April 28, 2007

Update Post

FINALLY UPDATED.

I'm going to do some work on the next pages, get dinner, and play FF8 for a few hours. It'll be like a super-compressed day off, and then there'll be another update this weekend. I hope.

SWOOSH GOES THE NINJA.

April 27, 2007

Everyone's Out To Get You, Motherfucker

Something else has apparently gone wrong.

Remember how Mom put me on her Wells Fargo account back in the day?

Well, she took out a loan at some point and had been paying it back at a fixed rate of $50 per month, automatically deducted from her SSI benefits. You see where this is going?

Her benefits have stopped on account of EXTREME DEATH, but my brother just informed me that the deductions have not. Not only is her account in negative balance, they're also tacking on a fee for each transaction. Or something. I found out about this too late to call them and get the information for myself. I don't even know if I'm on the hook for it, because I know nothing about how debts work. When I incur them, I either pay them off or run away until they default.

I have to call the bank tomorrow and find out what's going on. Fuck's sake.

Also, my little baby basil sprouts (which I have been gleefully showing off to the housemates as if I had personally given BIRTH to them) fell out of the window and the pot smashed on the floor. I was able to save the plants and re-home them in a tiny Halloween bucket painted to look like a kitty, but I'm worried that there might have been trauma to my babies. But that might be oversharing a bit.

My brother got taken in for $220 on an eBay transaction and his complaint to PayPal got no response. He's as unfamiliar with the internets as I am with the bank and financial world, so I've volunteered to help him try to get either the auto part or his money back.

All of this has happened in the 2 hours since waking up today.

I'm still not done with the pages, because everything has been going wrong since I woke up. I'm working on them, though. My sense of personal responsibility is going apeshit and won't shut up until I can keep a promise, any promise.

Looking on the bright side, it's a very nice day out. I haven't been able to leave the house to enjoy it, but maybe next week things will be different.

Polysics: I My Me Mine

Fun With MS Paint



Not quite done with shading yet. The backgrounds on these next few pages are a little bit elaborate, and I failed to anticipate this fact when I decided the update would be done tonight.

When I wake up I'll get right back to work. It should only take another 2 hours or so, if I stay on-task.

April 25, 2007

THE :TODD: IS BACK

You guys aren't gonna believe this.

Remember Tard Boldman from several posts ago? Well, he's been acting like a shit and sending C&D's to all the sites hosting proof of his plagiarism (to recap: Todd Goldman is an art thief who steals art with thievery). Not such a huge deal; people are tards, that's never been news.

He is also trying to knock the amount of money he owes Shmorky down to chump change by tacking on various fees and deductions. If he gets his way, Shmorky will have essentially sold him a design for a hundred bucks. Good little employee, pat pat. Shmorky is pissed and fighting it, and will not hesitate to sue. Again, not really unexpected.

My roomie Seebs registered for SA just to tell them "Hey, I sue assholes as a HOBBY, I'll host the proof. Bring on the lawyers!" He beat me to it, I was gonna do the same thing.

And then I missed updates to the thread for about 24 hours due to the crazy-busy week we've been having, but upon checking back, the smoldering fire of :TODD:mania had been whipped back up into a bonfire.

Here's why:



Yes, you're looking at conclusive evidence that Cockface's most popular shirt ever, the one that made him his fortune, was ripped from a 1999 Pentium III advertisement created by Chip Wass! You cannot PAY for this kind of hilarity, folks.

And it doesn't stop there, either!



The image on the right in the following comparison shot is also a Chip Wass original:




Oh, Cockface. If you'd just fucking PAY SHMORKY TO GO AWAY, this would stop. No, I lie. That may have been the case three days ago, but as of now I doubt even Shmorky could call off the dogs and stop the humiliation. People are having too much fun hunting down the rips and shitting on the Goldman name.

Add in the intoxicating lure of romantic danger posed by Cockface's crack legal department, and you've got everything you need for a good old-fashined bonfire of the vanities!

I wish I had more time to play detective along with the big kids. I truly desire a Cease and Desist letter of my very own. But knowing :TODD:, it'd probably just be copied from another lawyer's work anyway.

This story has been SlashDotted, so expect much more to come. In the meantime, Cockface's distributors have begun to feel the heat.



TO BE CONTINUED...

YOU KNOW YOU WANT TO SEX ME



Some things you need to know:

1. There isn't much you can safely do with a head full of henna, so things can get VERY boring by the end of the six hours it takes to kick in.

2. If you don't paint some of the gunk onto your eyebrows as well, they tend to look weird later when the rest of your hair is orange.

3. There was a camera nearby.

Thus, this series of photos. And yes, ladies--I AM single.

April 23, 2007

Domesticide

So I finally figured it out. It's not that I resent Rain for leaving, it's just that all the emotional triggers of someone I love going away are currently tangled together and it makes me panic.

As soon as my brain sees proof that she didn't DIE, I think I'll be okay.

