Can I Pet That Dog??

The great de-shrimpening.

I would like to make a video game. However, because I already have a full time job as a project manager for Maxwell Sloane LLC , and I also sometimes attempt to monetize my dice making (shop here if you wanna look at some shiny click-clacks), and I homeschool one kiddo while the other goes to public school and brings home every germ under the sun, and sometimes I pretend to manage my household too, I do not have the physical capacity to do so. Mostly I barely have the energy to flop onto the couch and watch TV for an hour before bed, it would be a time-bending sort of miracle to add game development into all of that.

And yet, like anybody with a little bit of creativity, the ideas will not leave me alone. I have so many journals so I can try and capture them in ink and paper and get them out of my head so they stop haunting me, but I reserve that for ideas I actually have the means to accomplish. What do I do with the wandering ideas I physically cannot execute but that still keep bonking around my brain meats like an annoying fairy that just wants me to listen?

Oh ho ho, this is a journal too, and one without particular purpose other than to give me an outlet to practice writing again, so let’s make this the first in a new series,

“Half-Baked Brain Batter”

….we’ll workshop that name later.

Today this idea banged around in my head demanding attention like a distraught toddler, a game about petting every dog. In my mind it’s a puzzle platformer, with your ability to command whichever dog is currently with you to help you solve the puzzles. The more time you spend with a dog, the higher its bond is, and the more you repeat commands the better it will be able to follow them. So yes, the dogs will have stats. Each dog knows a different unique trick to solve the puzzles and help you acquire more dogs. You can swap out dogs you have collected on command, so it must involve some kind of dog teleporter from whatever kennel they would be kept in. I imagined the game in the art style of Fez (spectacular game, do recommend).

As I write this out I worry I’m just re-inventing pokemon, but with dogs. Like, I could just go play pokemon and only choose doglike ones and then save myself the trouble of designing my own game. The only trouble is….

I find pokemon to be excruciatingly boring. It could then be argued that the central conceit of my game would be “What if pokemon, but actually fun to play” which seems like a good way to piss off a lot of people so maybe we won’t use that as the elevator pitch.

The other barriers are, besides not having dabbled in game development since I was writing for a MUD in high school, a mortifying thing perhaps to admit, is a lack of foundational skills in producing music, pixel art, and the ability to design interesting puzzles. Those first two are skills I’m confident I could learn, however: fifteen years of running Dungeons and Dragons has severely atrophied my puzzle development abilities. Partly because puzzle development hinges very much on guessing what the person who designed the puzzle wanted, which is a very un-fun game, but also because it’s 1v5 in terms of D&D, so even when I do put out a puzzle, those five brains get together and solve it pretty effortlessly usually by some means I never considered, making it no challenge at all. For Dungeons and Dragons, then, I lean a lot on open ended puzzles with no set solution, which is pretty antithetical to how video games operate.

At the risk of wandering even further into the weeds (for example, Scribblenauts has open-ended puzzles, but that actually makes it less fun when I can just solve all my problems with a dragon and call it a day), I’m going to leave the idea there. I just wanna pet every dog, and it sounds like a fun idea to try and gamify, but I’ve at least pinned it here like a malformed butterfly, so if I need to revisit it I can, and maybe now it will leave me alone.

For a little while, at least.

xoxoxoxo,

J.

Happy Birthday TO THE GROUND!

A cartoon of me, looking hunched and scrungly, stalking across a kitchen after a hot cup of coffee.

I didn’t expect to be alive this long.

13 years ago I was in a tremendous amount of pain. What is now a diagnosis of CPTSD at the time was a crippling depression that left me sobbing any time I was alone with my thoughts. On the bus, while quietly working at my desk, and definitely while in my room, where I was holed up every hour that I wasn’t dragging myself into the office. I often didn’t drag myself into the office, chewing through my paid time off and then just taking unpaid after unpaid day off as I struggled.

What a hook for a happy birthday post, eh? Any creature in enough pain will become absolutely desperate to make it stop, by any means necessary. I never fell into addiction to treat my pain, largely because just about every drug or medication I take makes me instantly and bone-achingly nauseated, long before I took a dose high enough for any kind of palliative effect. By a trick of biology I kept off drugs, but that left me with little else I could do about the unending, unceasing, marrow-melting pain I was in. And so I landed on what my therapist would eventually call a very long-term solution to a short-term problem.

