** with your host, rob remakes **
Yak and Giles taking on one of my favourite arcade games has me all aflutter. How could I not be excited about a Llamasoft I, Robot? Best possible videogame news.
Watching a film earlier and needing something to occupy myself, threw together a hasty (i)robot. Got a bit bored later on and drew the rest of it. Got even more bored a few weeks later and redid the whole thing. Quite happy with how some parts of this turned out!
Not bad considering I’m half asleep.
I can give up drawing Tempest anytime you know? It’s easy. I can do it.
OK, I can’t. It’s a great game and a great thing to practice with given the stuff I enjoy doodling the most.
Anyway, thinking along the lines of some eighties box art here (for a change!) and trying not to overcrowd things, which is always something my twitching noggin leans towards. Take that, noggin!
Swiped a couple of logos off the quickest google image search possible to see whether it’d work and yeah, I’d say I got close to where I was aiming.
Update: 16th March
Well. This is hell, basically. Coughed up for the drains being cleared and a couple of flush tests seemed to be going alright. Drain folk went away, having cleared all the accumulated crap from the drain itself.
However, a day later and we were back to blockages and things flooding back up that no human should really have to see flood back up into the shower. (We have a wet room, so you know… not like it’s easily contained).
Tried to deal with it ourselves, maybe the blockage was just higher? Friday, everything went very bad indeed. I was already broken from dealing with all this, well reached the “ok, this is too much” phase and the eldest ended up with no sleep, looking after me and making sure I got through whilst trying to organise an emergency plumber to try and sort out whatever was going on. The last of our money and a couple of hundred borrowed from a relative later and things still aren’t clear but at least we now know the drain has collapsed. No jet washing that one clear.
Can’t say I took this too well and absolutely lost it. I guess I’ve been overdue losing it but you know, pretty undignified run of posts into the internet there. I’m not annoyed with myself for that or anything, like what else can you even do when you’re facing up to three or four days with all the money gone on drains, other people’s money gone on drains and plumbers and an even bigger problem than you’d anticipated and no food to go round.
Thanks, again, to the kindness of folks we’ve been able to get some food in but I dunno how long it’s going to take to get this stuff fixed up. Proper nightmare scenario. I’m dreading finding out the costs given we’re scraping through for food each month as it is without this sort of expense hammering us. Fuck me.
I’m dead grateful for all the help folks have offered so far, we’d be fucked without it in no uncertain terms. I’m really quite fucked off and tired of everything already and dealing with another disaster has just left me shattered. I need some peace and rest from all this, you know? But really, I am so grateful that folks have helped me and the kids stick around.
We’re hopefully good for food until Tuesday when the eldest should have a few quid coming in but yeah, things are still very bad indeed.
I’ll keep the donation links up even though I feel I’m way beyond taking the piss now, any and all help is like, well, it makes a huge huge difference at the moment. And inbetween all that, I hope folks will excuse me for being a bit more down and done with shit for a bit. I am trying not to be perma-glum but the world really does not want to give me and the kids a break and I am so knackered. So soz about that, soz about all of this really.
With love,
-Rob
As happens all too frequently due to the house being a trash fire, late last week the drains clogged up again, backed up and flooded the hall. I shouldn’t have to be, but I’m fairly used to this happening by now and so, usual routine of do all the things – mop up the water, try and unclog the drains ourselves etc… and though I’m a bit slower than I used to be on this, it usually breaks the back of things and life goes on.
Given my existence doesn’t seem to work in any way other than as some sort of cosmic joshing competition between laugh loving space beings or something at the mo, this time things aren’t that simple and despite trying to do it all ourselves for the past three or four days, it’s abundantly clear by the fact I can’t have water on for long or flush the toilet without things returning, that this isn’t something I can handle myself.
Also, the amount of literal shit I’m having to clean up. Bit of a giveaway, that one.
And of course, because I’m me and I generally have no money these days, I have no money to afford even a flush of the drains right now, much less the rest of the work. I’m already juggling how to last until the next payday for normal things, never mind this.
Which leaves me here. Again. Fucked off to high heaven, wanting some peace and quiet, a bit of time to keep pushing forward with the house, but more urgently, having a bathroom that floods with shit if anyone flushes the toilet or runs the tap and that’d be rough if it was just me, it’s not like I can tell the kids not to need a shit or anything, I don’t think that works.
I’m just bruised and dazed by the unrelenting everything of the past few years, it’s been great to get back to having the basic necessities to y’know, store food, cook food, wash clothes and that again (though I need to clear the conservatory out before I can get the dryer in still) but life is taking the piss still and with no money to speak of, it’s not like I’ve got any runway when things like this happen and fuck things up some more.
So I don’t really know what to do, apart from keep going, ask for some help and, well, keep going.
If anyone can help, so I can have a literal shit-free house, I’d be grateful.
