Memento Mori, Memento Vivere

been having fun doing quick portraits without a reference to see what my brain decides to paint

Martin and Bosco Day Button Giveaway

Life can feel a bit bleak in 2026, so I decided my Tumblr community could use a bit of fun. I'll be giving away Martin and Bosco Day buttons! The awesome design is by @stinkybrowndogs.

I'll be covering the shipping costs, so the final number of winners will depend on postage, which I'm still working out. I'm doing my best. XD

To Enter: Reblog this post. That's it. You do not need to follow me and be subjected to my weird posts.

The fine print:

One entry per blog.

Winners will be randomly selected on June 21, 2026 at noon (Toronto time).

If you're selected, I'll contact you through Tumblr Messages to arrange shipping.

Due to shipping costs, this giveaway is limited to residents of Canada and the United States. I apologize to my international friends!

If you're selected, you'll need to share your name and mailing address with me so I can mail your button.

I'm eternally delighted that Martin and Bosco have their own Tumblr holiday.

Because my comics have gone around the internet, many people have asked if I’ve “gotten better yet”. The answer is a firm NO because that’s not how post-viral illness triggered by an infection that causes organ and brain damage works. Please consider your behavior and who you are leaving behind.

Check out the People’s CDC here where they provide weekly updates on the COVID situation in the U.S.

ID in alt text and below!

ID: a 10-image black-and-white cartoony comic.

The 1st image is titled Pandemic Year 3 and dated January 2023. The drawing shows a masked boy with fluffy hair, Joey, surrounded by unmasked people. The text reads: At some point, the people around me decided that the price of me staying alive — a few small inconveniences for them — was too high. In image 2, Joey sits at a table with his drawing tablet looking concerned. The text reads: The world, many loved ones included, is actively hostile to me continuing to live. How do I cope with that? I don’t have the answer. I’m just really alone.

Joey, stressed and frightened, clutches his laptop. The text reads: And I mean really alone. A figure on the laptop screen says: High-risk people will take care of themselves. Joey yells: How?

This image is split into two panels. The first one reads: How do I keep myself safe when the store, work, and school, is a death trap? For each word, a triangle displays that maskless environment. The second panel shows Joey’s sad face in a Zoom window. The text reads: I’m taking my final semester of undergrad online to the displeasure of many.

Joey lays face down in a pillow. The text reads: If you’ve been following me for any time, you know I got Covid in February 2020 at 19 years old and have become disabled by long Covid. Everything smells and tastes like rotting meat, I can’t keep anything I eat down, and I’ve started randomly fainting after years of dizziness.

Joey is shirtless and masked and hooked up to an EKG. The text reads: I’m one of millions of Covid survivors for whom re-infection is much more dangerous. Not to mention everyone who was already high-risk.

Joey lays on the couch and looks at social media posts where people are posting photos of themselves maskless in crowds. The text reads: The general public is very happy to isolate high-risk people from society if it means never having to think about us ever again and continuing with the actions that kill us. That’s eugenics, by the way.

This image is split into two panels. The first one shows Joey laying down, clutching his heart, and crying. The text reads: And it’s not just the people who don’t see us. The second panel shows Joey looking disheveled. The text reads: The cognitive dissonance is unlike anything I’ve seen. A speech bubble says: Are you sure you won’t do indoor dining?

Joey holds his hands lovingly under his face and raises his arms. Hearts are around his head. The text reads: If you’re here with me and isolated from the rest of society while being continually told that your life doesn’t matter and that you’re crazy, I see you. I love you. You’re not alone.

Next up on the new owlbear series: Panda + Lesser Sooty Owl

This is the chillest owlbear ever. But she will definitely maul you if you get near her cub. But like. In a really nice way.

So what happened? I’m gonna give the TL;DR version:

April 15, 1989. Hu Yaobang, a former Communist Party Chief dies.

Many people, including  workers, laborer, students and some officials come to mourn. You see, those protestors were originally there to mourn, not protest.

