Author: Clint

As a rule, I don’t binge watch shows. Maybe three episodes in one sitting would be my record before I feel the urge to take a break. Most of the time it’s a single dose.

I binged the Fallout tv show.

Oh not completely start to finish, I did take a break after Episode 1. But Episode 2-9 ended up as a seven hour or so marathon as I got sucked in. Wham, bam, allakazam. I wasn’t even particularly hyped for it, it looked pretty good in the trailers but then so did The Phantom Menace. You can’t trust trailers. And video game adaptations? The Last of Us was good and by accounts pretty faithful to the source, ditto for Arcane with League of Legends, but in the overall scheme of things they still seem like exceptions to the rule. And neither of those were dear to my heart the way the Fallout franchise is.

So I skipped the Amazon Prime premiere on April 11th, and only later as word of mouth started to build did I begin to allow myself some measure of excitement. Did they do it? Did the showrunners manage to bring the violent, darkly humorous world of Fallout to live-action life?

Well, I’m keeping this entry spoiler-free but I’ll just spoiler that bit and say: they did. Immaculately (if that word can be applied to post-apocalyptic grime).

Sometimes I’ve reviewed a series in this blog after watching a few episodes and gushed about it only to then see it go off the rails, but here I’ve now watched the whole thing not once, but twice. I even showed my 80 year old dad and my sister and they know nothing of the setting but were hooked into the story and that lovely balance of ridiculous and sublime that the series managed to faithfully recreate.

“They stole your plot!” my sister half-jokingly mused at one scene that certainly had a bit of Zombie-Ranch-ish flavor.

“Nah,” I replied. “This setting has been around since 1997. If anything it’s Fallout that inspired *me*.”

And then there’s the properties that inspired both, which you’ll definitely catch if you’re a fan of Spaghetti Westerns.

Anyhow, it’s not only fun and full of giddiness-inducing easter eggs, it’s got dramatic heft to go with the humor and is a real masterclass in “show, don’t tell” exposition even where some really weird things have to be introduced to an audience that might not necessarily take them for granted.

Fan of the Fallout franchise or not, watch it if you can. Though maybe try not to binge like I did, as the worst part is that there’s a long ways off until Season 2.

WonderCon 2024 has come and gone and we’re left to wonder about the results of our experiment with packing up and moving to a smaller but potentially more lucrative space. For many years we’d exhibited in the Small Press area of the convention as various floor plans came and went, but sometime prior to COVID the show solidified into a layout that — well, not to sugarcoat it, really sucked for Small Press.

The way things are set up, the attendees all get their badges and enter the convention floor from the far Southwest side (Hall D). WonderCon isn’t quite as large as San Diego but still spans several of the center’s Halls, which can be opened up to be contiguous but there are still solid blocks that give a feeling of partitioning. Small Press ended up in Hall A, past about three of those partitioning walls, and despite feedback from us and other exhibitors there to this day is no signage for Small Press or even a “MORE THIS WAY —>” prompt that I’ve seen other shows do.

We wanted to believe it wouldn’t hurt, but it does. Sure, on the program map “Small Press” shows up but what does that mean to the average convention visitor? To go by commentary from the people who made it there, not much, with a common refrain being “Oh wow, I didn’t know this was here!” often coupled with “I love your stuff but I already spent all my money.”

Conversely, Artist’s Alley for WonderCon is positioned right smack at the main entrance where everyone tends to come in, and while not everyone does great there and the space is more cramped, it doesn’t feel like as much of a ghost town as the far boonies. This is what we did this year, abandoning our usual Lab Reject Studios space in Small Press in favor of a more Dawn-centric setup in AA, to see if the reports we’d been getting and our own gut feelings matched the reality. And while I won’t say our sales were astronomical, they were certainly improved and there were at least a lot more eyeballs checking out what we had on offer.

This is why exhibitors throw fits when being stuck behind pillars or exiled to a basement. Positioning really matters. Sometimes people come find you using your social media posts and the maps and such, but the vast majority still are just wandering by and something catches their eye, and you can gussy up your space as much as you’re able but it still isn’t going to make much difference if there aren’t eyes to catch.

Small Press in SDCC feels a lot different because there’s at least one main thoroughfare in and out of the exhibit hall right next to it, as well as a big SMALL PRESS sign hanging overhead. But it seems like Comic-Con International only has one of those and WonderCon can’t borrow it.

It’s hard to make a floor plan that pleases everyone, but WonderCon definitely has a traffic flow issue with their current setup that for whatever reason has been going on for years and shows no signs of being addressed. So for us it was either pull up stakes and try the more crowded “neighborhood” or just give up the Con entirely as our yearly revenue kept dropping at the same time all the other costs are going up.

Anyhow, the change of position was promising, and it was nice to still have at least one local, comparatively low cost show to meet and greet at. We’ll see how the perspective changes in 2025.

I’ve mentioned Dutch film director Paul Verhoeven many times over the course of these blogs. Not every movie in his oeuvre is a classic, but his big three (IMO) are all but ingrained into my DNA and, by process of creative osmosis, infused into the inspirations of Zombie Ranch as well.

I’m speaking of the science fiction triple threat of Robocop (1987), Total Recall (1990), and Starship Troopers (1997). They don’t share source material, they don’t comprise any sort of shared cinematic universe — and yet their visions of media-saturated dystopian futures are certainly connected in theme and presentation. There’s a critique of the excesses of American culture, sometimes light and sometimes harsh, almost never subtle but almost invariably — well, fun. It makes them very rewatchable. It writes catchphrases into your psyche: “I’d buy that for a dollar!” — “Get your ass to Mars!” — “Would you like to know more?”

Are they shallow? Are they deep? Are they somehow both? Verhoeven never seemed to lose sight of these being popcorn-munching action movies even as he took the piss (as the British would say) with his subject. And with all the adventure and explosions involved it would seem natural that they would be further adaptable into video games, right?

Well, results there have varied. But oh sweet liberty did the makers of the game Helldivers 2 get it right. Look, I’m just going to take a minute to link the opening cutscene here. See if you can sense a certain familiar vibe:

Okay but blah, blah, we’re all jaded gamers here, we know better than to trust a fancy cutscene. Well, I’m happy to report the game very much preserves the whole feeling of the above in its actual play, right down to the propaganda videos that will play between missions as you and your fellow Helldivers kick back momentarily on your Super Destroyer before another suicide mission in the name of Democracy.

