Part of the joy I find in the family Dungeons and Dragons game is in making Paffoonies, the story-based pictures that illustrate and elucidate the characters and other things that enter spontaneously into the game.
I don’t invent every part of the image and concept myself. Some inspiration comes from the game books and published adventures, while others come directly from the players and the way their imaginations shape characters and events.
Many of the Dungeons and Dragons Paffoonies began life as character sheets. That’s why there are numbers, strength numbers, intelligence numbers, character levels, dexterity, skill sets, and magic items listed all around the character image. They more or less morphed over time into illustrations done in colored pencil on colored paper.
I enjoy drawing wizards and apprentices, warriors in action, castles, and dragons. I have used the game as an extended excuse to draw vast quantities of them. And now I have a resource to mine for Paffoonies to lace my blog with. They provide a sort of sugary spice that I love the taste of, and I will continue to share them until the end, even if they disagree with you and give you reading indigestion.
I am working on a new piece that is D & D Paffooney- related. I will keep you apprised of the the progress here until it is finished or until you get fed up with it. Whichever comes first.
Paffoonies are my own thing… pictures and stories melted together… loony, cartoony, balloony, pink baboon buffoons brewed together in a big pot. And I will continue to use them for acts of Dungeons and Dragons nonsense.
Outpost was abuzz with activity. The airless world had only limited defense from attack. The primary protection had always been the secret of its location. As an airless world, the surface could easily be lasered or bombarded with no atmosphere to interfere with the destructive force. Tron had ordered the mirror fields raised, hoping that some laser fire could be reflected into the surrounding darkness. He knew, however, that the only hope he had was in his fleet. If they could somehow use the dinosaur-shaped starships made with Ancient technology to destroy enough of Admiral Tang’s fleet to make him feel the losses were no longer worthwhile, then maybe the ground-side installations could survive intact.
There were still very talented corsairs able to fly fighting ships. Elvis the Cruel and Apache Scout were both peerless star warriors. But Tron had to believe that Admiral Tang had a few potent killers left to his name too. There was every chance that the situation was hopeless and would end in a massacre.
Still, there were a few unknowns on Tron Blastarr’s side. The crazy alien starship known as the Megadeath was the most agile killing machine that Tron had ever seen. The goofball rock-and-roll crew that flew it for Trav Dalgoda was now very adept at handling the alien thing, and Tron had kept them to help in his mad last stand. They were not smart enough to be scared of the upcoming battle. He was able to send his son onward to Don’t Go Here, the planet where the newly formed New Star League gathered its forces. So, hopefully, Artran would be safe and carry on the Blastarr name long after Tron and Maggie’s bones littered the airless sands of Outpost.
“Boss,” said Hassan the Elf, breaking Tron’s train of thought, “I have made something that I think might be of help.”
Tron looked at the child-like Peri and the invention he was now holding up. “A suit of armor?”
“Yes, boss. A special kind of suit of armor. It is made up of nanites.”
“What? Nanites?”
“Yes, microscopic robots that share a command pulse and can reform themselves into any sort of armor that might be needed.”
Tron looked quizzically at the bluish suit of nanite armor. “How do you make it work?”
“Well… for instance, if you want it to form an anti-grav pack on the back, you just say, “FLIGHTPACK.” The suit rearranged itself at Hassan’s command and an anti-gravity flight pack instantly took shape on the back side of the armor’s breastplate.
“Does it have weapons?”
“FUSIONGUN!” said the elf with a grin. A man-portable fusion generator and discharge barrel formed on the pauldron.
“That’s really good, Elf. That will help. But one isn’t going to be enough to save us.” He grinned sadly at the small Peri Space Elf originally from the planet Djinnistan.
“Oh, that’s the best part,” said the Peri. “Nanites can replicate themselves from raw metal ore. Since the planet is mostly metal and crystal, we can set them to making a million copies of themselves in an hour. You have to specify the number, though. We wouldn’t want the little buggers transforming the entire planet.”
“Amazing,” sighed Tron. “If only I had a million commandos to fill them with.”
At that moment Maggie came trotting up to him with a handheld communicator. “The call is for you,” she said, looking grim. “Arkin Cloudstalker has finally found his way back to this system. And that Lazerstone rock-guy is with him. Admiral Tang is sure to follow.”
“Yes. Sure to follow,” said Tron automatically, still gazing at the grinning elf and his newest invention.
