This is something Gabe and our mutual friend Kris Straub share - a suspicion that ghosts may be real. More than a suspicion, perhaps. They live their lives in accordance with the undeniable, universally understood fact of spectral incursion. I haven't gone into it super deep with Gabe but I can guess at the techniques he's developed to ensure his safety - and the safety of his family. Kris told me that he leaves shoes upside down, with the holes against the carpet, because… I'm trying to remember. I think the idea was that the open shoes implied an entity, and that was sufficient to create a point of ingress? Was that it?

It's all true; it is possible to enter the Halls of Denigration and secure yourself a key. Through the dark alchemy of Twitch Drops, your attention can be transformed into a closed beta code for Marvel Rivals. Well, maybe. They don't have an unlimited amount of codes to drop for Twitch. And it only goes until tomorrow. There was some other arcane text around getting it, but as I gazed upon it the sigils began to swim. How much danger was I willing to enter in order to maybe get a key for an Overwatch clone, ten years after the fact? I closed the browser.

I spent the last week working on stickers, but now I’m ready to open up new commission slots for August. I started doing these last month for the first time in 25 years. Before that I had only ever offered commissions during the Child’s Play charity dinner. It’s one of the requests I get most often though and after discovering the site Artistree I decided to give it a try on a regular basis. Last month I did four commissions and really enjoyed the process! I’ve worked with lots of big companies over the years but getting to work one on one with PA readers was awesome. Nothing beats hearing directly from someone how much a custom drawing I did means to them and I want to do more of that going forward. 

At a certain level, Disney seemed to think that it had a Captive Audience with the MCU and that it didn't really matter what they did with it. It turns out that it matters a lot! It matters a lot if the movies you make are good. With a pair of movies that brought in almost five billion dollars, they capped off and paid everyone for their ten year investment in a way that feels earned but also, you know… final, with real stakes. Once they lost that scaffold they lost the plot. There wasn't any attempt to earn audience anymore, they had them. When they stopped being captivated, they stopped being captive. Now Disney has flipped the script; they've decided to go with captive creators instead.

The hour is here!

You heard right!  The hour of the book is upon you!!!

Concord developer Firewalk Studios is quite obviously stuffed to the gills with world-class talent. They have technical and conceptual sophistication "out the ass." And what they've chosen to do is fairly striking: offer a premium product in the land of the service shooter, and slow down the pace of kills until it's something like a turn-based tactics experience, and whose characters chart a new form of -punk that we may not have the prefix for yet. I don't mean that as a joke! I'm honor-bound to support anyone who engages in dangerous heresies. Obviously, here are very mean ways to say all of the things I just said. For example, Gabriel says the game feels like you're trudging through molasses and that the faces are scary, at once living and dead, like animated corpses. He says he has been robbed of sleep! I don't know about all that.

I was not impressed by Concord and it seems like I’m not the only one. I’ve heard it said that the reason it seems to be struggling to find an audience is because people are tired of Hero Shooters but personally I don’t think this is the case. It’s like when you hear that audiences are tired of superhero movies and then Deadpool 3 comes out and breaks records. There’s always room for something genuinely fun,cool and creative that’s made with passion. I saw Deadpool & Wolverine over the weekend and it’s full of hardcore comic book lore that only the nerdiest of the nerds would appreciate. It was clearly made for fans and rather than trying to subvert their expectations, it was trying to exceed them.  

-Gabe Out

They're all done, laid out, and made beautiful by the design team, but the store aspect - and making sure Kickstarter Backers get theirs cleanly - has to be made perfect. So! On Tuesday, prepare yourself mentally and physically for a pair of tender novellae about Omin and Jim, which is to say "Ominifis Hereward Dran" and "James Winifred Darkmagic The Third."

Gonna jump into the channel and check out some cool stuff with Dabe - Go Mecha Ball, Kunitsu-Gami, and more!

(CW)TB

The First Descendant has its claws in me and I can’t escape. Early this week I was engaged in an activity called Outpost farming. These open world events were on a five minute timer. Essentially a bunch of monsters spawn at a given location every five minutes and after defeating them a boss will spawn and hopefully drop the item you’re looking for but probably not. The fight itself only takes about a minute so you end up sitting around for a while between fights. I was approached by a rando asking for help with a mission in the area. I ran them through the mission and afterwards explained that I had to get back because I was farming this boss every five minutes. They told me they knew an exploit that would let me fight the boss over and over without any timer. Obviously I was intrigued!

The First Descendant has emerged from the novelty phase, the will they or won't they phase, and now it appears to have truly entered the rotation. Sometimes called "Warframe But Your Face Doesn't Look Like A Bug," to hear our own Gabriel tell it it's a game where when they patch something most of the time you're happy to see it. For example: in the strip, we talk about a rando teaching Mister Gribbz a 'sploit to reset the timer on bosses. Trying to, at any rate. Well, between the time this incredibly patient entity attempted to help him and the moment I'm speaking to you now, they closed that loophole. But, they dropped the timer on the boss refresh from five minutes to one. Right? Affable design of this sort is indistinguishable from a "bro manoeuvre."

As I suggested on Twitter, I wrote the last line - so feel any kind of way about him that you didn't feel already. I knew exactly what he was talking about, because I have seen this be-bearded gentleman in all his guises - every finger of that extradimensional entity, pushed through the membrane of reality.

Jerry mentioned Sand in his most recent news post but another multipart series started this week 9 years ago. Our story “Grace” is a Nightlight tale and you can get started with part 1 right here. If you’re not familiar with it, Nightlight is a series of stories based on the idea that all families have a “Nightlight”. That is to say someone whose job it is to fight the monsters that DO IN FACT live under the bed. A Nightlight can be anyone and they have many different ways of battling these monsters. I always thought this one would make a great series on Netflix or some other streaming service. Who knows, maybe someday it will!

Specifically, the comic.  I saw via Design's perpetually delightful "Feeling Nostalgic" section that it had run about eleven years ago this week, but the initial page actually ran a couple years before.  That was sort of a busy time for us!  It took us a while to get back to it.  I think it was worth it?  Maybe?  No, I really like this one actually, this future western stuff is always in season for me and I have an endless desire to write in this patois.

Very soon, indeed this very week, I am releasing two novellas - indeed, two versions of the same novella. One as a fantasy adventure, and one as a fantasy adventure that is also a romance. We're gonna start digital; if it was good enough for MIke's living god Hugh "Wool" Howey, it's good enough for me. They'll be available right from our store.