Author: Fifth Ace

Holy cow, we’re in the December times already; where has this year gone?

It’s been a hot minute since I checked in here, and stuff has been happening in that time. First and foremost: we got the lease! We’ve signed, we’ve paid, and we’re moving into our new place! It’s a good thing that we’re also paid up in our current residence until the end of the year, which means we can take our time to clean up and transfer all of our stuff across without rushing around. We’re going to have more floor space, which means we can have a real dining table again, as well as our L-couch that has been in storage for five years because we couldn’t fit it anywhere else. There’s space for our desks, our board game shelf, and somehow ourselves as well; I am going to be so glad to have a kitchen that I can stand in and move more than a single step to the side. There will be some adjustments to make; our cats are going to have to acclimate to a new space, which will likely take a few weeks for Sparrow especially, and despite a slightly reduced rental fee, we will have to pay for our own electricity and gas heating now; our costs will more or less balance out, just distributed differently. The biggest shift is going to be the extended commute to work, at least an extra 15-20 minutes both ways, so the sooner I find a different job the better.

My weekends have been filled with social obligations lately, and this weekend will be no different; it’s Japan Day on Saturday, so we’ll be going out to experience some culture. It’s a natural attraction to the cosplay crowd; there are going to be a lot of anime characters wandering around, though the best I’ll be able to manage is my Japanese Spider-Man T-shirt. While going out and seeing friends can be fulfilling, as an introvert it leaves me very drained, as I mentioned last week; my social batteries especially take a lot of hits during the holiday season. It’s not all bad though; at a birthday party this past weekend, I found a new potential D&D group (purely theoretical, no confirmation yet), and just chatting about my preferences as a DM got me thinking about my homebrew world again. I’ve been absorbing quite a few third-party D&D content creations lately (the less said about mainstream D&D the better, really) and it’s helped me brainstorm a bunch of new ideas, or put different spins on old ideas that could do with a good dusting off. Whether or not I get to put these ideas into practice is a whole other fettle of kish, but they’re nice to think about in the meantime, and it keeps the creative juices flowing.

Speaking of creative juices, I’ve been trying to get into the groove of communicating with people on social media, Bluesky in particular; like I’ve said before, to grow a social media account, I actually have to be social, and what better way to do so than communicate through the language of art? I’ve taken the slower year-end work days to get some art practice in, using some of my favourite artists’ original characters to try out new techniques; I’m looking into greyscale colouring and rendering in particular, as that’ll be easier on my wallet if I ever get my comics in print again. Here’s a couple of fanart pieces that I’ve done in the past week, featuring Big Help by psudonym and Charlie by Yung Khan:

The original creators both expressed their thanks for my efforts; it’s a nigh-universal truth that creators love seeing sincere fanart of their characters, and if I can make people happy while experimenting and improving my art, all the better.

Think that about covers it for this week; if I’m not completely wiped out by next week, I might have more stuff to show for it.

Ciao for now.

Welcome to a very special Monday edition of Bottom of the Deck, which only exists because last week was so busy that I didn’t get a chance to type up anything.

The day job took up the majority of my energy last week, so I won’t dwell on it too much; the weekend was far more enjoyable, so let’s focus on that instead. It was my fiance’s birthday, and the celebrations took up both Saturday and Sunday; while my social batteries were completely drained by the end of it, it was a good time all around. We got to see a lot of friends and family, went out for dinner one night while ordering in on the other night, and there were three separate cakes throughout; all in all, fun times. Given how hectic the year has been, it was a great prelude to the holidays; Americans have Thanksgiving, we have a birthday that just happened to line up with the Black Friday weekend, so it evens out.

We also have some good news on the house-hunting front, and just in the nick of time too; like I mentioned last month, my fiance has landed her learnership as a student teacher for next year, which means we have to move closer to the school where she’ll be practising. While we continue to wait for a potential purchase to eventually come through, we have taken matters into our own hands by looking for a place to rent, and it looks like we may have found the perfect spot. This place checks off all our boxes for location, pet accommodation and affordability; we were practically ready to take it sight unseen, but we scoped it out tonight just to confirm, and are now eagerly awaiting a contract. Fingers crossed, over the course of December we’ll be able to start transferring our belongings across, so that come January we’ll be moved in and ready to take on the next stage of our lives. Plus, with a new residential address all but confirmed, I can finally take my job hunting seriously; once I can definitively say where we will be based, I can put out my feelers in a focused radius, and look for something that is more convenient for my income, my commute and my mental health. 

