Category: Writer’s Blog

So yeah, y’all probably knew this was coming. I waited until I got access to watch, and then I watched up through episode 5 (so I believe the halfway mark?) but it’s remained “on the rails” so to speak for long enough I’m going to stick my neck out and sing the praises of the HBO Max series adaptation of The Last of Us.

I haven’t played the video game and that’s mostly because I don’t have a Playstation and it’s only getting around to a steam release this year. This month in fact, looks like, which is good and most likely intentional timing. Anyhow that means I can’t speak first-hand to the faithfulness of the adaptation but I hear from people I’ve talked to that any changes made are for the better. Also there’s a side-by-side comparison Dawn watched on the Youtubes where certain scenes are not only the same dialogue but recreated shot-for-shot.

And yet the whole thing so far feels like someone dared showrunners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann to do something conventional wisdom would hold is not possible: make a prestige television event out of not just a video game, but a video game where you sneak around shooting zombies.

That’s I’m sure reductive to the experience of the game, which received high praise… but there’s always that dot-dot-dot of “yes, it’s good… for a video game.” There is still a lot of controversy over whether a video game can ever reach “high art” (whatever that means) but now here we are with something you’d have to be an incredible snob to dismiss, even though a giant half-fungus man just ripped that dude’s head off. Call it the Game of Thrones of the zombie apocalypse (and I hope I didn’t just jinx the ending by writing that!).

Now you could argue that The Walking Dead was already an instance of zombie prestige TV, based off of a similarly denigrated art form (the comic book). But for me personally at least, the quality fell off a lot by the end of Season 1. It probably didn’t help that there were a lot of changes at the helm, especially the departure of Frank Darabont (which was planned or forced depending on who you ask). No question the series remained popular, and there’s no guarantee that I won’t fire up episode 6 of TLOU after I finish writing this and find everything going downhill… but so far so good. I really like how the apocalypse is presented and how the exposition is handled… there are enough clues to piece things together before the series gets around to confirming suspicions. And of course the main story itself taking place 20 years After The End has a resonance to me for obvious reasons. There’s a high body count but I feel again that early GoT comparison where they spend a long enough time with the characters that each death hits hard, and the first episode is a masterful demonstration of Hitchcock’s definition of suspense as you wait for the “bomb” to go off and the biting to begin.

I don’t imagine one well-done series will overturn decades of prejudice over what we should and shouldn’t consider art, but I am relishing that this exists. I am drinking deep of all my favorite genre tropes and post-apocalyptic vistas. Here’s hoping the prestigious biting continues all the way to the finale.

I woke up this morning to a sad bit of news. Dawn and I have been fans of a YouTube channel called Neebs Gaming for some time and today they announced one of their members had passed on. Tony Schnur, aka Thick44, had finally succumbed to the big sleep after a long battle with brain cancer.

I can’t remember where I heard it but there was some bit of fiction where a man drolly described the kind of cancer he had as “the kind you don’t get better from.” That’s almost all you need to know, right? But brain cancer, that’s a particularly nasty strain because it seems like doctors won’t just write you off when you have it, and that very hope becomes problematic.

You see, listening to Schnur’s situation over the past several years felt like déjà vu to me. If I turn the clock back about 25 years to the late ’90s, I picture my friend Roger. Roger had his own place while most of my local friend circle were still living with our parents, and so we would often gather there to play Dungeons & Dragons, or Warhammer 40k, or Magic: The Gathering, or whatever other nerdy pastime was our fancy of the moment. He was a few years older, he had a steady job working as an electrician, and while sometimes gruff in demeanor was an excellent and generous host and lots of fun as both a player and game master. Many good times were had at Casa de Roger.

But Roger also had something else none of us had, and that was a shunt in his head to drain cranial fluid. Roger at one point had developed a brain tumor, but they operated on him to take it out, and shunt aside he seemed fine after.

Then the tumor came back. So they operated again. This time he was out of it for a few weeks, but seemed to recover again. Same old Roger. Gaming and general good feelings could resume.

And then it started growing back a third time. Or was it the fourth? And this time around, while the operation was a success, they scooped out something important. Roger lived for several more years but he couldn’t talk or move, a prisoner in his own body. You just weren’t even sure how clued in he was to the world around him any more. I know that I eventually hoped that he wasn’t, because I couldn’t imagine a constant state of being fully aware but also completely unable to move or even communicate.

As far as I know that last didn’t happen in Schnur’s case, and if it did it would have been mercifully short since he was still playing games and recording videos with the crew as of a few months ago — but the rest of the cycle of repeated tumor operations, followed by the hope that this time the surgeons had cured the problem and everything would go back to normal, was all too familiar.

If there is any sort of decent afterlife to imagine, I would hope that Roger and Tony are able to game again. And we’ll just have to see where this leaves Neebs Gaming, though I would guess that they were preparing themselves for the possibility that one day Thick44’s nameplate would no longer grace their actual play videos. In regards to my own experience I’m still more or less in touch with those folks that hung out at Casa de Roger but losing a locus like that, a central gathering spot and for that matter a friend who made it happen, was definitely the end of an era. Cherish those moments, for you never know when they may never come again.

