Ode To Joy

Y’know that stupid game you play with fortune cookies in which you read the fortune out loud and add the phrase “in bed” at the end…? Well, that’s apparently the favorite little fun game with the brain-rotted US media with regard to China, especially at the Olympics this past week — find any news of any positive achievement of or any news that reflects well on China, and the US Boss Media will be right on top of it with their shallow bitching and moaning about “human rights”, trot out their victims of the week, fling some over-hyped apocryphal stories around and wail “but at what cost”?

The front page of the Washington Post — where Democracy died long ago and is now beginning to smell really pungent in darkness — put on quite a show this past Saturday, pissing and moaning about the job the Chinese did of keeping covid under control during the Olympics, claiming that it “kept the joy out of the Games” and at “great mental and financial costs”. It was a headline so galling that I had to just kind of stand there in the front hall, slack-jawed, sputtering and giggling as I read and re-read it.

I was almost in awe of it, somehow — a gaggle of hacks from a corporate mouthpiece in the seat of the US Empire, which had twice as many covid-19 deaths last week than China had all of last year, is having a tantrum about China taking the steps any responsible government should do during a public health emergency, filling its pants about how it took the joy out of the Olympics. Myself, I think any “joy” issues our friends here had came more from the shock of being shown up by a Chinese-American who chose to ski for China, and by a government which treats healthcare as a public good rather than a commodity.

Yeah, shame those horrid, awful Chinese commies took appropriate action to mitigate the spread of an infectious pathogen and took a little bit of the “joy” out of it for you — not nearly as awesome as here in the good old USA, where we’re joyful and free and lost nearly a million people to covid19 last year.

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Sloppy Still Life

…in which the spirit of Vincent visits my 19 year-old self, turns away even more utterly demoralized, and shoots himself again.

The technical part — learning the UI, how it integrated the Pencil, all that theory-of-operation stuff — was the easy part; I pretty much had the software down cold in 2 or 3 nights. Now the real work is starting, which actually learning how to freakin’ paint.

Since I “officially” retired from the design biz, Mrs. F has had to listen to me occasionally mumbling all dreamy about taking another whack at learning how to paint — y’know, like a proper painter — some 35, 40 years after leaving school.

It's Martini Time!

Setting up the new Mini and sorting out the Great Monitor Mystery was actually the fun, easy part; the real work started when it came time to start learning the software that would be replacing Adobe Creative Suite after 30+ years as an Illustrator and Photoshop ninja. I managed to faceplant a time or two on those proverbial stumbling blocks, but things ended up working out quite well, and I'm closer to getting back to producing cartoons than I thought I'd be at this point.