It is patently ridiculous, over-the-top, and it’s probably the first “war shooter” I’ve ever honestly enjoyed, probably because in addition to nailing the satirical aspects the game didn’t lose sight of that other Verhoeven factor of being fun. Since it’s multiplayer this can, naturally, depend on your fellow Helldivers of the moment, but if you ever felt like stepping into the boots of Verhoeven’s vision of the Roughnecks, of Johnny Rico or “Dizzy” Flores, this is as good as it gets, ironically even though there are actual official Starship Troopers games out there.

If you’re looking for Heinlein’s original vision you’ll probably need to keep moving along, but hey, at least there are tacnukes. Just no real powered armor to compensate. Let faith in Freedom be your shield… or at least the shield of your next diver in line after that one vaporized.

So it’s been a few weeks since my last post, but I haven’t forgotten that I promised to go into some of my half-baked theories on writing. I rambled around the topic enough in the past entry that I’m not sure I even got to that point, which I suppose in of itself bespeaks poor writing, at least on a technical level. All these blogs tend to be first drafters anyhow, I’m not going for Dickens or Shakespeare.

Oh but speaking of those two gents, they both indulged in a bit of poetry didn’t they? In Shakespeare’s case so much so that he is often referred to as “The Bard” — which if you’re a D&D player will usually conjure up two immediate impressions: one of them NSFW and one of them a dude or gal who habitually carries and uses a musical instrument and sings a lot.

Well, let’s roll with this. What if I proposed to you that a gateway into writing could be found in music? Even music without official lyrics? Vidi this video proposing that the most memorable theme music for movies and television is stuff that lends itself to unofficial lyrics incorporating the title, and how many composers have completely admitted to getting their start from that text.

Star Wars… nothing but STAAAR WAAAARS…

But seriously, if text can lead the way to music, why not the reverse? We make up lyrics all the time. We sing stupid improvised songs to our baffled pets. Is that writing? Well if you took it and committed it in the fixed form of copyright fame, I would say so. Is that good writing? Okay, save that for the advanced class. After all, this memed parody of Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill” was wildly popular and will get stuck in your head despite what seems like a serious lack of effort in its lyrics:

@mattstorerhere

Art of the deal #comedy #music #fyp #parody #strangerthings

♬ original sound – Matt Storer

Ad jingles are kind of like that, too. I can’t remember where I left my keys earlier in the day but I can recite the lyrics to a Juicyfruit gum advertisement from the 1980’s nearly verbatim.

So maybe fledgling writers should stop worrying too much about being “good” and instead focus on, for lack of a better term, their “flow.” It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. To be, or not to be. Imagine someone reading the audiobook of what you’re laying down, do the words keep a kind of rhythm even though they don’t rhyme? This is especially true of writing dialogue. Speak it out loud, in the voice of the character as you imagine them, and see how it sounds. That way you hopefully don’t run afoul of Harrison Ford’s apocryphal quip to George Lucas of “you can type this shit, but you can’t say it!”

At very least I believe this could get you atarted, much the same as the music composers coming at the process from the other direction. It doesn’t have to be a full-on musical number, but a little bit of rhythm could go a long way.

If you own a copy of our first trade paperback, or you’ve browsed or been around for some of the extra content we’ve posted in the past, or been by our table at SDCC back when I was doing free “writer’s sketches” you will know this: I cannot draw.

Oh I know all the refrains; that anyone can learn to be an artist. That it’s not a matter of talent so much as practice and dedication. Maybe so, but at this point it’s like learning a foreign language to me. I might be able to fake it enough to get my point across but the natural fluency of the native is well beyond my reach.

What I never considered until fairly recently is that the same can apply to writing. Creative writing, especially writing dialog, seems to just come naturally to me. I enjoy it. I riff, I embellish, I play a tune and bring people dancing along. Enough of that metaphor though, since the only musical instruments I ever learned to play were piano and my own vocal chords and I am sorely out of practice with both. Which can definitely make vocal chords sore.

Look, the point is that for the past few years Dawn has been trying her hand at writing and has been very frustrated with it. What’s the number one bit of sage advice she’s gotten from me and my writerly friends?

“Just write.”

Well, from her perspective that might as well be her telling me to “just draw.” Sure I can tell her to just barf out words onto her medium of choice and then go back and massage them into something meaningful, but she gets tripped up at step one much less step two. How do I make it look so easy?

Well, maybe I do, but what’s not easy is trying to explain the process. Maybe that’s why “just write” was the popular answer. Maybe we writers are just a bitter and insecure lot who want to believe what we do is special but the general populace often doesn’t seem to think so. Think of the stereotype of every Tom, Dick and Harry (and distaff or enby versions thereof) saying that when they retire they will write The Great American Novel. It doesn’t really work out in practice, but the fact that that cliche is not retiring and composing The Great American Painting speaks to what I’m saying. So hearing someone actually admit they’re having trouble and coming to us in humble solicitude engenders a heady mixture of smug but also imposter syndrome and mistrust and we’re not quite sure how to answer, especially when put on the spot.

You could tell them to take creative writing classes, but will those help? Hell, my own experience with creative writing instruction was that no one knew how to actually teach it, so they just found some narrow definition of “thing I enjoy” and graded you based on how closely you matched that.

Sure, I can do edits on her rough drafts, but that invokes the adage of giving someone a fish versus teaching them how to fish. And I have to answer the question(s) for myself before I can even begin to think of helping someone else. I’ve begun to at least put together a thought or two, but for now I’ve rambled on long enough for one entry so I think I’ll save it for next time.

The story Roberson tells in this week’s comic isn’t made up. It took me some seearching but I at last backtraced a vague but powerful memory of my youth of watching a documentary film where baby birds were dropping dead in a drought. It’s the kind of thing that sticks with you even as all the hows and wheres and whys fade away, and yet I had so much trouble finding any sign of it that I began to wonder if it was just a nasty figment of my imagination, conjured up in the mind of a man writing a comic at least in part about the dark side of reality television. I’d say reality television is just a very biased and manipulated version of a documentary, but a lot of the documentaries I’ve seen don’t seem much better. In fact, reality television might actually be the lesser evil in comparison since it doesn’t have any agenda beyond creative editing to make someone look stupider than they are because the producers have decided they’re the comic relief dummy of the show.

