Category: News

Hey there sportsfans, here’s some of the good stuff going on in my life right now!

1. I’ve mentioned this, but I have a hamster named Otto (the Doodlebug), his hair is long and I can gently comb it as a calming exercise. Otto holds the escape record currently; he has escaped three times, and each time he has come back when called. That is kind of a big deal, for all you non-hamster-owners out there.

2. Regular church attendance has resulted in a group of people who care about how I’m doing, and whether I live or die. I’ve been doing yard work on the grounds, and last Saturday I had an amazing lengthy encounter with a bird, which those of you who follow my Instagram already know about.

3. The new podcast is going great, even though I left my computer on all night last night to render the second episode, and the codecs suggested by Patreon did not work, resulting in an unplayable block of nothing. I am currently re-rendering the show using trusted codecs, and I’ll post it soon. I think it’s great, and make no mistake, both myself and the engineer have been putting in a shitload of work on it. Remember that fact for later.

4. I’m not completely unemployed, I just need to make more money, because I owe my roommate a lot for keeping the two of us housed (for the time being). I have (including church yard work) two running gigs that I am intensely grateful for. I try to make my gratitude known as often as possible, so, yeah.

5. According to the doctor, my health is good, I don’t have HIV (which I knew already, where the fuck would it come from?), but my cholesterol is high because I eat cheap garbage. They’re putting me on some sort of program where I’ll get a certain number of healthy meals per week, and I’ll be switching back from butter to olive oil. (I literally eat butter sandwiches, which is a common “po boy” practice.) The nurse assured me I’ll be drawing again soon, because it’s my purpose and I shouldn’t waste it. You have no idea how badly I needed to hear that.

Note: There is no physical ailment keeping me from drawing. I have been mentally defeated since May of this year. Maybe I haven’t been clear, but when I was laid off in March from my newspaper-cartooning gig of 26 years, I stopped exercising my “artist muscles”, and have felt creatively worthless since then. Hence the lack of Ceaseless Fables pages. Thank God I have a regular design gig, but this requires the hated Adobe subscription ($60/mo). Hey- remember my Bands I Useta Like strip? That was in legitimate print for 19 years. 

Lastly, I fought off a nervous breakdown this morning, but this had less to do with me chanting “everything is okay” than it did with a paycheck coming in which I can use to reopen my storage unit again. Otto has been grooming himself all morning, so I can’t just fish him out and start combing. Funny thing; his hair is changing colors. The little patoot is a joy and a blessing.

I spent hours last night editing the podcast, because of overwhelming feelings of defeat and worthlessness that kept me from doing it earlier. You hopefully don’t know what it’s like to have a voice in your head telling you it doesn’t matter, you’re a failure, give up, there is no point in anything you create. I sincerely hope you don’t.

Speaking of voices…

Listen folks, some foreign people are great. I have friends at church who are technically foreign people, though I personally wouldn’t label them as such (nor do I think they’d appreciate it). And yes, I accept that I have lived for the past 7 years in a suburb designated for refugee resettlement, though moving here was a choice made when there were no other choices.

That said, I need many of you out there to understand something. Particularly those of you with the means to live in a neighborhood occupied only by people who look like you, and/or people who share your political ideologies, for better or worse. Particularly those of you who have means.

Some foreign people never, ever, ever, ever, ever stop talking.

I want you to imagine, while you are reading these words, that from beneath your feet, a woman is hoarsely shouting in an indecipherable tongue, maybe she’s mad, maybe she’s excited, who knows. I want you to imagine her doing that for eleven hours straight. She can be clearly heard in every room of your apartment, which currently reeks so badly from her foul cooking that you and your roommate are physically sick. I want you to imagine paying over a thousand dollars a month for this apartment, during a time when you are so poor you can’t even afford food (or air freshener).

I want you to imagine dealing with this situation for five years. Five years of lost sleep because someone is shouting beneath your bed. Five years of nausea from the inescapable stench of the worst cooking in the world. Okay? Can I talk about this? Can I express my righteous frustration without some mewling pissant half my age calling me a bigot? Can I? Or should I just continue to bottle it up until it becomes a cancer and kills me?

