Tuesday Night Party Club #42

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Gallery – 2019 Daily Sketches 243-272

Thirty more of 2019’s half hour daily sketches in one convenient gallery.

Story Seed #91
What Stays Up

A transatlantic flight doesn’t land. The pilots can’t find a signal from the ground. There’s nothing but ocean below them and something has taken over the plane. It stays aloft for hours past when it should have lost fuel. It will respond to some commands but it won’t descend.

There’s only so much food on board. How do the passengers react? How does the crew? Do they work together to figure out a solution? Do they go Lord of the Flies?

Recommendation

Jackie’s Vegetable Kitchen. Jackie put up with me for four years in high school. We haven’t talked much since but we’re connected on Facebook so I’ve gotten to see glimpses of her life. If you’re someone who likes to cook and is interested in vegetarian recipes, Jackie has dozens of dishes worth trying out.

Local News

Last week –

At USPS we delivered local voter pamphlets, then ballots. Every voting session I have ballots for people who have long since moved. Apparently all the noise about voting has had folks be more proactive. I had a lot less undeliverable ballots this time around.

Artwise I’ve been working my way through adding greytones to the character drawings for the pirate book and I’ve been working with an author and his publisher to narrow down cover designs for the author’s novel.

I’ve been feeling scattered mentally and emotionally. Apparently that’s pretty normal these days. It does mean that this newsletter is a short one. I’ve had a lot of thoughts but writing them out coherently hasn’t happened.

Thank you for dropping by. Stay as healthy as you can. Avoid idiots. Thank your friends for making your world a better place. See you next week!

Tiesday Night Party Club #41

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Gallery – Inkober/Drawloween 2016

There are a lot of different drawing challenges on the net. Mermay. Junicorn. Kaijune. I think a couple of the oldest are Inktober and Drawlloween. I think. They may simply be the most famous or the ones I was first aware of. In any case, back in 2016 I posted a drawing a day during October. I used the Drawlloween prompts rather than the Inktober ones. I don’t remember why but I suspect the Drawlloween prompts just seemed more fun. It was fun and I’d enjoy doing it again sometime. This year I’ll just post a gallery of the work I did in 2016. Boo!

Story Seed #60-#90

Every picture tells a story. Or suggests one. There are 31 possibilities up there. Pick an image. Write the story that it illustrates.

Recommendation 

127 Terrifying Creepypasta. In keeping with this week’s early Halloween theme, here’s a list (with links) of 127 creepypasta – short internet based horror stories. Have fun reading!

Local News

I’m been thinking more and more about what projects to handle in 2021. It’s easier for me to manage time and projects when I plan ahead, when I figure out what I want to be doing and set out some goal posts that I want to pass.

Last week I wrote that I was thinking about suspending commissions so that I could spend more time creating art for and marketing my zazzle and redbubble stores. I thought about it a bit and decided that I’ll be spending the first 6 months of 2021 just working on the stores. I may take on commissions again in July. If I do, it will be at a higher rate. I don’t think I’ve raised my rates in 10 years. The new rates will still be less than what I make while working for the post office. (If you want my rates, just ask.)

It always feels odd to write about pricing my illustrations. Art is one of those cultural necessities that seems sullied by putting a price on it. And yet, I live in a determinedly capitalist culture that insists that everything has a price. When I gave people art when I was young they would often say that they would hold on to it until I was rich and famous, implying that they’d make a tidy profit by selling it. Someday. And I’d be happy if they did get a handful of cash for some sketch I did 30 years ago.

I’ve read plenty of stories about paintings that sold for more money than the actual artist who painted them made in their lifetimes. Mostly I’m appalled. The painting isn’t better for having been traded for a higher stack of cash. It wasn’t improved. And the person who did the work didn’t benefit. Yes, there are living artists who sell their work for ridiculous amounts. I don’t begrudge them. I’m just not impressed by rich folks competing for ownership of more things.

I used to think of art as low in value in life. We need to eat. We need to sleep. We need places to live and clothes to wear. When things break we need people who know how to fix them. But art? I figured that we could live without it so getting paid for it or getting rich at it or doing it for anything but fun seemed weird. And by art, I mean all the creative arts – writing, cartooning, singing, acting, poeting, painting, etc, etc, etc.

The thing is, art is culture. Culture is the stories and metaphors and ideas that our brains use to organize and communicate our thoughts. Culture is the software that our brains use to think. No art, no thoughts. American culture is obsessed with money and status. I try to look at my thoughts and attitudes to determine whether those thoughts and attitudes are ones I developed consciously or if I’ve just absorbed them.