Funny word in an industry sense, isn’t it? “Independence.” In the geekosphere of pop culture creation, it’s usually taken to mean that you are beholden to no overlords, no company or collective, that has a say over what you produce and how you produce it. I suppose it gets more complicated when you consider that there are definitely companies or collectives who you can technically surrender some or all of your independence to but those companies or collectives themselves are considered “independent.” Perhaps it just comes down to a matter of scale?

I think more important than scale is the mindset, though. Critical Role Productions, LLC makes millions of dollars every year for its founders, who are the cast members of Critical Role. But although they do run some aspects of their business carefully (as you’ll see when Matt Mercer cuts off any non-public domain song asides from the group before they reach the threshold of copyright lawsuit) they still feel in touch with their audience. The audience are still their customers. If they took any other ventures under their wing, it wouldn’t feel like a hostile takeover. They don’t see similar enterprises like Dimension 20 as competitors to be dominated but as fellow travelers to talk shop with and even cross-pollinate for promotion and fun.

There’s a point where that stops, and I’m not going to say it’s entirely a matter of independence because there are definitely some assholes out there in indie-land and not all of them fail. But I do believe that there’s a sharp divide that businesses hit where you can see a before and after, and that’s the public offering. The company is now on a stock exchange, or indirectly so because they were bought by a bigger fish that is. The shift is fundamentally the same, though… the consumer is no longer the customer. The consumer becomes a resource to be… let’s say “leveraged”… in the service of your new actual customers, the stockholders.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not advocating the teardown of capitalism here, but it just feels like a built-in problem to me when full incorporation by design detaches a company from the end users. Now it’s all about the stock price and being able to show a constantly rising chart and it feels like no one really cares about the means of how you achieve that, just make it happen. That detachment, that ends-justifying-the-means mentality that turns people into statistics… it’s baked in, especially nowadays where people don’t seem to want to invest in companies and earn steady dividends so much as ride the waves of buying low and selling high to make as much money as possible as quickly as possible, then get out. What’s the company? What’s it creating? Who cares?

Well, there’s still wriggle room for creativity under these circumstances–I sure liked Andor and Disney is about as big a corporate overlord as it gets–but it feels like it’s in spite of the system rather than enabled by it, like the Eye of Sauron was looking elsewhere but once something like Frozen is a runaway hit you can bet Frozen 2 is going to be gone over with a fine-toothed comb by execs attempting to put quantifiable numbers on every aspect of human connection.

The detachment of incorporation affects everything, but in particular I feel it clashes with the creative arts where the human connection is everything. You can go by the numbers and there are certainly tried-and-true ways to manipulate the sort of emotional responses desired from a crowd, but in the end there’s still that nagging feeling because the ones at the top of the chain are very definitely not interested in telling a good story except as a by-product of getting them rich.

I mean at least it’s not a cigarette conglomerate, but ClearStream is undeniably my commentary on this situation and how that detachment can make even human life nothing more than numbers on a balance sheet. And although aspects of it are exaggerated–I doubt even a piece of work like Bobby Kotick sits in a dark room dramatically steepling his fingers–I’m glad that for all our faults, the only margins Dawn and I are truly concerned with have to do with page layouts.

After a few weeks you’d think I’d have plenty of backlogged experiences and observations to drone on about in this blog, and I do! But just at the moment I’m also suffering from a rather distracting stomachache, so I’m going to link this video without too much comment on it, other than I found it fascinating, especially from an alternate history/speculative fiction perspective. This lady (Nicole Rudolph) delved up some vintage fashion magazine articles imagining how people would dress “in the future,” decades or even a century down the road. I’ve seen stuff like this a lot in terms of technology, travel, etc. — but fashion? Never. That might just be me, though, since Dawn has assured me this is hardly the only video on the subject. After all, if you’re going to have a world where blimps somehow became the primary mode of travel (mostly because blimps were such a big fad in the early 1900s), you might as well have a look at what people of that time thought would be the inevitable march of blimp-based couture.

Anyhow, fascinating. The imaginings miss the mark for the most part, but sometimes it’s exactly those types of misses that really fire the “what if?” parts of our brains.

Dawn and I watched Jordan Peele’s most recent film offering a couple weeks ago, and we liked it. I could therefore have just titled this “yup” and left it at that. A true “What Would Frank Do?” moment.

But I’m honestly just not the laconic sort, and the movie is… controversial? It’s not a particularly “political” film from my perspective, beyond the fact that the main characters are black, and Jordan Peele is black, and so sometimes that colors (pardon the pun) their interactions with Hollywood, historically and otherwise. So I don’t think the 1-star reviews are necessarily just the result of a loud and disgruntled segment of the audience reacting to that… it’s not the main story, though Peele himself has come out in interviews to say part of the underlying message is about how the film industry can chew you up and spit you out, regardless of gender, creed or skin tone.

Whether or not that message connects and how skillfully (or not) it might be conveyed is probably the main bone of contention, though honestly there’s enough care and thoughtfulness involved I’m not sure it deserves 1-star. Does it deserve 5-star? My jury’s out on that as well, but we live in an age where critical nuance doesn’t bring in the clicks. Love it, hate it, or get out of the way.