I was fully half an inch shorter than the U-Haul trailer, so I got to stand inside and be TETRIS MAN. I made all the boxes fit with plenty of room to spare, and even got her crazy wrought-iron shelf unit to fit. It was hot and sweaty work, but we had a wonderful goodbye lunch at Big Bowl and sent her and Jenine off in style.

Today was also Rah's birthday, which got kind of lost in the shuffle. Sorry Rah, you know we love you.

After Rain left, I got to work cleaning up the trash and empty boxes and stuff that got left behind . By the end of the night I had cleared the entire living room out, swept it, and mopped with pine-scented cleaner. The floor looks like it's absolutely filthy because our previous houseowners had no idea how to treat a hardwood floor, but it's clean enough to eat off of. I took the curtain down from the big picture window and popped it in the laundry (it was almost black with cat hair).

Not even five minutes later, some dudes from the neighborhood were knocking on the door to ask if we were renting out the room. I guess they saw the U-Haul earlier. I said we had someone new moving in (LIES!).

I also noticed the way the one at the door was eyeing the house behind me. Tough luck finding something worth ripping off d00d! What can be seen of the ground floor from the doorway looks like a crank den, and for good reason.

Then I went and cleaned out the bathroom again. It was nasty but last night was worse by far because I had to scrub the toilet and it was an abomination.

Tomorrow I'm getting the dining room and the one that Rain used to sleep in. Cleaning seems to help get me out of my head. Although holy FUCK are my allergies and asthma going nuts from all the dust in the air :(

I didn't get anything done on the comic today, but I'm gonna go work on it as soon as I eat some dinner. I'm feeling a lot less like freaking out, and there's only one page left to go and I know exactly what's gonna be on it already.

Could you be at risk for IBD?

You thought I was being paranoid, but Internet Button Disease really does exist.

April 22, 2007

Despair is a hell of a thing.

When the lyrics to Nine Inch Nails songs start to make sense, you know you're one depressed motherfucker.

I'm flying under the radar, as far away from other people as I can get. At least for a little while, don't expect to see much of me.

Rain is leaving for Asheville on Monday. This is not the cause, or even a cause, of my depression; I've known since autumn that she was planning to go, and I think she'll do really well and make lots of cool hippie friends for me to make fun of.

And I'm glad she stayed this long. She got me through Omaha in one piece, and that would not have happened if I were down there alone.

But feeling abandoned is a kind of a theme for me right now, and so I'm more bummed out about her going away than I would otherwise be. Woe is me, everyone leaves. Ooh, hey. Sounds like a good title for a crappy poem!

April 21, 2007

Eye Candy



Holy frijole! Where can I find me a woman like that?

April 19, 2007

This Place Blows. Let's Go To Mars.



Five new buttons exist!

April 18, 2007

Another Goddamn Shooting

When I was a kid, I was bullied pretty much constantly at school. I didn't have friends to pressure other kids into leaving me alone, and the teachers never really paid much attention to what was going on.

The harassment ranged from the extreme to the mundane depending on factors I never could identify, but it never outright stopped. It wasn't uncommon to have groups of girls in nice clothing follow me down a hallway, taking turns asking me questions about my hygiene, whether I owned a TV, whether I worshipped the devil.

Sometimes they'd surround me with a single person leading the charge, but usually they stayed together and tried to remain behind me, where I wouldn't be able to tell who said what. Once in the bathroom, people started climbing the other stalls or crawling underneath to look at me. Another favorite pastime was thinking up nicknames.

I wore a lot of black back then, and I wasn't aware that I was lacking social skills. When people tell you you're weird, you just assume that explains everything and move on. I wrote poems about sadistic murder and suicide and turned them in. Teachers didn't really like that, but they also didn't ask any questions most of the time. I thought that was great; now I wish they'd been willing to invest the time. Things might be different today if even one of them had bothered.

Meanwhile people were still throwing spare change at me, stuffing shampoo samples in my locker, and singing "Pretty Woman" as a group whenever I got nearby.

The boys weren't as bad as the girls, possibly because they were too busy eating their own weaklings, but there were enough of them to cause me a headache. The bullying tactics of a boy harassing a low-caste female were usually more straightforward than you'd expect from a girl.

One would get behind me and pantomime whatever I was doing, so that I only knew what was going on when I turned to see what was causing the laughter. A lot of times, they'd try to ask me out on dates or embarrass each other with the old "My friend over there, he likes you" ploy.

Back then I was completely face blind. I'd been coming to class for years with these kids and I couldn't have picked one of them out of a lineup or called them by name. I tried, but somehow I never learned how to do it.

Because of this, I never knew who my tormenters were, or how many of them there were. I thought it was everyone, though it might have been as few as twenty kids for all I know.

What I do know is that from the minute I left the house until I came home afterwards, I had to be on my guard and ready for anything. I never relaxed. I was terribly paranoid and went to great lengths to avoid being near others, a habit which continues to this day even though I've learned to ape a lot of normal human social cues since then.

