My father James Thomas Cunningham is dead. And has been for a month. Well it was supposed to be a month, which actually would have been marked yesterday. Well WELL at first this was to be within the first week but hrm hah urm. I had difficulty writing something readable on the topic. Nonetheless I have embedded appropriately inappropriate messages within the images for if you hover your mouse cursor over them, like always.

Ever since it happened, or at least the first two weeks, I occasionally wrote a little note about it, in the hope of making a proper public post on the topic. But it never came together, because I did not want it to be depressing. I already make the positive updates depressing! But I do not feel like this was a good death, either. He deserved better, from me most of all. From November 1998 onward I did not speak to him, or in any place where I thought he could hear me. Not out of hatred, but simple, or rather complicated psychological blockage. And people generally did not accept this. I could not explain how it worked, and how their suggestions for how to fix it were totally non-applicable. And I would say now, looking back, it drew directly from the absence of fundamental human decency I experienced at the school I attended at that time, Cedarhurst in Hamden Connecticut curse them to heaping heck. Initially I stopped speaking there, and my father had the job of bringing me to various doctor appointments and one hospitalization that those monsters forced me into under threat of custody revocation, and without deliberately meaning to I transferred my speech prohibition to any time I was in his company. And gradually through the years following, owing to one illness and illness treatment side effect after another, the quality of my father’s life declined. It was only after I returned from an apartment I had in New Haven, and became his more or less constant in-home companion that the guilt from not talking began to overpower whatever force kept me from speaking, succeeding at last maybe in mid-2015. He did not even have two years remaining. And by that point he was almost more obligation than parent to me. Our relationship was healing, finally, after far too much sadness, but I do not feel like we finished the job. It was hard to be with him without resenting the job to some degree. I tried to ask him things nobody else would ask, and understand what he went through, and do things for him that nobody else would think to, assuming he had little time left. But I thought I would have more notice than I did, since the reduction of his physical abilities had always been gradual. One day he could speak, eat and move through the house with some level of assistance, and the next he could do nothing at all, confined to a hospital bed with tubes down his throat, on account of his myocard infarcting. Not even related to the prostate cancer, cerebral ataxia, immobilizing tremors, rib and spine injuries, but those things meant that he was not expected to survive heart surgery. There was no chance to take inventory of what we never got to and deal with it. No time to do something as simple as ask what his favorite movies were so that I could get copies of them and let him watch all that stuff instead Bones and Law & Order reruns he had already seen 4 times apiece. He was legally alive another two weeks, but not in a consistently coherent state, owing to more weird medications and stress, presumably, and not in a place that I would call comfortable.

We could even have finished watching Breaking Bad; we had the dvds, and had started to watch it, with my mother, also. But eventually their schedules diverged, and by the time they verged again we also had the Game of Thrones dvds and those had the higher pointless death to minute of airtime ratio and therefore took precedence.

Yes so we shared that, but the show wasn’t finished, was it. Presumably there will be closure in that somewhere, eventually.

Somebody in East Haven, Connecticut, actually wanted to pay my father to make methamphetamine. He was a chemist who could make stuff other people couldn’t. Certainly I don’t think he aspired to be a Walter White sort of person but he appreciated the subject matter –he liked to identify the element symbols used in the opening credits– and to some degree I have to think related to the character more than most people would, including having cancer and not being appreciated for his skills; he started a business with a partner who eventually cheated him out of it, and there are ASPECTS of the television character which might be seen as fantasy fulfillment.

I wondered if I should mention this on the internet at all. It is important to my life, and affects, and has affected what I do, but I hate dealing with people reacting to it in a rote manner. At the funeral wake thing, one after another people I barely knew approached me to say “sorry for your loss.” Why? Who are you? Why are you sorry for MY loss? The poor man whose crushed bone dust is in the box over there lost more than I did! I do not know what to say to people except “it is alright, it was not your fault.” Or “eh it is part of life. And death, I suppose.” Most of them probably did not want to say the line to me, but they SAW me, and thought: “oh pringles we made eye contact. if I don’t say ‘sorry for your loss’ to THAT one now it will blab to the people here that I actually need to like me.”
I appreciate that persons want to be helpful, but I think very few of them sincerely do.

