Demonic Halloween Costume Cult Dream

I sat in a van surrounded by people singing friendly road trip songs and eagerly discussing what life would be like from now on. We all wore the same plain, white t-shirt and jeans, and had short hair that stopped at our earlobes. The vans weren’t anything that I remember seeing in real life. A long, bench-like  seat wrapped around the inside walls like a limousine. The wall that slid open like a door didn’t have a seat. A pole stuck out of the floor so that people who had to stand could hold on to it. The only forward-facing seats were in the very back and in the front for the driver. There must have been three or four vans in our convoy. The air was pretty clean, and the forest surrounding the gravel road looked like a painted background moving behind the van windows.

We stopped at a sort of warehouse and parked among dozens of other bus-like vehicles. Dozens of other cultists like us were obviously inside. The building looked unfinished on the outside, like it was quickly built and intended to be taken apart again easily. White tin siding, unfinished pinewood, wing bolts. Inside, there were fluorescent lamps and clean checker patterned floor tiles. Aisles and aisles of metal shelves filled the whole inside of the building. Halloween costumes and toy weapons were neatly arranged on the shelves. Inside each costume was supposed to be an individual demon waiting to be merged with a human. Something on the way to this place had gotten me in a bad mood and I wasn’t feeling eager to go along with all of this. If I absolutely had to give my body to a demon, if I were forced against my will to wear a stupid costume, at least I’d be able to choose one out of such a wide variety. Irate by everyone else’s enjoyment, I found what looked like a whip in the middle of a bunch of soft, furry animal heads. Black and shiny, it was covered in scales with thin needle points sticking out. When I picked it up it slung itself out of my hand and around my body, and I felt a sharp pinch at the end of my spine and in my left nostril. This thing stuck out of my back like a tail. A spike like a toothpick was sticking out of the side of my nose. If I touched it, I could feel it rip at the inside of my nose, but I could also see things that I couldn’t before. I understood more information than I normally should have just by looking at something. I’d “merged” with this thing, but I didn’t feel at all like I was sharing my body with another soul and felt completely disillusioned by this stupid cult’s bullshit.

The group I arrived with began to collect at the entrance/exit of the building and we started moving out to leave. There was yelling and screaming outside. It sounded like quite a commotion. Where the buses and vans were parked, people in Halloween costumes were being stabbed by the hand-less arms of a tall creature and ripped apart in its wildly thrashing jaws. It had a thin body and thin limbs, was smooth, and so brittle that when it moved violently enough, parts of itself would accidentally break off. The joints in its arms and legs were hollow pot-like structures where the ends of each limb segment were sticking out. As it ran after people, it stabbed its footless legs into the ground like a person running on stilts. And its head looked like a shark’s head, and it moved chaotically as if it were trying to escape its own body. Some of the cult members ran into the fray to fight the thing. A lot of them were killed. The idea of killing this thing felt like fun. I ran in to get its attention, and dashed around it so that it would make sharp turns and trip over vehicles trying to chase me. It finally crashed to the ground and shattered. The head still wriggled around and snapped its jaws at everything it saw. I picked up a 4×4 piece of lumber that was lying nearby and smashed the head. Nobody around me seemed to care that I’d done something amazing. Nobody praised me, and it didn’t seem like anyone was any more glad to still be alive than before. I wanted attention and screamed like a child.

Then I woke.

Dream: Run Run Vegeta

For whatever reason, I was forced to retake middle and high school classes. Apparently there was a system I was caught up in and part of it was making 20-somethings retake fundamental classes alongside children. I must have been used to this system, because the office clerks whom I had to check in to accepted bribes to exclude from the record that I showed up late, and I’d memorized their charge rates. They only charged a small amount that coincided with personal belongings that would be confiscated by teachers and had to be paid for to get them returned. That way each bribery would look like an adult student buying back their whatever-shouldn’t-be-on-campus.

The last thing I remember was listening to a song. I’m sure it exists in real life somewhere and my subconscious held on to it. I did a little search in real life, and I couldn’t find it. It sounded like an old song, couldn’t tell if it was trying to be beach party or early punk, and the only lyrics I remember were, “run, run, run, run, Vegeta,” beat, “Godzilla!” Then there was a solo that reminds me of a Jim Croce song. Is it possible that my brain combined a mess of loose thoughts into an original song, or does that song exist somewhere?

What have I been up to for the past 3 hours, you ask?

There are six DVD sets that I want order from Rightstuf.com. They are:

Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam: volume 3 = $8.00
Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam: volume 4 = $8.00
Giant Robo Bargain Bundle = $9.99
Clannad: volume 2 = $5.99
Shigurui Death Frenzy: complete = $11.99
Otaku no Video = $8.99

Economy shipping rate is $3 for the first item ordered, plus $1 per each additional item.
Shigurui Death Frenzy is $11.99 for a limited time.
My bank account has x amount of dollars, and the cost of order all of these DVDs exceeds x considerably. y is the amount of dollars that I would like to keep in my account. x – y is approximately $37, the amount of money I’m willing to spend on ordering DVDs.

The first course of action is put together the obvious groups: the most expensive + the least expensive, the least expensive + the next least expensive. All other possible groups that I ran through were alterations of these two groups. When the sum of each group could allow the addition of another item, I added the least expensive item that wasn’t already in the group. When the sum of each group considerably exceeded $37, I removed it. The resulting groups that I favored:

Shigurui + Clannad2 + MSZG3 = $31.97
Shigurui + Clannad2 + MSZG3 + MSZG4 = $39.98
Shigurui + Clannad2 + Giant Robo = $32.97
Shigurui + Clannad2 + Otaku no Video = $35.97
Clannad2 +MSZG3 + MSZG4 + Otaku no Video = $36.98
Clannad2 + MSZG3 + Otaku no Video + Giant Robo = $38.97
Clannad2 + Otaku no Video + Giant Robo = $29.97

To narrow this list down, I ranked each DVD set between 1 and 3, based on how eager I am to own it. The greater the sum of points per group, the more likely it’ll be chosen for purchase. They were:

Shigurui + Clannad2 + MSZG3 = $31.97   (7)
Shigurui + Clannad2 + MSZG3 + MSZG4 = $39.98   (9)
Shigurui + Clannad2 + Giant Robo = $32.97   (6)
Shigurui + Giant Robo + Otaku no Video = $35.97   (5)
Clannad2 +MSZG3 + MSZG4 + Otaku no Video = $36.98   (7)
Clannad2 + MSZG3 + Otaku no Video + Giant Robo = $38.97   (6)
Clannad2 + Otaku no Video + Giant Robo = $29.97   (4)

Since $39.98 is cutting it pretty close to an uncomfortable price, I’m going to go with the $31.97 plan.

EDIT:
So I placed the order and the total wasn’t what I’d calculated. Whatever mathy bullshit I thought I was pulling off, it was apparently wrong.

Recently got a box of comics…

The lower half of this list is old as fuck. There’s some water damage, the images aren’t as crisp as we’d all like them to be, since the paper is so pulpy, and one or two covers have escaped their staples. When I flip through the pages, I smell a 50-year-old man’s childhood and decades of sitting in a closet. I don’t expect much response, I’m mostly making this list for the sake of making a list.

Marvel
Amazing Spider-Man – #365
Annex – #1
Beavis and Butt-Head – #1-6, 8, 9, 17
Conan The Barbarian – #129
Darkhawk – #2
Dazzler – #1
Excalibur – #32, 33
The Incredible Hulk – #300, 393
Kazar the Savage – #7
Longshot – #3
Marvel Fanfare – #9
Maverick – #1
Night Thrasher: Four Control – complete
Raiders of the Lost Ark – #2
Silver Sable – #1
Star Brand – #1, 15
Thunder Strike – #4
Wildstar – #1
Wolverine – #71

DC
Action Comics – #712
Action Comics Annual – #6
GHOSTS – #96
Kickers Inc. – #2
Legend of the Shield Annual – #1
Shade – #16, 40, 43
Superman – #364, 367
The Wanderers – #4, 6, 11

Image
Backlash – #7, 13, 14, 21, 22
Bloodstrike – #12, 14
Boof – #1
Boof and the Bruise Crew – #1
Brigade – #1, 2,  25
The Comet – #1
Darker Image – #1
Deathmate Yellow
Extreme Super Christmas Special – #1
Ripclaw – #2
Stormwatch – #2, 3, 5, 25,  27, 28, 42
Team One WildCATS – #1
Tribe – #1

Valiant
Deathmatch Yellow
Rai and the Future Force – #9

Wildstorm
Robotech – #1
Thundercats – #3

Topps
Mars Attacks – #4

Antarctic Press
Albedo – #9

Tekno Comix / BIG Entertainment
I-Bots – #2, 4, 7
Lost Universe – #2, 4, 5
Primortals – #1, 4-6, 9, 10
Mullkon Empire – #1
Xander in Lost Universe – #0

CHAOS!
Lady Death – #3

DDP
Voltron: A Legend Forged – #5

Defiant
Warriors of Plasm

Charlton
Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm – #21

Fawcett
Dennis the Menace Bonus Magazine – #115, 134

Whitman
Bugs Bunny – #176
Flash Gordon – #31-33
Pink Panther – #68
Tweety and Sylvester – #61
Walt Disney Mickey Mouse – #215
Walt Disney Scamp – #40

Archie
Archie and Me – #44, 88
Archie at Riverdale High – #7, 79
Betty and Me – #62
Betty and Veronica – #213
Jughead’s Jokes – #73
Li’l Jinx Giant Laugh-Out – #35
PEP – #268, 283
That Wilkin Boy – #22

Harvey Comics
Devil Kids – #87
Little Dot – #48, 137, 149, 152
Richie Rich – #124, 127, 128, 129, 163
Richie Rich and Gloria – #20
Richie Rich and Jackie Jokers – #43, 44
Richie Rich Cash – #37, 40
Richie Rich Dollars and Cents – #100
Richie Rich Gems – #36
Richie Rich Gold & Silver – #21
Richie Rich Jackpots – #53
Richie Rich Money World – #34
Richie Rich Profits – #26
Richie Rich Riches – #52, 54
Richie Rich Success – #97
Richie Rich Vaults of Mystery – #24
Richie Rich Zillions – #10
Sad Sack – #257, 279
Sad Sack and the Sarge – #116

This Morning’s Dream

Not very interesting to you, I bet.

Earliest parts I remember were of myself living the homeless life. For some reason, I had to stay hidden from most people. I was exiled from my group of pals, and I was wandering around until the part of the dream where I wandered back and they considered removing the exile. They had a hidden fortress built into a giant tree, and our quarters were inside of the branches. I was being asked to sleep on the outside of the branches until the decision was made that I would be fit to return or not. I don’t remember if I wanted to be accepted back or not, I just remember being frustrated. I found my own food and lived off of my own efforts. At some point I was given a closet to sleep in, or it was something like that. And people would harass me by stealing things I’d gotten while I was away or food I’d gotten for myself. I didn’t have the patience to wait for a permanent acceptance, and I left that place.

Next thing I remember is being in a school building where refugees were being transported to, divided and organized into groups, documented individually, and transported elsewhere. Their skin and clothes were different, and none of them spoke or responded to anything I’d say to them. I don’t remember why or how I’d gotten there, but I do remember seeing someone I recognized and trying to meet her. Stumbling through lines of people that shuffled between rooms, avoiding detection from men in uniforms with guns, and whenever I’d finally reach where I saw her, she’d be somewhere else that I was lucky enough to spot. Last thing I remember was hiding against a doorway that opened into the school building’s gymnasium. At least four doorways along the hallway opened into the gymnasium, only one line of people was moving in to the desk at the center of the room where people were being documented, name, teeth, hair samples and shit like that. I was outside of the doorway, looking in to see the person I was after getting recorded in the various ways. If I was spotted out of line, I’d draw unwanted attention. If I went into the line from here, I’d draw unwanted attention. If I were camouflaged in the line of people I might not be spotted, and in that case, I’d still have to face the person at the desk. I was trying to think of the new plan to catch up to this person when I woke.

Corny Happy Coffee Overdrive Poetry Post 2000 Mk.11 No. 20YO

To Sirs and Madams, with love…

Life can be compared to anything and everything, given the right frame of mind and desire to explore tired, trite analogies. For the sake of this tired, trite blogger, life is like a musical instrument right now.