Atlanta, once my favorite city, has become an absolutely intolerable place to work during the run-up to tomorrow. Some of you will never understand what it’s like to labor under the conditions in which I live, while an army of ignorant rich people who share my skin color paper every yard and street with signs that essentially say WE WANT MORE OF IT AND WE KNOW BETTER. I’m tired of going through ugly phases of animosity wherein I fantasize about killing myself and/or other people. I can’t make it funny. I’m overwhelmed with violent, suicidal hatred, to the point where I can’t possibly work a regular job among regular folks. I have psychotic episodes at the drop of a hat.

I don’t update as often as I used to, because I’m afraid of telling you how bad it is. Not to mention, I’m not alone. There are millions of people who are angrier than I am, living worse lives than I do. You think I want the responsibility of touching off that firestorm? No thanks.

So, back in mid-October, I tried hammering out a Bands I Useta Like article that would put a humorous, accessible spin on how I’ve felt for the past few weeks.

I failed in every aspect aside from starting the title with an “S”, as promised.

Instead of finishing the article and posting it on BIUL, I’m posting it here and giving you the option of continuing to read hereon. These are the words of someone who is struggling to envision a future for himself and the ones he cares about. Someone who has reached a dangerous peak of alienation. Someone who has given up hope that the world will ever wise up. Someone who knows that life as he knew it is over, and will never return.

If you’re as sick of politics as you should be at this point, read no further. Thank you for your understanding and support. May God have mercy on us all in the coming weeks.

———–

“SUSPICIOUS MINDS”

It’s entirely possible that I would have gotten a lot farther in life were it not for one troublesome character trait: I don’t trust anybody.

Oh sure, there are a handful of human beings walking this Earth whom I do trust, but as far as the other seven-odd billion, I expect them to fuck me over at the earliest opportunity. Why wouldn’t they? There is no reason to take me or anything I’ve ever created seriously. Even when times were relatively “good”, my work never made a dime.

That’s the test of whether art is worthwhile, right? Whether or not it makes a lot of money? Well, sort of.

Historically, art is only worthwhile when it makes a lot of money… for other people.

I look at myself as a sigma capitalist. First, let me explain the “sigma” part. Here’s the untrustworthy, condescendingly biased Wikipedia “explanation”.

When I was in first grade, my school library had a book I’d made at home upon its shelf, complete with date-stamped card boasting signatures of kids who’d checked it out. For as long as I can remember, I’ve always thought “yeah, books are cool, but I want to write my own books, for people to read.” I wanted to be an author when I could barely spell the word. I saw friends and family reading Peanuts comic books, and became overwhelmed with the indescribable desire to be the one who drew them.

Anytime my school passed out those little composition books for assignments, I’d swipe an extra one, and write my own Choose Your Own Adventure stories inside it. I grew bored with linear narrative and obsessed over malleable, multiple-choice concepts. Some kids were intrigued by my work, and encouraged me. Some kids were envious and cruel. Like, Stephen King novella-type cruel. The kind of emotional cruelty you carry for the rest of your life, whether you intend to, or not.

See, unlike the luckless protagonists of the average King paperback, I was never “touched” or otherwise physically fiddled with as a young lad. The bullies I dealt with knew of a far more effective way to cause lasting mental damage on someone like me.

They fucked with my stuff.

This is the part where any real artists reading this nod in silent solidarity. Back in the 1970’s and 80’s, when one or more bullies ruined or destroyed your hard work, there were no bloodsucking lawyers or crusading educators who took your side. There was no instantaneous form of shaming like social media; the best you could hope for is the principal calling the entire student body into the auditorium and unintentionally embarrassing you in front of everyone you know, as they rant and rave about how disappointed they are, as if that means a goddamned thing to any child that has ever existed.

And you just try to hold in your anger and sadness, until you can get the fuck away from them.

Your parents don’t take your side either; they lash out at you for being a weird little creep who’d rather draw in his room than play outside with the other kids. They almost literally push you back into the clutches of the bullies. They never give you any advice for dealing with the kids who hate you. It’s your fault they want to hurt you. If you could just be like them, and throw a fucking ball around once in a while, your parents would accept you. But no. You’re just a miserable, unhappy little nuisance who won’t get with the program.