While life seems to finally be progressing, creativity is still in a bit of a holding pattern; it’s been hard to maintain with everything else, and at this rate the Fifth Ace Showcase might only return next year, depending on how busy December is. There’s always a lot of social obligations over the holidays, so squeezing in some “me” time can be tricky, and I don’t intend to burn myself out like I’ve done in the past. Most nights lately I’ve been playing Minecraft, Stellaris, or more recently Deep Rock Galactic to destress; funny how my game choices seem to involve digging, space, or digging in space. On the other hand, some days my creativity runs away in different directions than I want it to, and I splurge it out in the form of free writing or conceptual art just to empty my head a little; here’s a little something my brain decided to throw out last week:

It’s probably a fantasy story, it might be sci-fi, I’m not sure yet. The basic premise is that a pair of twins on opposite sides of a conflict clash for the final time, and only one of them walks away; the survivor is heavily scarred and amnesiac, and does not know which of the twins they are. Do they want to know? What happens when the people who think they know, come for them? I plotted out a first chapter, but I’m not sure where the story might go from there, or when I’ll get around to actually telling it; this is what my brain does instead of focusing on existing ideas.

So that’s what I’ve been up to instead of getting blog posts out on time; I don’t know if I’ll post again this coming Thursday, it all depends just how much can happen in the next three days. Otherwise, we’ll be back on the regular blogging schedule next week once again.

Ciao for now.

Okay, let’s not be lazy about it this week; I’ll actually talk about stuff this time.

I know, I know, still no art in sight; I’ve doodled some stuff here and there, but nothing directly related to the website; chalk it up to the regular excuses and let’s move on to other stuff.

I’ve been thinking a lot about social media lately, and the requirements that it takes to become noticed on various platforms. The tricky thing is that each website tends to play by its own rules and algorithms; YouTube famously changes up their style every few months, Instagram is so invested in promoting Reels over pictures in order to compete with TikTok, and who knows what kind of horrific slurs you have to spout to even be spared a second glance on Twitter these days. For me, the latest challenge is Bluesky, and the tricky thing about this new platform is that it has no algorithm at all. There’s no magic bullet, no quickfire method of rapidly gaining followers, nothing to exploit to be seen; the only way is to post, repost and interact with others constantly and consistently, just like it used to be on other socials way back when. In other words, to gain ground on this social media platform, you have to be social. *thundercrack*

Social interaction has always been a hit-or-miss thing with me; I’m introverted by nature, and have a very limited pool of social energy that I prefer to spend on people close to me. I can handle small groups, which is why board games and TTRPGs work for me, but if I have to do it for more than a couple days in a row, I can get burnt out. Now picture trying to socially engage with hundreds to thousands of potential people in order to build a community that you deliberately want to see everything that you post online; you can see how that can be exhausting. Even trying to engage on an individual basis can be tough; I never want to come across as parasocial, even if I am genuinely not, but that’s the anxiety talking again.

I used to want to try and post something online every single day; that quickly went nowhere, partially due to workloads and partially because I couldn’t always find something significant to say on a daily basis. This is the primary reason I only blog once per week; there’s only so many times I can say the same thing over and over, especially if I’m in a creative rut or at a roadblock in life. Also, given how much I angst on here, I feel like I’m slipping into a habit that I’ve wanted to avoid: constant negativity. In the early days of my online presence, I tried never to post anything overly critical, or scathing, or negative in any way; if you can’t say something nice, shut the hell up, basically. There’s already so much bad stuff out there, I wanted to make sure that if I posted anything, it wasn’t going to contribute to the negativity. However, my ever-growing cynicism being what it is, any negativity that I wanted to avoid was inevitably turned inwards, and that was the perfect recipe for angst. In the year that I’ve been back on this website, I made every effort to haul myself out of the negative self-image that I wanted to leave behind, only to gradually turn around and start soaking my feet in it again.

I’m going to do better; I’m going to get myself properly motivated, I’m going to post stuff that makes people happy, and I’m going to turn my self-image back around to something positive. And in case I need a little extra motivation, there’s always Batman:

Ciao for now.