I like taking pictures of my doll collection. Those pictures are then qualified for Art Day posting. So, here are random pictures of dolls, most of which are from the doll shelf in my bedroom.
Not all of my dolls are on the doll shelf.
Chilly Willy here is a carnival prize that was probably won in a basketball-toss game at Six Flags and purchased by me for five dollars in a garage sale. He is technically not a doll. He is a stuffed animal.
So, let’s get back to dolls.
More stuffed animals, as well as ponies and paper dolls to add to this immense doll collection.Creepy Captain Action lurks behind mint=in-box Emma Watson as Belle while he looks for his lost hat. But Bo Peep and Wonder Woman are keeping an eye on him.I had to stop here as the caveman Minion had to go and start a fight with Peter Rabbit. Leave it to a mindless Minion… “Oobah Dee?” “Sorry, boss.”
This is actually a writer’s literary site meant to promote novels, and one day possibly earn money from writing instead of simply filling my closets with prose and old manuscripts (along with the wife’s many, many shoes). But since I am also an amateur artist of the irradiated subspecies known as “cartoonist”, I also have many visuals to share. I think in pictures as often as I think in words. So one of the features of this blog is that I tag artwork with a made-up word I coined myself. It allows the curious (or those immune to nightmares) to get an almost instant idea of how afflicted I am with cartoon-ism.
Yes, I tested it out. If you do a picture search on Google using the words “Beyer Paffooney” you get a free gallery of my artwork, the good, the bad, and the ugly. You might even find my picture of Clint Eastwood… but beware, he shoots first if you try to “make his day”. If you are brave… or foolish enough to try it, it should come up something like this;
So, there you have it. A cheap and easy 200-word post from a bad idea that’s still out there working.
Yes, I am philosophically a pessimist. I expect always that the worst outcome is the one I will have to live with. Hence, I was not as devastated by Donald Trump’s election as some who were too confident that Hilkary would win. And the climate crisis seems to be good reason to prepare for the worst that can happen. Some of it is already happening, already here.
But you really should listen to what this career futurist has to say about it.
The near future is, as documented with evidence in the video, far worse than we think it is. “Just doom, nothing else,” as Robin Williams declares. But too much pessimism at this point is the death of us. We have to keep trying. We can’t just give up.
A cheerleader who is not me.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not the right person to be elected head cheerleader on this issue. I have given in to despair and weeping on more than one occasion already. Since the election of Trump, the conservative pillaging of the Supreme Court, the roll-back of EPA guidelines and restrictions, the erosion of fundamental voting rights (soon to be followed by other rights,) the mismanagement of the economy, the Covid crisis, wildfires in the West, the insurrection after the election of Joe Biden, and more and more things that signal doom and possible Armaggedon, we have to battle the urge to lie down and die.
Here is where the optimism of the Reverand Peale is critical.
Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, also definitely not me.
If we stop trying, our loss and subsequent death is insured. It is only by continuing to fight that we will have a chance to save ourselves. And this is beginning to happen everywhere.
In 2020 we turned out against the Evil-Clown President in record numbers. We wrested the control of the government out of the hands of the corrupt elephants and put it back in the hands of the hard-working but mostly stupid jackasses. Biden’s donkey-like devotion to following through on the work that needs to be done got us through the rest of the pandemic, getting ourselves vaccinated and acclimated to life with the reality of the new deadly virus.
We need, like the faun, to be one with our environment.
We have tried hard and kept at it to achieve much-needed climate-control legislation. The fossil-fuel industry has made it difficult, and we nearly gave up on the Build Back Better program, but it seems through perseverance that we may have finally gotten a critical piece of that over the hurdles after all.
One thing definitely indicated is that we will need to turn out to vote in the midterm elections again this year. If we don’t, the elitist elefantiasis party will take away all our gains and punish us again, playing their golden fiddles while the world burns.
We will never have the magic we need if we don’t try to conjure it.
But despair is still not warranted here. We know what we can do to solve the problems that face us. We have done similar things before, with the Cold War, World War II, and the hole in the ozone layer in the 1980s. What’s more we have the tools we need already, and what we don’t have is quickly being developed. There are plans in the works for mountain-sized storage batteries, massive solar-power arrays, and wind farms (many of which are already built and operating.) We can rebuild and upgrade the entire power grid, not just in the USA, but for the whole world. It needs, of course, to all be weather-proofed, meteor-proofed, solar-storm-proofed, and, hopefully, greedy-Republican-idiot-proofed.
