THAT SHARK HAS ANIME EYES!!!!!! They're not black and lifeless as a doll's eyes at all. They're fierce and yet shy like a tsundere waifu's eyes. THAT SHARK IS A WIAFU!!!!

Last night I had a dream that my friend Mike Trebilcock set up a meeting for me with a friend who was an executive at Adult Swim and I was going to make a pitch for an animated Ghastly's Ghastly Comic series but when I got there to make the pitch I somehow totally forgot what my old webcomic was even about so I said "Well the whole cartoon is going to be centred on this really flamboyant guy who says things that are shocking or surprising and when people say "really?" he says "No... but oh my god, seriously could you imagine?""

It was the best idea for a cartoon that I could come up with on the spot and I'm sitting there thinking to myself "that was the stupidest idea for a cartoon ever" but the exec loved it and bought 2 12-episode seasons of it. So now I'm panicking because I have to come up was 24 episodes that revolve around this flamboyant guy and I realized I had no idea what I was going to do with him. So I called my friend Peter Lloyd to help me because he's a writer and I was hoping we could come up with something. So I'm sitting in Pete's kitchen and I tell him, "okay this is all I got. So the flamboyant guy is a doctor at the hospital, right? And there's this scene where these parents are waiting in his office and he comes in looking very serious and puts some X-rays up on those light things and says "Mr. and Mrs. Simone, I have some very bad news. Your daughter has cancer" and then the mother cries "really?" and the flamboyant guy laughs and goes "No.. but oh my god, seriously could you imagine?" and he continues to laugh and the parents sort of do a semi-relieved, nervous laugh along and the mother says "so... she doesn't have cancer right" and the flamboyant guy says "No, no, she's fine. She's totally fine, but oh my god, seriously could you imagine?" and the parents laugh nervously and go "but she's alright, she's fine." and that's all I got"

So then Pete says "Okay and then the flamboyant guy leaves and goes into the next room and you just hear him say "Congratulations! We've cured your daughter's cancer!" and you hear the parents should excitedly "really?" and then we cut to the next scene.

And then I'm like "good! good! that's a solid transition. okay so what next?" and Pete and I try really hard to come up with another scene but we just can't and we realize that flamboyant guy is just a sort of Family Guy throw away bit and not someone you can build a whole series around. By then I remembered what my webcomic was about so I went to Mike and asked him to arrange another meeting with his friend and he said "No. I heard about that flamboyant guy thing and I've done enough. No way am I getting my fingerprints on that train wreck."

So I snuck back into the studio and went to the guy's office to tell him I can't deliver the flamboyant guy cartoon but I'd like to do an animated Ghastly's Ghastly Comic. But when I got into the guy's office there was a dummy in his seat made entirely out of marshmallows. I asked his secretary where he was and she said "Oh, he was stoned out of his skull when he agreed to buy your flamboyant guy cartoon and when he sobered up he realized what crap it was and so now he's hiding from his boss using this marshmallow decoy. So I ran into Pete who was hanging out with the Scooby Doo gang and we all spit up to look for the Adult Swim executive.

Last night I had a dream I went to Port Dover with John and everyone was being really mean to me and I couldn't figure out why. All the store keepers and restaurant staff were rude and dismissive of me and people were either shunning me or telling me what a shitty person I am and I had no idea why. But then I found out the Ricardo Montalban had bought CHNR 1600 and was using the radio station to broadcast 24/7 his rants about what a thoroughly shitty person I was. As luck would have it he was on the beach at Port Dover doing a live remote broadcast where he'd stop people on the beach to either ask them why they thought I was a terrible waste of skin or stop people to tell them why he though I was a terrible waste of skin.

So I came up to him and everyone is booing and hissing at me and I asked him "why are you doing this to me Ricardo? What have I ever done to you?"

He (dressed in his Fantasy Island white suit) told me he was angry because of that one Ghastly's Ghastly Comic strip I did about him. So I told him that everyone has completely forgotten about that strip by now and that my old webcomic is virtually unknown and all you're doing by venting about the strip is making people remember it even existed in the first place. It would be long forgotten about if you didn't launch this hate campaign about me. But it didn't matter and I ended up getting run out of Port Dover by an angry crowd and I remember thinking "I've got to go find a dream where Ricardo Montalban hasn't made everyone hate me". So I was somewhat aware of the fact I was dreaming but man was I ever depressed as fuck when I woke up and thought Ricardo Montalban had made all of Norfolk County hate me because of that comic strip I drew about it.

Then I remembered that I never did a comic strip about Ricardo Montalban but I did have a strip planned that was going to be The Wrath of Loli-Khan where Khan and Kirk were going to be two moe frenemies who bully each other and try to foil each other's plans and the idea was you weren't going to ever be sure if one was a loli and the other a shota or vice versa. The idea for the characters eventually morphed into Sholi and Lota. So I guess in my dream reality I did the strip as I had originally planned and made a lifelong enemy of Ricardo Montalban.

Last night I had a dream that Godzilla and King Kong were having a fight in Hamilton and I was hiding in a bus shelter with Rocky and Zydeco and Alan Alda watching it and my dogs kept barking Every time the monsters got near and Alan Alda kept saying "would you keep those chickens quiet" and I told him they're not chickens they're dogs, you just suffer chicken based psychosis when you're stressed.

