First order of business- I'm not dead, I just got lazy... I'll try to remedy that starting this evening and try to get some illustration done. No ETA on the next Jewel Vixens page cause those never quite pan out... I'll let you know when it's coming.

I'm struck by an amusing phenomenon, however- sort of a battle between humans and trolls, and it all starts from an unlikely place: My Team Fortress 2 fan art.

It's sort of bewildering to me that my most popular pieces are the three existing anthropomorphic fan art pics for Team Fortress 2. While I like how they've come out so far, the fact of the matter is that I'm not reaching out for popularity so much as paying homage to a game I really like and playing around with the ideas a bit. No harm, no fowl... except for the Pyro, anyway.

What amuses me is that I've received some nasty, albeit brief condemnations from people simply because of the anthropomorphic nature of them. You know, the whole "go kill yourself" and "God's gwnna 'git choo!" thing, but today, rather than take the ten seconds to condemn me on this web site I was visited by a tailor-made spambot that dropped 450 e-mails into my account, all of these proverbial bricks through the window tagged with little notes saying how much of a loathesome, broken human being I am. I appreciate it! The admittance that I am a human being provides me with more dignity than your average troll does. Anyway, my e-mail client caught wind of this after a while and blocked e-mails from the fraudulent accounts, and I shift-click-deleted all of it in one fell swoop (Fool me once, shame on you, fool me 450 times, shame on me!).

The irony is that it just steels my resolve. It's all pretty laughable, when you think about it, fifteen brain cells gathering together to pool their resources to destroy what's currently 3 pieces of fan art hemmed out by some fat guy. At the current rate, I expect the following with each subsequent picture:

The Soldier: Someone drives by the house and throws a projectile through the window with a note attached- except they got the wrong house.

The Sniper: Undeterred, they try again, getting the address correct and flinging a Molotov cocktail in a milk jug- except that milk jugs are no longer made from breakable, frangible material and the plastic bottle with a flaming rag out the top makes a nice little candle on the front lawn.

The Scout: In celebrating the Scout's particular combat style, they purchase baseball bats and try to ambush me. Lacking the money and intelligence to differentiate between baseball and wiffleball bats, however, this assault goes poorly.

The Demoman: The haters band together to take a crash course in explosives. All but two are killed.

The Medic: The haters take a brief vacation, realizing that they will only have one last shot at this and that their numbers have been severely diminished by the previous destructive endeavor.

The Pyro: Success at last! They set fire to the house and carry that furfag straight to hell aloft a pillar of fire. Except that by this point I will have moved into my own townhouse some months prior.

Now I don't mean to be condescending to my enemies as such- it's just that I am making an educated guess based on the quality of the attacks I have seen thus far. Maybe you should try your luck facing me in Team Fortress 2 itself? My handle is YeeHaa. I'm not saying you suck- that's an unfair assumption- but I encourage you and other L-class personalities (no, "L" does not stand for "loser", it stands for "Loony as a flaming nun") to vent your prodigious frustrations in a harmless, social environment. I believe the word is catharsis...