I’ve taken almost no freelance work since starting my job at Motiga to help mitigate burnout, but last year I was approached by Cryptozoic to do another card for their TCG, HEX. I really love the design of their elves, so I made a small exception~
bad personal news under the cut and why I’m not really here anymore:
My dad just spent 6 days in the hospital after a collapse that required EMS. The cancer drug that said we could get 8 months from … isn’t working, and with his cancer type, blood loss is the main COD basically. There’s no taking it out. Radiation only lasted for a month or so. The doctors are urging end-of-life care… of course, my dad isn’t ready to die, so he argued his oncologist into doing a different chemo regime. Her only suggestion was a drug that buys 5 months of time… for 20 percent of the people taking it.
Obviously, that’s 80 percent that see no clinical benefit from it.
Best case, we’re talking August, September. If we’re very lucky.
I know it’s dumb, but I thought, maybe RNM will be back by then. Maybe the next season of Nancy Drew will be ready and I can see Nancy/Ace again. I’m looking for the tiniest treats for me. I am already in search of coping mechanisms for fall and winter. Fuck thinking about Christmas.
ETA: 4/19/2022 - my horse came up lame. Vet says he needs to be retired. There goes one of the few things that comforts me. Obviously I still have him, he’s just a pasture pet now.
ETA: 5/12/2022 - so RNM was canceled. So I get to lose my dad and my show in the same year. Fuck.
ETA : 5/25/2022 - we stopped treatment. Doctor says he has a few weeks left. Hoping we get to his birthday. Really hoping we get a few months if we don’t have chemo sapping his strength…
Comic #295: - Covid2 Electric boogaloo - Website links:Here! Some little things I found invaluable while being sick with the VARUS (I am over it again as of this week). Wish I was so lucky to be asymptomatic! Both times it has felt like a bad flu with thankfully no respiratory involvement
SuperButch is a webcomic about a lesbian superhero in the 1940s who protects the bar scene from corrupt cops. If you’d like to help us make more, please support the SuperButch patreon. Thanks!
my father said to me once that one of the things he deeply regretted was not putting music on for his father while he was fading away. he told me that grandpa would just sit in his old armchair in the quiet, and not until after he’d passed did my dad think of how he could have played of his favorite classical music tapes for him so grandpa could listen to something while he still could. i was very young when this happened and not much older when my dad told me this, but it always stuck with me as something important.
my mother died at home in a hospice cot, slowly shutting down over the course of about a week. when she had stopped responding, i remembered what dad told me about wishing he’d played music for grandpa, and i put the radio on her favorite country music station and kept it on for her until she died.
daddy died in hospital. no cassette players, no decent radios. the day after he was brought in, i thought again of what he told me, and i bought a little portable bluetooth speaker. even though he never woke up, was never aware, i played music for him too.
there’s no real significance to sharing this, not really. my motivation is selfish, again: i just want to hope that someone might think of this when their loved one is stuck in silence somehow, and maybe they’ll play music for them, and they won’t have to regret not doing so. i want to hope it helps someone. and i want to hope that someone will remember my dad with me, even in just a “story i read on the internet” way.
When I became conscious of myself again, I tried to slow my pace somewhat. But there was no way. These human waves were rolling forward and would have crushed me like an ant.
By now, I moved like a sleepwalker. I sometimes closed my eyes and it was like running while asleep. Now and then, someone kicked me violently from behind and I would wake up. The man in back of me was screaming, “Run faster. If you don’t want to move, let us pass you.” But all I had to do was close my eyes to see a whole world pass before me, to dream of another life.
The road was endless. To allow oneself to be carried by the mob, to be swept away by blind fate. When the SS were tired, they were replaced. But no one replaced us. Chilled to the bone, our throats parched, famished, out of breath, we pressed on.
We were the masters of nature, the masters of the world. We had transcended everything—death, fatigue, our natural needs. We were stronger than cold and hunger, stronger than the guns and the desire to die, doomed and rootless, nothing but numbers, we were the only men on earth.
At last, the morning star appeared in the gray sky. A hesitant light began to hover on the horizon. We were exhausted, we had lost all strength, all illusion.
The Kommandant announced that we had already covered twenty kilometers since we left. Long since, we had exceeded the limits of fatigue. Our legs moved mechanically, in spite of us, without us.
ONE DAY, when we had just returned from the warehouse, I was summoned by the block secretary:
“A-7713?”
“That’s me.”
