elitetrick

Weekly Update - 286 - 9/1/25

It's September already. How?

Comics this Week?

God Slayers - It actually ended up being a much busier page than I thought, so idk if I'll be able to finish it this week or not. I'll try but no promises. It'll probably depend on what else demands my time this week.

Solipsus - Yes. Should be pretty easily doable. Might not even take long.

Sona bonus art? - I think I should be able to finish it this week, but only because there isn't a ton left to do on the... four or so variants I have planned.

Patreon changed their UI again. Everything said above this line is now free -- I think? Lol. Which is basically what I want, because that's the important stuff. So... what is even the point of making these posts paid any more? It's not like I ever have anything worth saying anyway. I guess any time I start rambling it's good to hide that part behind a paywall, if only to limit the number of people who know the truth about how batshit I am.

Speaking of batshit, GS: TTRPG - Combat redesign is kind of minimally implemented atm. But I still need to go over all the other sections and fix everything that it broke. The joys of making critical core design mistakes early in the process and their cascading dependencies.

Impromptu Rant/Ramble?

Also, speaking of the em-dash, I'm genuinely amused by the people who are freaking out any time they see em dashes, just because so many people don't understand how useful this little piece of punctuation is. All the endless Tiktoks of people acting as if it's a surefire way to detect AI written text. I'm fucking old, and I learned to love em dashes literally a billion years ago, and authors across the globe would probably stand behind me in favor of their use -- in English at least. They're simply better at breaking up sentences and paragraphs than a comma ever could be. They're far more flexible and they are easier to read than even the glorious semi-colon. Frankly, in my experience, I don't even think AI overuses em-dashes to any appreciable degree -- and I think humans should use them FAR MORE.

I think I've blathered about it before, but the thing you REALLY got to look out for, if you're seriously trying to detect AI writing, is when the AI does this SUPER OBNOXIOUS thing where it goes "It's not just <normal sounding description word>, it's <weirdly bizarre overemphasis term.>" That one drives me fucking nuts, and nobody seems to be talking about it and AI uses it ALL THE DAMN TIME. "It isn't just a chair, it's a cradle." "It isn't just a door, it's an invitation." "It's not just an explosion, it's chaos." "This isn't any mere crystal, it's a relic." IT'S A SHITTY WAY OF DESCRIBING SOMETHING, IT ADDS NOTHING AND IT MAKES ME FUCKING BARF.

AI is so fucking bad. I once enjoyed RPing with it for a time, but I got so sick of hearing the same god-damned repetitive mechanical statements it makes over and over again, I just can't stand it any more. And I swear each new model is only getting worse. Now when I'm watching a youtube video I'll start to detect hints of that (NOT THIS, IT'S WHOA) shit in the script and I have to click away because I feel my last briancell (sic) shriveling up every time I hear it. So save the em dash, PRESERVE the em dash, love the em dash, and everyone needs to cancel the fucking "It's not just <Blank>, it's BLANK" horseshit that AI uses at the end of every godsdamn paragraph.

I've said it a thousand times, if humans are good at anything, it's pattern recognition. And if machines are good at anything, it's generating patterns. My once cautious optimism towards this technology has collapsed of late. Even in regards to its use in coding, which my husband was once a proponent for, but even he says it's getting worse in that regard, not better, not that corpos give a shit. And I don't know that I see a world where AI technology will ever be useful in the creative space. It's kind of fun watching it flounder and struggle to take root though, despite the ever-increasing rate at which it is being shoved down our throats. Hopefully that continues to remain the case.

Bleh, there's some more raw, emotionally-charged, half-formed thoughts on a topic I probably don't fully understand. Hopefully nobody ever reads these. Well, I know my parents still read them but nobody else probably should subject themselves to this torture.

