Howdy readers! How y’all doin’? I’m breaking out my western drawl as a nod to the Festival Western de St-Tite that’s going on in my relative neck of the woods. I’m not really into cowboy/western culture so it’s never really been on my radar. It wasn’t until I was well into my adult years that I came to know exactly how big that festival really is (hint: it’s really big). If y’all have been or are planning to go, I hope you had/have a good time!
This morning I woke up to the sound of rain…at 4:30 in the morning. Grrr…I eventually managed to fall back asleep but it took some time and I lost some of my premium sleep time. Anyhoo, I didn’t have any bus tickets or change on hand, so it seemed like I was going to have to take the 8am bus as I wouldn’t have time to walk to a store that was open to get some change in time for the 7am bus. At 7:30 I started walking and lo and behold, the rain had died down. “Perfect!” I said to myself (not out loud), “I can handle biking in this!” My rain gear should be able to protect me. I packed a spare t-shirt in my bag (just in case) and headed out. Well wouldn’t you know it, the rain picked up. When I got to work my shirt was fine, but the seat of my pants was soaked through in places. A little unpleasant, but manageable.
This will be my first week working all five days since the end of June…hoo boy! It’s gonna be rough going.
Many moons ago, I played A Touch of Evil with Fab and Lyne. I found it too similar to Arkham Horror (which I thought was a much better game) and didn’t much care for it. Fast forward to a few months ago I found Dark Gothic which is a deck-building game in the Touch of Evil setting. We were having a lot of fun playing deck-building games at that time so I thought I’d try it out. It came in just about the time that my gaming group died out so for the longest time it sat on the shelf, waiting. After trying a lot of different games with my mom and niece, I thought they might be ready for a deck-building game. Kayla had other plans but mom and I sat down and tried Dark Gothic and I have to say it’s a pretty solid game. It’s a semi-cooperative game in the sense that if the players don’t manage to beat the three villains before time runs out, everybody loses. However, everybody’s also trying to accumulate victory points on their own to be declared the overall winner so I found it to be more on the competitive side than the cooperative side. The timer mechanism in place is called the Shadows and everybody loses if there are ten cards in it. We played three games and never had more than five cards in the Shadows so there wasn’t as much tension as there could have been. It was more a matter of who could score the villains first. It just so happens that a new expansion is due out for the game in the coming weeks that’s supposed to put more emphasis on the Shadows. I’m looking forward to trying that out.
I blitzed and cranked out five Funnies strips last week for the week of the site’s fourth anniversary plus a mash-up. After all that I didn’t have it in me to draw a Bandit Baby strip. Right now the plan is to preempt Bandit Baby on October 2nd to post the last strip of the current Funnies storyline before the anniversary week strips start. Bandit Baby will be back on October 9th. That means during the week of the ninth, there’ll be five Funnies, a mash-up, a Bandit Baby strip and the blog. One thing this process taught me however is that my normal schedule of three strips and a mash-up is just about my limit. I just don’t have the energy to commit to drawing more than that per week. It worked out well that this big artistic workload fell on a week where I had two days off from my day job otherwise I don’t know that I would have been able to get everything done.
I think that about covers everything I had to share this week. Have a good seven and we’ll do this all again next Monday. Carja V.