I planned to make this with oil paint two years ago. I think if I had tried I only would have finished it now anyway, though the nature of paint mixing (especially with the way I apply it) may have resulted in better color cohesion. But I would like to figure out how to have that come along more naturally without mixing, because I do not enjoy using actual paint a whole lot.

I feel like this picture is on the verge of working, and you may have observed that I have posted other pictures on the same verge. I still have hope this will be the year I murder the verge.

More recently I had this waiting for two weeks since I was not sure what to do with the “pathway” in the foreground. I added that [today] and now I like the rest of the picture less. That is an improvement, though, since usually I like the last thing I did least.

Having all my big stupid pictures hosted locally now makes it a slightly more logical and justifiable process to make “normal” website updates of them. That text is cloned, however; the gallery entry can say something totally different. There is probably a way to make that specific data show up here, but I do not know how to do that, and it probably looks less unprofessional if I keep this sort of inconsequential rambling out of the official matters that we might presume people will see someday. Not today, though, hopefully. Probably not tomorrow, either. I have the patience for CSS editing approximately once a year and evidently it was last week.

An older picture I recently altered to make prints of for a pumpkin-themed event

See if you can guess which table is mine
(hint: it is the one with the lamest merchandise that the least number of people are looking it)
I sold nothing, but I sold nothing at higher prices than I had ever sold nothing at before. Partially at the urging of the venue owner, and partially because for all my stabs at integrity it means nothing once I can blame something that feels like a lapse on someone else. It also means I now must keep that price consistent or else the people I showed the high price to will get angry when they see something less than that. Or they would if any had paid it.

Anyway, in addition to some free iced tea they were nice enough to let me have the featured artist space for January, (though the decision came prior to my recent performance) and I will have pictures on walls inside the restaurant, which will not have interaction with me as a condition to owning one. The scenario also is feasible that somebody may buy a picture just to get it OFF the wall so that food may be consumed more peacefully. I am intrigued to discover how I will mess this up.

This was an improvement on my last event, where there were mystery boxes dumped directly in front of my table which visitors used for sitting on while facing away from me and eventually for standing facing toward when all the boxes were taken. I would rather fail because of what I did than have nobody know I did anything. When that happens my goal becomes to make people know what I did, and I might not consider that I did something pathetic. After this week I feel like I have taken another step toward my ultimate goal of giving up. After all these months of distractions and setbacks it is nice to be making progress again.

Additionally, you may have become aware of the three for the moment unsightly link “buttons” now at the top of the main bimshwel page. If you had not then now you have, in a sense. One attempts to connect to whatever this is.
In the past i have given out “business” cards to people at events like these, but nothing ever comes of it because if anyone entered the website URL mentioned on the card, instead of art details they would see instead endless rambling about supermarkets and dumb things people do on the internet (such as write about it). Now they can find pictures, if they wait a few seconds for those awful “buttons” to load, and then they can see the pictures and think “yep, that’s the stuff I didn’t buy prints of today sold by that awkward weirdo who kept saying ‘hello’ out of forced habit but had no natural social inclinations beyond that. Gosh that was upsetting. Why did I take this card?”

I intend to make the awful buttons less awful, but I also intend to go running once in a while and eat pizza less often.
Ideally, the gallery’s rather default-looking setup is only temporary. Even so, it is rather nice for something free, I think. And unlike other free galleries, when something does not work it is not done deliberately as a ruse to try and sell me non-free version. It might be unethical for me to use something free as a means to make a profit, but I have not actually considered any way to use this for that purpose. I imagine I could send art-work through the mail. My imagination usually gets me into trouble.

Here is what my ridiculous imps would look like if I had business sense. More gimmicky, impossible to tell who drew them, and seemingly ripped off of other commercial properties. Is this an official spinoff of trolls or little ponies or care bears or an unrelated venture trying to chase the same buckwagon? People only relate to things that I do not relate to. They want to buy things that remind them of other things they have been ordered to buy. I would never buy one, and thus I am ill-equipped to make something that a buyer of these would buy.

Of course this display was gone the next time I came into the store and I have never encountered the name “zelfs” since nor had I prior to then (and I must be clear that I do not desire to), but that can also be desirable. If your soulless, derivative, cynical grab at money fails, you want everyone to have forgotten it by the time you make your next attempt at reminding people of stuff that worked. You might notice that is the opposite of my personal feeling, where I prefer to be remembered and to not remind anyone of anyone else. If I saw something that reminded me of me and it made money I would get mad, because then I would need to change me to seem like I wasn’t copying me.

It is common, on the art websites I use, for a participant to become infuriated at “art theft,” in which somebody tries to sell another person’s pictures and collect money for it. I don’t even matter enough for anyone to bother. I would probably doubt that if I heard it happened. If it was TRUE and it worked I would consider trying to take the perpetrator on as a business partner (an unbiased observer might advise that person to turn me down). The closest I came to “art theft” was when I taped a huge pencil drawing to a wall beside a door at the university while I went to retrieve some other things, and it fell off, and somebody picked it up and walked off with it because it looked like abandoned garbage rather than a legitimate finished project that the artist was trying to take home. When the person was persuaded by police intervention to give it back I almost felt bad. I felt like I had ruined several people’s days (not including mine). I wanted to thank the unidentified taker for wanting it. The party which I retrieved it from offered no comment on the quality. I might have let the person keep it but I had not scanned it yet and I needed to bring it back at the end of the semester for a grade anyhow (rubbish generally gets a better grade than nothing at all). Currently it is on a shelf smaller than itself behind me with other things stacked on it and probably no longer in displayable or theftworthy condition.