“After your meal, you’ll go to see the dentist.”
“But … I don’t have a toothache…”
“After your meal. Without fail.”
I went to the infirmary block. Some twenty prisoners were waiting in line at the entrance. It didn’t take long to learn the reason for our summons: our gold teeth were to be extracted.
The dentist, a Jew from Czechoslovakia, had a face not unlike a death mask. When he opened his mouth, one had a ghastly vision of yellow, rotten teeth. Seated in the chair, I asked meekly:
“What are you going to do, sir?”
“I shall remove your gold crown, that’s all,” he said, clearly indifferent.
I thought of pretending to be sick:
“Couldn’t you wait a few days, sir? I don’t feel well, I have a fever…”
He wrinkled his brow, thought for a moment, and took my pulse.
“All right, son. Come back to see me when you feel better. But don’t wait for me to call you!”
I went back to see him a week later. With the same excuse: I still was not feeling better. He did not seem surprised, and I don’t know whether he believed me. Yet he most likely was pleased that I had come back on my own, as I had promised. He granted me a further delay.
A few days after my visit, the dentist’s office was shut down. He had been thrown into prison and was about to be hanged. It appeared that he had been dealing in the prisoners’ gold teeth for his own benefit. I felt no pity for him. In fact, I was pleased with what was happening to him: my gold crown was safe. It could be useful to me one day, to buy something, some bread or even time to live. At that moment in time, all that mattered to me was my daily bowl of soup, my crust of stale bread. The bread, the soup—those were my entire life. I was nothing but a body. Perhaps even less: a famished stomach. The stomach alone was measuring time.
everyone is deleting the caption to this but this work is called “perfect lovers” by the gay artist felix gonzalez-torres. the piece is about the illness and death of his HIV-positive partner ross laycock:
ForUntitled (Perfect Lovers) (1991), he synchronized two industrial clocks placed side by side. Inevitably, because batteries fail and things tend toward entropy, the clocks would slowly begin to advance at differing rates, out of sync, having moved, however briefly, perfectly together. (x)
“Don’t be afraid of the clocks, they are our time, time has been so generous to us. We imprinted time with the sweet taste of victory. We conquered fate by meeting at a certain time in a certain space. We are a product of the time, therefore we give back credit where it is due: time. We are synchronized, now and forever. I love you.” (Gonzalez-Torres, 1988)
Death of the Author - We don’t care what the author says he wanted the work to mean. We let the work speak for itself.
Weekend at Bernie’s of the Author - We don’t care what the author said. The authorial intent must be whatever we found in the work. (h/t @raggedjackscarlet)
Cryonic Stasis of the Author - The author is actually dead for a long time. Nobody gets all the references any more, but my literature teacher told me I have to take the context at the time into account, so I got a book that explains the work, instead of letting it speak for itself.
Frankenstein’s Monster of the Author - We let the work sort of speak for itself. We ignore what the author said about the intent behind the work. Instead we will use the author’s tweets on unrelated issues in order to ascribe intent and meaning to the work.
Night of the Living Dead Authors - Teeeeeeeeeeeeexts
Vampirism of the Author - The author reads a clever but far-fetched interpretation of his work and decides that it will become canon.
Near Death Experience of the Author - The author wants the work to speak for itself, but after a long period of restraint and silence, says that while the work still stands for itself, some interpretations of it are just plain wrong.
Faked Death of the Author - Author adopts pseudonym, explains intent as a series of YouTube fan theory videos.
Schroedinger’s Cat of the Author - The author publicly confirms that the ending was meant to be ambiguous all along.
Attempted Suicide of the Author - The author tells you that he wants the work to speak for itself; also he’s a huge Roland Barthes fanboy.
Suicide of the Author - The author admits that the story was not meant to be that deep and all meaning is accidental.
Necromancy of the Author - If author is dead, finding some similar literary figure and seeing what they reckon about the work’s authorial intent
Necrophilia of the Author - Slashfic - not all of it, just when it concerns a cartoonishly obvious sexual relationship that was for some reason not explicit and canonical in the original work
Induced Coma of the Author - The author stays quiet to see if we can work it out, as a test
Suicide-by-cop of the Author - The work concerns, or seems to concern, a hot-button issue. Some vast cultural institution decides what the real meaning of the work is, regardless of anything the author says or any basis in the text itself. This interpretation becomes the best-known and most widely accepted reading (cf. that comic about English class that ends ‘The curtains were fucking blue’)
