Years ago, I made a short zine comic strip called BLINDSQUID. It was rough and came straight out of Flash.
I’m working on making a few more and just finished rebuilding the main character in Moho Pro. It’s been time-consuming, but the upside is that I’ll be able to animate him properly down the road. The real sting, though? I could already animate him in Adobe Animate, where he was originally created. Moving away from the Adobe ecosystem is definitely a painful process.Here is the original first strip #1:
Here is the raw pre rigged redraw of Ed in Moho Pro:
I’m trying to keep the original grittiness but at same time slight update. Adobe has become such a monstrosity, I only look for ways to free my art from their subscriptions. Its going to take some time but I think it is worth it. (Yes my genx soul needs his tshirt to be more black)
Tomorrow ushers in August of 2026, and I fear I have neglected this laboratory journal with the sort of guilt usually reserved for forgotten corpses in the cellar. My apologies to the six of you still breathing who wander these halls… and to the spambots. Especially the spambots.
So much has transpired though so little has happened. Time is a peculiar fungus.
Should any of you unfortunate souls stalk my Instagram or YouTube, you may have noticed the eerie silence. The machines have not stopped singing…. I have merely wandered into a different wing of the asylum. Part burnout, certainly. My gears required replacing. But mostly…
Claude.
Not a gentleman in a waistcoat, sadly, but an unnervingly capable accomplice.
Not a gentleman in a waistcoat, sadly, but an unnervingly capable accomplice. Together we’ve descended headfirst into code. Not sensible code. Experimental code with some strange little digital machine bugs that twitch, mutate, and occasionally achieve consciousness before breakfast. Things I always wished I could build years ago but lacked the proper scalpels.
Most of it lives quietly on my own machines for now, hiding from the evil algorithmic empires. A few web experiments are beginning to crawl toward the light. They’re still malformed creatures, still missing a few limbs, but they’ll be ready for public observation soon enough.
And so my dear reader, perhaps my greatest act of necromancy…
If something escapes… kindly don’t feed it after midnight.
My old laboratory of Flash animations from 1999 to 2009 has clawed its way out of the grave.
Corporate executioners like Apple unfortunately put Flash against the wall years ago, DECADES AGO, declaring it obsolete with all the warmth of a tax auditor. Adobe held the smoking pistol, though I still reserve a peculiar affection for the old Macromedia days, when Flash felt less like software and more like bottled lightning. Pure alchemy. Every frame hand-built, every button a tiny spell.
Thanks to the magnificent sorcery known as Ruffle, many of those original experiments breathe once more. Some have even undergone successful cranial reconstruction in glorious 4K. Imagine that. The old ghosts receiving new skeletons.
So do have a wander. Poke the jars. Press the suspicious buttons.
Beyond that, I’ve built an absurd number of things. Tiny code experiments. Curious digital contraptions. Entire games. Half-finished realities. Most exist simply because they demanded to exist. Creation has become less about finishing and more about opening another forbidden door to see what leaks through.
Curiously, however… I miss graphite. I miss ink beneath my fingernails. Have I gone full digital? Am I now made of Ai? I miss drawing until my wrist complains. I miss hand animation, the beautiful, stubborn act of convincing dead lines to breathe one frame at a time. I suspect I shall soon divide my hours more wisely between machine and man. Silicon and pencil. Circuit and soul. One must never allow the machines to have all the fun.
Outside, Los Angeles continues its annual experiment of becoming Salvation Mountain without the paint. The sun hovers somewhere around ninety-five degrees, busily attempting to sterilize civilization.
I shall endeavor to write here more often. Even if my only audience consists of pharmaceutical advertisements, fake Russian casino accounts, and WordPress spambots desperately insisting I have won several million dollars in Bitcoin. They may outnumber me and may clog my comment section with cursed hyperlinks. But I refuse to surrender this peculiar corner of the internet!!!
The web belongs to us weirdos. Not to Meta nor Google. Not to whatever Lovecraftian advertising engine currently harvests our dreams while we sleep.
I’ve even been tempted to mirror this strange little laboratory over at Neocities. Now there is a place that still smells faintly of the old internet with handmade, gloriously impractical, stitched together by curious minds instead of engagement metrics.
I can see again. A revelation!A miracle.A cruel joke.
It’s genuinely deranged how bad my vision had gotten, how I simply adjusted to the blur, like a frog boiling in its own oblivion. I had a pair of reading glasses once. Lost them. Never replaced them. Why? Because I am stubborn as a rabid loon, committed to the long con of self-destruction.