I only had one clue that it was the wrong solution at the time, and that’s the fact that I immediately felt better. The more time I spent thinking about how to carry out my plan, the more pain relief I felt and the more normal I could act. At the time that struck a note of discord with me — all I knew about that act was what I had seen in movies and TV, and shouldn’t I be even more distraught, standing on a ledge weeping, gnashing my teeth, pulling my hair out as I scream into the void? But no, I felt calmer than I had ever felt. Relaxed, finally, with a way out mapped to be done with this pain forever.

So I called in some friends to keep an eye on me while I tried out therapy instead, because the math was not mathing for me.

It was hardly an instant fix, and it took a few tries to find a therapist that I actually clicked with, but even the slow and painstaking progress I made from the few initial therapists who were a bad fit give me hope that I could actually find a way out of this that wasn’t quite so….final.

”It gets better” has always felt like a trite deferment of responsibility now, irritating to hear when you’re in crisis and need help, but that doesn’t make it wrong, either. These days I have drug therapies to assist with the worst of the depression, and between that and therapy I no longer want to kill myself, and only occasionally think about laying down in the woods and letting the worms do their work. I don’t begrudge myself an escapist fantasy now and again as a healthy coping skill, as a little treat if you will, so long as I continue to do the right thing and reach out to friends and a therapist to actually help.

The worst of this went down when I turned 30. I’m 43 today, and while I often still struggle with believing anyone could love me, sometimes I actually do believe it, and that feeling is worth chasing and holding onto. I dunno if it really does get better for everyone, but I can pretty confidently say that I got better. For me.

xoxoxoxo,
J.

P.S: as a birthday present to me, reject fascism, deny AI, be in love with the world around you and the people in it, and maybe buy some dice ;)

Selfie time

Self portrait by Jaydot Sloane, 2025

Had an endoscopy yesterday. Wild ride. Nothing life threatening, just a routine check to make sure my routine acid reflux is actually routine and there’s nothing more sinister going on.

Anesthesia was nice. I asked them to add ketamine into my anesthesia mix because I’m already on a low dose for treatment resistant depression, might as well get an extra dose in while it’s covered under another medical procedure. So despite having felt like I deep throated a bunch of medical equipment for the rest of the day, I was feeling pretty chill about everything.

Regardless of my personal feelings, of course, the horrors persist. But so do I.

This Saturday is Hourly Comics Day, and I’m excited to get to participate. Every hour on the hour I’ll likely be putting out some auto-bio comic about whatever I’m doing that day, or at the very least that’s the goal. We’ll see how it actually ends up, but whatever happens I’ll be posting it over on my bluesky account (https://bsky.app/profile/jaydotdice.com) and trying to remember to tag it for my art-only feed (https://bsky.app/profile/jaydotdice.com/feed/aaajtcvbrpiew).

And if I’m feeling particularly ambitious, I’ll attempt to put up a master post of all the auto-bio comics here as well.

Anyway, I’m off to do some more persisting. I hope you do too.

xoxoxoxo,

J.

For the grell of it…

Rough sketch of a grell, by Jaydot Sloane (2025)

I struggle with grief. This is, honestly, pretty common in America. I can’t speak for anywhere else, but I can pretty confidently say that my culture is not adept at navigating grief. We would rather hide it as impolite, a burden, a thing to ignore until it goes away.

I’m not just talking about the kind of grief when someone you love dies. Even small griefs, like breaking your favorite mug or getting cut off in traffic. All of lifes tiny tragedies and all of its large ones, and we’re taught to just suck it up. Because someone else might have it worse. Because it’s not that big a deal. Because we need to just get over it, without any instruction as to how we get over it. Figure it out, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, and move on immediately.

Genuinely, the past decade of therapy has had this core running through it. How do I deal with grief. The depression I struggle with is not so different from your more mundane grief. It just doesn’t decay the way you would expect grief to decay, so instead of feeling better after some ice cream or a day outside or touching grass, I just spiral ever further into grief.