You know how I got the bullies to stop bullying me? It was simple. I was like 12 years old, I think. It was at Boy Scouts. I calmly and forcefully said if you say one more word about my mother, I’ll kill you, or something to that effect. It worked. They left me alone after that. No one taught me to do it, it was all my idea. I’ve always wanted to justifiably kill someone. I’ve come close three times in my life. If you think that’s abnormal, well you’re not me. You’ve lived a happy life. Be fucking thankful.

Let’s fast-forward (SHOOP! WHOOSH!) to the present. Time to play a little game.

I want you to think of the one person whom you trust least of all in your life. It doesn’t have to be a family member, or even someone you’ve personally met. Think of a person whom you know to be the most duplicitous, lowdown, double-dealing, backstabbing worm there is. Someone who fucks good people over for fun, on purpose, and then gloats about how they’ll never face even a glimmer of consequence. Someone who lies, grinning, with every outward breath. Someone too ignorant to be anything but a serious problem. Someone you hate so fucking intensely, that the mere sight of their stupid face causes you to behave irrationally and lose your temper. Think hard, now.

This person is the symbol for everything in this world you know you cannot trust, under any circumstances. For brevity’s sake, we’ll label this person as Them.

You wake up in the morning, and set about getting ready for work. Out of habit, you turn on the TV news, and the first thing you see is Them. The news reporters, ostensibly people who completed some manner of standard media curriculum (and who can presumably spell the word bias), prattle at great lengths about how wonderful Them is. It doesn’t matter that you know every positive claim is a fabrication. The objective news reporters have been either compensated or threatened with dismissal to talk up Them.

How’s that make you feel?

Maybe you’re like me, and you gave up on TV news a decade ago. You’ve turned to the internet for employment opportunities, as well as entertainment. Maybe you looked up a short video for proper instruction in a household task, or maybe you just wanted a laugh in your miserable, joyless existence, so you “fire up the web browser” and bring up YouTube.

No matter the subject, every video you select is front-loaded with an unskippable 15-second advertisement for Them. It makes you so angry that you close the browser, totally overlooking the odd coincidence that your favorite videos aren’t even there; their channels were deleted because they contained negative opinions about Them. If you ever want to watch them again, you’ll have to use one of those other video-sharing platforms… i.e., the ones you can’t share on social media, because there are links to material that is “condemned” by corporate America.

How’s that make you feel? Like a bad person? Like you don’t matter?

Imagine you are driving, to a job you hate. Along the way, passing through a neighborhood you no longer recognize as your own, you see one front lawn after another polluted with ugly signs reading THEM. THEM. THEM. THEM. THEM. THEM. Every sign another painful reminder that the people who posted them hate your guts. They want you gone. If you raised a complaint they’d spit in your face. They’re right and you’re wrong. Everything about you is wrong, and don’t you fucking forget it.

So, out of loneliness, hurt, and poverty, you try to connect with friends on social media. Because in 2024, a significant percentage of the world’s population communicates no other way. They don’t go to libraries or cafes, they don’t go to the movies, they sit in their pajamas in front of a laptop all day. It’s just safer, after all. Just like it’s safer to get all your information about the world from one source, which is exactly what everyone on social media does. Unsurprisingly, they’re all eager, groveling shills for Them. The ones who aren’t keep quiet, because God forbid they engender the wrath of their totally-not-psychotic spouses. God forbid Facebook has to step in and ban you for threatening their “community guidelines”. Then what will you do, to stay in touch with your friends and family?

Man, what the fuck is wrong with you? Why can’t you just get with the program, and trust someone whom you know in your heart not to trust? Why won’t you just forsake everything you love and know to be true and get on board with Them?

It’s never going to end. The toadies of Them will never allow it to end, and they’re powered by an unlimited supply of spite and resentment. They won’t even stop after you’ve compromised every single thing that ever brought you joy in this life. Every surrender you make grants them another win and proves them even more right. Accept that you don’t matter. Nothing matters but Them.