But back to my search. I was on the verge of giving up. It didn’t really matter anyhow, right? Zombie Ranch is a work of fiction, so why not just make things up pertinent to my point? Why did I feel such a need to validate that this documentary did, indeed happen and did, indeed leave a mark on my impressionable young mind that still burbles occasionally to the surface decades later?

And then, Eureka. I found it. Animals are Beautiful People:

An ironic title, given the memory that led me back to it. Other memories flooded back. They showed this in class in Junior High. It wasn’t all horror, far from it. In fact we all snickered at the depiction of the annual pilgrimage of the wildlife of the African desert to a certain spot to chow down on fermented fruit, basically spending a few days getting smashed out of their minds drunk in a way human festival attendees might find very familiar. Getting to watch something like that in school, sanctioned by the adults, felt deliciously naughty.

But then towards the film’s end, your soul paid the price. In the midst of a sudden drought, a lake had dried up into cracked earth within a matter of days, leaving the pelicans that had nested there stranded. Well, they could fly of course, so they weren’t technically stranded — but dozens of their just-hatched chicks could not. It was definitely not business as usual, but the adults waited as long as they could before thirst drove them to abandon the hatchlings. I captured some images of what happened next and sent them to Dawn as references… the entire flock of those fuzzy baby pelicans set off across the baking sands on foot, and the documentary crew filmed them as they died. It was all very artistically done, with narration drier than the former lake speaking of the tragedy unfolding and literally referring to it as a “death march.”

Nature is cruel. But more than that, I just could never get over the fact that a whole film crew, presumably well hydrated and supplied, was observing the doomed migration like indifferent gods. It’s the kind of thing that really calls into question the traditions of non-interference with the subjects. Could you help? Should you help? Is this letting nature take its course, or is it ghoulish voyeurism? To borrow from particle physics, we might be changing the outcome just by observing, much less anything more. Compound this with the claims that a lot of scenes in these films are deliberately staged including the aforementioned drunken fruit party and you’ve got a real double standard potentially going.

Now rounding up a flock of pelican chicks and transporting them to wetter environs would probably have been a logistical nightmare that could end up with them dead regardless, but if you had been part of that crew, could you have held that camera over those little dead bodies baking away? And if you did, would that stay in your brain when you tried to sleep that night? Hell, it’s stayed in my brain and I was only watching it play from a shitty VHS tape years after the fact and thousands of miles distant. Imagine being there, sipping from your canteen as those chicks dropped in their tracks, one by one, gasping their last breaths as their all too brief lives were burned away. Would you justify it as the right thing to do? Would you be so callous and hardened that you step through the aftermath just finding the best angle to capture their bodies?

I suppose it’s the same sort of hardening that allows people to clean up battlefields without wondering who the dead were or what dreams they had cut short. Or the hardening that lets people ranch zombies. But man, I’d be terrible at the job, and maybe that’s a good thing, too.

Hype is a dangerous beast. Getting caught up in hype can drown your brain in so much excitement that your critical functions submerge in a sea of serotonin, and before you know it you’ve invested your time, money, and perhaps even emotional well-being in something that could very well fail to meet your expectations. Disappointment after lofty hype can be a harsh fall, and if you’re old enough to remember waiting in line for the premiere of Phantom Menace you may know what I’m talking about. In video game circles we had the debacle of Cyberpunk 2077‘s original release in 2020, and more recently the disparity of promises versus reality in Bethesda’s Starfield. Sometimes the hype gets out of control on the user end, but hype is certainly an age old tactic to sell people on something, precisely because you turn your brain off and reach for your wallet. The gaming industry has pulled some really nasty tricks over the years like having someone on a stage pretending to play a game on the screen “live” when it’s really just curated and pre-rendered footage that ends up never making it to release. I personally am at the point where I don’t care how pretty a trailer is if there’s no actual gameplay shown, and even then see above in terms of having to be skeptical if it’s truly actual gameplay.

There’s still a want to believe, though, especially when something seems tailor-made to fit your tastes. An open-world exploration and building game where you fight weird-ass monsters with modern tech in a post-apocalyptic environment? Where magic and science mix and dreams and reality intertwine? Hey, what’s this?

It looks amazing, but everything about this should be a red flag as far as hype, right? Especially when you dig into it and find out it’s a Chinese game being published by NetEase which is mostly known for mobile gachas and abandoning their decent IPs not long after release. This is a problem track record that shouldn’t be ignored.

And yet, Dawn and I were lucky enough to get into their latest closed beta test over the Holidays and man, despite dealing with all the bugs and not quite completed content, the gameplay loop is there and quite compelling at the moment. It looks beautiful, even in the more grotesque designs of monsters and infected places. Combat is fun, including some Control-esque telekinetic powers, stealth kills, and lots of customizable guns to shoot things with. You level up, you build your home/base, you fight giant boss monsters in confrontations that could easily rival Resident Evil encounters.Even the enemy AI is annoyingly good, at least where the human enemies are concerned. Fighting a squad of soldiers with assault rifles and grenades is a lot different than gunning down zombies — okay they’re not called zombies but the “first stage” infected are totally zombies. There was an event about twenty years back in the timeline called Starfall where a partial dimensional merging caused Earth to suffer global catastrophe and mutation as Lovecraftian horrors and their detritus (called Stardust) ravaged the planet. Humanity struggles on, and new hope has emerged in the form of the PC’s who are not only immune to Stardust but have evolved the power to wield it and strike back. The writing and dialogue are not overly stellar but not terrible, especially considering English is not the primary language for the developers.

So the game is living up to a lot of the hype, especially since we’ve got our own grubby little hands on it and so can be assured we’re not being spoon fed some carefully curated cutscenes. But naatually, no monetization has been enabled yet, and since the game is currently set to be Free to Play on release you know it’s going to be chock full of stuff to spend real-world cash on. They claim that will be purely cosmetic items, but even if they hold true to that, what about NetEase? Will Once Human be abandoned like other games before it?

I mean, I’d hope not since what I’ve seen has so much potential both realized and possible, but the hype beast has to stay in check. This beta run expires in a couple of weeks and final release is set for several months down the road (Q3 2024). A lot could happen between now and then. A lot could happen after it goes public. Either has the potential to bury the good here under a heap of bullshit. There *is* something here, and it’s pretty great, and I’m thinking some of you folks would get a big kick out of playing. But first we’ll have to wait and see if it survives its own dimensional collision with the real world…

For the past several months one of Dawn’s side projects has been trying to put together a game of Traveller, one of the most venerable and yet relatively obscure tabletop role-playing games out there. A science-fiction RPG almost as old as D&D but one that only the “hardcore” gaming crowd might have heard of, much less played or refereed.

