Scribbles and Bits

This was the winner of the fan poll this month! This may well have been the first record of Feral Dumpster Rat, and the source of its name!

( images and context behind this cut... )

( ...and text-only transcript behind THIS cut! )

We're a Cyborg, and So am I
Series: Essay
Summary: "When I tell people I am a cyborg, they often ask if I have read Donna Haraway's 'A Cyborg Manifesto.' Of course I have read it. And I disagree with it. [...] The manifesto coopts cyborg identity while eliminating reference to disabled people on which the notion of the cyborg is premised. Disabled people who use tech to live are cyborgs. Our lives are not metaphors." --the Cyborg Jillian Weise, "Common Cyborg"
Word Count: 3100
Notes: Winner of the December 2024 fan poll by a landslide! If you want to support my work and help me keep uploading stuff, hit me up on LiberaPay or Patreon. Mentions of violence, ableism, and racism, but this isn't an intense essay.

Rogan: Our vessel became a cyborg when we were seventeen, more than half its lifetime ago. That was less than a year after my individual creation, so I have been a cyborg for basically all my life. My cyborginess is important to me, more so than the others here, because far as I know, I was the only one there for the whole process.

Mori: I'm working on the Madgic omnibus again, which means I had to make a cover for it! Here's what I've got so far...

I am truly floored that we apparently never uploaded this anywhere, but it was the winner of this month's fan poll, so we have uploaded...

Made of NOODLES!: 2016. Oh no! Sneak's arms are made of NOODLES! Very silly. 1 page. Script here.

This weekend was intense. But the listing for the paper version of Madgic #4 is up. $8 like the others.

Now to collapse and do nothing of importance for a bit.

EDIT: okay, I lied. Because there will likely be things needing taken care of, I decided to lurch ahead and upload the winners of this month's poll. And it was actually easier to just upload the ebook I made of EOZ for the Fitchburg Fandom Fest than it was to cut/paste and reformat it here.

So, with no further ado:

Embry, Olly, and Ziggy: my abortion story (by Rogan): This illustrated zine contains explicit violence, rape, incest, miscarriage, abortion and arguments thereof, teen pregnancy, disownment, hanging, a suicide attempt, and also consensual queer teenage sex. Reader discretion is advised. 16 pages. 2024. Alt-text built-in.

Boy Meats Girl: A zine about an abusive relationship, told overwhelmingly through collaged documents of the time: love letters, poetry, creative writing, photos, art, doctor's notes, etc. (The sole exceptions are written notes on the collaged pages, the Accord of 2004 strip, and the pages concerning the final confrontation.) As part of the process of making this zine, the originals were burned to create the final few pages. 32 pages, full color. Content Warnings: rape, vomit, strangulation, body horror, mental illness (specifically, PTSD and DID), headmate complicity in abuse, and endless whining. Script here.

Will update healthymultiplicity.com more properly later.

The Sins-of-Flesh Demon
Summary: Reverend Alpert meets a demon who just won't leave him alone. And she's friendly. NSFW.
Series: Reverend Alpert, the Traveling Exorcist
Word Count: 3474
Notes: Winner of this month's Patreon poll! And wow, talk about a blast from the past. We originally wrote the Sins-of-Flesh Demon back in 2011(!) for the first writeathon we ever threw, writing stories according to reader prompt. Shawn of Rolodexaspirin wanted kinky demon/exorcist porno; we had no idea what Reverend Alpert would end up becoming! Alpert (and the demon girl) ended up keeping us in toothpaste and toilet paper during the Homeless Year, which meant this story became a slight inconvenience--anyone who read THIS as the first chapter of the series would reasonably (and incorrectly) assume it was a porn series, but it was also such a keystone story that it couldn't really be removed or changed. It's undergone some major revisions so as to better mesh with the new first chapter, The Gestaltist of Blood. Content warnings in the comments.

Alpert was young, two-named, naked and face down in the dirt, arms pinned by High Guards whose features were long since blurred away by time and memory. A thousand faceless witnesses stared down at him from the amphitheater’s stands, a wheel of eyes. He felt Booker Z. Lilac’s weight come down onto his back, holding him down, and agony sliced into his back like fire. He screamed into the gag in his mouth.