Learning how to sit with grief, how to look at it head on, directly confront and comfort my grief has been the singular most important skill I should have learned as a child but instead am learning as a very grown adult. My depressions is worse when I try to dismiss my grief, or just refuse to acknowledge it altogether. And yes, sometimes naming my grief makes me feel like I sound selfish or rude or silly, but above all those things, the grief is mine. It’s not a value judgement on me, it’s not a value judgement on whatever it is I am grieving. It just is, and so must I just be with it.

In the macro sense of building community, it’s not always going to be with people you like, but it will be with people that you can work with instead of against. So it goes in the micro, internal sense. I have to work with the feelings I have, not the ones I wish I had, and that requires grace and compassion and patience and love above all else. Room to breathe, and room to grieve.

xoxoxoxo,

J.

Get weird with it

“Fix Your Hearts or Die” graphic merch design, by Jaydot Sloane

Get it on a tshirt, mug, throw pillow, etc here: https://www.teepublic.com/t-shirt/71638418-fix-your-hearts-or-die

I dunno. I’m struggling today. Spent a lot of time fantasizing about moving back to Tucson to live in my childhood home with mom. No mortgage. Set up a little art studio somewhere. Let mom play with her grandkids every day. Go swimming at the local pool.

I’ve run away from things so many times in my life. Every time before that, what I was really trying to run away from was myself. Sadly, wherever you go, there you are, so it never really worked.

I like to think after a decade of therapy and self-work it would be different this time, since I’m less running away from myself and more running away from all my responsibilities, ready to assume new, different responsibilities.

Then I remembered mom is allergic to dogs, so I guess I’m staying the course for now.

Sometimes the work is hard, burdensome, depressing. I am already full of CPTSD and prone to wanting to lay down in the road and let nature take its course. It’s not a pretty condition I have, but I want to be honest with myself about it, because ignoring it in the hopes it goes away is a much worse option that I almost didn’t survive once.

That said, after a decade of working on it, I can at least hold on until tomorrow. Maybe it won’t feel so bad tomorrow.

And if it does, there’s always the day after that. Maybe that one won’t feel so bad either.

Ad infinitum.

I know this isn’t the most inspiring entry today, but sometimes the best we can do is just survive. And that’s ok. I’ll live to thrive another day.

xoxoxoxo,

J.

Right to Repair

Goblin Week, day 6, “I Cast Fireball” by Jaydot Sloane

Set a man on fire, and he’ll be warm for the rest of his life.

Sounds kinda good right now. I am so cold.

I’ve spent days rambling on about praxis by building a community, which is markedly different than making friends. Community is work, and while friends are part of your community, they are not the whole thing. I probably had some grand plans to make another sweeping statement today, but honestly? Fuck it.

I fixed my instant pot. The heating element stopped working, so I searched up any repair guides, and found my exact problem here: https://frugalrepair.com/2018/04/how-to-repair-instant-pot-not-heating-or-working/

Popped the broken machine apart, because it’s not like it’s going to work any less, and lo and behold it was in fact the same issue. I did have to track down my soldering gun, having lent it out some weeks ago, but today I was able to complete the repair. Nervously, I put the machine back together, plugged it in, and gave it a test run.

The whoop I let out when steam began to rise from the water and my cookpot was working again, and all it took was a little bit of bravery to open up a machine I own and use tools I already have.

I do dream someday of that community kitchen, but I also dream of hosting repair workshops there. I like fixing things, and the idea that I could help people hold onto things instead of needing to throw them away and buy new ones sounds like a dream to me.

But for now, I’m going to be pleased with myself, for fixing something of my own.

Cheers,

J.

Creature Comforts

Goblin Week, day 6, by Jaydot Sloane

It is so hard to even think straight when you are cold. Or hungry. Or in pain. Which is exactly why that is the first things fascists want to inflict on you. Drive you crazy by driving you into pure survival mode, make you easy to control and direct like a school of fish trying to evade a predator.

Creature comforts are a foundational support of resistance. It’s much easier to tell someone no, and to fuck off, when you have a full belly.