You might have noticed some strange rubbish going on above here. Somehow merely explaining that proved too great a task for me to do in a week-end, so I will try again on Monday.

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page 18 of this.

Ah-ha I see. I don’t just draw over the pictures from before because if I put them in different places or change the dialog, things are not guaranteed to fit properly. Also, in those mold days, when the lizard creature wore a coat, I drew the coat first without planning a body beneath it, and this lead to implausible proportions, sometimes almost monstrous when I didn’t draw the feet. Adding feet made the creature inexplicably small. Neither form consistently had legs. Clothing that forms its own body can be used to good effect, but I was not doing that. The stupid car was worse, and is still awful. It will always be awful. You could even make the case that it looks worse than it formerly did. I like the colors, at the least.

By this point I have removed most of the dialogue that I thought was awkward and the “story” fragments that did not make sense. Now the task is to find a place where this can link with the existing pages, though some of them need to be enlarged or have their text made more readable. But at least nobody is going to abruptly give up because the pictures were grainy uncolored pencil drawings (after one more of these). Though someone willing to put up with that because they found the material engaging in some way despite being ugly is probably someone I should be glad to have around.

I hope i am not expanding Treco’s part too much and wasting responses and actions that would be better used for subsequent “encounters.” There is probably a limited amount of things that arms stuck to a chair can do and still seem interesting.
I have become aware that the last row’s lines are less conspicuous than on the rows before it. There is a perfectly good explanation for that.

page 17 of this. This will be known far and why as the only comic strip drawn entirely in microsoft bob.

I keep forgetting that I can simply draw over the pictures from before and use most of the same dialog. I don’t need to redraw and rewrite everything.

when I went to redraw this one, I eventually remembered that the additional device enters a code to start the car. Since the car has already been started it is unnecessary. But I liked the visual clutter, and perhaps I should have drawn it anyway and not thought what it was doing.
I had the car start earlier so that I could show it entering the detour, because otherwise it does not need to go anywhere. Me from 12/8 years ago is a very strange writing partner.

I tried using my quacom tablet to redraw my layout rather than the “usual” way, which is to use the mouse for that. Since I did this in an attempt to be faster, you can be certain that it took longer.

When I reviewed these, I discovered that I formerly drew the lizard’s nose as less bulbous and schnozly, and eyes in general as smaller and less focused toward the center, as I was in a phase when I thought I should make things harder for me. I like the look which resulted, even if it does not suit the awkward personality. I don’t know why this solution did not occur to me sooner. It might not make sense that clothing could alter a being’s physical structure, but many things do not. This did occur in 1994’s The Shadow but I just presumed it was really bad editing around stunt scenes. That’s the way we do it in America; everything’s fake.

HEY. That’s the U S of A you’re talkin’ about, pal.

At one point I had intended to have the lizard, whose original font was the redundantly named Pixiefont, speak in a coincidentally similar but slightly creepier-looking font called Gorey while wearing the hat, but I stopped using fonts between it jumping out a window and the next time it spoke, so that did not occur. And maybe it is best to keep visual signals to a minimum, so the viewer would have to decide how much influence the questionable head-adornment is giving at any point. However, for now it is supposed to be obvious.

I will answer the writer Mark Joseph Stern’s question with a parable.
At least once all up in a time, the Slate magazine website posted a substanceless, speculation-filled article with a loaded headline in an attempt to build controversy, make a few dumb people think they are smart, a few other dumb people really angry and overall waste everybody’s time. I decided it was silly. The end [7 paragraphs later].

No, gay people are not smarter than straight people, and straight people are not smarter than gay people, and anybody who gives in to this sort of thinking, wondering if one should win or one can win is an idiot, gay or otherwise.

The full, post-lure title includes “or do they just work harder?” but that is even worse, in a sense, because it implies one of those options MUST be true.

Is it not enough to have “men vs women” a core component of pointless, unwinnable, non-debate? Why can’t we treat this like racial questions? This same writer would be asking “are asians smarter than whites?” if that wasn’t likely to get him fired, and if it wasn’t it wouldn’t be a new question. So why doesn’t this get anyone fired? We know people are different. Generalizing about intelligence never gets us anywhere. Most people consider intelligence a fundamental aspect of their being. Attempting to rank huge segments of the population by this basic yet hard to quantify attribute has never been good for humanity and isn’t likely to start.

There are not but two sides to the world. straight v bent is like democrats v republicans. It divides people needlessly while also insisting that it is sufficient to pick one imperfect thing over one other imperfect thing and that this is in everybody’s best interest. It encourages us to argue passionately about GARBAGE. Look even I am doing it.
complacency about one’s intelligence is one of the dumbest behaviors I encounter, and it’s about even between gay and straight people. An article like this will only increase that behavior in either of them.