But look, let’s get past the meta. This movie has a ranch, and horses, and cowpokes, and media interference, and a hefty dose of weird. The subject matter alone predisposes your humble proprietors to give it opportunity. In addition to the Hollywood connection it’s also Peele’s self-admitted love letter to Jaws and y’all should know my feelings on Jaws by now (if you’re new here: it’s my favorite movie of all time). Peele flips the script and turns the murky ocean into a cloudy sky but the DNA is definitely there. One complaint I’ve seen about Nope is that a movie shouldn’t remind people of another, better movie, but for me that “honor” belongs to Jaws: The Revenge and its flashback sequences literally featuring footage from the original of its franchise. Also, the original Jaws is a high water mark (heh) so if you’re not as good as Jaws, that hardly makes you bad, and there’s enough spin on this tale and craftsmanship that I don’t have the problem of “why does this exist?” in terms of repeating something already done. No stories are really new, right? It’s all about the arrangements.

With that said, I’m not going to guarantee you will love it, but I do think the folks who read this comic might find it at least an interesting watch. Maybe even a second watch once all the cards are on the table? It’s a film to keep an eye on, even if within its confines the best strategy (in the short run) turns out to be to look away. And I do wonder how it will fare in five or ten years… is it too close to other films of its genre to be worthy of its own niche? Is the storytelling too disjointed or are the characters too sketchy to really paint a compelling picture or make us care? Or could this be a case of a diamond in the rough, getting a mixed reception at release but showing long-term merit? That’s impossible to determine right now, of course, but it’s happened before. Sometimes you just gotta wait for all the 5-star and 1-star dust to settle and then see what’s left standing.

Talking Black Friday of course. Dawn’s put together a sale of our merch between now and December 4th, because Black Friday as a single-day thing is only still relevant to people who want to trample each other into the unforgiving tile of the local Wal-Mart. First it was Black Friday, then Cyber Monday, then… ah screw it just do a date range and let people impulse buy that paper shredder at 3:15 in the morning because it’s 75% off. The days blur. Time is a flat circle, or something. The important thing is that maybe we can snag a heavily discounted countertop dishwasher somewhere in the mix. Also shout out to Brittany who dusted off our old contact form to tell us how much she loves the comic, and I totally, totally did not forget about said form such that I did not notice for a couple of weeks.

Meanwhile one of my writer friends sent me this, which is part of a tongue-in-cheek series by comics pro Chip Zdarsky. Please note the writer/artist relationship here is not accurate to the one that produces Zombie Ranch for you fine folks. Honest.

I am not what one might call a “tireless promoter.” In fact, I don’t think “tireless” has ever been an adjective that could be applied my way. I can’t even game into the wee hours the way I used to in my youth, much less do things I’m less comfortable with like networking and getting this comic seen and heard. I also have the hang up that if I should be putting any energy into this project it should be towards the creative side, especially in the current era where we’ve scaled back on production, as it were. The spoons, you know? And I think, how would I feel if I was in the shoes of a fan eagerly craving the next installment but instead of that they get what basically amounts to advertising?

Thankfully Dawn isn’t overthinking like this and has taken over using social media to tell folk that she has, for example, made Zombie Ranch sticker sheets and they are available for purchase. Or remind people of the trade paperback and various other merch we’ve made over the years, or promote her Patreon which covers not only the comic but her artistic efforts overall. As part of the site overhaul she’s re-coding and consolidating how the store interface works, all in a bid to get her/our brand some more recognition. She intended to do so before we started having crisis after crisis hit us these past few years and so this is part of her process for ramping back up again, and hopefully ultimately going beyond. She would love nothing better than to Art for a living, you see, but such is a long and arduous process and she isn’t a natural promoter either. So rather than considering her efforts cringe (as the kids these days say) I am appreciative of them, knowing how much it’s outside her comfort zone but yet crucial in the long run. Considerably so.

So we’re making our way back towards a consistent, if slow, schedule for the comic, though that said the Holiday season is almost upon us so we’ll have to see how that goes. Seriously, Christmas, you need to slow your roll, I shouldn’t be hearing Xmas music playing in October. First you took over Thanksgiving (U.S.-wise) and now Halloween? If there’s a war on Christmas, Christmas is winning.

But! We got Issue 18 into print, so we’ll have some copies of that at our next convention appearance, which for now seems like it will be WonderCon 2023. I hope it goes better than it did in 2022. Our new issue arrived in time to submit as well for San Diego’s 2023 Small Press selection and we should know in about a month whether we get in or are subject once again to the joy of wait-listing. Gah. At least the website migration seems to be sorted, at least to go by the lack of complaint from you all in regards to colors/navigation. Last time I mentioned going through and adding back in all the location and character stuff that vanished, but then Dawn asked, “Did anyone really use that?” — and it’s entirely possible no one did, or at least no one did enough to justify the work involved. I suppose sound off in the comments if you feel otherwise, since I’m inclined towards the lazy laissez-faire otherwise.

My mom’s birthday came and went about a month ago and I think both Dawn and myself had some lingering depression from that. Grief is a weird animal that can seize hold of you suddenly, even months after you’ve supposedly moved on. Probably years. I don’t really know since it’s the first time I’ve had to deal with my mother dying, though thankfully I’m pretty confident it won’t happen again.