Time passed and there were some hunger strikes, and protests, and a call for accountability and reform from the government.

Eventually, things went south, because the communist party doesn’t have time to deal with these sorts of “demands” and grievances.

Keep in mind, the people wanted not the end of the Communist Party, but for the party to stop with the official corruption, rule of law, and the gross monopoly of information and power.

Incidentally, China still suffers from all of these SAME problems to this day…

June 3, 1989. The massacre started at night to disperse the crowd. Many were shot, wounded, and killed.

June 4, 1989. Some of the parents of the protestors who never came home went looking for them. It was still total mayhem.

June 5, 1989. The iconic image of the tank man was taken. To this day, no one knows what became of this person.

Content Warning for video: blood

“Tell the world…”

I cannot stress how important it is that people remember and know about this event. Do you know how China responded? With lies and censorship.

Even now, in 2016, we do not have an official death toll on the Tiananmen Square Massacre, the Chinese government doesn’t even acknowledge the event as a “massacre”. And they weaves these cover stories of “counter revolutionaries trying to overthrow the government”. Therefore, the violence was necessary to ~protect~ the people. (Or some bullshit like that)

The amount of lying and censorship in China is, quite frankly, scary amazing. Tumblr, which somehow managed to fly under their radar, found itself being blocked in that country.

After all, tell a lie often enough and it becomes the truth.

And those who remember the incident in China? …………well, you tell me.

What the fucking hell.

I just remember thinking it was a happy event, because all these people were out on the street, and at first the army were interacting with these people. And it almost looked like a festival because people were singing and talking, and hopeful. And then tv coverage for the events got cut off.

The blocking of the live coverage had all the adults anxious, nobody said anything for ages, I just remember my grandmother saying, “Just be glad your father isn’t in China, now.”

And that stuck with me to this day. Because yeah, if dad had been in China then he would have been in Beijing studying, he would have been on those streets with those other students.

It was the first time I knew that something horrible had happened to all those people I saw on the television. I don’t even remember how I knew that the army must have shot at the civilians, I just knew. Because when you grow up in China, especially in the 80s you knew there were things you don’t say, that you can’t express in a public forum, because that can get you and your family in trouble. You just knew, and it didn’t fucking matter if your were a child or an adult.

To this day I don’t remember how I found out what happened in Tiananmen Square, because the news covered it up, but people found out. My grandparents knew, my uncles and aunts knew. Extended family visited my grandparents, I remember people telling my mother not to mention my father’s name because my father was a Chinese Beijing University graduate, who had gone overseas. Because there were people who died in the protests that my dad knew.

And it was all just so frightening because nobody was telling me directly what was happening, but I just knew that all the people on the streets was probably dead.

Looking back on it, Tiananmen Square instilled in a me a life long distrust of governments, but especially the Chinese government. I’m ethnically Chinese but I never want to return to China, not even for a holiday, and this has been my attitude even before Xi Jinping took power. Because Tiananmen Square was a peaceful protest that ended up with the army using heavy artillery against their own people. How can you trust in a system, in a government like that? Because if my dad had delayed further studies overseas by two years he would have been one of those students, one of those fucking kids on the streets that would have died.

And you know, when the Umbrella movement was happening in Hong Kong I was deeply panicked and just anxious because I kept on thinking all those people, all those kids are going to be killed. And when that didn’t happen it was such a relief.

When I found out years later that Chinese people a few years younger than me didn’t know what happened in Tiananmen Square I was so fucking angry. I can’t even articulate the rage and the sheer tiredness of it all.

That night, and in the upcoming months, Hong Kong was in perpetual tears, and in literal shock.

So many of the items in our daily lives are sew-able. A simple needle and thread changes the way you think. When an item breaks, you no longer think, "I guess I must buy a new one..." Instead, you think, "I guess I must fix it..."

How many of these everyday items rest for eternity in a landfill, because of a simple break that a needle and thread could have fixed? How many excess items were manufactured to make up for the forgetting of the humble needle and thread...?