Hi everyone. Time for another minor update before I go HAM on a larger one.
Reeling from the news from yesterday about the school shooting. I’m not just tired of the killings, I am tired of the overwhelming inaction, the tacit acceptance of death. We saw it with the (still ongoing) pandemic, we see it with gun violence, and soon we will see it as climate disaster grows more and more dire. People my age and younger have never seen a functional Congress or judiciary, and it is very obvious to most of us that there is no incentive for them to improve the lives of the general population.
I wish I knew the answers to all of our problems. I don’t. I know the addiction to infinite growth on a finite planet will kill us all. Personally, I have stopped eating beef and I am cutting down considerably on other meats, I only drive when there is no other option, and I minimize water and electricity use. I took the pandemic seriously and did everything I could to assure that I would not unintentionally kill others, by getting vaccinated and wearing masks and staying out of enclosed public places. That is what I can do personally, in my small sphere. It is so, so hard to think that I am making any difference, and I know I am not alone in that feeling.
With all this in mind, I had to refuse a few commission ideas recently because they wanted to portray suicide. Light hearted, jokey suicide, but that still sat wrong with me. And I have been working on things that are actually rather violent and grim! It’s a personal line that I cannot cross anymore. Long ago I had a character I would draw called Dex, and he had a friend named Suicidal Vinny who would perpetually have a pistol pointed at his own head as he went about his day. Vinny would take any opportunity to end it all by firing the gun, but some twist of fate always intervened to save his life. That was high school and in retrospect, it was coming from a very dark place. As an adult I would rather not feed these sorts of thoughts, and I certainly do not want to create a looping animation of graphic self-harm. My current limit for what I will do is “Looney Tunes but with optional gore”.
Lastly, things I would like to get done on this site:
- Update the PixelArt page. I have done more pixel art animation than anything lately and I need to showcase that more clearly
- Facelift the site completely? This is one of those things that is both more and less work than it sounds.
- Update my Commissions Page to be more beautiful and user-friendly