I fantasized about destroying the school. Would I set it on fire, shoot everyone, blow it up? What kind of bombs would I need? Where would I put them? How would I make sure I didn't kill any of the good ones along with the assholes, when I didn't know who was who? And so on and so forth. I didn't want to kill anyone but myself, but there was a wonderful escapism in planning out all these violent revenge scenarios.

Some asshole could be sitting two desks away whispering to her friends, and here was me debating the best way to get her head off her body. There was a deep satisfaction in it. No one could try to tell me that these soul-crushing drones were actually very nice and wonderful people deep down--I killed them in effigy, and that was enough. It didn't stop the bullying, but I didn't snap, so maybe it worked after all.

With all that said, let me confess that I had a major hero-worship thing going on with the famous school shooters of my era. Columbine came after I finally dropped out of high school for good, which is fortunate. Suddenly my old school not only noticed its bullied oddballs for the first time, it also had on-campus cops arrest them for being potential psychopaths (that is, wearing trenchcoats or looking Goth).

Still, if it had happened sooner, I would have been fantasizing it was my classmates eating lead. That's how it was with the Kip Kinkel shooting. That one happened at the school I was supposed to be attending, and the senior class was made up of people from my year. I spent a lot of time hoping that maybe he got some of the kids whose harassment in middle school made me quit going. I imagined he only killed people who tortured him and made him twisted in the first place.

Such thinking never holds up under scrutiny, but I was really angry and such evil thoughts were nicely shocking and dark. They expressed a need for ultimate closure, which I couldn't get on my own, and so I ran with it. I never would have been one of the kids taking a gun to school, but I understood.

School shootings can serve as potent wish fulfilment when your life is in chaos and your fellow students are doing their best to make you wish you were dead, until you're trampled so flat that Columbine makes you say "Good job, guys." The key is to pretend the enigmatic shooter was in the exact same boat you're in, and the people he killed--every single one--were analogous to the ones currently tormenting you.

There's this vibe of darkness and mystery that surrounds the American school shooter. It's almost coyly romantic. Think of a shooter and you get this vague impression of a trenchcoat-clad loner who nobody relates to because he's so quiet and weird, and then one day the guy (or girl) just snaps. "I've taken all I can stand from you people!" he roars, and the body count starts to rise.

Too often, the school shooter dies in the firefight, suicide by either the cops or their own hand. They get to go out in a blaze of glory, taking the truth about their motivations to the grave. Usually we never know what set them off, but within about 24 hours I can count on watching a Jesus freak make fun of my favorite video game or band on national TV.

Mr. Cho, our most recent addition to the club, has helpfully contributed to our understanding of the school shooter conundrum by way of a multimedia manifesto, mailed to NBC just before the slaughter began.

The contents of this manifesto are so absolutely moronic and petty, so loaded with self-pitying psychobabble, that all the glamour and mystique has been permanently stripped away from his image. Now, instead of going down in history as a silent martyr with dead aim and inscrutable goals, this dum-dum will forever be remembered as a whiny fuckwit who stalked women and had to gun down a fucking Holocaust survivor to feel like he even rated an obituary.

How does that bit go? The one about how it's better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open one's mouth and remove all doubt? Anyway.

Rest assured that we did not lose a potential cancer cure in Mr. Cho. The shame is that he knew this and decided to drag down a bunch of the bright ones with him because, hey, misery and mediocrity loves company.

Just about the only mystery left here is the fact that he made it all the way to college with as slow a mind as he apparently had. I guess God works in mysterious ways.

I hope weird kids today look at this guy's work and see it for the cowardly act of a total chode instead of the grand gesture it was clearly intended to be. It might be too much to ask for, but if even one would-be killer could be discouraged from idolizing school shooters as martyrs, that would be nice.

The moral of the story: School shootings used to mean something, man, but they've totally pussied out since their last album.

April 17, 2007

You Are Invited To A Funeral. BYOB.

According to the website of the Phelps family, they're planning to picket the funerals of the students who got gunned down today at Virginia Tech.

Now, this is just more of the same old publicity shit from the inbreeders, but it gave me a great idea:



The day this miserable cock gets buried, I cordially invite every messed up son of a whore who ever drew a sinful breath to join me in throwing the largest disruptive graveside orgy of derision and glee since the dawn of mankind. It'll be a regular hoedown (NOTE: HOS WILL NOT BE PROVIDED AT THE DOOR. YOU WILL NEED TO SUPPLY YOUR OWN). Got a megaphone? No problem, we'll be handing them out. Feel free to "make a joyful noise unto the lord" by playing Penis! with partygoers across the cemetery--it's what Phelps would have wanted.

Large and hilarious picket signs will be optional, but don't forget to wear something scandalous. GOD IS WATCHING! A prize will be awarded to whoever comes up with the most nonsensical protest slogan. Let's see if we can't turn those grieving Phelps frowns upside down with cries of "BUTT SEX BUTT SEX UBER ALLES!"

After a thoroughly demolished burial service, the party will move indoors, where we will toast his memory with unmentionable fluids.



RSVP, bitches. I want to make sure we buy enough party hats to go around.