We are not beaten if we don’t give up.
And as the futurist tells us in the video you didn’t watch, pessimists prepare us for disaster, but only the optimist can make us successful in living through it to a brighter future beyond.
Canto 143 – Morning Aboard the Starship Aboard the Starship
I couldn’t help but fixate on the things Admiral Tang had bragged about knowing from the future during his villain speech in a previous episode. Apparently, he had outwitted and killed a Time Knight at some point, and he had specifically told us that I was going to survive this adventure while poor Ham Aero was doomed to die in the upcoming battle for the planet Outpost.
I was sipping on my cup of designer coffee, my own special concoction called Isaac Newton’s Favorite Cup of Joe. And I was staring out of the front viewport of the Leaping Shadowcat at the guards in the cavernous docking bay of Admiral Tang’s flagship, Bregohelma. The Lupin child who served as cabin boy came out of the crews’ quarters completely naked and rubbing at his doglike eyes. Of course, the boy’s shameless nudity didn’t bother me since Lupins are covered in wolf-fur and don’t really need clothing to cover up relentlessly white, pock-marked skin and rolls of fat the way I do.
“Professor Marou, do you think the Imperials will just execute me or toss me out into space?” Sahleck asked.
“Well, if they are frugal, they will toss you out into space. It costs less.”
“Oh.”
The destroyed look on his puppylike face reminded me that maybe a strictly logical answer to the question wasn’t the kind of answer he needed to hear.
“But don’t go planning on dying yet. Time is a relative dimension in space and, as such is totally malleable.”
He looked at me as if he wanted to ask another question, but didn’t really understand what I had just told him.
“You know that there are Time Knights constantly meddling with what they think happened in the past to correct the outcome to some sort of plan created in the distant future…”
“Oh, yes…” Sahleck stammered.
“And since Tang says he killed one of those Time Knights, we know for certain that somebody is out there working on solutions to the problems we are now facing.”
“So, maybe they won’t kill everybody but you?”
“Oh, you all are probably going to die. Tang seems to know what will happen with information gleaned from the Time Knights themselves. But nothing is ever certain. Maybe I get killed too.”
That didn’t seem to help much.
Ham Aero wandered in drinking his own morning beverage, probably potent liquor of some sort.
“Sahleck? You are out of uniform, boy. You know that the job of steward aboard a starship is critical to staying alive in space.”
“Yes, Ham. I know I am supposed to scrub floors, maintain the air quality, and do whatever the cook asks me to do, but we are almost all going to die. So, what’s the point?”
“We are not giving up, my boy. What we are blessed with is lots of time, and the freedom to plan without worrying about being overheard. Tang doesn’t know it, but this ship is shielded from telepaths. Ged had me do that back when he was first dealing with becoming a Psion. So, we don’t have to just sit back and wait for death. We can plan and carry out our own rescue and escape. And I am not ready to die myself, knowing now that I am going to be a father for the first time.”
That made Sahleck smile.
“So, you have an idea about how to do it?” I asked.
“Not yet. But we have more collective smarts than they do. How many of their crew are rot warriors? Skeletons with robotic life? Nearly mindless undead things?”
“Mechanoids and reanimated dead folks make up at least 75 percent of all Imperial Navy personnel. You know this well, Ham.”
“Sure, but my point is… We have you. You are one of the smartest living humans in the entire Orion Spur of the Milky Way.”
Now, I know, of course, when I am being flattered in order to manipulate me. But he was not wrong. Duke Ferrari was on board, and he carried considerable political significance, and potentially leadership ability. And Ham’s young Nebulon wife knew a lot of secrets only formerly enslaved aliens really knew about. Ham himself was a canny strategist and ship-board leader. He knew how to solve the problems of living mostly in space aboard a starship. And he was not wrong about me being smarter than practically everyone else in the universe. (Not bragging, just an irrefutable fact.)
“Yes, you are right, Ham. We are not helpless. We do have an intelligence advantage over our enemies. And we will think of some way out of this situation.”
I spent a good deal of my time as a game master for the Star Wars role-playing game in creating alien characters that fit the movies, the books I read in the Star Wars series, and the game materials. In this post, I will give you a mini-gallery of the aliens I drew for the game.
Chee Mobok was a space trader who had a problem with his own ego. He believed that he was a genius at language and could speak any language he had heard a handful of words from.
