The AFOS blog is switching from weekly to monthly in 2017 and will come to an end in December 2017

Ken Levine, the former Cheers and Frasier writer who was also an announcer for the Mariners and the Padres, once wrote that he does a blog about comedy writing, showbiz, the radio industry and baseball because he thinks of his blog as the writing equivalent of a stretching exercise. He added, "I don't want to write all day and you sure don't want to read all day. But it keeps my mind active... Still, it is time consuming, and I'll be honest, there are times it's a burden. Coming up with interesting enough topics is sometimes very difficult. I can''t [sic] tee off on 2 BROKE GIRLS every day."

Levine wrote those sentences in 2014, when his still-active blog reached the nine-year mark. I've been doing this blog for nine years now (mainly as a way to tell the world, "I'm unemployed and I may not be active on social media because it has all the pleasantness of a Springfield tire yard, but I still fucking exist, dammit"), and I, like Levine, used to view the blog as the writing equivalent of a stretching exercise, but, well, now it has become a burden. It's not as enjoyable as it used to be. The stretching is starting to make me sore. The blog is taking too much time away from a book I'm trying to write (while constantly suffering from writer's block). There have been a lot of "AFOS Blog Rewind" reposts this year because I wanted to adhere to a weekly posting schedule during 2016, but there are weeks where I simply don't have jack shit to say.

Sure, I could easily rattle off in one day a bunch of posts that simply say "Look at this funny video!" or "Peep this link," but I'm not going to do that shit. This blog stopped doing click-bait ages ago. So I've decided that in 2017, the blog will switch to a monthly schedule and then come to a close at the end of the year.

Rest in power, the Minority Militant, a.k.a. Keon Enoy Munedouang

Keon Enoy Munedouang (1980-2016)

NOTE: A few more remembrances of the Minority Militant have surfaced online, in addition to the remembrances I linked to in my post below. One of his three sisters says goodbye to him and writes that "You lived your life through your convictions and didn't care what anyone thought of you. I had no idea, the extent in which your writing impacted the Asian American community." Slant Eye for the Round Eye's Adam Chau, who once made a guest appearance on this blog, has posted substantial excerpts from the best of the Minority Militant's cordoned-off Blogspot blog. Over at Reappropriate, Jenn Fang points out that though "TMM occupied a corner of the Asian American blogosphere that had little overlap with my own" and "we may not know one another offline," the Asian American blogosphere is close-knit, and his passing affects everyone in our community.

If you regularly read several blogs written by Asian American authors or you're active in the Asian American blogosphere, you're going to be hearing a lot in the next few days about a reclusive political blogger who wrote under the alias of the Minority Militant. From 2008 to 2010, the Chicago-based Keon Enoy Munedouang, a Laotian American military vet who was found dead last week in Montrose Harbor at the way-too-young age of 35, was one of my favorite Asian American bloggers, whether he was criticizing self-hating Asians who stupidly undergo plastic surgery to look more white, describing right-wing moron Michelle Malkin as a pundit who is "so far right she fell off the edge of a stoop and landed in a pile of jizz after a conservative gangbang convention" or mocking old Vietnamese American Republicans who supported the presidential campaign of Arizona senator John McCain, who had no qualms about continuing to refer to the Vietnamese in public as "gooks" due to the torture he experienced as a Vietnam War P.O.W.

While Phil Yu over at the much more popular blog Angry Asian Man was trying to make "That's racist!" a thing, Keon's favorite catchphrase over at TMM had him consigning the likes of Malkin, or as I like to call her, Uncle Ruckus, and extremely corny Iron Chef America host Mark Dacascos to "the chicken coop." Ken Jeong and former Entourage regular Rex Lee would have wanted to put a foot in Keon's ass for the negative things he wrote on his blog about the comedic (and sometimes controversial in Asian American circles) characters they've played. Jo Koy, a favorite stand-up of Keon's who agreed to a selfie with Keon after one of his shows, clearly didn't know what to make of Keon and ran as far the fuck away from Keon as he could when he requested to do an interview with him for his blog. Keon's drunken appearance at a panel for a 2009 Asian American blogger conference known as BANANA, an embryonic version of the annual L.A. digital media conference that's known today as V3con, alienated some of the other panelists and people in the USC campus audience who weren't familiar with his blog.