Weekly Update - 285 - 8/25/25

Waited until the absolute last minute to send in my personal information so they wouldn't delete my account here. I seriously considered just letting them delete it for awhile, ngl, because it's not like I make a ton of money from Patreon and I can't say if risking identity theft is worth it. But... eh. Over the past 7 years I've accumulated a huge stockpile of art and blathering here on this website, and I kinda like how it's organized, it's been slowly growing the past few years, and it'd be a shame to throw it all out for something that's as worthless as my identity. Besides, Patreon assures me that my personal information is securely stored and that it will never be sold or shared, and they'd never possibly lie or be wrong about such a serious topic.

Anyway.

I'm taking this week off from comics. It's time for a recovery week. I'll still be drawing and working on GS: TTRPG stuff, just not holding myself to a deadline until next week.

Ramble:

Today's Ramble has nothing to do with God Slayers or Solipsus. But it is about a nerdy fantasy topic some of y'all might be mildly interested in maybe.

It's about Fae.

Why? I'll be honest, the Fae as a concept has never really interested me before, but I can't stop thinking about them lately. And I guess maybe that's why I find the topic so interesting all of a sudden: I've had a recent shift in perspective that has opened up an entire world of possibilities that was previously invisible to me.

And before I continue I just want to reiterate (largely because I don't ramble as often as I used to so some of y'all might not know) that my Rambles are raw and unfiltered thoughts manifested into words that I vomit out into the internet so I can stop obsessively ruminating over things. I know I use hyperbole sometimes to try and support my points, and I know my opinions can be totally wrong, too.

Rant:

I've always thought of the Fae as they have been broadly depicted in media: fanciful, flitting, flying forest fairies that live in trees and sit on toadstools and warn adventurers to stay out of their groves and play silly tricks on anyone stepping into their mushroom circles. The stories I grew up with that had Fae in them always depicted them as either side characters, minor obstacles, moral guides, or convenient but especially annoying narrators, but nothing with any actual substance to . If they didn't fall into any of those categories, then the Fae were depicted as something that was SO STRANGE it was UNKNOWABLE, which might sound neat on the surface, momentarily, but give it any more thought and it's honestly boring AF. Seems like it's just an excuse for the author to avoid having to think about it too hard. "I can't explain to you what the Fae are because they are beyond human understanding." Yeah, sure, great. As a reader I love being told I'm too dumb to wrap my head around a concept the author has allegedly come up with. Let's not try and kid ourselves that stories aren't somehow written by humans, and that humans need to be able to understand such concepts in order to write them, and anything written that's allegedly "beyond our understanding" hasn't actually been written at all. And YEAH I'M LOOKING AT YOU, FROM SOFTWARE, WITH YOUR ALLEGEDLY SOoO0Oo0O DEEP AND RICH LORE. Turns out lore gets pretty damn deep when you do the bare minimum amount of work to seed "hints" all over the place and let everyone else fill in all the gaps with their own imaginations. A cute little writing trick that admittedly has proven success, BUT I DIGRESS. Point being, I got used to the idea that everything that might have once made the Fae interesting to me has been dumbed down and distilled down and whatever's left in the pot doesn't even have any flavor. So I never gave the Fae a second thought before because there were so many other topics that were way more interesting to me.

So WTF even do:

Now, before I go any further, I'm not saying that Fae have never been done right. There are TONS of stories and TTRPG systems centered around Fae that people love dearly. But because of the broad strokes they were painted with in most of the stories -I- was told as a kid, the fact that Fae are so broadly stupidified for mass media consumption, I never developed any interest in the concept of them at all, and today as my brain explodes with the infinite possibilities of spirits unbound by the limitations of a physical dimension, I feel like I've missed out on exploring a really rich and interesting side of mythology, one that I'm only now rediscovering for the first time. So I'm talking about it now just in case any of you might have grown up feeling the same way about Fae that I did. I might very well be the last one to the party in this regard, but maybe my experience of late can help open your mind as well, who knows?

