Ceaseless Fables of Beyonding

Tomorrow morning I will be 53 years old. The latest CFB strip is up (from which the attached image is an excerpt). In the first and penultimate panels you can see lampstones being activated, using a device that holds two of them together, so that they glow. These particular lampstones are rarer and higher quality than Imperial issue. That indicates that this room, wherever it is, predates the Age of Dark Unmentionables (Refusaleth). This is an important detail that no one has any reason to notice.

The room has no doors or windows, but it does have small air vents in the ceiling, because I was lying awake at night writing this scene in my head, having breathing issues thinking about being trapped in a room with no doors or windows. Any time I have a visceral reaction while thinking up a scenario, I write it into the strip. Another example was the tunnel from an earlier strip, which the characters used to travel under a prison. I did my best to convey the anxiety and claustrophobia onto the page.

Etalun brought Daemir and Radish-Hoof into this room through “connective darkness”, the ability to move from one lightless place to any other. He can leave if the lights go out; they can’t. With the lights on, none of them can leave. This shifts the power balance, and unless Daemir or Radish-Hoof somehow learn how to traverse connective darkness, they need Etalun’s help to escape the room.

By the Law of the Unicorns, anyone who frees a Unicorn from captivity is granted a single Wish. So if Etalun were to pull Radish-Hoof out of the room to freedom, he would be owed a Wish. Etalun has a false headstone that allows the Empire to see whatever he does. He may be under direct influence of the Empress Nefaria. The possibility that he could wish for whatever he wants is a big deal.

With the proper Knowledge, you can look into any mirror in the Beyonding and become dressed however you want. This is why Etalun points out the mirror, and why it’s partly covered. All this is arcane info that longtime readers of the strip, if they exist, will pick up on. They might even get the idea that a certain “Dark Witch” will reappear soon.

Thank you as always for your support. I don’t know how to do anything else because I don’t want to. This is what I do. I’m the only one who does it.

Thanks for everything.

Howdy friends, thanks for stopping by. The completed version of Ceaseless Fables SS#143 is now viewable on the CFB site. We are now one page away from the end of the current Saga (“The Curse of the Death Stallion”).

First, a note for my paying Patron Saints; I have groceries thanks to you. Much obliged, sincerely. I literally have to eat food at least a couple times a day for some reason. I have no idea why this is. It seems impractical and costly. I ate late last night because I am a moron and I just shove food willy-nilly into this “body” thing, with no consideration for the after-effects. Also my eyes are slowly wearing out, but that’s neither here nor there. I use them all day, it’s expected.

Okay, moving on. The image is intended to highlight the amount of effort (and ink) that went into the latest CFB page. In some areas of cross-hatching, the lines almost became three-dimensional. I tried to get a picture of the texture but this was the best I could do.

Thank you sincerely as always for your support. It literally keeps me alive.

Oh man- let me see if I can’t rattle this off real quick on my lunch hour. I’m busting my digital hump on some design work right now so I’m kind of all over the place.

1. It’s a privilege to get to forge some sort of living by entertaining you fine people, however meager that living may be at the moment.

2. It’s a privilege to get to operate not one, but two websites with their own proprietary intellectual properties, and to have done so over a not-insignificant number of years.

3. It’s a privilege to get to fiddle with a bunch of flat black squares and a keyboard, with the result being a page, or an entire book. I was just holding one Wacom tablet in my left hand, while using the other one with my right hand, alternating between looking at my laptop screen and my desktop monitor, typing this, and playing the abominable Transformers Earth Wars on my phone. This must be, to myself at 13 years old, absolutely nucking futs.

4. Seriously, sincerely, it is a privilege to get to live out the pursuit of my own artistic vision, especially in times like these. I was tested, as were we all, and I learned that the only thing holding me back was myself.

5. It is a privilege to live this life the way I want to live it, afforded me by the people who created the circumstances for it to be lived, in the places I live it.

6. It is a privilege for me to create work for you to enjoy. It is a pleasure and not a burden. It brings happiness into my life. Don’t ever think I take that for granted. I draw stuff for money; that’s as good as life gets, without random and constant sexual intercourse.

Thank you for being here, from the bottom of my slate-frigid heart, and for your unyielding (as far as I know) support. As they say, the best is yet to come, but that’s an easy bet because progress is inevitable.

P.S.: The latest Ceaseless Fables strip is so late at this point I’ll probably wait to post it until Sunday. I gotta get back to work now, lunch break is over, and I didn’t even get to eat my Moroccan sardines with sriracha!!!

P.P.S.: BALLS!!!

I hope you’re having a great holiday weekend, or just a great weekend in general. Here’s what’s up:

-Tomorrow’s Ceaseless Fables page is still being roughed. Historically this means it might be late. I hate this because I had a really good streak of on-time pages for a little while there. Now I feel like a chump, unable to get this darnable thing ready to go.

-After like a dozen revisions, I could not make my promised Bands I Useta Like article (“Some Things I Can’t Say”) work. I hate this because there’s a lot of good stuff in there, plus I threw in a positive blurb about one of my all-time favorite websites. I may go back in a few weeks and try to wrangle it into shape again, or turn it into something new for the next time a title starting with “S” is needed (if you know, you know). I hacked away at this article from February to early April. The focus was just off somehow.

-However, this morning in a fit of pique (manic phase), I blasted out a new “S”-title article, titled “Sore Subjects“. Much of the same subject matter is reused from “Some Things I Can’t Say”, pared down to two basic points. Only open-minded persons are advised to read this particular cri de coeur. I am beyond fed-up with people and this article reflects that. I am not sharing it on Facebook because as far as I can tell Facebook is dead intellectually. There are users who post messages there about how America is dead. I fucking loathe people like that and would very much like to physically harm them. So instead, I’m trying to hurt them with my words. It should work, because as we all know, words can hurt as bad as the knife of a piece of shit who kills someone over a seat. Right? Sure they do.

It’s all good, because the targets of my new article will never wise up and change the way they are, or learn anything, and I will continue to grind in obscurity and poverty. It’s all good, folks. Nothing ever happens or matters.

Thank you sincerely as always for supporting what I do, seriously, you’re about all I got, and have a great weekend.