I’m pretty gay

I thought the signature in japanese was so “I draw bad manga”.

The Bitch Machine

One morning I went out into the front yard and found a time machine.

It was covered in old hand-me-down clothes and broken toys.
The insides of a washing machine, a cardboard box from Panasonic filled with other, littler flatpacked boxes.  pieces of broken slate.

Dumped? by some unscrupulous dumper?

A giant, brass time machine.

I recognised it as soon as I saw it. Time machines all look alike. Theyre pretty obvious.I knew it would change everything. This was an awesome discovery.

YES

YES

YES

The control panel has a pretty huge clock built into it. A few of them, all telling time in different methods. Like a rich-person clock.
Analog ones. digital ones. There was a crude sundial, and another thing which looked like it measured time too… only it was hard to explain.

And a big Chesterfield armchair to sit on. Right in the centre.

Time machines never really stop moving through time.
They dont jump from one time-period to another, and then sit idle.
To a time machine, there is no such thing as idle.

A time machine exists before it was built. It exists long after it was destroyed.  They are built in a timeline long collapsed under an infinity of past time-traveller paradoxes.

It says all of this in a thousand different languages, etched into metal by unknown means.

The universe might only be the way you see it for the split-second you experience it. After that it might be broken by another paradox, undetectable by our minds.

Alternate timelines breaking and jumbling around when someone kills their own grandfather.
A dog is king of the universe for the millisecond just before this moment. You dont remember. You consider this moment to be the only true timeline. A second ago you probably had twelve legs and it was the rightest thing in the world.

Sitting in this machine, I pull the brass handle by the Chesterfield armchair and nothing happens.

In some other universe, I’m running around as dinosaurs chase me through a ruined city and breathe fire.

In this universe, it just breaks.

Godless

Ant farms are a microcosm.

This is pretty obvious. But it isn’t just a reflection on society. It’s a reflection on the nature of life and existence and everything.

What are they? A society of ants.
Ants on their own are stupid. More than stupid. An ant on its own will wander aimless. An ant will engage in a tug of war with another ant over a bread crumb, neither ant gaining ground, for hours and hours and hours.
Theyre both engaging in a very borderline, basic function. A system of reactions to reactions to reactions.
But when you combine them, suddenly they’re capable of huge tasks. Feats of architecture and cunning.

Singularly stupid. On mass, intelligent.

And who is leading them? Their queen?
The queen is mislabled. She’s just a giant vagina. An ovary. She’s a chicken birthing slave child after slave child. She’s a robot factory.

At the centre of the ant colony, there is no centre. There is no hive mind or combined intelligence. Ants just act the way they do,and the queen just works the way she does, and somehow in the middle of it all, it all just works.
Everything just comes together.

Ant farms are a microcosm.

Our brains are the same way.
A neuron is stupid on its own. It’s a single cell. it’s useless.
but combined with trillions of others, suddenly the aimless whatever of that cell in unison with others… it just works.

We have this idea that we are someone and that we have a soul. Maybe this is true.
Most likely, we are this bizarre haphappence that floats on top of a raft of aimless drone cells.

We are the manuscript of the billion monkey typewriter jockies.
Given enough time and enough random attempts, something amazing can appear out of nothingness. A sea of atoms combining on their own, writhing. Some things stick. Some combinations seem to exist better than others and they continue to float around.

Nature, or whatever you want to call it, is the most ruthless editor of all.

Proteins form. Then things more complex.
When something is created, randomly, that functions a little better… over time it replaces the old. The old dies, the new remains.
Little changes to its form occur as random mutations. Failures are destroyed.
Successes progress.

The only reason we expect to see a god somewhere behind all this, is because it’s our nature.

It’s as if, one day, that last change occurred, and our brains were switched on.
And we looked around and we saw ourselves and we saw the world. We saw the tools we had made out of stick and bone, and we saw the fire we had lit, and we recognised our nature.
selfish little imps that we are. Small little self-absorbed things, stuck in our own experiences… We saw that we were creators… we saw that we constructed and manipulated things into other things. And drawing from these experiences, we extrapolated…

There must be something like us. Something that creates. And THAT is where this all came from.