So, where did this all come from? Well, when my friends started work on a World of Darkness inspired urban fantasy LARP system they wanna make for some of our local crews, they wanted to include playable Fae alongside the ideas they had for werewolves and vampires and mages and hunters and such, but they had just a big ? under the category because they weren't even sure where to start and they were thinking of cutting it altogether. Initially, I had demons on the brain, and I was all about demons, and figuring out how to work demons into the setting. But my idea for demons got shot down, largely because of what the existence of demons implicitly implies about the existence of angels and gods as well, which changes the entire scope of the setting, forces it to define something like a pantheon, a universal structure, etc etc, so that didn't really fit very well... But like... then it occurred to me: what is really the difference between demons and fae? Suddenly my brain saw this blank canvas under Fae and started running wild because, given the opportunity to design something like the Fae from the ground up with no restrictions and infinite possibilities, I couldn't help but wonder what would that look like?

So WTF even IS?

As I usually do when approaching the design for such a thing, I examined the origins of such mythos to see where to start. Broadly, across history since ancient civilization and across many human cultures worldwide, people have always labelled "thing we don't understand" as either a fairy, spirit, or demon. Folklore is often just that: here is a concept we find odd or have no good explanation for, therefore we came up with a story for why it must be a spirit/demon/fairy. This includes everything from cosmic events and natural disasters to the simple uncanniness of some abandoned tools left in a forest or the reason someone misplaced a key.

Combined with some ideas from Animism, or the idea that basically everything has a spirit or soul, and I think I finally had an explanation for what Fae are. Essentially, they could be anything. The simplicity spirits, but they could be the spirits of every plant, every tree, every rock, every iPhone, every dream anyone has ever forgotten, every unexplained phenomenon or every concept. As they could be the spirits of anything, they could also be the spirits of the gaps in everything or the spirits of the potential for things not yet conceived. They could have infinite forms and shapes. In essence, the Fae are the rawest, purest form of creativity given a shape and made into a category of characters. Everything from a Hag, to a Fairy, to a kitsune to youkai, from animal spirit to tree spirit to spirit of time to spirit of stasis to spirit of dreams to spirit of halitosis, everything, every type of spirit limited only by the imagination can potentially fall under this classification of Fae. However, as my friend rightly pointed out, not everything should be PLAYABLE, necessarily. For reasons apparently initially obvious to everyone but me, granted I couldn't imagine anyone wanting to actually willingly choose to be a poo sprite. Chalk it up to my idealistic naivete, perhaps.

And... well, there's a lot more to it than that, because coming up with the concept for what Fae are is only the first of many steps, and there's certain tropes that need to be touched on for something that's called "Fae" to fit with player expectations... such as how they are famously mischievous tricksters and WHY that's a thing. Or why there's a broad perception of them as forest guardians, even if they aren't, necessarily, guardians of any forest. And I do think I came up with a decent explanation for it that makes sense from both human and non-human perspectives... but this Ramble has already gotten way too long and I'm tired of typing. So... effectively... for anyone who bothered reading all this, I feel like I just wasted your time telling you WHY I'm thinking about this and then holding back on any of the substantive ideas I think I've come up with, which were the whole point of this Ramble in the first place. Sorry.

Maybe I'll continue talking about this next week, if anyone wants that, or maybe I'll get bored and move onto something else. I am an artist, please god forgive me.

10 days until Silksong as well.

God Slayers - Page 233

If there's ONE thing that's even remotely redeemable about this guy... he's no bystander.

Solipsus - Page 18

"Wyte"?
"Ghostware?"
"Scruffy?!"

Solipsus - Page 18 - High Res

Someone here is confused.

God Slayers - Page 233 - High Res

So... I'm not super happy with the pages I finished this week. But I AM happy that I managed to complete two full comic pages in... what ultimately amounted to the three days I had this week to draw. So... guess I'll consider that a win, and forgive myself the myriad tiny mistakes I made as I rushed through them.