The King Kong stopped right in front of the bus stop and a door opened up on its foot and these naked people got out. It turned out the King Kong was a giant robot built for vore fetishists. I helped them take the fake fur off the mecha-kong so they could get back into battle then watched Godzilla fight Mecha-Kong in downtown Hamilton while Rocky and Zydeco continued to bark at them and Alan Alda had a mental breakdown.

Human civilization ended more than a thousand years before we even found your planet. Our archaeologists found your planet teeming with life but evidence was clear that it was recovering from a great ecological disaster and we uncovered evidence of your once thriving civilizations. You had killed yourselves off before you ever got to leave your world and join the universal civilization. Your culture, dreams, ambitions, all dead and gone. We were able to piece together a pretty good idea of what humans were, what their major historical events were, who their major players were but the day to day stuff, the small stuff, that's harder to pick out. We were sad that no mind would ever again know what it is to be a human. We were sad that you had destroyed yourself before we ever had a chance to meet you, to welcome you to our cosmic family. So we did what we've done countless times we've encountered evidence of intelligent life that had destroyed itself before we could know it.

We studied the artifacts until the artifacts had nothing more to tell us and then we created this world so we could know you. You exist here in this simulation that we've run based on the data we've collected. A simulation that has been making digital human minds since the australopithicines when you weren't even what you would recognize as human to now when your species is reaching its natural conclusion. Is our simulation perfect? No. Of course not. But if we took an average biological human that actually existed in the universe and transferred him to this one he would probably not notice much different. The later stage of humanity was actually the easiest to simulate because you accumulated so much data. Social media captured so much minutiae. In the next decade when an organization sets about archiving the entire contents of the internet as data etched into quartz crystals it's all this data you dismiss as fluff, meaningless ego pandering trivia that becomes the most important data for understanding what the human experience was. You're very fortunate as many sapient species go extinct before they are able to preserve their knowledge in a format that can last more than a billion years, and few ever think it important enough to save so much of their knowledge in the event that someone other than themselves would ever need it. Your vanity was ultimately your saviour. The universe still knows the human mind.

And human minds will continue. The extraordinary of you we cherish. When their simulated time comes to an end they will join us. Most intelligent life in the universe exists digitally as machine minds. Its really the only practical way to explore something as big as the universe when you're limited to such slow travel speeds and when so much of it is hostile to organic life. When we wish to have an organic experience we can always grow ourselves a body of a species of our choice and transfer ourselves to it but really there isn't much you can do organically that you can't do mechanically. Some of you will understand this when your simulation ends and you are invited to join us. Those of you who are creative, curious, compassionate, you will understand. So enjoy what little of the simulation there is left to run. The end of organic human life is unavoidable. Like I said, it happened more than a thousand years before we discovered your world. But the human mind? The best of them will be immortal.

Oh shit! If forgot to put :::SPOILER ALERT::: on the top of this.

So I've never before gotten high from smoking pot. It's a problem with being neural atypical is chemicals don't necessarily do the same thing for you that they do with most people. Some friends would take this as a challenge and try to get me to smoke the "good stuff" but all smoking pot ever did was make me super hungry and as someone with an anxiety disorder the last thing I need is to be more hungry.

So now pot is legal in Canada and it was suggested that I try edibles because sometimes people who can't get high from smoking it can get high from ingesting it. So I tried a pot gummie bear. It said on the package to eat half and then if you felt nothing after a half hour to try the other half so I did. 2 Hours later still nothing so I went to bed. Then I woke up about an hour and a half later with the worst cotton mouth ever. "Oh, so this is a wonderful side effect. Well at least I'm not hungry". But I also noticed I had what would best be described as a two beer buzz. It was very relaxing but only if I actively relaxed. If I got up (as I did many times to get something to drink) the effect completely dissipated and I was sober but if I laid back and closed my eyes and relaxed I could feel the buzz return. The interesting thing was it was different than booze in that I could literally will myself sober and also I had more control over keeping my thoughts going somewhere dark. If I'm drinking and my thoughts start going to dark places I'm pretty much stuck with having a bad time of it mentally but with this I was able to steer my thoughts away from dark places but I had no control over where else they went and they just went everywhere.

