#and started downloading the fables comics ]

[homeofjonicles]

What Are 'The Jonicles'?

Hello. It's me, [Number1RatedShitposter1997] Jeremy here writing this at 2 in the goddamn morning! After having finished the first few entries of 'The Jonicles', I feel like I should write a note explaining what they are and why they exist in more detail and I wish this will be of better help for any (normal) people failing to understand.

'The Jonicles' are a series of journal-like entries often written in a satirical, overly formal and jokey style where I document my strange infatuation and (now hyper)fixation on Jon Arbuckle from Garfield, dates and all. Whilst these are often satirical, the fixation is real and I truly do feel a strong connection with Jon to the point where it would probably concern someone. Some entries are deeply personal, whilst some simple express my enjoyment of the cartoonist and his fun personality. This fixation started on the 19th of May, 2022 on a Thursday at 4:24 am and is currently ongoing.

I introduced this concept in 'The Jonicles - Entry 1' briefly, as I decided to do it on a whim while VERY tired. Initially, it started out as just that, and I was planning in my head that it would be a daily thing, like a journal. However, that immediately changed when I forgot to write an entry for the next day after writing 'The Jonicles - Entry 2', so now it's more of a "kinda daily but i write it whenever i feel like it so its not really daily" thing.

 As mentioned before, 'The Jonicles' was only supposed to be simply a journal, but after the second and third entries, it's more than just a journal. It's a place to put my character analysis of Jon, my deep and complex feelings about him, and how much I resonate and relate to the cartoonist (see 'The Jonicles - Entry 3'). It was also supposed to be mainly satirical because I literally could not believe that out of any character, my brain chose him to fixate on. But after feeling the way I feel about Jon... Well, it's definitely more than a joke now, and I knew it would inevitably be this way, as my hyperfixations tend to end up. It's still pretty satirical in nature, but just know that my emotions past the second entry are all real and genuine, and that my tastes in men are definitely a little wacky compared to a normal human being who doesn't call Jon a "cum guzzler" after seeing THE comic (you know exactly what i'm referring to).

Anyway, I hope this more detailed explanation and small history helps you better understand this series, weirdo snooping around in my phone. I hope my Jon Arbuckle fixation both interests and frightens you as much as it did to me when it first happened. You will never understand my thought process however, maybe. No sane person would understand it but me, and no one will know nor understand why this fixation even happened in the first place.

At the time of writing, there are currently 43 images containing Jon in my downloads folder, a number I suspect will reach over 100 soon. And that's just on my phone. There's heaps on my computer, so much that it'd be silly to try to find and count them all (my downloads folder has over 3000 items not including the folders i'm not even gonna attempt that)

Last edited at 3:13 am. I am tired.

Update as of August 2nd, 2022 at 6:15 pm: I have counted, and there are now 388 images of Jon Arbuckle in the downloads folder in my phone, there's waaay more in my computer, but there's no way i'm gonna be able to count them all, there's just too many. So, I'm going to make an estimated of aboooouuut.... 400, which doesn't sound like a lot for 75 days at the time of writing, but trust me; that's a lot of Arbuckle, and that's just in my downloads folder. There's an extra 100 or so in my other folders, give or take.

I find it funny how I mention the fabled Entry 3 in here a few times considering it's not public... yet. I mean, I even say "(see: 'The Jonicles - Entry 3')" and yet... you can't see it. There will be a day where I may post it, but unfortunately (or fortunately depending on how i feel about it), that day is not today it seems. And also the "No sane person would understand it but me" quote, paint me surprised when I found out there are quite a few people who feel the same way I do about this fantastic cartoonist!

Also, the reason it says "weirdo snooping around in my phone" is because at the time of writing, the only place you could find 'The Jonicles' would have been in the notes app on my phone. I guess I had an inkling that there'd be more than one person reading these one day, and that inkling came true, obviously.

Cheers,

Your Local Jonnoisseur

Posted on the 2nd of August, 2022 at 6:32 pm.

