Author: Kevin

Apologies for going dark on the whole website/comic thing for so long! I just didn’t want to force anything out that I wasn’t happy with and was determined to just take my time getting things sorted so I could continue on better footing. Along with that I was resolving some IRL nonsense and got back into a consistent physical therapy schedule. Last month at my doctor’s visit I ended up being rather dangerously underweight. Every month I’ve been dropping a few pounds and at that appointment I weighed in at 101lbs…. I’m short, yes, but a healthy weight for me is 125-130lbs. Being in pain you tend to forget to eat, when you forget to eat you get tired, and when you’re tired you don’t wanna exercise… which leads to increased pain in my situation. It’s a vicious circle that you gotta fight against, and while it was a rough couple of weeks forcing myself to eat and exercise more, I’m finally starting to see the results. 

After a couple of years, I’m starting to actually walk better too! What was long accepted as my “new normal” after my heart issue, walking like fricken Jack Sparrow, has started to improve with a focus on improving my gait with low impact exercises in the pool. Starting to feel okay again and for the first time in a long time I’m optimistic about improving. As I’m writing this I’m getting ready to go to the gym in a bit. I don’t wanna go, but I know it’s good for me. Ugh.

Anyway as a result of this, I’m able to put in more effort into my comic/website. For the past couple of years, I’ve just used what little strength I had to chip away at comics/art little by little, but now I’m feeling like I can finally take a step forward to fully get things operational here. I worked on a ton of comics at once and focused on getting a more consistent art style between them that I could build upon. Feel pretty good about how they turned out and I feel ready to move forward from here. 

Worked on a bunch of pages simultaneously while jumping between them and periodically updating a document of them all next to each other. It really helped with the writing and making the art more consistent.

Unfortunately, I can’t promise any update schedules beyond this, but I do intend to upload frequently here. At the very least you should see “rambly” posts with little scribbles peppered in, and meanwhile, I’ll try to get a new comic page up when I can. The Driving Nowhere comic is more of a ‘big picture’ pet project that I intend to work on for a while.

Maybe I’ll have 50-page “volumes” that I’ll self-publish eventually… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I actually really like working on multiple comics at once instead of one at a time like before. Lets me sorta walk away and come back to pages with a fresh set of eyes, while also smoothing out the art/writing. I don’t waste time struggling with certain things when I allow myself to work on something else if I ever feel stuck. Usually whatever issue I encounter becomes much easier to solve when I let myself disconnect from it for a bit. I’ll prolly cut down on how many I work on at once, but I can see myself working on four or five at a time from this point forward.

   So… yeah. Forcing myself into a schedule I can’t physically manage would just result in compromised work that I’d regret. Instead of doing that, I’ll just have my rambly posts with scribbles peppered in as regular content, and the comics will be a bonus!

…watch me fail at this too and go dark again for a few years..

-K

So I randomly ended up watching ‘The Aviator’ again. Found myself in a Wikipedia binge on Howard Hughes and felt like watching the movie. My review: Pretty dang good! Alan Alda is a delight, but I gotta say that Decappytoad fella might just be a pretty okay actor. Funny how indifferent I was to him growing up…

I’m old enough to recall the Leo Fever at my school in the late 90s. One of our classes even watched that bizarre Romeo & Juliet adaption he was in, not that anybody complained. Roll that little TV cart out and you could screen anything to rave reviews if it meant avoiding a math quiz… Thinking back I honestly think our teacher just didn’t feel like teaching that day and rented the movie more for herself. We were nine.

…

Well anyway, between that movie and Titanic following, Leo Fever was at its peak. As a guy, Titanic is an unpleasant horror flick. So outside of that French girl scene, I didn’t care much for it. At the time I considered Batman & Robin as clearly the superior film. 

I quickly realized the girls I was starting-to-sorta-be-interested-in damn near WORSHIPPED Leo Decapricorn. I remember them carrying actual physical pictures, likely cut out from magazines (for Gen Z twerps: imagine the internet printed out on dead trees and mailed to your house every month),  and spontaneously squealing in a register that frightened canines when exchanging their treasured images of teen heartthrobs. 

