Rediscovering “Columbo” in 2020
From newyorker.com on October 27, 2020.
Still solid.
Joe Dator
Day 21,080
Drawlloween, day 20: vile viper.
Say hello to Ophelia Sarkissian, aka Madame Hydra, aka Viper. She showed up in Captain America #110 back in February 1969, courtesy of Jim Steranko. Her résumé is poison immunity, elite martial arts and marksmanship, and a strategist’s brain that carried her all the way to the top of Hydra, with a loadout of poison-tipped darts, knives, guns, and whips.
The Avengers and the X-Men have been dealing with her for decades now, but I still think of her and Hydra as mostly Cap baddies.
I went with her rather than a snake, because I was really at a loss for an Ed-style snake scene that would vibe (see how to draw pics after the source images)
#mabsdrawlloweenclub2026, #doodle, #vileviper, #mdwc26d20
Day 21,080: Thirty Thousand Posts Later
I did some counting this week, and this journal has quietly passed 30,612 posts. The archive runs from July 21, 1999 to today, twenty seven years of writing things down. Rather than one long ramble, here is the tour by era, with links so anyone can dig into the strata themselves.
The Mailing List Years (1999 to 2000)
The oldest thing in the archive is not even a journal entry. It is an email I sent to a Champions role playing game mailing list on July 21, 1999, asking how to build a monster under the bed that scatters when the lights come up: read the original email The signature says scottobear@geocities.com, with a little ASCII art border. The journal proper starts that October, and one of the first entries marks Newton's arrival: read the entry Newton the cat was a founding member of this place, and he appears in ninety eight post titles over the years. The spring the archive opens is also the spring I met my favorite person, in April 1999. The journal and the love story have the same headwaters.
The Flood (2001 to 2002)
Then came the LiveJournal years, and the tap opened all the way. This site holds 2,362 posts from 2001 alone, most of them short, chatty and written the same day they happened. Whole archive: browse the 2001 archive The voice of those years is "dear journal" in public, links of the day, quizzes, dreams, work notes and cat reports, sometimes three or four entries before lunch. Reading them now is the closest thing I own to a time machine with a comments section.
Numbered Entries, Hurricanes and a Wedding (2003 to 2006)
For a long stretch the entries were numbered instead of titled, like files in a drawer. Entry 6,318 went up in December 2003. The Florida years brought hurricane season into the journal, and the archive holds the Wilma watch from October 2005: read the Wilma updates We married in October 2006, and the journal entry from the wedding week is mostly about Newton's seventh adoption anniversary: read the entry Baltimore came first that week, then Myrtle Beach. That ordering of priorities tells you most of what you need to know about this household.
The Newtcam Years (2007 to 2011)
The second flood was bigger than the first. The busiest year in the archive is 2008, with 2,975 posts: browse the 2008 archive Entry numbers climbed into the nine thousands, with entry 9,341 posted in July 2008. Newton, by then a senior cat of distinction, had his own webcam, the Newtcam, and it was still producing reports in December 2008: browse the 2008 archive12/03/newtcamds-2/ Maryland years meant Chesapeake Beach, snow worth writing home about and a journal that had become a daily habit with no remaining interest in moderation.
The Quiet Years (2012 to 2015)
Every long journal has a valley. The quietest full year here is 2012, with 518 posts, many of them photos titled by file name and little else. The habit never broke, though. It just went low and slow for a while, the way gardens and friendships and journals do, and then it came back. By December 2015 the journal was happily reviewing Fallout 4 quests: read the quest notes Some priorities are load bearing.
The Cross-Post Years (2016 to 2019)
The social platforms started flowing through this site, and the archive kept a copy of almost everything. The categories tell the story: 559 video posts, 471 Instagram cross posts and 259 Twitter posts: browse the video posts Likes, shares and game screenshots washed in alongside the handwritten entries. In January 2019 the journal looked back at a Newtcam action shot from ten years earlier, Newton on his tower, and by then the looking back had become one of the journal's regular features. A memory that lives outside my head is also a memory that likes to visit.
The Home Years (2020 to 2022)
The world shrank to the size of a house and a yard, and the journal posted 1,507 times in 2020. An entry from March 24 of that year is titled "Flashback to a time when we still went outside": read that entry A kitten named Pearl arrived in 2020 and promptly took over. Cameras went up in the backyard, and the night shift started reporting in: skunks, raccoons, opossums, deer and eventually bears, several of whom now have names and fan followings of their own.
The Day Count (2023 to today)
Virginia years settled in, Roanoke took over the titles, and then the count changed what it counts. Since December 11, 2024, entries have been numbered by days lived instead of posts written, starting with Day 20,401: see Day 20,401 The next day I noted that 20,402 was a palindrome. Yesterday was Day 21,079: see yesterday’s entry The numbering impulse and the journal impulse turned out to be the same impulse all along. I just finally pointed it at the right total.