Sometimes (and this is likely still lag from the pandemic) it still all feels disconnected and the days blur together, and I’m sitting there pondering “What is time?” rather than actually getting my act together for an upcoming appointment, and I’ll suddenly panic over an unpaid bill or some other forgotten deadline only to check on it and find that I took care of it already a week ago. The relief of discovering that is then contrasted with the vague sense of anxiety that I didn’t remember doing it, like being a werewolf but instead of rampaging through the countryside the savage beast sits down and renews auto registrations.

But that’s enough of my scintillating, fascinating life reports for now. I will sign off by saying Andor is great and if you have Disney+ it’s well worth your time, especially because I figure you’re a crowd that doesn’t mind the talky-talk and the slow burn, both of which have been features of Zombie Ranch from page one. It’s a different kind of Star Wars than I’ve been used to, but it works and shows just how versatile the setting can be.

Folks, I tell you: 13 years and 500 story pages of comics and sometimes you still feel like a complete newbie.

Though now that I think on it, newbie might be the wrong term. Oldbie might be more accurate. We are weary veterans who have been through many scenarios at this point, and watched peers ebb and flow and even burn out completely. This comic has never been something sustaining us financially and probably never will be — but that’s okay. We just acknowledge that we still have a story to tell and people who want to listen, even if that storytelling has become intermittent.

If you’ve happened across us at a recent convention you’ll know that a lot of gray has crept into my hair since 2009. I’m approaching nearly half a century on this planet and there’s no question that I don’t have the sort of energy reserves I had back when we started. Dawn is younger but as she likes to point out, she’s burdened with enough pre-existing conditions to feel a similar state of low-key chronic malfunction. It’s not great, and it’s not always easy to react to crises and changes, the latest of which was the website’s comic theme framework finally going haywire beyond fixing. We had been throwing around ideas for Comic 500 like doing a (non-realtime) AMA session where we’d take your posted or emailed questions and respond, and then all of a sudden our framework we’d been using more or less since we started went kaput and we had to seek out a new one. Fortunately Dawn found Toocheke, which was good to its word of enabling a simple migration from ComicPress/ComicEasel with data intact. Unfortunately, it wasn’t quite that simple (is it ever?), and since the changeover we’ve been having to figure out how to mimic some features and layouts we had with the old that don’t seem to exist in the new.

Toocheke’s support people have been helpful but the process is ongoing and some of it is just going to be plain busywork, like just today I noticed all our character and location tags are missing. That means at some point I have to go through 500 comics and add them all back in, which leaves me wishing I had a personal assistant (don’t we all?).

But hey, the comic is readable as intended again and we got that new page up for y’all, and Dawn and I are headed up to San Luis Obispo to see The Warning live in concert, even though there’s no way in hell I’m going to bounce around like I would have in my 20s. But I’ll be there and listening to a great band perform some great music.

tl;dr: getting older sucks, but do your best with the energy you have, and even if all seems downhill, remember there are good things still to experience and do your best to enjoy the ride.

Listen, I don’t want to just spend this post gushing. I can hype this band all I want but I recognize that at the end of the day, people have different tastes in music. I’m also in no way an expert musician, hell I wouldn’t even call myself an expert comic book writer. But man, is there a lot of talent here. Young talent. Rockin’ talent. Talent I pretty much randomly stumbled across just a few weeks ago and I’ve been combing their catalog ever since.

Actually it’s more accurate to say this is the second time I stumbled across them, since shortly after being floored by the first few songs I listened to I realized that these young ladies are the same ones whose video of their cover of Metallica’s Enter Sandman went viral eight years ago.

Behold the Villareal sisters. At the time of this video guitarist/vocalist Dany was the eldest at 14, with drummer Pau at 12 and bassist Ale holding up an instrument almost as big as she was at the seasoned age of nine. But basically they filmed this for their grandparents and while I vaguely remember being impressed with the effort, it was hardly the stuff of lasting impact. Another day, another viral video, right? Next week it’ll be a duck quacking The Star Spangled Banner.

But these girls? They stuck with it, even after their fifteen minutes of fame. They worked hard. They did TED talks and went to music school and started composing and playing their own stuff. They grew up, and practiced, and started touring, and even the pandemic could only derail them for so long. To express it in on-the-nose fashion? They Evolved.

That’s them now in 2022. I’ve subscribed to their Patreon and bought tickets to see them next month since their touring schedule took them to Palm Springs… which is a bit of a drive from L.A. but they’re based out of Mexico and by the time they come back around I’m not so sure I’ll be able to score $25 tickets to see them in a small venue. I feel like they’re on the cusp of really hitting the big time and I’m not alone in that estimation, it’s just a matter of them continuing to get noticed. Take a trip down the rabbit hole, check out the rest of their music and maybe you might join me.

So here’s your notice. You have been Warned.

