it’s nemitz. Maybe that book is the Necronomicon. I hear they plan to take revenge by dropping an empty coke bottle on nemitz.

Actually, it only appears this way if your screen resolution is above 1024×768, because a few months ago the deviant-art machine placed a big block stupid ad in the uppermost row of every gallery page belonging to someone not paying protection money. (Gods use big monitors)

Another thing I like about Ryundai is that he doesn’t waste paper. If it seems imprudent to cram mass amounts of crazy fools onto one page together he tends to occupy excess space with bizarre heirlogryphy symbols floating all over the place in such a way that they seem like they make sense there. He also has pretty handwriting. I won’t pretend I think he regards Free Sketches 4 to 7 as his best ever work just because nemitz is in it, I just thought it would function well as a selfish visual aid for me. I was really only here today to talk about that.

Yes, so… I just thought I’d mention that? I swear none of this is supposed to be an insult. I have often observed that the amount of insult I cause is inversely-proportional to the amount I intend to cause.

The internet has it in for me.

NEMITZ, popular with the robots, Redeeming Value | (4) comments | Squirmalink