It is the same reason I keep my birth date a secret on the internet; I hate dealing with rote reactions from those whom I barely know, and then feeling like I owe each of them a unique, non-rote response, and then worrying that I now owe them unique birthday wishes when the time comes, and I do not have the energy for it. And I would be even worse at condolence-issuing. Fortunately in person nobody can see that I already gave the same reply to the person before them, so that at least I kept under control. The funeral scene is not for ME. The death was six days ago by that point, and I had grieved before then, before the death occurred, even. Afterward, getting the funeral to happen and visitors coordinated and met and all that, plus local family grieved with and reassured and all that, I was gosh darn exhausted by the time of the semi-public event. And then that was not even the end of it since there was a large dinner gathering following it, and people who had traveled to attend all this were still around a few days following that. However much I surprisingly enjoyed their company, it was tiring. I do not want condolences, just a break.

But until then wishing me well is meaningless, especially if it comes, as it did plenty, from somebody whose life would be no different were it me who was dead. And I am not demanding special attention, either; I just wish we all could spend less time pretending.

And less money on mopey parties for people to pretend at. Did you know that even a non-frilled cremation costs over three thousand dollars? And somehow having a little ceremony for it, a newspaper notice and a box to put the bone dust in costs $2000 more. And it isn’t even a FANCY box. We could have bought a fancy urn but there was concern about being permitted to bring it on an airplane if we wished to transport the ashes someplace else. Obviously this is because you could easily hide three ounces of water inside one.

We should not force ourselves to be sad because we think etiquette dictates it, and we certainly should not dive deeper into debt for the opportunity. I am terribly fortunate that whatever arbitrary force made my parents feel like they had to put all their children into Catholic schools was not in effect by the time half of them were dead and it allowed us to have a traditionally incongruous karaoke conclusion.

This is the picture that got placed on the ash box. It is a good picture, and it occurred during our 1989 visit to England, my father’s native country, but I have no idea whose dog that is.

Perhaps my foremost regret is that I never communicated how important he was, or had been, in introducing me to some of my favorite things.

Even if I did not always like the same things; I never liked futbol, Harry Potter or fish+chips, but definitely stuff that I knew of on account of him stuck with me my whole life following their introductions. For example, Rupert Bear books had been sent by my English grandmother to my family for several years in the 1980s (and for longer to my father’s brother’s family, who were a bit older), and I never got rid of them. I enjoyed John Harrold’s artwork, and it inspired how I drew a few things, long after the books’ initial acquisition. I am told I even once had a sweater with Rupert pictured on it that this grandmother made for me, but I have no evidence of this.

My appreciation for classical music started with my father. And I hate to condense centuries of artistic expression and styles into a single “genre” but that is beside the point for now. On his last day of open communication, Friday the 21, when he was done with life support and yanked all the tubes out, so at least he could speak and take liquid sustenance again, I quickly set up a playlist of music that he had used to listen to that I had always kept track of –he asked only for “Beethoven” and I knew precisely what he meant, and he seemed glad to hear it, and sadly I did not get through the list before Jeopardy came on

(Jeopardy! I still watch that), and he was still calling out answers to the end, and afterward he preferred the quiet. But being able to share that back was meaningful to me. I didn’t get to Smetana’s Moldau, one of the primary pieces, with Beethoven’s sixth symphony and Holst’s Jupiter, among others, that remind me of my father. Or rather I started it, but since the beginning is so subdued I think he didn’t recognize it, or maybe he did, but it reminded him of the Canals of Mars level in the NES version of Toobin’. So rather than try and jump to the distinct part I skipped it entirely.

That was a joke, but my appreciation of certain video games, Dragon Warrior and Romance of the Three Kingdoms foremost, two of the slowest, more inaccessible titles on the NES ever to be localized, I saw my father playing first, and eventually took a liking to, and I thought I was quite a bit smarter than anybody who thought those were boring, and this led to continuing fascination with that sort of thing. I even at some point read the original [translated] Three Kingdoms novel that inspired the video games, which is to date the longest thing I have read. I believe I also first saw him playing Landstalker (or trying to), my perhaps favorite sega genesis game, but that is only appropriate to mention with regard to a screenshot I ended up putting in this entry too late to be relevant to this paragraph. My father’s general Britishness struck me, as a small child, as being in some way superior to common American habits, and even if that was not accurate, it helped me to look outside a box I might otherwise not have. I even said so on one of my earliest terrible but preservable web pages back in whenever that was.