Low chords, high chords, can look beautiful and sound shitty, can look trashed and sound awesome, or any variation of those juxtaposed phrases, can be played well while it can also merely appear to be played well, can be misused, destroyed, repaired, abandoned, or maybe replaced if you’re that kind of person, and it’s all got to do with who has what and how they why. A lot of times, people face the decision of abandoning life/said-musical-instrument and others have the ability to choose for themselves taken away, or never even given to begin with. Born without the ability to live/play beyond an extended period of time, or an unforeseeable disaster removes a person the ability to live/play. Sometimes a person like myself will forget how wonderful it is to play until he/she gets some perspective from other musicians, and he/she remembers that being able to play an instrument is a blessing, religiously toned or maybe shorthand for a more complex series of ideas that can be tested and disproved through the scientific method.

To be brief, I’m sorry to everyone who I’ve been a downer to, and I can’t promise that it won’t happen again, but I can tell you that you all make being able to play a metaphorical instrument worth… being able to play a metaphorical instrument. I won’t ever stop being sorry for any of mistakes, but for as long as I can remember this feeling, I’ll certainly do my best to stop being such a pain in the metaphorical ass.

Blobguy AKA Robert Anthony Frank

DO NOT OFFEND THE CHAIR LEG OF TRUTH. IT IS WISE AND TERRIBLE.

As usual, I don’t have a topic and I’m not proofreading.

I haven’t been doing well. I neglect my bodily needs and I have fallen back into the habit of rejecting what doesn’t fit my ideal version of reality. Near the end of high school, I was sinking into movies and comics. There were a lot of things going on that really fucked with my ability to process shit. As I was dealing with the terror of walking around at a college campus and encountering scores of new people, only just a few months ago, I fell back on comics and video games. In summer, when less people have had jobs and classes to deal with, it was a pretty rough ride for me to get used to being around my friends again, and even then, I threw strange fits in reaction to being forced to face things about myself and reality that I want to ignore. I’m certainly not the first person to have these kinds of things going on in my head. And I won’t be the first person to let my fear beat me into an awful, awful place for the rest of my life.

I keep bouncing between embracing that I will die without having lived, to put it simply if not dramatically, and wanting to be a part of the rest of the human race. Sometimes I confuse the two. Like in the case of the shitty podcast that I have been “trying” to make. Don’t  defend it, by the way, it’s supposed to be shit and I care as much about it as what I flush down the toilet. But I’ve been making it with the excuse of trying to spend time with people. But when spending time with people doesn’t live up to the grandeur I’d hoped, I fall back on the purpose of interaction being the podcast. I originally started it up because I wanted to keep in touch regularly with one person, someone I can fall back on when I was tired of my self-imposed isolation. That’s a lot of responsibility to push onto someone, and it wasn’t fair of me. And it’s not how a healthy person reacts to wanting to break out of fucked habits.

For the first time ever, not too long ago, I had some hardcore introspection about whether or not I wanted to continue living past that night. I obviously did. Besides that, there shouldn’t be a reason for me to think about my own life in this way. You could say that I haven’t experienced anything that would make life unbearable, and I will always believe that there’s potential for a better situation, even if I forget that belief sometimes.

Drawing in the Dark: Through a Window Darkly

I'm not ready to put away childish things, yet.

The Lost Dream

What ever it was, I want it back. This is the second day in a row that a phone has taken me out of a dream that I was enjoying, and the phone call itself was meaningless. I want to go back there.

I’ve been thinking about the fate of this blog.

It’s been a long, long time since I’ve treated this blog as a showcase for my artwork. It’s been a personal one, for most of the time I’ve had it. You can probably tell what stages and crises I was putting myself through by reading through past years’ entries. This is a comfortable place for me to grow as a person, and it doesn’t necessarily need to go away just because I don’t use it so much these days. The time will come when I eventually will scrap this and move on to something more professional, or more focused on a central thing. The important thing for this blog, at the moment, is that it’s here when I need it, until I grow out of it. I’m still not done growing into an adult, some would say, unfortunately, but I haven’t felt as comfortable with myself as I am now since… I really can’t remember if I’ve ever felt as comfortable in my own skin as I have been lately. I don’t know what life is going to be like for me, and that doesn’t scare me anymore. I don’t know what I’m going to do to support myself, when I finally decide it’s time for me to start, but I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it. And I honestly don’t care if anyone thinks that I’m being lazy, useless, cowardly, pathetic, stupid, or immature. I am all of those things.

Lucid Dream

There were parts when I remembered that I was dreaming. And there were parts where simply wanting to be somewhere else brought me to a new location in the dream, but that didn’t necessarily mean that I liked being where I’d put myself.

The earliest part of the dream I remember is being somewhere where my high school classmates were. I get the general feeling that this is very soon after our graduation. We we gathered in a white building, some of us talking to each other, some of us avoiding each other. Someone I used to have one of my many stupid crushes on IRL showed up in the dream to talk to some of my freshly graduated peers. I was exiting the building as she was entering, and I asked to be excused as I almost bumped into her. She sneered at me. I don’t ever remember seeing that kind of look on her face. Outside of the building, I was waiting for something, but I don’t remember what. More people kept coming and going, all jovial, all nostalgic. I sat on the sidewalk outside for a while, and then felt someone kicking me. It was the person I’d almost bumped into. I surrendered to receiving whatever pain she thought I deserved, but she said that she was only trying to get my attention, and sat next to me, saying that she was going to help me. The way that people were talking inside the white building, the way I was so completely lost inside, the way I feel when I try to focus on college-sort-of-things, I get the feeling, now that I’m awake, that she was talking about helping me sign up for a school.

I next remember images of inside of a department store and wandering around in this house I live in at night while drunk, but I don’t remember the order or a more than that.

Morning at a college. It looked nothing like any college that I’ve seen IRL, by the way. I had been going to classes for months. This first class was math related. The teacher was excited about what he’s teaching, but after months of teaching this particular group of students, we could all see how jaded he’d become. Nobody paid attention. Nobody cared. I woke on the classroom floor, realizing that at some point, I’d decided to lay down and sleep. I was so ashamed of myself. I sat upright, and pulled the books and papers on my desk closer to me, as if that would make me seem more attentive. That teacher looked at me in disgust and without saying anything got his shit together and left. Nobody cared and went about their shit, and I was so embarrassed and ashamed and angry at myself.

I left that classroom, and the hallways turned out to be a part of the high school. I walked down to the end, because I was sure that this wasn’t the same place I’d been in a moment ago, and found the door to one of the high school art classrooms. I walked in and saw students working. A certain bald-headed teacher was wandering around, looking at the progress of each student. He saw me and looked at me with fierce eyes, as if to ask why the fuck I’d ever come back here again. I wanted to leave them all alone, but he stopped me and told me, “you’re gonna be alright.”
I didn’t understand. Stumbling and confused by everything around me,  I wandered into an office-like room where Walls was making photocopies of something. He looked younger than I remember seeing him IRL. He came up to me calling me, “Bobberino,” and asked how I was doing. I couldn’t say anything. I couldn’t speak or gesture. I couldn’t communicate anything, and all I wanted to do was leave this place as fast as I could.

Somewhere along the way, I’d heard someone mention a friend of mine, and the conversation was sullen, as if something bad had happened. I scrambled, moving blindly to get somewhere I thought that my friend would be, and the door to their house formed in one of the walls. Inside of the house, it was night, and the door was locked. I could see a single person through a window. I banged on the door until someone would open it. And everyone was fine. I could see them in the doorway as the door opened. I fell onto the floor exhausted and crying.

That’s not “deadpan snark,” Bob, you’re just an Eeyore.

I’ve been perusing the content of TV Tropes with great delight. Previously unaware of this site’s existence, I am now familiarizing myself with its terms and definitions so that I can effectively use it as a tool to further enjoy my consumption of entertainment. There are several articles within that I love just based on how common a trope has become despite its lack of presence in the real world, including We Want Our Jerk Back and Woobie The Destroyer of Worlds.

I came across the page about physics, which is incredibly well summed up by the quotation along the top of the article. That got me thinking about the shortcomings of a story that doesn’t follow its own rules. In Star Wars, space travel is depicted in much the same way that driving between states is. Presenting interplanetary travel in a fantastical sense works against the mysticism of interplanetary travel. For most of my life, I believed that time passed at the same rate in all points of the universe. Learning the opposite filled my mind with renewed wonder, and I have come to appreciate stories that are built around a submission to physics as often as ones that ignore it to tell conventional stories. This doesn’t mean that, in my transition from stupid kid to cynical asshole, I think lesser of the dumb shit than I already did. A steam engine plowing through space is as exciting to me as the best moments in 2001: A Space Odyssey. (Whether you think that this is a comparable pair in regards to excitement may be a different story.)

Beyond science-fiction, I’ve gotten to thinking about other examples of stories that don’t follow their own rules, rules based within the universe of the story instead of ones based on real life. According to Cyrus on Spill.com, Joss Whedon works well on the audience’s suspension of disbelief because of Buffy‘s very strict rules about what vampires are and how to kill them. It’s easy to be pulled into a fantastical world that abides by its rules thoroughly, as opposed to a fantastical world where all rules are broken, bypassed, and subverted by a lack of consequence. But then the prime example of a show with tight logic seems to fall apart when you reach season seven.

I don’t know where my thoughts are taking me or what I intend to do with my discoveries, evidenced by my anticlimactic ramblings in the past, but this is all very interesting, and I have TV Tropes to thank for the new wing in overthinking playground.

Dream

A long, cold, winding produce market, inside of a space station, maybe. I kept running into various versions of the many people I know. Two or three different points in their lives each with a different appearance and a different set of emotions. I treated each individual version of a single friend as a completely separate identity. Like… Friend-1 had three versions of herself walking around. Friend-1A had a career that was taking her far away and she was saying goodbye to me, probably the last time I’d ever see her again. I bumped into Friend-1B, almost confused her for Friend-1A, but remembered that 1B would never leave and I just gestured a passing greeting and continued what I was doing. What I was doing… I was trying to follow someone. I started the dream following this person, and he/she walked away for a moment as I was saying my farewell to someone else, and I was almost in a panic trying to find him/her again when that was over. It’s as if while I was dreaming, I was organizing files of people in my memory, with my older understandings of friends that I have were being deleted to make room for the moderns understandings, and I was desperately trying to hold onto the memory of someone as I started to wake.

When I had awoken, I forgot everyone I’d met in the dream. All I could recall is that I was talking to friends. As I lingered on the scenes I could easily remember, other stuff slipped away, and I’m sure that the people who I think I was talking to in the dream are just mistakes from me trying to fill blanks.

Being Honest with Myself

If I really want to be a professional comic artist, I’d be doing it to pass the time. I’d be finding any excuse just to work on the next page of the new idea, no matter what it’s about, no matter my ability as an artist, no matter what I think of myself. I’d be doing it right now if I cared enough about it. But I’m not doing it. So I’m convinced that my energy surrounding comics isn’t that of the desire to create, but to consume. And like many children, when I am impressed by an artist I think of their craft as a game that I want to play in too. The school plays, the amateur recordings, the awful poems, cartoons, and the many brief moments when I feel like I might want to play music or be an animator. Delusions have got to stop. I have never known what I want to do with my life, only what I want to be doing at the moment.

So what is it that I want to do with my life? I don’t know. I really, really don’t know. If I start up college classes again, what will I focus on doing? What is the goal? All I can think about is how I can mold my classes around my ability to enjoy the various media I consume. The deadline feeling is rushing through me right now, and I have nothing. No classes, no employment, nothing to make me feel this way. Like I’ll be out of time, soon, and I need to decide right now. For what? Do what?

I feel ashamed of myself. Because I’ve always been lying to myself, I’ve never been able to be honest with other people. That’s where all of my friendships go. Nobody who knows me should think well of me. Nobody I know should ever trust me.

Undesirable Dream

I’m in an institution that takes care of children and adults with mental problems. Illnesses that caused us to have a hard time living on our own or staying out of trouble.

White walls with cork boards, inspirational posters, and banners made of paper alphabets. A colorful carpet. A long table with a white cloth, on which baskets of food were placed. Various chips and candies. We were gathered around this table, sitting at it, each of us discussing what we like, but none of what each of us were saying had anything to do with what any of the others around us were saying. So I’d talk about Gundam as if everyone else there was talking about Gundam, and then someone would talk about her cat as if I had just said something about cats, and the next of us to speak would argue something about Superman as if this were a debate about Superman the whole time. None of us noticed that nobody else was talking about what we were talking about. I was fidgeting with something, maybe food, maybe a toy. My fingers short and wide and difficult to move.

