I could've been a cartoonist
Thank you for dropping by.
Here you can find my thoughts and ideas in long form, as they are best suffered. In this newsletter, I hope to un-typecast myself as a cross-platform tinkerer and expose (for better or worse) that which lies deeper.
I wasn't always this way—an opensource software developer, that is. As a kid, I wanted to be a cartoonist or a gaming journalist. This is summed up pretty well by this drawing of me playing on a Sega (somehow with an N64 controller) circa 1998, aged 5-6.
I never really grew out of those interests. I was drawing comics about Sega and Nintendo characters continuously from 1999...
... to 2003, with a series titled "Jamie & Alex's [current year] Comics" (the companion publication to my brother's "Alex & Jamie's [current year] Comics"):
The comics sadly ceased regular circulation after that (the management deemed it was unprofitable to keep writing comics for an audience of one—yes, even my brother didn't read them) but I couldn't help but keep coming back to them over the years. For example, in 2013, for an art livestream:
... and in 2021, at a sketching club:
Unfortunately, these characters don't see the light of day nearly as often as they should, and my art tools have been gathering dust. Since becoming a software engineer several years ago, I've found myself pouring rather too much of my spare time into opensource. And while it is fun and a legitimate creative outlet, it's a little too intoxicating for me.
So with this newsletter, I plan to cut back on spare-time coding for once and shall set out to fulfil my childhood dreams. With each article, I'm going to force myself to pick up a pen and become the cartoonist I was always meant to be. And through the course of the anything-goes subject matter, maybe on some level I can become a gaming journalist, too.
If you thought this was a jolly good read, then the excellent news is that there is a mechanism below for obtaining more of it. With any luck, see you in the next issue where again, I'll talk about Whatever.