Why is that? Well, perhaps because if someone has heard of it, the thing they might have heard would be its most infamous feature which is that your character can die during generation, just by virtue of a bad dice roll or two. You also may end up waaay off the mark from where you imagined being. I will be a naval officer! Well no, sorry, you failed to get into the Academy. University? Nope, a war started and you got drafted into the Marines, where after a few terms you got dishonorably discharged with no benefits after losing a leg in a botched mission. Okay fine, maybe I’ll just try being a security guard… no? Feckless scavenger it is, then… oh yeah and I’m old enough now I have to roll to see if I start feeling the effects of age.

The modern ruleset foregoes insta-death in favor of debt, injuries and enemies as bad outcomes, but preserves the random element and also discourages just going into the adventure as a fresh-faced 18 year old since you won’t know how to do most things, and trying to do things without at least a bit of knowledge is brutally penalized. But who knows what’s going to happen when you start accumulating those terms (each of which adds 4 years) and the dice start clattering?

It feels rare to come out of chargen under the age of 30 and with any appreciably amazing skills, particularly because the game actually starts skills at a rating of zero, meaning you don’t take the minus 3 penalty I mentioned above but don’t otherwise get any bonus to your roll. Also all your ability scores are rolled on 2d6 and you have to get a pretty high roll to even get a +1 out of those.

Now all of this may sound absolutely horrible and unfun, especially if you had your heart set on playing a dashing space pirate only to see that all come unraveled before the game even starts. But I think a reason Traveller persists and is played to this day is that Traveller is meant to be far more Alien or Firefly or Cowboy Bebop science-fiction than Star Wars or Star Trek. It’s not meant to be “heroic” and you might not even be that good at your job, or any job. You’re not out to fight evil or save the galaxy, no time for that when you’re literally trying to figure out how to make enough money to pay the next installment of your starship mortgage. More likely than not you’re going to be a crew full of losers and outcasts whose best years are behind them and whose childhood dreams are in tatters after being put through the wringer of cold, hard reality.

Pursuant to the title of this piece, it’s a “glass half-empty” setting (riffing off the glass of water metaphor) – a pessimistic universe where the odds are stacked against you and it may be triumph enough just to be able to continue putting food on the table or even continue to get up in the morning.

Maybe that’s another reason why it’s not as popular as D&D, since despite all the aliens and starships and such it still might feel just a touch too much like real life to satisfy the needs of escapist power fantasy. Why would you spend all day playing a character having to find work to pay bills when you have bill paying at home?

Good question. Why read (or in my case, write) Zombie Ranch, which is also a glass half-empty setting full of the crushing weight of money issues and governmental/corporate corruption where the working folks are constantly getting the short stick?

Well, maybe the sci-fi trappings are just enough distance to experience the (unfortunately) familiar with some amount of schadenfreude or even actual enjoyment rather than depression. One of the definitions of comedy after all is tragedy that’s happening to someone else. And I’ve always found it easier to root for, say, Hawkeye to succeed than Superman.

Perhaps it’s as simple as noting that when you’re down on your luck, just breaking even can feel like victory. And we relate to characters that keep on going in spite of what seems at times to be a hostile environment.

Ancient history is a relative exaggeration when you’re talking ten years ago, but then again as a webcomic goes it could arguably qualify. Does anyone besides yours truly remember this page, one panel of which has come back around again at last in this week’s comic? If not, then by default I have preserved the secrecy of what was going to happen better than any Marvel Studios set. But then again, if no one remembered, then does anyone care?

That’s the trick. Who are these people and why are we spending time on them? Well, I believe the answer is pretty obvious but I have the luxury of “inside baseball” as it were, where it’s literally part of my job to keep track of things and manage such writerly ingredients such as foreshadowing and exposition. I know there are at least a few of you out there who have read through the archives multiple times but it’s hardly comparable to the legions of superfans crawling over every inch of a piece of a mega-property like Star Wars or Star Trek where many times they have a better grasp on the minutiae than the creators themselves.

Putting aside the modern attitude of giant game publishing companies knowingly pushing out bug-riddled messes to the public, you can also hearken to Linus’s Law: “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” The common complaint of “how did they miss this?” can sometimes be answered by incompetence or malfeasance, but I believe most often boils down to that even a QA team of dozens or a Beta test of thousands pales in comparison to the millions of players that a popular game will have upon release, a portion of whom will immediately set out poking their noses into every nook and cranny and finding every possible exploit and then reporting upon them more or less politely.

But people have limited memory space and this comic has been shambling along slowly, so can I expect them to remember? Moreover, can I expect them to care?

Well, all I can do is connect the dots I’ve always meant to. If you don’t remember I ain’t gonna get mad. And like I tell Dawn every time she points out that, say, some “new” youtube video I comment upon admiringly has been there for years and, in fact, she showed it to me back then: “every day is a surprise!”

Back in my Theatre Major days in college (and yes, we did spell it poncy like that despite being in ‘Merica), they taught us an important shout. That shout was “heads!”

What did that mean? Basically to get the hell out of the way because someone up in the rigging just dropped something heavy. It was most likely short for “heads up!” but shortened to one syllable since every second counts in a situation like that. Also you probably shouldn’t actually be looking up in response since the only good that would do would be letting you see the wrench about to land on your face.

There was the possibility of course that you might dodge *into* the danger by accident, but at least you were aware of it. Plenty of warning words and phrases like this are sprinkled throughout the English language, e.g. “look out!” or “duck!” or even that mainstay of golf, “fore!”

Then I thought of the Flores family, who are obviously bilingual but one of the phenomena that can happen there is that in times of stress you might revert back to your native language. How would you shout “look out!” in Spanish, particularly Mexican Spanish (since when you get into slang it can diverge as much as Australia and America).

A little research and consultation and I had an intriguing answer, which was ¡Aguas!

But wait, you may ask, doesn’t that just mean “water?”

Yes, but it’s all about the context isn’t it? Just like “duck” is a species of waterfowl unless you happen to be shouting it at someone with concern in your tone. Duck is apparently from an Old English word meaning to submerge or dive and was applied to the way that certain common waterfowl will often upend itself seeking something to eat. It also explains the name of the unpleasant practice known as ducking a witch.