Later on, with some feeling of time passing, I was elsewhere within this institution. Sitting at a table in a kind of auditorium. White walls. White tiled floor. Stacking chairs spread throughout the room, all of them facing the stage. It was a recess into the wall with a raised floor. Wood panels. Someone we see about two or three times a week had a mic and was singing and asking us questions. I wasn’t participating, I was focusing on food, which was spread around on tables in this room. I remember feeling more comfortable with the food in this room than the food in the other room. It was easy to hold and it was fresh. The people participating in the group activity stuff were older, much older folks who had jobs outside of the institution. They all wore some sort of uniform. I remember feeling like they got special treatment because they had jobs and didn’t have to visit this place if they didn’t want to, even though they were just like those of us who did have to come here. People who were difficult to talk to because either they couldn’t understand what was being said to them well or what they said couldn’t easily be understood. The effort behind their speech is apparent to me, now, but in the dream it felt like they were just older than I was, and that’s how older people are. The person with the mic started to play some music and was trying to entice everyone to dance. Only one guy stood straight up and looked around like he was expecting someone else in the crowd to join him. He might have been pretty embarrassed. All of these people in one spot had been hardened and desensitized by the way they’d been treated most of their lives, and the group thought was, “I’m not going to be told by a clown in a suit with a mic to dance just because he wants us to dance.” The woman sitting nearest to the guy who stood first slowly made her way over to the poor guy so that they could dance together. Her breasts were large and swung heavily underneath her blouse as she walked, and her back was formed in such a way to make them look like pendulums swaying before her thighs. There was a general sense that something uncomfortable was about to happen filling the room. I saw another man who was sitting nearby this woman twitching and rubbing his hands in his seat. He had apparent sexual urges that needed to be dealt with right away. He stood and made his way over to the woman to propose intercourse as she and the first guy put a lot of effort into figuring out how to dance.

This is what I woke from.

I can’t believe the things I forget and falsehoods of my own memory.

I was trying to edit a recording of a conversation I was having with a friend about a show we’re watching. We started recording immediately after watching a few episodes, and I was saying things, describing characters’ appearances and dialogue without realizing I was recalling partial truths. What’s more is it’s a show that I watched a few times over, over the years, and in the past month from beginning to end. It’s something I love. And I don’t remember things about it. On top of that, it hasn’t occurred to me until just now that what I was saying was confused, after I’ve been spending hours sifting through materials related directly to the show in question, days after the last time I listened to myself reciting obvious mistakes.

What is going on with me? This feels like an entirely new problem, but I’m sure it’s been going on longer than I’ve been aware. I can imagine how people feel when they’re in conversations with me. I’ll say something that I believe is truthful and follow it with something that completely contradicts it, also believing it’s true. I’ll remember something a way that isn’t true at all, and when I look squarely at solid evidence against that memory, I won’t notice it. I wouldn’t have as much of a problem coping with it if these were conscious efforts to make myself seem a certain way around people, but this is frightening. Is this related to my often shifting self image and moods? And maybe it has something to do with my difficulties relaying specific ideas. People have told me that I don’t have that problem, but I am the only person who knows what the idea feels like inside of my own mind. How am I supposed to know if others have those same idea-feelings when they’re inside their heads? And maybe this also has something to do with my difficulty staying on topic. All of these problems might be connected to something.

I think that assuming I have a few network problems, instead of many unrelated problems, in other words, thinking along the lines that I have a psychological illness has triggered moments of clarity for me in the past, and I’ve experienced it again. Just have to hold on to the idea that I’ve got a problem, and I should be able to keep a good deal of my mind-self under control, right?

Bacon Avenger

As much thought went into this as... something.

Last kid in the neighborhood to get his first set of dice…

Given to me by Kyliegh. I used them for the first time at the latest session in Ziggy's campaign. Crit-failed every roll.

Giant Robo: The Day Logic Stood Still (spoiler free)

As a fan of sentimental giant robot anime, I did enjoy this. I was surprised that even without any knowledge whatsoever of the original television series, I was moved by the emotions and actions of the characters in the animated series. There is an entire mythology behind Giant Robo, and I have only glimpsed a small part of it.

This series is made up of seven episodes, and each one is roughly between 40 and 60 minutes long, including the time it takes to intro, summarize the previous episode, and close with full credits. Didn’t find myself enjoying a lot of moments, most of them being inappropriately repeated pieces of dialogue from earlier moments, like the many quick descriptions of Shizuma’s invention and the big accident that was erased from history. I took these frequent bits of recycled speeches as opportunities to check the time and was surprised by how slowly the plot was moving despite how short each installment is.

It wasn’t easy for me to keep up with who has what kind of powers and which characters are in what subfaction, mostly because I’m pretty dumb, and partially because this is such a dense cast of characters. The voice cast must reach triple digits. To help me keep track of the growing cast of characters and their constantly changing histories, I drew parallels to the original Star Wars as I was watching this. Who we thought was a completely good guy turned out to be horribly flawed, and a seemingly evil person was revealed to be a savior in his own way, and the protagonist isn’t as in control of the way that the story turns out as we were being led to believe through most of the series. The Star Wars way is my tool for keeping up with a lot of stories with a lot of characters.

Logic stands still in this series because of the characters. Without them, this story wouldn’t exist to begin with. And by that, I don’t mean that you need characters to tell a story. I mean that this particular story was molded to fit the cast, so to speak. So it shouldn’t be surprising when you realize that most of the conflicts between characters would not have happened at all if they had merely told each other the truth from the beginning. Episode six is the most blatant example of this. If you’ve seen the show, you know that these plot holes are everywhere, and chances are that you don’t care. And you shouldn’t. Because this isn’t Orson Scott Card or Arthur C. Clarke. If Giant Robo has one strength, it’s that it doesn’t give a shit how flawed it is, and it makes absolutely no attempts to hide it. It keeps on offering the very best in animation and mad science. And the fights are super cool!

I’ve slept three times in this day.

Fell asleep listening to the latest episode of Let’s Do This.

I just woke from a dream in which Korey and Co-Host from Spill.com and Hugo Weaving were hanging out after dark, running through an industrial town. I was tagging along. And we were fighting off punks in hoodies and makeup who were ambushing us and attacking us with improvised weapons like they were a gang from The Warriors. Next, we climbed up a broken elevator shaft into an apartment building and we were hanging out with this Spanish-speaking family. But Hugo Weaving said or did something that pissed off the family and Co-Host screamed every curse word as we were being pushed out of the apartment by an old woman in a sleeping gown. I lagged behind, because I had to gather my jacket and the bag that Hugo Weaving left behind. I got lost trying to catch up to the others, and started having to fight some of those hoodie-wearing zombie-looking wannabes on my own. They had flails with pipe handles and clusters of bricks at the ends of the chains. All I had was a pipe and my fat, useless ass, and I was walking into certain death when I woke.

Nothing New

Scanner / printer doesn’t connect to any machines, anymore.

Even if it did,  I still wouldn’t have posted any new artwork.

Not because I don’t have new artwork to post, but because it’s not worth posting.

It’s just garbage. I’ve fallen into a depressed state all week.

I’ve realized that most of my life, when I come up with a little project or each new idea, and I get excited about the whole thing, I’m just making a new excuse for myself to continue living for the moment.

I guess that I’ve been doing things this way for years, but since this is a new revelation, I really don’t know how long I’ve been like this. Or if it’s even true.

On the same line of thought, I think I’ve also realized that I don’t take care of myself so well is my way of  ensuring that I die early without actually committing suicide. That feels like a logical conclusion when looking at how I treat my body.

Maybe I’m just tricking myself again. Thinking that I can rationalize the awful in myself. When we all know that mos minds aren’t rational at all.

Captain Piping

Have I been driven to this point, or did I put myself here? Should I be focused on correcting myself or understanding myself? Will I ever do anything or will I continue to expect things to be done for my benefit? Thinking about things, asking questions, laying on the couch and getting fatter each day. I will always feel awful toward myself. I’ll always blame, knowing that all blame is misplaced and undeserved. Even if I continue to blame myself for as many things as I do. When will I make things change for myself?

I feel like I’m running on borrowed time. Like my subconscious knows about something in the future, and I’m just waiting for whatever that thing is to show up, and I won’t have to worry about anything once it’s arrived. I’ve only started feeling that way recently. Just like times when I’ll have conversations with people, and I’ll have moments when I’m interrupted and it hurts. And when I mowed the lawn and the neighbors saw me panting on the ground. What is that feeling? In the heat of physical stress, I’ll experience emotional episodes as well. And I thought to myself that it was my pride being hurt, that pain I don’t recognize. How dramatic I can be.

What am I waiting for?

Unhealthy Body, Unhealthy Mind

I suppose that I’ll never have a good idea of what kind of person I am in others’ minds. That doesn’t bother me so much, right now.

The other day, I mowed the lawn in the first time in so very long. It was pretty hot, and I’m in a much worse physical condition than I’ve ever been.

It’s such a simple thing. A combustion engine underneath a metal shell and wheels. It’s going to be the cause of my death. Either I push the death machine or we get fined by the city. I’m so weak. How pathetic can a human soul be? No burden is too great for any human being, and I nearly die pushing a fucking lawn mower. A part of me wishes that it would just happen. No part of my self is conditioned to survive. If I were literally starving, do I have a strong enough will to live to find a way to fight it? If I had to fight to see the next day, would I care enough to try? Always waiting for things to happen for me. Never going to change.

This Morning’s Dream with Additional Notes

I don’t know how many people read my unimportant updates on Facebook AND my unimportant posts on this blog, but whatever.

I had a dream about spending time with other people, day and night. Somehow, I could afford to spend nights at hotels. Mornings were unbelievably brightly lit, and everything moved calmly, as if through water. I still hadn’t turned 21, and there were so many things at the convenience store that contained alcohol. I met a mass of my friends one-by-one, and we looked for each others’ items, so we could evenly chip in to buy everything each one of us was after.
In this scene of the dream, it started with me waking in a hotel room. It looked like I wasn’t the only one spending the night there, but I was alone. Sheets all over the place, an empty bottle. The glass was very dark green. I put on shorts. They were jeans that had been torn about the thighs. I walked down the steps just outside the door. A parking lot. The buildings, the pavement, the sidewalks, the streets, the trees, all looked pale in the brilliant morning light. A friend from high school was carrying groceries in a paper bag. She had some ideas about what I had been doing the night before, but she never said anything about it. All that mattered to her was that I was alright. And I felt that. She was glowing.
The convenience store was packed with aisles. That was unusual for such a small place. And so many people so close to each other. I saw someone who I found very intimidating, and realized that my jean shorts could inspire a bout of violence from this person. The woman in the suit told me so. 

I remember a scene at a party, where a young lady and a young man were vigorously fucking on a mattress in the middle of the room in a house party. I accidentally knocked something over, because I’m a clumsy person, or something to that effect, and the young lady started screaming insults at me. For some reason, she assumed that I hadn’t graduated middle school, which I was very offended by. A woman was following me everywhere, but I think that I was the only person who could see or hear her. She always took notes on what I was doing and wore a business suit with pants and pinstripes. She often laughed under her breath at moments like this encounter at the house party.
Interestingly enough, I was increasingly aware of this scene as time passed in my convenience store scene. It’s as if I was remembering this whole thing within the dream, though I hadn’t dreamt it beforehand. Since the woman following me was speaking to me in the convenience store, maybe she was telling me these events, and a part of my unconscious mind has created an entire set of visuals to match the scenario she described.

Later, I was riding in a vehicle with a completely different cast of friends. It was a tall car, but there didn’t seem to be a roof and the windshield was small. Only one or two people could sit comfortably in the car the correct way, with two seats and torsos sticking out, like we were in a tank. So some of us were sitting in seats installed on the outside of the car. Someone used a very old set of toy pieces, which resembled the Little Digger, to hold an old portable television in place in front of one of the seats on the outside of the car. Nuts, bolts, washers, and tape held it in place, and wires ran into the car, where I could only assume a VCR was located.
I remember now that the vehicle was made of this incredibly dense, hard metal. It was heavily coated in yellow paint, which chipped away. Sometimes the uncovered metal was pale and tan, sometimes it was almost black with rust. I remember assuming that it really was a tank. Maybe it was. I’d like to say that I remember a turret, but I can’t say so with complete certainty. The tires weren’t really tires, I think. They were spherical, with studs sticking out of the surfaces.

