Last Friday there was a zine fair. I printed two Lit.cat writing collections and a collection of my own writing. It went incredibly well, I sold nearly all of my stock, and two people posted my writing on Instagram. (also, it is nuts how many people showed up to this fair, like maybe 300 people in a building meant to house 200?) My favorite teacher in the world was there- my 6th grade elementary teacher! It was his first year teaching a class by himself that year, and I remember him kindly for reaching out to all of us. He said the most validating thing to me after reading my zine: "That 12 year old kid who rambled in class all day- he's still in here. But now he's refined and persuasive. It was a good day. ===== I started playing Cuphead, I found out you could pair single Nintendo Switch controllers to your laptop, and it works well for gameplay, other than a weird glitch that prevents you from talking to characters and progressing. The music made me forget I wasn't white.
Cuphead looks amazing, but I think I'm gonna steer away from it due to the difficulty level. If you have any interest in old timey cartoons (the animation style that influenced the game), you can often find DVD collections of them for not much money at all. They're a great little thing to have if you want something playing in the background while you work and if you actually pay attention to them, you'll be amazed at the depth early animators went in exploring the craft from humor to surrealism. That zine fair sounds awesome and it's great that you were relatively successful there.
I have a Felix the Cat VHS set somewhere- I don't even remember any specific episodes. I'll find a Youtube collection somewhere. Hand drawn animation is nuts, it's the one job I'd rank above Astronaut. It takes so much work and so much skill. I still daydream about creating my own hand drawn Sakuga work, but it's too easy to convince myself it's too much work. I really wanted to work in cartooning when I was a kid. I remember there was a newspaper cartoonist who visited my class when I was in 2nd grade, and I gave him a page of comics. It makes me cringe so hard because I know the comics in them were so terrible. I also had a comic in middle school where I recycled the jokes from a Bloom County collection because we didn't have any of Berkeley Breathed's comics in our newspaper. I would arrive early to every period and a good portion of my class liked reading them. It would be years until I realized that people liked me because they thought I was cool, not because I was funny. Man, I really don't want anyone to not play Cuphead because the game is difficult, but it's taken me at least 8 - 15 times to get through each level so far. Each level is slightly over 2 minutes long. I hope you think about whether you can handle being stuck for 30 minutes, because it feels so good if you can get over it. I have a looping playlist of the music from the game with really exciting drum parts: