And above all, have FUN.
There is much more to say about this image! I will work hard to keep myself from doing so!
page 40 of this’s redrawings.
I am disappointed that these are not getting any easier even though the base drawings are less incomprehensible overall. There is less figuring for me to do, but just as much redrawing, alas. And still not NO refiguring, since I seem to have kept up cramming in dialog baubles wherever they would fit, and wherever they would not fit long beyond a reasonable time period. Some people can draw a whole comic book in a day, I can barely draw one old page in a month.
However, I have received the proof prints of the first book, all printed and properly bound together for the first time, and it seems like doing that in greater numbers is a viable operation. All this may amount to something, even if not a whole lot.
Minutae:
Somehow, I only noticed after I had redrawn the thing that I never explained, to myself or anyone else, how kumquat has closed the door in the last frame here. The next page certainly does not explain it; kumquat points at a control unit that was clearly not being touched when the door shut. This note is to remind me to shoe-horn in a clumsy retroactive explanation for that next.
Compared to the old version, I had to change the dialog because it was terribly out of character for elpse to not scream at or attack somebody who admitted to hurting nemitz on purpose.
The lizard’s first appearance is also out of character, but since that takes up two rows, it is hard for me at this point to think of something else that should go there. Since I inserted a page before here where elpse gets angry at someone for hurting nemitz who did not even do so, this page is harder to ignore.
Although maybe I would have made more success if I didn’t try to justify everything and just wrote an anarchy story. Nobody ever said to me: I like this comic strip but sometimes the characters have inconsistent personalities. But generally if people don’t like something they just keep quiet so I have to anticipate what they are having a problem with.
One good thing to come of the print attempt that I can apply immediately, is that it forced me to figure out exactly how much space I “have.” A long time ago I measured a comic book that I had and based my space usage on that, not considering that the book I measured might have had a reason for not printing to the page edges. And as I changed the paper I drew on, and its orientation several times, my proportions got further warped. Now I match them to a template provided by Ka-Blam, the print company, which I presume is consistent, at least, with what other north american printers are using.
The version I had here for years is either too narrow when scaled to the height of the template, leaving “live” space on the sides, or too tall when scaled to its width, entering the forbidden margin zone. Narrow is actually fine, since extra live space will be filled in exactly the same as the margin space. What is wrong with drawing in the margins? They MIGHT be cut off, due to natural shifting while printing or cutting across many documents. And the bleed WILL be cut off in any event. So why can’t the computer just choose to NOT print into the bleed since it knows exactly where that is? Don’t bother to ask anybody that question, since they will pretend you are asking something else and treat you like you are rubbing a doughnut on your face. They guard this sacred knowledge like it’s the Davinci Code. You just have to live with it, or you die for it.
So I can leave the page narrow. Except I drew way too big originally, and had to cram in the dialog awkwardly around the drawings that I could not comfortably reduce. Therefore, I ought to widen the page, and claim the live space that is rightfully mine to try and declutter the wordage, right? But I had already been widening the redrawn pages based on my latest guess at correct page proportions prior to using the template, which actually ends up being too wide or too short for proper printing!!! I went too far!
Scandal! Look at all that free live space! I long to see it captured and slaughtered. Having it be marginalized is inadequate punishment.
But too short, like too narrow, can go unnoticed. Since I arranged the words reasonably this time, nothing more needs to be done. In the printed book, therefore, most pages are too short. For once I left things alone! I only talled up a few toward the end of the process, and superficially altered a few others immediately prior to printing by increasing the size of the gaps between frames.
One of the taller pages with enhanced gaps beside one of the shortest, that you may already be acquainted with. The disparity is already not great, and since they do not actually appear together,
and a real book doesn’t lie flat, the issue is almost invisible.
Does that all make sense? It shouldn’t! Printing technology is still stuck in the 1940s. We can electronically send a sandwich into space but we can’t know exactly how a computer image is going to show up on paper right in front of us, and the machine responsible may break in one of many ways trying to do it. It took me so many years and so much rage to figure all this out and get used to it, I have no CHOICE but to keep printing books. For once I know everything that can go wrong and have prepared for them all. The books came out perfectly and I succeeded. I can not be held up further!
ARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGHHHHFFFFFH I’VE BEEN BORDER-LINED
Nonetheless, that bowl has shown no intention of ending. In honor of this, I continue my annual tradition of not going to Olive Garden.
