Being a flibbertigibbet

and embracing the clunk

The short stories continue. I’m not sending them out as individual newsletters for now, so as not to bombard you, but collating them, alongside Teresa’s stories in here:

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So, being a flibbertigibbet, etc.

Summer time for me is usually either ON or OFF, that is, I’m either working full tilt, or nobody needs me for anything and it goes quiet for a couple of months. So far, this summer seems to be an OFF one so I’m spending my days making stuff, trying stuff and thinking about how to survive the AI nonsense.

Part of my personal fight against AI and its fake ugly overly clean lines, horrible colouring, and too many muscly effeminate elven princes (yes, too much time spent on the internet, where the algorithm thinks I’m interested in romantasy, when I’m actually just rubbernecking the car crash that is the new and, frankly, weird idea that everyone is entitled to be a published author and to have to an illustrated book cover for free or cheap, plus “character art” whatever the hell that is¹… I digress) is by embracing the clunk in me and making silly, messy, clunky things that AI could never make (until maybe this September, when it has learned quirk, whimsy, nonsense, gobshitedness, and clunk, but hey, let’s enjoy this brief window where it can’t do those things).

I have a day drawing on real paper, then a day animating, then a day panicking and thinking I need to redo my website with a dead flashy showreel of motion graphics, then a day spent on my film, then a day writing the novel I started last year and of which I just had a radical rethink, then a day doing all of those things and getting absolutely nothing actually done.

This last week I made a bunch of things just to make me happy.

This is the title sequence for an imaginary documentary that I will imaginarily make, about the fetishisation of Portugal, all the oooh, Portugal is so pretty, tiley, fado-y, sardiney and cute bullshit. Need to speak to the telly bods.

This is a reworking of a test animation I made last year-ish, but this time with some people in bird suits. I like making endless loops in as few frames as possible. This one is about 50 frames, I think. I also like people in bird suits. I can’t explain it. No, come to think of it, I can. A person in a bird suit is unreadable into. If I put a person not in a bird suit there, there are decisions to make that I can’t be bothered to think about: sex, age, race, époque, costume, class, demeanour, ugly, pretty, shoes… oh god, the list is endless. Better to make a person in a bird suit.

Sometimes, I sit in front of the World Cup and pretend to be watching, while I am in fact just drawing more silly bird animations on my iPad.

On the subject of bird suits, I dug this little story in ten pictures out of the archives. Your guess is as good as mine:

Birdie

And this fella, a grumpy chicken with a bob, I think?

Then there’s this chap, a bird in a bird suit, from a drawing I was drawing yesterday and hopefully won’t have destroyed by the end of today. I destroyed a couple of otherwise lovely drawings yesterday by not being SENSIBLE and going too fast (now, there’s a chronicle for another day, entitled ‘SLOW THE HELL DOWN, LUCY’).

I was feeling sorry for the rest of Europe last week with its heatwave so, during another football match, I made this to help cool everyone down. The heatwave is coming back our way this week, so I’ll be rolling it out again for us in Iberia. By Wednesday, I might be holed up in the bedroom, where I have finally put a portable AC unit. Every time there’s a heatwave, all the ACs sell out and I forget about it for another year. I finally got there in time, after a the telly news was promising a week of 50ºC a couple of weeks ago and I was having none of it. In the end, the weather was having none of it, either, and we’ve had a couple of weeks of glorious 25ºC days instead. However, the mid forties are being threatened again for this coming week. So, here’s some visual AC.

AND FINALLY, here’s today’s short story:

The Portuguese habit of staring and how it resulted in my being crushed

You can find all the short stories so far in here:

1. character art for novels, that is. Character art used to mean the workings for a character that was to be animated. Gosh darn these modern people changing the meanings of stuff all the time. RENDER is another one. People are calling painting (digitally) RENDERING. THAT IS NOT RENDERING. IT IS PAINTING. God, I’m shouting in the footnotes now. I really have to stop looking at social media.