Sometimes you have to scrape the bottom of the barrel for every-day posting ideas. But, luckily, I stumbled across a computer file of artwork I had thought I lost when I upgraded to Windows 10. Sometimes bad things turn out well, and sometimes good things go bad. So, I figured I would share some of the inexplicable things I found in the lost file. Why would I do such a thing? Because I am not entirely lazy and out of ideas. No, of course I am not.
Filed under artwork, cartoons, humor, Paffooney, Uncategorized
One of the best things about Dungeons and Dragons is that, in order to play the game, you have to play “let’s pretend” a lot. You start with the notion that you have to pretend to be somebody else besides who you really are. Possibly you can pretend to be someone who is impossible and could never be real. You can be an elf, or an orc, or a dwarf… but if you decide to be a hobbit, you can’t call yourself a hobbit because that name is the intellectual property of the Tolkein family… but you can be a halfling… and somehow that gets you by. And if you are, like me, the “Dungeon Master”, it becomes your responsibility to become the voices for all the NPC’s or non-player characters. You get to be a multitude of people who are really not you. And you get to do things that the real-life you would never do… either because it is simply not possible, or you haven’t finished studying magic in the real world, or because you are really not such a terrible person in real life… or not such a good and wonderful person in real life as the elf paladin you play in D&D.
My eldest son’s character, the leader of the adventuring party.
Ditty Bytcha was my son’s first D&D character, rolled up with dice to be a human fighter and an artificer (a maker of useful mechanical and magical devices). His name was a bit of a joke. His back story included a father named Willy Bytcha and a mother who was a paladin of the god Aureon (the blue dragon god of wisdom and knowledge) named Gunna Bytcha. His grandpa was named Gummy Bytcha. But as time went on, he acquired a sword named Stormgaar. It was a magic sword, imbued with the intelligence and memories of the secret agent from Breland that gave the sword to him. It served as his conscience. It kept him from stealing from the poor and murdering women and children. It guided him through moral dilemmas like what to do with a captured enemy. And it gave him a way to add to his power to defeat evil. By playing this game of goblins and dire wolves, dragons and surly dwarves, my son learned to negotiate his problems. He learned that every problem does not lend itself to being solved by hitting it with something heavy or something sharp. It gave him leadership skills that I truly believe have influenced him as a present day U.S. Marine, and may have led to the leadership responsibilities he has taken on there.
My number two son’s character is Gandy Rumspot, the halfling rogue and builder of sailing ships.
My number two son decided to take over an existing character, the halfling rogue Gandy Rumspot. This character was a hard-drinking, charismatic, and thoroughly outgoing little hobbit… er, I mean halfling. He was really the opposite of my son in almost every way. My son is shy and over-cautious to a fault. Gandy, however, took to the sea and took to the air. He turned himself into a designer and builder of ocean-going ships. And when they encountered other halflings who rode on trained pterodactyls, he had to have one. They captured and tamed one, and he learned to glide through the air on the saddled back of a pterosaur. He has learned to take risks and try the things that might seem scary. When he wanted to get a job, without prompting, he went up to the manager of a tea-seller’s booth in the H-Mart Asian market and asked for an application. They immediately gave him an interview and hired him. He has already earned enough money to buy himself an electric guitar which he has taught himself to play very, very well.
My daughter the Princess chose as her character Mira Mirkestasia, a soul-gem wearing Kalashtar (a form of mind-reading sorceress).
Mira is my daughter’s character. It took a while to convince the other two that their icky little sister should be allowed to play the game too. They were worried that she wouldn’t be smart enough to keep up with what they wanted to do, wouldn’t be resourceful enough to help them overcome evil, and would be too squeamish to kill stuff and kill guys when it needed to happen. So, she became a cerebral Kalashtar, one of those ESP brainiac characters who can do mind-reading and telekinesis because they share their body and soul with a bizarre creature who fled oppression in another dimension entirely. In one adventure, she took possession of a mystically powered intelligent throwing knife named Xulo-Mira that would always hit the target (assuming she could make the dice roll) and would always return to her hand. She became a reader of magic scrolls, a lover of magic books, and, in real life, she fell in love with reading, particularly the Percy Jackson novels of Rick Riordan. Her grades in school improved. She has become inventive, creative, and artistic… enough so that she was accepted into the special METSA program for high school next year where she will be able to get college engineering credits and do the things she loves to do while getting her high school diploma.
