These aren’t in sequence

Fuck’s sake

What?

‘Bitch is crazy’.You tell em Sherman.

I learned my lesson with ebay years ago, if I see something I want but know it’s a bit silly or expensive I just save the photo. And that does it for me. Now I have thousands of photos instead of thousands of toys.

Same when I see dodgy toys in a shop. I just take a picture of them instead of buying it. I used to have a massive collection of counterfeit and knock off gems but I realised it was gay and just a hassle every time I move.

Witness the shitness.

A weird cash in on Kung Fu Panda complete with weapons and Kill Bill tracksuit. Check out Fustar, an Irish blog thats actually good and featuring lots of shitty poundshop toys

Started on the new Amperduke story and it’s coming along nicely. Helped greatly by the fact that I actually draw the characters now. Man there’s some ropey art in the book! I’ve changed Mrs Amperduke to look more real. In the book she looks like a fawning old nanny. In the new story she’s angry with Mr A for smoking on the sly and freaks out a few times.

I copied her hair from Martha Stewart. I’d dog her out of it.

There’s something about a woman raising her voice that triggers an innate kink we all have about being kids and in trouble. Stern made a good point about this when Hilary Clinton was running for office last year, once she started shouting at rallies it turned men off her.

My Mam had a roar. “ROBERT!!!!”. I vividly recall watching Thundercats one day and she yelps my name and it made me so angry, I didn’t feel the terror that day, it just annoyed me. I left the cartoon and plodded into the kitchen and she was deflated that I wasn’t scared. So she scalded my neck with gravy. Snarf.

Opted to practice colouring on Friday night instead of playing that awful video game. It’s good but to the trained eye you can see where I mess up and all the amateur mistakes.. The values are all wrong, I should have painted it in greyscale first because the blacks aren’t consistent. See the sickeningly detailed version here

I began work on a new Amperduke story over the weekend and it’s a gem. Lot’s of posts this week!

Been messing around with skin the past two weeks to try improve my caricatures. I have a new method that’s really quick to do and looks good.

Some makey up face

A wedding one in progress

The maniacal leer of my esteemed colleague Mr. P. I’m doing a family portrait for him.

I still struggle with digital painting. There’s just too many options! Figuring out how to apply tones and colours to my comics was a breakthrough though. Below is my first ‘coloured’ page done with Corel Photopaint 6 back in 1998. Man half of Amperduke and all the MBLEH’s were coloured in Photopaint with a mouse! If you’re anyway serious about messing with colour you need a Wacom.

Beautiful

We’re all going to hell for watching this but at least we’ll be laffin!

On every street in Tallaght there is a kid like this that gets buzzed off by lads in a Micra. I’ve been both the kid and the cameraman.

I’ve been sleeping terribly all month. I couldn’t figure out if it was too much coffee, too much water/not enough water, too much dope or the fact that I just miss my girlfriend’s legs draped over me. She’s gone for 3 weeks and it’s not the Ferris Bueller fun fest I thought it would be. I’ve realised I need her to tell me when to eat and when to go to bed. I’m a shambling, masturbating mess now.

So this week I decided to try figure out what’s stopping me from sleeping by changing something different in my day. Last night I only woke up once. I only had one coffee yesterday and drank lots of water but the real secret is this:

Sleep INSIDE your blanky.

Yep, open up your duvet cover and climb in. It’s like being inside a toastie sandwich, it’s fucking brill! I used to do it years ago but forgot about it. Give it a go. You’ll love it. I sure did. I’m biting my tongue here from telling a story about me sleeping inside my duvet lest it offend all involved. Let’s just say one night I was sleeping inside my blanky and Blank and Blank tried to Blank it blankily.

I’m full of energy today. I woke up doing the Charlston

I always wake up at 04:52. It must mean something

What a wasters weekend. Did nothing. Drew for about 4 hours and then did nothing. Pulled my pud, drank cans, smoked ropey hash and played XCom: Terror from the Deep.

My bro got me Left for Dead on the PC. Check it out. Zombie madness.

Now you’d think this would hold my attention. It looks great but it gets repetitive. On exiting the game I get a pop-up promoting the Xcom games for 5Euro each and next thing I know I’m typing in my credit card details.

I played that game on our old 386 back in 1995. That was the Summer I had to go to the doctor about the lump on my balls. It turned out not be a tumour but a bruise from jumping down the stairs. When I got the ok I tore the handle out of myself. My load was scalding. I played that dopey Xcom game everyday and the weeks just fell off the calendar. But there was a glitch in the copied version and I couldn’t finish it. I bought it on the PS1 and there was glitch in that too!

So now I have it again and I can’t leave it alone. I’ve been feeling tremendous guilt. But it struck me this morning that although the graphics are gay, the gameplay is great. Whereas Left 4 Dead looks smashing but doesn’t engage you. I suppose its like comparing a snazzy dressed up version of Ludo to a cheapo chess set.

But why play games that annoy you? Xcom pisses me off every time I play it and makes me feel disgusted with myself. It’s like the time I fell asleep with a kebab in my bed.

Theres a kind of humour that I’ve sort of grown out of. The broad, quirky self deprecating type that most people find amusing like admitting to wanking to Smurfette. Its funny in the way Joey and Chandler were funny but this story isn’t about that.