April 16, 2007

Update Post

3 NEW PAGES!

April 15, 2007

Animals, Prospective Animals, Socks in Doors

EDIT: I wrote this last night but the entry didn't save. Lucky for me, the window was still open! Please pretend that it is 9 hours ago for the duration of the post.



Just now the kitty nuzzles my door, trying to push it open so she can come in and be loved. I, however, knew this was going to happen and stuffed a sock in the jamb to prevent it from slipping open. There will be NO CATS ALLOWED in my room tonight. No, not even soft little Mai-mai with her nosy ways and princess composure. So ha on you, furry butt.

Went back to the lake today and walked around for a bit. Saw two ladies walking an Australian Shepherd puppy. It was a red merle with wonderful tea-colored eyes. I asked where they got it, but they said it was from Texas.

I am looking for a dog to adopt, and my ideal would be a red merle aussie like my dog Ishnamax, who got shot when I was 13. Ishna was the finest of the hounds. He had blue and brown patches in his eyes that looked like puzzle pieces that got swapped around. I still have his collar; it was in Mom's keepsakes box.

Last night Rain and I did each other's hair with henna. I hadn't dyed mine since before July, and it had maybe five inches of roots. The good news is that after the third application, the intense red stopped fading out and it looked as good yesterday as it did a week after I last dyed it. Rain ended up Kenshin red (Manga Kenshin, not cartoon Kenshin) and could easily cosplay Nami. Will post pics of the adventure tomorrow.

I am going to bed due to extreme tired, but unfortunately this week's pages are not yet finished. I'll pick it up and get them finished when I wake up. I'm also thinking of going back to Saturdays since I can't seem to adjust to this new schedule. Apparently, I am not a creature who deals well with change. It's very important to me that the updates be on time, but lately things have been sliding in all directions. I may take another week of mental health vacation time if I can't get my shit together before May.

Con season is pretty much not gonna happen this year. We're set up for Animazement, A-Kon, and Kumoricon--and that's it. All the other cons either ran out of tables or weren't worth the effort. I'll spend that extra time on things that actually matter, like getting a damn book together and finishing the side comics I've been putting off for years.

Ah. The Mai-mai has given up noofing my door. Looks like Operation Sock was successful. Now I can climb into bed without fear of the door suddenly bursting open in the night.

April 13, 2007

The Battle Of Myspace, Part Deux

I spent the day out of the house because it was too nice to be stuck in here brooding. Went to the lake and took some pictures, then to Panera with Rain so she could have a bagel. I also found a SOGEKING & CHOPPER figurine set at the Tomodachi store for ten bucks and went over budget because it had to be mine. I will call it a reward for getting through this shitty week.

Got back home and noticed that the Shmorky V. Goliath Myspace shenanigans have het up considerable in my absence. Todd Goldman, or one of his friends, has begun hacking and vandalizing various MySpace accounts belonging to people who asked to be added during he first leg of the Battle. Indecent content created for the occasion and hosted on Cockface's own website is being uploaded to their userpages. I doubt he can explain that one away as an accident!

Far from ending with the civility of a settlement, it looks like :TODD: will be unsatisfied with anything short of a full-blown temper tantrum. I look forward to seeing how this plays out,and will keep an eye out for screenshots.

Bad Dreams

Lately I've started having dreams about Mom dying. Mostly minor ones, and I guess it was just a matter of time before my subconscious finally decided to give the situation a full treatment. I've been having a few ever since I got back from Nebraska, but as my grief gets more intense, so do the dreams.

I've always had scary-realistic dreams and my brain delights in walking me through the most awful stuff with unlikely but vivid details.

The usual setup for the latest crop is usually plain nonfiction--she's dead and I see her ghost in various settings, very generic. Nothing like what I know my head's capable of. Nothing worth recounting except that the other night I actually woke up with my hand over my face trying to feel whether I was making the same grotesque D: expression as in my dream.

I think tonight was the fourth night in a row. This time, though, it was a nightmare. Mom died, then my brother came home alone from the hospital and shot himself on her bed. I guess his girlfriend wasn't in this dream because no one found the body for a long time. The stink was terrible and the body so decayed they had to drain parts of it off the bed into buckets.

I didn't want to go into the house because I was sure it would reek of death, but my sister had cleaned it up and we were going to have a funeral there whether I liked it or not. She let me in and was like "Look, the bed's still good." She wanted me to sleep in it when I stayed the night. I refused to go near it and she got angry at me. I started smelling putrid flesh. It was gag-inducing but she didn't smell it at all.

Next thing I knew the body started reappearing on the bed as it was when they found it. Just for a moment. Then my brother's ghost started bothering me. I found a letter he wrote about how much he always loved and admired me and how it wasn't my fault, he just couldn't stand Mom being gone and he hoped it wouldn't cause too much trouble.