Nothing ever will. You could write a fully-researched, wholly credible dissertation on why Them can’t be trusted, and no one will ever care. You can’t even pay someone to care, because literally every single person who could make any difference has already been paid off. By Them.

You want to wake up every morning and face a world like that? Because I don’t. I’d kill myself if it wasn’t what they want.

Is that harsh? Well, life is harsh. I had the same job for 26 years until a few months ago. Since then I’ve struggled with overwhelming sensations of obsolescence and uselessness. I’m straining to find a point in finishing this article. I’m straining to find a point in getting up in the morning. Some days I don’t. That’s how shitty things are.

Is that how you want things to be? Why would I trust you if you claimed otherwise? Just be honest with yourself. You don’t care if what you believe is actually true; you only care that other people think you believe “the right facts”. It doesn’t make you a bad person, it just means you’re weak.

[article unfinished]

————

Hey, you made it. I guess it wasn’t that bad. I don’t know anymore. The title was an indicator that I was going to quote song lyrics and include an Elvis video at the end. “[I’m] caught in a trap, I can’t walk out”, etc. Actually I might have included an Angry Grandpa video instead; he used to mockingly bellow those lines at his Elvis-loving ex-wife, to hilarious effect. It was a real-life running gag.

Next up is the podcast. Patron Saints get it free, everyone else has to pay $5. That’s as low a price as I can charge where the return is worth my while. Patreon takes almost half of it. I can hear that fucking woman screaming in the parking lot outside my window.

Things have to get better. They have to. That’s all there is to it.

Thank you sincerely for your support.

I have some good news and some bad news. First, the good news. At present, I am alive and relatively healthy. I have a very fluffy hamster named Otto who is a total sweetheart but can often be a handful. Also, my extremities are all in working order. Hands, legs, all good for a fifty-two-year old.

That’s about it.

Now for the bad news.

The thing about being a functioning artist is, you become a barometer for the well-being of society. Artists thrive when their community is thriving. When a community is suffering, there is no need for art or artists. When people struggle to provide for their families, artists are useless and displaced. Art has no logical purpose. The creative mind is shuttered to make room for survival and pragmatism.

During these times, art is all but forgotten.

The infestation of dominant left-wing politics in the world of art and entertainment has officially destroyed it. I’ve screamed myself hoarse for four years trying to reason with the unreasonable, and here we are.

Newspapers and magazines are gone. If not, then all their creative personnel have been replaced with free AI. Skills I have honed since my teenage years are as useless as tits on a boar. There is no conceivable, plausible way I can make a living as an artist anymore. No one is offering the amount of money I would require to live for another month, for anything I can do. Even if I managed to snag an entry-level job stocking shelves, it wouldn’t help. I don’t know how to make this any clearer for people.

I have begged and pleaded and bartered with people to get them to see that things are on the way out for me, and anyone like me, due in no small part to the bad political choices they insist upon making. It doesn’t matter. They don’t care. I don’t even think they care now that the world is literally falling apart around them. People are a lost cause. Like I say, the best I can hope for is that fifty years after my death, someone might say “gee whiz, it sure sucks that we didn’t see more output from this guy.”

Who am I kidding? In fifty years everything I ever created will be vapor. Everything I’ve ever accomplished in my life was for nothing.

There’s no getting through to people that what happens to me will eventually befall them, as well. They’ll all be scorned, replaced, and summarily forgotten. I say “them” because I’m trying not to scare you. Because no matter what you have, no matter what you think you’ve earned in this life, it’s all about to be taken from you.

Count your blessings. If you have children, how often do they choose some product of mass media over you? How often do you capitulate to their desires, which were implanted in them by forces that wish to annihilate your family, just to have a moment of peace in your home? How often have you been forsaken by blood relatives over a matter of political disagreement? If you’re like me, and old enough to be around grown folks who are half your age (or younger), how often do they laugh at your wisdom and tell you you’re full of shit? How often do you see them do things that you know to be harmful, from experience?

How often do they tell you that you made the wrong choice in life, and that your dreams are worthless and untenable?

