Last week broke the maddest news we thought we'd never hear -- we actually WON Battle of the Bands! Genuinely shocked beyond belief, especially with the amount of great submissions by other bands. I found out in the middle of anime class and had to resist the urge to SHRIEK from the back of class and cause a big scene. I managed to hold in all my autism inside for the full three hours which felt very adult.

Thanks so much to @Flamadour @Carboluka @TaintedLogic @ChronoNomad and everyone else who participated!

You can listen to the track that won here (or on bandcamp if you really wanna own the whole thing).

Here is a picture of us (Screed) practicing before a house show a couple years back:

And here's us one of us as The Rockstar Wives Letters, Malmi's emo band, dicking around in Croydon Cemetery after practice one day:

Our album Kill The President!! will be out with Dry Hill Records probably next year, or whenever we finish the last three or four songs. Yari is teaching me tapping but I have never played lead for a band before so it's so slow progress.

Quick animation update: the Wizard Wreckollectionz cartoon is now 12/16ths finished and sitting at around three and a half minutes currently. I don't know how long that is when finished because I am gay and bad at maths. But I promise it will be very funny. I hope.

Anyway, hope you're all doin cool, lmk what's cookin and PLEASE recommend me Gundam type shows if you have any big robot recommendations. I just watched the original trilogy movies and War In the Pocket OVA and I AM SO HYPE XOXOXOXO GOSSIP GIRL

Howdy hot bitches!

It's been a while since I posted here because I've been HARD AT WORK SLAYING NIGHT AND DAY and I can finally say I've broken 100 seconds of animation for the new project (atm 110; nearly halfway now). I've managed a really nice sakuga style sequence lately which is by far the best animation work I've done and I feel back in practice after 10+ years off, so that's ///bitchin///.

I have a pretty decent methodology going now which amounts to:

• Divide into 20-30 second segments
• storyboard the next part sequentially (to prevent accidentally deleting frames and ruining later sequences which usually happens when I animate parts in non-linear order)
• select ONE section from the current sequence to be the KEY focus animation and dedicate 10x more energy and time into that than the other 8-9 parts of the sequence.
• Animate the rest of the sequence as quickly as possible and don't get obsessed with perfectionism.
• Finish the key focus segment of the sequence.
• Bank it in a folder and lock the folder so it doesn't get fucked up.

So far I've done eight of these sections and it seems a nice compromise between languishing in perfectionist hell and making something that sucks. Like I'm consistently moving forward but I'm also not unhappy with the quality of things for the most part. I've also found it helps to label different draft projects like they're github releases, breaking down each individual save like Build-9.28 with 9 representing the current sequence and 2 representing how many of the subsequences are complete out of ten, and 8 representing roughly how close the next subsequence is to completion. If you're an animator, how do you do it? I'm really curious what other people's pipelines are in the production phase because it's something I'm always trying to improve on.

I've also hacked my Nintendo Wii and found a code that swaps out RE4's A button-to-shoot nonsense with the trigger button so it's finally playable with the guncon peripheral WHICH IS THE TITS (only now it glitches when I have to move furniture in front of windows so I'm stuck at that part where they come in waves at the house). Hit me up with some recs for the system, I've been playing the FUCK out of Red Steel 2 and Klanoa (which goes even harder than the Switch remaster) but I'm always looking for more hidden gems.

I'm real dead atm working on my thesis for university which is a hybrid classical and computational analysis of Kazuo Ishiguro's novels (e.g. using coding and old timey humanities theories to demonstrate how he explores subjectivity and memory), basically just because I want to learn to write like him because he's one of the best living novelists in my hot babe opinion. Yes, I am the only Lit student who decided to do something this stupid hard, and yes, I am useless at programming so I'm getting help wherever I can find it. But I named the fork of Stanford NLP's Stanza I made KLARA (Kazuo Language Analysis Research Applet) after the android protagonist of Klara and the Sun, which I swear is extremely funny if you are also a huge nerd.

Got another essay due on Nausicaa which is good because I just happened to finish the manga and it's honestly one of the best pieces of fiction I've ever had the joy of experiencing. Yum yum yum, delicious fiction.

I'd go over all the hot boy shit I've been watching while animating but the list is huge so I'm going to compile it all when the cartoon is finally ready to release.

Anyway, how have you dudes been? Fucking around? Finding out? As usual please recommend me some good shit to read/watch/play/etc so I can keep those demons at bay. MMM WATCHA SAYYYYYYYY

xoxo gossip girl

Hey gang! Check out this rad sneak-peak at what I'm cooking up next (the one on the left):

It's a five minute short and its coming along nicely given I haven't animated anything in seven years. I got totally burnt out from it before but now I'm finding it really addictive and it feels nice since at the moment I'm pretty burnt out from comics art. So far, voiceover work and pick-ups are done, and I've finished around 20-22 seconds of animation. So it'll only take another thousand or so years before its done for real!