And I say that as somebody who has agreed to go to Chip’s Pub, the restaurant with this menu, on numerous occasions. It is not as if I have standards. Honestly I can’t be waiting around for that bowl to end all day.
Oh right (wrong), I was complaining about this thing. What a pathetic dajinni! It has to carry its own teapot! Why is it wearing a HUGE turban? Does it think it is exercising religious purity? Does it think it will attain salvation and that I will be cursed for eternity because I do not wear a turban? Does it think it is better than me? Arrrf I want to wish for its freedom just so I can trap it in a box. But it can’t grant wishes!
Guess what, frimp: the gods have forsaken you! They made you live inside a teapot and have smoke for legs. You can only come out when somebody deliberately lets you out, and the only person who WOULD let you out would be something just as pathetic and meeply as you are! And worse, you were made you into some dumb unholy animaloid instead of a regular unholy human. You wear a turban as an accessory only and are therefore guilty of cultural appropriation, which according to the internet is problematic.
Regarding bowtie imps, some years earlier, I recalled a fragment of dream after awaking, and it featured a pathetic little creature correcting me “not meepmire, meepmere!,” as I had evidently mistaken it for the initial bow tie fool, “Mortimewde Stapleton Meepmire.”
To respond, first of all, I will call you whatever the meep I want! You’re lucky I even chose to get the first part right! Everyone hates you! Foul, wretched meepmere!
I could not recall the exact nature of meepmere and struggled to visually depict it. I can’t remember the last time I hated a beast so much before I’d even seen it. Unlike “meepmire,” it doesn’t even have a first name. It just is meepmere. It is a cut rate bootleg version of meepmire, despite having no legs, just feet, thus rendering it incapable of wearing a boot. Do you have any idea how hard it is to be a low-budget version of rubbish?
Stupid 2 cent garbage disposal animal. At one point in the pre-meepmere era, roughly mid-2005, back when I owned the world’s bloodiest television box, an advertisement for Galaxy Discount Carpet was repeatedly aired on local television, featuring a corny un-animated space ship floating through a real rug store accompanied by appropriately corny sound effects. Try and imagine the horror if you were standing on the street and you saw THAT THING appear from the sky and come toward you, totally unanimated. Would you shop at a store that IT shopped at? I was known to remark, possibly involuntarily, “AHHHHH TOO CHEAP! IT COST ONE CENT TO MAKE!” repeatedly in an incorrigibly high-pitched voice that would probably scar my vocal cords if I tried it now, thus making Galaxy Carpet the only thing that costs less than meepmere. The people responsible collectively received half a meepmere. The question, then: was it the meep or the mere?
During december the ad had a likewise cheap holly leaf overlay, that I will argue did not raise the budget since it was most certainly pulled out of someone else’s trash can. I understand that I am meant to be enamored with the cheapness, to assume “the carpet prices are surely also low!” but I don’t think I would want a carpet which was THAT cheap. It is probably made out of seaweed and diapers.
Galaxy Discount Carpet is SO cheap that its website has a different name than the store and they just figured oh well and displayed the wrong name directly beside the right name. They guarantee to beat any competitor’s price on the money they spend on advertising! They thought I would be impressed that they aligned the second, alternate-fonted instance of the telephone number to the roof, even though it only matches one of the roof parts that it touches. That phone number has no idea how cheap it is. I bet galaxy carpets don’t even fly! Perfect for today’s genie to keep inside its forbidden cave. The cave is forbidden because it is too stupid.
Some people get epiphany, life changing, prophetic visions in their dreams. They become inspired to create great paintings, novels and symphonies. All I got was MEEPMERE. And then I had to figure out what meepmere was! What a chore! Meepmere thinks it gets to control my life like that? Meepmere is sub-pumpkin! That genie probably started out as a meepmere. Meepmere isn’t superior to a doughnut! That is why in my completed displayable art there are two pictures of doughnuts and no meepmeres. I do not even like meepmere on a leap year. Meepmere is among my least favorite meeps, and I hate a lot of meeps!
This is beside the point, but I was certain I put this on a page years ago, since it is important to me, but I could not find it, even though I posted a different complaint on the topic after realizing it:
At the conclusion of the Disney Aladdin animated feature film, the short fat nameless man rhetorically asks “am I sultan or am I sultan?” In fact, he may be unsure because he isn’t sultan: Jaffar is the sultan. Jafar used the Genie’s power to become so earlier. Nobody ever unwished Jaffar from being sultan. Likewise, Aladdin is really a prince.
