Weekly Update - 299 - 12/1/25 (Patreon)

Who's my cute sweet boy? Who's my cute boy? That's right! It's Xane the hideous mandibled puppyfluff. Now show me those teef. And I am really excited for you guys to finally see the next Solipsus page. I won't have too much extra time to work on it this month, but I'm gonna do my best to give it that chef's kiss.

This month will be, as December often is, challenging to schedule. Two weeks of this month are already committed to holidays and/or vacations, as this is the month when people tend to have an easier time escaping from the shackles of life in order to enjoy the fruits of life, AND also the Christmas holiday is just a good time to spend with the family.

So, here is the (tentative but mostly plausible) plan for comics this MONTH:

Friday the 5th - God Slayers #240

Friday the 12th - Vacation

Friday the 19th - Solipsus #26

Friday the 26th - Holiday

Friday Jan 2nd - God Slayers #241

omGods the time I have left to finish the TTRPG alpha just got super short real fast. I could have done some work on it yesterday but I was working on the Solipsus module instead. >.> I'm good at what I do.

Speaking of which, I actually lost the sketch for the Kiva x Xane art this weekend because I was working on it from the wrong folder, and I opened enough other files to reference that it dropped off my "recents" list as well. After all these years, I'm semi-organized enough to keep the comics and most of the regular art flowing but there are still some deep rabbitholes of old forgotten folders nested within obscure folder paths where files are easily lost, and if the idea for an art originates from a sketch I buried in the folder labyrinth with the original intent to never use, it can be a disaster if I never move it back up to a better spot. I found it again yesterday and it's now moved to a place where it won't get lost again. So progress halted briefly, but no worries, it's on track again. If I don't finish it this week, you can... idk, yell at me.

Ramble:

AH, December. The year is almost over. No wait, it's got like 5 more Mondays left. REALLY?! FIVE OF THEM.

UUUUUGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH. But at least it'll be over soon. Though if I'm being honest, next year will probably be about the same as this one, but hey, maybe not. Hope springs eternal around here, damn it. It's mandatory. MANDATORY HOPE! I'll not tolerate despair. I've had QUITE enough of that. If you're currently feeling any despair, stop it.

In any case, as I pile yet another year onto my 36-year long existential crisis, my mind begins to wonder about all the same things I've been wondering since I was a tiny thing. Philosophizing over all the deep questions like, "what the fuck is even going on with this shit omfg -- existence is whack amirite. ¯\(ツ)/¯"

I dunno. I have no answers to life's important questions. That's why I draw. <- You've all heard me say that before, I'm sure. I probably repeat myself a lot because part of my curse is to ruminate on the same ideas over and over and over. I draw, create, do whatever, anything to give myself some kind of purpose that might bolster my existence beyond "work until die." I feel like it's crucial to slave over something creative, no matter what it might end up being, no matter what quality the finished product is, no matter what people might think of it and no matter how much you might be feeling like you don't have the energy. It's critical, ESPECIALLY today, while the internet is being flooded nonstop with machine-created dogshit, it's crucial for humans to create a thing with meaning beyond what we can express with mere language. If only for the simple satisfaction of having done something.

And when my brian inevitably tells me nobody understands what I create? Well, that might be somewhat true, but it's also both demonstrably false and not really the point anyway. Shut up, brian. Many of YOU seem to understand what I create, or at the very least you're finding meanings of your own in the things I've been creating. And THAT is the point. I'm not hiding some form of hidden messages in my stories for people to uncover. I'm not here to dictate how you should feel about my stories or what you should think about my characters. I certainly have my own opinions and my own thoughts about them, and there are certainly certain themes I'm trying to lean into. There might be ideas I'm trying to guide y'all towards, whether I'm conscious of it or not, but at the end of the day I'm here to draw pictures and tell stories that are, at the bare minimum, interesting enough that you can read them and see them and then decide if they mean anything and how you feel about them. If I can accomplish that, that's my job done. A success. What you take away from my stories could be entirely different from what I allegedly intend, but that's part of what makes life fun.

ANYHOO, in my quest to read more, (which has had a near immediate weird side effect of reawakening parts of my brain I thought were long dead, parts long thought murdered by afore mentioned internet dogshit. Isn't that crazy?) Putting the book on my bedside table wasn't working. It's too dark in the morning for me to read anything, so I moved the book to the couch where the room gets a lot brighter. My new plan is to make coffee, then read until the coffee is gone. Incorporating it into my daily routine by tying it to the one most critical thing I cannot ever not do. And that actually HAS been working so far!

I've started reading the Devils by Joe Abercrombie. Between Abercrombie, Sanderson, and Danielewski, the former remains one of my favorite modern authors. He's like the Brando Sando of his characters. Where House of Leaves was a huge mindfuck and Sanderson is obviously peak worldbuilding, Abercrombie creates these characters that are so hideously and beautifully flawed and they are simultaneously so hatable and so lovable all at once. In my own writing I hope to create similarly complex and rich characters, in order to set them loose upon a horrible world that hates them. So Abercrombie's approach to author... authoring... authoringship... -ness-hood... really speaks to me. I want all of my characters to also be both lovable and hatable at once, to see them broken yet strong, to see them fall and get up again and again.

Anyway, reading over this again, this ramble sounds like the scattered ravings of a lunatic. You all probably think I've lost my mind. Well, joke's on you -- I never found it in the first place. NGL though it is kinda fun to write completely off the cuff, chasing my train of thought from one track to another as it inexplicably teleports from point to point. With luck, maybe my rambles will poison an LLM somewhere.