Then my sister turned on the TV. It was showing my brother's autopsy. He didn't have a face anymore but I knew it was him the way you do in dreams. I ran over to the window so I wouldn't see anymore. Then we had a funeral and the real grief I was feeling for mom got the volume turned up to nearly unbearable levels. I remember thinking "God, this isn't the way I normally feel. This is more like those dreams I used to have about people dying." The dream got really boring from that point on. Rather than spend five more minutes describing the minutae of grief I'll just skip to the part where I wake up with every nerve on my body shuddering in sick horror.

I went back to sleep, hoping the next dream would be better. It wasn't.

In this one, I was outside getting a banana from a vendor and they started shouting about a big storm and possible tornado on the way. There were black clouds in the sky. Everyone went to the park to sit under the big trees and wouldn't listen to me when I said they weren't safe. I ran down an alley knocking on doors, but no one would let me take shelter. I ended up hiding under a tiny awning with two kids while huge white bolts of lightning hammered down all around.

The dream changed again and I was in a morgue watching some crazy asshole make out with the corpse of his girlfriend, who had been split right down the middle by a chainsaw. She was lying in her left side, truncated side up. From under the table it looked like he was just kissing a sleeping woman, but then I stood up and could see her tongue and head move around in her skull.

The sound of the birds outside my window woke me up. I was glad. I typed this up so I wouldn't have to go back to sleep with all of that in my head.

April 12, 2007

When is a copout not a copout? When it's a copout.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

POST POP-ARTIST, TODD GOLDMAN, CONTROVERSAL PAINTING

CLEARWATER, FL, April 11, 2007- Popular post pop-artist, Todd Goldman who has made a career of making fun of the world with his sarcastic commentary and cartoon icons, has mistakenly used the design of an another artist in two of his recent paintings. Todd’s painting, “Dear God, Please Make Everyone Die”, was inspired from a drawing he received unbeknownst to him belonging to an underground web comic artist David “Shmorky” Kelly.

In addition to painting, Todd designs t-shirts for his clothing company, David & Goliath. Todd and his design team create and receive thousands of design ideas every month. It’s no secret that Goldman creates a lot of his painting ideas from his t-shirt designs. Goldman says “I made a judgment error and didn’t research the background of this particular submission. “My intention was not to copy Mr. Kelly. I have never seen his work before and would never intentionally knock-off someone else’s idea.”

Goldman has issued a formal apology to Mr. Kelly and has stated that he will not be using his design again in the future. As a gesture of good faith, Goldman has pledged not profit from his mistake. He will instead donate his proceeds from the painting directly to Mr. Kelly or his charity of choice.


Typical lies and transparent ass-coveration, and the spelling error in the headline is hurting my soul. The attempt made by the PR department to soften the blow by replacing "TRACED" with "INSPIRED" is delightfully weaselminded.

The :TODD: account of events contradicts pretty much all the facts, and a decent chunk of common sense in the bargain, but it's good enough to be getting on with. Underneath the bullshit and spin is a nice little win for the good guys of the interbutt against the Cockfaces of unoriginality and swine.

Furthermore, :TODD: has confessed to being an unoriginal twat who uses other people's ideas and then graciously accepts credit for the work. This is nothing short of comedy gold, and my personal favorite part of the entire confession. It spells death for :TODD:'s obnoxious blathering about he's just so zany and cree8tive that he doesn't even look outside his own head for influences. And that's awesome, because that fucking PR spiel really needed killing.

His 'tude still lacks the humbleness appropriate for a man who is essentially confessing to being an artless consumer-pleasuring drone, is at least a start. I'm sure he'll learn fast; that's where the money is.

Speaking of moolah, Shmorky's going to be recieving a bunch of it for the (at least) three instances of his Purple Pussy art being redrawn and sold as an original painting. There may very well be others, but I don't expect Cockface would volunteer that information of his own free will after he barely managed to apologize for the known rips. And so begins the digging!

The amount Shmorky is due just for the known paintings totals more than $11,000, not counting any other miscellaneous good faith gestures (such as asshole tax, hush money, tithing and lawyer fees) that they may also choose to offer while he has the company bent over the kitchen table with an apple stuffed between the teeth. Not bad back-pay for a webcomic that ended several years ago, eh?

Shmorky plans to accept the full amount himself and will donate a portion of it to charity later, so that Cockface won't be able to deduct the donation from his own taxes. Nice try, dude, but you can't win on Apple Day.

Meanwhile, the rest of the internet has smelled blood and the rest of the wronged artists will soon be taking their own bites out of Goldman's vast fortune of ill-gotten gains. I wish them the best of luck.

Meanwhile meanwhile, the Battle of Myspace ended in blood and honor last night when the SA goon who registered the abandoned username switched tactics and deleted the account himself, re-releasing the name for registration. Then he re-re-registered the username and locked Cockface out of it permanently. Goodbye, hax!

Maybe Cockface will wise up and go directly to MySpace this time to ask for his username back--which I doubt they'll allow, after he used it to send furry porn to kids.

On a more personal front, this affair has made me hyper-aware of just how much snatching goes on with internet-based T-shirt/sticker/logo stores. I had no idea it was so rampant, although I always figured there was a risk of rippers.