The woman that only I could see appeared in this vehicle to tell me that with all of the events that I ensure happen around me, all of the encounters that I have, the nights I spend in strange places, and the company I keep regularly, the things I wear and the jokes I tell, my anticipations and every word of conversation that she had taken note of were indications that I wanted to study dramatic arts. That just didn’t make sense to me at all.

Amarcord: starring John Wayne as Aurelio Biondi

SPOILERS FOR AMARCORD

Amarcord isn’t a bad film. In fact, it makes me care for the characters as if I had grown up knowing them, myself. Which makes it a success as a piece of art. As a comedy… not so much. It’s interesting how the lives of the supporting characters have such little to do with the development of the protagonist, if you can find him. This makes it almost a complete 180 degrees from being a John Wayne film, in which all of the plot points and character decisions would be wrapped around John Wayne’s every comment, step, and thought. And the idea struck me that a good comedic experiment could be to adapt the plot of Amarcord into a Ford/Wayne-ish story and film it as an intentional companion to the original.

Titta’s father, Aurelio, is a perfect lead. He’s angry about the fascists running his beloved country and family means more to him than anything.  If we remove the mother character, Wayne would be playing a rugged, single father, who would instantly win the sympathies of any romantic interests roaming the set. That’s where Gradisca comes in. Titta will be played by a much younger boy, so that the movie can’t be bothered with the realistic emotional conflicts of a teenager and his father competing over the same woman, and the implications of an Oedipus complex to go along with it.
Aurelio is secretly the leader of a band of rebels. A foreign prince comes to the little town where all this shit takes place for a quaint vacation spot. His real intentions are to make direct contact with Aurelio, so that the Prince can offer the support of his own country to overthrow Mussolini. The Prince takes notice of a sexy, sexy woman in this bumpkin town, and invites her for a private meeting in his bed later that night. The night of the super, secret treason meeting. While in the Prince’s quarters, waiting for her royal sugardaddy to show up, she thinks of a good way to present herself. She strips frantically and poses on the bed, which is draped in curtainy fabric stuff. Aurelio is looking for the Prince and walks into the bedroom, lights off, and the voice of a woman greeting him with, “I’m all yours.”
“All yours? That’s a funny name.” From this point on, Aurelio makes pitiful jokes, calling Grandisca “all yours,” to which everyone but Grandisca laugh heartily at.
A few scenes later, Aurelio, his father, and his son go to the hospital to visit the mentally ill brother. They all go on a little picnic. But nobody is watching the sick brother when he fills his pockets with stones and climbs a tree. From the branches of the tree, he screams, “I want a woman,” and throws stones at anyone who tries to climb the tree to pull him out. Aurelio folds his arms, laughing to his son and stone-stricken father, “I think we oughtta get the fella a woman!” They send for Grandisca, and she agrees to charm the sick brother out of the tree. After the episode is over, Grandisca and Aurelio movie-flirt.
Later on, Il Duce makes his appearance. In the middle of the night, Aurelio is leaving his house to go to town, where he intends to draw the attention of the fascists and snipe them one-by-one from the bell tower of the church. His rifle and phonograph are already waiting for him in the bell tower. This is his impromptu chance to avenge his dead wife. Aurelio can’t open the gate, however, because it’s been chained and locked. Having the physical ability to, he climbs over the gate, where Grandisca has been waiting, to make sure that he can’t go through with his plan. Some loud talking and an exchange of slaps, and Aurelio heads off, leaving Grandisca behind to cry.
Mussolini is playing pool and drinking, when all of the power goes out in the town. Music can be heard echoing through the streets. Men in black uniforms run and holler between buildings when a shot rings out and one of the men in black clutches his side and curls onto the stony road. Aurelio is shooting at fascists from the tower, as he’d intended. Everyone surrounds the building and it’s an all-out battle between one man and many.
One of the secondary characters does something to distract the faceless badguys, and Aurelio is forced into escaping by some half-assed speech from his momentarily well-spoken brother.
Grandisca uses her connection with the foreign Prince to help Aurelio escape the country. Aurelio, himself, is too proud to take part in the plan, so it’s kept a secret from him. While drunk, he is convinced that the secondary character who caused the distraction from before has been captured and taken to an island nearby. They act like this is a rescue mission and take a boat to the sea in heavy, heavy fog. After rowing out for hours, the boat meets a foreign civilian cruise ship hidden in the fog. They have to spill the beans to the sobering-up Aurelio, and convince him that escape is his only option. A second boat comes out from the ship, and Aurelio gets on. He and Grandisca kiss.

From this point, I feel like Aurelio should either watch Italian soldiers in boats gun down the boat with his friends and attempt to board to ship. Should this be the ending, or should Aurelio dive out of the ship in time to take one of the soldiers’ boats and shoot all of the bad guys without any of the sympathetic characters dying?

dafnnnnnnnnnnnjkl;rgrgsfabuolgrr35hr5holiufsdalkkjjjaqrgjkujgbhsdfo;uhrgeareagl;nkres

I am in the middle of one of those times when I feel completely apathetic. When my emotions are stagnant, and it takes a lot of effort and concentration to do anything that isn’t lying down and sleeping. I don’t feel distress. I don’t get happy or amused. I’ll pretend when people are around. People who experience true apathy, they’re the kinds of people who have it all of the time, right? Because they’re missing a part of the brain? I must have something else. Like the passages between parts of my brain get blocked every now and then. I still like listening to the music I listen to, but I don’t feel emotional about it. I anticipate the things that I am a fan of, but I don’t feel excited. My sense of humor is different. My tolerance for hunger and thirst are different. I would rather sleep than spend time doing anything. Why am I typing this? I must not be feeling entirely apathetic if I’m going through the trouble of making public statements about myself, then. I feel very tired. How can I feel physically drained of energy like this? Is this depression coming back to me? Have I ever really understood depression? I’ve spent most of my life feeling a limited ranged of emotions and quite a few social ills. Not to be confused with social illnesses, which I’m sure I have a few of, also. Maybe this feeling is something new. This Imogen Heap song starts playing, and I’ve got more of an emotional response to it. I feel like my brain’s done a major file-cleansing process, and a lot of bits of local memory are deleted. Like there’s a strained connection between my mind as it once was and my body. Like I’m a sack of meat and bones being controlled like a puppet. I’m very heavy. I don’t know if I have the energy to lift and carry myself for another day. There’s slight pressure around my eyes and nose when I close my eyelids. I stand up and my eyes can’t focus. They’re hard to control. I’m going to drag myself to the couch so that I don’t have to hold up my head anymore. Or anything. Or anything anything. Maybe I shouldn’t wake if I fall asleep.

Fuck.

Haven’t had a night like that in a while…

I started sleeping around 10PM, I think. That seems about right. I had normal sleeping patterns, without any breathing problems or aches in my back. I think that this is a sign that I need to get out more often without setting a priority or a goal to accomplish.

Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex – Jungle Cruise (click for sketch and reference)

I spent a few minutes adjusting a lamp so that I could see how shadows are cast on the body when a gun fires in front of it. Batou has a bulkier build than I do, and I did last minute changes to the angle of the arm. Improvised the jacket, since I didn't think to wear one when shooting my reference. I really like how this turned out.

Fun with Nosferatu (click to see sketch and reference)

I did this piece to break in the new brush. Just for fun. I think I ought to lay off of the improvised lettering.

The Unexpected Dream with an Unexpected Guest

I was with friends. In a car. At a store complex. A place of community. A small cluster of stores surrounded by acres of parked cars. We arrived, interacted with dozens of people in the parking lot, I stepped into a dozen cars and had dozens of conversations in each one. Then another friend of mine showed up. Familiar feelings returned. Being around her was like a well of gravity dancing around my soul, pulling on it and stretching it like clay with which she molded into any form she’d like. When I first saw her, I avoided her. Hopping between as many cars as I could to get farther away. But she found me, when the night was darkest, when the clouds where gone, the moon was gone, and the stars were gone, by the light of flaming torches, she found me, while I hid from her. Truthfully, if I didn’t want to meet her, if I had really wanted to flee, I’d have left the damn place. And there she was, approaching me, slowly, and in each step I felt a layer of myself being peeled away. By the time she’d reached me, she spoke a few words, and I knew she could see how the core of my being jumped around deep inside me. She touched my hair. She knelt to look inside of the car. She smiled at me and asked if I’d like to go inside. That beautiful, terrible smile could start wars and raise the dead, it could cure all illness and exercise demons, the moons and planets rearrange themselves around it and and collide with each other.

The time that has passed… it feels like a wall separates me from past emotions, and this dream was a window in the wall. I could look through it, but I couldn’t walk through it.

Science Fiction Dream

My team and I ran, as fast as we could in our bulky atmosphere suits, from the experimental chambers to the teleportation pad. We had seconds, and the station would destabilize and crumble around us if we stayed for another second longer. The team sat in a circle on the pad and focused. Some of our noses were bleeding. We all knew that there was no chance we’d remember the progress we’d made in the last few months. We all knew, that no matter how many times we’d done this in the past, we’d forget. Despite our immense despair, we had to focus.

Something is wrong. We’ve docked at an ancient-looking station. The ship seems to think we’ve been here for months. How did we get here? And we’re missing a handful of crew members. I’m taking an away team to check that station out. We don the atmospheric suits, we gather on the teleportation pad, and concentrate collectively on our destination. With our minds synced on a single destination, the pad sends all of us together to the pad inside of the station. If we aren’t synced… we could go anywhere, and with disassembled bodies.

The station’s old, alright. This place looks like a laboratory for medical experiments. Chambers of stasis pods with living beings inside. Most have terminal illnesses that will continue to grow, if we free them. Some pods are broken open. And one of them has a member of my crew inside. How did he get there? We’ve been searching the place for a few hours without anything happening, and then an alarm goes off. There’s a warning about destabilization. The whole place is shaking and doors are closing all over the place. We run back to the pad.

Our seventh visit. It’s been a week since we’ve woken to this nightmare. We go back to that station every day, spending hours unlocking certain parts, searching new chambers, and picking up on the experiments where those before us left off. It seems like the member of our crew that appeared inside of the stasis pod has contracted one of the terminal diseases that people were sent here to be treated for. After a few hours of quick work, we rush to the pad before our lines to the ship cause the station to destabilize. We’ll get to the bottom of this.

It’s been a month. We can’t take much more of this, grinding away at dead research so that we can save one crew member. Everyone else is getting worn down, physically and mentally. We have to leave this station soon. We’ve encountered security machines locked deep inside of the station. It took a whole week to round them back up and lock them in again, just so we can get back to working safely on the station. It wasn’t worth it. We should have used it as an excuse to get the fuck out.

We’re running as fast as we can to get out. A rip appears on the wall of a chamber inside of the station, and a member of my team gets sucked through. Her body was shredded by the opening’s edges, like the station itself had finally taken its chance to devour one of us. We have to leave this place now. But when we get back to the ship, will we remember to leave? Walls, doors, glass stasis pods and metal furniture get tossed around inside of the station’s chambers. As we run, the station itself seems to be dancing around us, like this is some sort of ritualistic game. On the teleportation pad, we all need to focus on the destination, but all I can think to myself is, “don’t piss, don’t piss, don’t piss…”

I wake, with my bladder about to explode. I wonder how long I had told it in while I was asleep. And I think it’s marvelous that my mind invented a scenario that would quickly wake me and warn me about needing to go, at the same time.

Burning Bridges

It’s good that people forget about me. That they get tired of me. I’m not a healthy person to know, and I’ve met plenty of people like that.

I’ve made decisions that have effected others’ lives. I’ve been rude and supportive and insulting and generous, and I’ve never been the same person from minute to minute. It’s hard to be my friend, I know.

There are people who can tell you that I’m quite the hypocrite, and that I shouldn’t feel hurt or abandoned as often as I do, because I do many of the same things myself.

My friends have lied to my face. They’ve laughed at me in my presence, believing that I didn’t know. Or not caring. My friends hold me down and force me to drink water to prove a point. They’ve looked me in the eyes and tell me how they’d dispose of my body. And how many times worse am I to them than they are to me? Why are we so cruel to each other? Why do any of you let me live?

Doesn’t it just feel right that I should… well, it’s not like people gain anything from knowing me

SBI 10: First Class Humor (contains puns)

Life on Bawb 10 and 11 spread

There are friends of mine who will likely pick up on the awful anatomy in the first page. I raised the second head too far from the neck, the feet are at the wrong angles for the legs, and that right arm is awful. You probably can't tell, but I used a program to erase stray splashes of red ink that landed on other panels. When I get white-out stuff, I'll fix the actual pages the same way.