The Galactic Common speakers were always laughing at the things he said.
Huttese speakers like Jabba the Hutt were always trying to kill him for say precisely the wrong thing.
Hethiss was the Jedi Master when my son’s Jedi character was still a padawan learner.
He was wise, but unable to keep his student from doing things in violent ways when a diplomatic solution was called for.
Merv was a potential terrorist and a suspect in a series of murders on a water planet. He was, however, the good badguy character. You know, the villain who has a heart of gold and whose actions redeem him in the end… As opposed to a bad goodguy who seems to be a hero and ends up betraying everyone.
Fisonna was a street kid from the same planet and same race as Hethiss the Jedi master. He had the potential to become a padawan learner. But he also used his Force skills to pull pranks on serious adults.
Odo-Ki was a Gotal with the ultra-sensitive cones on his head. He had a limited ability to see behind walls and predict the near future.
Nadin Paal was an actual pirate and terrorist with no redeeming qualities at all. The best thing about him was, that when the time came, he blew up really nicely. A colorful fireball.
Kehlor was a Herglic, one of the whale people who required specially built extra-large space ships and accommodations. He was also a gifted pilot. You can see that he wears the uniform of the Trade Authority.
And finally, Klis Joo was a Duro and a Jedi, a gray alien with considerable Force powers.
There were many more drawings like this as well. But these are some of the best ones.
Lately I have been having problems with passing out during low blood-sugar moments in the middle morning, early afternoon, and shortly after supper, usually when I have already had a snack and my sugars haven’t balanced yet. When I pass out, perchance… I dream. Vivid dreams. So, for art day, I will post images I have made based on dreams I have had.
This one has shadows on everything. I exhausted three pens drawing shadows. Yet, there are no shadows on the child-figures. In the dream, they were glowing white ghosts.
Snowboy is one of the main villains in The Bicycle-wheel Genius. But the boy-robot made entirely of snow, ice, and circuitry first appeared in a 1978 dream that happened while I had a fever from the flu.
This dream is a mental-disturber caused again by fever. Here the two gigantic toys play with the little girl. I was not actually in this dream. I was an observer floating above. I think the bear was inspired by a Care-Bear.
This picture has all the elements of the actual dream, the candle, the line of glowing pixies, the sleeping princess, and Prince Charming. But nothing here looks like it did in the dream. The prince and the princess were both young teens that I did not know in real life. The fairies were larger and a lot more obviously nude.
I actually passed out while writing this post. It happened right here, before I could post this dream of living colors. All the colors were in motion in the dream, something I couldn’t really represent here.
I knew when I dreamed this dream that the Bambi-kin in this dream were members of my family, but at the time I dreamt it I had not met my wife yet, let alone had three kids of my own. Yet I knew that it was not my family at the time of the dream because one of my sisters was not there.
This is from a dream I had in college at Iowa City. I made an entire cartoon out of it called Babysitters Hate My House, It is about a babysitter having a horrible time with my two sons as she loses control when they show her the man in the basement that, “Daddy built out of a kit.”
And, finally, this dream featured not only the spirit stag and the medicine man, but the bolt of lightning in the background. The Dakotah people say having a dream with lightning in it makes you a “lightning dreamer”, a magic man, or a shaman. So, I guess that qualifies me to be one.
In the Cryptofont Zoo of bizarre and exotic creatures of word, I, as a wordsmith, have become quite a keeper. My lovely Zoo is the rival of any in the world… er, U.S… er, well, it’s different. Let me give you a tour and see what you think.
First on our tour are the strange and wonderful animals in the Popeye-isms section. You know, the bizarre creatures of word first spawned by E.C. Segar in his strip known as Thimble Theater, better known by the later name of Popeye the Sailor. I regularly use many of these little animals in my writing, making the spell checker hate me and making the readers pause with a private “isn’t this wrong?” sort of thing. I am often disgustipated with the words and I should have antiskipated the whole spell-checker thing. If you just keep hitting the add to the dictionamary button, soon the whole thing is discomboobulated and ready to just give me the ol’ twisker punch! It takes an ol’ salt like Poopdeck Pappy and a whole can of Spinach to sort this sichymawation out.
Thimble Theater by E. C. Segar
Now next on our tour, fear this thing over here, this Seussian Sphere, where we keep the rhyme animals more. I use these critters too, in place of bad glue, and to gloss over all that’s a bore.
