a perhaps needless clarification: I do not hate religious people. I hate when religions themselves seek to control people with threats and encourage them to hurt each other, which as far as I can tell all religions do, and I have no respect for that.
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this time of year i see manishevvitz products more prominently at the grocery store. i recognize the name because some dumb late night show(s) I used to watch would make jokes about “drinking manishewitz” –because as the wise philosopher Adam Sandler once pointed out, “so many Jews are in show biz”– so I knew it was some kind of wine that you have to drink if you get jewish. But apparently Manischebbitz isn’t the wine itself but the brand which sells the wine, and they have stuff other than that because in Connecticut and theoretically other places, it is illegal to sell wine in a supermarket, and the Manicshevorlet company thus needs some way to remind Jewish people that they have to go buy the Manischewbacca wine at another store before it’s too late.
Thankfully i am not afflicted with religion so I do not suffer such a fate. Religion is like diabetes for your personality. The authorities want you to endlessly pay for and suffer through dumb traditions that you will never be free from, be too busy worrying about what rules you might violate to consider if the rules have any practical purpose, much as pharmaceutical and food companies pay off the american diabetes association to recommend insulin and disgusting splenda that they can charge whatever they want for rather than recommend eating fewer carbohydrates so you never stop having to buy insulin and splenda from them. maybe that is a stretch of a metaphor but the important thing is that unfortunately seeing Manishevitz reminds me that it could easily have been Manishnemitz.


(trashover is a sorriday in which there is a lot of trash going on and you want it over. manishnemitz is one of the leading suspected causes)

When you are serving manishnemitz, don’t bother opening the door and pouring a cup for Elijah since you know he isn’t showing up. a shut door also discourages more fuzzy imps who now think they are welcome from entering.

if i see a bottle of manishnemitz at the store, i smash it on the ground! it isn’t fair to the store staff who have to clean it up but the store itself should never dared to have stocked it. what a horrible idea. what’s next, manishdope? i don’t mind telling you, I REFUSE to drink manishnemitz. i won’t even drink womanishnemitz. I don’t know what the difference is in that context but more people want me to draw men than women characters and the men ones are usually designed grosser and fetishier.

the worst part about manischnemitz wine: it isn’t even kosher. if it is made by dumb imps, particularly ones with pig noses, there is no way it is “clean.” do you think people drink manishewitz because it tastes good? it probably tastes awful! you just HAVE to drink it. i bet 4 out of 5 sederers say the WORST part about passover is having to drink manishewitz, you just DO because it is kosher and a gang of rabbis will pull themselves out of your hats and circumcise your fingers if you don’t drink it, and you ALSO have to wear hats. I learned that from Fiddler on the Roof. That is almost as scary as laser wolves.

and i worry if someone at the supermarket hears me mumbling about manishnemitz and thinks i am being anti-semitic. no i am only anti-nemitic. i realize this is anti-semite fluorish season to give slightly less-right-wing-creeps something to point at as an excuse to keep equating middle-east-except-israel-residency-or-ancestry with terrorism and continue not being held responsible for decades of trooping, shooting and looting wherever they feel like over there and causing such a disaster that leaving and letting the goshdang taliban come back seemed relatively prudent long enough for them to do it and wash their hands of it, but I am here to talk about something much more important, how a brand of wine’s name sounds sort of like that of a cartoon character that I draw.

And i can’t just THINK about manishnemitz, *I* need to hear me complaining to know how it sounds and to stop thinking about it. But I also had to remember it so I could tell you about it. Very important.

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.