The clay dragon the Princess made in art class and wowed the art teacher into blubbering incoherence with.
I cannot claim with a straight face that playing the D&D role-playing game allowed me to train my three kids into wonderful people. That is just an opinion from a doting father who gets off on playing god in an imaginary universe. But I have found role-playing to be a useful way to teach things. Over the years I played a lot of RPG’s in the classroom and at home. I used role-playing exercises on kids whose behavior needed a lot of molding and modeling. It can be done in real life, and I am not merely a D&D nerd who only lives in a fantasy world of his own making. I am a D&D nerd teacher who teaches through a fantasy world of my own making.
Yesterday we went to the DMV to make a second attempt to get Henry a learner’s permit and make him into a driver of cars. We had already been once, but this is Texas. You need multiple forms of ID to get an ID. After all, we might be trying commit voter fraud like those other eight people somewhere in the U.S.A. (Former Governor Perry assures us they exist and are a major threat to the Constitution and our FREEDOM.) So we brought a folder full of potential proof that my son exists and is currently present in this State, not including DNA evidence, but realizing we would probably need it.
I have been there before. I do realize what kind of an alternate universe the DMV actually is. They pack in 3,ooo people, including children, babies, Tia Carmen from Honduras, and random homeless people that the DMV applicants needed to provide moral support. Then they tell you that everyone needs to take a seat because of fire codes, and they provide a generous twelve chairs for that purpose. You have to be given a number to proceed. But they don’t call those numbers in order. And the time you first enter the infinite waiting room has no bearing on the time they finally call you out either.
So, a wait of three hours gave me plenty of time to observe, well… not stupid people exactly… but people displaying much of the basic and endearingly non-smart simplicity of the species.
Like the guy who pulled up in his sports car while we were still part of the 35-minute outside wait line still waiting to get in the door to be told by the officer guarding the twelve chairs that everybody had to take a seat because of the fire code.
This simple citizen asked us, “Is this the line you have to stand in just to get in through the front door?”
Somebody gave him the more-polite version of, “No, Duh!”
“Oh,” he said, “Frog that!” Or possibly the less-polite version of that… and proceeded to back his car out again, nearly running over the young Asian lady being dropped off behind his car. He roared out of the parking lot, apparently not needing a renewed license anyway, because white guys are obviously Republican enough that voter ID laws don’t really apply to them. (I have wondered if a “heart Trump!” button would be enough ID to get you in to vote in Texas in the upcoming elections?)
Of course, there was also the lady with the five… or possibly seven… or thirty-two kids in tow who put her baby stuff on seven of the twelve chairs as she took her horde of non-license-getting little ones to the restroom and drinking fountain. They have the lovely side-effect of extinguishing all nostalgic feelings for when my three kids were that small… or did I have thirty-two of them back then too?
And of course there were numerous random wandering folks who didn’t bother to read signs, or listen to the angry officer tell them where to go or what to do next, or even understand a word of English, because they all thought that even though they had no earthly idea what was going on, they were going to be given a driver’s license in Texas, and they were probably next at the counter.
After almost three hours of this we finally got to the counter. There the exhausted and impatient lady that was working the desk took all of three minutes to discover the two things we still didn’t have to qualify. It turns out you have to enroll in the driving school before you get the learner’s permit. The opposite of the way it was five years ago when we got my older son his permit. But possibly because last time we asked the driving school first. So, I ended the very exhausting day at the DMV secure in the knowledge that I would have to do it all over again the next time I work up the courage to tackle the whole issue.
This is Poppy
Poppy is happy
But Poppy is also sloppy
So he is a sloppy happy Poppy
And being sloppy can make him droppy
So he is a sloppy droppy happy Poppy
And Poppy calls his baseball bat a boppy
And he dropped the boppy on his foot
So sloppy droppy happy Poppy became hoppy
He was a sloppy droppy happy but hoppy Poppy because of the boppy.
And his hat is becoming floppy… er, what’s that disgusted look on your face?
Okay, maybe I better stoppy.
In the quiet but creepy back-street, dark-alley parts of Fantastica there is a creepy house known as Monster Mansion. Yes, it is a cartoon house in a cartoon fantasy land. But it is creepy. Well, maybe creepy in a funny, cartoonish sort of way. Okay… so it isn’t really creepy. But Dr. Pinkenstein (pictured above with his monster Elroy) does live there, so it has to at least qualify as weird.