If you’ve read some of my previous blogs regarding video games, you might remember that I don’t buy big games on release, and I certainly don’t pre-order them. The last pre-order I was tempted to do was years ago when No Man’s Sky was the big talk, and fortunately Dawn talked me out of it as it became an infamous debacle on its launch. Fast forward a couple of years from that and the big talk was Cyberpunk 2077, an adaptation of the venerable 1980s tabletop RPG Cyberpunk 2020 with an updated timeline considering the world was almost to 2020 with no wetware or flying cars in sight. If anything we got Covid 2020 instead… but I digress. The hype surrounding CP2077 was insane enough it was my turn to talk Dawn down from a pre-order, despite the developer CD Projekt Red having a good rep with its Witcher series. Games–particularly ambitious games–that work as promised right out of the gate are such a sad rarity these days we’re surprised when one does. Besides, the requirements necessary to run the game, much less run it well, were really starting to push what our five year old rigs could handle.

But the game on launch ended up having a distinct lack of “well” regardless of someone’s hardware. The botched launches of No Man’s Sky and Fallout 76 were nothing compared to the crash-and-burn of CP2077, which released in a near unplayable state much less one whose features were going to push gaming forwards to the next level. So much so that even by the time Dawn and I acquired systems (theoretically) capable of playing it, our interest had fallen to “thick shrug” levels.

Because I’m a cynic about these things, I expected CDPR would just cut their losses and move on. But as the article I linked above shows, CP2077 stayed on the radar somehow. People were still playing it. Maybe because as a single-player game it was mod friendly in a way FO76 could never be? And then apparently at some point this year Patch 1.5 dropped, and (at least for PC) fixed and restored a lot of… well, okay, brass tacks would be that Cyberpunk 1.5 seems to be what 1.0 should have been.

I state this because I must justify that it recently went on sale to celebrate CDPR’s 20 year anniversary, and while the sale meant $29.99 rather than $59.99, after some hemming and hawing I bought in at long last. I mean look, I always found cyberpunk to be a cool genre. Take one glance at Santone in Zombie Ranch and you’ll see the DNA of Blade Runner and other such imaginings of future dystopia all over it, even if people aren’t running around with robotic arms.

But I really didn’t know what to expect. I was taking a chance. After all, the narrative since its launch was all about what had gone wrong, what was missing or buggy or half-baked–not what was there, or perhaps more accurately what was there now that the 2022 patch job was in.

What’s there is… actually quite a lot! At least for a guy like me who values exploration, immersion and a good story. Maybe I’ll get more into it in a future blog, but with a pair of good headphones on walking or driving around the main setting of Night City is a great experience, and even if you can’t go into a lot of places the illusion of a bustling futuristic metropolis is there, particularly in the downtown streets at night where your senses are assaulted by holographic ads and diverse crowds in the best way. The voice acting is superb and the in-game models are expressive in form and face enough to make the conversations you’re having feel real. Forget side quests, I can get a thrill in this game just traveling from place to place sometimes.

Now, that kind of immersion would be impossible if the game is crashing constantly or NPCs are sliding around in T-poses, so I’m not going to be any kind of retroactive apologist for CDPR, and I can only hope that maybe, just maybe the industry will slow their roll a bit on releasing games too soon and making paying customers act as beta testers. But long story short, I took a chance on the game and I’m glad I did. Though I’m also glad I waited to do it.

Last December, Dawn and I made our first convention appearance since the COVID pandemic began. It was relatively small and very local and we did okay for the amount of “ring rust” we’d accumulated. Then a few months later we did WonderCon, and that was definitely rough on our stamina at points, not to mention our cat unexpectedly started having epileptic seizures and I almost sent Dawn off solo because of that. But we persevered, possibly thanks in large part to Comic-Con International extending their free drayage program to WonderCon for the first time (that basically means they assist you with load-in and load-out).

Next up was going to be Midsummer Scream at the end of July, which we signed up for back in 2020 to try out after we had been put back on the waitlist for Small Press at SDCC and had decided screw it, we’re just going to go to SDCC as pro attendees and also show our visiting niece around since she hadn’t quite turned 13 yet so was eligible for a free child badge.

Of course we all know what happened next, and as the conventions started poking their heads back out two years later the landscape had definitely changed, as was (unintentionally) reinforced by SDCC when they rolled over our guest badge choices from 2020 and… oh, hey, my mom was one of them. Oof.

My niece was now too old for a child badge, of course, and also not as interested in coming down from Washington State. Just as well since SDCC then also did the thing again where we did get called off their wait list for exhibiting, and even got offered the same placement as we had in 2019. Dawn and I talked and we decided to do something which was probably nucking futs of us, which was accepting that and thus setting up a scenario where we had a marathon convention to do, and then just a few days later would do another three days at the Scream.

SDCC also ended up offering Dawn a table in Artist’s Alley at the last minute, and that offer we declined since we were already feeling pretty stretched thin. We’re considered pros but we’re not pros, you know? We did a circuit but not in the way friends of ours do where they’re going out to New York, Atlanta, Chicago and somehow staying sane and whole.

It’s like, I didn’t even start with the exhibiting thing until I was well over 30, and though Dawn is younger than me she’s still got some mileage on her. Now I’m pushing 50 years old and I wonder if exhibiting is a younger man’s game. Again, we do have good friends of similar age who do the big circuit and make it work, but doing the circuit is their actual job. They’ve literally done things like changing their sleep schedules to acclimate for evening shows, which is not quite like base camp at Mt. Everest but still  above and beyond how the average person would prep. And this year too I’ve seen some people who have been successful for years showing signs of breakdown, either physical, mental, or both. Is convention exhibiting akin to a sport where you only have so many good years in you before you’re out to pasture, so to speak?