Life on Bawb 9

Life on Bawb 7 and 8

Latest Dream

I was in a bookstore owned by a friend. I had to depend on my parents for rides to and from places.

In the store, I was looking for material that had been suggested to me. I felt like I was committing the same crime as those guys who read the Twilight books to stay on their girlfriends’ good sides. I found this awful book that I didn’t want to read and started reading the first few pages. My parents were impatient about my trek through the store taking so long, so when my friend who owned the bookstore announced that the store was closing for the day, I left, but with the book still in my hand. In the parking lot, I realized, and rushed back to the store to return the book or pay for it, without bothering to explain the whole thing to my parents. I approached the door of the store, and the owner did this silent, “aw hell fuckin’ no,” gesture for me to leave. I stood outside of the store, looking in through the windows, watching the owner converse with someone important, while the four employees inside ate lunch or whatever.

At first, they were all watching me watch them, but I waited long enough for them to stop so that I could act unnoticed. I don’t remember how I got in, or actually transitioning from outside to inside, but I got in. As if there was still a pane of glass between us, acting as a fourth wall to divide my actions from the real world, the employees stared at me as they ate, as I moved with a laughable sense of stealth, trying to move quickly between pillars and aisles of shelves to reach the owner without being spotted by the important person that he was talking to. I had money half in my pocket and half in my hand. The book that I had almost stolen was in my pocket, also. I guess I was about to pay for it.
The important person noticed me, very soon after my entrance, but who didn’t see that coming? She looked on me like I possessed some sort of awesome disgust, like I was the most putrid thing that she could never have imagined, and that I was admirable for it. Turned out that I didn’t really need to sneak around, because when everyone realized that I was inside, nobody cared. The owner accepted my money to pay for the book, and I stepped out of the store.

Just outside, here was another person that I know in real life. (These people I like to call friends, but my terms on friendship are easily met by many of the types of people that I’ve met.) She was wearing a sort of cosplay-ish costume, advertising for a fan celebration of the very book that I had just bought, with balloons and a sign. A car was parked in front of her, the two people inside listening very intently to what my friend had to say about this celebration.
I approached her, and we conversed. I remember at some point, she must have understood that my parents were too pissed at me at the moment to pull anymore favors, and she said something along the lines of, “so I guess that means that you can’t bring the alimony money to the party.” I didn’t know what that was. (I had to look it up when I woke, a few minutes ago.) She, apparently, didn’t know either, and bothered to ask the people in the car what alimony is.

What I gathered is that in the book’s story, the protagonist had to swipe someone else’s alimony money to be able to afford getting into a very expensive act of thievery, really, the possession of that money, was the catalyst for the entire plot of the book and the MacGuffin for several characters.
The point of bringing money to the party was going to be that everyone had committed their real lives to celebrating the importance of this plot point, by bringing their own money. I don’t know, it sounds like something that fanatics of a book series would do.

I didn’t have that money for the party. I looked around the parking lot, and I knew that the time waiting outside of the bookstore, the time inside, the time talking to my friend just outside, my parents didn’t wait for me. I doubted that they ever would, again.
Then I spied a navy blue bus. A carnival of wacky folks circled, danced around, flipped over, anything-you-can-imagined in relation to the bus. Every friend that I had in my first couple of years in high school was there, having fun before they had to leave for the next venue that would get hit by their antics. I walked into the crowd and fun was had. Soon after, a few people were walking around with this light tan, fibrous stuff on them, like the hair of a light-furred animal laying, running, dripping, staining, like a liquid. And someone shouted something about shit.

Then I woke.

Another Dream

I dreamt a dream. I was living in an Archie comic. I’m unfamiliar with the characters, but I know well the awful humor and Wonderbread culture from whence Archie comics were spawned. Solid colors, heavy outlines, wardrobe designed by detatched adults, but… the characters, the people who I interacted with were believable people. I’d expect something like the cast of Saved by the Bell, but these people felt so real. Their emotions, their fears, everything about them was almost overwhelming, with everything else around us being so transparent and bland. Even the clouds. The clouds were flat and resting along the surfaces of invisible steps in the sky. As the clouds moved, the traveled down the jagged slope.

What I remember most is the end. I was in a field closed off by a fence, with a group of others my own age. I was watching the sky, but the others were more interested in rubbing against each other and licking earlobes. (This is the weirdest part, I think.)
A helicopter came into view. I was surprised to see it, but everyone else reacted to it as if they’d never seen or heard of helicopters before. The wind from its blades sent the clouds flying, and like a fleece rug being dragged down a flight of invisible stairs, a cloud came down to us and hovered beside me. I could feel something moving into me, and I screamed longer and harder than my lungs could possibly allow in real life. Something I was hoping for or expecting to come to me had finally shown up and entered my body, whatever it was.

And I woke.

Dreaming

I slept and dreamed that I was making a movie. It was a comedy about child-minded adults trying to get to the bottom of a dangerous conspiracy, much like Mystery Team. There was a tear-welling moment that we worked on where George Clooney and another person in the cast were using a Risk board and shot glasses to map out the illegal influences between world powers. There was a plump tech nerd who could only understand relationships between people as components in a machine. His inability to relate to people drove them away, which in turn reinforced his inability to relate.
There was a point where I bumped into a couple of friends of mine. They were so goddamn happy, and I couldn’t look them in their faces. I felt like poison. It made me sick to my stomach, knowing what I was doing, keeping it a secret from decent people… I think that I might have been exploiting others’ social disabilities to produce entertainment. Like the actors in the film weren’t acting, that they really were sick and needed compassion, instead of being made fun of.

Why was George Clooney there?

I felt a quick, violent vibration moving through my foot and woke. Why was my foot shaking?

Drawing for the sake of fun, rather than to fill empty obligations.

Pose taken from an Alex Ross Superman cover. I was gonna do the full cape, but I thought that a kid's Halloween cape would be better. So the Alex Ross visual reference is lost.

Dream

In the world of this dream, Shawn and I were blood-related siblings. We’d grown up apart, Shawn attended a series private schools, and we hardly knew our father. We were temporarily living together with our mother by the time the dream started.

The dream itself has a few disjointed scenes.

The two of us have driven to the comic shop, which was more like a comic parlor. The comics were in a pretty large area, but the host business took up the rest of the building. I don’t remember what the larger business was. It was in this scene that Shawn and I were talking about our estranged father, and my consciousness was informed of the family relationships. I also have a moment’s memory of costume, but I can’t remember if costumes were being discussed or being worn.

Next thing I remember is driving through the neighborhood on our way back to the house. Cleaner, taller, better buildings in this neighborhood than the one that I live in in real life. This place was great. Our house was a sore thumb.

I don’t remember what it was like in the dream, but Shawn, our mother, our father, and I dined at a fancy restaurant. The four of us had our micro-celebration, but I was hiding a great resentment toward our father that I am personally unfamiliar with in real life. This scene probably didn’t play out in my head, but I do have the knowledge that this event happened between scenes.

Driving home, again, but this time in father’s car.
In the dream, I see him simultaneously wearing a white-dress uniform and a Hawaiian shirt get-up that I associate in my mind with yachts and private jets. If you can imagine what wearing two sets of clothes is like in your own mind is like for a dream, go with that imagery, since it’ll be easier for you. But the way I saw it and understood it… he wore the uniform when I didn’t like him and he wore the yacht clothes when I felt like he’d insulted me.
Passing through the neighborhood we lived in, in the dream, father took a wrong turn on purpose, and we went close to the tallest house, deep in the center of the suburb. It was designed after the Japanese Imperial Palace. As one would move further away from the center of the neighborhood, the more contemporary the design inspirations would become.

Night. We finally got to the house, where people Shawn knew were partying and drinking on our lawn. We stuck around outside, father left, and mother slept inside. More people gradually showed, more people who I knew, and I woke as I saw a real-life mutual friend of Shawn and I dancing with Shawn to drunken singing, by the light of a fire set inside of a small, metal trash can.

SBI9: A Critical Clam

Lessons in Self

Working on another self-portrait isn’t going to halt my regular output any more than deciding to make a sandwich. I don’t need to make any more, I just want to. I find them amusing at times when few things are.

Like a child, I will be more likely to act and think in anger when I am in the wrong and do not want to admit it. So I need to take time to think over why I’m about to react, and what course of action I need to take to prevent things from getting worse for myself and, more importantly, the people around me.

My Father in 1981

In case you're wondering, that's an issue of "Secrets of the Legion of Superheroes" in front of him.

Dream: The Confrontation over a Mutilated Collaborative Piece

I get the feeling that this took place in high school, with all of the awful feelings of immediacy driving everyone’s decisions, but the colors were more Earth-like, the bricks weren’t painted over, and the hallways were uncomfortably thin. I like to think that this was college, but that’s my conscious self.

I had been working on a collaborative piece with musicians to produce a large charcoal drawing that would visualize the intended emotions of an album. The imagery involved a giant baby, an anthropomorphized form of death, I can’t remember if death was riding the horse, but there was a horse, dead, running along a forest of dead trees with sand dunes burying them at the trunks.
The piece was multilayered, with the figures in the drawing being rendered with shadows that when seen at a distance, possibly, created a new image in the mind of the viewer. When close enough, one could see that the image was on the surface of pages torn from the Bible, and the texture of ink against paper was visible through the charcoal.

The memory of this dream begins with waiting. As I often find myself doing in life, I was in this dream, waiting for something. In this hallway, with red bricks that went unpainted and sickly, green tiles gridding the floor. The bricks were a sore sight, as if every single one of them had the same snag was they were being processed. Jagged peelings rippled off of every wall. (I’ve been looking for images of bricks, and have found nothing that resembles the ones I remember.) My contribution to the project was framed and on a wall across from the door that I was pacing in front of. In all of my pacing, I must not have noticed three guys remove the drawing’s frame from the wall, open the fframe, rip the drawing into several pieces, replace the drawing into the frame, with pieces traded out, like a jigsaw puzzle, and put back on the wall before calmly walking out, unchallenged. Because I didn’t notice any of that happening. When I did see the drawing, I ran to it and removed it from the frame and laid it on the floor as quickly and delicately as I could, as if I were treating an injured person. Someone I know in real life, but haven’t seen since high school, approached me and described what happened to me. It didn’t occur to me that she didn’t do anything to prevent this from happening, that nobody of the dozens of people sitting along the hallway floor, draped in thick, 80s colored blankets and cold weather coats did anything to prevent this, nor had it occurred to me that I was present the entire time that this had happened and did not notice.
As her explanation concluded three black kids, who I’d not seen since middle school, walked into the building through the entrance at the end of the hall. They were wearing jerseys and matching hats, and they walking in a straight line, with the shortest in front, and the tallest in back. The shortest gripped a fountain pen in his left hand. I don’t remember anything about the middle fellow. Those two kept on walking by.
“Those are the guys that did this to your drawing.”
The third guys stopped and greeted me friendly-like. He knelt over the drawing and I saw him reach down to it with his left hand. A detail knife, designed for cutting small, intricate, detail-type things out of flat materials. The blade scratched away some of the charcoal.
“What a shame.”

I stood upright and asked why he had done what he’d done. And there was more talking and gesture. I honestly don’t remember it very well. It all seemed very civilized, but passionate at the same time, as our respect for each other was the only thing keeping us from killing each other on the spot.
Then, at some point, he reached over to me, to do what, I didn’t know. His blade went into my arm, and I saw my own blood rolling out of the opening. When he pulled the blade out of me, I didn’t feel anything. (This is where my perception of the real world enters my dream.) I wasn’t feeling any pain, and I reached for my right arm to cover the wound with my left hand, but there was nothing to cover. I was slowly waking as I screamed, “you stabbed me! Why did you stab me?”

Sometime, as I was writing the beginning of this post, I remembered that there was a precursor dream, but details and events escape me. It was set in the metro-theater, one of my dreamscapes that gets used frequently, like the living campus, the underground military mall fortress, and so on.
The metro-theater is a theater with an entire city for a lobby. The theater exists to entertain. The lobby businesses, shops, restaurants, etc. exist to make the wait worth while. The wait, by the way, can last long enough for one to need to stay in a lobby hotel. One may even find smaller theaters. The visitors are like first-class citizens. Those who work for the benefit of the visitors are second-class they live in theater. The lowest class of citizen in the metro-theater lobby are those who live in the theater and work for the benefit of the second-class citizens. They’ll need electricians and grocers and a police force to keep the peace within the lobby and a military to enforce peace with outside businesses… again, I wish I could remember the events of this one, because this place is always a delight to visit.

