march 31 supposedly was “trans day of visibility,” and as it usually goes I did not know there was one or that it was coming, and so was unprepared.
I also do not know if i properly qualify as “trans” but i absolutely have trans-like issues via preferring ambiguity, on account of not believing that i would be accepted as a full trans person, which a good many people and systems who don’t know me [and a few who sadly do believe that they know me would] still scorn me for, and i also hate to be seen, perhaps in large part due to those issues, so here comes this
on further reflection it isn’t all that different from this idea except i spent substantially less time drawing it and no longer share a bathroom with other people’s toothbrushes
Today’s might have communicated its message better if i showed the creature driving and going to a store to obtain the potion ingredients and emphasizing how it fares poorly when seen amidst doing that, but I have shown that before also! It didn’t communicate its point well but they never do. I would almost hate to break from tradition if I knew how.
march seems to be unofficial pathetic snake month. which counterintuitively means the creature must fare worse than usual since its existence is dependent on it having negative experiences
as usual, based on a few different people who remind me of each other. and as usual the snake is meant to be laughed at rather than with. I thought that was obvious, but I have very little grasp on what is obvious, “obviously”
another item based on my experience of not feeling like i belong anywhere. I shoddily added the first “frame” after the other two when i felt like, as usual, I was failing to put forth the intended point with the initial upload, but that the layout for a change allowed me a chance to also fail at rectifying.
the POINT: is my taste too old? No, because taste older than mine is still being imposed both by the same entities who did when i was a child and also by newer ones now younger than me, and sometimes even are paid to do it. Taste is subjective and can be neither “correct” nor “wrong.”
maybe THAT should be the comic strip, but that sort of thing is not funny to me! Stern didacticism pretending to be comics is something that I make more annoyed comics about that i have to over explain afterward.
as often happens, i am not entirely sure who i am angry at. actual personal acquaintances? contemporary media saturation? magazines publishing pompous lists to proclaim that human creativity peaked six decades ago? internet dorks my age or less? but complaining, even in a way that appeals to no one, theoretically helps me be less bothered, at least for a little while.
People used to say that “like a business line” before trump’s first presidency. Even though Trump’s businesses all failed and he didn’t pay employees, and only he himself profited since the APPEARANCE of success made it lucrative to license his own name to other businesses. I don’t know that anybody said that this time, but I also gave up on trying to find any nuance or value in the words of people who attempt to praise this guy.
The idea is less “everything was fine until last week!” than “the president didn’t decree that this was ideal and legally permissible until this week”
This won’t help me at all or change anything but it seems improper to post comic strips complaining about people who mean well when we have a new government that transparently does not mean well and is really just looking to hurt people. At least not without doing both. Big T has issued executive orders to do the stuff twitter addicts convinced themselves he was going to do back in 2017 and that I tried to assure them at that time T had no legal authority to do. Apparently he could have granted himself the authority all along. Maybe republicans weren’t sufficiently cronyized even by then to be presumed willing to let it happen. I certainly don’t have any reason to believe that Trump was NICER eight years ago. Maybe just less focused on who he wanted to hurt. Maybe just less worried that he will actually ever be punished for any malicious deeds he commits while president. He has become the cartoon figure
I would PREFER to make comic strips that have nothing to do with any of this since they tend to deal with topics no one else cares about or that or plenty dealt with by others who can reach their audiences better than i can and without needing hours or days to draw it, and surely I could be working on something with marginally more lasting value than this.
Initially the right side snake was the orange one that frequently appears in these pieces. Generally it to some degree represents me and i am not immediately at risk with any of trump’s first week policies, since my personal identity goal has always been neutral rather than trans genderm since i never expected to be accepted as fully transy, and i have never been targeted by nazis except on their own dumb nazi forum and by extreme lightweights when I posted protest comic strips like this one on art sites. And so i changed it to a different generic snake with colors similar to one of those trans flags but I never understand the whole deal with flags. I AM part of the freshly-reoppressed section of the population, i just mostly experience it internally, following non-aggressive acts, so far.
“radicactus” directly quotes “frumpald” on that old page from a comic strip i would better devote my energy toward, but i didn’t realize i had used “gollyo” there also. i wonder why i didn’t include “stringbeans” at that time, since i know i have put those two together, even if not in anything that got to the internet. there used to be a terrible commercial for a product called “polly-o string cheese” which i always thought was an extremely stupid yet memorable name. It also supposedly still exists, and the pollyo company is even rather large, but I have certainly not noticed it in a long time. It originally was “Pollio” but unlike Chef Boiardi, whose name was dumbed down to appeal to the lowest rung of consumers, Polly-o just wanted to distances itself from Polio. They never changed back which is good because we now have a Department of Health leader who may well preside over the resurgence of polio through canonizing rubbish paranoia about vaccines.
arrrgh i want to eat pizza
to follow up on my very timely critique of Phil Collins’ Sussudio a few weeks ago, today at the same supermarket I heard what turned out to be “Abacab” by Genesis four years before Sussudio, and while it could certainly be a better song it sounded less hollow than Sussudio and I was intrigued enough to try and find out its name later despite never turning off my headphones while I was amidst it.