I’m heading off on tangents that I can’t really explore without doing a lot more writing than I have time for. And time is what has become more important. I believe that the value of any work of art is reflected in how long it survives after it becomes part of the general culture. Frankenstein. Starry Night. The Road Not Taken. MacBeth. Lola. Superman. Kafkaesque. Lovecraftian. Oz. Peanuts. The art that survives is the art that matters. There are artists who were financially successful in their lifetimes who are forgotten now. There are artists who struggled financially whose work is now known by millions who have never experienced it directly.

I never expected to get rich doing art. It’s always been a way for me to relax. The process of drawing shuts off more annoying parts of my brain. Writing does the same but I need a quiet environment to write. I can draw in a noisy space. At this point I’ve got a job that pays all my bills and, barring the economic collapse of the USA, should continue to do so until I retire.

What I want to do is create some art, some stories, that has(have?) the potential to live on after I’ve stopped. Living that is. The art that has its own life is generally the art that is original. Using comic book artists as examples – consider Jim Steranko and Berni Wrightson. Both brilliant artists. Both illustrated some lovely stories that feature established corporate owned characters. Outside of comics Wrightson’s work is more likely to be remembered because he co-created Swamp Thing with Len Wein and his illustrated Frankenstein presents a definitive version of the story.

It’s not so much that I want to be remembered after I’m gone. Once I’m gone I don’t expect to care. History and culture will save what it deems important. There are images I want to see and stories I want to read that don’t yet exist. No one is commissioning me to create them. People commission me to illustrate their own ideas, not mine. If I want to see those specifici images and tells those specific stories I’m going to have to create them. And that means I’ve got to dedicate some time to creating them.

The Mighty Nizz. Misspent Youths. Kaiju Weather. The Witch Engines.

More next week. perhaps.

Thank you again for dropping by. I appreciate it. Your time is valuable. I hope, in the next week, you’re able to spend some of it doing things that bring you joy. If that’s creating art, yay! If it’s experiencing art, yay! If it’s engaging with the world in other ways, YAY!

 

Tuesday Night Party Club #40

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Gallery – Illustrating Mr. Conyers

Adam Crossingham at Sixtystone Press got me started (and continues to have me) illustrating RPGs. I thank him for that. I’ve had a lot of fun.

David Conyers got me started working for Chaosium. In 2006 he contacted me asking if I’d be interested in doing the cover illustration for Secrets of Kenya, a Call of Cthulhu sourcebook that he had written. David and I had both work published in The Black Seal. I said yes. The resulting cover is still one of my favorite color CoC illustrations.

The following year Conyers asked me to do the cover illustration for his and John Sunseri‘s collection The Spiraling Worm. That was my second job for Chaosium and more work (some of it illustrating more of Mr. Conyers writings)  followed. I thank him for that.

The last job David sent my way, in 2011, was a series of spot illustrations for The Midnight Echo #6, an issue of the magazine of the Australasian Horror Writers Association. I don’t think I ever got a physical copy of the issue. I’d actually forgotten that I’d done the job. I have forgotten having done a lot of illustrations. I tend to focus on what I’m doing next far more than what I’ve already done. Fortunately I rarely delete emails. I found the Midnight Echo pieces while doing a search in my old correspondences.

David is still actively writing. Harrison Peel, his protagonist in The Spiraling Worm, has starred in a series of novels, facing down the horrors of the Mythos and remaining somewhat sane and mostly alive.

During my email archive search I found progress images for Secrets of Kenya that I had sent to David. Here’s a gif of the illustration from inks to final colors.

Story Seed #59
Message in a Bottle

A man is walking on the beach. He sees a sealed bottle being washed back and forth with the tide. He picks it up. There’s a rolled up paper inside. He opens the bottle and takes out the message.

It reads – Thank you for finding this message. Please return it to the bottle and throw the bottle back into the sea. Whatever you do, don’t turn around.

Recommendation

ReplyAll is a podcast kinda sorta about technology. It’s about that, told in interviews and stories and therefore, it’s about the stories of technology and the people who create it and use (and misuse) it. The first ‘cast I listened to was a history of the QAnon conspiracy, how it got started and who is probably continuing it. There are currently 168 episodes to help you lose a few hours.

Local News

Mail volumes may be down but parcel volumes are definitely up. Every morning a supervisor goes around the station and asks each carrrier to estimate when they will be getting back from delivery. There have been days when, based on the count of letters and flats (magazines, catalogs, large envelopes), I would guess I’d be able to deliver my route in undertime. And I’d be wrong. I would have multiple large parcels that, being too large to fit in my satchel, I would have to deliver individually. Or the number of small parcels would be high enough that scanning them during the delivery process would increase my overall delivery time.