I don’t have much to say this week, so I’m going to let this song sum it up:

It’s meant to be about 2020, but it might as well be about my feelings in general lately; hopefully the weekend, and some D&D tomorrow night can help shake off the funk.

See y’all next week.

Ciao for now.

It’s November! And the Christmas decorations are already going up! What the hell is wrong with people?! It’s a dead horse joke at this point, but I refuse to let anyone think that this is normal…

In terms of art, not much to say this week; the Fifth Ace Showcase may still be a while in coming due to outside factors, but I might start throwing up some filler art here and there if I have to. If I can’t get to the stories, I can at least draw stuff that is fun to look at. I’m not going to dwell on this lest I sound like a broken record, so let me talk about something else that happened this past week.

Last Friday, my fiance and I scored a couple of free tickets for the Five Nights at Freddy’s movie, in exchange for her dressing up in her Foxy animatronic outfit and doing some on-site advertising before the show. As always, she was a huge hit, frightened the pants off several people and got quite a few photo ops in the process; I had a massive smile on my face watching from the sidelines as she was in her element, it’s always a joy to see. The movie itself was a lot of fun; I can’t really judge it as a horror movie, since they aren’t my preferred genre of film, but it was filled with references and easter eggs for the fans of the games, which I count myself among even if I’ll never play one of them myself (Let’s Plays and lore videos are more my speed). Horror in general isn’t something I usually gravitate towards, which made the whole experience very unique for me.

One of the big things that I’ve noticed changing through the years is the level of audience engagement in the cinema. Growing up, I was always told to quietly enjoy the movie and not interrupt anyone else’s experience; there would be the occasional group laugh at something funny and maybe some applause at the end, but that was about it. I know cinemas tend to get more rowdy in some other countries, but it’s not something that usually happens here; this is something that seems to have evolved over time. I saw it first when I watched Avengers: Endgame on the opening weekend; the cinema was packed, and every big reveal and dramatic moment was accompanied by cheers and screams, and some of them I freely participated in (you can’t blame me for whooping out loud when Captain America picked up that hammer). I figured, “Okay, that’s to be expected, it’s a story that’s been building for twenty three films, of course people will be excited.” But it’s something I noticed in FNAF as well, and I don’t think I can put it all down to fan excitement; there were certainly people laughing and cheering for fun references and cameos, but there’s something overall different about watching a horror movie in the cinema.

There’s that stereotype of people watching horror films and yelling advice to the characters on screen, all the “don’t go in there!” or “don’t touch that, nonono!” going on as they stumble into the deathtraps. Guess what? Stereotypes exist for a reason: that actually happens. I was so worried that we might be making too much noise, or speaking over other people’s experience, but it’s actually sort of expected in that setting; literally everyone was doing it, because part of the experience was the freedom to do so. We all know something terrible is going to happen to the characters, we can feel the tension building and we see the deathtrap looming, and by vocalising it, we connect with everyone else feeling the same thing. Watching a horror movie in the cinema is a surprisingly community-minded process, which I didn’t expect at all; whenever I notice easter eggs in a movie, I tend to chuckle quietly to myself and roll with it, but in a horror movie, if you don’t wince and go “ooooooooh!” out loud in unison when someone gets bitten in half by a murderous animatronic, you’re doing it wrong. I doubt that this will turn me into a horror-aficionado, but I had a good time; again, I don’t know how to judge FNAF as a horror film, but as a fan experience, it was a lot of fun.

That’s all I really have for this one; our D&D game that was set for tomorrow got pushed back a week, so I’m going to keep brainstorming characters for that; for some reason, all the ones I’ve been coming up with have low intelligence scores. Maybe I’m just tired of trying to be smart in-game, let me be a doofus for a change.

Ciao for now.

Good grief, where did this month go? I’d probably better do something around here…

No guarantees that the Fifth Ace Showcase will return first thing in November; I did say it could be the earliest that it would reappear, but I naturally didn’t want to promise anything. The day job hasn’t been too hectic, but I’ve had enough going on day to day that stuff has been keeping me occupied. In the evenings, I just want to zone out, and I’ve been using podcasts and Let’s Plays while playing Minecraft as a means of doing so; I only rage quit once in the past week, which is a vast improvement on my usual playstyle. All this to say, there may or may not be comic pages from Wednesday next week; maybe by November 6th if I feel I need a bit more time to build up a buffer.

