This year is my 20 year High School reunion. I have no desire to attend it but I did get out some of my old yearbooks. High School (along with Junior high and elementary school) was a real shit show for me. “Bullying” was not a thing people gave a shit about back then. They did not have PSA’s with movie stars. No one 20 years ago was “#takingthepledge”. When I got beat up and went to the office they asked me what I did to invoke such an ass kicking. I’ll never forget sitting in the office of Mr. Sharp my Junior High principal. I guess he was tired of seeing me in there with various injuries. his advice was “can’t you just try and act less odd?”

My cohort slash phylactery Mirsh Morshamasha maintains a policy of Maximum Adventure, and I do my God Damnedest to maintain precisely the opposite; such is the nature of the strange battery that produces "whatever you would call this site." In any case, he was telling me about the book he was reading, which has historically been a bad strategy for him.

Today’s comic is once again a true story. I picked up the first book in the Dresden Files series for a little trip I took down to L.A. this week. I picked it up because Patrick Rothfuss and Scott Kurtz both recommended it at a dinner we had back in Boston. I had avoided the series because it sounded sort of silly but Goddamnit this is a fun book!

I think Bloodborne is one of the best games I've ever played. I'm on a little trip right now and away from my PS4 which means I'm not exploring Old Yarnahm. I've never played any of the previous Souls games that preceded Bloodborne, so I decided to remedy that today. I grabbed Dark Souls 2 on Steam, plugged in a controller and started dying over and over again.

Helldivers was such a cool surprise. We didn't really know about it before it came out a couple days before PAX East, on pretty much every type of Playstation there is. On the earlier difficulties - the difficulty I crave, the difficulty that consistently reinforces my own godhood - there are periods where you're just waiting for a timer to tick down, and you may be sort of checking your watch, like, okay. I guess this is what I'm doing now. But those spaces completely evaporate on harder levels, and you will long for those Good Times, times when you had nothing going on and were not being sliced into useful parts in the manner of a stolen Maserati.

I'm about to get on another plane in a few hours but I wanted to get my Sketchdump posted real quick before I leave. Here's some stuff I was working on last week:

I picked up Bloodborne expecting not to like it. I've never played any of the Souls games and from what I’d heard, Bloodborne was the same sort of game. As I understood it, these were brutally hard games that seemed to generate equal amounts of frustration and joy. I’m not an especially skilled gamer and I don’t tend to play very difficult games. I get frustrated easy and I’m usually the first to read a game F.A.Q. when I get stuck. I just sort of assumed Bloodborne was not for me. Boy was I ever wrong.

The first day, he quit on two separate occasions. This is not weird in any way. It would be like if you had just gotten a job and your job was to be kicked over and over in places ill-suited to jostling. You would say, "Maybe this isn't for me." Then I got this text:

I was surprised that my cohort went in for something like Bloodborne - he's never accompanied me on any previous journeys into "From Software Bullshit," except in one instance, which I will detail later. The main thing that distinguishes the new one from the old cadre is that it allows (in a way) for a more traditional co-operative multiplayer, which is almost certainly what sold him a copy.

You can watch the same intro we did if you want to, and you should. If I suggested that Final Fantasy XV had a wild tone - Monster Hunter Road Trip + heartthrob warlocks - the austerity and documentary presentation here will twist your head a few degrees past its stated tolerances. Some have found it confusing! As usual, I stand ready to part the veil.

Today’s Sketchdump is an interesting one I think. Last week my youngest son came down with a cold and he was having a hard time sleeping. I laid down in his bed and read some stories to him and then he asked me to make one up. I started with the classic Dad play of using your kid in the story. “Once upon a time there was a little boy named Noah.” I ended up telling a story about a little boy who lived in a lighthouse on a tiny island in the middle of a great big ocean. One foggy day he saw a ship on the horizon and realized his light was turned off. So he had to run up the stairs all the way to the top of the lighthouse to turn the light back on. He kept getting distracted though as it turns out his light house is full of rooms. They started out pretty normal, he stopped at the kitchen first and got himself a sandwich, then the bedroom and the laundry room and he had to stop in each room and do something. There was a video game room where he stopped to play Mario, and a homework room (which he actually skipped right over since he was obviously in such a big hurry) and they got more ridiculous as he climbed. The last room before the top was an “Ice Cream” room which I honestly have never seen in a lighthouse, but it was a crowd pleaser. Anyway, he finally got to the top and turned on the light just in time for the pirate ship to see it and avoid crashing into his little island. It was a goofy story I cooked up on the spot, but then he asked to hear it again the next night.

I was feeling a little nostalgic today. Usually I never go back in the archive but today I kept jumping back and forth between the current comic and the first one. Like this:

It’s been a long time since we talked about Club PA but it’s still going strong. I first of all want to thank everyone who signed up when we first launched it last year. If you signed up previously it might be about time to renew and if you don’t have any idea what Club PA is, let me break it down for you.

We had a really good time checking out both games, actually, but yeah. As soon as the bing bong told us it was downloaded, this is what was up. It's been a long time since I invested myself in the larger budget "Square Games," we've been in different places for awhile now, with my tastes more or less chipped into granite and them trying to broaden scope. But go to a friend's house and check out that FFXV shit, for reals. It's a road movie where everybody is some species of sorcerer. The tone is fucking whacked out.

This is the strip we did on stage at PAX East. Typically its manufacture runs virtually the length of the time allotted, but with all the extracurricular sketching he's doing it was like forty minutes or something. The cold was real, though: I had to bring someone a pass, outside, and only a few seconds out there triggered a fight or flight response. I felt the surface of my eyes freeze.

As someone outside all the traditional production-y roles for visual stuff, I find this kind of thing really interesting. Steve Hamaker, who did all the coloring on The Judging Wood and a bunch of other rad stuff, all over the place, everywhere, recorded himself coloring the last page and it's pretty fuckin' wild. My son winced when I typed the f-word there, but I assured him that this is how the truly hardcore comport themselves.