And I have alluded to all these things on numerous occasions throughout my years of frivolous website production, and I think my father, of all people, might have appreciated it, especially when I was not able to speak to him –So many of the strange quotes I adorn my entries with and that surely confound of those who attempt to read the dumb things, come from strange old movies that my father would have on the television, or the stranger advertising– but by 2001 or so, before I was writing regularly, and long before I was writing half-competently, he no longer wanted, or no longer could use a computer and certainly would not have had time to read my rubbish weekly. And it was never my way to impose nonsense on others. I wouldn’t go and print out pages and pages of this and assume it had a purpose. Occasionally when I had art prints I might show those, but a great majority of my drawings have never been printed, and my sketchbooks are messy and incomprehensible, even for me, who does not require spectacles.
Indeed for the most part my father probably had no idea what I was doing. And he was supposedly proud of me anyway. That does eat at me inside: He was content with me being totally worthless and I never got to prove that I wasn’t!

One tribute to him, in a sense, that I am sad to say he did not know about, and that to my knowledge nobody else did either, even though I drew it just over ten years ago, is the way the creature “kumquat” types on its computer device is based on how my father did back when he could still use a computer. One finger at a time, alternating. Even by early 1998 (prior to my problem) when we first had home internet, my father’s coordination was not stellar. It was not long before he was asking me to type out replies for him when another user of the AOL trivia whatsit accused him of lurking in the game for long enough that the questions looped around. He had me explain, in considered detail, that while he had observed that behavior in others, he would not do such a thing, and he knew the answers he knew because of this this and that, but the person had already logged off, not concerned with whether they were actually right (and, I have to think, probably lost the trivia game due to THAT tendency) and in those days that meant you just plain could not send a message to the person. Argh what a scumbag! My one opportunity to fight for my father’s trivihonor and I wasn’t fast enough. My only hope is to make that incident into a bit of useless trivia itself.

In fact, that I recall, I do not think I ever drew anything for my father, except a really crummy photograph imitation watercolor painting of a pelican. In 2012, before I could speak to him in person, I had become able to speak over the telephone, and I asked what his favorite animal was, thinking that I could imitate photographs of animals in physical media in a way that is pleasing, and that would be easier than any other thing my father would possibly want art work of,

based on my experience with this manner of product. I had not considered that I chose this picture not due to there being birds in it, but rather to its suitability to the task of imitation by me, due to an abundance of vague but colorful details. The pelican scene featured complicated but specific feathers, a limited range of colors and a view of the sea where the light reflection made it seem mostly white, but the imitation to look like I have a fundamental, pre-school-level misunderstanding of what water looks like.
It was so bad that i never showed it to its intended recipient until that last Friday, in the hospital, since I had such massive guilt about what I just told you. A bit later somebody had propped it against a wall in the room with the wrong side up. That is how bad it was. I became the classic delusional artist joke, where two people take turns turning the canvas around to try and determine which orientation is correct. The stuff that I knew how to draw well I was always embarrassed by. Nobody in my family has a “fursona.” And thank goodness but for people who do, it is at least much easier to figure out exactly what to draw, and usually not very difficult.

February 26 of this year, the last time my father went to a restaurant. Zhang’s Madison, the closest restaurant to our home, since he did not like to travel at all by this point. But his sixty-fifth birthday had been on Tuesday, the 21 of February. “Oh two, two one, five two,” as I heard enunciated as clearly as he was able in countless doctor waiting room visits. often multiple times the same trip since the people in that building don’t communicate, and don’t realize you already proved your sanity once to them today. Anyway, something moderately special seemed called for. He is seen here drinking his customary “Coke…. NO ice,” with the latter part usually appended just as the server is leaving. In fact he preferred Mountain Dew, but through the magic of corporate contracts those two are mutually exclusive offerings in any food service establishment. I think he possibly learned that habit from me. Before I stopped speaking, he took me to and from therapist appointments, and I remember stopping at the McDonalds on the highway and ordering the then new “crispy chicken deluxe,” and with none of the customary unspeakable goop on it, which the employees could handle, and a large coke with no ice, which they could not handle. With no ice because nobody can drink ice, but I could drink a lotta coke, and you can fit more in there without the ding dang ice. Presumably the ice is to save THEM money on soda, even though that is probably the cheapest to produce thing in the entire store, a category in which there is fierce competition at a McDonalds. And sometimes servers aren’t mentally equipped to process “no ice” and assume, through what seems to me a more strenuous stretch of logic, that I must have meant “no sugar,” and I end up with a huge undrinkable cylinder of diet coke, just about as undrinkable as the ice in there with it. This all seems to be mostly about me, but I have few coherent memories from when I was on good terms with my father and he could actually do things. Everything afterward has regret attached, so I will take what i can get.