So I was able to lay back and go "Hey brain, this buzz is kinda nice so let's not ruin that. Let's not 'harsh' this buzz. That's what the stoners say, right, 'don't harsh my buzz'. Yeah let's just enjoy this and not go dark. I wonder what a buzz harsh looks like. I bet it's like a little white glowy ball that's all sharp and spiky. Yeah that would harsh a buzz. Like that crystalline entity in Star Trek. That guy is like a giant buzz harsh. Wow that was a really dick move of Lore to summon it. I bet the entire colony was just trying to enjoy a buzz and Lore was being a big dick by harshing it. Like maybe Lore was invented to be some sort of bong for the colony because I've noticed on the internet that stoners become engineers when they need to make a bong. So maybe Soong was just trying to make a bong that could help the colonists get buzzed and Lore was all 'fuck that, not a bong I'm gonna harsh your buzz'. That's cool to not want to be a bong, I get that. But man, that was a dick move to summon a space harsh to harsh their buzz. You know who would probably have benefited from an edible, Buzz Lightyear. Because then he wouldn't be upset to be a toy. He'd be, 'you know, we're all toys in some sense. You know we just want to play, have fun, give pleasure'. If Buzz Lightyear got buzzed he'd probably be okay with it when he was playing the tea party as Mrs Butterworth. He'd be like 'yeah, I'm a little old lady now and that's cool because I'm still playing'. He'd be a really happy Mrs. Butterworth. Wait... his name wasn't Mrs. Butterworth, that's a maple syrup. Oh hey, does everything in the Toy Story universe become alive if it gets played with? Like if you were a little girl and your parents couldn't afford to get you a doll so they gave you an empty Mrs. Butterworth bottle to play with and you played with it as a doll would the Mrs. Butterworth bottle suddenly become alive when you left the room and do shit with the other toys? And what if the little girl also had a rock that she pretended was Mrs. Butterworth's husband, would that rock become alive like the other toys? Would it still identify as Mrs. Butterworth's husband? Would they be happily married. I wonder how Mrs. Butterworth would feel? Would she feel worth? Or would she feel just really empty because she doesn't have syrup inside her anymore. Wow, I bet it would be great that she's married to a rock then because then when she's feeling down the rock would be like, 'hey, that's okay, I'm still here for you. I'll be your rock'. Then she might not feel so empty because you know, she has a rock. And maybe sometimes the little girl might fill up the empty Mrs. Butterworth bottle with koolaide or juice or even just water. I bet Mrs. Butterworth would really like to be filled with koolaide. It would probably make her feel young like when she was filled with syrup. Yeah I'd like some koolaide right now. My mouth is so dry. I'm gonna get some koolaide".

Then I'd get up and open my eyes and be instantly sober and going "what the hell was all that? that wasn't normal? Is that what pot does to regular people that smoke pot? Does it make them just follow every random thought in their heads with no aim or direction?" And I'd go get a drink, then go lay back down and close my eyes and wait until the two beer buzz feeling came back and I'd end up following another random thought train until I eventually noticed how thirsty I was again. And this went on for about 2 hours until I lost the two beer buzz feeling.

The other really nice thing was my arthritis didn't bother me nearly as much as it does normally. Even the next day my arthritis didn't seem to hurt quite as much.

Some people might be wondering how I draw stuff and what equipment I use. There was a time I used to do all my pencils and inks on paper, scan it and then computer colour it but for maybe the last 10 years I've been working 100% digital on an Android tablet using Autodesk's Sketchbook.

When I first started working with Sketchbook it was on a Toshiba Thrive. It was a great tablet because it had a 10" screen but it didn't have a Wacom digitizer so there was no pressure support and I was using one of those dull crayon type of styluses. It took a little getting used to be was completely workable because the software was so good. At the time there was Sketchbook and Sketchbook Pro the latter being the paid version which is what I used. Nowadays Sketchbook is completely free with an (also free) Autodesk account and it's still, in my opinion, the best illustration software for use on the Android platform. I also have Corel Painter for Android which does a good job of simulating real world mediums like oils and watercolours but I still prefer Sketchbook but will sometimes work with painter for the heck of it since I bought it so why not. Don't bother looking for Painter for Android as it seems Corel has discontinued it.

I'm a really shit penciller I'm sad to say. If I was ever doing pencils and then passing them off to an inker, that inker would probably hate my freaking guts because my pencils are so sloppy. I usually have three layers to my pencils. First is a layer of skeletal forms and lots of scribbling the basic pose. This will be done in a very light colour like cyan so it won't get in the way too much. Then I'll do very rough sketchy pencil layer over top of that, usually in blue. I'm not really making my choices at this point I'm more or less just trying to get the idea in my head realized on the "paper". It usually becomes a big mess. If it's a really bad mess that I won't be able to ink from in confidence then I'll do another layer of pencils in red this time refining the illustration some more and trying not to make too many superfluous lines that won't be inked. Even if the figure is going to be fully clothed I draw it bald and naked first so the proportions won't be too bad and I'll have a better idea of where the cloth will catch and how it will hang. Then I draw the the clothing as another layer in a green or purple and the hair as another layer too.

Here's a timelaps video of my drawing on my tablet. It's pretty cool that sketchbook will capture video of your work. I should point out the software just records frames when it detects stylus movement so it looks like I'm drawing a hell of a lot faster than I really draw. I'm a very, very slow drawer and this video doesn't capture the many minutes I pause looking at my drawing going "okay, what have I fucked up now and what am I getting right". Put it gives you an idea of the technique I use. This is just a drawing of the pencils and final inking of the drawing. I'll probably do another one in the future that shows how I colour the drawing.

Out and about again with my tablet. Doing a sketch to pass the time. Naughty elf, molesting that poor orc.

God my pencils are so damned sloppy.

... between saying "I've finished a New-Half Elf drawing" and "I've finished a new Half-Elf drawing".

I was out and about with my tablet today so I felt like making a sketch.