One Tart Per Million

I loved Masters of the Universe so much that I had to do some fan art yesterday. I shared it over on my Bluesky but wanted to make sure it got posted here as well. 

I saw He-Man shit at other kids' houses, but like a lot of the eighties it simply wasn't allowed in my house. Even The Smurfs were considered a monstrous affront - not only the sorcerer Gargamel, but the "demonic" Smurfs used magic as well! My mother had a book called Turmoil In The Toybox which she used as a kind cultural baleen to winnow the (sacred) wheat from the (profane) chaff, because sometimes you gotta look really really hard at toys in order to figure out why they're bad and that's why it's somebody's full-time job. You might think My Little Pony is about horse dolls, but what these wanton mares actually do is seize daughters nationwide and corrupt them into hellbound sluts.

I saw Masters of the Universe over the weekend and wanted to give my review as a long time fan of the cartoon and the toys. 

Having run credits on 007 First Light - and I don't think there's another ending in here somewhere - my feeling is that they stuck the landing and that I want to know what's next in an unreasonable amount of time. Sometime late next week, perhaps. No? That's probably not going to happen? Alright. Well, I had to try.

What we discovered when creating this strip is that people have NSA stalker tier levels of knowledge about these mice. It sounds like Gabe has some serious competition in this arena and should - until further notice - make his enemies start his jeep. Just until things cool down.

The movies running away with the box office are "indie ahh" horror flicks, tuned to Generation Zed. Quarantine sorta permanently broke the theatre habit for Gabe I think, though he'll occasionally lurch out of his cavern for something his larvae might be interested in. By comparison, there are people in my neighborhood's younger cadre who are, like, members of AMC Stubs and shit. They love going to the Goddamn movies. And I'd bet that a strong part of the take for films like Obsession and Backrooms - which Gabriel will not be seeing - are people who were essentially robbed of the ritual because a actual horror movie was taking place worldwide.

If you aren't a moral busybody or a turbo wastrel there's no world for you left. I sometimes try to determine which performance I like least, but the answer is something I apparently have to build from first principles every time. They're utter duplications of the other, arguably manufactured by each other; sometimes they can even switch sides successfully. It's a personality type, as near as I can tell, trailed by a velvet cape of adherents. On the one side, you've got young people becoming old people, desperate to outrun their Something Awful posting history by pledging allegiance to… themselves, I guess. And on the other side, you've got people who get irrationally angry when they see an A cup. You know? It's the, uh… it's the fight of the century.

So, I sleep sometimes.  Obviously, it's a failure.  I'm working on it.  I'm doing the work.   There's an odd point between being asleep and awake where I am happily paralyzed, and when that occurs I can start thinking any thought I want to and it will simply unfold from there.  I can push play on a blank cassette and it will orchestrate itself.   I am not the best judge of these ideas, I mostly like to see them born, but every now and then one makes an impression and I wrap it up for delivery to the outside world.  A few nights ago, this entire sentence was projected onto the screen and for some reason I thought it was worth remembering.  Most of the people I've talked with about it don't agree.  Here it is:

Like I was saying yesterday, I had the chance to write a whole adventure for Demo x Dungeons & Dragons: Battlemarked. It's called "A Golden Opportunity," and involves Acquisitions Incorporated's Omin Dran - um, that's me - utilizing the knowledge Jerry Holkins has about old school D&D lore to craft the most insane and yet also lore accurate Get Rich Quick Scheme the multiverse has ever seen. Let me go into it a bit. I mean, if you can endure it.

I've been playing a lot of games recently but two of them have been taking up most of my time and I wanted to share some quick impressions. So here's what I have to say about Forza Horizon 6 and 007 First Light:

We've been pretty hardcore Demeo fans from the jump; making a D&D experience inside VR where you reach down and move models around on luscious dioramas is the sort of thing plucked from my fantasies. The only thing missing was the actual license, really, which they got - and then delivered the much more story forward Demeo x Dungeons & Dragons: Battlemarked. The first game got tons of neat, free chapters - and Battlemarked just dropped their first. Except I wrote it! And voiced Omni Dran in it! Because it's an Acquisitions Incorporated adventure!

Getting a chance to run a game for people asymmetrically was really exciting for me, and I wanted to tie it into their campaign's first chapter and move time forward a little bit - just make everything feel a little more real, like a campaign around the table would. Of course it is about a get rich quick scheme, but I'm always trying to put people onto the Elder Lore and I think I found a great way to do it. Please grab a copy, or load it back up, because I have a bunch of ideas for an incredibly stupid campaign set in their second chapter and I'm hoping might let me play around in there some more.

(CW)TB

At various times, I have known various people who have done various things at Bungie - going back to the Microsoft purchase. That is to say, I've had the opportunity to see their management stumble drunkenly from acquisition to more of a sugar daddy situation and then - rain-soaked, on the doorstep, in cinematic desperation - back into the arms of another suitor. I've seen the people they drag into these scenarios slowly ground into dust, all the while creating incredible worlds people live and believe in.

We'll get back to more reveries soon, when all these things stop happening! We gotta come in Monday with some stuff about them sunsetting Destiny 2. It's simply gotta be marked. Plus, there's some legitimately shady shit going on in this year's Horizon Festival it seems like - and now it's entered "the discourse stage." We were always gonna have to manage the advent of drivers with paracausal abilities, and maybe we should just count ourselves lucky that it didn't happen until the Year Of Our Lord 2026.

Forza Horizon 6 is doing numbers on Steam, and I'm glad - I think this series is the torchbearer for A Fun Racer That Is Just Technical Enough To Offer An Intriguing Skill Ceiling. That's a new subgenre I just made up. But apparently the game is fun, and works on computers - a powerful combo that's delivered real results in Q2. The only issue Morak has identified to me are the faces, which… well, I'll show you. They aren't faces in the classic sense, they're more like a fongoid "fruiting body":

I wanted this strip to erupt into a thousand strips - I wanted flowers to bloom the world over. My counterpart said no because for him, any effort to create beauty is regarded as a personal attack. That was just an opportunity to throw in a line from an Art of Noise song; in truth, beauty is the only thing he cares about. To an extent that it's been a problem!

It would never have occurred to me in a million years to unearth Cheeto of all things, it's completely nuts. My instinct was to say "cracked" but that means something different to the youth of today - something illicit, an etymological spur I've always feared was Fortnite-derived. But it was requested by the shivering mutants on Tumblr, and we are honor-bound to elevate these dreams, yea, unto the material world.