Silly little monkeys. Stupid little atoms, all bundled together in your little teams. Your little self-contained cell societies.
Your little ant farms.

We are what we are. Random little robots that float around. Caught up in this experience. This hollow, imaginary experience.

Insects.

The hunt for fuck-you-tober

So Ive been on deviantart for about a billion years, and last week I got, inexplicably, my first deviation. And missed it, because I’m pretty much just never on Deviantart anymore.

Over the course of one day I got like 900 billion fucking comments. Which, do not let that ‘fucking’ there bely how much i was super excited and how awesome I thought it was. cause yeah. I was excited and I thought it was awesome..

BUT.  It’s this totally harsh double-sided sword. Or, no, to make that old adage more apt… its a sword with a sword for a handle.  When you use it, you lose your fingers. That is what this is.

Cause I mean, hey, it’s awesome right? all those page views? All those comments telling you how cool our work is? Right? RIGHT?
I mean, it really just comes down to something you made, that you made ages ago and what youve moved on from… becoming, for one little part in time, a part of a wider audience… and then after a 30 second comment, promptly forgottten.

Thats it. it disappears, leaving behind a small taste of notoriety that turns bitter.

No one will come back.  Well, no. Maybe a few will. But those people will be looking for more of the same. Moresilver cockroaches. More different things like that. When, really, that was a one-off thing. That was one piece of work. Now im working on other things.

It’s this sad thing. I think artists everywhere make this sacrifice at some point when they find their door into commercialness.

I could change my direction now and go fo all that kind of thing. make insect sculptures and be known as ‘that guy’ and maybe make money. But what I really want to do is make a comic.

Having a daily deviation is awesome. It’s like free advertising. It’s like a beacon that summons people to come and say wow. to say yeah. but its this dangerous weapon that, when used, also fucks you severely. Imparting a realisation that noone actually cares beyond those 10 seconds. That you were just a blink of light in an afternoon of deviantart surfing. That this shit happens every day.

It’s like being a reality tv star.

Christmas is coming and it is looking less and less likely that we will have moved out before then. Which means that we’ll probably be spending it alone, but surrounded by roommates who we really really dont get along with.

I mean it isnt like we fight or burn each other. Noone is really impolite intentionally.

But every little smile and gleeful hello

is hollow hollow hollow hollow.

 

They hate us. That’s pretty obvious. The couple think we’re boorish because we’re loud. Theyre stuckup prudes who watch indian soap operas at full volume. Whatever.

The other one is a middleaged alcoholic who feels entitled enough to talk to niki and I like we’re his step children. God, theres a horrible thought. I hope he doesnt actually have any….
We pay more rent than either of these guys, and we actually PAY our rent, and we’re not evading our taxes or subscribing to foxtel while we’re thousands of dollars in debt.

 

We’re not exactly blameless, but I can say with all honestly and correctness that we are the lesser of 3 evils.

 

But these are the crazy years. These are the stories that become party anecdotes.

Fucking horray.

Runner

Sophie. Avoiding RPG fire in a Cobra. Where she found that sweet ride in the ruins of an ancient city 500 years in the future.. well. I’ll never tell.
(my imagination)

 

Holla

Gavin, in fallout power armour, with his trusty dog sidekick and his droid bodyguard.

And it’s casual friday in zombie land.

Madam Cas

And cas. I hope this inspires more of your story.

Zo-om-beh zo-om-beh

Jane. I didnt mean to give her saggy boobs, but here we are.

I momentarily forgot which thing was darker. Bricks, or the bit inbetween the bricks.

Neither looks right.

Violet sunrise

Uploading this because those other things are ugly. Heyo.

But so is this.

Working on another Zombie drawing. Excited? I know I am. In my pants.