I’m Trying to Brainstorm Patreon Rewards

Hey all! I wanted to start off directing you all to this post on my patreon. I know times are tough for everyone, and I understand folks gotta tighten their belts. I’m trying to get my patreon to cover my student loan monthly payment and want to add more extras for people who support more. Right now, it is just reading my comics a month early. Also, to encourage folks to sign up, for all of June, I’m giving 10% off any backer level $2 or higher. Just use the code BDAY-26.

This month I’ll be selling books at Books with Pictures Con on June 13th. It is free to attended, so if you are in Portland that weekend stop by.

I’m gonna do another special stream this month. June 10th is my birthday and the Hugo awards gave voters codes for most of the games that were nominated. So I’m gonna play all the games for two hour each before I vote in the Hugos. I’ll start at 2pm pst. The games are:

2-4pm Dispatch
4-6pm Expedition 33
6-8pm Hades 2
8-10pm Citizen Sleeper 2

I’ll be streaming on Twitch.

On Saturdays at 11 am PST, I usually watch a movie in my discord. They are all movies I haven’t seen. Anyone can pop in and watch along. This month we are watching:

June 6 – I Saw The TV Glow
June 13 – no movie I’m at BWPCon
June 20 – The Talented Mr. Ripley
June 27 – Call Me By Your Name

Pop in with this link.

Other that the big special stream, I’ll also be streaming on these dates and times:

Tuesday at 7pm – 10pm PST – Art times
Wednesday at 7pm – 9pm PST – Art times
Sunday at 8pm – 10pm PST – Disco Elysium

Join me on my twitch!

I made a joke about it back when A Knight in the Seven Kingdoms first aired, but I’m now doing a podcast called Westeros Runs on Duncan. This is just for patreon backer. Two episodes are posted. I’ll be posting new episodes each Tuesday.

I’m editing the Iron Circus comic Lie Machine, a nonfiction anthology about misinformation and propaganda. I’m also drawing a fairly short comic for it. So I’m getting ahead on Glass Diamonds, so I can take a month to focus on drawing it. It’s going to be called Look Upon My Works and Don’t Think About Me At All. It’s about quotes taken out of context.

The movies I picked to show in my discord last month are all movies about tech in some way. I want to start having a theme to the movies I group together each month. So the first one was Johnny Mnemonic. It is a really stylish movie. I can definitely see why it influenced the cyberpunk genre. I particularly liked laser whip and the dolphin at the end.

Then we watched Blackberry which is about the raise and fall of blackberry phones. I mainly checked it out because of Glenn Howerton. I heard he brought the some of that unhinged anger he uses to play Dennis in Always Sunny to this movie. He didn’t disappoint and is the highlight of the movie. One thing that I really appreciated is that both of the leads were needed to make the phone a success. There is a great scene early on where a pitch to Verizon is going poorly until they are both there. I also like that toward the end of the movie they are told they are about to go from the #1 phone to that phone people had before an iphone. It reminded me that toward the end of Sorcery 101, I had a scene where a character is boredly dicking around on their smartphone only to realize it was still 2006 in Sorcery 101. I had to look up what someone would have instead since the iphone wasn’t out then. And it was indeed a blackberry.

Then the following week we watched Her. It was a much more thoughtful movie that I expected. I thought it would be about a dude shaping/making his AI girlfriend and pull more from Pygmalion. Instead it was kinda the emotions of a relationship in a condensed manner. That focus made it more thoughtful and unique take on the artificial girlfriend. It also made both the main character and the digital girlfriend more sympathetic when she outgrew him because it was a more nature coarse of the relationship. I also liked how warm and bright the colors were.

And the movies in my discord ended the month with Minority Report. It is a movie that looked really good, but should have been 40 minutes shorter. I read the novelle roughly a decade ago and the movie was way more convoluted then the source material. It really killed the pacing.

While drawing I listened to the audiobook To Ride a Rising Storm by Moniquill Blackgoose. It is the sequel to a book a read a year and a half ago. My complaint about the first book is that the main character was too nice for my taste, but now that she is more experienced she challenges things more in this follow up. So I was much more on board this book. Also, because she is pushing things about the status quote, some of her friends push back on her a little too. It made a lot of the relationships more dynamic in my opinion. It ends on a cliffhanger, which I found a little annoying, but I’m grabbing the next book as soon as it drops.

I also checked out Foundation on Apple TV. I had read the book ages ago and when I heard it became a tv show, I thought there was no way it could be adapted well. But then I heard bits and pieces of people saying their were good parts. So before I end up turning Apple TV off and switch back to Netflix, I checked it out. It is kinda wild how good one half of the show is and how bad the other half is. It is also interesting that is kinda has the opposite problem of Game of Thrones. Game of Thrones got worse the further they got from the source material, where all of Foundation‘s best parts are completely original. If you are unfamiliar, Foundation is about a society started by a mathematician who claims to be able to predict the coarse of civilization with math. There are large time jumps between each conflict. So it is trying to make the point that the individuals don’t matter in the big picture. Which is interesting to read in prose, but TV likes to follow one character. If we keep jumping centuries ahead in time, you can’t have that. The main narrative from the books tries to solve that by having a sorta psychic chosen one who defeats the purpose of the big picture and weakens the whole narrative. On the other hand, Lee Pace plays a cloned emperor and the storylines focused on him and the other clones were super interesting. I assume it must have been fun for the actors because they could flex the different personalities of each clone. The picture above is one of the clones decided doing drugs and hanging out with animals is more interesting than ruling. It dealt with them struggling against how they are supposed to be one person but clearly aren’t, what their propose is while they try to maintain a failing empire, and existential crises. I kinda wish the show was just about them, because it is much better written than the rest of the show.

While watching Foundation, I saw a lot of people talking up a new show Widow’s Bay. It’s a horror comedy about a small New England down. It does a great job balancing those two tones without it being jarring. Usually when horror and comedy get combined, it is more slapsticky. This is bit more character bit focused and lowkey. So it is exchanges like this.