We’ve also been short carriers on many days so the rest of us have been having to carry extra even if we’re not on the Overtime Desired List. I’ve been of the ODL for a year now and I’m still doing a lot of overtime. The larger paychecks are handy but I got off the ODL in order to do more art and have more time to hang out with my wife.

Sigh.

I’m currently working my way through a couple of projects. One is a series of character illustrations for a Call of Cthulhu sourcebook set during the 1700s. The other is a cover illustration for a novel by Joshua Samuel Brown. I have previously done a couple of spot illustrations for Formosa Moon, his travelogue/dialogue with Stephanie Huffman, and multiple illustrations for How Not to Avoid Jet Lag, his book of travel stories.

I’ve also been thinking ahead to how to best spend my art time in 2021. I’ve been kept busy the last couple of years doing commissions. That’s been fun. I love adding to new books to my biblography. I’ve started a shop at Zazzle and another one at Redbubble. I’ve had a few sales. The commissioned work pays once. I can include it in my portfolio but most of the pieces don’t have much use outside of the projects for which they were commissioned. The stores have a potential for multiple sales on multiple products. I haven’t had to look for the commissioned work. I have enough folks who like my stuff to keep my schedule full. The stores are going to require a lot of marketing before they start to generate enough income to compensate for the time I spend on them. So far very few people know they exist.

I currently have commissions to fill my time until mid November. Then the Christmas crush will hit at USPS and I won’t be expecting to be able to get much, if any, art done. And then?

Do I continue to accept new assignments? Do I focus on new designs and doing marketing for my stores? Do I continue to try to do both? Decisions, decisions.

I’m happy to hear your opinions.

Thank you for stopping by. Remember to vote. Hug folks if you can (and they like that sort of thing). Be kind to yourself and others. See you next week!

Tuesday Night Party Club #39

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Gallery – 2019 Daily Sketches 213-242

Here are another thirty of the sketches I posted on a daily basis last year.

Story Seed #58
The Screaming Memes

Mirriam-Websters site defines meme as:

1: an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture.
Memes (discrete units of knowledge, gossip, jokes and so on) are to culture what genes are to life. Just as biological evolution is driven by the survival of the fittest genes in the gene pool, cultural evolution may be driven by the most successful memes.— Richard Dawkins

2: an amusing or interesting item (such as a captioned picture or video) or genre of items that is spread widely online especially through social media
Letitia Chan has figured out how to encode a meme inside a meme. She has figured out how to transmit instructions for thought and behaviorial change within a short video. The videos she creates are seemily simple amusements – kittens chasing butterflies, fat puppies rolling down stairs, baby goats hopping enthusiastically. Watching the video once implants a new behaviour or core belief into the viewer – a smoker quits, a previously sedantary person takes up exercise, a Christian gives up their faith.
Chan is not driven by ideology. She’s just experimenting and amusing herself. She wants to see what ripples she can create in society. She doesn’t intentionally create harmful metamemes. She avoids encoding violent ideas and prejudices.
But any technology, once available, gets used in unintended ways and Metamemetics is too dynamic too go unexploited. Chan’s coding is quickly reverse engineered. Advertisers, governments, con artists and scumbags of all kinds flood the internet with new and dangerous memes. Activists of all stripes fight back with alternative memes. Minds and behaviors change minute by minute.

Recommendation

This is a request. My friend Andy Syversen passed away last week. Folks have come together to support his wife and daughter in many ways including this one  –

A college savings account has been set up in support of Maggie’s future education dreams. We invite you to make a contribution to this account established in memory of Maggie’s wonderful dad, our amazing friend, Andy. Maggie’s full name is Wencke Margaret Syversen, named after Andy’s mom and grandmother.

A 529 plan is a tax-advantaged program that helps families save for future education expenses. There are no fees with the Ugift savings program; your entire gift will go to Maggie’s college savings account.

To make a gift contribution using Ugift:

1. Go to Ugift529.com.
2. Enter Maggie’s Ugift code: R0D-81Y
3. Enter your name and the amount of your gift.
4. Make your gift via electronic funds transfer.

Please share with other friends and family of Andy, Crissy and Maggie.

In gratitude. Dana and Autumn

I’m posting this here as much for myself as for others. I read the original request in our FB messenger group. That’s going to vanish quickly. By posting here I’ll hopefully increase the signal and make the link easier to relocate.

Local News

I’m writing this part of this post this (Tuesday) morning. I’ve had the last 11 days off from USPS. I’ve done a bunch of artwork, got rid of some furniture, rearranged some furniture, scanned and posted a bunch of old photos of friends to Facebook and watched a few more TV shows and movies than usual.