I’ve seen it said a hundred different times and a hundred different places, but the idea of a lone hero who saves all of us is a dramatic fantasy (sorry Luigi, much as I admire your work, and appreciate the way you’ve unified so many of us, it’s the conversations that happened between people afterwards that brought us together moreso than a hero standing over a corpse).

(hello FBI watchlist, I would like to note contextually this is denouncing vigilante violent justice)

(hello vigilantes, I would like to note contextually I do prefer to cover my ass, legally speaking, but that I am not a cop or your mother)

A leader is a single person with no power save what people give them, and it’s the people around that leader providing childcare, and meals, and warm places to sleep at night, that make anything that leader does even remotely possible. Anyone can stand on a soapbox and scream (sounds amazingly cathartic so I don’t begrudge those who do that), but the first steps to change are bringing people together and getting them to work together.

And not in some happy sappy everyone gets along kind of way, but in a “we recognize we’re all screwed over and we all want to pitch in to make it better” kind of way. Any kind of movement needs way more people who are good with spreadsheets than charismatic leaders. The work is hard, bitter, cold, and hungry, and often discouraging. Changing our fortunes and changing our culture, however, is worth it, to make those promises of an easier life for everyone come true, not just for those who swear fealty to their great leader (often to be sacrificed at his earliest convenience anyway so what has that fealty really gotten you).

Anyway, my fingers are frozen now. I’m gonna go warm up, so I too can do the work.

Goblin Vision Board

Goblin Week day 5, by Jaydot Sloane, “Goblin Vision Board”

The purpose of propaganda is not to convince you of its “truth,” it’s to exhaust you into being unable to imagine things any other way. To put up a poster declaring our leader to be a Great Leader does not convince you he is, in fact, a great leader, but will force you down a path where your head is full of only him and all the ways he is a terrible leader, and leave you feeling helpless and hopeless because you cannot imagine what could be in his place.

So long as we are exhausted, we cannot fight back, and people are rarely as energized by the idea of “anything but THAT” as they are by seeing what things COULD be. Give people something to work FOR, not just something to work against. I think the fascists in charge know this (perhaps not in a smart, fifth dimensional chess kind of way, but definitely in a gut instinct on how to keep a motherfucker down kind of way). Campaigns against a set of ideals never work half as well as campaigns that are for something, and if you are spending all your time exhausting yourself trying to fight against something you will never have the energy to build something better.

All of this being high justification for drawing a goblin farting in a bowl of cheerios. Making art, even bad, weird art (or perhaps especially bad and weird art) is the act of imagining the world as it could be. Showing people that they aren’t stuck with whatever horrible politician that’s trying to ruin everything. That they could, in fact, live in a better world where they have their needs met. Am I saying farting in a politicians cheerios is in the hierarchy of needs?

Yes. At least it is mine. And I know this now, because I drew it yesterday.

I have so many things I would like to do with my time on earth. Last week I imagined getting to build and run a community kitchen once I’m done re-building abandoned houses into affordable housing. There are going to be many challenges and hurdles to ever accomplish such a thing, but it’s now my dream, and if the point of fascism is to take my ability to dream better things away from me, then I’m just gonna double down and dream even bigger.

Don’t go to war hangry

Goblin week #4, by Jaydot

One of my big therapy goals the past few years has been, essentially, to grow a spine. Without getting into a big long medical history of mental health issues, the short version is that I have a strong survival skill of rolling over and letting people have what they want. I find it as wildly upsetting in myself as when I see the national democratic party do it. I get it, I truly do, but that doesn’t make it ok or mean it doesn’t suck ass.

Yesterday I was so angry I could chew rocks. I knew taking action on the situation (no I won’t go into gory detail on this one, it’s work shit and honestly besides the point) while I was that furious could lead to me doing something that I would regret, so I gave myself time and space to settle in with my feelings, and decided to wait until after I’d had some dinner in me.

Hangry could only make things worse, so reasonable to assume a full belly would give me more focus.

Cooking in the kitchen is also how I self-soothe the most. I love my family and relaxing is nice but there’s just something about being in the zone of my core competency to make me feel like a real human being instead of a bumbling angry idiot.

Except once I was comfortable and full, I found my anger slipping away from me. Wouldn’t it just be easier to let it go? The person is very nearly no longer affiliated with any aspect of my life, I could just ignore the whole situation and forget about it.