Keon's writing wasn't for everybody. It was highly opinionated and outspoken writing (he once wrote, "I am relentless about racism. I cuss like a foul-mouthed sailor"), and he was much more outspoken than Phil, who--while there's no disputing that Phil's a legend in the Asian American blogosphere who has done a lot of good in terms of Asian American representation, speaking out against Asian-bashing and promoting the work of other Asian American authors--has never really been as enjoyably scathing or as in-depth a writer as Keon (or someone like Emily Yoshida over at The Verge or my current favorite Asian American blogger, playwright Philip W. Chung over at YOMYOMF).

I never got to meet Keon face-to-face. All of our brief conversations took place only in comments sections and via e-mail. But I was a regular part of Keon's blog. I drew and designed the header that appeared every day at the top of his posts, back when I was in the middle of an ultimately unsuccessful phase in which I attempted to become a cartoonist and graphic designer. Keon was my only graphic design client.

The logo Keon commissioned me to draw for his blog

Keon was a fan of the webcomic I drew and posted for a couple of years over on this blog. In fact, he was the only fan of the webcomic. Not even I'm a fan of my own webcomic. In fact, I've been considering deleting almost all of the webcomic's installments from my blog. They're that embarrassing. But Keon was the only person--other than my parents and an online friend of mine, current DC Comics letterer Janice Chiang--who believed in my artwork at the time, and I'll always be grateful for that. While some asshole from the discontinued Asian American Movement blog was bashing some of my Minority Militant artwork over in some now-forgotten comments section somewhere, Keon always stood by my artwork.

I never agreed with Keon's choice for his blog header though. He wanted me to draw him wearing a hoodie emblazoned with "TMM," and out of all the header options I designed for him, he liked the one with him in a hoodie the most, but I never really cared for that one. I made Keon look too much like a Jules Feiffer cartoon. A header he rejected, in which I inserted a photo of a bruised and beaten Uncle Sam, was, to me, much more effective at reflecting the pugnaciousness and candidness of Keon's writing than the header he picked.

An unused header for Keon's blog

Minority Militant "Project X" T-shirt design sketches

The Minority Militant, a Chicago blogger who's a fan of my webcomic The Palace, recently asked me to design a T-shirt for his Project X fund, which he'll use to "reward any independent film director or producer with an outstanding treatment that casts at least one lead role for an Asian American male or female."

Check out the evolution of my Project X shirt design.

Because Project X is about supporting Asian American cinema, I originally wanted to draw an image of the Minority Militant literally kicking the backside of a white actor who's in yellowface and dressed up as the very dated Charlie Chan, whom Hollywood studios keep threatening to revive every few years (last failed attempt: that time when 20th Century Fox tried to get Lucy Liu to star as Chan's granddaughter). The image of Chan with a foot in his ass had stemmed from an idea I've had for a teaser trailer for the Asian American private eye movie or TV series I always wanted to create, in case it would ever get greenlit. The trailer, which would be a sendup of Chan movies, would show a white actor as a Chan-esque character who's trying to reveal the killer in a roomful of suspects, but before the Chan-esque detective can finish his corny, Confucius quotation-laden summation, he gets run over by a car driven by the movie's real hero, whom the trailer announcer would describe as not being "the same old Asian detective played by a guy who's as Asian as a Dutch clog dancer."

I told TMM my initial concept for the Project X drawing, and he joked that he's non-violent, which gave me an idea for the pose that became part of the tee's final design. I based TMM's pose on the famous 1964 "By Any Means Necessary" photo of an armed Malcolm X peering through window curtains, which an Uzi-wielding KRS-One memorably imitated on the cover of Boogie Down Productions' By All Means Necessary album. But instead of a rifle or an Uzi, TMM is holding his preferred weapon, his blog, which is represented by a laptop.

Minority Militant header sketches

Below are my sketches for a header I designed for the Minority Militant, a Laotian American blogger and activist from Chi-Town whose posts I've enjoyed reading. He riffs on Asian American-related topics ranging from the ugly racism that's often on display on reality TV to President-Elect Obama's Asian staffers.

Props to TMM for giving me my first job--even though it was a small one--after I lost my regular job earlier this year. TMM has been digging my black-and-white webcomic, The Palace, which I created to keep myself busy (I've been posting the comic here on A Fistful of Soundtracks: The Blog), so he asked me to draw a new header for his blog.

The sketch of the Asian brother in the hoodie emblazoned with "TMM" is the final version of the image on the header, which can be seen on TMM's blog in all its fully inked, cleaned-up and Paint Shop Pro-and-Photoshop-enhanced glory.