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Been listening to an awful lot of Pineapple Upside-Down Car on youtube. OK, earlier I was saying about how given the choice between drawing an animated TV sitcom or death I'd choose death. I think that might still be true. But I'm feeling a little less bad today and I've been thinking again about how I'm always changing things up so much. I can't start on or finish anything because the interim period between starting work on an idea and finishing an idea for a piece of art I'm making is long enough that I think the idea is old and overused before I get very far into it. Consistency is a really important part of selling yourself, or at the very least, being so inconsistent that you change your mind 1/4 of the way through a piece and throw it away is not very conducive to a high output rate.

"Say something once, why say it again!!???!????" It's like David Byrne was trying to warn me about something.

You know how fromsoft just kept making the same exact kind of game over and over and over again until they made the game so good that it became a billion dollar cultural phenomenon? Why can't I be satisfied doing the same kind of thing even once? What is there to be afraid of? Nobody is looking at me!! Nobody is observing me that hard!!! It might actually be good for me to do some things over again. Maybe even over and over again.

Current Music: goof music for laff and yuk addicts

The state of this world is pushing me to try the full dose of Zoloft again. The interim adjustment period is making me feel kind of crazy again though. Look at this shit I wrote in my drafts:

I want to reach greater heights. I want to succeed in my endeavors. I want to make something worth talking about.

Insane, right? It made me buy RPG Maker MZ on steam and I have no idea what I'd even make with it.

A moment of clarity came to me last night as I lay in bed struggling to sleep, that my Austin Powers project was too long. I mean it's obviously stupid that I was going to make a visual novel based on my wife's joke comment on my Tumblr post, but the stupidity doesn't bother me. I need to make something short, something manageable. I'm weak, I'm easily tired out, I'm creatively miserable in every way. I need some small victories. Maybe all I'll ever have are small victories, but they'll still be mine.

Another tangent, but as always related to my mercurial emotional state: during my father's hospice I was able to overcome a significant amount of driving anxiety by thinking of the road as my friend that wants to help me get where I want to go and the other cars as my coworkers who are all completing their own tasks. It made me think again about how little enjoyment I get from media most of the time, but what if I thought about TV and books and the computer as my friend that wants to help me be entertained, instead of how I currently view them which is kind of unfavorable. This is a very religious type of view, it creates many invisible gods. Would a belief in the supernatural and my deeply ingrained need to please other people make me a more active and healthy person? Probably not! You would need a whole community of people with similar delusions to positively reenforce those behaviors. Maybe what we need is some kind of all seeing mechanical God that judges and scores our every second, even while we sleep, and eventually our thoughts. That would give life meaning, right? I'm just thinking out loud here, folks.

Always thinking of shit like, "If I had to make a cartoon in the ToonBoom Harmony animated sitcom style or kill myself, I would choose to kill myself." Looking at my wife read Superosity in the morning makes me think about drawing comics in the superosity style - not the way it's drawn, obviously, but the cramped-up 4 panel closeup on face direction - for 30 years and that makes me want to kill myself. It's important and good to be opinionated about art and food and things of this nature, because it makes life more interesting, it makes a person more alive. I'm blind to the line between being opinionated in a way that gives life pizazz and being opinionated in a way that makes you a crank and a hack. I can't see it, I don't know where I am or where other people are in relation to the line, or whether or not it's actually good to be over that line in some instances. What would life be if you didn't experience interacting with and being a crank or a hack every once in a while???

Wandered around a bunch of nearby stores looking for a sympathy card to send a friend of the family. It was very difficult to find a loss sympathy card that didn't have stuff written on the inside of it and just be blank inside. There were very few period that had blank insides actually. I'm certain I could have found a better card if I'd ventured out into some more specialized stationary stores, but I felt time was of the essence for some reason.

I feel somehow as if any second I'm going to have to get in a plane and take off again, I guess I've been travelling enough that I don't expect to be able to spend any time at home at all. But I'm not traveling again until I see my family in December.

I still need to order parts and replace the entire drivetrain of my bicycle, it's nearly useless right now. It might be a better idea to just buy a new bike, I dunno. I've got a lot to think about in the bicycle department.

I've made a list of names for my renpy project that I'm working on:

Dr. Pincer Deadnettle
Dr. Meredith Stance
Dr. Macy Slaughter
Dr. Cadence Nightjar
Dr. Tuxedo Otterhound
Dr. Penny Mitre
Dr. Viper Tuxedo
Dr. Blackhaw Thymus
Dr. Diesel Kittentail

I think it should mostly be about doctors and their various disagreements about how the world should be organized, also it will still be loosely based on the plot of Austin Powers, but with more body horror, more talking animals, more deadly women. I had a revelation about people want to see art about attractive people, not ugly people, and given that I mostly just draw ugly people - I should change that! I need to be drawing hot anime babes and some guys and nonbinaries as well. It could be a terrible challenge.

"Macy" is a name I've been thinking about a lot, as a possible replacement for my current name, to better reflect a gender transition. I will possibly ask my wife to start referring to me as such as an experiment to see if it can feel good or natural at all. It's got some baggage from the department store, but I'm a department store kind of person so it feels spiritually manageable.