Hope you're all having a great summer and don't live in England, where there are race riots going on in all the major cities because the sweeping tide of facism is being amplified by the media and our left-in-name-only government refuses to do anything except expell its on members who vote in favour of repealling the two child benefit limit that would lift 330,000 children out of poverty (we miss you so much, Zara). And BBC news has decided to describe the islamophobic mobs burning cars and storefronts as "alt right protesters" instead of "fascists", because apparently being apolitical means watching white supremacists straight up torch shit and using less loaded language then they did for the peaceful protests against genocide only months ago.

But you know how it is. When human rights are under attack, what do we do? Stand up fight back! This was my favourite call/response in the crowd at the demo against Brighton Pride (who had genocide enablers and transphobes in the parade this year). I am a little salty that all my mates bailed to go to the pub and I had to go it alone, but we had fun afterwards so it's cool.

Other News:

-Still behind on all my existing art stuff (comix rewrites, the big print piece, etc.)

-Still ignoring all the extremely important admin stuff I need to do for cons and grant applications and zine/sticker reprints (the terrors, they exist) -- if anyone has advice on how the manage that side of things pls hmu because I simply do not understand how it works

-Have not yet broken anything while skateboarding so far. Me and Joe only fell over ONCE on Brighton Pride (and we were REALLY drunk) -- I also painted the underside of my board to hold up for the protest and it looks SICK and they showed me how to fix turning with a skatetool (thanks Joe!)

-I bought 28 ex-library books since our branch is going into refurb and they're all massive art books for research for a big graphic novel project I'm super excited to get started on (but it's gotta be next year because I have to write my dissertation on Kazuo Ishaguro first)

-Mega Man Legends 2 goes ridiculously hard, shoutouts to ViciousVictory for the rec

Anyway keep it 100, friends!!!!! slayslayslay also pls give me anime recs UwU UwU xoxoxxoxo

sharpie marker bc i meant to hold it up say anything style while picketing croydon pride this weekend (arms dealers should not sponsor pride uwu uwu) but i missed the parade because it arrived at 4pm instead of 12 SO I GUESS INSTEAD IM GONNA HAVE TO USE TO BREAK MY STOOPID BODY AN THAT!

honestly this is probably the best deal ive ever got on anything before besides that time adrian traded me his most busted up bass guitar for a dominos pizza. the pizza bass served me on many a basement show even though i had to restring it to be left handed. hopefully this board will do the same (and not immediately split in half the moment i try to turn on it).

i broke my arm going real fast on heelys last year down the disabled ramp at work (sorry jenny) so with any luck i can get a really funny zine or comic out of this experience xoxoxoxoxo

hope ur all good too friends, keep doing what you love

if this is my last blog post then its probably because i'm in heaven with tony hawk and evel knievel serving uwu dangerman elaganza realness after a stupid fall (or else i forgot my password again uwuwuwu oxoxoxoxoxxo keep it REAL folx!!!)

Rise and slay besties!!!

Hope life as a weekend warrior is keeping you well, remember to look pretty and do as little as possible on your day job to conserve energy for the legacy of the wizard (making dumb goofy shit on the internet to impress your friends). Remember: it isn't weaponised incompetence if you convince your colleagues to ALSO skive off and play Half Life on the staff PCs with PSX2 and rebind for mouse controls. It is, in fact, praxis. Our union elders fought and died for us to be able to screw around on shift for min-wage in between helping out members of the public and shit talking upper-management.

COOL WIZARD SHIT IN THE PRIORITY OVEN AT THE MO:

• Prepping for vocal pickups with Malmi on Sunday with Rockstar Wives Letters. Also finishing up a rewrite of a song in A phygrian that's kinda Fugazi coded and half-demoed. I fucked up the stems and now I gotta unfuck it but most of my mixing takes place on my lunch hour at work which is where I'm writing this blog right now :):)))))
• Setting up distro for the latest record on my solo project, Screed. The album is called New Essays In Criticism and Research, and it's mostly old songs from 2019-2022 including a couple of way harder tracks that I'm real excited to share.
• Art practice so I can draw real good for this graphic novel pitch I'm working on that's a kind of coming of age dramedy / parallel worlds English folklore adventure story. Think Labyrinth meets Jonathon Strange and Mr. Norrell by way of Giant Days. This definitely won't be done until I've finished my thesis on Kazuo Ishiguro next year but it's shaping up cool and I visited Wales this month to research castles for it. Hopefully eventually I'll get funding for it!
• Spotty work here and there on a middle grade illustrated book called ONE THOUSAND AND ONE CAT SANDWICH!!, which hopefully I can get done before academia consumes my life once more.
• Not getting fired for being a constant liability and reading manga at the desk.
• Fixing my Nintendo Switch which I bricked tryna get it to remote stream Baulder's Gate 3 from my brother's PC to the work wi-fi.
• Sending a really overdue email to an artist friend I really respect for advice on how to get your shit together and deal with art career stuff professionally.
• Everyday UwUwizard art, plus finishing off some comics that have been in the shop too long.
• Finishing a long overdue 5 year anniversary peice for me and husbundo that I'm 2/5 of the way there on.
• Destroying emo gatekeepers.

In other news, I keep projectile vomiting for some reason and had a manic episode at 6AM yesterday and impulse bought a hardmodded PS1 on eBay for more money than librarians should sensibly be able to spend uwu uwu.

Someone pls recommend me some games with impeccable vibes?