I doodled this back in the day when Neopets was still good, because there were a few editions of the Neopian Times editorial where the editor decided to have some fun and let site characters King Jazan and Hanso answer player-submitted questions... much to their consternation. It was hilarious.

I've actually written multiple Neopian Times short stories about the misadventures of the long-suffering Jazan and the Ixi thieves who keep him on his toes (i.e. both Hanso and his wife Nabile). I haven't been putting them on this site because I wanted to keep focused on my main Neopian Times cast, but maybe I'll add them to the collection someday.

I also wrote an NT short story that's a series of correspondences between a desperately penitent Jazan and a very vindictive Princess Amira, in which she makes his life miserable as politely as possible and he tries very hard to be diplomatic about it. It's got a Jane Austen-esque vibe to it and I had a lot of fun writing it, so I'll have to post it here eventually.

(To be clear, I like Jazan; I thought he had a really interesting character arc in the Lost Desert plot and I loved further developments of his character in subsequent plotlines. His high-strung personality and complicated relationships with other characters just make him really amusing to write situational comedy about.)

I doodled this to commemorate the end of the Cassini-Huygens mission back in 2017.* Cassini-Huygens was one of the big planetary exploration missions going on when I started following space stuff more closely in college**, and I really enjoyed keeping up with the plucky probe's adventures around the Saturn system over the years, until it was finally time to say goodbye (and did it ever go out in grand fashion).

Here's hoping we get missions like this for the ice giants one day!

*If you take a look at the sidebar, you'll notice that I started this blog in 2017. But I didn't put this illustration up then, because Cassini-Huygens ended in September of that year, and I didn't start this blog until October. It narrowly missed out on being one of my first posts, I guess.

*I have been a space geek since I could read, but the proliferation of social media around the time I was in college made space news more accessible, so that's when I really started paying attention to things that were going on in space as they were happening, not just reading about them years after the fact. Plus, as a teenager, I was unfortunately distracted from science by stuff like too many video games, bad friendships, and just trying to survive high school.

Something sort of abstract that I painted in college, purely out of the relief of getting through a really intensive month-long summer mathematics course that left me with no time for art.

 This isn't really supposed to represent anything in particular or have a story behind it; my being a paleontology geek has just left me with an unusual fascination with skulls (but less in a goth way and more in a nature-is-amazing way).

Incidentally, I suffered a major health breakdown a couple of months after that class, and I don't think those two things were unrelated. Take care of yourself, folks--there's no use earning a fancy college degree if you die in the process.

I've been rooting around my hard drive and I found more old artwork that wasn't terrible, so I thought I'd go ahead and share it here.

First up, some rare Digimon fanart. I didn't care much for Davis when 02 was first airing, but as an adult he's grown on me because he's just so ridiculous. Veemon is an absolute cinnamon roll and I'd love to have him as my Digimon partner (I could really use his upbeat enthusiasm and unconditional friendliness on days when I'm an anxious mess).

This picture in particular was inspired by the third Digimon movie (i.e. the last part of the amalgamated Digimon: The Movie that was released in the West), which had a definite vibe to it. It was surreal and weird and the animation was totally different to the TV series, and I just loved the evocative setting of the characters traveling through the American West, the plot culminating in the rolling fields of southern Colorado in the summer. Also, although the film didn't really try to be all that deep, it had some good messages about the value of friendship and that yes, letting people into your life and letting them help you can be terrifying, but true friends are worth taking a chance on.

It was like a road film if you replaced the cars with Digimon, and I feel like it took the franchise and its storytelling in a new and unique direction. I also have nostalgic memories of watching Digimon: The Movie during a sleepover at a friend's house in junior high (that was back in ye olden times when you rented VHS cassettes from Blockbuster). 

I've been on a My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic kick lately, so of course I had to draw myself as a pony.

 I swear Twilight Sparkle is my actual spirit animal, and one of the reasons why I enjoy MLP:FiM so much is because fiction needed more egghead heroines who save the day through research, overthink everything, and have friends who help them get out of their own head and live a more balanced life.

I'd love to get my 7-year-old niece into FiM, but right now she's too busy obsessing over The Nightmare Before Christmas, zombies, and mummies. She's every bit as terrifying as her cousin in her own unique way.

 This didn't actually happen while we were playing, but in my headcanon this is how these two met. I thought this would be a fitting sendoff for this comic series. For now, I've got other projects to work on... until my niece decides she wants to play through Tears of the Kingdom. 

 Well, we finally finished the game*. It took us nearly a year (silly school getting in the way of video games), but it was a fun ride and I'm glad I got to come along. These comics also gave me a fun project to work on, so I'm grateful for that. It was nice to flex my cartooning muscles(?) a bit.

Ironically, my niece had been badgering my sister for weeks to just go fight Ganon already. And then this happened. (My sister said, "Do you want me to wait for you?" "No. (leaves the room)")

My sister and niece have started (re)playing Ocarina of Time and I've been watching, but I'm not sure I'm going to draw any comics about that, because a big part of what inspired these BotW comics was the sheer spontaneity of my sister and niece experiencing that game for the first time, my sister having no idea what she was doing (I coached her when she needed it, don't worry), and my niece being totally ridiculous the whole time. When we play OoT, it's more my niece eating snacks while my sister and I reminisce about when we thought N64 graphics were the most amazing thing we'd ever seen. Still fun, but it just doesn't quite fire my creativity the way BotW with them did.

That said, I think we're going to have a lot of fun with Tears of the Kingdom when they get around to playing that.

*Sort of. We freed all the Divine Beasts, beat Ganon, and completed a lot of the Ancient Shrines and some of the side quests. I wanted to take them through all the Shrines and side quests, but my niece's attention span only goes so far and I think they were ready to move on.