I am fortunate that the recent deceased got to 65 years; many people lose parents at younger ages, and without even the little amount of awareness that it is coming which I had. Not everybody has a father, and some have no parents who love them at all. This could have been worse. Much as this entry could have been much longer; I removed or did not attempt to implement several parts that seemed attached to a different narrative, and perhaps I will see those later.

But right now I need a break! Preferably to do something non-depressing in.

Thank you for your time and consideration in these matters.

Howdy. I am trying to write something important to go here, and suspect that continuing to spend time on filler updates was, in fact, spending time, rather than saving it for me, so I think putting up this extremely lame update in 5 minutes rather than a moderately lame one in two hours is more conducive to me getting the important one done. Once it IS done, my less important ones ought to be more functionally unimportant.

page 22 of part 3 of whatever this is.
Not only does this page not accomplish anything, it was almost impossible to draw. And i worried with all the brown it would be very boring to look at, but I like how the colors worked out.
There are two more like this; maybe I will paste in the frames I just used and only change the relevant parts. It will still take a month and be a complete redraw but I will not have to worry about forgetting to include anything.

A reminder to all you retcon-resenting star warfare enthusiasts out there

that George Lucas never got around to removing Sebastian Shaw from the 1997 comic book Star Wars: The Last Command issue 1

in which Princess Leia gives birth and looks like this.

Although on that note if I were force-sensitive I would be wary about doing anything near a window, knowing that a giant creepy judgmental ghost Yoda could be watching me at any time and that I would never be able to stop it or prove to anybody else that it happened. Hey, Yoda, Ben is a family friend but none of the people in there even KNOW you.

In fact I have been generally concerned about Yoda’s mental state recently.

All good? Great, I trust you.

Also, this is besides the point, but all it takes is another kid at school armed with a “va” to ruin Jaina’s life for several years. And Mr. Solo, do you NEED to wear your cowboy vest at ALL TIMES? Come on, I mean it’s the year 9-ABY already, get a new look.

Beside the point but I take issue with this comic book for exaggerating Mark Hamill’s acting skills

although I praise the depiction of his elegant fingers.

Blogroll, dopes, unsightly | How to lose a guy in (9) days | !

Not my best work! Not even the best of my bad work. I drew this in a hurry for somebody in twittor who liked pog a lot back in 2009 or so, but by the time of this drawing and whatever comment from them instigated it, maybe in 2014, seemed to be over it, and then I forgot about it. But I didn’t have time to draw anything else last week, so I was fortunate to find it. Life has been very tiring. And it will be different in the future. Not necessarily better. I will explain later, definitely. Maybe not elsewhere but here I will. This site may be trash, but it is trash that I trust. Whatever the case my drawings will remain stupid! On this occasion I primarily added the weirdo on the stairs, who is plainly not drawn in the same manner as anything else and is far too in-focus. And I did not want to REDUCE its detail level to make it fit because when I do something well I don’t want to mess with it, even if it totally breaks the immersion, and that is the simple tragedy of my existence. But all this is consistent with the creature being a weirdo. I reckon that thing thinks it is VERY respectable, dressed like that, so much so that it thinks it is entitled to break the laws of optics. It is not and shall be disciplined as soon as I have an opportunity to enact that. I am done putting up with this sort of nonsense.