Even lurking creepily
and without fingernails, he is a prince, and therefore outranks the jobless dwarf who formerly was sultan, and does not need any rule changed, nor to wish to be made a prince again. The inbreeding that led to his nailless fingers suggests legitimate royal ancestry, besides. And ironically, Aladdin no longer needs to be a prince to marry Jasmine anyway since her way-too-old-to-have-a-teenage-daughter-father is no longer sultan. The genie is just trying to con Aladdin into making a non-wish to make up for the earlier free wish he accidentally granted, because the rules are all in his mind and he cannot mentally handle an inaccurate wish-count, but he can’t admit it because nobody believes he REALLY suffers that badly and could easily stop if he wanted to, and would even point to the earlier event as “proof.” Judgemental privileged non-immortal scumbags.
We never find out the blue genie’s name, either. After Jaffar wishes to be a genie, he continues to be known as Jafar. Unless the blue one was actually named “Genie” prior to becoming one, this doesn’t make sense, and it is rather dehumanizing for the people around him to continue referring to him exclusively as his race. It is like my father watching dumb vote-off shows and referring to the deeds of “the black guy.” Perhaps the genie forgot his old name after “ten thousand years.” But not the weird rules he made up that no other being has the power to hold him to. And after being freed, he legally no longer is a genie, since Jafar, merely through wishing to be a genie, was automatically imprisoned. Prisoner status is inextricably tied to genie status. A freed genie is a geNO. One can still grant wishes, but only if you wish for pizza rolls.
Thankfully, you don’t have to wish for indigestion!
Oh faddle dee doo, another embedded video.
I suppose Super NES Seizure would have been a more catchy title. But if I knew a thing about catching on I wouldn’t need to make stupid gimmicky videos like this. Consider:
It is full of video games
It exhibits no playing skill
It is rather long.
I have the capacity to keep clunking these out.
I would have to work hard to mess this up. Fortunately, nothing I do is easy.
But I bet this looks like it was easy to make! Especially since Macromedia Flash, what I usually make videos in, can automatically load images in sequence if they have numerically ordered file names like these pictures were generated with.
However, I was unprepared for how Flash would lock up and what seemingly innocuous occurrences would cause it. Even though locking up has historically been what Flash does in [any] situations. In this one, most errors relate to moving large amounts of frames after I remembered another folder full of older screen-captures that I forgot to add before the newer ones already in there. Any reasonable person would dump them at the end, and not even consider trying to re-arrange this many objects if the order did not matter, and certainly not persist after establishing that trying to do so is equivalent to throwing potatoes at a wasp nest. But consider my position! Have somebody see my 2008 screenshots and THEN ones from 2005? Why I would have to buy a new hat and get the next coach out of town. And the fun thing about Flash is that moving frames is slow, laborious agony even when the whole thing DOESN’T explode and force you to start over.
And consider the glorious introduction! It progressed a bit like this:
1 I want the concept explained in the video someplace because [reason]
2 The title should be animated to show that I have some flash ability beyond piecing still images together so that people will come to my page if, pog willing, somebody actually shares this video.
3 I should incorporate my own characters into the introduction also so that it is undeniable who made it if, weather permitting, somebody actually reposts this video without context, even though nobody actually knows what those characters are.
4 The introduction needs to be longer so that the text, that is in a weird font and will be funny only to four people who played one stupid game, is readable.
5 The video’s music ends prematurely, and I can add some kind of ending noise to wrap it up.
6 The ending noise now goes beyond the original ending of the video, so I need to add some kind of closing, and it might as well call back to the intro.
7 Now there is 15 seconds of irrelevant nonsense that, if anything, will make people NOT share the video, even though I was primarily trying to account for that situation. Imagine you live each day in agony, terrified you are going to step on a concealed rake and comedically smack yourself in the head, so you buy a suit of plate armor, but the armor merchant uses the money to buy a piano to drop on you.
When that is all done, just getting a video onto youtube in a bearable format is a whole other matter. Every time I add an object, I feel like I have to relearn the process, and some different weird thing goes wrong that magically invalidates all my effort. As if viewers, and even the website itself can SENSE I am unworthy even if my content is something they would otherwise pretend to like.
