Woof, Way Back Machine is probably going to air my dirty laundry when it comes to the first few drafts of yesterday’s post. What eventually became a lovely short story about a viper and some vague remarks about my own emo-level torment (are emos still things? Or did they die out in the Scene Wars?) was initially quite dark. Makes sense since I was in a dark place.

I feel much better now. Instead of festering poison I just feel a bit of a void. I spent time with others I love. Opened up about what was hurting me. I hate opening up. If I were a can, I’d give you an uncomfortable glare while you pried open my lid with a can opener. No pull tab.

To quote me during my last physical, “Stay the Hell out of my can.”

But I feel calm now. I’ve lost a pillar, but the structure is holding. The structure needed renovation anyway. New pillars. Ones that weren’t going to inevitably collapse.

I am still sad. Makes sense. My Viper was a valuable friend. As I descended the mountain, they made the journey bearable. When given a choice between loneliness and misery with company, I usually choose loneliness. It’s more stable. Normal. It’s what I do best.

But I picked up the viper. I knew it would bite me eventually. No surprises when it did. What was surprising was how desperately I held onto it, even after the fangs struck. I wanted nothing more than to hold it close as it pumped poison into my soul.

It’s probably not healthy that I’ll gladly pick up the next viper I see. It’s not that I’ve learned nothing. I’ve learned plenty.

But at some point, I just need a little more venom in my life.

Not healthy, but neither are deep fried Twinkies. And I love deep fried Twinkies. The things that are worst for us are usually the most enjoyable. Delicious. Pleasurable. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.

Let’s do it again.

It’s a little past 2:00 a.m. Unbelievably exhausted yet unable to sleep. Just want to shout into a void for a bit.

There’s a story I’ve been reflecting on a lot lately. A man climbed a mountain and on his way down encountered a poisonous viper. “Would you please pick me up and take me to the foot of the mountain?” Asked the viper.

“No,” said the man, “Because I know you will bite me.”

“I promise I won’t bite you,” swore the viper, “I will have nothing but gratitude for your assistance.”

Eventually, the man gave in to the viper’s pleas. He picked it up and set it around his shoulders. During the journey down the mountain, they spoke at length, laughed, and intimately bonded. Along the way, the man found he was indescribably grateful for the viper’s company and wondered why he doubted it in the first place.

When they reached the foot of the mountain, the man paused, sad that the journey with his new friend was coming to a close. But did it have to? Perhaps the viper would want him to carry it further. Perhaps they could be together for the rest of their lives.

In a way, that wish was tragically met. As he opened his mouth to ask the viper if it wanted to travel further with him, the viper sunk its teeth into his neck. The poison pumped into his system, robbing him of all strength as he slumped to the earth.

The viper started to slither away. Bewildered, betrayed, and wounded, the man choked, “Why?”

The viper was confused by the question. “We’ve reached where I wanted to go,” it said, “This is where we part ways.”

“You promised,” the man gasped, feebly clutching at the bite marks in his neck.

Again, the viper was confused. What did its promises matter? It simply lived in accordance with its own nature. If anything, it was annoyed that the man had the gall to hold it to any higher standard. At the beginning the man said he knew the viper would bite him. Now that he was bitten, he was pretending to be surprised.

As the man’s life ebbed, the last words he heard were the viper saying, “You knew what I was when you picked me up.”

Unlike the man in the story, I will survive the poison from my viper. It burns now, but soon it will just be numb. A part of me will likely always be necrotized and blackened. Unfeeling, dead flesh. The rest of my body will move forward.

Alive. Unburdened. Alone.

I would like to think I’m a somewhat decent cartoonist. I’m humble enough to realize that there are some truly talented, hardworking people that make my work look like mere scribbles by comparison. I’ve spent years working out my style, learning how to draw digitally, and trying to pin down that elusive concept which is humor.

I also know that I’m some random dude on the internet that hasn’t been posting for very long and has posted very infrequently until lately. I’m not expecting a million customers at this early stage of my cartooning career. Still, I am absolutely dumbfounded how some social media accounts for cartoonists have thousands of followers and strong readership when their product is… subpar.

I know humor and art are subjective. I am not above criticism myself. I am grateful for the supporters I currently have. But if I am going to make cartooning a career, I need a much wider audience and customer base. If anything, it is humbling for me to accept that the comics I view as subpar reach further and connect with more people. They clearly have something I don’t.

And while envy is a poison to happiness, I would be a fool to enter into a business field and not observe trends and best practices. And here’s the thing: I am a decent cartoonist, but an absolute amateur when it comes to social media. Being an independent cartoonist goes so far beyond just drawing funny pictures. It’s about building communities. Getting exposure. Understanding algorithms.

Fortunately, I subscribe to a school of thought that I can do anything if I am willing to dedicate time to it. Social media is a skill. It can be observed, learned, and mastered. So that’s what I plan to do.

Well, let’s see if I got any better over 100 comics.

