DADA ISSUES
According to last month’s poll, 77% of you want to receive me monthly: so be it. For the remaining 184% I made a Telegram channel where you can find my new drawings, cartoons, psychotic slavic memes, and other content. Once again, there are no likes or comments (although you can dm), just an indiscriminate feed of things. Hope it will help me to keep up a daily practice, instead of lying on various soft surfaces feeling morose.
So please sign up via @troutledger. Most of that stuff won’t be in this newsletter.
NOW LIGHTS OUT
And here’s my new short film, although it’s more of an animated monologue. Did it at the height of my ketamine infusions, which probably shows… A couple people asked about how that’s going—it definitely helps with all things suicidal/ptsd/etc, but can also take you to some very dark places in the process. Some parts of this story were clearly an attempt to revisit these dark places and lighten them up a bit.
Not happy with the character/animation (going to try a flatter approach moving on), but the whole uneven and chaotic process did inspire me to adopt a hard one-big-project-at-a-time rule, instead of scattering my attention and making middling things.
Earlier I read a book called the Mind is Flat, and it confirmed a lot of my suspicions—that subconscious creativity is a delusion, that we cannot multitask, that our minds have no depth whatsoever. I told myself: one main project, and some explorations/edits on the side, like the drawings and comics strewn around this post. Balancing personal work with work-work is bad enough—no need to dilute your brain even further.
Anyway. Thanks to Lije Morgan for helping with the rig and After Effects (check out his own animations, they are great). I initially did a little interview for him and Kohana Wilson (who is also great) on their podcast Boiled Over. I think I was just beginning to work on My Jeopardy, so I had no idea how wild it would get—thought it would just be a loop or something…
I remember telling them about this used Lego set that I was gifted as a child by our neighbors, who were one of the very few people to treat our refugee family with kindness. It was batshit complicated, with co-dependent pneumatic tubes and mechanisms and things. I’d get lost in it for hours. Decades later, playing around in Blender gives me the same feeling—it really is extraordinary, the thing they built, the fact that it’s free and open-source. Now we can all have a nice digital neighbor.
Lije & Kohana also have a lovely episode with Sarina Nihei, who is one of my favorite independent animators right now. I’d love to live in (or at least visit) her world—there’s something so comforting in all this violence and stilted movements. Her films reminds me of Jason—they both have a certain distinct rhythm that leaks into your real life.
Btw, the bit with the yellow balloons on Russian Wheel of Fortune is entirely real (lockdown filming measures). The dumpling bit is semi-real too, believe it or not (it was just one kind of dumpling (Siberian), but the flour dipping is one of the more haunting memories of my childhood). Yorkshire is fictional.
Also watch this ridiculously inventive short by Nata Metlukh. She’s so good at making the familiar feel strange, and there’s so much to take in. Her loops are also fantastic, especially if you’re familiar with all the technical stuff she’s referencing.
And I also really enjoyed Dan Britt’s Space Man shorts. Great style and humor. The glitchy tweening is such a nice touch. The bit with the crossword painting is my favorite. You can watch the whole collection via HBO, and there’s a few other notable Adult Swim shorts on it, too.
ANIMAL MATTERS
Lastly, our fatter cat has been peddling the automatic feeder tray all night, meowing in frustration at the semi-transparent cover, and generally being almost entirely dick. All it took for him to stop his reign of terror was hiding the feeder in a different room—he almost immediately calmed down and became all in all much more affectionate and reasonable.
It got me thinking that the key to contentment (to hell with happiness) is hiding your automatic feeders, be it social media, addictive substances, hot MILFs in your area, or other people’s opinions. Freedom from temptation, etc. Anyway, thanks for reading/watching—here’s one last stupid comic.