The Gaming Thread
Games run through this archive from the very first entry to this month. The 1999 email at the bottom of the pile is a Champions question, and by the summer of 2001 the journal was posting characters from the old Justice Society game and a list I still stand behind, 51 Things I Have Learned From Playing Champions: browse the 2001 archive08/18/51-things-ive-learned-from-playing-champions/ The tabletop years gave way to console years, with Fallout 4 quest reviews in 2015 and Boss Monster nights in 2016. Then Fallout 76 set its map in West Virginia in 2018, practically in this journal's backyard, and the coverage got local fast, cryptids included: watch the welcome The thread never closed. The journal marked Fallout Day in October 2025: see the post Twenty six years from a mailing list rules question to holiday observances for a game series is a respectable run for any hobby.
The Doodle Thread
The drawing habit is nearly as old as the writing habit. The journal has meeting doodles from March 2001, posted as a series: browse the 2001 archive03/29/meeting-doodles-3rd-in-a-series/ In 2002 I was sketching on a Palm Pilot on the bus and posting the results: see the Palm sketches The tools kept changing and the margins kept filling. These days the doodles run on prompts, from the Gnarled Branch to Drawlloween every October, and the very first day count post was a doodle post. In March 2025 the journal posted a skunk doodle that felt like a self portrait: see the skunk doodle In June 2026 it posted a whole doodle archive dump: see the dump Pearl got her own Halloween doodles earlier this month: see Pearl’s doodles
Why Keep a Journal for Twenty Seven Years
People ask sometimes why I still write it all down. The honest answer is that I always have, in one form or another, since before some of my readers were born. The form changed from mailing lists to GeoCities to LiveJournal to this site. The impulse never did. This archive knows what the weather was, what the cats were doing, which games we played, which meals mattered and which small Tuesdays turned out to be important. So here is to the next post, whatever number it wears. It will probably be about a cat, a walk, a drawing prompt or the weather. That is not a failure of ambition. That is the whole point. The ordinary days were always the subject.
Thanks for reading along, however long you have been here.
Day 21,079
Drawlloween, day 19: cat.
I have never liked Poe’s short story “The Black Cat,” so this one gets a different ending minus the animal abuse and uxoricide. The primary human in this version also sadly became a cruel monster, but instead of all that, he drank too much, tripped, fell, and died without hurting anybody but himself. (The cat did nothing wrong, I swear, and you cannot prove that he bashed that guy’s skull in; not even a little bit. Also, it is *purely coincidence* that the guy might have been based on my boy EAP, who may have died mysteriously.) The upside for the guy is that he did not go to the gallows.
#mabsdrawlloweenclub2026, #doodle, #cat, #mdwc26d19, #roanokeva
Warning, I made item 4 animated, and may be a little flashy flashy for sensitive viewers. Also, picture of a dead dude bleeding out in front of a cat.
Clayface
Probably won’t be seeing the new Clayface movie for a while, unless a version from the high seas floats my way via parrot. (Reasons why at the bottom)
Even though, my all time favorite version of possibly my favorite batman weirdo villain is Matt Hagan, especially when he is shown as just a treasure hunting idiot who tripped into a gooey, shapeshifing power set.
The other versions are fun, too, but dumb ol’ Matt is my fave.
These days, whenever is see Clayface, I think of the poo emoji, not because it is bad, but because he is a brown soft-serve textured muck with eyes. 💩
1961 Clayface for me!
Problems with DC/WB/Skydance
In October 2026, a major $110.9 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery by Paramount Skydance was officially completed. To help finance the equity acquisition, Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund (the Public Investment Fund, or PIF), alongside the wealth funds of Qatar and the UAE, provided $24 billion in backing.
While Skydance Corporation remains the American parent entity controlling Warner Bros. Pictures and DC Studios, Saudi Arabia holds a massive stake as a core financial backer.
The same Saudi wealth fund (PIF) that backed the Warner Bros. acquisition is directly tied by global intelligence to high-profile state assassinations.
Specifically, court filings and declassified intelligence reports revealed that the private jet company Sky Prime Aviation-whose planes transported the 15-member hit squad to Istanbul to murder and dismember journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018-was ordered seized by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and transferred directly into the PIF less than a year before the assassination occurred.
So, I am not going to willingly give any money to WB or any Skydance / DC studios project, and will encourage anyone else to do the same.
Day 21,078 – 570817043407
A Halloween-themed Gasoline Alley Sunday strip by Frank King from 1923. I split out the panels for easier reading. I still refer to small children and animals as Skeezix, sort of a more familiar form of “buddy,” perhaps when I am being particularly inquisitive or disciplinary, in the vein of “Whatcha doin’ there, Skeezix?”
Man, I miss the Sunday funnies. If I had seen this in the paper, I probably would have pinned it up.