#jonicles #what are the jonicles? #bonus entry... i think? #with a fresh new title image! #i made it in 5 minutes #are you proud of me yet #it's always bothered me how Jon has that one miscoloured white spot on his face in that image

[roselite854]

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[thewadapan]

I rewrote the most infamous Transformers comic of all time.

I wanna give fair warning here. See, when I started working on this comic, I wasn’t really expecting it to turn out quite as dark as it did, and I suspect neither are you. After all, this is The Beast Within, right? The story where Grimlock goes crazy and talks in Comic Sans? How bad can things get? It turns out that - with just a few decisions made in poor taste - the answer is “very”, to the point where I feel the need to stick some kinda content warning at the top of this post. Unfortunately, I also feel like I’ve got a responsibility to the story, and there’s no way for me to do so without ruining it, so this is the best you’re gonna get.

This isn’t the first time I’ve made a comic like this. All the way back in 2016, I made “its christmas... so what??”, a kinda-bad re-lettering of a four-page ‘80s Marvel comic called “The Night the Transformers Saved Christmas”. I wasn’t too happy with the result, so half a year later I tried again - producing “PASS”, a re-lettered version of an obscure six-page UK-exclusive Marvel comic originally titled “Peace”.

“The Beast Within (My Pants)” is quite a different, uh, beast.

Each of the three comics I’ve produced was intended to be the last of its kind - standalone, yet fitting into the same overarching continuity. You can read any one of them alone, or you can read all of them in the order I made them. They’re individually available as albums on Imgur at the following links:

“its christmas... so what??”

“PASS”

“The Beast Within (My Pants)”

Alternatively, you can download the whole set as .cbz files - renamed .zip archives of images which you can open with a standard comic book reader.

It’s not too late to turn back.

Still with me? All caught up? Good. You’re probably wondering what the hell I was thinking...

I. I Have Summoned You Here For A Reason

Our story begins all the way back in 2004. The UK company Metrodome, looking to spice up their DVD box-set releases of the original ‘80s The Transformers cartoon, hired some local talent in the form of Mr. Jamieson (owner of a then-notable fansite) to write up some bonus features. They also commissioned him to write a mini-comic to be packed in with the set - with art by Mr. Gibson, a self-proclaimed fan since childhood with seemingly no other ties to the franchise.

The comic wound up being published in two parts (the second being subtitled “Consequences”) across the “Season 2 Part 2″ and “Seasons 3 and 4″ box sets. As a kid, I actually owned the latter of those box sets, and would watch it almost religiously - to what I can only assume must’ve been great annoyance from my poor parents - but I have no memory of it including a comic of any kind. Maybe it did, but it got separated at some point, and is lying around in some forgotten folder. A damn shame, that is. No, seriously.

I’m sure some record of the fan response at the time exists out there, in the doldrums of one of the many hard-to-search often-defunct forums which existed back then. I can’t really be bothered looking for it, sorry. You’ll have to content yourself with this TFWiki talk page for “The Beast Within” from mid-2007, which speaks of “Consequences” in hushed tones - as though it is a fabled artifact, prophesied to bring about Armageddon.

Another record - this one from 2009 - comes in the form of an eight-page TFW2005 thread ominously titled “Anyone afraid of the Dinobot combiner?” If you’re reading this commentary, you’re already strapped in for the long run; I recommend reading the thread in full. Well, okay, I don’t: it made me wince throughout, and I’ll be explaining the salient bits here, so there’s really no point subjecting yourself to it.

User “Razorrider”, after reading the TFWiki article on the Beast, opened the thread, noting “I don’t feel afraid of him myself.” The reactions soon started to pour in - some agreeing that the design was in fact “awesome”, others describing it as “hideous”.

Just going off my own personal opinion here, I think it’s fair to say that effectively nobody on the first page of the thread had any idea what they were talking about - and the pages that follow fared little better.

