Schlock Mercenary

Sergeant In Motion: Schlock Mercenary Book 20, will be the last book in the Schlock Mercenary “mega-arc,” the unbroken¹ string of 7,300-ish² days of daily comics airing here at schlockmercenary.com. At that point the continuity of the Schlock Mercenary universe will include those twenty books, assorted bonus stories (which appear in the volumes in print), the Seventy Maxims book, and the Planet Mercenary RPG materials. Many of you may be asking (and indeed, many of you have already asked) “what comes next?” Good question. The answer requires a bit of cold, calculated business stuff. See, it’s much easier to sell a collection of stories in print when you can tell a potential buyer that the collection is complete. So no matter what comes next, it won’t make the twenty-book story feel incomplete. I’ll be leaving lots of room for readers (and RPG players) to tell their own stories about what comes next for such characters as survive the events of this final book. That sounded a bit more ominous than I meant it to. But only a bit. Also, all I’ve done is answer the question “what DOESN’T come next?” and that’s not what anybody is asking. In the face of a crassly commercial decision about what NOT to make (and let’s be blunt here—between the words “schlock” and “mercenary” there is a broadly telegraphed justification for me to be crassly commercial) I need to give people a reason to keep showing up. So here is a bulleted list of things that will definitely be here after Book 20 wraps.

Amazon’s Good Omens miniseries is a rare thing. Exceedingly rare. So rare, in fact, that I can’t off the top of my head name another thing like it, though I’m certain others must exist. It is a TV show which is as good as the great book from which it was adapted. There have been plenty of TV shows which failed to live up to the brilliance of their namesake novels, and more than a few which have outshone the prose from which they stemmed. And of course there are countless programs which reached equilibrious mediocrity with their so-so source material. Good Omens, however, is brilliant in both mediums. The book, by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, is a classic of modern literature. The new miniseries from Amazon is every bit as artful. It plays with the form enough to surprise us, but not so much as to alienate the audience. It subverts some expectations, exceeds others, and will someday serve well as a master class in “how to turn a book into a TV show.” It’s a far better piece of work than the fan art it inspired from me, but that didn’t even slow me down.

Today, June 12th, 2019, marks the 19th anniversary of Schlock Mercenary on the web. The comic has updated daily, every day, without fail, for nineteen years now. Not because I’m a machine, but because I plan ahead, and have always had smarter people than myself handling the automation. Still, nineteen years. That window is large enough for there to be people who began reading the comic when they had no children, and who are now grandparents. I don’t think that’s likely, because the starting audience was not large, but that’s what nineteen years looks like.

The embarrassing thing is not that Pokémon Go is the most exercise I’ve had in a year, nor that I still haven’t figured out how to dodge during a raid battle. The embarrassing thing is that I’ve been playing for three weeks, and I only came up with this today. Apologies to Niantic, Jim Henson, and all those Valor and Instinct players who find their new affiliation unpleasant. Note: For those of you who keep track of this kind of thing, the idea hit me around 11am. I put off doing anything about it until 12:10pm. Reference art took about two minutes to locate. Rendering took about 30 minutes. It’s ink and Copic on Deleter manga board.

Tonight (Tuesday, June 4th, 2019) at 7pm (9pm EDT) I’ll be a guest player at the Typecast RPG table. That link leads to their Twitch stream, so you’ll be able to watch live as I make a half-orc of myself. The game is run by Dan Wells, and the three core players are Charlie Holmberg, Mari Murdock, and Brian McClellan. The setting is a D&D 5 home-brew featuring magical flying cities and other stuff I still need to read up on. I really do need to read up, because tonight I’m playing a half-orc bard, a traveling scholar who does bounty hunting on the side. It would be pretty embarrassing if I didn’t know at least some of the lore of the place. Especially if the occasion calls for me to set some of it to song during battle. Here’s the Typecast RPG home page, and for good measure another link to the Typecast RPG Twitch stream.