In terms of stuff happening day to day, I am overjoyed to report that my fiance absolutely crushed her learnership interview, as I knew she would; she heard back the very next day with them offering her a contract for next year. Not only is this something she’s been wanting to do for a long time, it’s something that is going to change our lives as a whole. In order to take on the contract, we have to move closer to the school where she will be working, which means we need to be living in a new place by the beginning of 2024. We’ve been waiting for a potential house purchase all year, and that still hasn’t manifested properly, so we’re currently looking for a place to rent instead. With the salary that my fiance will receive from the learnership, we should be able to afford a bigger space than we currently have; that said, if I can find a different job closer to the school myself, it’ll be a lot easier on my fuel tank, and my car’s fuel tank too. As much as living in a full-sized house would be preferable, anything bigger than the two rooms we have now would be an upgrade, plus we wouldn’t be dependant on anyone else for owning the house; if we are renting purely on our own income, we are still living our own lives without anyone holding such things over our heads.

A bigger salary would also help with sundry expenses; we’ve made more trips to the vet in this past month than we have in years. First Silver had some unidentifiable pain that we needed anti-inflammatories for; then she developed an abscess that had to be drained and sliced, and then flushed daily by us for a week; and then just as Silver was recovering, Sparrow got an upset stomach and was vomiting all night on Monday; it didn’t last long, but the vet gave him an anti-nausea jab just to be safe. We’ve managed to stay afloat, but it’s always inconvenient when the day job can’t pay on time; moving house is the perfect excuse to try and find something better.

The biggest change that would come with a new house would be more space; it sounds obvious when I put it so plainly, but it’s also the thing we’ve needed the most for a long time. We’ve spent three and a half years in our tiny home, living on top of each other and having our stuff clutter up what little room we still have. To be in a bigger space, with everything spread out, and having dedicated rooms for our activities is going to be such a relief; with a proper office space, I may actually be more productive in my personal work without having to fit in between everything else that life has presented us with, piling up on the desk.

Other than that, there’s a new D&D game on the horizon; with our every-other-Thursday game on hold indefinitely, one of the players has elected to run a game of his own with a new group, starting in a couple of weeks. I’ve been brainstorming characters to play since the weekend; whenever I join a new game, I always make a bunch of characters so that I can pick one to fit whatever everyone else chooses. I’m already quite attached to a few of them, and am keen to be playing again; the Thursday group was okay, but that was the one with the problem player I mentioned way back in March. Due to circumstances that are not my place to describe, it’s unlikely that we will ever return to that game, and I’m okay with that if it means I’ll no longer be sharing the table with someone who I am convinced is an actual, clinically sociopathic narcissist.

Well, that was a bit of a longer post this week; like I said, stuff has been happening. Tomorrow we’re going to see the Five Nights at Freddy’s movie, which I’m sure will be gloriously stupid, but probably highly entertaining. My fiance will be in cosplay, so if you’re at Cavendish Mall and see a Foxy the Pirate animatronic standing around, come say hi!

Ciao for now.

The weekend cannot get here quickly enough; whenever I think that time is passing quickly, it decides to crawl instead, and vice versa. The fact that this is going up a day late should prove that.

My sleep schedule has likely been permanently altered by the ever-nearing arrival of summer. With the sun starting to rise earlier in the morning, our cats are waking up earlier to match it, and subsequently so am I; 4:30 AM is the new standard, and if I had more space, I’d probably use the extra hour for exercising (hahahayeahright). We’ve given up trying to keep Sparrow inside until the sun is fully up, since he’ll climb the curtains and whine until he gets what he wants, so we just let him out as soon as possible; he settles down a lot quicker after he’s had a chance to scope out the neighbourhood before coming back inside for food. Silver doesn’t wander as far, but she’s had to spend the week indoors; she developed an abscess on her shoulder over the weekend, which we think may be linked to whatever pain she was in last week. We’ve been keeping it clean and flushed after the vet lanced and drained it, but to say Silver was mad with us would be like saying the Sun is a little bit hot. At least the vet said we didn’t have to give her any more antibiotic tablets; they were making Silver throw up, which in turn brings up the tablets, and rather defeats the purpose of the whole business. By Saturday, she should be in the clear to go outside again without fear of infection, and her attitude has already been improving a lot.