I think the main issue stemmed from the fact that a lot of those users didn’t think to explain the metrics by which they judged a “good” design (or, indeed, a “bad” story). When one person says “I think Optimus Prime has a good design”, they might just mean “I think he looks cool”, or they might mean “I think his proportions and colours give him a heroic stature which reflects his personality”. In that sense, a “good design” is one that communicates aspects of a character visually, even if it’s ugly. The Beast is hideous, yes, misshapen, yes, and it looks like the result of a teleportation accident, fine - but those are all intentional design decisions that perfectly reflect the nature of the character. In the foreword to the first part, Mr. Gibson notes the following (you’ll have to imagine that it’s written in Comic Sans for yourself):

Creating ‘The Beast’ was probably the most interesting aspect of the project. I wanted him to be a grotesque, twisted character that contained the design elements of the Dinobots he is created from.

People proclaim that the Beast “should never have existed” - a line from the comic’s narration, note - but somehow fail to realise that this is the comic’s own intent.

(Compare the Beast’s design to that posted by one user on the second page of the thread, which - minus an admittedly-inspired Triceratops-fist - just looks like an upscaled version of Grimlock.)

Okay, the alarm bells should be ringing in your head now. This is all starting to sound disturbingly like I’m some sort of The Beast Within apologist, isn’t it? How slippery is the slope that leads from “the Beast is a good design” to “The Beast Within is a good comic?” Have the hours spent poring over this thing in MS Paint turned my brain to mush, capable of only vague all-caps-Comic-Sans-penned ponderings?

...Well, yes, but- look, just stick with me!

The most accurate recurring statement in the thread - though perhaps not in the way it is intended - is that The Beast Within reads like a work of “fanfiction”. See, Transformers is a franchise with an ever-growing history, and many of those who work on it now have been lifelong fans themselves. This is true of many franchises which have stumbled into the new millennium, finding themselves seemingly unable to die. We live in an age of fanfiction - yet some fanfictions are fanfiction-ier than others.

When compared to the likes of Star Wars and Star Trek and Marvel’s comics, one sees a marked difference in Transformers. Throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s, every story Hasbro put out seemed to fit vaguely into a single guiding narrative - each distinct strand of their multimedia barrage falling into contradiction with one another, yet still seeking to adapt some underlying premise. The 2001 series Robots in Disguise - in the West at least - saw a complete departure from that narrative. The ramifications of that strange borderline-afterthought cartoon cannot be understated, yet in retrospect feel like they’ve been a part of the franchise for as long as anyone can remember.

Almost every year since, Hasbro has effectively wiped the slate clean. Each new series tries to be its own thing. Continuity between series - if it exists - is understated, ignored, or overwritten. To date, this is still something that confuses us geeks; so used are we to the mired pits that are the canons of Star Wars and its ilk. This can be frustrating - there are only so many times one can retread the same story - but so too has this rare cycle allowed authors to really explore the concepts and themes presented by the premise of “car robots” to a level of depth which I believe is simply unattainable in franchises which adhere stringently to a single narrative.

That’s the bright side.

In practise, many Transformers stories have become increasingly myopic - existing only in service of themselves, or (more often) in service of older (better?) stories. The single most influential of these stories is almost certainly 1986′s The Transformers: The Movie, and it’s that influence which is felt most strongly in The Beast Within.

Of the countless insights offered by Terry van Feleday - if you don’t know who that is, don’t worry, I’ll explain later - I find that this one rings most true:

When Optimus Prime du jour mouths off “One shall stand, one shall fall” for the twentieth time, there is simply no longer that understanding that he will not be the one who stands.

Where so many modern Transformers stories are misguided recreations of the animated movie, The Beast Within is a reaction to it. But we’ll get to that. First, let’s talk a little about the story’s artwork.

Mr. Gibson himself, I believe, deserves almost none of the criticism he’s received over the years for his work on this comic. Though his layouts are occasionally cluttered, and he does seem to have been trying a little too hard to emulate the style of Pat Lee (the man behind Dreamwave Productions; license holder for Transformers comics at the time) in the first part, his panels have a strong sense of energy and tone.

Though he didn’t exactly get to explore a broad range of emotions over the course of the comic, he managed to keep the characters expressive - always a challenge, when dealing with visors and mouthplates - and, crucially for a cast of this size, on-model. Look at the fury on Razorclaw’s face! The way Prime’s fist flies out of the panel! Menasor, torn in two! Predaking’s sundered legs! The mishmash of heads inside the Beast! The sickly colours of the second half! While it lacks the practised ease seen from some fans-turned-creators on more recent books, it’s still impressive work.