I Exist

I'm sure most of you are familiar with my general feelings towards existence in general. Figure I'll just share this with you guys for now, cuz it's done, and I had a lot of fun fucking around with the colors. Was thinking of making the low-res version the TWC voting incentive for September or something idk.

For clarity's sake, this ISN'T the promised bonus art of this character that is still pending, this was just an extra thing I drew last week because I wanted to.

Weekly Update - 284 - 8/18/25

Where the hell did this week go? Where did this month go? What is even going on any more? Why is anything ANYTHING?

NGL I'm kinda stressed out, kinda struggling to focus, kinda biting off more than I can chew while at the same time everything keeps happening to constantly chip away at what limited time I have to do thems things and it's NOT GETTING BETTER.

But it's fine. I will live. I simply need to slow down, take a deep breath, breathe in... breathe out... self-hypnotize and relax...

I don't need to over-pressurize myself. I'm still gonna, you can't stop me, but I don't NEED to. And it's important for me to keep that in mind.

I want to post both comics this week, but I don't think I can, not without some miracles of productivity hitting me right in the face. I'll commit to posting one OR the other. If I get both done that'd be super neat but I don't know that I can promise that.

Comics this week?

God Slayers - Maybe!

Solipsus - Maybe!

描妖 Bonus Art - I mean I drew SOME of the foxcatbatmew drawing youkai but I don't know if it's the one I want to declare is the Spicy bonus art I promised because it didn't turn out very spicy. I'll share it at some point anyway and get started on another image. The REAL spicy bonus art image.

GS TTRPG - Combat redesign made some good progress this weekend but it's still pretty rough and in progress. but Comics first.

Solipsus - Page 17

I think Cerellia needs to work on her spiel a bit more. You can't just loredump on people right away and expect them to buy into your narrative.

Solipsus - Page 17 - High Res

Halberds, I've learned, are among some of the coolest weapons in history. Some might even call them OP.

Weekly Update - 283 - 8/11/25

I feel bad for Taisuko. They don't deserve any of this.

Our comic's seventh anniversary passed last Friday. I don't usually celebrate it much because even though the comic officially debuted on August 8th, 2018 I've had a few sabbaticals in there and it doesn't feel like I've had a purely contiguous run. Once we've gotten up there to 10 years, 15, it'll probably feel way more significant to me... but wow I guess 10 years isn't even that far away any more.

And most of you guys voted for my foxcatbatmew drawing youkai sona in the poll. More amusingly, you were split exactly 14/14 on both the Spicy Sauce versus the Cute Sauce section... or were you?

When I look at the raw data, it seems a bit... incomplete. 5 total votes are missing, leading me to believe that Patreon either doesn't log everything or that their site is bugged out or something, who knows! At the end of the day it's a vibe poll, so the raw numbers are less important than just tipping my needle of indecision towards an actionable direction, which it has!

In any case, the 描妖 wins, (okay but is it Byouyou? Kakuyou? Egakuyou? Or should I just go with Konefu? I'm not even sure what the best way to say this is. That's what I get for making up a word in a language I don't fully understand. >.< I believe I have the kanji correct, representative of the species I created and the whole theme I'm going for [essentially a drawn spirit/demon], I'm just confused about the actual pronunciation. Maybe someone who knows more than me can tell me how THEY'D read/pronounce it.) and they'll be getting a drawing soon with... some amount of spicy and sweet sauces, whatever that actually means in practice I don't yet know. Cute but also kinda sexy? SFW but kinda on the line? Dunno. I'll do my best!

Comics this week:

God Slayers: Um! No... maybe... no. I think no. I need to do a bunch of work on the TTRPG, because it's pretty busted and it's getting in the way of making my new character and it's been bothering me. This seems like a good week to do some of that.

Solipsus: Yes. I think yes.

