Tag Archives: Dreamlands

Skook Words (and Pictures) #33

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Give me a Y!
Give me an A!
Give me a D!
Give me an I!
Give me an R!
Give me an F!

What does that spell?

YADIRF!

What does that mean?

Time for another fabulous newsletter!

These Days …

Tomorrow the Seattle Post Office is moving the start time for all its carriers from 7 am to 7:30. The Union has filed a grievance and hopefully we’ll get our start times moved back again. We had that new Seattle Postmaster drop by our station on Wednesday to introduce himself and one of the questions a carrier asked was why he was moving the start times. His answer didn’t make a lot of sense to me. It seemed to be that, because we were handing less mail now than in previous years, we …

That’s where his explanation stopped making sense. He talked about route adjustments and how when he was a carrier he used to have so much mail he’d have to leave some of it undelivered on a regular basis. We have less mail but we’re allowed an hour in the office to set up our route and if it takes longer than an hour we’re supposed to use “street time” and …

If we have less mail it seems like we could actually start earlier? Like at 6:30? We started at 6:30 ten years ago when I started working for the Post Office.

The fellow emphasized that we carriers need to do our job safely so we can come home to our loved ones. Yet by moving our start times he’s making it more likely that, especially once Daylight Savings is inflicted on us, we’ll be delivering mail in the dark. Often on unfamiliar routes because we’re being mandated to work overtime.

Tellingly, during his speech, the Postmaster said something like, “We all love the Post Office, don’t we?” This was clearly a prompt for us to applaud, cheer and huzzah. He got resounding silence. I will give him credit. He didn’t pause his speech for us to react after that. He soldiered on, saying that we loved to be able to provide for our families and give service to our community.

I was neither impressed nor especially disappointed by him. He came across as a guy who thought that the current rules were good and that they should be followed. Questions weren’t encouraged. I have some sympathy for management at the PO. They’ve been tasked with making the USPS, an organization that is not and should never have been designed a business, into a profitable business without being given the resources and autonomy to do so. Those above them demand that they make the carriers and their stations hit a set of numbers that are based on a fantasy of an efficient organization that has all the resources it needs to do its job. We, the carriers and the clerks, have contempt for management because we know that the number they want us to hit are bullshit.

I’ll save further complaints for another day.

Cats!

I’ve just about finished my illustrations for the update of Cathulhu. Since I’m waiting to show those off until Sixtystone Press makes it available, this morning I’m showcasing some more of my illustrations from Tails of Valor, Golden Goblin Press’s scenario book follow up to Cathulhu. These are from the adventure –

Triumphus Felis Ferae (set in 41 C.E. Rome) by Jeffrey Moeller
First the vermin became scarce, and then kittens and cats began wandering off, never to be seen again. Later, people began acting strangely, disobeying the Praetorian Guards and attempting to enter the Imperial Palace. Then the Emperor Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus (known to later history as Caligula) himself vanishes, leaving the city teetering on the edge of utter chaos. Can a band of brave and proud Roman street cats solve this mystery, and restore order to the Empire? Triumphus Felis Ferae is Latin for “the triumph (all march) of the wild cat” or more simply, Stray Cat Strut.


All of the illustrations in Tails of Valor were published in black and white. Oscar Rios, the publisher, commissioned me to color one of the illustrations as a present for Jeffrey Moeller.

It’s a Mad Mad Mouse (Process GIF)

The art I do is for amusement. My own. Hopefully yours. Hopefully people I’ve never met.

A lot of the art I’ve created in the last couple of years I did with a thought toward putting it on something – a mug, a t-shirt, a poster – and making it available for sale. The image below was made with that in mind. Sooner or later, when I have my own POD shop, I will put it on something, if only for a short time.

Until then, it’s only getting posted as fan art. Because one does not rattle the doors of the House of Mouse. Next year, in 2024, the version of Mickey Mouse as depicted in the silent cartoon “Steamboat Willie”, will enter public domain. Mickey Mouse will continue to be a character trademarked by the Disney Corporation. Copyright is limited. Trademark can be forever. I could argue that the design below is a parody and therefore this depiction is fair use. I could argue that, as long as I don’t market the thing as a version of Mickey, I’m not trying to infringe on Disney’s trademark.

But, honestly? I did this for the fun of it, not to throw rocks at the windows of the Mouse’s fortress.

M! I! C! K! E! Y!

M-O-U-S-E!

Smoke ’em if you’ve got ’em.

And that’s it for this week.

May the next seven days treat you well. May you get the rest you need and may you have some fun and experience some joy.

Cheers!