Now that I've stepped into that world myself with about 80 original slogans, I feel like I should wise up and be more proactive about protecting my rights. I'd hate to be the little guy crushed by big business, even if this week has shown clearly that the little guy sometimes wins.

ETA: Here's the newspaper article we were promised. Not bad, although it bugs me when newspaper writers publish quotes from bloggers but don't bother to attribute them.

April 11, 2007

The Battle Of Myspace

Yesterday, Cockface (Todd Goldman) chose to spam anyone who messaged him about his massive and ongoing thievery with a rant publicly accusing Dave Kelly (Shmorky) of being a pedophile. The rant included links to some babyfur porn Kelly had drawn on commission many years ago, as well as photographs that were falsely represented as being Kelly himself.

MySpace has this little policy regarding people who send porn to minors, and they deleted his account not long after the complaints began to roll in. At the point of deletion, the username toddharrisgoldman became available for registration, and an SA goon, thinking fast, snatched up the account and turned it into a gallery of shame to showcase the growing sea of evidence.

WELL.

Today, Cockface somehow regained control of the now-reassigned account, and deleted all the evidence from the page. The SA goon who registered the new account, however, was still logged in at that time, and is therefore still able to edit the page as long as he doesn't close the window.

Mr. Goon has been faithfully restoring the gallery of shame each time Cockface tries to delete it, which is often. Cockface does not give up easily. This may not be due to bulldog tenacity; considering the available evidence, he's just too dumb to quit.

And so, the Battle of Myspace rages on, to the great amusement of all.

You can witness the ongoing shenanigans, silly buggers and all-around skullduggery by going here and hitting reload every few minutes. Be sure to read the hilarious comments and blog entries, including the one titled "I CAN GO ALL NIGHT, TODD."

If you get there after the fun is over, the YTMND version will sum it up for you nicely (with music!)

It's not going to achieve anything, but who cares? It's hilarious.

Oh, you mean your face doesn't unbutton? Shame.

Would somebody who's current with the art/fashion scene on DA please tell me who started this twee little "washed out photo of a model's solemn face with little clothing buttons stuck to it" trend? I've seen it four times now. It can't be just my imagination wanting to make something out of nothing.

I am only a simple Luka and do not understand the world, but if you help me find whoever's responsible, I will do my part by kicking their ass.

April 10, 2007

The Epic Fail Of Todd "Cockface" Goldman

The Todd Goldman/Dave Kelly plagiarism thread has really grown since I read and posted about it here last night. Cockface Todd started spamming anyone who messaged him on MySpace with links to furry porn. Way to keep your cool, fella!

Meanwhile just about everything he's got in his t-shirt store has been outed as a trace of something else. It's truly become a case of Internetus Failus Totalus. If you can call a long list of obvious and not very funny ripoffs a career, then it is safe to say that his is over.

And now, because other people are doing it and I want to be cool like the big kids, I present for your amusement a pretty picture of Todd as he must look right about now:



COPYRIGHT TO LUKA ALL RIGHTS REVERSED.

April 9, 2007

Ouch, My Purple Pussy!

Gosh, it's been a while since we had a nice juicy art theft controversy. I burn for a fix... maybe something involving famous people preying on webcomickers. That would rock.

O HAI LOOK AT THIS!

Remember those painfully snotty "Boys are stupid, throw rocks at them!" t-shirts? The creator, Todd Goldman of David And Goliath Tees, sells a lot of ugly pseudo-Happy-Bunny crap at Hot Topic, and even has a few stores of his own.

If you're a 13 year old girl who thinks she's a rebel because she doesn't wear pink or spell her swear words out anymore, you probably have one of his "Duh, I'm just a consumer!" tampon holders in your purse right now.

Okay, I made that last part up. But the rest is true!

Anyway, Cockface opened a gallery show in LA recently to rave reviews. Somehow, drawing Todd Parr-esque stick figures (sans the whimsy and humor) has made this man very popular with the actual high art crowd. Very high, if you ask me, but I digress.

Someone attending the show recognized one of his exhibits as a pretty much unaltered trace of a classic panel of the webcomic Purple Pussy.

The photo of the rip in the gallery shows a little red dot sticker underneath the piece, which I believe means it sold, earning Cockface hundreds or thousands of bucks. Right after that, a slightly different trace of the PP comic turned up on the gallery site, meaning that he's traced the same picture at least twice.

Well, the artist for Purple Pussy has an account on SomethingAwful, and he posted about the situation in the forums. Links were posted to Cockface's shirt store almost immediately so people could go digging around for more rips. Last I saw, Roman Dirge was wading into the action over some questionable goth girl art and there is a lively game of "find the original" being played. I'm having Banrai flashbacks here, almost.

My suggestion is to grab a beer and follow the mischief as it unfolds. Lawyers and reporters have become involved, a sure sign that this is gonna be awesome. I hope he gets his little empire knocked down. Not just because he's obnoxious and a thieving cunt, but because he's a wretched human being and anyone who makes shirts like this fails at life forever.