An attempt to quickly make a scene out of four unrelated creature sketches that happened to be near each other in my drawing book. In the past I have only used two. Perhaps I will try three sometime. I have hundreds of these tiny little idiots.
And it did not work very well, which is why i waited over a month to put it here. Usually I only make “artwork only” posts when I have been too busy to finish anything else for this site by my imaginary weekly deadline (which I have missed by several hours the past three occasions). This looks like one of those corny publicity shots Nintendo put out when hyping the early development on the N64, where there would be a cardboard-cutout looking picture of Mario or Rare ltd retconned computer generated Donkey Kong in a corny but fancily-lit 3d environment. But I only drew it in a hurry on that day to meet an imaginary deadline on another website. A surprising amount of my obligations are imaginary! But this week they are real (albeit not to anybody paying me money), so here is one more rushed site post. Perhaps that is just the way it will be from now on! Perhaps I have finally reached the point where life is just plain too complicated to do anything personally meaningful except at the expense of having any place in the world. I had my time, and did not spend it efficiently. In fact I took more than I was entitled to, and I did not win.

Perhaps I draw losers like this because they remind me I could do so much worse!

page 21 of part 3 of this!
this page accomplishes one thing: it saves me from having to draw a character that looks like a cat in the future. my tolerance for cats has dwindled considerably since I first introduced this character without any attempt at “design” whatsoever.

The sequence that follows does not actually prove anything but i am amused by the script I wrote and the little previews I drew. it is all information that can be introduced later. And I tried to cram it into an absurdly high number of frames on one page, but hopefully restraint will win out and I will make two pages out of it, however little information is conveyed.

page 20 of part 3 of this! Except it’s actually just part of page 19 again because I decided 19 was far too cramped, and there was one final frame I wanted to add in, which I was going to then have to put on the next page, which was already ludicrously cramped just in the layout stage, before I start adding in whatever has not even occurred to me yet. Notice how this still feels too cramped, and despite the copious amount of new drawing I have done, it still feels rushed and incomplete, if you want to thoroughly undermine my effort. It was terribly demoralizing to have fallen so far behind on redrawing old pages, so it seemed prudent to start redrawing new pages.

Also, I have been quite sick, my father has been in a hospital with an uncertain fate, and I have been futilely trying to get my service provider to fix my broken email but they inexplicably keep finding ways to prolong the “not reading what I say to them and repeatedly offering the same obvious and wrong solution” phase, while I am also sick and going to a horrible hospital that drains energy out of me that i don’t have because someone else is sicker than I am. I do not request or desire the sympathy of strangers, but I wanted to explain some of that somewhere, because I do not like submitting unsatisfactory work unless I also get to complain about it. However, this is a shorter negative portion than I usually accompany comic updates with, so I may be at last making real progress.

Sure to be the most important 80 seconds of your life.
The proper flash vector version can be seen right over here, unless you are using a telephone, since telephones do not like it, and for good reason, I say.
The previous part can be seen at there and the flash version is probably there but I am not going to check on that!
Without meaning to I hoped this would be the release that convinced people I was not just a bum pretending to have some useful skill, which would at last permit me to breakthrough to the next level of unobscurity. It is rough in some parts, due to being made in a strange way in a strange program, also I repeatedly forgot to go back and draw Greegorp’s legs properly in the part where they are visible and strange even though that very part is plainly visible in a previous recent post here, but I think the good parts in it are the proof I sought. In the end it convinced as many people as the snake cartoon, which is to say, nobody who was not already on board, but I think my technique has improved overall, and whatever the case it is was necessary for my psychological state to move forward on this. As always, I need to know I made it more than anybody else needs to see it!

People laugh at Donald Trump for that McDonald’s commercial he did with Grimace but overlook the fact that Ted Cruz IS 1970s Burger King’s Duke of Doubt. This is important because as a nobleman of a foreign nation, Cruz violated article two of the US Constitution by running for president. We are told to worry about Russian influence on our government but there is an embassy to the Burger Kingdom in every major city.

Which is not to indicate the Duke necessarily pleases the king but he does what he is told as best he knows how.
Apparently I have more to say about this. I presumed I had talked at length about the Duke on past occasions, but there seems no easily-obtainable record of it on this website. Certainly, my preliminary inquiry leads me to doubt that there is.

addender: I showed a picture of the duke in this entry here but did not discuss the matter.