Regardless, Mr. Gibson’s first outing with Transformers proved to be his last. He didn’t end up getting paid work from Dreamwave Productions as he’d perhaps hoped (though in retrospect, neither did most of the people who illustrated for that company, so that was probably for the best). There’s no mention of The Beast Within on his personal website, which bills him as a “children’s picture book illustrator”, amongst other things. To put it simply, the guy’s always been a talented illustrator, and his style’s come a long way since this comic - the portfolio work on his website is very impressive.

(On a whim, I went back to late 2004 on the internet archive, and did in fact find the comic’s first spread buried at the back end of his portfolio. The entire website is a product of the early-2000s - there’s a link labelled “Go to Flash site” in the sidebar, though the page it takes you to sadly seems to have been lost to time. It all seems like it was borne of another age entirely.)

Anyway, let’s get back to that TFW2005 thread. The thing that makes it particularly notable is that, on the fourth page, Mr. Jamieson himself wades in to try and set the record straight. It goes about as well as you’d expect.

For a lot of people, I think, the idea of interacting with an author might seem strange. They’re aware of J.K. Rowling’s online antics, and are becoming increasingly comfortable with celebrity interactions on Twitter, sure. But there’s a difference between those kinds of interactions and the kind that take place on forums or in chatrooms - places where everyone’s on a level playing field. I come from those corners of the internet, and am lucky enough to have had conversations with lots of people who’ve made things I like, and have seen almost the full range of approaches those people take when dealing with their audiences. It’s safe to say that Mr. Jamieson’s approach in that decade-old thread is just about the worse one there is: over the course of just five posts, he smugly lashed out at the people in the thread, whipping them into a fervour that lasted for three more pages after his departure.

Regardless of whether or not Mr. Jamieson was correct - in the attacks he levelled at the other users, in the defence he offered for his work - there can be no question that this kind of behaviour is grossly inappropriate.

(Whether it is more or less appropriate than digging up old threads and archived web pages in an attempt to justify a bastardisation of a much-maligned comic book remains to be seen, I suppose.)

The key point that Mr. Jamieson kept returning to is that he sought to avoid the dreaded “info dump” (a hallmark of early Transformers stories), and didn’t want his readers to be “spoon fed”. A recurring criticism of the story is that it seems to begin halfway through, with little explanation for what’s going on - but I, like Mr. Jamieson, don’t think that complaint holds water. The Beast Within begins “in medias res” because we already have the context: eighty issues of a comic, ninety-eight episodes of a cartoon, and - crucially - a movie. Everyone knows the story of the Transformers, because the story of the Transformers - ironically enough - never really changes. “Is it ever really over, Jetfire?”

(That’s the last line of the original version of The Beast Within, by the way. I had to add the comma in myself.)

Like the impact of Robots in Disguise, the impact of The Transformers: The Movie is kinda hard to see unless you were there at the time - and I wasn’t - but in 1986, it did something which was profoundly shocking to thousands of children: it introduced them to death.

That’s about all I’m going to say about the movie itself, because much more experienced critics than me have already mined it for every ounce of subtext. I’ve already quoted the work of Terry van Feleday, who did some excellent scene-by-scene analysis of the film in a thread all the way back in 2010 - and I’ll come back to her writings a few times in this post. This very year, sorta-famous YouTuber hbomberguy released his own long-form take on the movie - what I find interesting when comparing the two interpretations is that van Feleday struggles to find much merit in the movie outside of its opening, while hbomberguy employs a reading that allows him to be much more optimistic and charitable even towards the end of the movie.

In a way, I think Mr. Jamieson had an intuitive subconscious understanding of the subtext which both of those critics later brought to light, an understanding which directly informed the premise of The Beast Within. In the same way one can read the monster planet Unicron as a physical manifestation of death, so too can one view the Beast - and Mr. Jamieson (almost certainly unconsciously) posits that, although death does not belong in a children’s cartoon, it is an inevitability that all children must eventually face. It is the dark spectre that lurks beneath the surface of every childish thing made by an adult.