In the case of aguas, the derivation of the warning usage turns out to be more in line with “heads!” as it is generally surmised to be a term coming from before indoor plumbing when the common practice was to toss your dirty bathwater (and worse) out into the street, sometimes from an upper window. Not a practice unique to Spain or Mexico, just crowded cities in general, but here it was basically saying there was some nasty liquid about to rain down and you might be well advised to run for cover. And rather than wasting time specifying the particular kind of nasty liquid it was shortened down but everyone knew (or would quickly learn) that it was not going to be the kind of water you’d get fresh from mountain springs.

Fast forward to where indoor plumbing has become commonplace in most cities around the globe including the Spanish-speaking ones, but much like “half cocked” the slang has survived and in modern usage has little to do with literal water or liquid but just a way to quickly and loudly let someone know to be wary. Pay attention. “Duck” and cover.

I’m sure at least as many puns have been made based on that as we’ve done with “duck” but where actual danger is involved it’s probably best to dodge first and think about the particulars later.

This is a huge topic and one I probably shouldn’t be broaching in a short blog piece, but in the midst of some crazy days dealing with my day job it’s been nice to just come home and bleed my brain into a video game, absorbing someone else’s world building rather than having to dwell upon my own. You might recognize the above screenshot as coming from Baldur’s Gate 3, which recently released… and of course here I was somehow stumbling across a zombie reference — not just any zombie reference but a dude trying to sell one and a potential customer being confused what to look for in terms of zombie value.

The above is out of context enough it shouldn’t be any sort of spoiler, and yet I felt it a good example for discussion. Behold fantasy economics, where writers do their best to either handwave or make educated guesses at the worth of goods and services that have no real-world equivalents. The Dungeons & Dragons setting of Forgotten Realms which BG3 utilizes not only has this particular bit of practical necromancy but all sorts of other magic including the actual raising of the dead back to life, prompting the question: “What is the worth of a single mortal’s life?”

No really, that question gets asked in-game, and you can give various answers to it but in the end it’s basically “it depends.” Most people in the game that are killed stay dead. In D&D this is usually waved off as resurrection magic being expensive so that it’s out of the price range of the common rank-and-file. Same for magical curing of ailments and diseases. If we trot on over to Zombie Ranch for a moment I have a similar conceit going on where the cure for cancer exists but not everyone can afford it, including (ironically) most of the Ranchers bringing the raw materials necessary to market, the way a Forgotten Realms herb merchant might deliver their wares to an alchemist shop’s back door but can’t really afford the miracle elixirs being brewed and offered in the front. It’s all still a matter of supply, demand, and circumstance in the end.

Well, except for one thing, which might have made an even better topic for discussion here, and that would be something I could call Narrative Economics. Probably someone smarter than me has essayed about this already and called it something else, but here I’m just thinking how bottom line, having everyone just able to come back to life really screws with stories requiring dramatic deaths. Like *boop*, hey there’s Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru back, good as new, no need for Luke to go haring off into space with that weird hermit. A supply and demand of death. If a mortal life has infinite or near infinite supply, wouldn’t it become nearly worthless in the balance?

That last discussion is probably worthy of a whole book chapter of dialog from Plato and Socrates, but I think for writers the answer is much simpler which is that you either have to come up with some reason your characters can’t just call the healer for the sick grandma or ignore the fact Cure Disease exists and hope none of your audience really cares. At least you get to be the arbiter of your own question.

Seems like there’s not a lot of good news coming out of Russia these days, but Dawn recently reminded me of this little gem from a couple years ago distributed by Youtube user “birchpunk” that depicted farm life in a futuristic setting that for all its new technology has a lot of the same ol’ problems.

In fact, Birchpunk has a whole series of short films on their Youtube channel that may not have zombies but otherwise feel very much in the spirit of Zombie Ranch‘s tongue-in-cheek depictions of “everyday” life, from cops on the beat trying to deal with their glitchy K-9 robot to surgeons getting their van-like transport injected into a patient’s bloodstream a la Fantastic Voyage (and honking impatiently at a slow white blood cell in their way). The farm one embedded above is of course particularly close to our hearts and it feels like Nikolai and Uncle Chuck are cut from the same cloth, just worlds apart.

Which is cool since their latest video (alas, as yet untranslated) has a brief note that it’s being turned into a streaming series! Hopefully this won’t mean the content disappears from access by us Westerners, as the shorts so far have combined witty writing and surprisingly good production values to show a setting at once very familiar and very strange, and almost always hilarious.

Guilt in recreation activity… that’s a paradoxical concept, isn’t it? Stressing over something that’s supposed to help you relax? And yet it happens all the time to people, even without outside factors involved.

Case in point, regular readers of this blog should have picked up by now that I am a fan of computer gaming and also tabletop gaming like role-playing games. So are, by some utterly bizarre coincidence, a fair number of my long-term friends. But the dialogues we have now often touch on some themes and topics that weren’t prevalent in our younger years.

There are those who would accuse us of not having proper hobbies for “grown-ups” as if we were stuck in some state of arrested development, but if only it were so. Instead there are homesteads to manage, children to tend, work to be done and bills to pay. We have progressed from poor yet enthusiastic youth to an adulthood which has more money but a comparative lack of time and energy, especially in terms of coordinating any group activities. And so we occasionally note and bemoan the cycle of being intrigued by some new TTRPG, purchasing it, and having it thereafter gather dust on a shelf, sometimes without even a real go at reading through it. Running a session? Possibly, if you can get the spoons together and channel everyone’s excitement into a commitment. Running a campaign? Woof, good luck, even on an irregular basis. That goes even for online attempts, where more than once a game has been derailed by sudden family needs or other such emergency adultings. So there we are, occasionally bemoaning the proverbial shelf — whether digital or physical — which continues to accumulate RPG books for systems that may never even be more than skimmed, much less played.

So, what about a nice single-player computer game, right? Well if you’ve got kids chances are you’ll be needing to pause a lot, or even quit out on a moment’s notice, so stuff with any sort of checkpoint system is still going to be tricky. And without kids, it remains tricky because the days of staying up all night are behind you, or on those very rare occasions when it still happens your body will cheerfully remind you why it should no longer be attempted. Further complicating matters in my case is that I prefer games with some level of immersive and rich story content, with choices to be made that matter. I also like exploring and doing interesting “side quests” — but therein lies the rub, doesn’t it? All too often, my drive to play runs out of gas somewhere along the route, and it’s often because I picked up something new on sale and now that’s become the favored toy. Deprived of momentum, I stop actively caring about the fate of the Worldwound or whatever other endgame is driving the engine of engagement, and for all intents and purposes the game has gone “on the shelf,” doing nothing now but occupying space in my Steam library. And looking at that list becomes a guilty feeling, like I’ve left food on my plate at dinnertime (a no-no in my house growing up which I find hard to overcome to this day).

