Sorry Flicker, your pride is in another castle. Don't worry, you can win it back, just cross Hyrule field, go see Impa and tell her about the blue rat's ring you've been collecting for a while, she'll give you a barrel ticket to Donkey's place. oh right, he's still searching for his bananas, he won't be here to welcome you. Here's a tip, the Team Rocket stole his bananas, so go and catch'em all. Oh, did you hear this music? It's the game-over theme, you didn't make it in time. It's okay, press reset and try again. Select character: Steve Napierski. Here we go-oh !

Steve is 30. He's living somewhere in Virginia, USA. Officially, his real job is a web designer, but he's also a freelance artist, doing some web design, animation, illustrations, etc. As curious as ever, we investigated Steve's life by interviewing him of course, but also by hiring a private detective, going through his garbage, questioning his neighbors, etc.  The usual routine. In our defense, we did all that because Steve is as secretive as your next door fast food restaurant's nugget recipe. But we assume Steve has more chicken in him.

Never mind, we'll talk about his current, and most famous, project: Dueling Analogs, a semi-weekly color  web comic that lampoons the culture and subtext of modern gaming culture. He also has another web comic that is about to end, it's called The Outer Circle. And lastly a super secret (because is such an expert on keeping secrets that he has been asked by the CIA to create a new internal secret language) third project that he has been working on for years and will be launching very soon.

Dueling Analogs was launched on November 17th, 2005. Steve wanted to do another gaming web comic because he felt there weren't enough of them on the internet. Joke, laugh please. Honestly, he had been doing The Outer Circle for a while and decided he wanted to do another web comic that was not story driven. Dueling Analogs was that.
Dueling Analogs is even more than that, it's all that a web comic can dream of. It's funny, often updated, it's about videogames, sometimes it's gory, but it's always well drawn; five reasons to check his web comic immediately.

"-Steve, now that the interview is finished, we reckon that we can tell you that we're huge fan of Dueling Analogs, so how did you manage to be such a videogame web comic icon?
-I'm a self-taught college drop out. But, I make more money than most of the people I know with college degrees. F--- Their lives.
-Oh, okay. Why did you choose this FML?
-Because FML is friggin' awesome. Schadenfreude is definite what makes most of the world feel good about themselves. And this is the schadenfreude nexus of the internet.
-Why did you decided to send an illustration for FML?
-Because I really didn't have a good story to submit. Fuck my boring life. Besides I look forward to the rest of the world commenting that the jerseys referenced in the FML are real football jerseys, a.k.a. soccer, and not American football are I drew."

Comments, we're waiting for them. Thank you for your participation Steve, and remember: "Videogames ruined my life, good thing I have two extra lives!"

Oh, okay, that's just nasty. Stop putting your finger there, it is so not sexy, and so not healthy. Gosh that's really green! No, don't put it in your ... okay, we're not hungry anymore. Hello everybody else, if you're not a pig, you're welcome! Today we're featuring a new artist, who dared to approach the mysterious Booger world. Yami. Ladies, gentlemen, nose monsters, please welcome Andrew Bargeron, also known as Gimetzco !

Andrew is 35. He lives in Nashville (TN) where he's designing t-shirts, drawing funny pictures, album covers, lunch boxes and yes, he's getting paid (and laid) for that. You want to be a comic designer yourself? So listen to Andrew's story, it may give you some tips on getting the greatest job of all time.
In 1995, after college, Andrew started illustrating for a ska band called My Man Friday. From then on his focus was largely on working for bands. Through the years he'd like to think that he has improved in his abilities, to the point where major label bands like Phantom Planet, Reel Big Fish and Weezer contacted him to illustrate for them. In 2005 he started focusing on T-shirt and screen print style design. Recently, he has shifted his focus to designing t-shirts (and other designs) with an aged poster motif. He has been printed by Threadless, Woot, Spring Leap and Ript Apparel, so yes, he's a star and yes you can buy one of his t-shirts and walk proudly in the street, because the artist who designed it is so cool, and he illustrated one of your favourite FML stories. Or something like that.

His current projects are pretty various as our today's hero loves to try several ways to create, to then feel several ways of stress. He's working on the conception of a toy called Brain Thing and a bunch of characters called the Cryptid Crew that he imprints on t-shirts, posters and a bunch of other stuff.
This is what Andrew loves, drawing a story (or elements of a story) but in a one single image, and in as many different ways as possible. And he's doing it perfectly.