Last night I got confirmation of a book cover commission. This morning I’m reading parts of that book in order to get a sense of what I am illustrating. So I’m reading this morning rather than writing more detailed news.

Thank you for dropping by. I hope you are safe from whatever disaster is occuring in your part of the world. May things get better from here.

Tuesday Night Party Club #38

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Gallery – The Black Seal #2

It was in doing illustrations for the second issue of the Black Seal that I found my basic style. The bulk of the illustration is done on paper. I use a mix of ink and pencil and markers. I then enhance the illustration in Photoshop – add lighting effects, blurs, patterns – things I think will make various elements pop out better. At various times I’ve tried to more digitally and I always come back to putting as much of the illustration on paper as possible.

Story Seed #57

Someone (a man or a woman) wakes in the middle of the night. They’ve heard a noise somewhere in the darkness of their bedroom. They don’t have pets. They live on the tenth floor of a large apartment building. Nervously they reach over and turn on the light.

Sitting in a chair across the room is a very large raccoon. The raccoon has its forepaws up in a gesture of peace.

It says, “I’d like to make a deal.”

Recommendation

I’ve got nothing this week.

Local News
Andy Syversen passed away on Thursday night. I found out that he was ill on Tuesday. A friend emailed me asking if I had heard and knew more than she did. I was at work when I read her email and waited until I got home to do a search of his wife’s Facebook posts to see if I could find out anything else before I contacted her. It turned out that she had posted the news on the 10th, the previous Thursday. By Tuesday he was no longer able to speak.

The last time Andy and I had spoken was at a memorial for another friend back in the spring of 2013. Seven years.

We used to see each other regularly. Back in the day, that is, back when we were in our teens and twenties, we were part of a group of friends who got together and partied. That group still exists, just scattered in the winds of relocattions and responsibilities and jobs and all the vagaries of adulthood. We’ve come together, a little bit, using Facebook in a benevolent way to send each other love and photographs.

Andy and I met in high school in Sebastopol, California. I don’t remember what classes we might have shared. High school was a place to get away from. My memories are of nights in the orchards and at friends’ houses and in open spaces around the Russian River. Drinking. Getting stoned. Talking. Trading insults. Hiking around.

That continued after graduation. After we had jobs and had bills to pay and apartments of our own and some folks started getting married. He started working for UPS as a delivery person. I’m sure I saw Andy at least once a month until I moved up to Seattle back in 1995. He married Crissy Smith and they had a daughter, Maggie.

Andy was a good guy. Steadfast. Smart. Dependable. Kind. Friendly. Fun. Whatever faults he had were enough outshone by his admirable qualities that I don’t remember them.

On Saturday I posted this on Facebook –

“Grief has five stages?
I’ve never gotten past denial. What are the other four like?”

It’s true. Anger? Bargaining? Acceptence? Friends and family members die and I keep going. I get that they are no longer able to talk to me. Or anyone. But knowing them has made me who I am. How can they be gone?

I am a better person for having Andy as a friend. The world is a better place because he was in it. I say that to the world because I didn’t get a chance to say it to him.

Tuesday Night Party Club #37

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Gallery – 2019 Daily Sketches #183-212

Thirty more sketches from last year’s daily sketch project.

Story Seed #56
The Telepathy Plague

A virus spreads. It is airborn, carried via respiratory droplets from host to host. Its incubation period is about a month so it has infected millions before the first cases are reported. Symptoms start small. The infected person starts to “hear” thoughts that are foreign, have desires that are new, remember memories of events they’ve never experienced. Only an infected person can “hear” another infected person. As the disease progesses infected people begin to experience more direct contact. One person can feel anothers physical pains, anothers emotional highs and lows, anothers direct thoughts.

How many people would run from infection? How many people would run to it? How many people would seek a cure? How much chaos would result from people being unable to keep secrets, being unable to lie, being able to see each others needs and pains?

Recommendation

Patrick E. MacLean writes fiction and essays. He also podcasts them. Most of the time I like reading more than listening so I appreciate that he has both options available. And both versions are worth experiencing.

Local News

I haven’t added much (if anything) to my Zazzle and Redbubble stores this week. I have plenty of images to use to make products. I’ve been lacking words. Rather, I’ve been lacking the necessary enthusiasm to write sales copy. Every time I post something new I have to write something new. Most mornings I’ve gone to one site or the other, picked an image I wanted to use and then drew a blank on what to say.

On the internet, a picture doesn’t speak for itself. Internet searches are based on words. No words, no search results.

