My new year’s resolution this year was to push myself to get better at drawing. I was in a rut and feeling pretty shitty about my art in general. This year my goal was to break through that wall and really try to improve. Part of that meant sketching as much as I could. I’d stopped drawing for fun. I’d gotten into the habit of only drawing when I had a job to do. Now I draw almost every night and I try and force myself to NOT draw things for work. It’s been awesome and while it was hard at first, It’s getting much easier.

I had the weird-ass Brown And Green Zune, so I am not really in a position to defend myself; I made tremendous use of the device. I think it's my job to act as a halfway house for orphaned, exiled things; I have always had a fear that a preconception or the preconception of another will foreclose realities in some way. I thought it was solid. IP wrangling being what it is, some of its cool tricks couldn't manifest. It was a pretty fucked up time - you'll recall that you couldn't buy MP3s directly, yet. Microsoft has a strange, almost preternaturally doomed habit of releasing things at exactly the wrong time.

I should have understood at some level that Silent Hills was too beautiful to live. If P.T. was any indication, we'd be talking about a psychological piece in the horror furnace of that damned place, executed by two unconventional, unquenchable, functionally speaking invulnerable fucking weirdos. I have let the part of my brain which has no contact with linear time run free on what it all means, though what it means in truth is that reality is a kind of sieve that retains horror and lets noble potential run straight through.

I wouldn't mind playing around with an Apple Watch, and I don't doubt that it represents a very specific fork of our wearable future, but I don't sense a hole in my life the device would fill. I also think the pricing is outta fucking control. What's funny is that I would not find a traditional timepiece in that range offensive; such a device represents a graphable point in life, is Property, is functionally a phylactery which will communicate my cold will to future generations. I am trying to imagine how one would "inherit" a piece of notoriously transient first generation hardware. My daughter's daughter would have to hit up Future Etsy for an artisanally made cable just to update the firmware.

I have a bunch of digital sketches for you this week.

Tycho is off getting his first tattoo today and I’m really excited for him. I like the design he chose which is more than I can say for my first tattoo. In fact I know a lot of people who aren’t thrilled with their first tattoo. I got my first one about twenty years ago when Tycho was considering his Gargoyles homage. We were living together at the time and I was looking through some of his RPG books. I found this illustration of a heart with a crown of thorns around it and decided that would be my first tattoo. It’s still sitting there on the back of my calf. If nothing else it reminds me of that time in my life and who I was back then, even if I’m not thrilled with the design itself anymore.

I feel compelled to tell you that I am not at the office. I'm not even writing this! I am having a man I barely know dredge a needle through the skin of my forearm, over and over. And, as if that weren't enough, he's dipping the tip of this needle in ink so that even once they've healed the scratches this miscreant is scratching will leave permanent marks. It's rude at best. What's more, I'm paying this highwayman for the privilege of being thus savaged!

I got these three frames in a text message a few nights ago, and I can't prove it but I think he may have drawn them on a pile of spare printer paper, in his lap, while also playing Destiny. I mention it, because I can barely do one thing at a time.

Captain Forial's finger hovers over the communications circuit, withdraws. Then it flips out straight, like a retractable antenna, only to retreat again. Now she's holding her fist against her mouth. She would go through the cycle again, maybe, if the channel hadn't flared open, if a tiny version of her nemesis hadn't appeared.

Here's this week's peek at my sketchbook.

I'm given to exaggeration. Example: I once said that mice were "way, way smaller than voles," and got an earful from the Rodent Liberation Front, Friends of the Mouse and the Vole Association. But I am not exaggerating and am in fact being circumspect with my language when I suggest that redemption arcades are a spectacularly bad investment.

This is the last strip in this series, at least, I think it is; ol' Gribbz gets home tomorrow, and it may be that something has occurred to him in the intervening period. Judging from the response to it and other content in this vein (something my associate alluded to in an earlier post) we, uh... hm. It seems like there is a huge group of people that nobody is talking to about this stuff, and they really, really want to know it. Complicating matters is the fact that, in their situation, to ask the question is to fail! You're supposed to know it already, and if you don't, that's one more thing you've fucked up this afternoon. The only way for you to learn it is for someone else to volunteer it. Wheels are in motion.

I took two awesome games with me on our spring break trip to Oregon.

We're spending Spring Break down in Oregon right now so I just have a few doodles for you today.

Like the man said, he spent some time at an Honest To God PTA Meeting (H2GPTAM). He told them about a lot of stuff, stuff so rudimentary about our ways that you would be insulted if I tried to tell it to you. But that's where you have to start.