I tried to warn you. I tried to convince you that my Constitutional rights were under attack. I tried to tell you that enemies of free expression are all around us now, everywhere from the corner store, to your job, to the highest levels of government. I tried to warn you that your sainted presidential messiah had made it legal for your own government to use propaganda against you. Over and over and over, I tried to make you understand that the entirety of the mass media complex was corrupted, right down to the newspapers that barely exist anymore, and that not one single news media outlet was telling you the truth.

You fucking laughed in my face.

When my enemies are female, you call me a misogynist. When my enemies aren’t white, you call me a racist. When my enemies are part of the ultra-rich global elite, you call me an anti-Semite. You never miss an opportunity to take the side that opposes me. You treat me like a loathsome deviant while you celebrate insane people who mutilate themselves, or who humiliate women by crudely mimicking a grotesque caricature of womanhood.

If I disagree with a famous celebrity, whose side do you take?

If I disagree with a politician, or agree with one who happens to be the subject of your “Two Minutes Hate” (READ ORWELL’S 1984, G.D. YOU), which side do you take?

Do you think my motives are purely contrarian, like a pathetic atheist? Do you take offense at my calling atheism “pathetic”, even though it’s no more respectable than nihilism, and atheists are worse than vegans with the condescension and smug, incessant lecturing and tongue-clucking?

Do you think I make art or humor just to fuck with you?

Where, exactly, is the money in that?

I liken myself to the “canary in the coalmine” because what you see befall me will eventually befall all of you, unless we reverse from the path we are on. When the miners see that the caged bird is on its back, that means that the gas in the mine is lethal, and it’s time to get out. If you continue to work you will die.

The benevolent, fatherly publishers of old are long gone. The alternative weeklies that once printed cartoons like mine are all shuttered. There are elected members of the US government who actively oppose the Constitution and work in secret to dismantle it. You probably voted for one or more of them. You probably ugly up your lawn with campaign signs promoting them.

I shudder to think what life will be like for you when reality hits. Once you see the scale of what your ignorance has wrought upon this world, as well as your own existence. Imagine your life’s work becoming obsolete and unimportant overnight. Imagine expressing your personal opinions, and receiving only indifference from your audience. Not disagreement, not agreement, nothing. 

When people are troubled and suffering, they don’t buy art. They don’t buy comic books, or any books at all. They sure as hell don’t commission artists to create great works.

The artists are the first to go, historically. We just die. That’s the future that awaits me, thanks to the choices made by people like you. That’s why I’m always angry with people, because I’m all too aware of the fate to which their ignorance leads. And people have never, ever been more ignorant in my lifetime. Once people start attacking the Constitution and siding with AI, my days are numbered. Taylor Swift, Disney+ and Starbucks are all the art and beauty you need in your lives. I honestly don’t know why I ever bothered.

Enjoy your weekend.

I busted my hump all day today sanding and oiling a door from the 1880’s for a job, and I come home to this. What does this mean? I have no idea what they’re talking about.

Is it because I’ve been getting thousands of views posting short clips of Family Guy? For one thing, they’re not monetized, and for another, I make it crystal clear that it’s not my content (and they permitted it). Take a gander at my Videos page. I’ve made three What’s The Deal videos, all of which took no small amount of effort, and not one has cracked 100 views. Combined, they don’t even crack 200.

As far as my original shit goes, “John Vomits” is my most popular video of all at 45K views… but I posted that 6 years ago. My flawless impersonation of Droopy Dog as Fredo from The Godfather has 26K views, but those took 5 years to accrue. Droopy Dog from The Dark Knight has 1K views so far, after 2 years. Meanwhile, my feature-length, award-winning 2008 animated movie that took me three years to produce? 362 views at present. With creator commentary? 50 VIEWS.  50.

Hey- how about that special Ceaseless Fables trailer for the strip’s 2/20/2020 relaunch, that took me forever to painstakingly edit? 60 VIEWS. There are literally videos of me belching that get more traction. Now I don’t have “sufficient channel history”? I might have broken “Community Guidelines”? Why, because I’m not a pederast like literally every major YouTuber? Because I’m not a fatherless female idiot teasing equally fatherless male idiots for “superchats”? WTF did I do wrong exactly?