You may mock me for drawing creaturefolk who abstain from wearing trousers but at least I regularly issue belts; Lizard Man from Capcom’s 1991 arcade classishc Magic Sword has to CARRY that scabbard at ALL times. And Magic Sword is not a brief jaunt; either; there are 50 stages!

Eh don’t push it! A bunch can be cleared in under 30 seconds, and many can be skipped! However, skipping while holding a sword and a scabbard will wear you out on a long journey. Lizardman risks mild eventual pain from clutching one object that long.

Please, Ninja, put that thing down first! I know you want to help but right now you are just complicating matters.

I would ask Thief to carry something but I am concerned he would not give it back.

Thief, you appear to have come into a bit of wealth recently.

Did you share it with Lizard Man? He seems to have spent it all on gold rims and breast implants instead of practical things that he needs! So irresponsible! Typical frivolous lizard. Reptiles don’t even HAVE mammaries. And I can refer you to several people who will think they are extremely smart for telling you that.


Think you I would wed such a brute? My mother warned me about lizard men like you! I know you’re only holding a shield instead of a scabbard to appease me.

I see you have met the underwear and bare chest dress code for the wedding but oh! Don’t tell me you lost your sword! I just saw you throw away three perfectly good ones! What am I to do with you?

Well well, it appears I have some options now.

A landscape sketch from five years ago that I tried to do up properly more recently, but now see as without focus and not reasonable to dwell on further! Perhaps I will think of a purpose for it and consequently a path to finishing it later. Preferably one with fewer stairs than usual.

This is a major matter I have been occupied with the past half year. Major in the sense that it eats much time, not that it is important.

These depict a creature named techno made up by a person most recently called beepysopod.
Although I have offered to make drawings for money for years for, this is the first one I have received consistent interest in from other people. And that is because while there are many, many amateur artists on the internet who are more technically skilled and/or more visible than I am, or just plain not as angry as I am about the wrong things, most of said persons are terrible at pixel-level artwork. A few people are better, but not enough of them are to totally crowd me out like usual. Or being better leads them to other opportunities so that they are no longer available for small time work.

The prevailing mentality is that it is just a regular drawing done at low resolution, or with a 1-pixel wide outline. And again most buyers cannot tell. And most people in general do not care about pixel art in 20167 that is not in service of homaging popular commercial properties. (the awareness of which contributing to my anger and the public ignoring of which contributing to my non-visibility)

A FEW people do interpret this as useful and unique, however, such as the owner of the rightside figure, Fallenfolf, and here we are. I of course have known I am “good” at this for many years; there was a time when there was no way to draw on a computer EXCEPT zoomed in, using a mouse. But back when there was real NEED for this skill, in 1996, I did not know anybody. And I still don’t know anybody, so here we are again. Although now I have the scrap of legitimacy that makes people willing to pay me scraps of money to make them, although generally the people who buy from me do not know anybody either, which keeps me available for scrappy art work and the game from breaking. Can you imagine if I did something meaningful with my life? It would be a disaster. My entire personality draws from my life being a joke. Anything I do right is inspired by doing things wrong. If it were possible for me to predict what would go right, I would only do right things, and therefore do them even worse.

Anywhy, what changed was the introduction of the Telegraph messenger service. You might have heard of it, that is the one Islamic State militants use to coordinate their attacks since the story is that Telegram does not track its users. Which also means paranoid furries love it. One of telegram’s major features is “stickers,” 512×512 pixel images any user can shove at any other user. Many people will draw these in exchange for money. Usually poorly-drawn and scaled down heads making idiotic exclamations are preferred. The beeply isopod person happened to ask me for some, but without specifying that they be poorly drawn or disembodied heads, and I took it upon myself to draw them at the actual display size, since, you know, I COULD, and I offered that person five examples, all of which I was asked to complete. Ever the shrewd business-thing, I did all five for free, then three more for free even as I found myself increasing the detail level, uncertain at what point it was no longer experimental and that I could guarantee a consistent level of quality. After this point a single person asked to pay me for one, and I set the rate at $20, because that was about as much as I could imagine somebody paying me.

AND I promoted it with this specific image, because it was the best of the group, even though it was also the most difficult and time-consuming one of the group and under no circumstances would I feel adequately compensated to draw a prop more complex than the character I was requested to draw for less money than I could get a good pizza with in this miserable overpriced town.

