A few intervals ago I mentioned Al Terzi, and how I had no real memory of him post-1989. After typing his name into the Internet, I discovered that he scares me now.
in part, no doubt due to resembling the ghastly photograph-print on the old Lipton tea box, which scared me then. That scared me partially because of the dual tone, high contrast yet faded greys used, Terzi does not look like this, but he reminds me of other aspects of the lipton picture that didn’t necessarily scare me, so he is scary by association.

Though I implicated the colors, the angle, facial expression and hat are nonetheless alarming.
Once I found out where these were in a store, I couldn’t go near them. i would see the red and yellow from a distance and not go down the aisle. (this was at the time also a good way of avoiding a match with Hulk Hogan)

Well gee it’s trimmed down quite a bit since I knew it.
I used to love the lipton iced tea, but when I learned to identify logos and discovered this was the same as the scary guy company, I stopped drinking it immediately, and continued not drinking it long after Lipton had ceased to appear on his own packaging.
By now they’ve replaced the delightful plain white cans with some less forgivably gaudy rubbish (but at no point Lipton himself, mercifully), and I can’t find it in cans anymore anyhow, so I can never return to it and express my true feelings. Tragic.
And I distinctly recall some advertisement about the late 1980s in which a chorus gleefully sang the word “decaffienated!” while a camera momentarily fixated on a closeup of the troublesome box. I didn’t know what decaffeinated meant but I assumed it had something to do with my downfall. Thankfully “The Lipton Tea Man,” as one website I could find evidence of this labeling on refers to him (for he is fond of drinking the lipton tea tea), is based on a real person, of whom other photographs can be found which render him less inflexible, 2-dimensional and inhuman, and thus the one scary version of less permanent and menacing.

He is no less dangerous, but now lacks the psychological advantage.



Which is more than I can say for the yet unidentified, disembodied, disemHEADed phantom of the opera face fragment on the Taster’s Choice label from the same period. This was replaced by a full head at some point, and the model himself posed near to it after he successfully sued Nestle for using it (and before Nestle successfully appealed the verdict) without telling him or paying him, but I can’t find any conclusive proof that these were the same person.

We know he is the fellow on the left container, there identified as The Taster, (Nestle’s counter-argument claimed that he chose to not be paid) which shows a full head. However, the photographs were taken in 1986; the partial head was in use before then! I expect Nestle used this new guy because it was no longer on speaking terms with the fragment, which was upset more than likely over breach of anatomical context. Worse, behind the packages on the left we have introduced a NEW head fragment; attorney Eric Stokel doesn’t even have a mouth. Might I ever find peace through full accumulation of pieces?

But anway, back to my point: looking like Lipton is bad news.

I don’t even remember what this guy did (though Wikipedia informs me he used state helicopters to get to church) but he really doesn’t have to do anything.

The virility of this family is worrisome. Rather an elaborate scheme to keep us from realizing that they lost the secret ancestral recipe for spelling wharf properly.

It is far more than a mere arbitrary childhud fixation of mine. Somebody meant for me to be afraid…

See here: I have now evidence that Lipton is secretly a robot. And what are robots’ natural foes in the wild? Correct. Skeletons.

And so it is portentous that they have teamed on this occasion. But what’s so scary about this skeleton? Nothing, really; this one has been injured and its Lipton cloaking drive damaged.

But when first it met Kuros, folklore’s bravest destitute vagrant, the skeleton was very tiny indeed. The smallest form is most alarming, because it looks like it is wearing a Lipton hat. Luckily pausing covers up the sprites so I never, as a child, until now noticed that the bones which are being thrown (naturally) resemble elongated backward ‘S’es. I wouldn’t have gone into stores at all if I knew there were little Liptons hopping all over the place tossing pieces of the alphabet at their detractors.