Ever booted up a game you haven’t played for awhile and found you’ve just about completely forgotten where your character is, what they’re doing and (perhaps most importantly) how they go about doing it? Dawn sometimes just starts games over when that happens so she can learn again from the ground up, but the idea of doing that with something like Divinity: Original Sin 2 was mildly horrifying to me given how long I remember it took just getting to Act 2 (and then Act 2 was even longer!). At one point last year (or was it the year before?) I rolled up my sleeves and determined to finish, and had pushed through almost to the finale before the momentum ran out again. Same thing happened with Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous and Cyberpunk 2077 to the point it felt like this was becoming a bad habit, a videogame equivalent of tantric edging without any of the supposed dividends to body and soul.

So over 4th of July weekend I went back and finished all three of those while doing my best to feel like it was not some chore or obligation. I cut the remaining side-quests loose. I even performed the sacrilege of setting the difficulty lower. This hurt me less than I thought I would because honestly when you go back to some of these games you realize just how much inventory management there is and (particularly in DOS 2’s case) how gimmicky the combat can be. All those clunky mechanics you suffered through before come oozing back into your reality and the honeymoon that carried you through them back in the day is long since over. Wrath of the Righteous is so buff-centric it also feels borderline unplayable without the 3rd-party mod that automates that process.

But all three games still have great writing and a great story, it’s just that it came down to a decision of not spending time reloading and retreading. And I did it! I got through them, watched an ending and then uninstalled two of the three.

Yes, there are multiple endings and all those side-quests and paths not traveled, but I just felt I needed to cut bait somewhere or I’d be nothing more than a digital hoarder. If I really need to see what I’ve missed I can call up a YouTube clip, I’m sure.

Right now I’ve got less than a month until Larian Studios officially launches Baldur’s Gate 3, which they promise is much bigger than DOS 2. Gulp.

The cycle continues…

As our ranch crew prepares to sit down to dinner in-universe (though it won’t happen real-time for some weeks yet), this past weekend saw your humble proprietors at long last cleaning up their residence in order to host some proper in-person gaming again for the first time since the pandemic began.

Yes, we were perhaps very slow about this. We have never been the most social of butterflies, being more akin to burrowing moles as far as animal comparisons might go. Certainly we have gone blinking and squinting into the harsh light of day and other people prior to now, or had a few friends over here and there, but time was that our abode would host movie nights and tabletop events on a basis that I recall being more-or-less monthly. The Gaslands game I posted about in my last blog was the chosen vector but honestly given the amount of folks that showed interest, not to mention showed up, I think people may have just missed gathering at the Wolf Den for some beer, pizza and rolling of dice, as if some ritual ceremony of geekdom had been lacking.

Certainly I will say that having impending company over gives one motivation to strive against the forces of entropy and make the place presentable. I by no means would say sparkling and fancy, it ain’t that kind of crowd and we ain’t that kind of folk, but I have a benchmark I’ve held in my head since my teen years where we’d occasionally go gaming at the home of a couple from the FLGS (that’s Friendly Local Gaming Store in the elder tongue) and their bathroom toilet was perpetually in a state that Lacey would definitely describe as “yugh.” If we can maintain our standards somewhere above yugh, I am pleased enough.

Meanwhile the rest of the service felt like it went as it did in the Long Long Ago and this certainly gave rise to a certain feeling of satisfaction in my being. We remain a childless franchise by choice and while our real estate footage is by no means huge, it is ample enough to accommodate a Fellowship-sized gathering indoors without too much squeezing. Perhaps most importantly, despite being in the Los Angeles area our street provides for ample free parking most times of the year. So if there was a get-together to be hosted, we were often the ones to knuckle down and provide the venue.

That had been lacking, and although we’ll likely be giving over to SDCC prep and Dawn’s artworks for the next few weeks it was good to dust off that particular bit of pre-COVID lifestyle with hope for more like it again in the future. Nerds aren’t necessarily social creatures, but the occasional party (adventuring or otherwise) on our terms is still an important feature.

In the wake of the Great Pandemic, my local friends have been reaching out feelers towards group play gatherings again. Not RPGs, but good ol’ friendly competitions — in person, usin’ them table thingies what aren’t even virtual.

But what to play? Well, we were floating around the usual boardgames that had been gathering a patina of dust but nothing was really firing excitement. Miniature wargaming was out, even with Warhammer 40k debuting its 10th(!) edition. Just too expensive…

…or was it?

One of my friends brought up a game he thought had good fun potential and a low “buy in” called Gaslands. What, pray tell, was Gaslands? In a nutshell it was a post-apocalyptic car combat game.

“Oh, like Car Wars?”

“Yes, but this is designed and scaled so you can use Hot Wheels as miniatures.”

Ooooh!

I mean, not just Hot Wheels, any 1:64 scale vehicles will do. I myself had a box of twenty Matchbox cars that I purchased several years ago with the idea that we could take close-up pictures of them as Zombie Ranch references. Alas, the Matchbox 20 (heh) mostly remained in storage… but now was it time to roll them back out?

Dawn and I played a test game and it was utter chaos. In a good way. The rules encourage recklessness and even have a built-in feature so that even if you get your whole team of cars wiped out you can get back in the game. There’s a remotely tuned-in audience, you see, and if you blow up stylishly they love that and will shower your (next) driver(s) with accolades.

So from that you might get the sense there’s a heavily tongue-in-cheek media element to the mayhem, and you’d be right, and combined with the “soft apocalypse” setting which still allows for some amount of civilization, Zombie Ranch wouldn’t feel very far off from the very loose lore so far provided. Heck, there’s even a zombie horde scenario provided where the object is to collide with as many of the posthumous pedestrians as you can — what a waste of perfectly good zombies! But game designer Mike Hutchinson straight up admits he’s less interested in world-building and more just wanted to make a fast-paced game where you can push toy cars around and go “VROOM PEW PEW” and have lots of dangerous and fatal hijinks ensue. Team Sponsors add special perks to spice up the running and take inspiration from Death Race, Mad Max, and even Stephen King’s Christine.