I.m okay with fallow creative times. Drawing a blank with words doesn’t mean I’m drawing nothing at all. I’m currently working my way through sketches for a couple of proposed Call of Cthulhu supplements. Other projects are in the thinking and sketching stages.

Our housemate moved out at the beginning of the month so we’ve been moving things around in the apartment. And once you start moving things you really notice the things you don’t need anymore. I’ve been putting the “don’t need” things onto Craigslist, free to anyone who will come pick them up. Most of that stuff congregated in a side room that we’d left unused so our housemate could use it. She put a couple of things there that didn’t fit in her room and then ignored the space. Over the years stuff we weren’t using ended up there. Of course.

I want to turn the room into a conscious storage space. I’ve got large pieces and flat files and shelves of art that could get moved into that room and open up more space in the studio/library. I’ve also got 11 days off from USPS starting this Friday that I can use to move stuff. Fun, fun, fun!

I hope your week goes well. I hope you get a lot of rain, physically and metaphorically. Large parts of the country need it these days. If your soul is dry and dusty, please seek out some emotional H2O and spiritual fertilizer. The world already has a lot of people burning up and burning out. We need each other. It’s heatlhy to look after others. It’s healthy to accept help.

 

Tuesday Night Party Club #36

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Gallery – The Black Seal #1

I did my first RPG illustration work for The Black Seal back in 2001. AOL has purged all the archives of their inactive accounts so I can’t check the sequence of communications that led me to contribute. I remember being contacted by John Turner first. He’d seen my illustrations on the Delta Green website and asked if I would be interested in submitting illustrations to a new fanzine of modern day Call of Cthulhu (and specifically Delta Green related) adventures in Britain. I emailed back a positive response and was soon working with Adam Crossingham, the editor, doing illustrations for the first issue of The Black Seal. 

The Black Seal was named for an Arthur Machen story “The Novel of the Black Seal” about a hidden civilization secreted in the wilderness in Wales. The magazine’s focus was to be on material about PISCES, the UK’s Mythos fighting equivalent of Delta Green. I provided specific illustrations for a few articles and some random simple spot illustrations to be used as needed. I didn’t know what print quality TBS would have so I mostly did straight black and white work. I did spend a lot of time doing Photoshop effects on the second illustration in this gallery. I was still very inexperienced with the program and was figuring it out as I went along.

 

The Black Seal saw three issues printed between 2002 and 2004. I did illustrations in each issue and provided material for a couple issues that may see print someday. Work on TBS got me started doing Call of Cthulhu related illustrations. I’ll be showing some of that in future newsletters.

Story Seed #55
A Conspiracy of Squirrels

Most animal attack stories focus on large predators. Sharks. Bears. Wolves. Small varmints are primarily represented by rats. But rats hide in dark places. You usually don’t see them during the day. Squirrels? If you live in a town with trees you see them constantly. They’re everywhere.

Spying.
Plotting.
Organizing.

They only look cute until there are hundreds of them out for your blood.

Recommendation

This week I recommend How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism by Cory Doctrow. Doctrow is a writer and activist with a focus on the benefits and dangers of modern technologies, particularly the internet. This is his latest book, free to read online.

Local News

I spent more time on my Redbubble store than my Zazzle store this week. Redbubble’s set up makes it easier to position on image on multiple products so it’s made it easier to feel like I’m getting more done. Mostly I’m importing images that I created to show off here at Skookworks in recent years but I’m beginning to create some images just for Zazzle and Redbubble. My favorites have been expansions of some designs I originally did as bandanas for Dagon Industries. The images are on most of the products in my Redbubble store. Since Zazzle’s focus is on individual products I’ve started by putting the design on the square puzzles.

This Cthulhu design is meant to be displayed as a diamond but Zazzle doesn’t offer that option. Just turn your head to the left a bit.

Great Cthulhu Glow Green Jigsaw Puzzle

Great Cthulhu Glow Green Jigsaw Puzzle

by Skookworks

That’s it for this week. I appreciate the visit. I hope that you’ve got people around you who keep you amused and make you feel loved. If you do, thank them! They’ll only get more amusing and loving.

Tuesday Night Party Club #35

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Gallery – 2019 Daily Sketches #151-182

Thirty sketches in one convenient gallery. Cheers!

Story Seed #54
A New Spell for Utopia

Magic exists. Stories are spells, wishes in long form. And, as The Monkey’s Paw by W.W. Jacobs illustrates, the wish one makes is rarely the results one receives. For more than the last fifty years we’ve been telling tales of apocalypse and dystopia. This is most noticeable in our movies and television. Watching a film is a more social activity than reading a book. We all see the same images running at the same speed. Groups can experience the same story all at once.