This is a story that has hounded me and when I tell it it gets a laugh but I’m serious when I say it has plagued me. I have woken up at 4am and replayed it over and over again wondering just what happened.

As a kid, around 7 or 8 we went to Butlins. Somewhere in the UK. I have no idea where because as a kid you’re not going to England; you’re going to Butlins. Same way as a child when an adult would ask me where I’m from I’d say ‘Ireland’ when the answer they wanted was Tallaght or Dublin. You have no idea about the scope of geography.

For those who don’t know, Butlins is/was a holiday camp for middle to working class families where the parents could sit themselves down in the huge drinking hall and be free from the kids except for the regular returning to get another pound coin for the arcade. I loved it. That summer I discovered Pac Land . Having played Pacman for years I just couldn’t believe how wonderful this new game was. They also had a huge swimming pool with windows in the sides, facing the drinking hall so if the parents bothered to turn their heads they’d see their blue faced kids pounding on the glass trying to get a wave.

There were loads of activities all overseen by The Kids club. Which thinking about it now had to be ran by teenagers. ‘Bubbly and outgoing guys and girls needed for child friendly holiday resort’. They laid on lots of things to do, arts and crafts, races and the like. It was fun but I’ll always remember the complete downer of being told sit down at a desk in what looked like a classroom on my summer holidays. ‘This isn’t a shower….it’s a fucking gas chamber!’

They paired you up with other kids. I went on my own one day and got matched up with some English kid. We talked the way kids do in awkward spurts and disjointed ramblings about He-Man and football stickers. I remember thinking he was a square because he never saw an ice pop stick sharpened down to a point by rubbing it on a kerb. I always had one tucked in my sock in case things got messy.

So this days activity was a ‘treasure hunt’. You were given a photocopied sheet, no it was actually spirit print, those cheap but fun purple copies. I remember my school start using them and we all knew it was a cost saving measure. The items we had to find were….

I knew I was going to win. I can’t remember the prize, I think it was a pencil and a can of Coke but I wanted to win. A treasure hunt. I’d be the number one treasure finder. As we filed out calmly I noticed there were kids who were much older and taller than me, they must have been at the age between being a kid and a teenager and weren’t having fun or not admitting to it. I remember the last family holiday I went on when I was 15 and we all realised it was over. I couldn’t sit and drink Fanta. That was the time I shot my goo into my eye in the shower down in Tramore.

So we’re filing out calmly, me feigning disinterest and then darting off in the opposite direction from where around 12 kids where being led by the Leaders on a group treasure hunt the fucking losers. How could they win if they’re searching in a group? My ‘friend’ said we should go with the group and I told him we’d have better luck going the complete opposite direction and he still hesitated. He must have remembered the shiv in my sock because soon he was foraging with me.

We found three of the items immediately, a match, a pebble and a cigarette butt. We still needed a flower and a bottle top. We searched all over the place, grabbed a doozy of a flower from some display but couldn’t find a bottle top. I was getting agitated. What was the time limit? How long had we been gone for? I searched like a lunatic in a bin as he looked on worried. And then it hit me. I had to play dirty.

I had money and there was a Supermarket within the resort so I’d just buy a bottle, drink it and then present our haul and bag the prize. I remember the two us looking very guilty and nervous as we approached the checkout thinking that the Kids Club had issued an APB banning all kid from buying drinks in case of cheating. I’d go on to feel that exact same terror countless times in my teens as I tried to buy alcohol in Super Valu. It went smoothly and we left with a gaudy two litre of some cheapo Orange drink like Fanta. It had two colour printing on the label. It was cheap. I started chugging it. Frantically.

I passed it to him and he took a timid sip, I could tell he felt like he was breaking 100 laws that day. He passed it back and I lashed into it again but it hardly made a dent in the thing. I don’t remember if I demanded he drink it or if he was trying to end this sordid affair as quickly as possible but suddenly he was gulping it down like it was the antidote.

And this image is ingrained in my head. His face red and his eyes watering, either from the cheap fizz or the awfulness of the situation.

We ended up pouring it down a shore. We ran back to the clubhouse at full speed. I siezed him just before we crested the corner. “WAIT!!” I yelped. And I dropped the bottle top on the ground and stomped on it. “It looked too new”. He wasn’t impressed and I was digusted. I could imagine his dopey life, his scalextric packed neatly under his bed, his undoodled copy books and when he was a teenager his Ma wouldn’t let him put posters on his wall and he’d grow up to play pitch and putt. I hated him the little sap.

The clubhouse was closed. We waited a while in silence. He wanted to go. I told him to wait. We waited. But then he left. Fine, I thought. Fuck him. I’d get all the glory. The lone crusader.

But nobody came. It felt like an eternity. It was.

Was I far too early or far too late? Had we collected the items in record time or spent far too long on the bottle top? I looked at the grubby treasures in one hand and the 50p in the other and decided to leave for a game of Pac Land.

It bugged me for the rest of the holiday. Was I too early or was I too late? Had my dishonesty made me win or lose spectacularly? And it bugged me for the rest of the Summer. Then the rest of the year. Then the year after that. Was I too early or was I too late?

And for the rest of my life. I lie awake and mull over the things in my life and the kinks in my past and it’s usually the first thing that comes to mind. Again and again. You can laugh but these are the words of a tortured soul.

Man this one is a keeper. Awful, hilarious and silly in equal measures.

There’s a dude at about 02:50 that cracks me up.