And just 'cause I felt like sharing it, here's a Goldman clone I spotted aaaall by myself:



The one with the badly placed apostrophe comes from here. The other one is from our friend Mr. Cockface. Separated at birth? STAY TUNED TO FIND OUT.

ETA: Hah! Check it out, somebody found another Cockface version that still has the apostrophe:

A World of Giant Heaving Breasts

This is quite possibly the most awesome fetish website ever created.

Make sure you don't skip the story explaining how their models got such huge tits. It's a gas.

Isn't it great to know I'm not wasting my weekend on just any old regular porn site? Yup. I'm mad cultured like that.

April 8, 2007

Update Post

THREE PAGES AND MASSIVE HEAD TRAUMA!

Good lord am I tired.

I wanted to get these pages up on time no matter what, and so I pushed myself. Everything came out awsome, but I certainly regret the slacktitude of yesterday.

There's a moral in there somewhere, but I'm more interested in pillows and snoring :)

Happy easter!

Easter Peep Show

I'm running late on the update again due to yesterday's extreme fail factor. The three pages will be up probably on Monday.

On the bright side, we're #12 on BuzzComix. This is quite rad! At this rate Kagerou might could make it into the top 10 for the first time since joining this toplist. And then EVERYBODY THERE WILL HAVE TO LOOK AT KAGEROU'S UGLY LINK BANNER.

Also, here's something I made. Sure, it's a shoddy substitute for a timely update, but I'm running late so I'm hoping you'll pretend it's funny and not kill me until after I get caught up:


(Clicking will make it bigger.)

April 6, 2007

On Incompetence

Today I was in search of distractions and ended up on a website for a learning disorder called Dyscalculia, which I'd only heard the name of. I always assumed it was just like dyslexia except with numbers. This has turned out to be semi-accurate.

I never expected reading about the condition would startle me so badly or sound so much like a list of a lot of the ways in which I secretly consider myself to be a big fucking failure at life. This is a harsh thing to say, and to be honest I didn't even know I felt so bitterly about myself until I had to sit back and examine the issue.

I've spent the afternoon reliving Painful Backstory (TM) and it's lame. Today is a grief sort of day and I'm more or less feeling low already, so it's even lamer.

The various nasty symptoms of Dyscalculia go way beyond that I consider math-related. Problems with measurement or estimating distances, chronic lateness due to trouble conceptualizing and managing time, inability to accurately recall names and faces, getting lost easily due to poor sense of direction, inability to follow sequential instructions, and so on.

Suddenly all this bad stuff was neatly spelled out as a list of genuine impairments rather than personal failures that could have been remedied if only I'd tried harder.

I've never hidden the fact that math's had me basically waving a white flag ever since double digit multiplication tables. Society doesn't even bother to chide me for this--it's acceptable in the US to be female and hate math (Boo, hiss). I run into people who hate math every damn day and they never put pressure on me or make fun when I'm trying to calculate a tip.

Except I don't hate math. I love the concepts and usefulness and logic of it, but it's the love of a battered spouse who's gotten used to always having a limb in a cast. By the time I quit high school, my stance on math was "Why bother?" I'm never going to go anywhere in life with incompetence as my guide, so why learn how to count all them benjamins I won't be earning?

I can't handle money, I can't make change. I have no grasp of 'math facts' and rely on a primitive counting system called touchmath that my retarded Oregon public school drilled into us around second or first grade. Math, for me, is like trying to read Braille with your eyes.

Watch me try to handle money at a convention sometime; you will be witnessing me at my most confused and flailing. All it takes is one tiny complication and I'm all over the place. It's the single thing I hate most about working conventions. And I have never even successfully completed a tax return.

These are just a few examples. What I'm getting at here is that math and organization are massive problems for me. I always thought the only plausible explanation was that I was stupid and just covered well. And that's where the real problem lies--the slow destruction of confidence and ambition. When your very best isn't good enough, what's the point of trying at all?

I know it's the fashion these days for people to be all cute and make much of their little neurological eccentricities. Who hasn't met a person who identifies as a sufferer of OCD and whose symptom boil down to "liking to keep my kitchen clean, LOL?"

So I am not diagnosing myself with anything here. But I've never been proud of these failures. Not being able to read a clock or tell right from left without looking at your hands is just plain embarrassing. I don't like having to question my own intelligence over something as basic and daily as balancing a checkbook.

I learned early to eschew activities that might expose my incompetence. I was like a ninja, making my brain work overtime to avoid situations where I'm likely to fail in front of other people.

When you're falling behind, you eventually quit asking questions because you wouldn't understand the answer anyway, and asking would expose your ignorance. You do your best and hope it will at least be enough to fool your teachers into eventually letting you leave with some scrap of your pride still attached. Thanks to our overtaxed school system, this behavior works, especially if you're a very timid person. That's probably how so many illiterate people manage to get their diplomas.

The counselors I had in school tended to think precocious communication skills meant I was doing okay because hey, smart kids figure things out for themselves. It's the psychotic tantrum-throwing freaks who get the attention.