It’s wild in the best way and Dawn and I are already brainstorming some customs for next time. I mean, you can just use your unmodified toy cars, but a quick Google search will show you what people have gotten up to and we still have a lot of bitz packed away from our Warhammer/Warmachine days. And Dawn has her 3D printer which means there’s lots of free STLs for an enterprising lad or lass to grab online.

But still, it’s nowhere near as big a buy in as most of its ilk and you can just write what you’re armed with on a sheet of paper rather than having to painstakingly glue it to your car, if you don’t have the time or energy to do that. You can use thimbles for start and finish gates. All the bells and whistles are totally optional and my group of 40-somethings, several of whom have kids, are not going to judge each other on that score. The rulebook is less than $20 on Amazon right now, and then you buy, print, or excavate some toy cars and you go. Vroom vroom.

Ever experienced being the game master of a tabletop roleplaying game? If not, maybe you’ve been a player, or at least watched, or at very least let’s get to the important bit:

If you want to tell a story your way, go write a novel, ‘cuz TTRPG ain’t the place to try that. Unbound by narrative conventions, invisible walls, or sometimes even the merest inklings of common sense, players are (in)famously capable of screwing up your best laid plans. Try to railroad them and you’ll just end up with a Sherman’s necktie.

Now me, I always would advise aspiring GMs to stay flexible with their communal storytelling, but also I liked to think I could get very, very sneaky about getting a game back on track. The players, after all, don’t know where All This(tm) is going, and so it’s just a matter of arranging things so that they’ll feel great about taking the path less traveled, but eventually said path is just going to happen to loop back into the main line, and if you’re really good about it they’ll think it was all their idea.

I suppose I bring this up because even if you’re the sole author of a story, there are many paths from A to B and it can be beneficial to acknowledge that. Shit happens. First draft don’t make no gawl-dang sense. Should you keep trying to hammer the proverbial peg through the hole it doesn’t fit, or take a little detour? You’re still gonna get where you need to go and you might even be in a lot better shape when you do.

So, you know, don’t be afraid to get lost sometimes. All roads lead to Rome. Might as well take the fun ones.

I heard a lovely portmanteau word just the other day that I hadn’t heard before. I don’t think it originated with my source, but still, I’m low-key mad I didn’t come up with it myself even as parallel evolution.

Fandomentalist.

If you don’t know, a portmanteau is a combination of two words and the concepts of those words into something new which aptly describes a fusion of both. “Motel” is one of the more famous examples, being coined as small places to stay for the night started to spring up around the U.S. in response to the proliferation of the automobile. They were hotels designed specifically for motorists who didn’t need anything fancy or long-term, just a (hopefully) clean bed and a shower. Motor hotels. Motels.

Fandomentalist brings together “fan” or “fandom” and “fundamentalist,” the former of which I’m sure you all are familiar with and the latter which speaks to a particular kind of religious mindset which believes in holy texts such as the Bible or the Koran as literal and unalienable truths. Word of God, not to be questioned by mere men. The fact the scriptures in question were written by, or at least translated by, mere men, and thus taken literally are full of outdated, confusing or even outright contradictory content does not bear consideration by a fundamentalist, and in extremes can lead to a justification of all manner of bad behavior even though you’re professing to be following a faith and/or prophet that seems to want you above all to treat your fellows upon this Earth with kindness. Not to mention that in America a lot of the preachers over the decades that have been the most vociferous and hardline in their denouncements of sin and straying from the Word sure seem to get caught sinning and straying a lot. In any case, it’s rough going when you stake some or all of your personal identity on ground that may not be solid enough to support your strict adherence.

But being a Catholic or Muslim at least has the weight of centuries of legacy and tradition behind it. Pop culture? Star Wars hasn’t even been around for fifty years and yet there are people out there who treat it like a religion, proselytize it tirelessly to others and brook no suggestions that might violate their sense of canon (and guess where the term “canon” originally came from?). They’ve memorized every line of the movies and can quote them to you at need, or with no need at all, and if you posit the opinion that, say, Star Wars is not the greatest thing ever, they can get viscerally angry.

And you know what? I’ve felt it at times. That instinct to defend the things I love against outsiders (heathens!), or worse Those Who Should Know Better (heretics!). The feeling of being personally attacked even though all someone said was, “I don’t like Ghostbusters” and the urge to explain to them why they are wrong, or push them away if they remain unrepentant.

But the Fandomentalist takes that feeling and forgets that ultimately this was a goofy movie about professional supernatural exterminators made by a studio for profit, and sends death threats to those who would dare threaten their childhood and by extension of that their sense of self. They forget that these properties are about entertainment and having a good time, and turn on even their fellow disciples if they dare show a hint of deviance or schism. The forums become filled with sects and at least the threat of violence, which unfortunately has at times gone beyond mere threats.

So yeah, Fandomentalist. The Fandom Menace. So next time you get worked up over your favorite bit of pop culture, take a deep breath and remember that it’s all just opinions in the end and Star Wars is already a mess of contradictory lore already despite being not quite halfway to the Century mark. It’s no hill to die on, and certainly no hill to kill or even cause misery on, for sure.

So I have a confession regarding this week’s comic. I’ve had the idea of it in my head a long time because hey, there are these tacky things called “truck nuts” (spelling can vary depending on who’s trying to trademark them) which are basically oversized novelty plastic testicles you hang off your truck’s rear hitch so anyone behind you on the road gets a face full of big ol’ balls bouncing around. So of course I wrote that Chuck had scavenged a pair and he’d have them proudly hanging off of the ranch’s wagon.

Problem being that in all our recent showings of the wagon, I hadn’t been paying attention to that particular bit of continuity and so no nuts were present. This wasn’t a matter of awkwardness, believe it or not, even though you might think so with the idea of turning to your wife/artist and hollering across the room that she forgot to draw the balls on the truck. We’re well past that point of the relationship. No, it was just me forgetting, flat out. It was just a background detail anyhow, not something we’d called attention to.

But no worries! I could still reference them and just have it be that they fell off or got shot off or met some other such vague fate at some vague point between their first appearance and now. The continuity of that appearance would thus be preserved and I could even make a new joke out of it. I’m a genius.

Out of curiosity though I decided just a couple days ago to peruse our archives for the first appearance of the truck nuts, and discovered something…

…they’d never been shown. Ever. Maybe they were in a draft of a script that never made it on the page, or maybe I’ve just had it in my head all these years. Wouldn’t that be nuts (har har)?