There are also the Thingamadoodles like oodles of poodles that come from the Forest of Seussian Lore. I never will know why the Whangdoodles tootle and spurt the bright snootles while they snore. The thing that’s head-achy and a little mind-breaky about the Doctor’s good chore, is the way it is rhyming and syllable-climbing while you write it right out through the door!
Once I bounce just an ounce of the rhyming nonsense out of my head, I can tell you about word munchers and other evil critters. One evil word muncher got the word “thing” in the previous sentence and made it come out “thong” until I caught the spelling error; (My spell checker still has not forgiven me my Popeye-isms, so I have to check it myself). It is rare that a word muncher is ever useful. I collect many of them in my writing on a daily basis, but mostly they just take up space (like the “mostyl” I just captured in this sentence!). Oh, yes, the most common variety of word muncher seems to me to be the “dna” or “adn” or “nad” that always blossoms its evil petals out where ever I need a conjunction.
The family dog (not dgo) from the other day… but in full color ( not cloor)
Bedevils are evil stray thoughts that pepper everything you write with distractions. Bedevils, by their very nature, and I assure you they are natural, will… what was that I was talking about? Oh, they have evil in their very name. Emerson said that a “foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds”, but I think that Bedevils are more like a real hobgoblin that plagues the minds of those whose heads are too full, and not of straw, like in this Wizard-of-Oz allusion.
Okay, I have taken you as far through this little word zoo as my mind can handle. If you really read it and now are plagued with nightmares about it, I apologize for what I just did to your own writing. You will never be free of these wee beasties again, will you?
Catch a Falling Star 
Don’t Give Up!
Yes, I am philosophically a pessimist. I expect always that the worst outcome is the one I will have to live with. Hence, I was not as devastated by Donald Trump’s election as some who were too confident that Hilkary would win. And the climate crisis seems to be good reason to prepare for the worst that can happen. Some of it is already happening, already here.
But you really should listen to what this career futurist has to say about it.
The near future is, as documented with evidence in the video, far worse than we think it is. “Just doom, nothing else,” as Robin Williams declares. But too much pessimism at this point is the death of us. We have to keep trying. We can’t just give up.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not the right person to be elected head cheerleader on this issue. I have given in to despair and weeping on more than one occasion already. Since the election of Trump, the conservative pillaging of the Supreme Court, the roll-back of EPA guidelines and restrictions, the erosion of fundamental voting rights (soon to be followed by other rights,) the mismanagement of the economy, the Covid crisis, wildfires in the West, the insurrection after the election of Joe Biden, and more and more things that signal doom and possible Armaggedon, we have to battle the urge to lie down and die.
Here is where the optimism of the Reverand Peale is critical.
If we stop trying, our loss and subsequent death is insured. It is only by continuing to fight that we will have a chance to save ourselves. And this is beginning to happen everywhere.
In 2020 we turned out against the Evil-Clown President in record numbers. We wrested the control of the government out of the hands of the corrupt elephants and put it back in the hands of the hard-working but mostly stupid jackasses. Biden’s donkey-like devotion to following through on the work that needs to be done got us through the rest of the pandemic, getting ourselves vaccinated and acclimated to life with the reality of the new deadly virus.
We have tried hard and kept at it to achieve much-needed climate-control legislation. The fossil-fuel industry has made it difficult, and we nearly gave up on the Build Back Better program, but it seems through perseverance that we may have finally gotten a critical piece of that over the hurdles after all.
One thing definitely indicated is that we will need to turn out to vote in the midterm elections again this year. If we don’t, the elitist elefantiasis party will take away all our gains and punish us again, playing their golden fiddles while the world burns.
But despair is still not warranted here. We know what we can do to solve the problems that face us. We have done similar things before, with the Cold War, World War II, and the hole in the ozone layer in the 1980s. What’s more we have the tools we need already, and what we don’t have is quickly being developed. There are plans in the works for mountain-sized storage batteries, massive solar-power arrays, and wind farms (many of which are already built and operating.) We can rebuild and upgrade the entire power grid, not just in the USA, but for the whole world. It needs, of course, to all be weather-proofed, meteor-proofed, solar-storm-proofed, and, hopefully, greedy-Republican-idiot-proofed.
We are not beaten if we don’t give up.
And as the futurist tells us in the video you didn’t watch, pessimists prepare us for disaster, but only the optimist can make us successful in living through it to a brighter future beyond.
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