hello babushkas...

spent the past few weeks working myself to the bone {thugs n harmony} on a breathlessly boring video editing project for work. i say breathless because i had to edit out every breath, er, erm, uh and stutter out of a 3 day software conference. i would much rather have been working on my own video projects. i think i've shelved the sex robot show for now, its just tough working on something that you know nobody will ever see, which has been the case since getting shit-canned by youtube. Im not too bitter though, since it did net me a job. The job that led to the project i just complained about (cry laughing emoji). Anyway, getting banned doesn't prohibit me from creating a new channel and Ive been toying around with the idea of making some fun stuff, as there's no use in reposting the sex robot show again, if it's all going to get taken down again. btw, for anyone who's interested in the sex robot videos they are currently hosted on odysee and archive.org, with links to all episodes at thesexrobotshow.com

but fret not young friend, my sex robot work continues. I've been working with the International Congress on Love and Sex with Robots, an annual academic conference coming up in November. Virtually all academic writing on the subject either comes from, or heavily cites works published by this conference. The way academic conferences work is once they are announced there's a call for abstracts and researchers will submit their papers, and the conference committee selects which ones they want to publish, like an academic journal*. The authors of selected papers will present their work alongside keynote speakers and panel discussions. The panel I organized is gonna be hella cool, which i'll talk about later.

The main reason i felt like writing anything here today is because ive been feeling swamped and its always those times where im overran with project ideas and other things id rather be doing. things to make, video topics, weird online shit, paintings. and then when i have free time i either watch youtube, or at best, start assembling all the materials I might need for doing a thing. I had it in my mind at the beginning of the year to learn oil paint, so i racked everything i could possibly need and bought an easel. I thought of a small sculpture series so i began storing away sculpey. i started watching more and more videos about VRChat so i found an oculus on letgo. ive yet to push around any paint, open the sculpey package or set up my headset. good thing i dont have time to kick myself in the ass and dwell.

last night i got the idea to make some kind of project journal to keep on this site, so i could have some visual public ? form of accountability (as if the ever-growing mountain of materials choking up free space in my room isn't a reminder). not that i think its the kind of accountability where people are actually gonna see it and hold me to anything since a) i doubt i have return visitors to this site and b) people dont hold each other accountable to their aspirations anyway. but it will at least be something out there, in the world and im hoping that having a list of boxes to tick might be somewhat satisfying.

im also going to make a page for all the ideas that i can never carry out, since i simply dont have the resources/experience. Ideas for apps, machines, even policy initiatives. these are the ones i will think out to the extreme, and it would be kind of a shame for them to live out their days and die inside my wet brain. its kind of weird when you think about that, how many wonderful things have never existed, never spoken of, trapped inside so many people all the planet. i think thats why we like originality no matter the quality, its kind of fulfilling for the viewer that they got a chance to see it. i think im talking about weird art i see on instagram now, even though its not where this started. i love weird. i loathe artists that turn themselves into one trick ponies no matter the execution or talent. i'll see a cool illustration, like a bunch of animals in the shape of a skull and go to their page and its all different crap in the shape of a skull. having a style is one thing but being boring is a sin. thats a da vinci quote, not mine.

anyway im going to try to update this site here and there and write more. ttyl

*I've thrown their published work from past years in the resource section of the sex robot show website for anyone who's curious.

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ermagerber, it's 9/11 youse guys! did you forget to remember, because we said we would never forget, didn't we? what i remember is a few years after the shit went down hearing that there was this new cool animator who was supposed to be on one of the flights that crashed into the towers but his assistant screwed up and told him the wrong time to be at the airport so he missed being on that flight... and that animator's name was JESUS. jk. and that animator's name was Seth MacFarlane. so had it not been for that snafu we wouldn't have had the family guy, the family guy reboot, and most importantly gangsta stewie t-shirts. moral of the story is, fuck up all you want at work, because you never know when it will save a life.

hi guys
update
lilil update

havent used this thing for talking about myself in quite some time but i think about doing it often. i think about doing a lot of things often. like making videos again, or making some random thing, i have all these ideas i kick around and add to but it feels like up to how the day flows which ones get done. but lets put that aside, we dont need to talk about what im not doing. thats not how these things work.

just finished a painting commission the other day, which came out pretty stellar, ill wait til it gets to its final destination before putting up the pic (now that i think about it i should probably have some sort of place to put those... judy at it to the list, will ya?).

been poking around a new sketchbook that is giving back nicely. sketchbooks are weird, no matter how much faith you have in them when they are blank, you never know which one its gonna be. thats why you cant waste your money on them, you'll feel too obligated, to beholden. you gotta steal as many as you can and find the one you get along with. you can make good art with any thing but you cant always make it any where, and sometimes a sketchbook is a place. tell me im wrong. otherwise we'd all be buying boxes of copy paper at costco.

ive gotten lots of positive feedback this month in the little things i do online. nice comments on retro gaming servers and reddit about the Retroid site I made. I havent been playing that much what with working the fields on Sumikko Farms 24/7- and i really mean twenty four and seven. sometimes i wake up in the middle of the night and go to the barn to collect milk and feed the "cows". The cows are little boba dressed as cows. wearing little cowfits. bo-bines.

my dinky little farm!
compared to the expanse ive yet to fill.