But welp, Dawn had already been drawing and as before noted it was not a particularly crucial plot point. So I’ve violated the principles of foreshadowing. I have no Chekhov’s Ballsack to point back to, only the informed speech of characters that yes, at one point they were there but are now gone. Obviously this was not the work of the Huachucas since it has been so since the truck wagon first appeared in Episode Four, but hey, Oscar and Chuck don’t know that. Could have just as well been Suzie surreptitiously performing some vehicular emasculation prior to the cameras getting a chance to broadcast it.

These are the webs I weave, sometimes out of cleverness and sometimes out of mild desperation. And sometimes, that’s a fine, fine line…

We’ve all heard of “dumbing it down,” right? Well just in case, you can educate yourself on the idiom here. This is the classic creative conundrum of, say, me not using a lot of the words I just used on account of the danger that people might not understand them. Oftentimes it’s at the behest of an editor or executive who believes that not treating the audience as if they were mentally deficient or short of attention span or both will lessen the appeal of the product (and thus the amount of cashola it might generate). Product that is aimed at or seen to be as “for kids” is especially vulnerable to this as I’ve noticed throughout my whole life that there is a disturbing tendency among a lot of people to equate lack of age with lack of intelligence.

Myself, I believe that lack of intelligence and lack of experience are two very different things. Children and teens might lack perspective (and to be fair, there are plenty of adults who do as well) but they can get their brains around a lot of things conventional wisdom wouldn’t expect if you give them the chance. In fact, doing so just might broaden that perspective they lack, as well as potentially helping their self-esteem.

For example, when I was a youngster in the mid-1980s, much of Saturday morning cartoon fare was rather mindless by design. Certainly episodic, as it was considered that kids couldn’t and wouldn’t handle any long-term storytelling. Then The Real Ghostbusters premiered and, while still mostly episodic and bearing some cutesy elements like Slimer being the odious comic relief mascot, had a surprising amount of depth at times digging into both historical and fictional folklore. Most mind-blowingly (pun intended) of all was an episode titled “The Collect Call of Cthulhu” and yep, there were the Ghostbusters confronting the horrors of the Lovecraftian Mythos including a finale showdown with Big C himself. Unfortunately the powers that be eventually got wind of all this smartening up and dumbed it back down in later Seasons, but while it lasted it opened up a whole new ideal to me of the idea that, hey, not all this stuff needed to be written like it was teletubbies. What’s more, it felt like some adult or adults out there were reaching out to me and saying, “you’ve got a brain and you can handle this.” That felt good.

Later I would learn one of those adults was J. Michael Stracynzski and that totally tracked. I also remember the one guy at my local geeky gaming store who treated us kids well and even ran campaigns for us when the other adults there were barely tolerant of our presence. So anyhow, at WonderCon I got a chance to pay that forward, taking a break from our booth with Dawn’s generous permission to try out an introductory game of the Starfinder RPG. Somehow I ended up the Captain of the ship at a table full of strangers including two teenage kids, one of whom seemed shy and another who was definitely not shy but who managed to create his own character while all the rest of us just grabbed pre-gens. From what I could tell of all the options involved, this was no simple feat. Kid knew their stuff, certainly more than I did for all that I probably could passably claim to be his grandfather.

It probably helped no small amount that I had the Captain role and the starship combat in Starfinder (and as presented by the GM) seems heavily focused on the crew in various assigned roles checking in with the Captain for guidance. I may not have known the system inside and out but I like to think I can latch onto potentials and run a decent game plan on short notice. And more than that I just tried to make sure everyone felt respected and was having a good time, especially the kids. I believe the children are the future, or something like that. The sheer gleam in the one kid’s eye when they (as ship’s Engineer) suggested re-routing power in a certain way and I told them “Good idea, let’s do it!” — that was wonderful and I hope they carry the memory of a greying-haired adult (and ostensible authority figure) being earnestly supportive and immersed in the game they so obviously loved.

Anyhow I reckon I’ve strayed a parsec or so off of my topic at this point, so let me just attempt to bring it back around and say much prefer enjoying a creative property that treats its audience as smart people than the all-too-common opposite, regardless of genre. And that goes for writing one, too.

WonderCon 2023 is coming up the weekend after this one over in Anaheim, CA, and I’ll be part of my first panel discussion since before COVID.

Nice, eh? David (Lucarelli) whipped that up for us and also gets credit for pitching the panel to the powers that be. Having been there and done that, I’m more than happy to basically just show up with a head full of wisdom to dispense.

Yeah, sure, that’s it. That’s the ticket…

But seriously, you have to fight down your imposter syndrome for these things because you might just have something interesting to say. Hell I’ve sat next to Neal Stephenson and had him and the rest of the room at least pretend to listen to me holding forth on why the choice of what weapons a character wields can be just as important as the rest of their look. Indiana Jones. Indiana Jones has a revolver and a bullwhip. Cowboy weapons. ‘Cuz that’s what he is (cue Henry Jones Sr. lamenting “You call this archaeology?!”).

I digress. With six people involved and plus the intention of a Q&A sesh I doubt I’m going to be speaking for long, but if I do it’ll probably be about the logistics of telling a long-form story. Really, really long form at this point. Seriously, if y’all don’t remember what happened five pages ago I can’t complain because right now five pages ago could be a few months in the past. Even my artist and dear wife may not fully remember. I have to try to keep it all in mind, though and keep the story rolling… because no matter how slowly the pages might be churning forth, they will eventually be collected together and they need to have a flow to them supporting that. True, five pages ago is a few clicks away (though I admit the navigation on that isn’t what it was — put that on the pile of things to try to still tweak after the template changeover…) but once someone’s holding a floppy issue or a trade volume it’s flip-flip-flippity-flip and they absorb that content just as fast as they want to. A panel by itself does not sequential art make, but a page, an issue, a volume? It’s writing to three different scales, and remembering things that happened years ago as if it was only yesterday — which it might well be for the characters themselves.

Some of the writers I’m sharing the panel with do webcomics, and some do not. Some are self-published and some have worked for known companies like Dynamite! Some have up-to-date headshots and some are making do with a random convention picture snapped in 2019 (*cough*). Anyhow it should be a gamut of perspective, since the concept of scale doesn’t just apply to the writing process. We’ll just have to see how many folks show up at 6pm on a Saturday to listen.