I’m a terrible control sample, though. I have bad feet, I’m diabetic, I’m allergic to a distressingly wide range of flora… hell I need a machine just to breathe freely at night. Beyond that I’m not psychologically fond of traveling, either, at least not where I have to pack a bunch of things. Honestly it’s a wonder I get out of the house at all, much less that I came out alive from this recent bout of back-to-back conventioneering. I survived, obviously (or I’d be a literal ghost writer) but I definitely felt beat up.

Likely part of it is a matter of training and conditioning, but man, I sure feel a lot more tired a lot more of the time than I did 10 years ago, to say nothing of my teens or twenties where staying up until 2am playing TTRPGs with my friends was just the time for us all to go out to Denny’s or some other 24 hour venue and have “dinner.”

Anyhow, this isn’t meant to discourage anyone from convention lyfe, but if you can get started sooner than later, that’s probably for the best. And here’s hoping that by the time your mind and body’s warranties decide they’ve expireed, you’re rich and/or famous enough to have assistants!

Y’all probably have heard of “writing prompt” exercises. If not, it’s easy enough to google up. In the context of creative writing, it’s basically meant to get around the problem of writer’s block by offering up an idea to start your pen flowing (or keyboard clacking, or however you like to get your hopefully eventually copyrightable material into fixed form). For instance I’ll pluck one out of the search I myself just did:

3. Misheard Lyrics. Think of some of the song lyrics you have misheard throughout the years. Pick your favorite, and use these misheard lyrics as the title of a new creative writing piece. Write a story, scene, or poem based on this title.

So almost immediately, the song “Purple Haze” as performed by Jimi Hendrix pops into my head with its infamously misheard lyric: ‘Scuse me, while I kiss the sky!

Or as many throughout the decades have thought: ‘Scuse me, while I kiss this guy!

Maybe in honor of Pride Month we can just imagine that wasn’t misheard at all, but in any case now I have something to potentially build a story around. Of course, this exercise does ignore the whole maxim that “ideas are easy”… because then again, sometimes they’re not, right? “Where do you get your ideas?” asks the stereotypical audience member, craving the wisdom a writer often has no satisfying answer for, or should perhaps probably come up with something better than “a 10-second Google search.”

Anyhow, sometimes I get them from games. Playtime. It’s definitely not unheard of for this to occur, but then there’s the gulf between “wow, that would make a good story” and actually making a good story inspired by it. Or any story at all, really.

How about just recounting it in a way that makes someone else entertained? That’s a story, right? Doesn’t have to be a novel. You don’t have to fire up Photoshop and use your very limited skills to…

*record scratch*

Okay let me backtrack. So I recently started playing this video game called Stellaris which is sort of like Civilization on a galactic scale. You guide your alien empire on a quest for supremacy but unless you’re a fanatical xenophobe, devouring swarm or similarly anti-social collective, you may very well end up with several different species populating your various worlds. There’s a good deal of randomness involved in what alien species might be present in a given game and how everyone feels about each other, etc. etc., and you’re guiding your empire across a period of centuries as leaders live and die and today’s deadly rival might be your staunchest ally fifty years down the road and nevermind that little misunderstanding during First Contact where an entire ship crew got vivisected, right?

But I digress. Your planets have jobs, and one of the jobs is basically the “police” which is more generally termed by the game as Enforcer and as things progressed one of my migrants randomly ended up being The Law upon my tundra-world colony of Alpha Lyncis Prime, but said migrant happened to be a member of a species that looks like a cross between a sea-slug and a blob fish. Not precisely Judge Dredd material, but now that’s the kind of thing dreams are made of. Or writing prompts, at least.

I write a lot about how words change their meanings over time, sometimes so rapidly that one generation thinks of them as completely the opposite of what the understanding was just a couple decades before. Sometimes it’s a matter of slang that was cool back in the day being now considered incredibly dated and corny… “cool” itself being one of those rare exceptions that has kept its–well, cool–for longer than I’ve been alive, at least, while “groovy” has been relegated mostly to ironic use. It’s also interesting to note that certain trends keep cropping up where synonyms for something being good are… bad? This evolves, but the latest iteration would be referring to something as “sick” when you mean it’s actually awesome.

Speaking of which, awesome and awful… or should I say “awefull” as in “full of awe” as in “awe inspiring” — but now that word which might well have been referring to something good now means it’s terrible. Instead only being partly awe is good. Never go full awe.

But I started down this track yet again as I think about Billy the goat, because back in the day there was slang regarding sports games where people would (rightly or wrongly) pin the glory or blame on a single individual for the outcome. Catch the touchdown pass, you’re the hero — fumble it, you’re the goat. Likely that came from the term “scapegoat” but I’d have to look into it further… the point is, you didn’t want to be the goat. Hell, in Spanish-language slang it’s downright insulting to call someone a “cabron” — which Rosa has done, thankfully where Chuck couldn’t hear.

Except now there’s goat and there’s GOAT, right? This confused the hell out of me at first, especially with people those online who considered caps lock as cruise control for cool. MUHAMMED ALI = GOAT!! goes the forum post and I thought “Whaaat? Muhammed Ali was one of the best boxers ever… also boxing isn’t usually a team sport… what’s with the hate?”