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Tuesday Night Party Club #1

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Welcome to the first official post/newsletter of 2020. As of this writing I have 193 subscribers. A few of you folks are subscribed directly from this website. The rest of you follow my posts on Tumblr and Twitter. At least, that’s what WordPress tells me.Quite a few of you are probably Russian bots. Welcome anyway. The basic format of these posts will be a little art and a bit of writing.

Artstuff

In my first unofficial post on New Year’s Day I said that I’d made new image banners for this site. I made a dozen of them. They load randomly whenever you refresh a page or move to a new page. Rather than ask you to reload the site a ridiculous number of times to see them, I’m posting them all here –

Back in 2013 I tried to do something with my twitter account by posting story ideas. With twitter’s word limits it seemed like a good use for the site – idea summary with a longer commentary at a blog I called Storythinking. I posted 24 ideas before I got distracted by other things. That blog got rolled into this website and I collected the “story seeds” onto a page here called #99Stories. This newsletter seems like a good spot to release some new ideas into the wild. If any of these ideas spark something for you, feel free to take them.

Story Seed #25
Little Nemo in the Dreamlands

I’ve looked and, so far as I’ve been able to find, no one has mashed up Winsor McCay and H.P. Lovecraft. I’m kind of surprised.

Little Nemo in Slumberland by Winsor McCay is one of the greatest comic strips of all time. It’s also kind of boring. Yes, it’s visually stunning and inventive. But the strip’s formula means that nothing of consequence happens. Each strip ends with Nemo waking up. Storylines and adventures may carry over from strip to strip but that beat of Nemo walking kills suspense and reminds me that he’s just dreaming. I know that I’m reading the strip differently than it was intended. It was meant to be read once a week not sequencially in a book or online.

But it’s 2020. Daily comic strips have mostly been simple gags for decades. The Sunday installments are only slightly more complex. In 2014 Locust Moon Press kickstarted Little Nemo: Dream Another Dream, a massive collection of new one-off Nemo strips by over 100 different artists. Little Nemo was again revived as a graphic novel by Eric Shanower and Gabriel Rodriguez in 2016. Both of those projects were beautiful.

My dreams are mostly pretty boring. My imagination seems most active when I’m awake. Asleep it tends to send me wandering through endless corridors or driving around delivering mail. Lots of other creative folks have very vivid dreamlives. H.P. Lovecraft was one of those folks. His Dreamlands stories (as well as many of his other writings) were inspired directly by his dreams.

Both McCay’s and Lovecraft’s works are in the public domain. How would Little Nemo fare in the more hostile environs of the Dreamlands? How would it work if he couldn’t wake up every time danger loomed? Would King Morpheus send help? The strip could be charming and funny and childfriendly – Nemo meeting more benign versions of Lovecraft’s horrors. Or it could be raw and terrifying and adultsonly – Nemo barely escaping and going gibbering mad. Or a perhaps one could come up with a middle ground.

For added flavor one could blend other dream worlds into the mix – Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland comes to mind. What adventures could Alice and Nemo have together, especially when pursued by Night Gaunts?

Perhaps it’s a 21st Century Nemo trapped in a technologically advanced Dreamlands? Steampunk ghouls? Industrialized Celephaïs? Slumberland, Wonderland and the Dreamlands are rooted in the early 20th Century. What we imagine and dream evolves with our culture. What would these places be like today?

Lifestuff

It’s 2020. New Year. I’m not one for resolutions. I try to make changes as needed rather throughout the year rather than in one big push. The one change that seems necessary this year is cleaning up and moving my studio from one part of the house to another. Entropy has claimed far too much of the current space and only a move will create new order.

At USPS (my day job), the big change I expected is apparently only happening to other carriers. Our station covers four zip codes – 98146, 98136, 98126 and 98106. I have route 0633. Last year management did route inspections on all the routes in the 06 zip code with the intention of eliminating one of those routes. That was a bad idea. Fortunately, they figured out that a better idea would be to more fairly distribute the work load of the current routes. So the routes in my zone are getting adjusted so that, on the average, it takes a carrier eight hours to prep and deliver a route. My route is the one route that’s staying unchanged. I can keep doing it in my sleep.

Fine by me.

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August the 14th, 2019

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The so-called Dreamlands pre-exist human beings by hundreds of millions of years. Serpent people sorcerors created the sub-reality as a safe(r) place to practice their spells before they used them in primary reality. Over millions of years the Dreamlands expanded. Each new dreaming species added to it until it grew to encompass our solar system. Every planet is inhabited, at least in Dreams.

Happy Birthday to:
Jonathan Grossman
Michael Hvidt