You know what folks? THIS is why I lose motivation to create video content. THIS is why I don’t livestream. Why bother? I can post content here, on Bitchute and on Rumble and they leave me alone. Granted I get even fewer views in those places, but c’est la vie as the old folks like myself say. What is YouTube’s problem exactly?

My latest animated cartoon, which I’ve been working on over the past three years (thanks as always, paid-subscription-based Adobe Creative Suite), is nearing completion. Actually it’s one of two cartoons that I’m working on finishing before the end of the year. I’m gonna put a work-in-progress video of the former up here on my Patreon either tonight or tomorrow, schedule permitting. Behind the paywall, for my paying customers. I’m considering never putting it on YouTube for free, once the cartoon is completed. I have literally no reason to give it away. I’m sitting here counting loose change so maybe I can have something for lunch tomorrow. As it is I’m eating frozen catfish for dinner that I got at a food pantry back in February. Everything I earned working today goes to late bills and (if I’m lucky) late rent. I am flat broke. Again. Think how stupid I feel giving away my hard work on YouTube when it gains me nothing.

So yeah. It’s long past time to start focusing solely on paying customers. If you hate the idea of joining my Patreon, I have an option wherein I can charge a few bucks to view a post. This is new, so it’ll be an excuse for me to try it out.

This is one of the first animations I ever did, over 20 years ago. Back then it got something like a quarter-million hits and was seen around the world. It currently has 360 views. Gee, you think maybe the fix is in? How do you think that makes me feel?

Thanks for reading. You know where to find me. God bless.

This post is for the benefit of my general audience. I haven’t been productive for a long time now and I figured one or two of you might like an explanation as to why.

Out of consideration for my own mental health, I have decided to officially focus on quality over quantity. Sometime in the early 2000’s, when I was an award-winning Newgrounds user and was actively competing with websites like Doodie and Something Awful, I made the mistake of convincing myself that I could provide quality content on a daily basis. I saw other websites doing it, and, without a moment’s thought regarding whether they were run by more than one person, decided I could keep up.

In the beginning this wasn’t a terrible idea. I have a backlog of pre-written comics, hundreds of pages and strips that could be posted daily for a substantial period of time. I conditioned myself to create at least one solid idea or gag a day. But little by little, I made myself crazy. Okay, crazier. I set myself up for failure at the starting line.

If a day goes by without producing something creative, my self-hatred increases and my sleep schedule is decimated. If a week of days passes with no solid output, I grow despondent and miserable. I don’t expect anyone to understand this.

Some very blessed people pay to access the “good stuff” on my Patreon here. There are times where I feel overwhelmed with guilt because I should be cramming this site with material, when in reality long periods pass with nary an update. I don’t understand why I can’t just pour material out of myself as rapidly as I can think it. Take a look at the About page of my Bands I Useta Like website (now in its 10th year). Contemplate the absolute mania required for one person to create that amount of stuff. And it doesn’t even include the decades of daily/weekly editorial cartoons I was doing, at the same time.

I languish in confusion because I comprehend and trust other people even less than I ever did before. Even for an artist, I am alienated and dejected. For the better part of fourteen years, I created weekly Ceaseless Fables pages, first and foremost for myself, but now I struggle for a reason to continue. I feel like everything I have created has been for nothing.

Look at the world around you. Look at the people around you. Do you find anything that inspires? Does anything spark your imagination? Does anything give you hope for a better future? Does anything make you believe there will be one?

Lastly, if my latest article on the BIUL site disturbs you, or makes you consider withdrawing your support, consider the fact that for some time now I have been watching one of my dearest friends suffer and slowly die, thanks in no small part to conditions in this country that people who should god damn know better want to continue for another four years. I haven’t mentioned this because it’s not your business. My household has lost two pets this year and is infested with cockroaches. My eyesight is diminishing and two of my teeth have fallen out in the past six months. I have not set ink to paper since May (though I have been animating, largely out of obligation to the massive monthly fee required for the software).

I hope this helps everyone understand the extremity of my emotions, although I am simply being consistent with who I’ve always been. Thank you sincerely for your time and support.