Most tellers of tales of terrible futures will tell you that their stories are meant as warnings, not predictions. That’s assuming they’ve thought about their premises in any ways other than exciting settings for adventures. The thing about magic is that it’s tricky. Warnings are part of the spell, often the spark that burns up the normal world. Ask Adam and Eve. Ask Orpheus. As Oedipus. As those dumb kids who who went to Crystal Lake. The Gods know that the best way to make something happen is tell human beings not to do something.

So we’ve been casting spells to avoid apocalypse and all we’re doing is calling it up. The Gods are laughing.

We are all magicians because we all tell stories. Some of us have larger audiences but we all shape the world. Imagine putting power into creating a world that we want to live into, a world for our children’s children’s children. It would mean learning to tell different stories in different ways. The vision of a horrible future is not banished just because the story ends on a note of hope. Hope is nice but it’s not a roadmap. Once we’ve lived through the End, how do we live then? Or better, how can we live well, period.

Weave your spells, magicians. What does a good world look like? How do we live in it?

Recommendation
Toren Atkinson’s Post-Apocalyptic Movie Guide

Toren Atkinson has a list of a Post-Apocalyptic movies. It’s not complete. It doesn’t include zombie apocalypse films. But it’s a good overview. He helpfully includes a notice on whether each film ends on a positive note for those who want to enjoy a story set after most of humanity has died without getting too depressed.

Local News

I started last week feeling frustrated and unmoored. I’m writing on this on Tuesday morning feeling simply unmoored.

The day job is a chunk of time that I wade through that leaves me with only a small amount of time to create new art. I’ve got two shops (Zazzle, Redbubble) that I’m having fun working on each morning but they’re online stores. Despite what my spam comments suggest, people don’t end up on websites by accident. You can’t walk past an online store and decide to go in and browse. Either you know it exists or a search engine shows it to you. And in order for a search engine to show you something it has to know the something exists. So I’m trying to figure out how tag my stores in such a way that search engines direct people to them.

Basically I’m learning to write summoning spells.

It was recognizing that I was trying to work magic that helped to change my attitude. Google gives the definition of magic as “the power of apparently influencing the course of events by using mysterious or supernatural forces”.

In order to get someone to come to my stores I need to make them search engine friendly. Right? I need to somehow include words and tags that match up with what my potential audience is putting into said search engines. Oz? Cthulhu? Frankenstein? Thousands of results show up. Mighty Nizz? That wild child shows up on the first page. David Ingersoll? Using Bing I don’t appear for a few pages even though I own davidingersoll.com. Using Google my website shows up on the first page but I do occasional searches for myself on Google and Google’s algorithms are designed to give you more of what you’ve searched for in the past.

Search engines and website feeds are more and more designed to give you more of what you’ve already shown interest in. Or to give you more of what has already been designated as popular. The more popular something is designated, the more it is fed to searchers and the more popular it becomes.

I could be discouraged. Oddly, I’m not. I’ve ignored “search engine optimization” for most of the time that I’ve had a website.I didn’t care much about increasing the traffic here. I’ve only got so much time to do individual illustrations. Having more people commissioning me for more illustrations is appealling but only to my ego. Unless I quit the Post Office I don’t have time to take much more work than I’m already taking.

The online stores are different. The work is already done. Each piece can be sold multiple times so the more people who see an image or product the more chances that some of those people will purchase it. So now I have to learn to ” influencing the course of events by using mysterious or supernatural forces”.

Am I really performing magic?

It’s fun to think of it that way. I’ll be doing research and learning new skills and being boringly practical about everything but “have fun” is a primary motivation for me to do anything. I’m only feeling unmoored because there are so many directions I can look for information and so many new skills to aquire that I’m uncertain where to head first.

And that’s fine. To be unmoored is also to be in motion. Time to choose a direction to point my sails.

Thank you for dropping by. Remember that you are a magician. The daily slog is real but it’s also an illusion. Fight it when you can but, when you can, give power to the moments of joy and wonder that present themselves. Share those moments. Magic lasts longer when performed in collaboration.

See you next week!

 

Tuesday Night Party Club #34

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Gallery: Delta Green

Most of my RPG illustration work has been for Call of Cthulhu related projects. That’s the result of intention and good luck and accident.