Andrew loves hanging out with his wife and their dog and cat. He really enjoys the fantastic but not the usual fantasy stuff (orcs, goblins, trolls. we hate trolls too), he quite enjoys genre cinema, particularly Grindhouse/Drive in movies, but more sci-fi horror than exploitation. He also likes making music (which can be found on his website as well). He is a real Leonardo da Vinci for the 21th century.

"-Why did you choose this FML, lovely Andrew?
-Booger is a very commonly used word in my daily vocabulary, and I like monsters plenty.
-So the booger-monster was inevitable. And why did you decide to send an illustration to  FML?
-I was asked, and upon investigating, noticed some of my well respected peers (notably Muckpuddy and Jublin) were contributing, so I figured I'd give it a go."

We're glad you did. Thanks for your participation Andrew!

If you want to be the next published artist, send an email to alice@fmylife.com which starts with a hello and ends with a goodbye, including your name, age, and a link to your website/blog. If you don't have one, attach some of your drawings. But DON'T send your illustration right away! You need first to get in touch with Alice, who saw her computer dying at 2 A.M, who will tell you what you have to do!

You were more than 5000 to take part in our fantastic Xmas competition, and finally over a thousand to find the 10 FMLs from the book which were hidden all around the website. Thanks to all of you for taking part!

We put all the names into a hat, and these are the people we drew:

- Kinpower
- Wolfie07
- WonderChef
- teenie1407
- elli81216
- Mookdaruch
- Kaldra
- weeble_wobbles09
- sscoles
- itprosam
- AndyNicole
- caitlinmc14
- ntwnangel06
- xxmollyxx
- kstirling689
- beatlegirl123
- LadyLieDie
- shayne1911
- prosik
- rminesinger

All the winners will be contacted very soon via email. We will ask you for your postal address, so we can send you your prize. You should receive your book sometime in January!

What sort of shitty trouble happened to you today? You let your phone fall and crash on the middle of the street, seeing the screen fluttering in the gutter and the keyboard hitting the streetlight? You missed your bus and had to walk 25 minutes to your workplace and THEN realized you'd forgotten your briefcase? You had to come up with an introduction for an article with no idea on how to do it? Oh wait, that's us. Anyway, today, once again, it's FML illustration day, well-served this time by Sharlene Leong, also known as Sharmander on the wonderful world of the internet!

Our charming Sharmander is 23, and listen carefully boys and girls because she's bi...coastal! Right now she lives in New York City and has been there for the past 5 years but now that she's got used to the cold, she's working on returning to California. For the first time in weeks, our artist of the week doesn't take art lessons; Sharmander is in fact doing Psychiatric/neuroscience Research. She works in the Molecular Imaging / Neuroscience Department (M.I.N.D.) at a psychiatric institute. In other terms, she looks at brains in jars, which is going to be practical when we'll get the zombie apocalypse situation everyone's talking about, because she'll have delicacies to lob at them so they'll leave her alone. If everything goes as planned. Comics and music has been a real outlet for her during work and studies, that's why two years ago, she created her web comic called "Sparklydoom", due to the fact that she was reading so many web comics that she figured out that she could do one of her own. Well, almost on her own, a few months back, her sister joined her on this comic project, Brontë style.

After growing up in southern California, Sharmander decided she needed a change and invested all of her efforts into getting into NYU.  When she graduated from there she wanted to hold off on grad school and enjoy being independent for a while.  Luckily, this job is pretty relevant to her field and gives her lots of downtime to draw.  That's the joy of this job, but most of her comics are hand sketched on the backs of notes and recycled documents and then scanned when I get home. These past couple years have been important for her, for finding herself and understanding "Sharlene", she even confesses she wouldn't trade them for the world.

The project Sharlene's working on right now is a tough one as it's to find preventative measures for suicide. She does enjoy that she works for that cause. Her long term goal is a clinical psychology degree so that she can help people on a personal level and a molecular level. A good knowledge of both is super important to her so she knows what's going on all around. But of course it will take a lot of time so she needs to work on other projects at the same time.

Almost time to let our future Freud work on the importance of being earnest. But first, let's get into her intimacy.
"Art is my hobby and helping people is my passion.  I also play world of warcraft with my friend which keeps me from sleeping.  Oh and I'm obsessed with kingdom hearts (ok so I like videogames a lot).  All in all I'm very busy with things that keep me bouncing on the coasts of the US. In summation: I like videogames, music, martial arts, dancing, fruity drinks, being inappropriate, and puppies."

