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.

finally back to lerd,

another of the very old 2003 monsters, redrawn at ten times the size with slightly more competent animation.

marginal progress, major reminder of how stupid my life is, which I do not need, because I do not forget.

the movements of the tail appendage do not match on each angle, but they do not have to, merely not look terrible, and only the back facing one does, along with the arms, that look more like a low-impact exercise than a motion to pull the body along a floor but it looks better than the old version, to me, and inside that game the old one looked fine so I will be impressed to see how this ends up being worse.
the mid-section is a different color now but I can palette-swap it to green in-game. And I can also NOT palette swap it to green, in case you were wondering why I’d bother to discolor it at all. the colors only need to be distinct, not specific.

keeping the color zones distinct and mapped to indices on the game’s 256 color “palette” means they can be changed separately from each other, to colors which are not necessarily on the palette but for the purpose of preparing this example quickly they are.

There was never a reason for lerd having four breast orbs before, as it only had two arms. maybe it looks unique but I don’t want people to think I have a fetish for bare cartoon breasts considering how much other fetishy junk I have attached to my name in the intervening years. ALTHOUGH if, as today’s commenter suggests, having just two makes the problem worse, I can change them back or try something else entirely.

i will start the next non-snake comic strip page next. probably. you might think i have spent some of the long period since posting the most recent page figuring out what is going to appear on the next page but you ought to know me better than that!

4-16-2024 whoopf i forgot i have a website this week. fortunately it is rarely remembered in general. i have another redrawn old dumb monster to show, when i get around to showing it.
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maybe too much greebling for the amount of content here. i felt mentally drained after the stupid animation and posting it to all the websites, and sought a sketch that I could computer paint over. and that was too much, so I went after this one instead, which was also too much, but since I had already dumped two days on the first one I stuck with this. the stages of production as far back as I have proof of can be viewed over there since I lack the energy to deal with them here. Yes that is an obnoxious paywall site. Somehow or another 11 or 12 still people actually pay me small bits monthly through that, out of pity or whatever other reason, and I will take that. This particular post is “unlocked.” Others are not, more so the people paying money don’t feel slighted than because I think anybody wants to steal them.
I believe it to be the picture that made me realize I was not cut out for water-color painting on physical media. I will sketch and resketch elements for ages to get them in functional balanced positions and next I will be reluctant to place colors that I might change my mind about. And so this lingered unfinished for years but still with blue tape on it as if I thought I might finish it. Obviously I FORGOT most of that when I decided to bring it out for this. At least five years had passed. It was supposed to be straightforward and mindless, and mindless often means irrelevance. but there are also always stupid challenges that need to be thought about that most people would not encounter. what is this thing swimming in? anything i want. but what then IS that any thing?

only THIS part is truly mindless.
obviously, the dope is awful. the dope is scum. nobody is denying that. yet they also will not take steps to do anything about it. the GREEN dope in this picture, does it think i will think it isn’t a bad dope since it isn’t blue? what a horrid dope! just look at those ears! it is JUST as bad as every other dope. i doubt it even KNOWS what color it is! maybe it even thinks it IS a blue dope! but i do not want to say anything appropriately abusive to it since i don’t want it to look at and smile at me.

really stupid idea i had years ago but only believed i had the means to execute this year and it still took longer than was remotely reasonable.
years before that I messed around with ripping my own spc music out from super nintendo games, and observed that I could play save states from the emulator “zsnes” as if they were spcs, even though sometimes there was stuff wrong with them, such as tunes playing with the wrong instruments loaded. That is is how I ended up with the screwy mario paint music which reminded me of dopes. somehow or another i ended up with a version of this options screen tune from the super nes game sparkster which only had this single sound channel active, and it made enough of an impact on me that I continued to dwell on it for long afterward. I thought for certain it must be an error, but the snes plugin for winamp allowed me to disable individual sound channels on a properly created SPC of the tune, and indeed that corny organ is in there just like that, buried under the audible instruments. I hadn’t run winamp in years but I had to dig it out again to export the different layers of the tune for this dumb cartoon. Imagine, if winamp had only been more shoddily coded and unwilling to run on windows 7 this whole mess might have been prevented.

the yeep and meteor were added late when I realized someone might assume this was just a dumb loop of the first pose and turn it off early if I didn’t show something else non-cyclical happening. they need to see that it is a dumb longer sequence than that.

but i also have to consider the organ grinder’s situation: you are trying to encourage people to give you money but then some dumb DOPE comes along and starts doing some STUPID DANCE. it is hard ENOUGH to attract customers when your only skill is spinning a handle to make corny music come out of a box, but NOBODY is going to come with a DOPE there, even WITHOUT the horrible dance.

what are you looking at? me? do you think i am going to bail you out of this? it is not my fault that the music is corny and decided to degrade to its base corniness. if YOU choose to degrade and TRANSFORM into a regular dumb old corny animal that should not be my problem.