I want to thank Local 58's own Kris Straub for taking over Art duties today. Gabe has been more careful than anyone I know, he's still retained many talismanic practices I have softened on, at least in my own neighborhood - but one of the ways your world is trash is that kids at school will bully you if you wear a mask until you take it off and get COVID. And then your dad takes care of you, and he gets it. At home! At fucking home. In the end, he got it at home. When I talked with him before it really took hold, he suggested the call had come from inside the house.
Kris was talking about Loab just the day before, the woman now called the "first AI art cryptid." This is very, very much up his alley, it's the most Kris shit possible, so when we ended up having to do a strip together it just fell out of our heads and into the script. This was so on-brand for the cyber meat ghost lady that it proved irresistible. And Mike is still throwing up on his own shit, which means Kris and I will almost certainly be back in the saddle for Monday.
I feel a little tenderly about it, but having just wrapped up our third sponsored stream for Games Workshop immediately after wrapping PAX really got to me. I try not to prevail upon you; I know what you mean to me, in aggregate - you are the giant, friendly silk moth I have written to for decades. I find consciousness quite trying, but you have helped me process the world. I don't necessarily know what I mean to you, and I certainly don't presume. I think I must be something like Loab myself, an unreal thing, something this haunted place generates purely as a function. The last two years have been more gruesome and painful than I could ever tell anyone, least of all you, who has done so much for me. Even here, in the ostensible moment of its revelation, I could never truly map its contours.
I don't have any tools to manage a good feeling - a kindness. I can feel horror for years, and sequester it, and try to minimize it for others, but I absolutely cannot withstand the sort of warmth and camaraderie I was granted at the show. It's like the kind of lotion you might sample at a mall kiosk, it just lays flat on the skin, redolent of fruit, unabsorbed. Nor is there any place to file the idea that my friend set us up with a stream to do something I - please don't tell them - to do something I would have done for free. Shit, I would have paid them, and I have. I'm just staring at the keyboard now. I can't really calculate any of this, except to say "thank you." Thank you.
(CW)TB out.
