Late last night, I woke from uneasy dreams of apocalypses with an idea sitting heavy in my head:

R’lyeh is an ancient waste storage site, and C’thul’hu is the waste itself.

The weird “architecture” of the place is just a bunch of nasty spiky stuff the Elder Race put on top of the buried waste, to mark it as a place to leave barren, ala the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste site. The seven-pointed Elder Sign? Their symbol for “radiation hazard”. Or for whatever kind of hazard can be found at Waste Storage Site RLYH, one of many such sites spread out across the galaxy wherever the Elder Race stopped.

Perhaps Cthulhu is just an abbreviation for something like the giant mass of corium known as “The Elephant’s Foot” that’s deep in the heart of the ruins of the Chernobyl reactor. Somewhere in the long chain of translations from the Elder Race’s writing to modern English, there was a language that required everything to have a gender, and thus a giant psycho-radiactive pile of KL5-LO got called “he” and had people trying to pronounce its chemical label as a word.

It is dead – it was always dead – but it still lays there, still has power, still can kill you with its invisible tentacles of radiation. Stay away; do not approach. “But in strange aeons even death may die” – its half-life is measured in billions of years, and eventually this remnant will be safe. Good luck, whatever creatures come after us.

I doubt I am the first one to have this idea.

I go outside and put peanuts on the stump outside my door. There are no crows or ravens in sight. I whistle the little tune I always whistle when I do this, and immediately I hear a far-off AWK. A couple seconds later I hear the same AWK much closer. And when I get inside and look back out, there’s a raven perched on the railing, eyeing the peanuts.

I’ve been seeing the ravens more than the crows lately. It’s been weeks since I last saw 5-7 crows clustering around the stump; I wonder if a couple of ravens have muscled in on their territory?

Damn. I suddenly feel like I dodged a serious bullet.

Back in the 2000s, I started working in the animation industry. Doing Flash stuff. It was a pain in the ass. I burnt out and left around ‘05, not liking the future I saw of endless Flash jobs.

Flash forward to now. Pringle, one of the people who worked under me when I was a Flash director has been at WB for a while. Foster’s, Teen Titans Go, stuff like that. He’s been posting some process videos on Twitter.

One of the things we always wished for was a way to bend stuff in Flash. On Foster’s, Pringle came up with some clever workarounds involving making an art brush in Illustrator. A hassle what with having to export to AI, then export back to Flash, but clever nonetheless, and less hassle than drawing stuff by hand or trying to control a shape tween.

He was still doing this, apparently, as late as LAST YEAR. Adobe added bones to Flash in ‘15 but he says they’re pretty useless (and I am inclined to believe his professional opinion on this), and in the past couple years they FINALLY added custom brushes in Flash to let him do this trick easily.

Pringle says they are, of course, buggy and unstable as of now. Because why would they be different from anything else in Flash?

There is an alternate universe where I found more Flash work for the past decade. I am pretty sure that I am much grumpier in it, despite still living in Los Angeles. Holy shit.