Just under two weeks left now! Been a lot more conscious of how I've been spending my time as a result, trying to get trips organized and see places, take photos, work on stuff before my departure on the 24th. To that end, it's been fun—Caby and I even saw a movie on a whim!

Earlier on in the trip, Caby happened to see a poster for The Bad Guys 2, and neither of us having seen the first one, we thought we'd hop in on an afternoon showing and miss the train rush back home through it. If you're not familiar, The Bad Guys was originally an Australian book series about a team of criminal animal people who elect, unsuccessfully for various reasons, to work to become good. You got all the species you'd want, a wolf, a snake, a...shark, a pirahna? Tarantula? (I really really thought Wolf was played by George Clooney, but it turns out he is not.)

Anyway, the second one finds them kidnapped by a new team of thieves looking to pull off the biggest heist the world has ever seen, under threat of releasing footage of governor Diane Foxington's past life as a master thief herself. The interplay between the Bad Guys and the New Guys is very funny (especially Snake, who is utterly betrayed by Doom the crow numerous times and is still completely smitten with her, been there), but what Caby appreciated the most is that all the girls were just plain compelling without their being women even being noteworthy. Growing up used to weirdly sexualized female counterparts in animated movies, having a butch boar true crime nerd was pretty heartening to her. I'm inclined to agree.

Anyway, knowing none of this going in and having no preconceived notions outside Diane being pretty popular on DeviantART, I was smiling big through the opening scene, showing the Bad Guys pulling off a truly spectacular heist in Cairo where you see everyone's specialties play out. Shark is the amusingly convincing master of disguise. Snake is a safecracker who connects his art to, um, lovemaking. It's what Caby calls the art of letting artists do their thing. You're making an animated movie, and where Disney at this point is too precious with their brands to let their artists do anything other than stiff, status quo dollhouse films, The Bad Guys 2 pseudo-mixes mediums between paper explosions and comic book interstitials, each scene loaded with fluid visual gags that demonstrate total mastery in the language of animation. It looks just as fun to have made as to watch the final product of.

That's high praise for a kids film, I get it, but it really is interesting to me how everyone's left Disney behind at this point. It's not that Dreamworks is incapable of making hot dogshit (we got a trailer for that fucking Gabby's Dollhouse film before this one and boy does that look like a trash fire), it's just that you have bangers like this and the last Puss in Boots film and then Sony's Spider-Man animated films that by all accounts are a total visual treat, and then Disney continues to turbofuck everything up with their inability to let artists do their thing. They're twitchy little creatures whose bones animate with ideas regardless of if you're paying them or not, and when you let them chase those ideas down with a decent budget, surprise! You get better films. Shocker.

Anyway, to get back to The Bad Guys 2, I really appreciated how well it was paced and how well it navigated the usual story beats of an animated movie. There was that "oh, everything is fucked and these guys are down and out" bit in the middle—for like, a minute and a half, and then it did something else fun with it. Caby turned to me in the climax and went "wouldn't it be really funny if this happened?", and then that thing happened two minutes later. I'm being vague to not give away the plot, which isn't gonzo shocking but is enough fun to push you towards seeing it yourself. This is a movie that doesn't overstay its welcome and is super fun to watch for both a minute and for the whole 104 minute runtime. That's batting a lot better than other kids films, I'm sure you know.

And I haven't even mentioned the best part! Moss from The IT Crowd plays a fucking hench guinea pig.

There. Now you have zero reason not to see it.

Little bit of a journal exclusive here—here's the colored Superkitties from a while back ago now! Been trying to finish a few things from the backlog up here while I've got the nice screen tablet and also the motivation of hanging out with the world's most scribbly wolmf to do it, and I got this one finished almost two weeks ago now and again have just continued to put off posting it in full. You can see these lads in action decoration the "Design Specifications" page on the Superkitty world on toyhou.se, aww. It's like they're a real species or something.

Oh, on an unrelated note—I'll be saving up any album reviews I do this month to get a backlog going once and for all into September. The goal for a while now is to start planning these things better, mixing in more of the requests again and also albums I wasn't as keen on to help the repetition. I'm sure I can do it if I start planning things out better. See you in a month for how those plans turn out!

I tell ya, it has been harder than anticipated to keep the journal updated like I'd like this trip. No matter! It's been really good. I finally bit the bullet and made an art Tumblr! I've had this idea for a bit now, but truth be told, I'm always iffy about posting into a void, which my other art presences have become. That said, it was the response dcb was getting on his sketches that emboldened me to give it a go.

I had this burst of inspiration very late the other night (we're talking "I went to bed at 6:30" late—did I mention I've just sorta still been operating on East Coast times this entire trip?) to put Cammy on top of a Bryce3D render. I do still love Bryce a lot, and realizing the projects I'd worked on were five minutes from disappearing with the second death of the eMachines Box has made them more precious to me. I shall do another one while I'm here. The Cammy was pretty automatic. I'm good at drawing dweebs by now.