Scripting for Fifth Ace Showcase #0 has been slow; I may have my shortlist (and I’ve trimmed it down to a lean 24 pages), but deciding how much information to include in each character’s profile is tricky. I want to present something that shows off the intrigue of each character, but I have to be careful as to how many spoilers I can include; there are things about the characters that have yet to be revealed that I want to be plot points further down the road. Heck, most of these characters haven’t even been revealed yet; they’re still waiting for their debut stories down the road, whether those appear in the Showcase or some other hypothetical one-shot that I may or may not write. I want my universe to have a very lived-in feel; there is backstory to all of these characters, because some of them have been around for decades in-universe, and they didn’t spend all those years doing nothing. At the same time, I don’t want to delve too deep into anything that might make for good stories in the issues to come, especially if it seems like there would be a foregone conclusion to those stories; if there’s anything referencing a “historical event” in the timeline, I don’t want the ending of that story to be too obvious, is what I mean.

With all this going on, my fiance had an interview yesterday for a learnership position at her old school, her next step to becoming a student teacher. I knew she would absolutely crush it; she’s been working so hard, and she’s so passionate about the job, they would be fools not to hire her on the spot. We’ll hopefully know the results within a few weeks; maybe if the position is secured, it’ll be the final push needed for things to get into motion regarding our living situation.

That’s about it for updates this week; I’ve got a board game day coming up on Saturday, and we recently acquired a bunch of new games to try out with more people, so I’m keen for that. I’ve also been experimenting with some solo board games that have been waiting for me to find the time; I have plans for those too…

Ciao for now.

It’s been another one of those weeks; between sick cats, work overload and a very stressed out fiance, I think I’ll be conserving my energy and keeping this one short.

As stressful as it all seems, everything I just mentioned has passed, or will (hopefully) be passing soon; it just kind of gets to you when it all hits at once. Everyone is/will be okay, so nobody panic; we’ll try to do the same.

Artistically speaking, despite not being able to fit in anything between frustrations at the day job, I have at least compiled a shortlist of the characters I want to feature in Fifth Ace Showcase #0; I may cut the list down further depending on how long I want the issue to be. Previous issues have all been 36 pages, but I might shorten this one to the more usual 20-24 comic book page count; I’ll decide after I’ve properly written up the script. Oh yeah, I’ll actually have a complete script for this one; character profiles aren’t the kind of thing you just improvise. Naturally, the fewer pages I have to write, the quicker I can get it done, and there are some characters that I’m still debating on whether or not to reveal at this stage for fear of spoilers in future stories. I’ll work it out as I go, if I can find the time.

Like I said, I’m going to keep it short; there’s a ton of stuff that needs doing, and with Friday the 13th happening tomorrow, I’ve got to shore up my defences.

Ciao for now.

The spooky season is upon us, apparently; wouldn’t know, it’s not such a big thing around these parts. Though once we get closer to the end of the month, it’ll surely become more prominent.

Having more or less recovered from ComicCon Africa, I’ve been slowly getting back into the groove of making art again. Last Sunday in particular was a lot of fun; for an art study, I did a recreation of a comic page by John Buscema, my first unofficial teacher from How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way. I specifically did a page of his from Savage Sword of Conan, since I’m still toying with a sword-and-sorcery comic idea, and Buscema is still regarded as one of the signature artists of the genre. Here, you can see my effort compared to the original; I wasn’t trying for a one-to-one recreation, especially since my page proportions are slightly different, but I think I still did a good job on it.

Savage Sword of Conan #1, Page 15 – Original art by John Buscema.

My recreation.