L33t shit. This player's land is so [on point] they got a god damn cemetary

if you dont know what im talking about because of course you fucking dont, Sumikko Farms is a game put out under the Sumikko Gurashi license, a character line I fell in love with back in Taiwan for their absurd characters and collectibility. I never played that farm game that took facebook aunties by storm back in 2014 but i think this might be like that cuz damn is it demanding all my attention.

and chola is doing better than ever! im completely convinced they juiced her with some benjamin button type potion because each week that passes she starts performing behaviors she put behind years ago. zoomies, playing with toys, fighting shoes, humping. she's picking fights, losing weight, and tugging at the end of her leash where a few months ago she was dragging behind the whole way around the block.

im constantly getting little jolts of inspiration, and getting enough work to keep me busy. and after long last ive found a book i want to see the last page of. after what feels like a year, of checking out books, downloading them, printing some off and getting a third the way through only to not give a shit about what happens to anyone in the story, or pretending im going to read non-fiction, i found this book of short stories with an incredibly, painfully, possibly intentionally cringe-inducing title. its right up there with perks of being a wallflower. it's so bad i dont want to share it as THEE BOOK that got me back into reading. but i will share that it's by the guy who created bojack horseman, which i remember liking back when i still watched things on netflix.

oh speaking of watch, 'Portrait Artist of the Year' is absolutely superb. its free on tubi and i cannot measure how much it has improved my desire to take painting seriously. its a contest style show with a mix of amateurs and professionals that gain entry based off the merit of their self-portrait submission.

each episode 9 of them have four hours to paint a sitter, and after this happens 9 times, those winning 9 come back to scrap in a paint battle that yields the top three. season ends with the three of them given a month long commission and a final four hour sitting, for which the winner receives the honor of painting a portrait that will end up in a british museum and 10 grand. The artists come from across the UK, and theres also a Canadian version. both are miles away from the only comparable American television show I can remember watching that had a lot of Open Mouth Crying, challenges like "it's Pop Art Week, everyone... dont forget it's sponsored by Fiat so youll need to be inspired by their latest vehicle", Sarah Jessica Parker and the Sucklord. PA o'the Y is hosted by Tai Shan Schierenberg, who is fucking good, and roams this earth as possibly one of the world's earliest hapa.

ok times up. that's been me. a lot of dumb details but hopefully ive gotten enough of the mundane out of the way and next time i can dip into something deeper. ive been writing here and there for medium-length stretches on less tangible things, but i dont know if that needs to be shot into cyberspace. well. none of this does, its more of my need to to the shooting I guess.

ps: ive hit more than 20 submissions from mostly strangers to the slambook, which is so rad. if you left an entry, i want to say thanks! and if youre one of the few that mentioned dorohedoro, hit me up sometime, i think we're already friends.

A few weeks ago my friend Leonard was killed.

Not in an accident, or by COVID, he was killed with intent, he was shot. he was murdered.

Which has been really difficult to think about, and what makes it harder still is, when i say "my friend" its only as reference for people to understand that i personally knew him, but i wasnt that fucking nice to leonard. i was kind of a dick. I "met" him when I was living in Taiwan, and suddenly became every insomniac's best friend, due to the time zone difference. I wasn't really putting it together that these conversations I was just happy to be having in English might have meant a lot to the people who were confiding in me in their late night hours when no one was around to listen. I admittedly talked a lot of shit to someone who was opening up to a stranger. or maybe he was just being cringe and trying to make me his cyber gf. who knows. either way, after that period passed and some weird run ins between him and people I knew, i would still talk to him every now and then. it was a weird dynamic, with him not knowing when to stop being honest andputting too much on display and me not letting him feel anywhere close to knowing who I was. Which is something I could have taken to my own grave, but I think needs to be said because of the well-meaning condolensces Ive received and weird dishonest feelings they bring.

despite everything, i have always thought Leonard was a pretty killer photographer, documenting the grime of poverty and the dope scene in Albuquerque. He had a book published that sold at prestigious sellers such as family, and endorsed by the likes of barry mcgee and that guy that photographs teens with cigarettes I cant remember the name of right now. However that book wasnt nearly the entirety of his catalogue and Ive had half a mind to scrub his IG for photos to throw on a dedicated website, so they dont die should zuckerfuck shut down its servers. In the very least I want to get them backed up to archive.org.

Until then, i gues this is all there is: ocular_depression

The above is a painting i did off a photo I found from the day his son was born.