I have been gaining weight again and it's unpleasant! Everytime I see someone's parents I gain ten pounds, and I've been seeing people's parents an awful lot! I still can't fit into my nice shirt that I like. I've got to start eating a lot of vegetables with a small amount of sauce on them. I wish I thought ranch dressing tasted good. I'm gonna figure this shit out. I recently discovered you can dip just a tiny little bit of a sugar snap pea into some hoisin sauce and it's incredible, I tried this with "Bachan's Japanese Dipping Sauce" today and it was similarly good - very nutty! I know this is just recreating salad dressing but I'm intensely dissatisfied with salad dressings that I see in the store. Maybe I just need the right contexts to appreciate them. There must be an ideal vegetable for each individual salad dressing...

Current Mood: strange
Current Location: home
Current Music: Simcity 4 OST

I successfully flew home, being sat in the middle seat next to yet another tiny lady with no sense of personal space, jutting her elbow go way over the seat rest and she was even sticking her damn foot under the seat in front of me. What is it with diminutive women and being obnoxious on an airplane? This is like the second time this year. Of course, I'm Canadian levels of polite so I didn't say anything.

It's time to fire up renpy. It's time to write about evil austin powers. I will conduct research by watching austin powers, or, failing that, have an AI write me a detailed summary of the plot of austin powers international man of mystery. I'd like it to be very dark and body horror-ish. But I don't know if I can make it work if the whole world is all fleshy and wrong, I think you need the backdrop of familiarity and safety to be there in the first place to be corrupted. I was playing a lot of Stardew Valley on my phone and since the last time I played they introduced a feature called the Green Rain that tints the whole world slightly green, even indoors, and spawns a lot of special foliage that can be harvested along with boosting tree growth temporarily. Let me tell you: even though it's completely benign in the game, waking up and finding the inside of your farmhouse tinted green with no idea what's going on is something I found to be very unnerving.

But that shit is a little advanced for what I really need to do, which is just write a bunch of dreck, to attempt to write something serious and find myself completely unable to resist twisting and perverting it into something I think is funny.

Going to try and earnestly use this dreamwidth the same way I used livejournal back in my high school days. It's been decades. I just want to write about my life and let off steam on something that isn't connected at all to my comics or my art or anything. I want to try and pretend I'm still living in an era before we all had the inclination to write banger posts or a need to accumulate followers who were anything other than our closest friends and distant acquaintances.

My wife is recovering from her pneumonia or bronchitis or whatever the fuck it is she had, and we are now leaving California... I didn't get much done, but that's okay because I'm just hanging out with my in-laws. Besides the sickness, it's been wonderful because I like my wife's family very much and the weather has been generally palatable or even beautiful.

I have been having crazy restless legs for ages. I should talk to my doctor about it. My hope and wish is that it's something that can be cured with some kind of stretch instead of some deeply affecting medication, but from what I've read restless legs is a neurological thing. None of the over the counter vitamins people suggest do anything for me, which makes me wonder if it's not in fact restless legs, but some other kind of bullshit, maybe related to my changing body on HRT? Maybe it's related to my SSRI? Considering dropping my SSRI to test this.

Good news: I watched that Naked Gun (2025) film and even though it's not really up to the level of the original and had some pretty bad pop culture style jokes that dragged on way too long, I actually found myself laughing quite a lot at it. I would have liked to have seen a much higher density of background gags happening, but the fact that there were any at all made me feel some kind of hope for comedy on the screen again.

I continue to worry about my future in this country and the safety or my friends and family as transgender people. It's very obvious what this administration wants to do, and I feel like it's not going to be long until they start doing it. It's not like they seem to care at all about breaking the law. Or about starting nuclear war with other nuclear powers. I'm not the kind of person that believes in the end times, that shit is stupid. Life will go on, society will continue to exist and go through it's various ups and downs. But there could be an awful lot of suffering and death ahead of us, which will include me. I don't want this to turn into some kind of mind-numbingly stupid social media style political proselytization thing, the scope of this journal is supposed to be about my everyday life and my feelings and my thoughts. But this is a thing that has to keep coming up, and it's especially distressing to me living inside the no-man's-land of Washington DC that can't even offer the feeble resistance of the state against swarms of evil fucking ICE agents. It sucks and it's scary!

I am really itching to make something that's fucked up and evil, like really deranged art. But it can't be a comic or a cartoon, I'm completely burned out on that shit. It's gonna have to be a bad renpy visual novel. Just absolute dogshit. I'm going to make a grimdark reimagining of Austin Powers. There's a ninety percent chance I won't finish it. But writing is a lot faster than drawing, and it's fun to make images and sound appear on the computer screen.

Despite the tone of this post, I don't feel too bad actually. My life is very good if you ignore all the impending doom politics stuff. I have a wonderful wife and I'm currently financially secure and I have health insurance and fall is upon us. Fall!! I fucking love fall. I'm that kind of person. It's when decay is truly beautiful and colorful and vibrant and refreshing. That's all for now, have to catch a very long flight back home.