Another Self-Portrait

Image via Wikipedia

“Dude, isn’t there anything else you’d rather do than draw yourself?”

Fuck you.

I’m making one. When Caravaggio was young, he did a piece of self-portraiture featuring himself as Dionysus. I don’t know much about Greek mythology, but I know enough to say in confidence that it would be a disservice to Caravaggio’s work and life to not only imply that I am like the great painter himself, but also that I can replace him as an interpretation of a god that I am obviously not anything like.
So I’ll be focusing on looking into my own mythologies, the pieces of culture that voice the philosophies of my own existence. I only have a passing understanding of most things that I encounter, so research is required.
There are some things about myself that I need to come to terms with, and I’ll be using this project to do so.

This will keep me a few days or weeks away from my next full comic page. This and some things concerning intellectual property laws that I will be doing some research on. The thing about that: I intend to directly allude to Pup, the comic that inspired the basic idea of my own, by inserting Drew Weing’s character into a panel as a passing joke. I want to know that I can do that without offending Mr. Weing or breaking copyright infringement laws, before I actually start penciling the page. I mean, I can move on to a different idea that I have prepared. I just think that it would be cool.

Huh.

What bitterness I hold within myself.

Life on Bawb # 6 (The I Fucking Hate Myself Edition)

SBI8: Amateur Night of the Daleks (showing off some of my hand-quakes)

I get the feeling like someone may have done this kind of thing before, but I'm not sure.

Sketchbook Introspection: Part VII (contains a subtle, original take on a classic lead role)

Sketchbook Introspection: Part VI (breaking in the new pen / anatomy ain’t a thang)

Life on Bawb # 5 (This page was the biggest clusterfuck I’ve ever finished working on.)

Forgive me, Doctor, for I have sinned.

I told a lie! (This blog post contains mindless ranting and zero reliable sources of data.)

Recently, to calm down the disruption that I had caused by mentioning Doctor Who in the presence of two people who would seem to absolutely hate it, I told them calmly and quickly that I know it’s completely absurd and that nothing within the show could ever possibly happen. That was a lie, and I apologize to everyone for it.
The truth is that the fictional series is so wonderful and captive of my imagination that it’s so goddamn hard to even think of the possibility that the events of Doctor Who couldn’t ever really happen. I mean, come on.

Anyone who knows me well and pays very, very, very close attention to me when I speak and make decisions can ably tell you that if it weren’t for my belief in the existence of multiple realities, then life would be unbearable for me to get through. I suppose that this is something of sick religion. (And I’m the nutter who doesn’t read the holy book.)

In all of the multiverse, there exists a single universe that contains every physically possible set of events. That means that every single human idea can and does exist somewhere out of our reach. And the culmination of every human idea can’t possibly reach 0.025% of all possible realities. Of that probably less than 0.025%, there are still billions of billions of human ideas. I can not ever accept that in those many, many possible universes, there doesn’t exist a race of beings that have the technology to travel easily through time and space, that one particular being of this species frequents the most hazardous moments of human history on Earth, and that he doesn’t wear a bowtie. The idea that the Doctor doesn’t exist at all is as strange to me as suggesting to some people that we aren’t being watched over constantly by a greater consciousness that created our race.

Yes, yes, I’m crazy, but that’s not news to any of you, is it? You should be quite used to that. But my original point was that I lied to everyone at the last D&D meeting, and I have been feeling awful about it for the past few weeks. I’ve let it all out now, and I feel very much better.

Do me a favor and try not to talk sense into me, yeah? I think that you know that that doesn’t work that way.

Paul Robertson’s World of Pain

HELP!

LATEST: Well, everything seems fine, now. I don’t know if the problem was solved by the site, the browser, or the person with the blog, since I sent her an email about the whole thing, but there doesn’t seem to be a problem anymore. I don’t understand an ounce of what was going on.

I’ll take you through the steps of my issue. I don’t know anything about how computers work and what is considered useless information, so I’m putting it all in.

1. A friend of mine has a blog on the Google-hosted site, Blogger. I was in the middle of typing a comment on one of her posts when I lost my internet connection.
2. No auto-fixes for the disruption, so I passed the time, waiting for the connection to return. Maybe after an hour, it had come back.
3. I immediately logged back in so that I could post that comment. I could successfully access the blog itself and read the post that I was going to comment on.
4. When I clicked on the hyperlink to post a comment, I was sent to a not-page. The URL was visible in the address bar, but Firefox 4 was constantly redirecting from the page that was loading to the very same page, over and over, so that I couldn’t access it at all.
5. After finding this problem, I looked for “blogger comment page error” on Google and every result features complaints about this message, instead of the problem that I am facing here.
6. Also, since finding the problem, accessing Google pages, like the search engine or the RSS reader, has taken two-to-five times longer than usual. After a few minutes, the browser slowed to death-pace and I had to close the damn thing with Task Manager.
7. So, no programs open, a notice for a Windows update shows, and I’m thinking that maybe there’s something in this upgrade pack that’ll help me out. I ran the upgrade installation, and it was only for Internet Explorer 9.
8. EDIT: I started looking into how I could alter Firefox 4 so that it would stop rapid-redirecting. I’ve checked “about:config” as one person on a forum suggested to others, I altered the tool settings so that my approval would be required to redirect, I downloaded the highest rated redirect-controlling add-on, and absolutely none of that worked. I get warned about redirects, but the browser continues to loop with or without my input.
9. EDIT: I tried using Internet Explorer to access the comment page, and it offers the exact same results.
10. EDIT: Here’s a real kicker – I was capable of accessing the comment page on another blog on the Blogger site.

Here I am on Firefox 4, typing this shit, hoping that there’s something simple I can do to make using Google easy again.

Still alive, over here.

I penciled up a new page the instant I put the latest one on the blog, but I made a mistake in the inking stage soon after. It’s put me into quite a depressed state, and I’ll be back to working on it soon enough. I know that it must seem silly that I make excuses for delaying my progress on something I do leisurely. But this is a blog about myself, and it wouldn’t be very useful if I didn’t use it to inform people what’s going on with myself.

Life on Bawb #4 COMPLETE (turned out exactly perfectly)

ATTENTION, ALL YE READERS!

Do you frequent my blog and check in regularly to see what’s what? In all of the molten, magnetic kingdom of Earth, favored by Luna and mighty Sol, why waste increments of your life’s remaining time reading my bullshit?

Instead, now that I’ve insulted and alienated all of you, I suggest directing your regular attention to Alex Smith. He’s sort of like me in that he’s a male human being.

His art blog: Sketchy McDrawpants

His figurine-painting blog: Sketchy McMinipaints

And his all-new, all-different podcast about The Avengers and all related titles: Earth’s Mightiest Podcast

Drop by right now, and see what he’s got going on. I’ll let you know ahead of time – whatever it is, it’s awesome.

Eh?

“AY, Bob, you been slakcin’ off on yer damn art blog thing. The fuck happened to that comic y’ere wurkin’ on?”

I’ll get on it tomorrow, for real. For really, really, real, I’ll start working on that thing tomorrow. Really. Honestly.

There must be a word for this sensation.

I am deeply depressed and I have no desires at all. I want attention, but I wouldn’t do anything with it if I were to acquire it, possibly generating hostility. There’s a feeling in my chest like a spinning wheel, its axis going through my shoulders. How strange that my mind reacts to some things with the illusion of physical sensations in my chest, no? Or is that normal? If I were worth the life that I have, I’d probably know. My memories are constantly looping in my subconscious mind, as if I a part of me were working so very hard to make sure that I don’t forget, even as I die. I recall things that embarrass me, have pained me, things that remind me of stupid decisions. Does anyone else experience this? Where the worst memories that a person can recall at any given time play simultaneously on a loop, on a strange, never ending, loop of self-loathing and disgust? “Don’t touch me you faggot,” and, “leave me the fuck alone,” and, “why didn’t he just do it to you, instead,” and everything about myself that I would tear apart were they living, flesh-filled people instead of just being parts of one. And the nights when all of this builds into massive, clashing, banging, barking, fucking, awful storm of chaotic noises. There has to be a word for it.

DC Women Kicking Ass

Follow this link, and read the post.

Looking Back on Doctor Who

I decided to venture into the Doctor’s past, today, using Netflix.

The Aztec episodes of the original series were a grand arc. Well enjoyed. And outside of William Hartnell looking as old as the Doctor actually is, I didn’t have any trouble at all believing that this was the same character who later would happen to look like Christopher Eccleston, David Tennant, and Matt Smith. This obviously marks how well the return of the series has been handled by all of those involved and how dedicated they are to the character and his universe.

I moved next to one of the Patrick Troughton seasons. Everything was so minimalist and pseudo-dramatic, I expected everything onscreen to slowly abstract into three black cubes on white reciting Hamlet. No, I couldn’t stand the thought of watching another episode after just one, and that one was pushing my tolerance. I will say that while this incarnation of the Doctor was more emotionally responsive than Hartnell’s, Troughton reminded me most of late Eccelston and early Tennant. Sometimes talking to himself, grabbing his face in horror. Even the way that the camera treats the set in those two seasons came back to this… experimental age. To say it gently. Most unlike the Doctor that I know, Troughton subjected the Doctor to some more cowardly behaviors. Whining and all that, instead of ceasing the situation.

Deciding to skip the third Doctor, I jumped right into the Pyramids of Mars, with Tom Baker. And shit, was that boring… I mean, events took place in the span of two episodes that may as well have happened in one. I don’t think I’ll be finishing that arc, either. I sort of got the dry, old man in a youthful body that came out in some Tennant moments. It wasn’t… ugh, it wasn’t what I expected of the Tom Baker Doctor. I was hoping for something more light-hearted, something less cynical. For someone with such a whimsical appearance and life, he felt so depressed and held down by duty. Nothing like the energetic loon doing stuff in time and space just for fun that I have come to know.

Life on Bawb #3 (just black/white for now)

Yeah, just click on the thumbnail so’s you can read the page.

I originally intended to always represent his genitalia in this series as small enough to be completely hidden behind a large bush, but I think that readers would be more comfortable with the faux-censored approach. Too many uncommon traits for the only character for a long time can make an audience lose interest fast or keep the audience from identifying with him to the point of hating him. Never good.

I want to give the moon a color, and if I do that, I’ll have to have a pallet prepared for every panel to keep it all balanced, and I need to keep the moon the same color ever time it appears in the future. This one won’t stay black/white forever, like the previous one will, but I don’t want to jump into colors without a plan.

I was thinking a lot about how I would bridge from this character’s perspective to the next one’s and I sketched up a few pages that, combined and simplified, became my conclusive idea. Page three is the last one where The Planet has a voice for a while, and in the next page, you’ll get to see some of the advanced flora. This means more working on dialogue, more character designs, more setting designs, more ignored research, thus more time spent on each installment. So, you know, I’m glad that most of you have gotten tired of this guy talking to himself in space.

Going on, I see some horrible things in every page I’ve finished, so far. What looks almost passable on a format I can hold looks worse than the worst of mediocre on a screen. I think that it’s because of the fact that the images on a physical format are a portion of a piece. Like my consciousness is being distracted from details because most of my attention is on the format itself. There’s no format to be conscious of when looking at a scanned image, unless one is altering individual pixels… I don’t know. I don’t know anything.

Art will be posted (later) in the morning. For now, though…

I’ve got some killer ideas for alternate events in the heavily climactic ending of Metropolis. Yes, this is something like fanfic, so if reading these kinds of things aren’t really your… kind of thing, move on lest you bore yourself with my words. I shouldn’t like that if it were to happen.

The mob of enraged proletarians swarms around the stake-bound Hel. They move en mass toward her a step, individually to spit or yell or throw things, and they all move a step away to keep a safe distance from the fires. Like animals. They don’t know whether to pounce the villain or wait for her to die from a safe distance. Someone’s got a gun and shoots Hel’s Maria-looking face. The contact rips away some skin, and the metal head beneath is visible. Hel writhes in sexual ecstasy.

Not so many difference there, if memory serves correctly. Th biggest noticeable changes in this set up would be how the machine is made to look like Maria and how far from the base of the stake she’s tied.