An author places some of themselves in a book - but the reader withdraws something of their own perception as well. I wondered what I might see in the book: a child believes a lie because they know no better; a grown adult sees the lie because it fails to line up with experience. In this way, a child’s story could be so many different experiences. With enough subtext, a thing made for a child becomes an entirely different world to an adult. [...] There’s no telling when subtext will defeat the facade of a thing.

(I’ll tell you what that quote’s from later.)

I wonder, perhaps, if the endless swathes of edgy reimaginings of children’s stories are something of a mass outcry from those who grew up being told - every Saturday morning - that when people got blown apart, they’d be put back together by the next week’s end. What was it like for those children, in December of ‘86, to learn that some people could never be rebuilt?

II. It Pleases Me To Be The First

It occurs to me that I never did really do a commentary on “its christmas... so what??”, although I did talk about it a little in the commentary for “PASS”. Its title is a reference to the famous (well, you know what I mean) cover of “Stargazing” (issue #145 of the original UK run), which featured a banner reading “IT’S CHRISTMAS!” over an image of Starscream, arms out, yelling “SO WHAT?”

(Side note: at first I thought that I hadn’t read that particular story, but it occurs to me that as a kid I used to borrow a lot of Titan Books’ reprints from my local library - and I do in fact have distinct memories of reading Transformers: Second Generation, which did collect “Stargazing” amongst other Christmas stories - so I guess I probably did read it, even if I don’t remember doing so.)

The Women’s Day comic is something of a curio, as explained in this excellent article (which reprints the comic - with its original text - in full). It’s basically the only US strip which was published outside of the eighty issues of the run proper. This rare, standalone nature is something I have sought across every re-lettering I’ve done - from the UK annual-exclusive not-by-the-usual-author set-in-the-future “Peace” to the UK DVD-box-set-exclusive set-in-an-ambiguous-cartoon-inspired-continuity The Beast Within. These works feel like they’ve been lost to time - and corrupting them feels like unearthing buried treasure (and smearing it in turds). But I’ll get to that.

Back to “its christmas”. As I explained last time, I just went through the comic panel-by-panel and changed stuff to whatever I thought would be funny. I didn’t edit the two-line introductory blurb (which ended up informing the backstory detailed in the new set of AtoZ profiles). I barely paid attention to established portrayals of the characters beyond Soundwave’s association with music. I had no large-scale plans.

There’s a lazy (and poorly-conceived) gag where the little girl calls Bumblebee “gay” (also note that at the time, I misinterpreted the art in the third panel of the third page - I thought it was the girl speaking, when in fact it was her mother - leading to some erroneous dialogue), which in retrospect feels like a less-drawn-out version of the excruciating opening scene from Freddery McMahon’s Combiner Wars abridged special. That spoof somehow manages to be less funny than its source material, and I sometimes think that the same holds for my own creations.

Still, that’s not to say that “its christmas” doesn’t do anything that I like. I’ll admit that lines like “lol without mustard christmas will be CANCEL suck it nerds”, “toot toot here come some flutes”, and “help me drag it to the hospital” still kinda make me laugh. I like the way Bumblebee drowns out the little girl’s insults by tooting loudly at her. The final panels - wherein the humans steal Bumblebee’s blood as the other Transformers watch impassively - have an offbeat intensity to them, and when it came to writing Bumblebee’s AtoZ profile it was those which I chose to call back to.

If I had to sum up “its christmas” in a single word, I’d pick “childish”. The jokes, the characters themselves, the entire concept behind the comic - all feel kinda immature, and that was kinda by design. Summer Meme Sundae was a terrible piece of work, but - if I had to ascribe a theme to it - that theme would be growing up; realising that you’re running out of summer holidays. “PASS” and “The Beast Within (My Pants)” kept that atmosphere, but became increasingly cynical and obscene. That was just the natural direction they had to go in.