Well, now I know that GOAT in this case is supposed to be G.O.A.T. — an acronym standing for “Greatest of all Time.” We’ll not nitpick about which words should and shouldn’t be included in acronyms. Acronyms are made so people can just rattle them off as short bursts of easily muttered code, like the ETA on that AWOL OIC before this LZ is FUBAR.

So is Billy a goat or a G.O.A.T.? I know what his own opinion is, for sure.

In the previous page, Lacey was threatening to shoot. In this new page that threat perhaps carries more weight, seeing as she’s now got the safety catch off and a round actually chambered.

It’s something I notice every time now that it happens in movies or TV that I didn’t even think about while growing up. The bad guy has a pistol to their hostage’s head, threatening to shoot them. The hero hesitates… so in order to show how serious they are, the bad guy racks the slide of the pistol, usually taking it off their hostage’s head in the process, then puts it back now that they’re ready to shoot.

Which begs the question, why weren’t they ready to shoot before they tried taking a hostage? Why doesn’t the hero tackle them the moment they start messing with the slide, a tacit admission that if they’d pulled the trigger the hammer would have fallen on an empty chamber? You never see a bullet popping out in this setup, after all.

Sure, the real-life rule is to treat all guns as if they’re loaded and capable of firing, but it’s just funny to me that the dramatic action of racking the slide means the hostage was technically in no danger up until the bad guy did so. But it happens anyways, because it makes a satisfying sound and is a big cool motion and shows how serious things are now.

Except now for me it has the opposite effect because it reminds me how silly it is. But it’s been a part of cinematic language for so long that people just accept it, the same way they accept that chest compression CPR alone can bring someone back to life. Hopefully they never have the opportunity to be disappointed by reality.

Lacey is being very serious, and the situation is serious. But Lacey and the situation are also on some level silly. That aesthetic fits quite nicely into Zombie Ranch, don’t you think?

Policing language and grammar is ever a slippery choice of career (or hobby).

Don’t get me wrong, since for better or worse I am my own editor for Zombie Ranch and so have to do exactly that, especially before committing to print where fixing a typo is not just a matter of editing a text layer. I also have characters who are not necessarily adept at communicating in formal Oxford English, which is just a fancy way to say they “don’t speak good.”

Yet the very idea of someone’s quality of communication is a malleable concept. You may have heard that in modern writing, “passive voice” is to be avoided. “The ball hit Jed” and not “Jed was hit by the ball.” Some explain it’s because the latter, passive expression sounds “weaker” but as far as I can tell the derogatory view of passive voice is a 20th Century invention intended to conserve words while conveying the same concept. Go back to the mid-19th Century and you’ll see passive voice everywhere, even in military communications where you’d think Generals were getting paid by the word. Sorry, I mean the word paid the Generals.

Woof, that’s active voice but doesn’t make much sense. That’s the rub, isn’t it? The end goal of communicating is to convey ideas, everything else is just window dressing. A message forum question like “how to find code?” sounds ESL to me as a knee-jerk reaction, and yet the more I think about it, do we really need to say “How do I find the code?” or is that just a lot of unnecessary grammatical dressing? Everyone knows what you meant and much in the same vein as passive voice fell out of favor, isn’t this possibly just the next step in the name of efficiency? It’s arguable that the invention of the telegram is what led to the marginalization of florid verbosity (usin’ lots o’ big words) in favor of more succinct communications. Nowadays one of the main ways people communicate is by texting, which is like telegrams in real time. Data plans don’t make you pay per text any more like they used to but speed and compactness of message are big priorities, so who am I to look down upon a message like “where r u?” This may well be the future, like it or not. Today the smartphone, tomorrow the OED and the style guides.

Though in the meantime, you may continue to look forward to complete sentences from yours truly.

Mostly.

How to make webcomic?

For as long as I can remember, I’ve forgotten.

Dang, that would actually make for a pretty good opening line to a novel, wouldn’t it? But what I mean specifically in this case isn’t just “where did I put my keys?” or “what was that dude’s name?”

No, in this case it’s the fact that so much has happened since the last time I really blogged that it’s all sort of mushed together in my head to a useless amount of white noise. It’s the same phenomenon I experience when I have a few hours to kill and decide to watch a movie, but suddenly all I can think of is several instances since the last time I watched a movie where I picture myself clearly uttering, “oh man, I totally still need to watch <REDACTED>” and no it’s not a movie called REDACTED it’s just that for the life of me I can’t recall what it was.

Maybe you’ve experienced the same thing. No? Just me then? Do you perhaps (figuratively or literally) lower your glasses just so upon the bridge of your nose, peer over them and suggest, in none too dulcet tones that “Well, Mr. Writer… perhaps you ought to start writing these things down?”

Perhaps, perhaps. Something to be aspired to. The middle-aged dog learning a new trick. In the meantime there’s so much to say that I don’t quite know what to say at all. Topics, topics everywhere, and not a thought to think.

S’alright though, I’m pretty sure I’m inherently incapable of shutting up. Gimme a week or two and we’ll figure this out.