I knew that was the wrong answer, but I struggled with the motivation to follow through and rectify the situation, since it would involve more confrontation with a deeply unpleasant person. I am awful at holding grudges (again, a survival skill that served me well as a kid but as an adult trying to live in the world it’s fucking me up), so I decided to turn to my community for support.

Phone a friend for: Grudginess lessons.

It helped. It genuinely helped. I may not have the skills myself, but I’m smart enough to know who does and reach out to them. I still have to follow up on the issue today, but I know I’ll get around to it. I got a little more procrastination in me for an unpleasant task, but I won’t avoid it entirely. I am capable of holding someone accountable for their shitty actions.

Just maybe…a little later. After lunch or something.

xoxoxo,

J.

P.S: that was TOTALLY a nazi salute what the fuck is anyone rolling over for THAT. I refuse to reject the evidence of my eyes and ears. I’m not stupid, neither are you, and we both saw exactly what we saw. Cheers.

Making pudding at 3am

Image: Goblin Week, day 3, by Jaydot Sloane

I actually slept fine, but honestly that’s because I pop a garden gummy before bed every night. Otherwise the insomnia wins and I know for an utter, inalienable fact that the basis of being able to cope with anything that happens is getting good rest. What did I say yesterday about it being too easy to catastrophize? That is, of course, the goal of the opposition. To suck all the energy out of us by spinning us in circles having meltdowns and panic attacks about whatever the fuck it is they think they are doing. Losing sleep over stuff only helps them do whatever they want.

No. Fuck that. I’m furious and hurt and angry and upset and furious (I am not generally an angry person, perhaps I need to start expanding my vocabulary around these feelings), but I cannot make meaningful acts and decisions without enough sleep. This is probably applicable in some broad metaphorical sense, something about how resting is not the same as laying down and taking whatever is dished out. Something about how strength lays in rest, and if you let them take rest away from you that’s far more giving in to the onslaught of the horrors than trying to get some sleep ever would. The hyper vigilance will be what kills us, when instead we can fortify in shifts and make sure everyone has the strength to face whatever comes our way.

That said, once the gummy wears off I’m usually up and out of bed getting chased by panicky thoughts so let’s not pretend I’m some pillar of sanity, some bulwark against the tide of fascism. I intend to take up space, I intend to be the weasel in their cheerios, I intend to take all this fear and rage and anger and point it in the right direction and chip away at whatever I can reach. But in the morning, I am just scared.

Yesterday I made the dough, and this morning I made the chocolate-cinnamon-date babka, and when I’m done with this blog post I’m going to go fry up some donuts. Because it feels good to have my hands in something, it feels good to make something, it feels good to feed people, and all of that is enhanced by having gotten rest the night before.

Rest up, babes. It’s gonna be hard, but we can do hard things (with enough sleep and calories in our body to make it happen).

Close enough. Welcome back Xanga / Livejournal.

Goblin Week piece #2 by Jaydot Sloane

I hate writing manifestos. I refuse to be so pinned down.

I was playing “Dragon Age: Veilguard” last night, a second playthrough where I can see what happens if I make different choices (an option sadly lacking in real life), and during a sidequest for some treasure I found an ancient note that said this as part of a prayer (paraphrased from memory here): Destruction is change, and we are ever changing.

Sometimes the thing you need to hear comes from places you wouldn’t expect. 

I have no doubt things are going to be hard, wicked hard, brutally painfully destructively hard for the next few years, and I refuse to make predictions beyond that because it’s too easy to spiral into catastrophizing about it. It’s too easy to feel hopeless and give up. It’s too easy to just roll over and give them what they want because the impending struggle is going to be devastating.

It’ll be hard to live, but I know we can do hard things. More importantly, no single one of us bears this burden alone. We rest when we can, we celebrate every little fucking thing no matter how small, we remember that we are alive, immutably alive, and until that is taken away from us we can use every breath we have to be as annoying as fucking possible to the kinds of people who hate that we live.

And as always the lesson of the snail: We literally physically cannot go backwards. There is only progress, and however slow and incremental, it is still progress.

xoxoxo,

J.