Generally I like Collins in Genesis better than Collins with his own band but they definitely have a few mopester songs that I can’t stand.
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There was a time when this was said to me regularly! Though not recently;
the script for this is old enough that the snake had ears and I stopped drawing it with ears rather a while ago. Unfortunately it still somehow knows what I am up to.
also I at last have uploaded and placed the remaining pathetic snake-and-miscellaneous-topic comic strips on the website section which i set aside for that some time ago. the layout is still horrible but i like to fantasize that i will fix that. maybe at the same time that i replace the twitter link icon with a bluesky link icon. the important thing is that I do incredibly unimportant things
as usual I must warn you that clicking on this will lead to a bigger version on which the text may be legible.
back in august I mentioned a “documentation/abuse forum.” some time after that I posted a comic strip without an explanation. It was MOSTLY inspired by the same thing as this one, then I built the rest around my frustration with that. I wanted to stop thinking about it but I still did and then this one came about, which is more direct, though still possibly hard to understand. I cannot explain it concisely, either. Even trying to explain why I can’t explain it concisely isn’t concise, so maybe I will try again later. Or ideally I will forget about it this time.
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october 28 2024 addendumb: It has come to my attention that the person this was mostly about was banned from that forum over attempts to photographically prove its own biological womanhood to other users several days after I posted this, but presumably utterly unrelated to my having posted it since no one legitimately perceived me a target who deserved to be stalked at length, just abused for a few moments and tossed away. But for all the ungrounded garbage written about me, I was never actually kicked out of that septic tank! I could still go back if I wanted to! But why? They ban the people who most fully embody their own spirit of hateful pettiness. Who can you trust if not the ones as evil as you are? Not only is it a nest of voyeurs and vipers, the vipers are cannibals.
I prefer to leave the fake title lines on their own but guess what, snakes! that’s a dumb place to look for spaghetti!
but here is another one of those annoying snake comic strips that you have to click on to make legible and that have nothing to do with the better comic strip that I have not worked on since June
I have noticed that when somebody wants to buy a drawing, they do it. When they ask IF i sell drawings, they never buy, and it is never people I hear from ordinarily, who are actually looking at the art I am posting, because the ones who ask this aren’t actually following the art. If they were paying attention they would have also already have seen the hundreds of links I place leading to my commission information. They don’t want what I am offering, and I am unclear why they ask. I cannot prove but I believe there is a perception that I will be so overjoyed just to have this notion brought up, that I will do whatever nonsense they ask and cheap. When my basic information makes clear that I will not, the instigators disappear. Back when I let other people make the rules, it never got me anywhere. And I am still nowhere but it is a less uncomfortable nowhere.
I recall February 2012 (or rather I repaste text from my previous 2023 recollection of this story, several details of which I had already forgotten since then), when I was waiting for a bus, drawing in a sketchbook, and a man saw me, offered to pay me $10 or $15 to draw him and his wife on a large sheet of paper. I had to +friend him in facebook to get references, which seemed odd. The job was not quite my forte but bearable. However, then I had to walk across VERY windy New Haven without the thing getting damaged to meet the guy in at least two other spots whose locations he gave me, poorly, over the phone while I was walking. He had expected me to also give him some sort of bag to carry the thing in, which he only told me at the end. Then he tried to just pay me $10. He stated “I said I’d pay you $10 OR $15.” I protested and got the 15. But it was so windy, midway through my 20ish minute return walk home I lost a glove while blowing my nose, and the pair probably cost $30.
Later on the fellow sent a text message telling of the “brownie points” he received for his gift. Neither of us heard from the other again. I still have the remaining glove, though. I think I also have voicemail messages from the person amidst the task but they are probably unremarkable. And I only re-remembered that after I already made the comic strip but cheaters, short-changers scumbags, they don’t change much, so it is better to refer to ones who are less likely to see these things and think “is that about me?” Because my issue is with the people only pretending to pay attention in order to enrich themselves.
perfect example: this dork who has some automated function “favorite” any picture I upload a few a minutes after it goes up even though he doesn’t actually browse the site. And I know he doesn’t because I sent a direct message a week ago asking if he does this, and he hasn’t seen this message yet but still somehow “favorite”d THIS comic strip inspired by people like him that I uploaded today. In fact I postponed putting it here because I thought of this dork and wanted to see if he would do it again. And he did because he doesn’t care that he cheats. People like this think they are entitled to give fake support to try and trick others into giving them real support. No advantage is too small, no cheat is too petty. They “fake it ’til [they] make it” and then continue faking it because their entire psychology is fake, just like everyone they idolize is a wealthy, soulless cheater, which is why people like trump are viable presidential candidates, and we get low quality alternatives. Or just a few people on stupid art sites are lazy boneheads.
you will definitely have to click this for the larger version if you want to read it, so please avoid doing that.
I am being informed now that the snake is fine.