As the skeleton eats more of Kuros’ magical meatballs, the valuable protein causes it to grow and be less frightening. For with maturity (observe that the skeleton has acquired the wisdom to use an axe to cut the meatballs into reasonable bite-sized portions), the skeleton realizes it doesn’t have to look like Sir Thomas Lipton and scare people to get attention, but like most profound revelations it came too late and Kuros murdered the poor undead mariner anyway so that he could

steal the treasure and finally reassemble the fearsome Energy Zone robot,

who promptly resumed terrorizing the good shirtless citizens with its insistence on jumping for no reason. I told you Kuros was a bum.

For the purpose of disclosure I should admit that of course the magic wand meatball picture was a fabrication; real warriors always bring the boots to this level.

Let us see about Friday the 28. I have a wonderfully stupid reason for not doing it Thursday.

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October 25:
I haven’t been too busy to make a content upgrade. In anticipation of future busy-ness, however, and mindful of daylight saving’s time’s tendency to cause confusion I set my clock ahead one week last week.

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This should be called “Two Generic Humans and a Marionette I Don’t Recognize in Front of The Muppets.” It actually looks like they are deliberately working to keep muppets from being seen. I think it is important to distinguish “The Muppets” and just “Some Muppets.”
I will be the first, only person to bring up my classic livejournal interest, “People who resemble muppets” (somewhere between “people worse than me” and “old fashioned bingo apparatuses”), but at the time I had not considered the possibility that muppets might be deliberately designed to have people who would not otherwise resemble muppets resemble them.

I doubt this would be the worst thing to ever be done with muppets; rather I reckon nobody in charge has much cared for a while.

Likewise, I doubt this is the worst thing to have ever been done with diapers. I don’t think the worst thing to be done with diapers that I know about is the worst thing.

Yes those’d be the ones.

And this isn’t even the worst thing I know about with both “diaper” and “bros” in its file name.
However it’s the worst one I’m posting today. Good night. If’n that’s possible when I end on a line like that.

life on the street, popular with the robots | How to lose a guy in (4) days | !

A somewhat more awkward lope than usual is distracted and nearly misses an important incoming transmission.

It is awkward because the base sketch did not include the hat or the other accouterments and evidently those need to be considered from the start to prevent them from getting unruly.

I cannot justify the existence of this work, and so it fits right in. The actual object, border included, seems to be round-about 6 square inches, so it is mercifully easy to hide.

^{(strike it and it gets bigger. You must establish your dominance to to earn its respect.)}
I like hats and rock formations.
Most of these are appropriate reactions.

I would like to tell you I have been too busy to complete any substantial written thing, so you may imagine I have just done that.

page 46 of whatever this is.

I used to kill minor characters constantly in my oldest comics, and continued bestowing maladies-apparently-exceeding-injury to sketchbook dwellers, even ones which returned to live again afterward, but at some point I started finding it more depressing than funny. This has not changed.

I tried to keep the ink layer separate from the color layer, because this would allow me to preserve the full alpha qualities of the lines, rather than reducing them to flat black and white. Not only did this not look better, it in fact looks worse, because correcting errors is more of a hassle so I’m less inclined to bother, and what I did do took four times longer than usual, in part due to the various scan blemishes also retaining full fidelity, which I meant I had to constantly be removing them. Ordinarily, all the murky greys turn white and cease to be a factor. But now…

GRIIIIIIIIIME! Hours and hours removing grime! My compulsions are too powerful to allow me to not remove grime. The worse is when it’s on highlights or in the center of the letter O. The shiny part of an object should not have grime on it! Must scrub. This grime I cannot handle.

No! Even this picture of someone scrubbing has grime on it! It’s nothing more than a common griminal! It’s not even a special griminal! It’s the same old grime every time!

I’ve been seeking out grime for so long that now I’m seeing it in places where it does not exist! Single layer, flat-color images that I know factually that I never scanned off of grimy paper through a grimy scanner. My monitor itself is afflicted and now I will always notice it. Or perhaps my own EYES are covered with a wet, slimy substance! ARHHGJKHGJ GET it offffffffffffenbach