I’ve set a ko-fi goal that’s a (incredibly) little over what I should need but just in case anything else crops up, you know? The old gofundme is still up if folks prefer that and the PayPal is where I left it. I hate this, I hate all of it, but fucked if I know what else to do right now.
Thanks, and sorry. If anyone knows what imp I’ve pissed off in the past to be cursed, can you ask them to tone it down a bit as well. It’s long past funny now.
https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/retroremakes
https://www.gofundme.com/f/rob-and-family-get-their-lives-and-house-back
A practice piece that got way out of hand, this one.
I’ve been intending on tackling either this or 3d Lunattack for a bit and kinda put it off for a while because eurgh, effort. Today was pissing me off and I needed a distraction and I clearly hadn’t realised how much of a distraction.
The Seiddab games are pretty formative experiences for me. Sure, not the first or the best of their kind but still impressive stuff for the time and I still keep a little flame alive for them all these years later.
I was never the greatest fan of Elite (read: I never liked it in the slightest) but I did enjoy the more arcade end of the 3d spaceships spectrum, whether it was Star Wars or Darkstar, Starion or 3d Starstrike, all that sort of thing was very much my bag.
Starion is a bit of an odd one because it sits somewhere in the middle. It’s neither all out arcade nor quite close enough to pass itself off as a space simulator, which made it all the more interesting to me because it’s, frankly, a bit weird like that. It also has ginormous floating space letters and everyone knows floating space letters are great. I think? Look, just don’t quote me on that.
After doodling Elite last week, I figured I owed it to myself to draw a space game I actually liked and as Starion was the first one I mentioned in jest, that was what I settled upon.
Chris has been chipping away at Oidanoid for a while now and quite a few folk have had a play around with it before me. I’ll admit that it wasn’t for want of opportunity, it was just I kept forgetting because I’m completely rubbish.
Fortunately for me, I got thrown a link to the latest version yesterday, downloaded the thing, popped it onto the Steam deck and … yeah, go on then!
It’s a neat twin sticker very, very much more in the Minter vein than what I do and obviously, everyone knows that’s the correct approach to anything whatsoever. There’s a lot of Yak DNA to the game with its biscuits, flying text, and more chill Llamatrom vibes and that’s probably the first thing anyone will notice.
A bit of a play and that rather slips away as it reveals itself to be, and I piss you not about this, more Blue Jam than you’d expect any game to be. There’s a constant, calm but unsettling ambience to everything and sure, as far as I could tell nobody has put any lizards in my Steam deck, it still made for a pretty weird (in a very good way) experience.
And, you know, I do love a game that feels extra personal. Aside from some social media chats over the years I don’t really know Chris as a person but this is one of those videogame recipes where it feels like there’s only one person in the world who could make this the way it’s made and that’s my favourite thing in anything, ever.
So of course I had to give it a doodle. I love that stuff. Plus, you know, neon grids. I can’t help myself.
You can follow what Chris is up to over on the Blueskys. Go on.
Mucking around with some bits and pieces and this is where it ended up. Quite like it! It should be the law that you have to put a neon grid in everything.
Having a glum day, listening to HMHB because some days you just really need to go and do that. It’s not just the jokes that get me through.
Idly thinking about the social media clowns that are Sleaford Mods and how much more on point, how much more angry in the right direction – not complaining the world is shit and everyone else is a wanker – just the first verse alone of Oblong Of Dreams is compared to their entire oeuvre.
“Move him onto his side —
Give him dignity, give him some warmth
Which he’d possibly not received of late
I’m not a mate as such
I just used to see him around and about
And I could never work out if he was heading
For a food bank or a pharmacy
A field path or indecency
Either way, he’s out of it now”
You couldn’t imagine them ever being able to write something with the righteous, direct, fury of A Country Practice, which 26 years on is still way, way too fucking relevant.
”She died with her telly on, eighty-seven and confused
With not enough hospital beds ‘cos all the money’s been used
On the end of the century party preparations
And they reckon that the last thing she saw in her life was
Sting, singing on the roof of the Barbican”
That’s what kind of gets me, has always got me, about Half Man, Half Biscuit. I can sit here talking for days about being in love with the jokes, the wordplay, everyone can hear Vatican Broadside and have it stuck in their head forevermore, but there’s a deep, deep compassion that comes with the jokes, the prodding at the absurdity of the middle classes and shaggy dog stories. And the anger at the things that are wrong.
26 years on and A Country Practice shouldn’t be relevant. The way 2025 is going, it’s fair to say the now three year old Oblong Of Dreams shouldn’t be too. But it is. And here we are.
I’m having a bad day, thank fuck for HMHB.
To be honest, I just wanted to see if I could doodle a decent enough space tube and needed something to pop on top of that to see whether it worked. I don’t really care for Elite all that much! Each to their own and all that, it just isn’t my bag of space videogame.
Still! It gave me a nice break from drawing mascots and I think I’ve sort of got a way of doing tubes how I want to. Wahey, etc…
