Let's face it: Darling sounds like a terrible last name to suffer under.

But I'll make more of my dumb comics someday soon. I keep getting ideas so they'll have to produce something.

A few weeks ago I broke the display of the MacBook that I use to make comics (I have a backup PC but it's slow). The local Genius Bar said it's basically totalled, and they couldn't fix it, anyway. This kind of killed my comic juices for the moment, but I've been writing a lot, so it balanced out.

"Why you runnin barefoot?"

tooting is probably one of the more classic things you could do with one's own horn

Sometimes you're like "heh heh I'll base this character on a semi-obscure thing I loved from my childhood, it'll be a fun point to start from" and sometimes you go "this is a great original character oh it's just Lin Beifong I made Lin Beifong again."

He also repeatedly told me that, when you feel powerless, sometimes the best thing you can do is just keep going on, doing small, good things.

I tell stories, and sometimes that feels like it makes a small difference.

The girl was freed. The borg ran, whimpering in pain from Chuck's super-critical roundhouse kick. I got a fancy new cyber arm. Life went on.

Chuck isn't with us today. But he fiercely believed in doing what was right, no matter the cost, no matter how futile. That doing right was its own reward.

The room erupts. "Your foot is broken, you know that? And you can't beat his skin weave," the GM says over the cacophony, but we shout him down. The dice explode, you recall. So Chuck rolls again.
Another 10.
He rolls again.
9.
The DM collapses. "You beat his armor. Your ankle snaps, but he reels."

So I'm bleeding out on the ground, our other friend is trying to stabilize me while medivac comes, and it's Chuck's turn. He has no weapons. He's surrounded by snipers with anti-material weapons. His foe is a full-borg Corpo with metal skin.
Chuck says "I kick him in the head." He rolls. 10. A crit.

To drive home how screwed we were, the cyborg signaled the invisible snipers surrounding us and one of them shot my arm off. In one shot. That's how Cyberpunk is and we loved it.

Anyway, it was a marathon session, and we were returning to the super cyborg who had hired us to give him the package (a girl with a special surgical implant). The meet was in a clearing in a forest, and, just like in all Cyberpunk games, the employer betrayed us and threatened to kill the girl.

Anyway, Chuck's character was basically Spike Spiegel in a cowboy hat, and he played him, as Chuck always did, as a bit of a madman. "We need to break into this building? Let's strap a bomb to a hooker and send her in the front door." That kind of awful, but hilarious to college kids, idea.

CP2020 remains a super cool game, with a lot of cool mechanics. A favorite, which several other system use, is the "exploding critical": if you roll a 10 (on a d10) to hit, you get to roll again. Another 10? Roll again. It's rare but really special to see.

Back in college my game of choice was the at the time obscure Cyberpunk 2020. Chuck was on leave from the Navy and decided to spend it visiting me. He was a huge gamer and loved Cyberpunk, so he came with a character prepped to drop into our session.

I often wish to be powerless. It's funny, but it makes me comfortable. "Okay, this is out of my hands. I can relax now, for better or for worse." Today is not one of those days. So instead I'm thinking of my late friend, Chuck, and how he made every single tabletop session memorable.

I think rock 'n' roll is pretty funny when it's serious.

Look, if you need some reassurance that people are (or can be) good, actually, watch the show Jury Duty. Second season just ended and frick man. People can be good.

I'm still butthurt over "hooded sweatshirts" becoming "hoodies" without my permission.

This job listing says they value best practices, but never more than forward motion.

Despite this sentence causing bile to rise in my throat, I applied. Clearly they need someone on their team who values best practices over forward motion.

Since I haven't been able to make anything recently due to health stuff, I thought I'd share some old work now that this website has more people on it!! This is Ethernet Cable Girlfriend, a short comic I made last year! Robot yuri 💕 (1/7)

"At [company name], we're [transforming/revolutionizing/rethinking] how [nouns] [verb] [nouns] by applying AI to make them more [intelligent/efficient/impactful]".

"Design, develop, and optimize"
"Design, develop, and maintain"
"Design, develop, and integrate"
I guess it doesn't matter what the third word is, but your job listing for a web developer job had BETTER include "design, develop" at the start of the job's responsibilities.

I look forward to the day when searching for a simple "how-to" gets you useful results again, instead of three million AI-generated pages that give you a general idea of the steps you take but nothing specific.

I'm having a hard time motivating to work on my comic lately, so I'll just be retweeting them I guess.

In 1997, a young girl, Jess, looks forlorn as her mother critiques her room-cleaning abilities. "I asked you to clean up, but look. Little piles! Little piles everywhere!" the mother says, gesturing broadly. The captions explain this was a common thing for the girl.

In 2025, an adult version of the young girl laughs to herself while answering a test at a desk. The caption indicates she is taking an ADHD screening test, and is amused when the test asks if she leaves her things in small, organized piles. "I'll text Mom! She'll probably laugh," Jessica says.

A close-up of a text conversation between Jessica and her mom, explaining that Jessica is taking an ADHD screener and a question made her laugh. She hopes this will be a conversation starter with her mother.

Jessica looks distraught as she reads her mother's responses, which imply the mother has no recollection of these conversations, and instead goes off onto a long rant that fades into the background about how the mother has always suspected she herself may have ADHD. The caption states that Jessica thinks of the "little piles" interaction daily, and her mother's response was devastating--even if the tests were fun.

Little Piles #01: Little Piles
Originally I just called this "my weird trans diary thing" but I decided the subject matter of this first one also works as a vague metaphor for, like, everything.

So yeah, look for more Little Piles comics in the next month or whatever.

i think a decent way of critique is to decide between 'this is what i PERSONALLY think but it has no bearing on a fundamental good or bad art' OR hunt for some objective metric of 'REGARDLESS of what i personally felt, did this piece accomplish its goal?' both are valid, issue is conflating the two

I don't really care for astrology, because I (generally) don't believe in things that haven't been (or can't be) proven by the scientific method.

But here's the thing.

If believing in such a thing makes you HAPPY, and you've tested it and proven so, then, heck, dude. The science says go for it.

I probably should have realized I was a girl when, as a child, I fell absolutely in love with "A Walk in the Clouds".

It's silly to argue nature vs nurture when life, even (or especially) human life is non-deterministic.