"-We love puppies too, specially grilled on our BBW. Why did you choose this FML dear Sharlene?
-Because you don't mess with someone's ice cream!  I just pictured the hilarious image of ice cream causing someone to question the existence of a higher being because that would be how I reacted in that situation.  I got my purse stolen once and lamented the loss of my chapstick more than anything else in the bag...and the pacman pins I had on it...stupid thief.
-Life can definitely be cruel. Why did you decided to send an illustration for FML?
-Because I've been reading a lot of them and I enjoy all of the art styles that are being submitted.  At first I was like, I can't compare with them, they are real artists!  Eventually I was like, oh what the hell, if I have an idea, I have an idea."

And finally, here your are! Thanks for you participation Sharlene!

Sparklydoom is here: http://www.sparklydoom.com/
Piece of Mind is here too: http://pieceofmindlog.blogspot.com/

If you want to be the next published artist, send an email to alice@fmylife.com which starts with a hello and ends with a goodbye, including your name, age, and a link to your website/blog. If you don't have one, attach some of your drawings. But DON'T send your illustration right away! You need first to get in touch with Alice, who finally resolved the James Vaughan's grave mystery, who will tell you what you have to do!

Hey there crazy person, do those bloody eyes dangling in your hands belong to you? Yeah, we didn't think so. See, we're used to crazy people. And we're sure you're used to them too. Sometimes it's the old lady with nothing but some fishnets covering what's left of her feminine body that you meet in the supermarket, sometimes it's your one-legged neighbor who is convinced that his microwave is haunted by aliens, and sometimes it's your most beloved-one. FYL. And to talk about this awkward phenomenon, today we're welcoming Justin White, also known as Jublin!

Justin is 24, lives in northern California and he's a freelance illustrator and designer. He also watches cartoons, eats food, hangs out and sleeps, but he doesn't get paid for doing those things. Jublin went to school at SDSU in San Diego and graduated in Multimedia. He's still not sure what that means, but he had fun. He has always been very much in love with drawing and art, but never considered actually making any money out of it until he stumbled upon the website Threadless back in 2005. That's when he started getting involved with freelance work.

Our awesome artist of the week loves to draw and be creative. So any time he's able to do so, he's happy. He'd love to one day get involved with television and animation. He'd also love to just wander around the world with a tiny little sketchbook. He could pay for everything by drawing dollar bills, Euros, and all sorts of exotic currencies and because the drawings would look so realistic everyone would be like, "Whoa you're a billionaire!" and He would hold his finger to his lips and whisper to them "Money isn't everything". Then he'd slip them a hand-drawn $20 and they would go buy a delicious Christmas goose for their family.

Maybe you know Jublin thanks to his very unique and cool pokemon portraits project. Remember Nurse Joy and his cute white and pink outfit, who used to take care of your pokemons when they were in a coma? Jublin created a new dimension where this pinky nurse doesn't exist, and where K.O'd pokemons seem more like scraggly animals. It's gory indeed, and it's funny. In other terms, we love it. Psyduck in straitjacket, Chansey with a broken egg, Drowzee filled with sleeping pills and so much more, all kind of dazzling interpretations that make us want to hit ourselves repeatedly over the head with the keyboard, as a kind of homage to his genius.

ANYWAY. This year, Jublin finally fixed up his website. He has always been pretty active on the internet and all the social networking sites. It's a great way to see what other people are working on and simultaneously be inspired and filled with jealousy.

"-Now, it's time for our traditional last question before we let you go, why did you choose this FML?
-I thought the idea of a guy latching on to his girlfriend's back and chomping at her hair was ridiculous. And I really wanted to draw a koala.
-Oooh Koala... and why did you decided to send an illustration for FML?
-It's a fun site!"

And it's a fun illustration. Thank you Jublin !

Jublin's website is here www.jublin.com
His flickr account is overtherewww.flickr.com/jublin

If you want to be the next published artist, send an email to alice@fmylife.com which starts with a hello and ends with a goodbye, including your name, age, and a link to your website/blog. If you don't have one, attach some of your drawings. But DON'T send your illustration right away! You need first to get in touch with Alice, who has always been madly in love with Columbo, who will tell you what you have to do!