Yes that ought to solve all my problems. But it did not because as I sold more, I kept increasing the complexity level, which people didn’t even know they were getting, and didn’t necessarily want, either, because it did not necessarily work!

At this point I only look greedy, which is fine because I need to scrap the “one price for whatever you want” system and put a cheap rate on the cheap drawing and a higher rate on a better-produced item. But I cannot easily do that because

I only allotted that much space for pixel junk on this garish chart, a chart which was already agony to cram as much junk into as there is. Because I thought people would ignore the garish chart if it was not orderly and its sections evenly distributed. Every picture is a distinct element, and text is on different layers, so that I could change the examples and what my name was based on what website I posted this on because I do in fact have dumber names than bimshwel that I do not want to have used interchangeably with it, since the other mes make even worse things. Then I had to remember to swap all those details around again when I adjusted the price on the one thing people bought. Which I eventually forgot to do, which is why this one says “grebij” on it.
And I only have the stupid chart at all to makes things easier! Because if I write out what I am charging in text form, with multiple examples for each category and descriptions of what each category involves, people don’t read it and just ask me directly, and then I cannot remember what I wrote and risk giving even wimpier prices.
If somebody refers directly to the chart, I know they have already seen and accepted my prices and at least are not going to try and pay me less than that.
Except for one person who did but if you are reading this then it wasn’t you!
I often do not realize what a sad state I am in until long after issuing a price estimate. Because I cannot well start working on something, then give a proper estimate, and risk having the other party say “ehhhh no dice.” Or worse, try to pay me in dice!

Observe that these are considerably more tightly-drawn than the first five, and more effort was taken to prevent and remove glaring edge artifacts. It SEEMS like I have done something properly while planning to, which should disprove my earlier theory. Since I made the first group without thinking, they came out rather simply and everybody was pleased. But these I obsessed over, without only minor practical improvement. Although I did not knowingly change my method; I merely paid more attention to it.



These ones, for a Scoots-Buragi, who saw the previous group and wanted a similar meltitude, were a bit loose again, but with all the stripes in there I thought it was justified. The ends still taper to 1×1 pixel points occasionally. Thankfully this did not, as some animated work last year did, endear me toward people who thought that I must surely have the same erotic fixation on masculine figures melting as they did, but I continued to have buyers anyway. So I seem to be coming out ahead, for once.


In fact they may have endeared me toward a dear, Kait Foxdear. That is dear in the precious sense, hence an A, even though the creature has deer components. The world is quite complex. This drawing is tightly rendered anew, and I kept the colors under control. Except for there being some bright green pixels stuck to the edges that I literally did not notice and remove until I went to write this website entry. wh-wh-whoopth.

For one HellBaby-From-Hell, this one came out almost TOO easily, so that I felt like I must have done something wrong, and so I got the details even tighter.

Which then totally spoiled me for these two, the first for Trufours and the second for Relaxingdragon (obviously, Relaxingdragon requested the raccoon person), whose subject matters were considerably more complex than the Hell-Baby’s. Finding a reasonable point at which to stop was impossible for me. Everything was drawn at 1 pixel and I put no limit on color density, although the latter party requested that I limit the hues, and consequently I thought it prudent to fill in the transparent sector with other grey tones. But then that destroyed its ability to be used as transparent imagery! Also, [depressing digression]. However, ultimately only two people really need to like any of them, right? Me and the recipient. But I also need other people to keep wanting them. Theoretically these are the best ones I did, but they are NOT because I beat the energy out of them.

This one, ostensibly a gift for somebody named Doomdweller from another called Syrenti, I was amidst while wondering why the last two were less good, and finished while realizing why they were less good, rather too late to do it differently!

This gives an idea of the tedious process. However, I made this video BEFORE I realized I had slipped into an undesirable way of doing things; I only thought to record it because I thought I was finally doing something properly! Alas, I can only be right by accident and I lack the resources to record my entire life. A pity, I would love to see a 3 minute video of me not messing up so I could determine what that looks like and try to be more like it.

I think everybody would like to see that.