It was certainly a strange thing to witness, but shortly after that ‘The Mummy’ came out and I finally understood where they were coming from…

-K

…So… I figured… I have opinions. I have this space. I could put my opinions on this space. So instead of cluttering whatever social media platform I use or worse: Ranting about some obscure subject to some poor uninterested soul in person… I can drag my soapbox over here and vomit whatever comes to mind into the cold dark void of the internet.

Yes I know, I’m starting off my rambling here a tad bit controversial, but I’m just as likely to drone on about the history of the spork. I’m treating this space as a sort of ‘junk drawer’ of whatever thoughts come to mind. Feel free to ignore and look at the pretty pictures. I’m also rethinking how I illustrate my comic. As crazy pathetic as it appears from the outside: Driving Nowhere is my focus and it’s important to me that I keep chipping away at this thing…

Anyway back to my soapbox:

I’m social media neutral, so I generally just ignore whatever drama is going on and go wherever the people are. Me whining about whatever dumb shit some billionaire says solves nothing. I’ll leave when the platform starts to suck. And believe me, I never wanted Twitter to fail. I joined super early (thanks Diggnation for the tip in early 2008 lol) and landed the handle @kevinmoulton. I actually had a few people offer me money for it. 😂

Twitter or “X” has seemingly been infested by bots recently (which is hilariously ironic considering the claims before…) and half the feed basically shoves certain individuals down your throat through an incompetent algorithm that makes hiding/muting irrelevant. I’m not a conspiracy theorist, it’s just obvious that half of the feed Twitter/X spits out is actively pushing controversial figures to rage bait users. And it works. Well. Worked. Until a competitor showed up that appears to do everything better for advertisers and the casual user.

Instagram, for all its faults, has a good algorithm. Your feed eventually settles into just the sorta things you want to see. And yes, that includes products you may be interested in. Now don’t get me wrong.. I’m sure I gave permission to Zuck’s AI to track my sleep and listen to my inner thoughts through 5G microchips snuck into my McNuggets by the deep state collaborator Ronald McDonald already, but if that means I don’t have to see some douchebag rant about qanon despite repeatedly muting/hiding them… okay. Have you tried the Oreo McFlurry™, it’s pretty good-… wait what was I talking about…? oh right social media.

Same energy towards Threads as me not wanting to know how hot dogs are made. I’m okay pretending everything is great. I don’t need to know the details about acceptable amounts of rat content per hoagie. Keep it pleasant and I’ll happily play along. Similar to there being other food than just hot dogs, there are other websites than Threads/Twitter/X. I can post whatever the hell I want on my website here… if it’s legal in my country. If you truly are afraid of being ‘silenced’, then you’re either overly paranoid or using social media in a dumbass stockholm syndrome way. 

And yet… at this point, I feel like I’m in social media limbo. I have zero confidence in “X” and only spend about thirty seconds a day to see what’s “trending” before the nausea of what that platform has become sets in. “Threads” is taking a bizarre amount of time to implement essential features like hashtags/trending/search, and the longer they take to do so the less likely they are to take the easiest W in history. If I was an investor at Meta I’d be SCREAMING at them to be faster. All the other alternatives are either crap or too niche for me to bother. Meh.

In a weird way, I’m kind of enjoying the lack of certainty. It’s almost a return to how the internet was before social media. Back when the expectations of a single general platform weren’t really a thing… Suddenly it’s cool to have your own website again! 

If you’re a millennial you already have experience with social media platforms coming and going. I understand this is a new concept to generations before and after us… but I assure you that everything will be okay. 

And if you simply cannot part with that tinfoil hat… get a VPN. Don’t put any one platform/publisher/journalist/pundit/celebrity on a pedestal—even people you like.

Hell, don’t put ME on a pedestal–

–…what am I doing. I can probably make money grifting frightened people desperate for answers from a confident asshole… uhhh. Send me cash and I’ll tell you what to think. You like that? Bitch. The voices in your head are real.

-K