In the sub-basement (where there are no submarines… that we know of) there is an underground river. That is where the resident gill-man lives. Known as Swampie, he takes care of the rats, the cockroaches, and the fish… mostly by eating them. In the portrait above, he is being visited by Lonny the Wolf-boy and the Monster Mansion resident vampire, Count Stinkula. Both of them are often asked by the Mansion’s residents to spend time in the sub-basement, Lonny because he howls too much, and the Count because he smells really, really rotten.
If you ever make the mistake of visiting Monster Mansion (and that would be a really, really big mistake), you will be greeted at the door by Monster Mansion’s butler, Doofy the Pumpkinhead. He is a very nice and welcoming scarecrow sort of dude, but he’s a little hard to hold a conversation with. If the candle in his head goes out, there is nothing going on in the gourd at all. In the picture above, Doofy is pictured with the Phantom. Mr. P is in charge of mood music in Monster Mansion. He plays the pipe organ, but it has been relegated to the basement because the clinker notes have a tendency to break the windows upstairs.
So, that’s everything you didn’t want to know about Monster Mansion. Sorry I had to break it to you this way. But cartoonists can be like that. Not creepy, really… more like a little bit weird.
I have been a D&D nerd since the early 1980’s. I have played the game with brothers and sisters, kids I taught from middle school and high school, and my own three kids. It was a chance to be a story-teller as the game master, the plotter of plots, the maker of tales. It gave me a focus for things to draw and books to buy. Then, I got old, and my kids grew up and didn’t have time to play any more. So, I end up a sad old nerd with a vast collection of game books and D&D drawings. So what do I do? I use them for posts on my blog, naturally.
Filed under Dungeons and Dragons, feeling sorry for myself, humor, Paffooney
Here are the newest pages of Hidden Kingdom;
If you would like to see how it fits into the whole of chapter 2, then you can visit it at my vault with this link; Hidden Kingdom – Chapter Two
Filed under artwork, comic strips, fairies, Paffooney
It began in childhood with the Red Skelton Show. Every Wednesday night it a was a refuge for me. And refuge was a critical idea for me. I was a child hiding a terrible secret from the entire world. At times I hated myself. Twice as a teen I came very close to choosing suicide over life. The person I most needed to hide from was myself. And humor helped. Red Skelton’s gentle humor helped me to not only escape from myself for a while, it taught me to laugh at my own foibles and not take things quite so seriously.
media.npr.org
In my college years I discovered humor in written form. Mark Twain swiftly earned my utter devotion as I read not only Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, but Roughing It, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Pudd’nhead Wilson, The Mysterious Stranger, and The Autobiography of Mark Twain. You know, there are a large number of things in Mark Twain’s humorous books that make you cry, that make you angry, and make you think deep thoughts. I basically discovered that humor is a way that smart people choose to think of things which helps to keep you sane and basically un-suicided.
A beautiful portrait by artist Emily Stepp
It is obvious that some people become very skilled at humor because they have used it all their lives to fight the darkness . Robin Williams is only few years older than I am. In many ways his life has paralleled my own (obviously minus the wealth and fame in my case… but what would’ve happened if Robin had become a school teacher?) I have depended on Robin Williams’ movies to keep me going, giving me insights in how to talk to kids, how to be a parent, and how to empathize with others. Of course, I haven’t yet taken some of his movie advice. I never put on a mask and a dress to deceive my own children. But only time will tell.
I obsess about humor and how you create it. I gorge on things like the works of Dave Barry. Do you know who he is? Florida newspaper columnist who writes books about everyday life and the fools who live it? I have to do a post on Dave Barry, because he makes me laugh so hard that milk shoots out of my nose, sometimes when I am not even drinking milk… believe me, I don’t know how that works either.
I love to laugh. It makes the world right again. I have laughed an awful lot for almost an entire lifetime now. I treasure all the funny people I have known. And I need to continue to try to make people laugh up until the very end. Because the world is too often not a funny place. It can be full of badness and sadness and suffering. And as Mark Twain so aptly pointed out, “Against the assault of laughter… nothing can stand.”
I discovered a new artist today. I was reading posts in the Facebook writer’s group, 1000 Voices for Compassion. And there in a post by Corinne Rodrigues was a YouTube video by Andrew Peterson. And it was a miracle. I clicked on the video and he sang my soul. Here is the original blog post. And here is the video.