What wasn't automatic was the response I got from this! As of writing, both my Tumblr advertisement and the Cammy with ghosts drawing from last trip I posted alongside it have 30 notes. 30! In 12 hours! I'm one or two off from 15 followers in the first day. The rush I'd gotten while we were waiting in Jollibee for our food earlier was immense. I've gotten really used to basically zero reaction, keep in mind. This advertisement drawing did sweet dick all on Sheezy, and got one notification each on FurAffinity and Weasyl, both from the same person. I really was ready to just post on autopilot and ignore everything, because all these sites do is let me down. Tumblr? Tumblr likes me.

What that means to you is completely fair. For me, I'm excited to post more. You can expect to see two posts a week of just solid back catalog stuff into October, by my calculations, let alone finished stuff until then. Remember, coffeecoloredbadger on Tumblr, follow right here. For now, I'm gonna vibe and work off the beer buzz I got watching Red Dwarf with Caby in the lounge tonight. Very funny show, and her folks now own the entire original run on DVD! Everyone won today.

Ah man, the days get away from me... I never like it when I look up and three or four days have passed. We've been in a time loop recently! A very nice one, granted, but with the family still in France (they're coming back tomorrow, all good), and us having to stick fairly close to the house for piggo breakfast and dinner and also because they get lonely, it's been hard to get out of the house and do stuff. We've been night owls, really! Been meaning to update the journal with stuff I've been drawing and also call my mom and all that, but I keep putting it off. Such is life with no schedule and no employment.

Thankfully, still got the better part of a month left on the trip, so nothing feels wasted, we have been very creative, and it's been nice doing more domesticore things with Caby, chores and chatting and going out for ice cream. We fixed the dryer the other day! Their dryer doesn't drain to the outside world like mine at home does, so we were experiencing weird pauses in the drying routine (and they normally air dry their clothes, so she wasn't sure what the issue was). Pulled up an owner's manual, found it was a full water tank, emptied it, and all was well. We're so smart and handy. (Then we burned some burger buns in the convection oven really badly, so. Well.)

We also baked! It's really funny. Caby sent me a compilation of Dylan Hollis historical baking shorts and prefaced it that she didn't expect me to watch the whole thing. I'm pretty sure I've seen more of them than she has now. This guy is great. He's the wittiest fruit in the bag, he makes weird and sometimes delicious-looking cakes and breads from the last century, and he's the only guy I've seen who can do an energetic, zingy personality in his shorts, and then pull off a calmer, more informative, but still highly entertaining personality in his longer videos.

I was looking through his shorts to find one Caby and I might wanna do, and the one for strawberry fluffies always intrigued me. It's an oddly really simple recipe. They're effectively cake cookies. Empty a box of strawberry cake mix and Cool Whip into a bowl, mix, form balls, roll in powdered sugar, bake. Little did I know that cake mix is as rare a beast as an unfinished bottle of rum in Trys' room in the UK, and Cool Whip doesn't exist here. Sainsbury's does sell the Betty Crocker stuff, thankfully, and we were able to thicken up some British cream as a substitute. (As for why I picked this instead of, like, a real cake or loaf, it was easy, and we've very rarely baked before. Start small.)

They were really good though! Like I said, they're effectively cake cookies, so you're getting the fluffiness of a cake from a pan or a loaf in cookie form. The color differences come from us experimenting with the baking time. The 13 minutes from the Dylan Hollis video gets you that ideal pinkness, but Caby thought they were still not done at first, so we did some for a few minutes longer and they got crunchier and slightly caramelized as a result. Still very good though. Highly worth the confusion I gave everyone in the group showing them the unbaked "batter" early on.

Since these went so well, Caby and I have been looking at other recipes we might be able to pull off from his repertoire. The peanut butter bread is apparently really good, and we both like peanut butter. Anything more in bread form is easier for us, since her family doesn't have a full-sized oven, only an air fryer and then a convection oven. (Both of these gave very similar results with the fluffies, so if you're wondering, yes, you can indeed air fry bake things. I'm sure I'm the last person on Earth to know though.) Also, her mom loved the idea of these, because the whole family likes simple and easy, and you get a lot of fluffies out of one box of cake mix. I wouldn't be surprised if there's more batches to be made.

Anywho, I will be posting more art on the journal, I promise. I also have an exciting announcement for a new place to see art from me soon, so stay tuned. Back to cleaning up the house before the folks get home!

Listen, when you visit a girl with a really nice screen tablet, you use that screen tablet. I have been stuck on art all month, but shortly after she went to bed one night (we're talking 5 in the morning), I doodled two Setters, and here they are finished!

I've been stuck exactly how I like to draw him—too big a snoot and hair more on the wavy side than the curly side, and he's basically just Cammy. I think they're pretty distinct now, still the same genre of guy, but again, distinct enough in flavor and design that I think both could be on Art Fight and no one would be confused.

Speaking of Art Fight! I do intend on participating next year, and I'd like to expand out my list of characters for that. Each ref I do very nicely pulls double duty: means I can get another toyhou.se bio up, and it means the character can go up on AF should I want that. Really, my true love for art hosting sites is still toyhou.se. It's not just a gallery, it's a big browseable directory of OCs that I can write bios for, and that means a lot more to me than just an art gallery.

Been also thinking of making an art Tumblr. Think folks there would appreciate Setter muchly, and maybe other things I draw...