^{(There is a brief looping SWF video here that you will not see if you are browsing on a telephone. I could make an animated gif out of it but if you saw it you might think I should not have bothered!)}

Seeing my sister Salome more irrationally annoyed at the Hamilton guy than I am made my night. I had not intended to watch the Academy Award progam, and I certainly did not intend to mention Lindo McMirando again but there in the presence of the spectacle I was fascinated with it. I do not have the emotional investment in this sort of thing to complain about any other aspect of the program and nobody needs me to do that (I need me to do this).
She had to leave the room, HA HA HA HA I laughed like that for about 30 seconds. Like somebody from a comic strip or a video game.

One big slow HA after another. It looks fake to see written out but that is what happened.

It is not easy disliking so many, many things that are inescapably heralded. Having disliking company who are also not insane makes it more pleasant. I specify “not insane” because I have known some sorts whose discontent I related to up to a point, but then they let it run their lives. Although our current presidente empowers that sort of attitude, even though without existing money and influence you will never make the core contacts necessary to elevate yourself by acting like that, and will just bring pain to yourself and those around you. So then I start to think I must also be insane and that my own discontent is not valid. But it IS, sometimes, to a degree, and however unpleasant, I like it better than pretending to like stuff that I don’t. But I do not revel in it. I do not seek that which makes me miserable. It is highly adept at finding me, but this could be so much worse if I and it were both in on the scheme.

And so, this dorky little man alone on a stage rapping tough, it is hilarious how bothered we are. At least he shaved off that weird beard for the occasion. And he of the hyphenated first name was all over the broadbast despite only being nominuted for one award. The system wants him in it. I almost felt bad that he didn’t win the one award since I would have enjoyed the intensely negative reaction in here, and I worried I might have cursed him with my evil energy, like I did to Haley Joel Osment. Even though barring a Roberto Benigni-as-Pinocchio level overestimation of public adulation, he is probably going to be at every awfward show for the rest of my life. Unlike Bernigni he got scooped up by Disney, who will not tolerate challenges to their Real versions of folklore characters, and is only going to get harder to avoid. But this time, La Land La could not be overcome with regard to incessant mentions and camera time for participants, and its wretchtacular Best Picture win was what finally disgusted Sallius out of the room for good. Ha ha hee ho heh that is almost as funny, in retrospect.

Actually on that topic, recently the Disney company re-released Pinocchio and acted like that is a big deal for the 80th time, and the ad inexplicably has some ahhhhh oh oh oh song in it even though the actual film has its own songs which aren’t that. Any time there is song with a chorus saying “ahhhhhhh” or “na na na” or “oh oh oh” there is a good chance somebody will want it in a bad ad. Ads love songs with really breathy nonsense vocals

Also on that topic, but not on the topic I first alsoed on it:

I have seen news about this dork twice in my life and both times he had that same scumbag expression.
Our top story, some disembodied head guy that is probably horrid to talk to has made himself impossible to talk to
And a followup: apparently the company that owns everything was giving him money and only just realized he had that face. Gosh his middle name is “die.” Who assumed he wasn’t a corporate liability?

Who’s to blame when parties get out of hand? Who’s to blame when they get poorly planned?

A totally contextless and silent piece of something I have been working on. Initially I instituted bizarre movements in the overall production to distract from my unwillingness and inability to animate mouths. But recently it came to pass that I started animating the mouths anyway, which seems like it will render the completed product more presentable to others, but without making it unsightly to me, because ultimately I want people apart from myself to like this stuff that I spend years on, right? Yes, I do, and mouths are golly geeby gupty important to them. I am not very GOOD at it, but the mouth-work on Garfield and Friends was even worse and that stayed on the air for eight years. This only needs to be tolerable for eighty seconds. However, I will miss the order and balance that an absence of mouth movements brings about, especially since the way I do it, I need to redraw the whole head for each frame, rather than reusing the same one, so I use that as justification for showing this right here now. Also, I have no time to write anymore! I tried and it was bad, and sad. I cannot write non-sad things while I am worried, and I am worried about all the non-writing I need to finish. I am also worried about not having a website post ready. I would need to write it while I was not in need of one, which I can only do when I am not worried about unfinished beet matters. I am actually not worried about beets, but rather the things that I have not started doing because I have not been sufficiently worried about beets to complete their projects. However, I would BECOME worried about beets if I imagined I no longer cared about finishing them.