Rotwang has Maria on the roof of the cathedral. It’s a desperate move, and he doesn’t know what he’s doing, believing simultaneously that his beloved Hel is dead and that Maria is a Hel who’d never died. I like to think that he only believes that Maria is Hel if he sees her face. It adds to the general confusion and it justifies this: to prevent Freder from getting in the way, Rotwang takes the Freder-bait (Maria) and chucks her off of the roof.
Maria claws at the air as she falls, and she almost breaks a hand catching herself on one of the ropes holding Hel to the stake. Maria tries to see where she is, noticing first that her hands are at the waist of another woman. Maria sees her own face on the woman, twisted into fiendish shapes, an ogre or a demon gnashing her smiling jaws at the flames.
I’m thinking it’d be a nice bit to show Rotwang and Freder together looking down from the roof onto the fire pit below, Rotwang yelling for Hel, Freder for Maria.
Hel’s head snaps quickly to look down on Maria so that the metal revealed by the rioter’s gunfire can be seen by Maria. The girl freaks, lets go of the rope, and falls into the fire. Rotwang jumps after.

A common tragedy between Freder and the workers from the lower city. I don’t know about Fredersen’s attitude about the whole thing. I’ll probably have to go through another viewing of Metropolis to get a better understanding of the characters.
But really, I think that I was built for this fanfic thing. Altering things that I enjoy within my own mind to invent new dynamics which stimulate the inspiration for even more new ideas. Very much something that I like. This was fun.

Life on Bawb #2

Life on Bawb #1 (click on image to see black/white inks)

Sketchbook Introspection: Part V (contains “special” training)

Back in Black

EDIT: Well, it turns out that I am truly a bastard. I didn’t sleep last night, and I slept through morning. I’m incapable of driving to the theater, and father has started baking his cake. Ain’t got no… way to go. Some cosmic being has marked this as one of my hell-dimension-sins, I’m sure of it.

Today (or rather, tonight) has been one of working on cartoons. I’ll have them up on the blog after a busy Saturday of supporting the beloved Flowertown Players and my wonderful local comic shop, Soundwave. I really hope that I don’t oversleep for this.

I don’t want to spoil anything for you guys, but let’s just say that I feel like I’ve overcome a giant monster in my mind with this latest self-project. Entering a personal new frontier. I’m hoping that it turns into something I can trust myself to add to regularly. And that I can scan it properly.

Sketchbook Introspection: Part IV (contains dog shit and dicks)

Sketchbook Introspection: Part III (contains a big ass)

Sketchbook Introspection: Part II (unfortunately does not contain nudity)

Sketchbook Introspection: Part I (contains nudity)

That box is WAY too big for covering that area.

I work most when I am alone. I prefer it.

Brain-shit-storm

Panel1: GUY masturbates in front of computer, CEILINGCAT watching in background

Panel2: CEILINGCAT close-up, CAMERA watching in background

Panel3: SECRETGUYS watching CEILINGCAT on a monitor – SECRETGUY1; “Doesn’t that cat know the meaning of ‘privacy’?”

possible Panel4: over-shoulder shot of GUY masturbating to SECRETGUYS on his own computer

possible Panel5: GUY smears semen onto his monitor, lovingly

I love listening to smooth jazz.

There’s a documentary made up of separate episodes called “The VICE Guide to North Korea” and you should watch it.

EDIT: I should make it a little more clear, my meaning… uh… if you’re not an individual who has ever been within the borders of North Korea, then it is of my opinion that the aforementioned documentary will introduce ideas to you about the North Korean culture and people that you might be in the dark about otherwise. I mean, I saw a documentary made by a woman who smuggled a camera into the country and saw what civilian life is like, without being treated as a tourist, and it still didn’t offer as clear a picture of the country as VICE does. The nation-wide staged efforts to appear functional as a state to outsiders, training the brightest, most talented children for the limiting careers in entertaining the one or two tourists who visit per month, the frustrations that civilians experience when their lives are built around a single function, like the guide who was offended that Smith didn’t remember the lyrics of a song or the girl at the tea shop who doesn’t see any people for over half a year at a time… it’s all so… there. It’s there.

This is Our World

A country lifts its spirits in unison to celebrate a man’s death. The moment I realized it, my first thought was, “finally.” I felt like weights had been removed. Why do I feel like this? Who am I?

I don’t have any facts. I don’t understand anything. The usual.

And now I’m afraid of myself. Again. Because I could only think of this person as a symbol, a person carrying all of the blame of an entire decade of global woes. Do I know if he was behind any of it? Do I know if he was elaborately framed? Do I know who he was?

What about other villains? After a decade, we’ve still got a mess of individuals whose faces we attach to our own grievances. The Bush family, Dick Cheney, other people who I have no idea about, whose shoes scuffed hallway floors in government buildings, FOX, Limbaugh, everyone who ever publicly instigated rifts between the people of this nation, there are comedians, there are documentarians, there are musicians… every single person who had ever been psychologically connected to any bit of stress that was a part of the painful amalgam digging into everyone’s heads… will another great weight be lifted with each of their deaths, too? Is that how we want to heal ourselves of our current pains? Do we need to see FOX News get punished? Do we need to see Michael Moore suffer? Until every single personality to show up on television or the internet, who we generally associate with any sort of disagreement or problem, in the past is dead? The faux sense of relief brought on by one man’s death is a growing bitterness. One person’s death won’t be enough, will it? And we’ll want to see more famous villains’ corpses on CNN.

I’m angry, and I’m sad, and humans’ deaths by other humans’ hands isn’t going to solve any of that for me. How does it solve anything for anyone else? I feel like a monster. “Finally,” was the first goddamn thing I thought to myself. Jesus fucking Christ.

I used to enjoy my dreams, no matter how terrifying.

My dreams have recently taken on a common theme: I am mentally retarded. Now I never want to sleep. These dreams are so convincing that when I wake, instead of forgetting parts of the dream as time passes, I gradually remember things about reality. Like I’m returning to a recurring dream that I used to have as a young child.

Drawing in the Dark: Sean Bean is awesome in Game of Thrones

Drawn while watching the episode "Kingsroad" in the dark. My desire to include Jim-Lee-like-lines sort of got in the way of attempting likeness. Or maybe I'm just bad at likeness.

Webcam Models

I was thinking about getting an account as a webcam model.

Traditionally, the idea is that someone with a desirable body gives incentive for anonymous users to pay easy money. Like strippers, only less athletic and a little more personal.
I’ve seen models do other things, like playing the piano or… like I said: other things. They use their talents and still get paid for displaying, even though they aren’t committing to the traditional approach of the business. I was thinking that I could get an account, gather my materials, log on, and anonymous users can commission drawings. They tip me, I take their request, they see me work in front of them, and they can access the image that they paid for through a link to my blog after I’ve scanned in the image.

How does that sound?

Runescape

My father got deep into Runescape a few years ago. I tried playing after he’d started, and I just couldn’t give a fuck. I couldn’t! It was all… boring and simple and I couldn’t invest myself to it.

I tried again a few days ago, and you know what? Same thing happened. It isn’t the fault of the designers or the game itself, I think. I just believe that MMOs aren’t my thing at all. I will cease my bitching about MMO players, guys. These are individuals who have adapted parts of their own minds and lives around a form of social connection with other human beings that I do not understand, and it’s not my place to judge these people and lifestyles.

Who else can I bitch about, now? More United States cosplayers should dress as United States characters.

Breakfast at Noon

Portals in Real Life: His or Her

Image via Wikipedia

The review for Portal 2 on Spill.com has gotten me thinking about real-world applications for a portal gun.

The first thing to come to mind for me would be emergency transport to the hospital. Say that a hospital has a set of portal guns. There’s a hub just outside of the ER, walls are covered in untapped orange portals with alpha-numeric codes above each one. Every ambulance driver has a portal gun only capable of firing blue portal openings and each ambulance has bare, solid, white walls on the inside and outside. In the case of an emergency that requires immediate attention, the driver with gun D-5 fires a blue portal and the patient is instantly in the ER through the D-5 portal opening at the hub.

Now I’m thinking about shipping goods. Two options: an orange and a blue portal gun that work together, a “safety” feature on the dual-portal gun.
First, the buyer sends a blue portal gun to the seller. The buyer fires his or her orange portal within a local warehouse. The seller fires his or her blue portal where his goods are waiting to be shipped. The two guns can only form a space anomaly with each other, and not other portal guns.
Next, a portal gun with a “safety” feature could be used by a traveling investor. He or she fires the orange portal at his or her desired location for the goods he or she is after. This person travels for as long as it takes to find what he or she is after and doesn’t worry about misfiring the portal gun because it’s been given a mechanism that prevents itchy fingers from making messy mistakes. The goods are found, the blue portal is fired, and the investor simultaneously closes the deal and returns home with the goods that he or she is after.

What about space travel? And not “space” that can be interpreted as any open area within which one may travel under his or her own power, but traveling from celestial body to celestial body. A cosmonaut team suits up, ground control fires an orange portal here and a blue portal on the moon, the team has tools and materials with which to build simple, temporary structures. Cosmos enter the pressure chamber, the airlock, and set foot on the moon. They build a structure around the portal on Luna’s surface. Next, a moon-trained team of construction specialists use their materials to build something more substantial and safe. A moon colony has begun to take form.

What kind of stuff would you guys come up with if you possessed the portal gun? (EDIT: Everyone knows that astronauts can’t build shit. It’s as much a fact as the natural ally of the bat being the robin. I mean, come on, where did YOU go to school? Not-School High School?)

Steak-of-Self: a Change of Attitude?

“I’m getting really tired of being angry at people who are like myself. We’re individuals AND alike simultaneously, so we’ll do whatever. Complaining just makes me that much more exhausted from being alive.”

That’s what I wrote. I didn’t know what I was writing at the time. But was feeling very exhausted, not in body, but in soul. I’ve gotten tired like this, like I wear out the intensity of my emotion on occasion, and I can physically feel the effects of it. Hating myself, being angry at people who misunderstand the meanings of words, while I am constantly being proven as ignorant as anyone else… I was watching Almost Famous, and sort of saw that I am a fat, ugly, somewhat talented, emotional, stick-in-the-mud with a tendency to jump to conclusions and get angry, who also finds it hard to communicate with other persons. I’m not cool. That’s no reason to be unhappy on my own terms. Shit, why don’t I embrace more of myself? Just like what Peter Dinklage said in the first episode of Game of Thrones, I’ve got to own everything about myself. I’ve recounted my many flaws as a person, before, but I’ve never thought of them as components of a complete self, just inedible gristle on the sense-of-self steak. The “steak-of-self,” if you will.

I was experiencing a sort of high with the idea that I am a real person that exists beyond others’, and even my own, minds.

Later in the day, maybe less than half of an hour ago, I woke from sleeping through an episode of Cosmos thinking immediately that I waste my anger on trite matters. I’ve gotten angry about misspelling and the meanings of words. No, anger should be inspired of ignorance or disrespect in others for the world around them. People who refuse Pluto’s relatively recent reclassification as a planetoid because it isn’t what they’re used to and those who call tomatoes “vegetables” because they don’t eat them as they would other fruits. Just because it conveniences your life to believe something is so doesn’t change the facts of the universe that you are a part of. And I’m sure that you don’t like being called a “monkey,” right? Whether you “believe” in evolution or don’t, we can all agree that humans are not monkeys. Respect the fucking tomatoes.

But is anger the appropriate response to this kind of disrespect for the universe? No. I’m far too ignorant to pretend to know everything. Trust me on this, I know when people around me are holding back their own higher understanding of facts from me. A fellow named Ryan I met a couple of years ago through the Flowertown Players didn’t hold back on correcting me when I needed to be corrected, and I respect him more deeply for it than some people I’ve known for years and years longer. I still feel bad about not helping you pack your stuff for when you were on the move, Ryan. You should totally kick my ass for that.

Dream

I just woke from sleeping on the couch. If I don’t clear my bed of the stacks of things, I may destroy my own spine.

I was in a supermaket, buying comics. I needed to piss. Should I put the comics down, here? Should I bring them with me to the restroom? Where is the restroom? There’s an elevator. It’s taking a long time for the elevator doors to close. I get out and hear the doors close behind me. I have got to piss badly.

Then I woke and pissed.