Kind of. I should go back to four panel comics on occasion. I’m also really glad I learned about Clip Studio Paint (CSP). Just looks so much better than what I could do in PhotoShop. (I don’t know if you’ve ever read The Immortal Think Tank, but it was actually Che Crawford who recommended I try out CSP. I’m so grateful they took the time to respond to my questions. Go check out their work.)

Also, I fully acknowledge that this is a weird comic to have at number 100. I didn’t want to interrupt a storyline to do a special issue. It is what it is.

I don’t know how many of my readers use this website and thus see these posts, but if you’re reading this, I am so incredibly grateful for your support. I hope I make you laugh on occasion.

100 down. Thousands to go.

This post is primarily an operational test for social media sharing.

Social media is kind of like my second chin: I’ve had it as long as I can remember, I kind of hate it yet can’t get rid of it, and I don’t know how it got to be so big.

Unfortunately, it seems essential for making this website an economic success. I’m trying to figure out how to effectively use it and feel like I’m stepping into a strange alien world. It’s weird and a little nerve wracking, but every day I learn something new.

Perhaps one day I’ll even achieve the lofty heights of being an “influencer.”

Though I still get a little confused over what influencers are. As far as I can tell, they are famous yet useless people that just kind of exist in the public eye and go to conventions when they’re not busy posting videos of them reacting to something someone else made.

Kind of like a leech, but one you want attached to you because so many people are watching it feed.

Laundry is a hassle. You need to wear clothes outside so the police man doesn’t stop you and give you a hard time. Worse yet, there’s a social expectation that your clothes shouldn’t smell like an old sewer filled with curdled yoghurt and the intestines of goats with extremely poor diets. In order to keep your beloved friends and strangers safe from puking due to your rancid husk wandering the streets, you need clean clothing.

And so laundry was invented, probably sometime in the 1600’s. Don’t fact check me. But like the invention of the car created global warming and the invention of cheeseburgers created the American obesity epidemic, the invention of laundry created clean laundry. This usually hazardous byproduct consumes millions of collective man hours to fold and store.

Fortunately, I am here today to tell you about a method to keep your laundry relatively clean while also not wasting your life folding it and putting it on coat racks or something. This method is “Laundry Piles.”

Simply put, wear clothing until it is considered unsanitary to keep wearing it. Then, remove it from your corpulent frame and chuck it on the floor. Eventually, your reservoir of clean clothes will run low. As necessary, pick up some of the dirty laundry pile and chuck it into a washer. Place it on the “warm jeans” setting or whatever setting you want, dry it, and gather it up into a clean laundry ball.

Now this is when people usually screw up. They set the clean laundry somewhere and sit down for three hours folding it into squares. Worse yet, you can’t even effectively wear these squares. Then you have to put the squares into a box and take them out again later and make it stop being a square to wear it again.

Just take the ball of clean laundry and throw it on the ground. Even if you don’t clean the ground, all filth will be conveniently absorbed by the lowest layer of clothing, which you can just launder again once you reach the bottom of the pile. Throughout the week, just grab whatever clothing you want off the pile and throw it on! Once the clothes you’re wearing are disgusting again because you decided to use your stomach as a plate while eating ravioli or something, just remove them and throw them back into the dirty laundry pile.

Rinse and repeat. On the warm jeans setting.

All you have to do is make sure the two piles are far enough away to be distinct. If you forget which is which, just take something off the top of one and give it a quick sniff. That’ll probably tip you off.

You can even place slightly less horrible clothing on the edge of the dirty laundry pile to reuse in emergencies, since the edge of the pile is scientifically proven to only have 15% of odor from the rest of the pile.

Not only are laundry piles easy to use and set up, they have a multitude of uses:

Beds for pets.

Forts for children.

Emergency kindling.

Hiding places from home invaders.

Places to store your magical artifacts so dark wizards can’t steal them.

So stop folding your laundry today! You have better things to do and now you have a little more time to do them.

Oh, joy. Another year. Can’t wait to fill out the date on something and accidentally write 2022.

In 2007, I created a website called thepulloutcouch.com to post webcomics. I was something like 16 at the time and overestimated my artistic and comedic capabilities.

Greatly overestimated. (I also thought giant blocks of text, pink skin, horrible resolution, and a reference to the “gallon challenge” were all great things that would age well.)

This persisted throughout high school and college and resulted in 118 horrible comics. I then became a missionary and was separated from the world for two years, during which thepulloutcouch.com was unpublished and died like a unloved relative being taken off life support.

After the two years were finished, I returned to regular life and discovered that I was kind of a vastly different human being. So I started a new website and restarted the comics from scratch.

Which was a pretty good call. However, something unfortunate happened. I got a real job. It proceeded to consume my energy and soul for the next six years. It turns out it is very hard to draw funny pictures on the internet as a soulless husk. I was also incredibly lazy and inconsistent. Plus, I once again started to hate what I had written.

So here we are, 16 years later, writing yet another “first post.”

Can’t wait to end up in the same place in another 16 years.

Happy New Year.