I’m going to start this off with an assumption.

I’m going to assume that 97% of the people reading this didn’t know Roger Rabbit is murdered in Who Censored Roger Rabbit?, the novel that inspired Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

Yep, fucking murdered.

I didn’t know this until about two years ago, when I dined on those wonderfully weird novels by Gary K. Wolf. There is so much Disney left out of the film. I’m not going to spoil it, because I think everyone should read the books and judge for themselves. If a cartoon rabbit getting murdered doesn’t hook you, I guess that’s where we differ.

And that’s okay! That doesn’t mean there aren’t other things we can connect on.

Long story short… (TOO LATE!)

Disney took a novel about a rabbit murder investigation and turned it into a movie about toon genocide.

I love Who Framed Roger Rabbit, but reading the original made me think about what happens when you create something, hand it to someone else, and watch it become something completely different.

What went wrong?

Hi, I’m Mike. This is Small Sad Yard Sale.

What is Small Sad Yard Sale?

Small Sad Yard Sale is my personal collection of handmade and hand-curated art, stickers, apparel, collectibles, trading cards, and more. Everything I sell helps fund my dream of starting my own indie video game studio.

I want to own my ideas. I have a vision for the things I create, and if I can see that vision through myself, I think that will mean more to me than handing my stories to a company that could butcher them for financial gain instead of preserving their emotional value.

But to explain why creating those worlds matters so much to me, I need to go back a little bit.

A Small Sad Flashback

Like most kids, I spent a lot of time in front of either a TV or PC playing video games. But I didn’t just play them. I studied them, drew the characters, and wished I could live in their worlds.

Even when enemies tried to kill the hero, the rules made sense. With a little determination, you could defeat them and continue on.

That wasn’t the case for kid Mike, who was terrified of everyone around him. I was a voiceless kid who always seemed to be screaming for someone to notice.

Sometime between the ages of five and nine, around 1992–1997, I attended a sleepover with some neighborhood kids: two brothers and another kid who lived down the street.

I woke up with one of the brothers straddling me and pinning my arms behind my head. The other brother rubbed shaving cream into my face and hair until I couldn’t breathe. The other kid laughed.

I swallowed so much shaving cream that I threw up until I passed out. They thought I died.

When I came to, the kids’ parents yelled at me for making a mess, and I ran home crying.

A few days later, I remember not feeling well. I wanted to tell my parents, but I didn’t know where to find them, so I left my room on the second floor and walked toward the stairs.

The next thing I remember is waking up in the hospital. The doctors told me I had mono. I don’t remember how long I was out or when I woke up.

For years afterward, I lost all trust in the people around me because nobody had been there to protect me. There were times when I didn’t sleep for weeks because I was afraid something would happen to me while I slept.

So I stayed up and played video games.

Those heroes became my friends.

My first friend, Jim Worm, taught me rayguns were fucking cool—and yep, I wanted to continue. Then there was Sub-Zero, super chill guy. Charizard was basically my first pet. Mobo and Robo Bonanza felt more like family than my real family. Conker taught me early that hangovers were gonna suck and every team shooter in the future was gonna suck even more. Master Chief took me to space, somewhere I hadn’t been since my pal Ness needed my help. 

And I’ve never stopped making friends.

Now I want to introduce some of the friends I’ve created to you through video games and art, and hopefully help other people create theirs too.

After leaving my tech support role at Hasbro/Wizards of the Coast in 2026, the more I learned about how games were made, the clearer something became to me: these massive companies don’t care about the player the way I thought they did. What a rose colored glasses moment. 

They care about investors. They care about whatever IP is hot, what they can sell, what they can buy, and what they can turn into the next crossover.

Meanwhile, people burn out and staff don’t get heard and now AI.

What happened to the fun and feel? What happened to easy to play, hard to master?

Everyone seems so focused on racing toward the future, but so many of the things that worked best are heavily rooted in the past.

Fuck, even movies from twenty years ago sometimes look better than movies now.

Society just keeps accepting that this is what the future is supposed to look like: $60 unfinished games, day-one 40GB patches, server load times, gacha, subscriptions to subscriptions, and old dudes scalping Pokémon cards.

I don’t want that future.

I want to go back a little bit, and that’s what my art is rooted in.

I want to make the things I see in my head and actually see them through. I don’t want to hand over something personal and watch someone else change it because they see more financial value in something different.

I want a future with bold lines and color.

SO MUCH COLOR.

Mike

a Small Sad Yard Sale …
… for a COLORFUL tomorrow.