As the winner of the patron poll, we have uploaded Gigi's Story, a comic Gigi made in 2013 when we had a brief lull in our homelessness about her feelings about our family at this time. This is the only comic she has ever made completely on her own. We have also uploaded the script!

Title: Tucked, Forever, Right Now, and Shaved (three-story combo!)
Series: Infinity Smashed
Summary: Bob and Grey go full-bore into casual sex and do their best not to think of the professional or personal ramifications. NSFW!
Word Count: 2500ish
Notes: Okay, I finally have two brain cells to rub together, so I've decided to upload another 2500 words of Found Wanting for folks here, since that series was the poll winner and that makes things more in line with the "3000+ words a month" plan. Thank you for your patience.

The Morning After
Series: Infinity Smashed
Summary: Grey wakes up.
Word Count: 500
Notes: Winner of the patron poll this month, and a scene cut from the print version of Found Wanting! Sorry it’s so short guys; under normal circumstances I’d give a bonus, but to be fair, Red Roses Old Horses was quite long and also… it’s been a steamroller of a couple months. I am flattened. Sorry. Hopefully next month is less brutal.


When Grey wakes up the morning of February 15th, it’s been too long since her last dose of painkillers and moving to get more sounds worse than trying to go back to sleep. What was she thinking? Vicodin or no Vicodin, in this condition, she never should’ve considered fooling around—

More ask meme answers, these from wolffyluna! (The meme's still ongoing if you want to ask us shit.)

Show your favourite drawing from this year.

Mori: Rogan can't show his, because it's the climactic page from Coming In or Staying Out, but he says he's very proud of drawing ball-squishing and jizz convincingly.

Me, if we use "this year" as to mean "within the past twelve months" I'm real proud of the stuff I did for Madgic. Here's one from the upcoming Madgic #4, where Biff and Rawlin first meet:



I think I love it most because it sums up why I claimed Biff as my dudema. Realitybreaking giant runs you down like a dog in the street? Treat him like an out-of-towner who cut you off in traffic.

What inspires you?

Mori: I live in a world full of majesty and wonder and fucking cheeseburgers. How can I not be fucking inspired? Life is full of crazy weird shit! I am writing this on a plastic box that through science I don't understand can broadcast this text all over the globe. I am saying this as an imaginary friend who lives with a bunch of others in a headspace with a sentient ocean. On the table is a book of fragments of poems by Sappho, a poet who lived thousands of years ago and had no idea I would ever exist to read (parts of) her work! What's not to be inspired by???

How do you deal with artblock?

Rogan had this whole long poetic answer about how artblock is a bunch of different things with one name, but he ain't available right now, so my summary: we go do something else.

When we are lacking spoons for one thing, we look around for things we do have spoons for. (If we have zero spoons for ANYTHING at all, then we have bigger problems than our creative output.) For instance, some art requires pretty high creativity--like initial writing and penciling. Editing and inking require less creativity, but more focus. and attention to detail. Research requires very little creativity at all. Then there's what we call "donkey labor," which is a huge part of any job, artist included, but nobody much discusses it because it lacks pizzazz: digitizing old multi books. Checking citations and links. Bugsweeping our website. Donkey labor isn't fun to discuss at parties, but it rarely requires much in the way of creativity or smarts; you just gotta get it done. But it means there's usually SOMETHING we're able to do.

I feel like our job has forced us to learn how to swap between tasks as our ability and level of batshit waxes and wanes. Some people truly seem to want and be able to draw/write (the "fun" or "cool" stuff) all the time, eight hours a day, five days a week (or more). We cannot. But fortunately, there's a vast supply of donkey labor that always needs doing. And brain-blasted LB feels better knowing that the tedious work being done is work that Future LB will appreciate! (Always say thank you to the self that does the donkey labor.)

We also suspect that part of why our body is holding up surprisingly well despite years of this job is because we keep switching tasks and doing different things, allowing our body to move around and use different muscles.