You know the old saying, sticks and stones may break my bones but words will make me dwell at length and periodically explode comically, but I worry this might still worry my mother if she saw it.
I had hoped in september to get back to more productive projects but this one keeps coming back
busy week, almost forgot
i hear “go to disney” said casually regularly and it bothers me, much the same way as “google it” does. I don’t like brands replacing bits of language, even if in this case the brand has merely replaced a reference to its own branded attraction. it still means language got stupider through the actions of boring complacent people.
whenever I see or hear the phrase something about it seems nefarious, possibly due to early life exposure to the terrible but ubiquitous 198x “Ghostbusters” video game that commanded players “GO TO ZUUL” at some point, the whole while various ghosts have also been going to zuul and presumably strengthening it. I never actually knew how to play it or if not going to zuul in a timely fashion made a difference but I remember being worried about it when watching other people play it.
more of this is absolutely what everybody wanted.
it is not a complete waste since the seeing what complainers fixate on can help me to know what I am unclear about and what they absolutely will never accept any level of clarity on. Which still accomplishes nothing long term but it momentarily satisfies my curiosity, potentially. So it is probably only about 85% waste.
speaking of cults,
Why? Tom Cruise isn’t French and he definitely isn’t an olympic competitor. He is an actor who pretends to do amazing things but in actuality is the top spokesman for a billionaire cult that actively harms its own members and tries to destroy former ones who speak about it. I realize that describes all billionaire cults but the important thing is that Mr. Cruise represents one, not which,
one of the recurring complaints that I received about this was that the ridiculous things I made the character say were TOO ridiculous, since nobody actually said them and thus the argument is invalid. Consequently I produced an an alternate version.
Surprisingly this did not change anyone’s mind. I guarantee you any public figure consistently photographed wearing a cowboy hat believes one or all of these, and Trump himself either does also or doesn’t care if he enables and empowers someone who does.
the second could be better, but it was foremost a work of spite and that was supposed to be obvious from the low effort level, though still substantially more effort than the meme gifs with which people who had nothing to say tried to argue against it. The third frame refers to a number of killings that were justified after the fact by claiming that the people shot had mental illness, were on drugs or were criminals and thus are better off dead, the best known of which is the Kyle Rittenhouse matter. But I actually forgive him because he was 17 years old at the time and was plainly trusting in very bad people. He shot one person who attacked him BECAUSE HE HAD A GUN. After that occurred, two more attacked him, one with a skateboard, and they also got shot to death. The third had his own smaller gun, which also had no business being there. Was HE planning to shoot someone BEFORE he saw someone with a bigger gun? Impossible to know. So it is a complicated issue, but the PERCEPTION of this is that Kyle bravely fought for freedom and gunned down a mob of pedophiles, which isn’t what happened and isn’t what ever will happen outside of Deadpool 2 (which I didn’t particularly enjoy but that is unrelated), and they let their belief in this absurdity flavor their view of the world, which doesn’t help ANYONE. Leftists (as I have been called for posting comic strips like this) don’t help by presenting the House of the Ritten as a deliberately acting white supremacist T800 either, but as unfortunate as that is it stops short of endorsing more gun violence.
stupid arguments led to the creation of a THIRD strip but since it actually has new drawings I should probably try and pass that off as next week’s update instead of forcing it into this one. I am also tired after foolishly responding to no less than thirteen comments from the same guy who seems to have only seen that troublesome third frame, even after I discovered that he spent several WEEKS, maybe years, arguing that She-Ra looked too much like a man in some dumb cartoon.
The people who want to argue with me about this literally having nothing better to do or aspire to do. I ought to at least act like I do.
you will absolutely need to click through to the larger version to have any hope of reading the text on this
this is not remotely finished but I am uncertain of the internet situation at the place(s) where vestigial family obligations intend to hold me hostage for the next ten days and I thought this was important. I will replace this with a more legible version if opportunity thinks that is necessary. in reality I and the shirtler did not speak, i never found out what it said and I am not actually a snake. however I was able to find the full text from 500 different vendors, which states “If you don’t like Trump then you probably will not like me either, and i am okay with that,” which I think encapsulates the nihilistic spite of the american spirit appropriately for independunce day. the land where so many are ready to pay for the right to tell strangers “i want you, whom i haven’t even met and may not meet and in fact cannot confirm exist, to NOT like me” that there is a wide-ranging market specifically for it. Alas I could not find the specific variant of ugly corona beer velcro sandals, so perhaps I was looking at vintage collector’s items, the mark of a true enthusiasthole.
no i do not reckon i am getting much work done at this 19th century fischer priƒe pretend desk. I should think it nice to have something resembling a desk at all, a rarity on these trips, but since there is just one bathroom for all four people and it connects to this room this is unlikely to be an efficient room even with a work surface not made for and by elves. the chair TOUCHES the desk.
a recurring and stupid problem.
this is not the new comic strip page that I threatened last time! That is complicated. It will be better than this. Still probably underwhelming. But building it is complicated.