I’ll likely be doing a few more of these in the weeks to come while I continue to fiddle with my own story concept; I’ll stick to Buscema’s art for the most part, but there are a lot of other great artists on Savage Sword of Conan that I should reference too; Barry Windsor Smith comes to mind…

I’ve also been slipping in a bit of fanart here and there on social media; I did a new Fodderverse piece the other day, as well as a Draw This in Your Style challenge from someone I follow on Bluesky. I have to say, as compared to Twitter, Bluesky is shaping up as the place to be; I’ve barely glanced back in the three weeks since I made it to the new platform, and I’m seriously considering shutting down my Twitter feed for good. I’ve got about 10% of the followers on Bluesky that I had on Twitter, and I’ve already had far more interaction than I had before, and none of it negative. I find myself making more of an effort to interact with people than before, because I know the more highly curated experience is less likely to attract the kind of people I’d rather not see. The platform itself is a little barebones compared to its predecessor (still waiting on a private messaging option), but as it’s still technically in beta, that’s to be expected. I’m anticipating good things from Bluesky; considering how Twitter seems to be literally getting worse by the day, Bluesky doesn’t have too many hurdles to jump at this point.

As far as comics go, I’ve got a slightly different idea for the next part of the Showcase; given that I won’t likely get a full issue of three stories out before the end of the year, I’m considering a zeroth issue, a #0 that will literally be a character showcase. It’ll give me a chance to introduce a large number of characters and explain their abilities and motivations outside the continuity of stories; I’ve hinted at several pre-existing characters in my universe, but if I wait for them to show up in the main story, it may be years before they appear on the page. With an Issue #0, I can devote a full page or two to each character, expand the scope of my world, and maybe drop a few hints about what is to come in the future. We’ll see how and when this will manifest properly; I’d better start putting a shortlist together of who I want to introduce this way…

Anywho, that’s all for now; I’ve got my paid D&D gig tomorrow, and then a family lunch on Sunday, so I’m looking forward to drowning out the work week in positive interactions.

Ciao for now.

Phew, has it really been a week since the last post? It feels like both an eternity and no time at all; this past week has been a blur of activity.

ComicCon Africa was a rousing success! The Dragon Wagon did well as always, and we had a team of people to help out this time, so we were able to get out of the stall a bit more often than usual. I still stuck around as much as I could, as is my wont for such things, but I was able to join my fiance for some photo ops and autographs with the visiting celebs for a change. We met Anthony “C-3PO” Daniels, Veronica “Ash Ketchum” Taylor, and John “Jack Harkness” Barrowman over the course of the convention; they were all extremely lovely, positive people and an absolute pleasure to talk to. I was as conservative with my cash as I could be, though I still found the wiggle room to support a few of my favourite local artists, and there was a lot of inter-stall trading happening everywhere (you’d be surprised how effective dice are as bartering tools). Overall, despite the additional expenses that we had to factor in, we still made a sizable profit that proved the trip to be well worth the effort.

There were some hectic storms happening in Cape Town while we were away; looks like we picked the right week to be in a different city. Fortunately, our cats were safe in a very well respected cattery; I can only hope their time in close proximity with each other helped their relationship somewhat. They are both very happy to be home again, though they were very vocal with their complaints when we picked them up; Silver doesn’t like being in a carrier, and while Sparrow handles it a lot better, he hates car rides, carrier or not. Both the trip to drop them off before we left, and the one on the way back were a cacophony of caterwauling, but they calmed right down as soon as they were out of the car. We’re going to give them the day to acclimatise back into the home situation, and by the weekend they can go out and roam again; there was a tree that got blown over in the park across the street that I’m sure Sparrow will love to explore.

Naturally, while I’ve been away, artwork has been on hiatus once again, and I will be taking a break from posting comics during October. However, I am keen to get drawing some other stuff in the meantime, as well as potentially building a buffer for the next issue of the Showcase, properly this time. I’m still running on the creative energy of ComicCon; seeing what everyone had to offer in the Artist Alley has been a major inspiration and motivational booster to me. You’ll recall how I mentioned that ComicCon pulled me out of my depressive spiral; it was in my first major blog post on this site when I finally returned, almost a full year ago. In the time between ComicCon Africa 2022 and 2023, I’ve gone through a lot, artistically, physically and mentally; on the whole, I think I’m a lot better for it, and it’s the power of creativity that has helped me keep pushing through in many situations since. I’ve stumbled here and there, and I’ve still got a long way to go, but I’m feeling refreshed, reinvigorated and…a third thing beginning with “re” that I can’t think of right now.

Even being back at the day job hasn’t put a dampener on my mood yet, so I’m going to ride this high for as long as I can, and get started on whatever comes next.

Ciao for now.

…

…

…

…revitalised!