The Intention part happened in the year 2000. I submitted some illustrations to the Delta Green website. Delta Green was a Call of Cthulhu RPG set in modern times – the late 199os. Most CoC games are set in the 1920s/1930s, the time the original stories were written and set. I discovered Delta Green in 1999 when I working at Half Price Books. I was the buyer when a customer sold us his collection of RPG manuals. In the buy was Delta Green and its sequel Delta Green: Countdown. I bought those books for myself. I loved the ideas behind the setting. It updated the Cthulhu Mythos for the late Twentieth Century in ways that surprised and delighted me. It created a means and a reason for investigators to, well, investigate the horrors from beyond.

I’d wanted to illustrate RPGs but didn’t have much of a portfolio of examples to show. I found the Delta Green site early the next year. I don’t think it had a way to send submissions and I don’t think they were asking for any. What it did have was a way to submit fan art and writing. So I worked up three illustrations (see the follow gallery) and submitted them. They got posted. No one from Delta Green contacted me.

Oh well.

Two years later those illustrations got me work at The Black Seal. But that’s another post.

The original photoshop files of these illustrations are, possibly, residing on an old back up drive. It’s formated for Mac and I currently use a PC so I haven’t tried plugging it in. A lot of the work I did in the first ten years of this century was done on a Mac. The art always started as graphite and ink on paper and then had photoshop magic applied to it. I’ve got the original drawings in big metal flat files but the art that got published looks different.

Earlier this year I realized that I’d sent most of those illustrations to the editors and publishers via email and I’ve never deleted any personal emails. So I’ve tracked down a lot of that older art and will be showing it in future galleries. I found the two black and white illustrations in the above gallery in my emails.

The first three images, however, I couldn’t locate in my gmail archive. AOL has long since deleted all my old emals. At first they didn’t appear to be on the current Delta Green site but, after doing some obsessive google searching and some sort of back door poking around on DG I found them in an archive. Huzzah!

Story Seed #53
The Time Line AntiDefense League

There are a lot of stories that feature some sort of organization whose mission is to defend the “correct” timeline, to make sure that history works itself out the way that it is “supposed to”. Bleah. How about an organization whose mission is to create timelines where history works itself out in the best ways for the most people?

Recommendation

Beeple. This person’s art started showing up in my tumblr feed, shared by other folks I followed. It was weird and creepy so I subscribed to his feed. He posts an image a day, every day.

Also, the Growing Up / Overnight Kickstarter concludes on the 30th. If you’ve been putting off backing it. please jump in.

Local News

Last week, in one of our stand up meetings at USPS, we were reminded that we, the letter carriers were not supposed to talk to the press. That if a member of the press attempted to engage us in conversation we were to refer him/her to management. Also, while we were in uniform, we were not to engage in political discussions with anyone lest they assume that our views represented those of the USPS. We were also to be careful not to express politcal opinions on social media in such a way as to lead people to believe that our views represented those of the USPS.

Sigh.

To be clear, anything I write here about my job at USPS is just my experience and my opinion. I like to assume that those of you who read these newsletters recognize this but, on the off chance you don’t, I AM NOT A REPRESENTATIVE OF THE POST OFFICE. I’m just a guy who works there. In my opinion, the USPS can’t actually have an opinion since it’s an organization. Organizations are not people. The people in charge of organizations may claim that their opinion represents the opinion of the organization but that’s just a fiction.

Anyway.

The most interesting part about the day job right now is that I have a new T6. USPS delivers mail six days a week. Regular carriers work and deliver theri route five days a week. A T6 is the person who delivers the route on the regular carrier’s day off. My last T6 had medical issues that prevented them from delivering my route on a regular basis. My new T6 is healthy and detail oriented. More detail oriented than I am, actually. And that’s good. It means I’m updating labels in mailboxes and doing maintenance on my route that I’d let slide. I keep most of my customer changes in my head. Having another person who has to regularly work my route reminds me that I should communicate customer changes in clear, written methods. It’s only polite.

We’ve also moved our start time from 7 am to 7:30 am. I’m not a fan but I’m adjusting.

I’ve left my alarm at 4 am. I get up. Drink coffee Write. Do computer art or make products in either my Zazzle or my Redbubble stores. I’ve updated my various websites to include a “store” page with links to each. This week I spent most of my store time working on an Oz Squad collection for Zazzle. Oz Squad is Steve Ahlquist’s creature but, as a fan and sometime collaborator, I try to find ways to keep the brand active.

In the evenings, once we’ve finished dinner and our spot of television, I work on physical art. Right now I’m doing pirate sketches. More about that when the project can be talked about publically.

Thank you for dropping by. Remember that life has always been insane. Look out for yourself and your friends. That’s where sanity and security dwells.

See you next week!

Tuesday Night Party Club #33

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Gallery: 2019 Daily Sketches 121-150

Another thirty of last year’s Daily Half Hour Sketches, now in one handy gallery.

