Category: Writer’s Blog

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.

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.