Orange Cartoon Cat
Not that one, the other one.
Hello Gorgeous!
I’ll be back on Twitch and YouTube tonight at 7pm Central Sock Standard Clock Time, hope to see you there.
Last Wednesday I was on TheRustyPandaa’s stream Wiki Wednesday. We talked about lava lamps, Halloween, and lots of other stuff. Here’s the replay if you missed it or want to relive the magic.
Heathcliff
I’ve been seeing a bunch of Heathcliff comics lately. Here’s one for example.
They are mostly one-panel comics, and they don’t really make a lot of sense. When I first saw them, I wondered if someone just started doing weird comics based on an old character for clicks. Or maybe there was an inside joke I was missing out on.
But after a little Google-Fu, it turns out that since Peter Gallagher took over the comic in the late 90s, he just does what he wants. So, I went from not really liking them to liking them a lot. I even tried my own version of it.
It’s actually really freeing. Comics like Garfield, Peanuts, Family Circus, all those newspaper daily comic strip gimmicks, aren’t really laugh out loud funny. (Unless you're this guy) At best, you might get a hearty chuckle. But when you throw out the basic expectations, you can get weird in a good way.
There’s a fine line between nonsense slop (like most stuff written by AI) and just weird stuff that’s weird but still worth looking at. Heathcliff pushes the boundaries. But like all good art it makes you think. People don’t like to be out of the loop, so sometimes your brain will try to work overtime to figure out what the heck you’re looking at. Turns out its just silliness. Hilarious? Not really. Whimsical? You bet your boots!
And BOY HOWDY do I love whimsy.
I have a kind of perfectionism that will convince me that what I made isn’t good enough unless it’s completely groundbreaking and original and will be written about in history books 100s of years from now. That’s ridiculous of course, but it does stop me from doing a bunch of stuff. Things like Heathcliff give me the confidence to just make something and move on. Now, will I actually do more things? Probably not.
My brain is convinced that the safest thing to do is nothing. If you hide in a corner, nobody will tell you your stuff sucks, cause you didn’t do anything. But that’s not a great way to be.
Anyway, I just wanted to talk about the Other Orange Cat (who actually came first) for a little bit.
Maybe you can join me on Twitch tonight and watch me try to make you, and myself, giggle a little.