Story Seed #52
A Stone in the River

Most crime fighters and/or superheroes are reactive. Mostly they take action after a crime has been committed either to bring villains to justice or, on the more antihero side, get revenge for the victims. There are a few stories of characters or organizations that stop crimes before they occur, they catch criminals before they can become criminals, they punish the guilty before they can be guilty of a crime. Usually the organizations manage this by either having members with precognitive abilities or computers with the same abilities. Eunice Stone can’t see the future. She simply knows how to read people. If she spends enough time around someone she’ll be able to predict how that person is likely to react in any situation.

She doesn’t see good or bad people. Eunice sees life as a game. She sees human beings as mostly unaware entities trapped in massive systems, reacting to outside stimuli and stuck in lives that, too often, spiral further out of control. So, as a child, Eunice set out, not to fix the systems – she knew that was too big a task – but to redirect the people who are trapped in them. A suggestion here. A secret favor there. Redirecting an angry man’s attention at someone who deserves his wrath rather than the family he’s been taking it out on. Showing the unrepentant thief better targets than his neighbors.

Eunice becomes a fixer. The smarter and more aware people around her, both criminals and legitimate businesspeople, notice what she does and try to enlist her in improving their situations. And she does. Mostly to the advantage of everyone in a situation. She makes connections. She points out solutions. She goes around her clients selfish desires and finds points them at satisfying ends. Eunice knows that there is always a win win scenario.

And for those who refuse to play her way? Those who can only win by making someone lose? Eunice will take them out of the game.

Recommendation

The Kickstarter for Growing Up / Overnight ends on the 30th. Please support this project! Thank you!

Local News

Life at the Post Office has been tiring. Last week was my Long Week, six days in a row, every day with overtime. There are a lot of carriers on vacation at the moment so a lot of routes need coverage. I volunteer for a desired route at the beginning of my shift in order to avoid being mandated to carry a route I don’t particularly like. This will make for a larger paycheck but currently I’m only noticing a more tired body.

I’ve read the news about the Postmaster General’s sabotage of USPS. I haven’t noticed any unique new problems. Upper management is doing more micromanaging but they do that every few months anyway so, if I hadn’t been hearing about the new PMG, I’d just assume regular management stupidity. Being a letter carrier is a job. I’m past the point of feeling any particular loyalty to a job. Jobs don’t love the people who do them and upper management in most businesses will make decisions that poorly affect the people who have to follow the new directives. If upper management consulted the workers before implementing a new procedure that would be unusual.

So I do my best to put my emotional and creative energy into activities where I can have some fun and some control. This last week Sarah has been good at reminding me to get some drawing in after work, regardless of how tired I am. Just 15 minutes can improve my mood.

In the mornings I generally do computer work. Photoshop. Writing here. I have now have two online stores. One at Zazzle. Another at Redbubble.

The first week that I was putting together my Zazzle store I made a lot of products. Unfortunately they didn’t all become publically available quickly. My first 29 items appeared promptly enough. Then, from Saturday to Thursday, nothing loaded. I looked at the Zazzle forums and checked with customer service and got that slow load times during busy periods could be expected. By Wednesday I was feeling a bit itchy so I decided to check out the other POD sites that I’d seen recommended.

I started setting up a store at Redbubble. I’d only set up a profile but not loaded any art when Zazzle’s public links resolved and the 50 products I’d been waiting on became available. So I continued making stuff at Zazzle. I decided to just make one or two things a day. Partly so that they’d load in a timely fashion and partly so I would spend some time figuring out best marketing practices. And I got a commission to do illustrations for an RPG supplement about pirates.

Redbubble is persistent though. I got emails reminding me to finish setting up my store. So, what the hell, I figured I might as well have two stores, one Zazzler, one Redbubbler. Zazzle had been recommended as a general, less focussed site, Redbubble as an artist focused site. There’s definitely a difference between them.

With Zazzle, you choose a product – a cup, a t-shirt, a puzzle – upload an image and match it to the product. With Redbubble you start by uploading an image and the site helpfully puts it on EVERYTHING. For a few of their products that means you have to do some repositioning to make the image look good. Most of the time the fit is great. Zazzle seems to be the best platform for smaller images, the sort of things that I’ve been putting on cups and mugs. Redbubble seems to be a better platform for larger, more complicated images. So those are good reasons to maintain two stores.

Zazzle provides code that lets me post individual items or collections to this website or other social media sites. That’s cool.

Redbubble lets me put a sample store onto this website. Check it out –

Thank you for dropping by. I hope that your week provides you with more happy moments than otherwise. Look out for each other. See you next week!