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.

my lil tendoroni had to get emergency surgery, and it was a trial to say the least.

her symptoms escalated from mild to life-threatening extremely rapidly and we are blessed she is now on track to making a full recovery. minus her uterus.

apparently there is more than one reason you ought to spay your bitches. Older female dogs that continue to experience heat cycles can get a cervical infection called Pyometra that fills their tissue lining with pus and will either begin to secrete a discharge if their cervix is open, or fill until it eventually ruptures when the cervix is closed. luckily chola had the former, and was licking herself constantly, which told us something was weird.

we made an appointment for the next day, and what was initially a $50 ultra sound turned into Xrays, blood-work and emergency surgery the next morning. By the grace of god we were able to foot the bill, which was a lot, but overall could have been a lot more.
the place we went to, Southpaw Vet, was nothing short of incredible.

• Family-owned, small business
• active in LGBT community
• support local artists through posters and merch

no longer happy with Banfield -the vet clinic and hospital chain affiliated with Petco, where its impossible to get prompt care, thus shunting patients into expensive emergency, and the atmosphere is on par with taking tickets at a deli counter- once chola was experiencing symptoms, we looked up low-income accommodating veterinarians, and Southpaw Vet was the highest rated on yelp, and its no wonder why. The staff was kind, gentle, and compassionate and their facilities are great; a hall lined with private, cheerfully decorated rooms where you can go in with your pet and talk to the vet. Banfield by comparison takes your dog at the counter, ask little questions and force you to fumble around like a lost member of the Foot Clan in their "lobby" which is the surrounding Petco it is housed in.

Option one: Private attentive care.
Option two: 45 minutes of spiralling anxiety next to the kitty feather teasers display.

She's hating that cone, but looking good. in the end, we got fucking lucky. a series of immediate actions as soon as we saw symptoms worked in concert to save her life, which i say without hyperbole.

TL/DR:
Southpaw Vet in San Diego is top-notch.
spay your dogs and love them everyday.