God Slayers - Page 232

Coming up with racial slurs for races I've created still feels wrong somehow...
Undergrounder (Surface dweller's common name for Chisokojin) -> Ugger
Chisokojin (What they call themselves) -> Choke
Troglodyte (Word for cave dwellers) -> Trogg

God Slayers - Page 232 - High Res

Chisokojin eyes are sensitive enough to light that it can cause incredible pain and eventually permanent blindness from enough overexposure.

Solipsus - Page 16

Sure it was.

Solipsus - Page 16 - High Res

I've already forgotten what I did to create that effect in her eye. It ended up being probably at least 15 layers of needless complexity.

Weekly Update - 282 - 8/4/25

It is well within Cerellia's ability to use her "magic" to fix and braid her own hair.

Still a few days left to vote in the thingy before I lock it in!

What else news? We spotted a bat that's been living on our house the past few days. Just an eepy lil guy clinging up under the eaves on the porch outside one of our windows. It made me happy idk I like bats.

Comics this week?

God Slayers: Yeah.

Solipsus: Yeah, though I'll be honest the "buffer" I've been working from is gone, so clearly I can't keep up with the one every week pace and have the comic still meet my own personal standards for quality. I guess I'll just have to keep trying to get both better AND faster without sacrificing ANYTHING except health sleep and sanity. That'll work I'm sure.

Solipsus - Page 15

Sorry this is late, I completely lost track of the days this week and convinced myself yesterday was Thursday. >.<

Solipsus - Page 15 - High Res

Maybe I spoiled this a bit too much for it to have any impact now, idk.

Weekly Update - 280 - 7/28/25

This is a really good song. It's just so true and relatable.

And for some reason it always reminds me of this one.

Why, you may ask? What a weird question. There's no reason. Why would there possibly be a reason? Funny thing is I'm not even a fan of League and I've never played any of Riot's games, I just like Arcane, and fwiu most (if not all) of Arcane/Riot's music is composed by one who goes by Mako, and he's incredibly incredible.

Anyway.

Vote here in the thingy-thing if you haven't yet. As usual I'll probably keep it up for another week. The outcome is certainly leaning a certain way for the moment but as I've witnessed in past polls literally anything can happen right up to the very end, so vote whichever way you want, change your vote as much as you like. Whoever wins, wins.

God Slayers: Not this week.

Solipsus: Yes, and the next page is one of my favorite things I've drawn all year. My goal this week is to try and rebuild the buffer of pages I once had so I can continue posting Solipsus every week without interruption. It turns out it's quite a challenge to continuously post a page every week without fail when I don't actually finish new pages every single week. Weird!

The issue is largely that I've found myself making Solipsus pages progressively more complicated and taking more time to work on each of them as time goes on, rather than, as was the original goal, trying and practicing different techniques in an effort to speed up my production capabilities. I've still been experimenting with different things, lighting and backgrounds and stuff, but maybe it's time to take it back to the experimental drawing board and trying some extra differenter more quickery things!

Who knows.

I can no longer make any sense of this world, so I'm going to just keep drawing forever until I can't.

Detective Nick - High Res

Now you can see all of my countless mistakes close up! Enjoy.

Detective Nick

So I had an idea for this image originally, then I lost it. Then I didn't have any ideas for this image. Then finally I did this noire detective thing because I don't normally do anything with monochrome and thought it'd be worth a try. Also it's at a whacky perspective. Dunno! You can decide for yourselves if I succeeded or failed at whatever I was trying to do here.

Nick won the last poll, vote for the next one here please! Or suggest whoever you want.
Who should I draw next? Round 16 | Patreon

Who should I draw next? Round 16

Pick something, I have no energy left for decisions or thinking or existing this year.
(Vote for as many options as you like!)

Solipsus - Page 14

It must.

God Slayers - Page 231

Some of you may doubt that third panel will go quite the way that Snake imagines it going.

Solipsus - Page 14 - High Res

Sometimes I wish -I- was covered in glowing tattoos that also did cool stuff.