I’m not sure what I was expecting from Godzilla: King of the Monsters, but it neither surprised me nor disappointed me, and I enjoyed it quite a bit, so I guess what I was expecting was a Godzilla movie with lots of monsters in it. The show stealers for me were Mothra, Millie Bobbie Brown, and Aisha Hinds. All three were so compelling on-screen it was hard to pay attention to what the other actors were getting up to. You might take issue with Mothra being grouped with “actors,” but the film’s credits very clearly listed Mothra as being played by “herself.” My only two¹ complaints were that King Ghidorah seemed less realistically-rendered than the other monsters, and the orchestral score fell a bit short of the utter brilliance delivered by Alexandre Desplat in the 2014 Godzilla film. YMMV, of course. Godzilla: King of the Monsters clears my Threshold of Awesome, and will definitely be going in the Blu-ray collection as soon as it releases. ¹ Okay, I suppose I have a third complaint, which is that the movie didn’t have enough Kong in it, but since we’re getting a Kong vs. Godzilla movie in 2020 that complaint falls into the category of “I am impatient,” and it can’t fairly be levied against this film, which already had plenty of monsters in it.

I got my genes scanned, and we found cool things. For starters, we found that we could get my genes scanned by using FedEx to send a Q-tip to a laboratory. The 21st century has its problems, for sure, but it’s really, really cool, too. MTHFR looks like an abbreviation for something impolite. It isn’t—not unless you think words like methylenetetrahydrofolate reductase are impolite. The salient point here is that the MTHFR gene, which codes for the production of that methylwhatsit folate stuff, is not working quite right for me. Most folks can get the vitamin B12 they need from folic acid supplements. I don’t do very well at turning folic acid into usable B12 folate, so I either need to go back to nature and eat lots of leafy greens, or I need some special folate supplements. Did you know that avocados have lots of B12 in them? And I like them a lot more than I like kale. We found other things, including a strong indication that my current antidepressant, bupropion (Wellbutrin), isn’t the best choice for me. Over the next few weeks we’ll be changing my meds, feeding me some methylfolate supplements, and putting more avocados in my diet. Probably not on toast, though.

First, the inciting incident: We’ve had a few months of unexpected expenses, including one major appliance failure, two dental emergencies, and the urgent replacement of a video card and 32gb of RAM. Add to that the scheduled expenses of a kitchen remodel and two kids heading to college in the fall, and finances here at Chez Tayler are currently rather tight. To the auction block! We’ve listed a few my originals on eBay. All of these are one-of-a-kind items, and some of them are unusual, like this rare bit of fan art I did for Warmachine, or the hand-painted ABS plastic Game Chief screens I did as prototypes. We’re listing seven sheets of original card art for Munchkin: Starfinder, and four of those sheets are uncut (like the page to the left), so they have TWO originals on them. Each sheet comes with the card(s) that Steve Jackson Games made out of what I drew. Here’s the full list of our current auctions. We also have several things discounted in our store. including XDM: X-Treme Dungeon Mastery (I illustrated it ) which is out of print, so if you want it, probably don’t wait. Looking for Schlock Mercenary coinage? All of our commemorative and challenge coins are back in stock, including the the Maxim 70 coin, and the new key fob version of that coin, which has a hole for a key ring. https://shop.schlockmercenary.com/collections/coins Other Ways You Can Support Us If you register with Schlock Mercenary via the right-hand sidebar, you can pledge monthly support via either Patreon or Stripe. Supporting members get access to high res versions of the strips, week-at-a-time browsing, and can even read Schlock Mercenary ad-free!

Take a pokéball and fill it with nostalgia. Then shout “I CHOOSE YOU” and throw it. Depending on whether you’ve given your Nostalgia the right kind of pokéberries, it will have evolved into PURE JOY. That’s this movie in a nutshell pokéball. My eighteen-year-old loved Pokémon: Detective Pikachu, while I merely enjoyed it. My pokéberries aren’t the right kind. Many scenes which I could acknowledge as being impressively immersive were an absolute wish come true for her. She grew up watching Pokémon, and I did not. She also solved the mystery while we were in the car on the way to the movie. I rejected her hypothesis on the grounds that it seemed like a real stretch, and would make for a weird story, so chalk another one up for her. She enjoyed the movie more than I did, AND she solved the puzzle correctly. Pokémon: Detective Pikachu does not clear my Threshold of Awesome, but I concede the point that I am only audience-adjacent for this film. If you like Pokémon, you’re the target audience, and you’ll probably love it. If you’re making it a group activity, though, you might want to check everybody’s pokéberries before heading out.