Here’s the inside of my head:

I’m trying to teach myself to be good at making pixel art (I’ve always maintained it was an unconscionable failure that I didn’t make Adventure Dennis in pixel art), so I kinda drew a stream-of-consciouness piece. The results are full of PDR-ness, so I thought I’d make some annotations:

• To begin, the colour scheme is basically that of this website (more orangey than yellow, but close), which I’ll have had for 20 years this year. It’s a pretty important part of my life, even if after all that time I don’t think I’ve managed to make of it what I want it to be. But I’m still going here in this Internet age of social media, how many websites from 2006 can say that?
• It’s a cityscape. None of the buildings here are specific references, really, but PDR is definitely cityfolk and likes tall buildings. I tried to work in a garden of flowers on the rooftop near the beekeeper, but I sucked at drawing it, so instead we have a cityscape that doesn’t show as much nature as I’d like, but I can pretend that’s there and just enjoy the cityness of it.
• I mentioned the beekeeper, and that’s another very PDR thing. Remember when the Internet was a little more innocent and people got into debates about Pirates versus Ninjas? Well, PDR decided he had to be kooky and special and different and chose Beekeepers. But you can’t say I didn’t commit. I have become the world’s foremost reviewer of Fictional Beekeepers, after all. The Beekeeper in the image could be Adam Obianu, my own badass fictional beekeeper, but it doesn’t really matter, it’s just the concept of Beekeepers.
• The person with the beekeeper is nobody in particular, but I’ve come to think that if this is, as I joked, the inside of my head, that’s probably my own self image. Certainly it doesn’t look like me physically, since I’m a big masc oaf, but I do think that if I could choose my physical form at will something smaller and more feminine would be likely, since I already feel like I take up more space than I’d like and I am not especially manly by the standards of society. And she’s friends with the beekeeper. I like friends and I like beekeepers.
• The building the beekeeper and figure are standing on has a little occult symbol on there. I mostly just enjoy designing symbols that look occult (I did it in The Demon of South Gloria as a recent example), but the one in the image I have designed with a story in mind that I’ve not yet managed to tell.
• To the lower left of that occult symbol you can see Mackestry Manor, home to Many Monsters and setting of activity books I’ve made for sale on the Internet. I’ve not had the energy to make more recently, but I intend to get back there at some point.
• On a building overlooking the Manor is a little creature called a skeffix. This little guy comes from a one-page RPG I made as part of a Game Jam, and is standing in for my desire to create games. I mean, I technically HAVE created games, Skeffix for example, but I’d like to have the time to really refine and produce one that I could sell to the world. Maybe this’ll be the year.
• Above the skeffix is my attempt at a duck flying by. I purposely made to attempt to make this accurate to any species of duck because, once again, this is a self-reference. Back before emails and stuff, when I used to send letters to friends, I would occasionally just end them with “and here’s a picture of a duck” and do a little doodle of a duck. It was never meant to be high art, it was meant to be PDR’s way of ending a letter. I just like ducks. Here’s one time I made a Snow Duck.
• To the right of the duck you’ll see some sort of UFO-looking thing, but that’s actually the Hover Headquarters, home to Hover Head and the Team of Superheroes, the stars of a comic I made years and years ago. As far as this image is concerned, that floating base stands in for all my webcomics, including the likes of the insufferable Comical Comedy Rabbit Comics, or the Phone Guys, which has somehow had over 800 strips at this point. The fact that the two comics I have that are still ongoing are the ones I’ve intentionally made difficult is not lost on me. I really ought to revisit Hover Head and try to make a comic that actually works.
• Behind the Hover Headquarters one will note a massive sphere in the sky. That certainly isn’t the sun, PDR doesn’t enjoy the sun enough to include that particular massive sphere. While making the drawing, I got it into my head that this city is on a moon around a gas giant world. No real reason for that beyond my general love of science fiction, but that still counts.
• And finally, streaking across the sky, is a little spaceship designed by none other than PDR at some point under age ten. I don’t remember exactly when, but in elementary school I made a little spaceship design out of some construction toys and I still have it. I use an image of me as a child as my profile image on pretty much all social media because I want that kid’s dreams to come true. And that includes that spaceship. Like the occult symbol, I have a story in mind for that spaceship, and I hope to tell it someday.

If anyone actually visited this site and looked around, they’d see that there has been a “Store” section on here that was completely unused for a long time. Since 2010 or so it has consisted only of the following:

Well the future is now! I have begun a shop on Etsy on which I am selling a little printable colouring an activity book called The Many Monsters of Mackestry Manor. I hope to turn that into a series of such books, but hopefully I will have other things on the store as well down the line.

I have opted to keep using the name Bottomless Hippopotamus to maintain a continuity in my attempts to accomplish this. Maybe I only ever sold one or two things on Cafepress (not including the Adventure Dennis mug I still own), but it was still a part of my past that led to this shop here, so the name continues and I can tell myself this is what I’ve been building toward after all these years of failure and stagnation. This is, hopefully, me taking a step in the right direction.

Nothing against Pete and Jeremy, but it bugs me to see nothing but Phone Guys going up on the site. For a while we had that thing were my Twitter posts would come here, but that’s busted I guess. Ah well, I’ll just have to actually post something to break things up momentarily.

Life continues about average for me. Financial struggles continue to govern my life, but at least I’m making good progress on several projects (because, as always, I am unable to focus on a single project at once). Here’s some updates:

Surrounded By Danger: The game I am making has gotten to a point where I feel like I would be realistically able to finish it within this calendar year. But the thing is, as it is right now, it’s a game about characters I created for SecGov Robots and the Beekeeper Chronicles. I love that cast and am enjoying making a sort of “Choose your own path” Story Mode game with them, but that is complicated and they’re not exactly universally known. So what I’m gonna do is restart the whole concept and make a Zombie Mode version of the game. Since the beginning I’ve been aware that the mechanics of the game are pretty good for simulating a fight against zombies. This should, if I don’t mess it up, allow me to create a version of the game without a Story Mode that can be put into production and actually get into the world while I go back to working on the Beekeeping version of the game.

The Many Monsters of Mackestry Manor: Another project I am working on is a franchise about a bunch of little monsters who live in a house. This one is aimed at very young children. I’d love for it to progress to the point of being a series of little adventure games, but that feels unlikely. What I am working on now is a colouring and activity book starring these monsters. That’s a much easier scale for me, and I honestly think I can have it complete by some time in October. Once that’s done I’ll begin work on a book that tells more about the monsters and see where we can go from there.

So while I’m toiling away on these and other projects, I’m sorry that the Phone Guys have the whole place to themselves.