God Slayers - Page 231 - High Res

Snake's Brilliant and Flawless Plan for Success

Step 1: Punt Riley into the Canal.
Step 2: Harness Lightning.
Step 3: Tame Pyre.
Step 4: ... Profit?

Weekly Update - 280 - 7/21/25

I've probably bitten off more than I can chew again. Oh well!

This week?

God Slayers: Yes!

Solipsus: Yes!

Nick Bonus Art: Yes!

How am I going to do all of that in a week? Who tf knows!

Ramble:

I want to take some time this morning to roast my younger self. When my parents came to visit they brought me some boxes of old books, and among these books, I found an old sketchbook from waaay back when I was still in High School.

Most of the art contained within on its yellowed pages is... unremarkable, with much of the pencil being thick enough and smudged enough to make many drawings undecipherable. It also contains a lot of art exercises, and it was probably one of my sketchbooks for an actual art class. The quality of SOME of the art is... not awful, but it's not great either. But the main thing I want to roast myself on is these original quotes I'd scribbled on some pages, making CERTAIN to sign and date each one, just in case there was any question about who came up with them. They were probably thoughts that teen me had while drawing that I thought were especially profound or notable, worthy of being recorded on these pages forevermore, for the benefit of future generations or perhaps for all humankind. I was so unbelievably full of myself back then.

And I want to do this because I often feel like, particularly with my rambles over these past few years, I still KIND of do this sort of thing. From time to time, having thoughts that feel really important in a fleeting moment and wanting to capture and share them just in case they are. While I like to think that my thoughts these days are a little more nuanced... maybe they're not? Maybe even my deepest and most thoughtful thoughts are actually super shallow or self-evident things that don't need to be said at all.

SO I want to revisit these now, evaluate myself more than 20 years later, and see if any of these quotes still hold up as well as a much younger me thought they might. All of the quotes below were written by me in the early 2000s, and my reactions are me, today.

Roasting High School Me

Quote #1: "Those who believe themselves wise but say not are wiser than those who believe themselves wise and say so."

Reaction: Hoo boy, we're off to a great start. This one is on the back of the very first page of the sketchbook as well, suggesting that I thought it was important enough to write BEFORE doing practically any art in my SKETCHbook. I'm sure I must have been overflowing, maybe even BURSTING with wisdom in my teens, like I just couldn't WAIT to tell people about all the things I had thought up all by myself. With this quote, I feel like I was trying to paraphrase that slightly more famous quote, "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt," but that I somehow felt I could write it even better. Except I think I've completely missed the whole point. All I'm really doing in this quote is comparing one type of person, "those who believe themselves wise," to themselves, and then judging them based on whether or not they talk about it.

Now, it isn't, perhaps, the worst take ever written. There is a modicum of truth in the idea that those who constantly brag about being smart do often tend to be less smart than they think they are. But the way this quote is written, and the quasi-high fantasy flair I tried to give it to make it sound like a failed mockery of bad Victorian poetry makes it sound like one huge nothing burger to me.

It's also comforting to see that while my handwriting has not improved in the last 20 years, it hasn't gotten any worse either.

3/10

Quote #2: "What we know can be more frightening than what we don't know."

Reaction: Fucking how? I almost feel like I was just writing down every compact thought that came to mind regardless of whether or not it made any sense. All one must do is examine the horror genre to recognize that inspiring fear is accomplished by concealing details of the "horror" from the characters or the audience, because our imaginations are capable of coming up with things that can never exist in reality. All of Lovecraftian Horror is built on concepts of Things we do not or cannot understand or sometimes even perceive. I feel like this quote completely neglects to consider the power of our imaginations and creativity.

However, I suppose I should acknowledge that while our imaginations are powerful, in some cases much too powerful, they also generally cannot harm us directly. So there could be very specific cases where what we DO know, if that was, for example, an imminent physical threat, can be scarier than some imaginary boogeyman. But as a general quote that was probably supposed to portray some divinely inspired 100% always applicable wisdom, it's dumb. It's author was dumb. I was dumb.