Yesterday I posted a self-reflected goopy bit of nonsense about how I write and draw. Today, I realized I haven’t explained why I write and draw.
You can capture it in words. You can capture it in pictures. Like Andrew Peterson did, you can capture it in music. It is deep and profound and eternal… and you can’t really explain it, but it is the singularity… the right word… the way to caress the very face of God.
This music from Andrew Peterson is musical poetry that expresses love in terms of romance and religion. Love of the significant other is equal to and intertwined with the love of God. There is a truth in that, and a fundamental reason why despite how religion has let me down, I will never be an atheist again. Through the right words I have come to know God. I speak to him daily. I spent twenty years as a Jehovah’s Witness, even to the point of knocking on doors and sharing the little pamphlets that are supposed to contain the capital “T” Truth. I can’t do that any more, though. The thing is, they believe the chosen of God, the only people who can reach paradise, are the people who all say and do and believe the very same thing, the very same words. Anyone else is left to destruction. No paradise. No life after death. And they clearly tell you what the words are, and you must repeat them like a magic spell. Peterson’s music is forbidden. JW’s don’t want you to listen to anyone’s words but their own. So, since this is Christian music, but not JW Christianity, it is the work of the devil, trying to lead you to destruction. What kind of selfishness is this? And yes, I have repeatedly been shown the words in the Bible that say that this is so. But I have stopped believing that all words in the Bible are the right words. When the Bible speaks of love… those are the right words. When the Bible speaks about what you must hate and who is condemned… those are not.
You may have noticed that I have obsessively searched out and shared this Andrew Peterson music. I do that when I find the right words… good words… I obsessively want to find more and more. I did that once with butterflies. When I was a boy, I chased them down with nets and collected them. But you have to put butterflies in killing jars and then mount them on pins and Styrofoam boards to collect them. I realized too late that this was not the right way to treat them. You have to let them flutter in the sunshine and float on the breeze. You have to let them live. And so must you do with the right words when you find them. You must use them and share them and let them live.
Yes, the reason I write is because my life has been lived and it is coming to an end. But it is a good life. A life filled with wisdom and love and the very best of those words I have collected in butterfly nets over time. And I must share those very right words… and let them live because they are beautiful and true… and it is simply who I have to be.
I recently posted about being synesthetic and discovering how I am different from normal people. Here is the post if you are interested.. Then I discovered that Kanye West is also synesthetic as he gushed some southern-fried crappie-doo about how wonderful he is as an artist because he sees the colors of his music. Well, now I don’t want that mental affliction any more. I don’t wish to be anything like him. Of course, it has to be incurable, doesn’t it.
Now I am wasting today’s post on another metacognative thinking-about-thinking style of paragraph pile when I could be rhapsodizing about the humor of Dave Barry or the wisdom of Robert Fulghum, the author of
I could be shamelessly promoting the work of artists whose works I love instead of examining the random filing cabinets in the back rooms of my stupid old head. But I can’t because I now need to explain myself to myself again. Self doubt and self examination are features of being an artist. We reach a point where we have to think about how we do what we do, because if you don’t know where the magic comes from, you might not be able to call on it the next time you need it.
I am a self-taught artist. I have had art classes in high school and college, but never professional art training. I know how to manipulate the rule of thirds, directional composition, movement, perspective, and lots of other artsy-craftsy techniques, but it is all a matter of trial and error and an instinct for repeating what works. I have had a good deal more professional training as a writer. But I do that mostly by instinct as well. Trained instinct. I have reached a point where my art is very complex and detailed. And I don’t mean to suggest there are no flaws. In fact, I am capable enough to see huge, glaring mistakes that really skew my original intent and make me feel hopelessly incompetent. But others who see it and don’t know the inner workings of the process can look past those mistakes and not even see them. Given enough time to look at my own work with new eyes, I am able to see at least some of what they see.
Now that I have totally wasted 500-plus words on goofy talking-to-myself, what have I really accomplished beyond boring you to death? What’s that you say? You are not dead yet? Well, that’s probably only because you looked at the pictures and didn’t read any of my sugar-noodle brain-scrapings in loosely paragraph-like form. And if you did read this awful post by a colorblind artist who doubts his own abilities, you probably didn’t learn anything from it. But that’s not the point. The point is, I care about doing this, and I need to do it right. And I managed to learn something… how to ramble and meander and make something that is either a hot mess… or something that vaguely resembles self-reflective art.