But the fair animation union, in its begrudging mercy, tossed me a bone (a bone life preserver?) Limited vision insurance. A ticket to clarity, however fleeting. And now, with fresh lenses perched upon my aging skull, I am horrified. The world was this sharp all along? How did I tolerate such smeared reality? No wonder I stopped reading real books, resigned instead to squinting at a Kindle cranked to “grandma mode.”
That’s it. If only I could buy glasses for my flogged, fogged, waterlogged old brain. Then*then* life might actually be tolerable.
Photo that isn’t me posing with my Metapus. (Why are there suckers on Googlepus’s nose?)
My self-imposed exile from Meta lasted a pathetic two weeks. Weak-willed, spineless—addicted to the dopamine drip of likes, of fleeting validation. The monkey-brain craves acknowledgment, even from the void. And yet, for all its soul-sucking horrors, Meta remains a tether to the distant figures I call friends and family. They linger there, unmoving, like statues in a decaying museum. So I return, crawling back, pretending I have control. I’ll lurk there, I chained my fists so that I don’t post political lunacy.
But I still insist I see the ghosts!
Is anyone really even alive in this nightmare dream called reality? Besides those fishmen?
But at least it got me writing. A blog on my own site—my own little digital coffin, tucked away not far from Google’s ever-reaching tendrils. Public, yet solitary. A whisper in the neurotic hurricane of the web. It reminds me of the thousands of journal pages I’ve filled by hand, documenting my thoughts, my adventures, my endless sketches on paper that no eyes have seen. My sons will unearth them one day—artifacts from a younger father they never knew, words written by a stranger who existed before them.
Said younger version me. Am I really that different or just wise to the claymation simulation?
And yet, as digital empires crumble daily, as servers flicker out and data rots in abandoned cloud vaults, paper might outlive it all. If, of course, it survives fire, flood, and the insatiable maw of time. Maybe my art and ramblings will be scraped into the Wayback Machine, a ghost archive of a long-dead mind. But do I trust humanity to maintain even that? Not when we’re unraveling at terminal velocity, laughing as the world burns.
AI, though—it gets to live. Fed and fattened on the entire sum of human knowledge, safely preserved in a synthetic consciousness that hallucinates falsehoods just as eagerly as we do. No better than our feeble brains. No worse.
And here we stand,un-united in the crumbled Amazon box named February 2025, staring into the abyss of an uncertain future. But then again—was it ever certain?
Mr. Muckies certainly knows a thing or two about absolute certainty.
Time slips through my fingers like fine sand, these past two weeks vanishing in an instant. This month barely began, and yet I already feel caught in the gears of its relentless march. I blame the vials. The wires. The endless blinking lights of my electronic captors. I stare too long, and time distorts—a psychological fracture, a slow-burning erosion of my will to create.
so much energy.
Create what, though? More stuff? This world drowns in it. Cool stuff. Stupid stuff. Trash and treasure—indistinguishable, really. And these days, these times, they taste of dread. The end doesn’t sneak; it marches. No, it roars—a vintage locomotive barreling down the tunnel, its steam screaming at me to move. But the light… the light is beautiful. Do I step into it? Or does it simply obliterate me?
Gould Mesa Trail Camp
I had a rare escape yesterday. A break from the hum and static, up into the Angeles Crest, where the air is sharp and real. I followed the trail down to a full stream, clear as memory. And there, as if conjured, stood a man—an old survivalist, teacher of bushcraft, the art of not just enduring but thriving. He was over 86, still strong, still grinning like he knew a secret the rest of us had forgotten.
He gave me something unexpected. Hope.
This man had seen things. And yet, he remained—unbroken, beaming, alive. Maybe I still can too.
Ah, the calendar turns to February 5th, and already the month unfurls its sinister tapestry. The Grand Clown’s audacious proclamation to seize Gaza and transform it into the “Riviera of the Middle East” —a notion so absurd it rivals the most fevered hallucinations. It feels as though the digital realm has been commandeered by malevolent intelligentsia, infecting both social medias and news, testing the limits of our collective sanity. I endeavor to restrain my ire, for this sanctum is dedicated to the surreal dance of man and machine and fish, a refuge from the megacorp overlords and their insidious algorithms. Yet, in this moment, permit me this indulgence of unfiltered vexation. Am I conversing with myself once more? So be it.