Left-to-Right, Black-and-White

I was reading a left-to-right converted manga, black and white. Everything You Want, a song from 1999, when I was first reading comics played. All of the forgotten emotions that my younger-self felt when he was reading Dragonball Z in the back of his father’s Jeep at the flea market came out. Like when one steals gasoline by putting a hose into a car’s gas tank and sucks on one end to make it pour out into one’s gas can. I was feeling an hour ago what I hadn’t felt in over a decade, and I felt so alien and perverse. I want more of that. Before the bad days and the beating and the fear. I am still fairly innocent, compared to my peers, but it isn’t enough for me. I don’t know what I want or where to go, but there’s a weight in my chest like a bag of stone marbles, and it’s leaning me toward somewhere I have already been.

Fan Fiction: Wheatley’s Adventures

This contains NO spoilage. If you have not finished playing Portal 2, the content will not be given away in this post. For those who HAVE finished playing, don’t worry, yo. To others, this list of ideas will seem unrelated to the official viral media released by Valve.

I imagine a series of short adventures for adults where Wheatley encounters characters and witnesses events from television shows, comics, movies, and albums about space. He tries helping everyone he meets in an overcompensating idiot sort of way, like he believes he’s Bakula in Quantum Leap or something. But things either go perfectly well without being due to Wheatley’s attempts to do right, or they go catastrophically, heart-breakingly wrong.

In one episode, he meets an intergalactic police force and he’s there long enough to see the entire history of the GL Corps condensed into 24 minutes.

He could whiz by a satellite shaped like a bone once a season.

Throughout the series, Wheatley is constantly finding old British police boxes; he get’s excited, tries looking for a goofy Englishman, opens the box, and is always disappointed to find that it’s yet another police box flying around in space. Every season finale will have a four second “egg”. Like the TARDIS‘ traveling sound playing in the background, or a Dalek shadow cast from around a corner. Brief and small, so it won’t be apparent to everyone, and they can find it in others’ Youtube videos.

In season two, he’ll meet an advanced race of mechanical beings who build up his body to be a gigantic ship, like V’ger in Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

He’ll happen upon an anomaly that sends him back in time, and he becomes the set of a television show hosted by a famous scientist. The show then becomes one that is not about Wheatley being a loner while trying to help people, but one about this foolish person who is given an immense amount of responsibility and how he learns, through carrying a television crew inside of himself through space, to become the person that he wants to be.

Every time someone says, “I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” someone else will always slap that person.

I almost forgot.

Today is the end of human civilization as we know it, due to the destruction caused by Skynet, according to The Sarah Connor Chronicles. So plan accordingly.

House Things

The landlady got someone to work on the leak underneath the house, yesterday. A fellow who claims to have retired and a younger man who I assume was the son and heir to the business. I tried keeping my cool with all of the weird shit going on, and like a child on a trip to a new city just a few kilometers away, I was feint of energy after all of the excitement. I slept through the second plumber’s arrival, who would use a “snake” to unclog the network of pipes in the bathroom, and father handled the talking like-people-talk stuff when he got back to the house. This damn house. I’ve been living in this house for 17 years, and I don’t know anything about it, how it works, what its parts are called, or where we keep things in it. I may as well have been as absent from this house for as long as the landlady has been.

Fan Fiction: Dirty Dancing

One of the other dancers who hangs with Johnny, and the recently accepted Baby, has a problem getting over his history with drug smuggling: one of the dealers he’s done business for blames him for a debt related to the last smuggling operation this new-to-plot character’s pulled off.

Johnny and some of the others don’t want to, but they believe the only way to make this problem go away is to go to the mattresses. Baby doesn’t want Johnny or any of her dancing pals to get hurt and tries coming up with legit-o-mite ways of gathering the money that Character is being hassled for. Johnny and Baby simultaneously prepare for the day when things either go south or end peacefully. Montages of Johnny and the others training to fight like street rats and of Baby working day and night on minimum wage, selling her things, and refusing to get her rich parents mixed up in this drug money mess.

Finally, Baby works off enough money to keep the dealer at bay. Together, they organize a meeting so that she can hand over the money and talk terms for filling out the rest of the debt. Johnny founds out about this secret meeting and intends to crash. His pals try to catch up, but he shows up ahead of them, the dealer freaks and pulls a gun, Baby jumps in front of Johnny, BANG!

The dealer drives off with the money, pretty upset by the whole thing, and Baby dies in Johnny’s arms, West Side Story style. The cops show, and everyone moves in to Johnny to either calm him or take Baby’s body away. He cries and screams “NOBODY TAKES BABY TO THE CORONER!”

The People You Know and the Person You Are

For half an hour, I’ve been in a dark place. The feelings that I get when depression hits me the hardest… I’ve faced them and now I live in an expanded world beyond my imagination that is full of people with feelings like my own, capable of wonderful creation and horrible destruction. As capable as I am. Real helplessness isn’t something I’ve ever felt before finding this world. I’ve known it for a year, and I shrink back to my smaller world, hiding from other people’s pain. But the real helplessness is knowing that you could help someone, having the tools to help someone, and wishing that you were there to do everything you possibly can. I have friends who think that I overreact, but I don’t believe that they realize how close to eternal silence every living soul is. This is what I was working on before this past half hour:

Paranoidisms

I’ve been thinking about times when my fear of people, interaction, and I guess anything and everything would fuck with me pretty badly. I remember saying things to people that I would never, ever, EVER say if I didn’t have this deep feeling like every living human knew my thoughts and were recording them, twisting my behaviors based on my fears and making me believe that their imposed ideas are my own. Yes, as if I were living the movie Videodrome. I realize over and over, sometimes too late, that other people don’t control me, and that I am a victim to various problems within myself. Being my friend hasn’t been easy for people, I know, and I’ve been exposed to the very situations that I put others in, and I was still making things difficult. I’m not a villain, I’m not a monster, I’m just a person, and everybody else is just a person, and nobody can understand other peoples’ thoughts unless they communicate through means of the physical realm. Well, the ideas that we have are products of a physical structure and ideas cause adjustments and distortions in that physical structure… so what separates the physical realm from the mental realm? Maybe minds can be read.

This was supposed to be about me making a sweeping apology to anyone who I have inconvenienced, confused, insulted, or… anything that was a negative result of this particular kind of depression that I occasionally experience. You guys don’t need that shit on top of everything else that you have to deal with.

With the resources of the internet, my experience in and out of serious states of depression, my immense imagination and undernourished ability to express ideas through art, I am still as incapable of helping anyone or making things right as anyone person is capable of doing for his or her self. And a lot of times, I wonder to myself if my soul is completely useless if I can’t aid another’s.

Have I told you guys about the plumbing problem in this house? I’ve made some passing jokes about it before, to lift my own mood, but it’s not a good thing. There’s a spot in the house where every pipe that directs water out of the house. If  something obstructs the pathway into the sewer, waste would build up to that one point that I described. Well, that has happened. A root system broke into the pipe leading to the sewer and filled the pipe. Waste is clogging the point of exit, and now all fluids move to the lowest accessible space: the tub. So my situation’s pretty shitty. We’re all low on money, father is having problems getting in contact with possible future employers, mother gets little sleep at night and works through daylight at a hospital downtown, we can’t flush out toilets, we can’t bathe, and our landlady claims to have contracted a plumber, and over the weekend, there’s been no development of this proving factual at all.

It occurs to me now that of all times, this might be one of the most appropriate to be depressed, but I’m not. Maybe this is an element of my development that I have been missing, a version of the “convenient cancer” that unifies me on basic levels with others who I should be close with were I healthy, but under a circumstance that puts my life into perspective for myself and helps me realize the person that I am. Maybe I’m just trying to make another lighter, more positive spin on something that blows hard.

Storms and Tornadoes over North and South Carolina

Keep track of this shit as it’s happening.

Make sure all your people are well while all of this is going on.
“Dude, you worry too much.”
Fuck off. Tornadoes aren’t a fuckin’ joke.

Pages

Take a look at the section in the bar to the right. Under “pages” you’ll see that all but one have been removed. And if you check out my wishlist, it’s been updated. Letting people know that I’m trying to get my blog up to speed. A whole year passes, and I completely forget about some of this bullshit.

To Sarah Connor Chronicles with Love

Image via Wikipedia

It’s when you experience the content of a story, instead of humoring the continuation of a franchise.

It’s when the characters come to mean more to you as people in your life than images with sound.

It’s when you reach the end and feel such loss. You do everything that you think you can to bring it back, but it’s not in your power. (Subtle sign of unhealthy mental tendencies?)

Now all you can do is hope that the original minds and performers return sometime to finish what they’ve started.

Maybe I cheapen the human experience by applying such strong emotion to a show in place of individual people. But I don’t think so. What value do we have if our culture isn’t as important to us as each other? Hoping that TSCC returns to us in one form or another… I love you.

Webcomic: Menage a 3

I’m trying to catch up where I left off, when I stopped reading this strip, because, well, it’s a damn good comic that I should never have stopped following to begin with.

By its appearance, it seems like a comic about sex. And it is. But I see it as a very interesting character study. Menage a 3 has a wide variety of characters, like Archie set in a pornographic Canada. (Are the people there really like this? Why am I still living here?)

There is an assumption that, like Archie or Liberty Meadows, there is one primary character around whom the entire strip is focused on, where the subplots and characters shifting around without the protagonist’s awareness are a backdrop to the world that he or she lives in. I would put Gary in the position of protagonist in this instance, but that is a subject matter, is it not?

Then there is the assumption that there are three main characters whose lives intertwine, and the events of parallel plots are as important to each other as to the plot that the events belong to, like Seinfeld or Peanuts. This assumption is supported by the title of the series: Menage a 3. So Gary, Zii, and DiDi are a net of individuals with equal value to the narrative.

I treat this comic with the first perspective, as I can identify easier with Gary, the 29-year-old virgin nerd, than I can Zii, a petite nymphomaniac, or DiDi, a perfectly proportioned French Canadian goddess.

I’m typing a lot about this comic, things that you could figure out for yourself if you read it. So just read it. From the beginning, for real, because it’s no fucking fun to start in the middle of a series that’s been going on for years. Assholes and senior citizens do that, and you’re not either of those, are you? So play it straight.

Ugh, what a loser. Oh, just me, yeah, I’m a loser. No, no, I really am. The blog is a testament to that.

Ding Dong, the Beard is Dead

Scars and scabs, small chin, chapped female lips, and a pale, pale face exposed to the brutal Spring sunlight. No depression until 5 o’clock!

On the Backs of Winged Tapeworms

I’m going to stop feeling sorry for myself, play a few hours of Mass Effect, sleep, go to class in the afternoon, tediously work on my current projects, come back to this shithole and masturbate to Joe Quinones’ artwork, play more Mass Effect, and shave this fucking Depression Beard off of my stupid, ugly face, AND I’M GOING TO FUCKING ENJOY IT, BECAUSE I AM ALIVE.

About “Nowhere Man”

I used to divide the things about myself that I dislike from the rest of myself to create a persona in my mind. Like Nega-Scott. But I called him Nowhere Man, inspired by the Beatles song.

I wrote an entry as this person, and I felt much better about myself doing it. It isn’t healthy to think of myself as separate individuals or to convince myself that the things I dislike about myself are not an import part of myself.

So don’t expect it to happen again, and if it does, I apologize to everyone.

Nowhere Man Speaks Again

By now, she must have a career and responsibilities that I cannot comprehend. But in the twenty-oughts she was a different person. You can see it, there, in yellow numbers on the side of the image. You can see it in her grin as she stares back at you.

From that position.

This is someone’s daughter. This was a girl who scraped her knee learning to ride a bicycle. She’s had crushes on boys and had plenty of periods. On the screen, staring back at you, from that position, is a woman finding out who she is going to be. The image stares back, but what was she looking at? Her eyes are warm and excited. Steam from her breath is nearly visible. Was she looking into the lens of the camera? Was she looking beyond the camera, smiling for the person taking this picture? Or does she know that this image will be seen by strangers on the internet? Smiling at an audience that she can only imagine.

She, neither the woman nor the image, doesn’t know how that face penetrates me. In my mind, I see an infinite set of emotions and thoughts behind that expression, and I experience something sick. Instead of finding the connections with people that I ought to, I find connections with my own imagination, which takes the form of someone else. Someone who is real, someone who is alive and walking around, who has a career and a family, whose past I could never guess.

This is a mess. This image taken of a woman in the middle of an intimate act serves as a form of pornography which I can only masturbate to with my own mind, stimulating parts of the brain that flesh and blood people can’t.

The fictional people are the ones that occupy my life.