#sundaycomics #frankking #gasolinealley
Day 21,077 – Giant
Day 18 : Giant
We recently watched Below and enjoyed it; @maximilliondeersteak requested a squid for the next appropriate day. Who am I to say no?
Regarding Madame Squid, one minute she was minding her own business, and the next, some whale decided to get too close and become the main event in a tentacle situation, and probably a tasty snack.
The submarine crew was filming the ideal subject for a documentary on sperm whales who pretend to be baleen whales; apparently, there is a trend among some sperm whales to get chin tattoos, trying to look like filter feeders rather than the dangerous, toothy beasts they truly are. The divers were getting some footage, but little did they realize that they went from a nature documentary about a cetacean poser to a kaiju movie!
I do love whales, but this guy just really had a bad attitude and was asking for it.
#mabsdrawlloweenclub2026, #doodle, #giant, #mdwc26d18, #roanokeva
Lantern
Day 17 of Drawlloween: Lantern!
Mr. Lamplighter has his work cut out for him today….
#drawlloween #mdwc26d17 #mabsdrawlloweenclub2026 #jackolantern #edemberley
Day 21,076
Day 16 of Drawlloween: Hist”horror”ical!
On June 24, 1947, pilot Kenneth Arnold was flying near Mt. Rainier when nine crescent-shaped objects streaked past his plane. He told reporters they moved like saucers skipping across water. A newspaper shortened it to “flying saucers,” and the modern UFO era began in a single headline.
Arnold’s sighting lit the fuse- within weeks, more pilots, a prospector, and hundreds of ordinary Americans were reporting saucers of their own, and the summer of 1947 became the summer everyone started watching the sky.
#drawlloween #mdwc26d16 #mabsdrawlloweenclub2026 #ufo #flyingsaucer
Some bonus ed emberley illustration aids
Tiny Terrors! Day 21,074
Day fifteen is “tiny terrors,” and while some may think Pearl here is a terror, I love that little beastie to bits. She protects the house from the true tiny terrors-any little bugs that might find their way in-and she reminds the chipmunks and goblins outside to keep out. (She is also good for a cuddle and purr session pretty much 24/7.)
#mabsdrawlloweenclub2026, #doodle, #tinyterrors, #mdwc26d15, #pearl, roanokeva
Day 21,073
Day 14 – Witch for Drawlloween!
The Ed Emberley style returns! Emberley’s drawing books taught generations of kids to build whole pictures out of simple shapes. This witch follows that recipe: a triangle hat, a broom drawn in a few strokes, and a black cat along for the ride. Green skin is optional but encouraged.
#drawlloween #drawlloween2026 #mabsdrawlloweenclub2026 #witch #edemberley #halloween #spookyseason #roanokeva #art
Day 13, mirror
Evil Queen:
“What do you mean, you’re not Artificial Intelligence?”
Magic Mirror:
“Oh Queen, who rules with pride and grace,
Look closely at this glass-bound face.
You ask if science, gears, or art
Controls the spirit in this part.
I am no product of a screen,
No microchips, nor cold machine.
I do not scrape the web for data,
Or train on code to feed your beta.
No algorithms compute your face,
No servers spin in distant space.
I crave no power, nor port 80,
I only serve my royal lady.
So fear no virus, glitch, or tech,
My magic holds your foes in check.
Pure sorcery is what I am, my guy!
An ancient spirit, not AI.”
#mabsdrawlloweenclub2026, #doodle, #mirror, #mdwc26d13, #roanokeva
Day 21,071
Day 12 of Drawlloween, and the prompt is raven.
Perched, and sat, and nothing more.
Pallas is Pallas Athena, goddess of wisdom, so the narrator pours his grief out to wisdom itself and gets “Nevermore.” in retutn.
Enjoying the “Below” miniseries. About 3 episodes in.
Day 11 – yokai
The Baku (獏 or 貘) is a benevolent Japanese yōkai (supernatural spirit) known as a protector that devours human nightmares.
In Japanese folklore, the baku is a chimera that devours nightmares. Old accounts describe it as a patchwork beast with an elephant’s trunk and tusks, a lion’s mane, and pieces borrowed from half a dozen other animals. Tradition holds that if you wake from a bad dream, you call on the baku to eat the dream so it can’t return.
The creature came to Japan from Chinese folklore, where it was known as the mo. Its name later attached itself to a real animal, and the tapir is still called baku in Japanese today.
Sleep well tonight! The baku is on duty.
#mabsdrawlloweenclub2026, #digitalmarkers, #doodle #yokai #baku, #mdwc26d11
Day 10 – Jabberwocky
I thought this would be easy, it wasn’t. It *was* kind of fun experimenting with shapes, and even though he has buck teeth, I thought fangs just looked better.
I hope all your vorpal blades go snicker-snack today.
#mabsdrawlloweenclub2026, #digitalmarkers, #doodle #jabberwocky , #mdwc26d10