It may be possible for “straight” types to go longer in life without having their fundamental beliefs or feelings questioned, which may make them more inclined to be stubborn on everything and never consider other possibilities. Increasingly, however, gay people are taught to believe there is nothing out of the ordinary about their preference (thus holding up the concept that ordinary is something to strive for) and they are RIGHT and should be PROUD and so become inclined to be just as insufferably set in their ways, and just as inclined to track down rubbish like this article to use as “proof” of their own superiority as the opposing side, which ideally wouldn’t be opposing them at all.
And anyway there are other ways to be misunderstood or disliked than what sort of person you make sex on. I don’t do it to anybody and that’s not the biggest thing that keeps me from relating to them.

People are bullied and tortured for being or seeming homosexual. I am not saying that is good. I just think pride is excessive. Criticism is not persecution.
On a similar note, my previous blowing up about Nazi symbolism should not imply I am one of those ultimate “friend of Israel” types. We shouldn’t be afraid to point out when the Israeli government does something cruel or foolish. It DOES and it gets away with that because it is proud and can easily equate criticism with persecution.

Mr. Joseph Stern determined who was smartest by what category of people were getting genius grants. This one time, even though gay people have existed for longer than a year. I saw a few years ago another article about the smartest cities in the country and determined the winner by counting libraries and museums. You can’t determine overall intelligence quantity by such limited categories. I question if we really can at all.

A direct quote from today’s article:
“Gays are wealthier and better educated than most Americans; shouldn’t that indicate that they’re also smarter?”

It shouldn’t! That is centuries, millenia-old self-justifying nobility dogma whose only result is that they vote themselves higher salaries and lower taxes. That’s how we get manifest destiny and slavery and all that manner of horror. The fact that more multimillionaires are openly gay than previously doesn’t make them all grand and noble now. I realize this as slippery a slope argument as “what’s next? letting people marry animals?” but this has historical precedent. I do not think slavery of non-gays is likely or feasible, but it starts like this. When you declare one group less smart than another group you declare them less worthy of decency.
I denigrate intelligence too often, but I avoid declaring a “smarter” group. I also avoid putting faith in group that has proclaimed itself worthy to declare a smart group. The sad fact is that a declaration of superior intelligence often arises over evaluation of a subjective matter, often in artistic fields. I don’t believe any of us is smart enough to know who is really smartest, and we only hurt ourselves as a species when we convince ourselves that we are.

I do not say “nobody is smart.” I say trying to label everyone accomplishes nothing good, and I have said it for years. If I do it, it is for amusement purposes and should not be mistaken for serious journalism, and I will never pretend I know who is the most superior.

This reminds me that deviantart, the ostensibly free visual art website, recently fulfilled my prophecy and gave paying members huge stars next to their names. Fortunately, and for the first time of those when I paid attention, more people are protesting the garbage change than supporting it, but not without some priveleged bootstrap class elitism slipping in.

Criticism isn’t just persecution, it’s an act of treason. Observe how it doesn’t matter if these two are homosexual.

And without switching websites:

I won’t point fingers but I have a theory that one of these openly male artists is gay and the other one isn’t, but I think they actually have a lot in common. They both blame someone else, for one thing.

Back to my “point,” plenty of idiots go to college. And plenty of idiots are inclined to imagine they are smart BECAUSE they go to college. They could be exceptions, but that would still call the criteria into question, and assist in calling the question into question. By this definition of intelligence it really doesn’t matter who is smarter. You could ask “are gays better at adhering to arbitrary constructs of society than straight people?” And you wouldn’t because straight people built them.

Another quote:

“Gay people might just work harder than their heterosexual counterparts”
And you just might have NOTHING and be tossing out speculations about things that are impossible to verify so you fill more space.

The article concludes with the author ADMITTING that there’s nothing:

“Gays might be overrepresented in the “genius” pool—and the Ivy League, and the Fortune 500—but there are more than enough dumb gays to even out the numbers.”
but never considers that his criteria is garbage. Nor that there is any alternative to being a “genius” than being “dumb.” “Intelligence” determines many things and is not a single value that can be conclusively measured. He also does not appear to consider that there might be any alternative to being hetero than homo sexual.

we can probably say that whoever bought this magazine to gain home access to the “who’s gay” list is probably a moron. And still I can imagine a remote exception in which that would not be the case.

I saw these both the same day and wasn’t even taking a picture of this one, an issue of Globe. I think I was aiming at an US weekly for some reason. I only noticed it now when I was trying to find my picture of the Examiner cover. Maybe we can talk about “smart” when we stop caring who is gay.

And yet I think we have come a long way even since I have been on the internet.

Nobody even wonders if Pokemon are gay anymore.

You know what, forget it. I would like to wash my hands of this matter, but I am currently at an important business meal engagement. What-ever shall I do?

Boh fiddlesticks.

Next time I will wear my dinner [fingerless] gloves.