I know I haven’t updated in like a month, but things have been busy. We all know how it is – summer rolls around, and instead of being really productive, you do a whole bunch of other cool things and your new website begins to gather dust and spam comments.

In case you haven’t looked, I have been working on Fencing Club for the past week. Unfortnately, things are getting busy again so I can’t work on that either. But if you haven’t been following it lately, then you should check it out, there are a lot of new pages up.

Just because the media has focused its attention on the dead celebrities doesn’t mean that the situation in Iran has gone away.

Marjane Satrapi, author of the autobiographical comic Persepolis, is asking people to sign an open letter to Mr. Ban Ki-Moon, Secretary General of the United Nations. Basically, the letter is asking for the United Nations to expel Iran’s government from the world community and close down its embassies in protest against the Islamic Republic’s violations of human rights. It also asks that the hundreds of pictures and videos be used as evidence in a trial against the Islamic Republic by the International Court of Law.

I have signed it myself, and I’m asking you to sign it. I don’t know if this will do any good, but it’s better than being silent.

So, I’ve created an MS Paint Adventures inspired comic on its forums. If you’re unfamiliar with MS Paint Adventures, it’s another webcomic that gets most of its content from reader suggestions. I’ve been wanting to do something like this for a while, and was happy to find that the forums had a section for people to make their own adventures. This should be fun. If you have any suggestions for this adventure, you can find the adventure here.

I just figured out how to get an avatar on my comments. If you go to gravatar.com, you can upload any image you like and it will work not just for this site, but for all of your comments on any site. There’s an cropping tool when you upload images, so you don’t need to upload square images.

Before I show the next stage in my artwork, I want to give you some more background info. I’m guessing you want this to be humorous, so I will try and keep it that way.

I have talked a lot about the end of Hoops. What happened was that I showed some of my friends these comics and they didn’t like them. Why? Because it was my sophomore year in high school and I was still drawing the same crude little stick figures with the inanimate objects for heads. Enough was enough. They set me straight and said that the art was horrid.

Of course it’s terrible - it’s stick figures. But the main reason they brought it up was because I had recently added clothing to my characters in an attempt to make them better looking. You can see an example below of this new style. My friends looked at my tubes of clothing over these stick figures, then at me, then at the clothes that you don’t have to be a fashion designer to tell that these look terrible, then at me.

Then there was an awkward silence.

And at that moment, they drew out their Art Police clubs and beat me mercilessly.

Shortly after that, I gave up on Hoops. I finally capped my cheap Papermate pen, closed my notebook, and moved on. The crude little stick figures, with their antics of stealing other people’s saugages and blowing each other up with low-yield nuclear weaponry, were finally put down.

Or so I thought…