And then you enter the job system, where your incompetence and meekness and self-doubt gets your ass canned so spectacularly that you give the fuck up and spend the rest of your life leeching off people who contribute to society, unable to see any way out that doesn't involve skills you don't possess or education you cannot obtain without someone sitting over your shoulder walking you through it.

You eventually die in a gutter somewhere, singing a sad sad song.

It's too late to do anything about the past, but if I take action and seek out help, I can at least try to salvage some dignity and learn to work around my incompetence.

Maybe there's no Big Answer to my problems. But if there is, getting help or learning workarounds would free me up to use that wheel-spinning energy to finish college someday. That would sure beat staring at the class brochures for every Spring and Fall session, knowing full well that I have no place among smart people who have their shit together.

Maybe that's why seeing the insecurities of my childhood broken down into symptoms for a learning disability has put me into such a spin-dive. If there's a genuine reason for all those years I felt inferior and helpless, there's hope I might begin to manage it the way I've been managing the OCD.

But I'm a stumbler, a scatterer, a scribbler on the nice clean wall of Order. I've always dreamed of being something more, but how can I, when I see myself as incapable of success outside of creative fields? The idea of putting my ass on the line all over again, even for a shot at improving my life, is intimidating as hell. What if I fuck that up, too?

Can you teach an old dog new tricks?

Sailing Day



I don't really dig Japanese rock music as a rule, but I make an exception for Bump of Chicken.

My WHAT?



This video has given me a new lease on life. A very silly lease. It probably helps that I've never heard the original version before, and thus had no idea what to expect.

Win.

New Voting Incentive!

Do you like Easter?

How about CAMEL SPIDERS? Severed hands, child abuse, mutilated kittens, eerie monoliths?

If you're more or less fond of all these things, you will probably not understand why I've cried myself to sleep every Easter since I turned 11. (I don't want to talk about it.) But you will probably enjoy Kagerou's brand-spanking-new Red/Kid wallpaper.

There's a catch, though--I'm not just going to post the high resolution version any-old-where! No sirree bob, it's all exclusive and such.

Don't despair! You can still get a piece of this action. Just mosey on down to the BuzzComix vote button and give a couple of clicks for Kagerou. It's for a good cause (alleviating my low self-esteem as webcomicker) and, more importantly, you'll be in like Flynn with your very own copy of this fine wallpaper.

It will be my way of raising a glass of expensive champagne and saying "Welcome to the COOL KID CLUB, dahling!" in my snottiest voice, with my pinkie sticking off in the air.



Trauma is never unseasonal.

April 5, 2007

WRYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY

My favorite part is the burst of happy little candy stars.




You know, I'm starting to think maybe I should wait a few months before I go through with getting that tattoo of Clay Aiken as a WTC firefighter on my forehead.

April 3, 2007

The GoatsaGram(TM)



It's a GoatsaGram! Isn't it DEEP? It symbolizes the balance between needing eye bleach and not needing eye bleach.

Anybody who gets this totes intellectual logo tattooed on them will be featured in my nonexistent band's upcoming liner notes! Music album will not be included, which (in my opinion) puts me one up on most metal bands in the world.

PS - The band is called HER. That's short for Help, Elephants Rampaging.

April 2, 2007

Fill In The Blank Time

This is strange. I keep requesting to join fairly laid-back LJ communities and the mods keep rejecting me.

OMG did I pick up a bad rep from sleeping around with gayfaggotinc that one summer!? :( Guess I'll go eat worms.

In other news: ABSOLUTELY NOTHING PRODUCTIVE HAPPENED TODAY BECAUSE I SPENT IT SLEEPING AND PLAYING VIDEO GAMES. And also going out to eat with Rain.

One quick story: at the restaurant, our waitress asked if we wanted lemon with our water and Rain said yes. I cracked one about making lemonade at the table and asked the waitress if people actually did that (because I read it on the internet).

Waitress laughed and said that I would be surprised by how often that happened.

So I said, "Does it usually mean the person will be a bad tipper?" Waitress sort of leaned in, and said.........

Well, actually, how about YOU fill in the blank here. What did our waitress say?

Here are some hints: Waitress was white and young and looked around the dining area to see who might be listening before she gave her answer in an exaggerated whisper.

If you guess correctly, I'll let you decide what color underwear I should put on tomorrow.

Luka Gets 2 Days Off!

I am taking today and tomorrow off, bwahahahaha! Slacking and video games, here I come!

Today, I:

-Read in bed for the first time in months
-Dug out my USB game controller and old game saves for Seiken Densetsu III
-Ate a whole club sandwich WITH MY BARE HANDS without having to go wash them during the meal to alleviate horror and shame.

The thing I like best about playing video games on my day off? The endorphin rush. Oh, blissful bliss. I bet my pupils are huge.

April 1, 2007

Update Post

Four pages are complete, finishing up Chapter 36 with a bang.

CLICKETY CLICK HERE!