Thus, it went up without a thumb’s nail preview image. Just so you know, youtube requires me to have 50 followers before I may choose my own thumbnail, and refused of that privilege, a preview gets automatically pulled from approximately midway through the video, and I am given no option to retry the selection if the selection fails to occur. And the default image that appears in such an event is “…” like a scumbag says in typed chat when passing judgement on me. Like “I have nothing to say, but I want you to feel bad so I am going to say nothing in a showy way, as if I think I’m on a sitcom or something.” Not that anything that would come up as a proper thumbnail would be meaningful, given the individual meaninglessness of the screens, but somebody who sees NO thumbnail will not touch it. Even if told “something went wrong with the SYSTEM and not me and no thumbnail was generated,” they will keep away. By the morning following the upload a preview had appeared, but the the mark had been made. They can smell my stale calculated contrariness through the internet tube and find the experience objectionable.
Most users don’t have that problem because they have cameras or operating systems specifically designed to let them megadump rubbish onto media websites with no thought or effort. If you had time to think, then you already lost! But this time I know exactly what I did! Next time I may be able to do it without thinking.
I’ll have you know I am getting very good at complaining!
Oh, I had such plans! I had enough pictures unused, since Flash was choking so much, to make a sequel video. Then I was going to do it with my Sega Gensesis screenshots, and another with regular NES pictures. I could probably do five with Doom screens. But now? I still might since I actually like the video. In fact, all this time I was whining about how terribly it came out, I secretly thought it was rather engaging and aesthetically pleasing. Many of my favorite things are terrible. I feel like I still have an awful lot left to give to the world.
A matter begun here
And continued here:
As implied earlier, this weekend I will be participating in Artspace City Wide Open Studios’ Alternative Space Weekend, which certainly seems like a long title when I make the whole thing a link.
Of note is that while the official address is 290 Goffe Street in New Haven Connecticut, United Statia, you actually enter via Hudson “One way that is probably not the direction you will be approaching in” Street,
through a gate adorned with signs warning you not to go through it, plus generous helpings of razor wire across the prison’s perimeter on the right. Or maybe I just have to enter on Hudson Street while hanging things up, and the front gate will have been breached by the time guests arrive. Honestly I am unsure, but I assure you it is possible to get in there since I have succeeded on 2 out of 3 attempts.
I will be in room 216c, on the first floor obviously, available to receive complaints noon to 6pm both days.
Observe how the view from outside the room highlights the windows and the radiator, where I cannot hang anything up. I don’t want to creep anybody out until they are in too deep to change their minds. There are numerous other artists also who will, with any luck, be more interesting and/or creepy than I am, so come to see them also in case I am not doing it for you.
I will be attempting to sell original artwork, digital art prints, greeting cards, and any other thing I can grab that legally I have some creative claim to and can also fit on the $30 folding table I just bought.
That’s right you get to see a BRAND NEW folding table fresh off the Wal-Mart rack where, judging by the condition of the others I had to move to get to this one, they have been waiting unpurchased about eight years.
This is from the Autism Services & Resources Connecticut Walk for Autism back in May, where people walk to raise money for more autism. This scene proves that I can fill eight feet of table with stupid junk. These tables belonged to the event organizer and I only have a four foot table now, so imagine how exciting it will be to see all this crammed into half the space.
Although there is no rest room, there is a toilet on the premises. Because, you know, art. But think of how much more artistic the installation will be if you use it during the exhibition.
In fact I deliberately abstained from putting a toilet in my painting because I was so certain toilets would be in abundance among other participants’ works. I am not one of those people who wants to abuse society by declaring you should give me money because I just found something gross in the street and wrote my name on it. I just think toilets are funny. But I do not think things that go in toilets or people on toilets are funny. As this is my first time at the Open Studio, I decided to not risk being misunderstood.
Obviously this abandoned toilet I saw in Paris would not count as finding something gross in the street since in France people make sure their toilets are clean and not-at-all gross before tossing them out of windows. Truly this is a city of fine art.
But they keep this sign nearby just in case.
Following from there:
In this morning’s New Haven Register newspaper can be discovered another triumph of my print-ready-file-sending intuition! The painting I am exhibiting was not finished/started at the time when I registered, so instead of that, for my designated 300×300 pixel representation I sent a segment of Cholesteronslaught, one of my historically least hated pictures.
Come see my sickly-colored amorphous blobs at city-wide open studios in New Haven next week-end!
Continued there.