2/10

Quote #3: "Which is mightier? The atom bomb or the Bible?"

Reaction: -Bangs head on desk- It's just an early attempt at a thought experiment, right? It's just an innocent question, meant to get a person thinking, it doesn't actually -- okay so I know what I was probably thinking when I wrote this, but that doesn't make it any better. I've never been very religious, so I was probably just trying to convey that the raw destructive power unlocked via the Manhattan Project was physically more powerful than a book, but that's an incredibly shallow take. And by referencing the "Bible" in particular instead of something else it's also trying to sound like an angsty tear-down of religion in general. And it also feels like I'm seriously dating myself by using the term "atom bomb," which I probably heard too many times watching too many historical documentaries with my grandpa.

I'm STILL not very religious but these days I think I might argue that concepts, ideologies and words can be far more powerful than pure destructive force. As a species, it's practically undeniable that we've accomplished so much by building new and better things upon even the rickety old structures of our past while sticking to some core ideologies that support and uplift our civilization. Meanwhile the institutions and organizations and ideologies that have existed purely to harm or destroy may rise up from time to time but they practically always crumble away into the ashes of history because pure destruction is not sustainable.

I have to believe that. Especially today.

Anyway, 1/10, stupid quote.

Quote #4: "Putting limits on your imagination is like putting reins on a 747."

Reaction: Oh, you sweet summer child, you're so close to something I might actually agree with even today but you phrased it so repellently. Would you believe that I wrote all these quotes so far in about the course of two weeks? How did I ever come up with so much wisdom in such a short time?

So yes, I believe the freedom of imagination is important. That should come as no surprise. After all, I'm supposed to be some kind of writer or creator or something. My imagination is about all the value I have to offer this world, for whatever it's worth.

But putting reins on a 747? I swear I must have heard that phrase somewhere else, like perhaps on a comedy show or something, and then I thought it would be a good idea to try and misappropriate it like this. It's a terrible analogy. An airplane exists to transport people and cargo from one place to another. Attempting to "rein" or slow or stop it prevents it from fulfilling its purpose entirely. Meanwhile, imagination probably SHOULD be limited in some regards. Unfiltered imagination can be really strange, ridiculous or nonsensical. Creators tend to succeed by filtering their imaginations to the important bits and then portraying them in a way that makes sense to others.

This was probably some early effort to let everyone know that I would let NOTHING HOLD ME BACK. Hah. I can practically imagine young me thinking that it would be a great idea to go around telling people this because it's such INCREDIBLE advice. Don't limit your imaginations, guys, SRSLY. It won't even work.

4/10

And it looks like that's where I gave up. There's no more quotes in the rest of the sketchbook. Maybe someone saw them and made fun of me, or maybe I just ran out of wisdom, or maybe I just realized a picture is worth a thousand words. Or maybe I just thought the world wasn't ready for any more of my teenaged genius. The rest of the sketchbook is just more drawings. Some of them are kinda neat I guess. A surprising number of dragons and an unsurprising number of non-Euclidian structures because I've always been a huge MC Escher fan. Eh, I probably shouldn't be too hard on myself, all that really matters is how I've improved since then.

I hope you enjoyed this little bit of self-reflection! I know I had fun.

Solipsus - Page 13

What IS going on with that tail? Like seriously.

Solipsus - Page 13 - High Res

I don't actually know if I ultimately accomplished what I set out to accomplish with this page.

Weekly Update - 279 - 7/14/25

Still hosting the parents! It's been a fun trip so far! Here's some sketches I did a few weeks ago for pages that are still a few weeks away! This week will end up being about a half week for me, as far as doing art is concerned. New Solipsus yes, new God Slayers no.

Next week I'll do the Nick Bonus art and more comics then after that we will be back to our regularly scheduled programming! Thanks for reading!