There’s a whole well-known tendency among creative types to be avid consumers as well as producers of media. Painters go to galleries, directors watch movies, writers read books. If there’s money involved then doing so is even potentially claimable as a business expense for your taxes. Imagine my jealousy of my buddy who is a professional video game developer…

But I don’t think consuming entertainment like this is just “homework” or whatever you’d want to call it. Entertainment is supposed to be entertaining, right? Even when you’re the one producing it for others you should ideally be doing so out of love and joy, much less when it’s your own relax time. That ideal isn’t always lived up to where job and hobby overlap, but there ought to be some of that escapism element we all crave with storytelling, both for listener and teller. Arguably it should be even more escapist for the creator despite them having to deal with all the niggling nuts and bolts of putting things together… or maybe because of it? Presuming they are able to keep their heads down and block out the real world for a time.

If you’re someone like Stephen Colbert, welp, sorry, what’s happening in the world is something you have to stay wrapped up in even though you’re presenting it in a comedic fashion. That’s what you signed up for. But Colbert never has more of a true gleam in his eye than when he gets to nerd out over J.R.R. Tolkien on the air. Creatives of his ilk might well want to go home at the end of the day and have nothing to do with current events until they get back to the writer’s room. Or maybe they still do, but can frame it in a different context as a viewer.

Something a lot of folks don’t consider is that their therapist might very well have a therapist. Someone to talk to in confidentiality and perhaps unload all of the stress they’ve dealt with from helping other people. And that therapist might have a therapist, and so on… it’s not a situation so far as I know where there’s a Grand High Therapist somewhere and all therapy begins and ends with them. So it may be with the media artist whose career (or semi-career) could be homework, job, therapy and escapism all at once. And whatever they create in turn might help others with the same.

Dawn and I got around to watching Disney’s Encanto this past weekend and it’s been on my mind. A slow burn, honestly, but now I’m as obsessed as anyone else with “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” (and it’s safe to say a lot of folk are obsessed since it recently reached #1 on the Billboard Top 100 in the U.S., a feat not even “Let It Go” accomplished).

I haven’t really had any stock in the Academy Awards in many years but I have friends in the movie industry or industry-adjacent and so it’s not something I can entirely ignore. One of my friends expressed amusement that Disney’s backing for Best Original Song went to a different tune than the one currently ear worming its way through America. Apparently the story there is that Encanto’s premiere came after the deadline for submissions for Oscar consideration, so Disney just had to make a wild guess ahead of time on which one of the compositions would be The One and… well, they guessed wrong. To be fair(?) “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” is not the kind of song that focus groups and conventional wisdom would see as an Oscar contender or even a chart topper. It’s not a belting solo or a romantic duet, it’s a quirky ensemble piece that’s heavy on the storytelling to the point you arguably need to have watched the movie to understand it.

So I suppose one take away would be — a lot of people have watched the movie. But another thought that’s interesting is just the factor that should be its weakness, which is the heavy storytelling element. I personally am quite partial to songs that “move” narratively-speaking, especially if they’re bangers (as the kids say), but I have learned over the decades how little my personal tastes matter in the larger picture.

This song works, and there’s a lot of analysis that can be done on why it gels together in such an effective way, including a climactic group repeat of individual stanzas that’s up there with “One Day More” from Les Miserables even though the subject matter is basically family gossip rather than revolution.

But one thing that comes to mind is that I’ve been listening to the audiobook of Maria Konnikova’s The Confidence Game which is all about con artistry and why people keep being susceptible to its wiles throughout the centuries, and one thing she brings up is the power of storytelling. Facts, she explains, can be argued and refuted. Stories are slippier things to deny and tend to take root much more easily in our psyches, which is likely why ancient parents first made up something out in the woods that would eat you if you wandered off, just like poor little Og got eaten — rather than just rattling off what big fangs a sabretooth cat has.

Stories can have immense power for good and ill, which is a heady thing to contemplate as a storyteller. But in the meantime, it makes it less surprising to me that a mysterious tale spun about a lost relative could resonate with a mass audience, especially if it’s got a beat you can dance to.

Feels like the past few blog posts have been me, me, me… which they usually are since this represents my lil’ corner of the website. We had a near miss recently where we were going to go out to dinner for Dawn’s birthday and pushed it back a day due to reservation issues, then on the day of my dad called up and said he was feeling sick so probably shouldn’t go. We dropped one of our COVID test kits off on his porch that night and lo and behold he tested positive, which sent the family into panic mode all over again and I was playing operator for the concerned texts and phone calls. At this time he seems to be over the worst of it and getting better, hopefully with no long-term complications in his future. As far as I know he was masking up and taking precautions but he likes to run his errands in person and made some trips to the grocery store and post office and such a few days before his symptoms.

So anyhow that’s about my dad, right, not me per se? But it shows how raw everyone in my family still is. Not a good time to go AWOL, for sure. When my uncle didn’t show up for a scheduled zoom call the troops were dispatched to get eyes on and make sure he was okay. Both these gents are getting close to 80 years old but they’re still up and about and very independent-minded, which makes for an interesting balance for me of wanting to give them space but also needing to make sure we’re not out of touch for too long since they’re now living alone.

But yeah, some of you have already been responding occasionally with your own “status reports” and sometimes it’s just therapeutic to share, so, how’s 2022 treating y’all so far?