Category Archives: Crossposted

Announcements, Crossposted, Journal

We’re Having a Wedding This Week

Our oldest daughter, Keliana, is getting married on Wednesday. This has been playing merry Hell with my schedule, but it’s the very epitome of “merry Hell,” because we’re all quite happy.

Tyler and Keliana are very good for each other, and to each other, and the old saw about not losing a daughter but gaining a son seems to apply pretty well here. I mean, except for the part where they’re not living with us because they’re off to have their own adventures.

(If it’s not obvious, the illustrations in this post are Keliana’s work.)

Announcements, Art, Crossposted

Typecast RPG: The New Season Begins Tonight!

A new season of Typecast RPG begins tonight¹. The party must leave the snowy wastelands (which we all hated) and pay a visit to the Verdenfleet (which hates all of us.)

There will be big changes for some of the characters, including a bit of apotheosis-justified retconning.

Dungeon Master Dan Wells and I discussed my bard’s character last month, and have determined that I play him more like a cleric. So, instead of leveling from Bard 4 to Bard 5, or Bard 4 to Bard 4/Cleric 1, we’re using his meeting-with-deity from the end of last season to justify leveling him from Bard 4 to Bard 3/Cleric 2.

The show starts at 9pm Eastern, and in addition to all the fun role-playing from Brian, Mari, Ethan, Charlie, Dan, and me, there’s an art-cam! And I got some markers that have GLITTER.

Join us! Follow and subscribe at twitch.tv/typecastrpg!

¹ Assuming “Tonight” is Tuesday night, January 7th.

Announcements, Crossposted, Journal

2020: There Will Be An Ending

The Schlock Mercenary mega-arc will draw to a close this year.

The arc began when Schlock enlisted with Tagon’s Toughs in the strip dated June 12, 2000. That means it’s basically everything that has appeared on this site so far. It will end with closure, resolution, satisfaction, and a big, all-caps “THE END.”

I’ve been saying this for a while now, and every time I say it somebody pops up and says “wait, what?” So I’m saying it again, but this time around there’s an air of urgency.

You probably have questions. I shall attempt to FAQ you some answers.

Q: When will it end exactly?
A: I’m not telling. Before October, though.

Q: Will all the books be put into print?
A: Absolutely! That’s pretty much our highest priority.

Q: Why are you doing this?
A: Because everybody—the characters, the readers, and okay mostly me—deserves the opportunity to close the book and have a nice rest.

Q: What are you going to do next?
A: My current plans are to explore the true meaning of the word “sabbatical.” Those plans depend on how the finances shake out.

Q: Will there be more stories in the Schlock Mercenary Universe?
A: Yes. Lots of them. We can talk about what kinds of stories they’ll be when I start telling them.

Q: Will there still be daily comics at schlockmercenary.com?
A: That kind of depends on how I arrange things for the sabbatical. I’m sorry if that sounds ominous.

Schlock Mercenary is one of the longest-running things I’ve done with my life. I’ve been a husband and a father for longer, but my career at Novell only ran for 11 years. Taken in its legally-defined entirety, my whole childhood only ran for 18 years, and I can’t remember the first four of those, so it’s more like 14.

I am forced to concede the point that it’s unlikely I’ll launch anything that runs longer than Schlock Mercenary’s 20 years. There are too many different things I want to do, and in twenty years I’ll be 71 (or dead, because there’s a happy thought.)

So here we are, at the start of a shiny new year, and I’m talking about endings. There will be plenty of beginnings for me this year, and you can rest assured I’ll talk about them when the time comes.

Crossposted, Reviews

Frozen II

I don’t think Frozen II is going to get sing-along screenings, but I’m okay with that. To my mind, if there’s a weakness¹ with Frozen, it’s that one of the songs was so iconic, so memorable, and so infectious it unfairly raised the bar on the rest of the franchise.

Reset that bar, and Frozen II stands up just fine. The music perfectly suits the story, and the story is complex enough to give people (including parents and their children) interesting and important things to talk about after the show is over. Oh, and Olaf’s recap of the first film calls to mind Michael Peña’s recaps in Ant Man, demonstrating that there’s more than one way to entertainingly and unreliably re-narrate.

Taken together, I think the Frozen films suffer from a worldbuilding problem: specifically, the first film was written without the sequel in mind, and the worldbuilding that made the second film so very interesting raises the “wouldn’t someone have mentioned that?” question with regard to the first film.

Put another way, they created a fascinating setting, and it’s so immersive I want it to hold up like a proper epic fantasy rather than than a couple of animated musicals.

Worldbuilding notwithstanding, Frozen II clears my Threshold of Awesome. I’m “I remember every Peter Cetera² music video” years old, and Kristoff’s musical number alone was enough to lift the film over the bar for me.

¹ There’s more than one weakness, but this review isn’t about the first film.
² Cetera was the bassist and lead singer for Chicago in the 80’s, and did well as a solo act. Kristoff’s number sounded like a callback to Cetera’s entire catalog of ballads, and I loved it.