III. Every Place Reminds You Of Some Place Else

I’ve long had an idle fascination with abridged series, and have toyed with the thought of making an abridged series of my own. Most notably, I’ve long fancied the idea of abridging Machinima’s Prime Wars Trilogy of Transformers cartoons. Here’s an extract from a message I posted in Allspark Chat (the Discord server associated with the Allspark Forums):

I'd probably try and keep Megatron mostly the same as he is in the show as it is. Optimus'd be kinda murderous - you can tell he can't wait for Rodimus and the rest of the Council to kick the bucket so he can retake unilateral control over Cybertron. I'd maybe try to go for something of a more sympathetic Starscream - he wouldn't actually have any plan, he just has Cybertron's interests at heart and ends up trying to use the Enigma solely to rid the world of Megatron and Optimus forever. Windblade'd maybe be trying to force some hero's journey stuff - picking fights with progressively bigger opponents in a misguided attempt to prove her narrative worth

As pitches go, it’s not much. It doesn’t help that, as I previously mentioned, Freddery McMahon himself - pretty much the only name in Transformers abridging - has already tackled the series; his style of parody isn’t really to my taste, but his production value is fairly impressive and would largely overshadow any improvements I made on a script level. I feel like the Prime Wars Trilogy has potential, because it’s a fascinating piece of media, but I find myself unable to answer the question of how to parody something that already feels so much like self-parody. Sound familiar?

By the time the last entry in that series - Power of the Primes - was wrapping up, I'd been posting semi-frequently in the Allspark’s threads with a borderline-apologetic tone. Takes included:

The emptiness of Cybertron lends it a Beast Machines-esque tone

The Mistress of Flame’s death is cathartic

You can see right through the script

I want to get off Machinima’s wild ride

Wow, Windblade sure screams a lot, doesn’t she

The finale of Titans Return is good, actually

Hearing Megatron say “piss me off” is an unpleasant surprise

Hey, this soundtrack’s pretty good

Wait, no it’s not, but Galvatron’s implied reversion to Megatron is

Narrative emergence gives rise to Buddhist allegories in TFTM

Grimlock acts like his cartoon self - but only around friends

Okay, for realsies, the soundtrack’s good now

They’re right to kill Sludge; he’s the least toyetic Dinobot

I’d probably describe a lot of what I saw in the Prime Wars Trilogy as a kind of narrative pareidolia - only instead of seeing faces in inanimate objects, I was seeing value and meaning in an indefensible web series.

The problem with abridged series is that they require a ridiculous amount of effort. You need to be a good writer in the traditional sense, but you need to be able to work around the visual material available - you’re gonna have to edit everything yourself, you’re probably gonna need to do custom animation, and you’re certainly gonna need to wrangle a cast of voice actors. All of that for ten minutes of animation that’s probably gonna get taken off YouTube within ten minutes of upload. It’s just not feasible - and yet there’s part of me that loves the idea: commentary and content, all rolled into one.

To pretend that it was Combiner Wars that led me to create “The Beast Within (My Pants)” is a little misleading, however. The real answer - I’m sorry to say - has more to do with ponies.

See, every now and again I get very acute nostalgia for My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, which was perhaps my first brush with fandom - or at least, proper fandom. It’s heard to measure these things, y’know? Anyway, when that happens, I realise that I don’t really want to sit and watch a cartoon for little girls, so I usually just listen to some fan-made music or - as was the case last time - rewatch one of the abridged series based on the show. I use the word “series” here in plural because there were in fact two (well, two that matter): Friendship is Witchcraft and The Mentally Advanced Series. There’s long been quiet debate over which of the two is the (soundwave) superior series, and I’ve historically believed that they’re (buy some) apples and oranges. The latter is a more thoughtful parody of the source material, while the former is more polished and standalone.

However, after blitzing through Friendship is Witchcraft once more in its entirety over the course of a couple of days, something about it clicked for me - a bigger-picture thesis - and I realised that it had much more to say about its source material than I (or, well, most people) had given it credit for. It was at that moment that I felt the awful urge to create a My Little Pony fanwork of my own.

(The quote I used earlier, about subtext in children’s stories, was spoken by Princess Celestia in Rainbow Dash Presents: The Star in Yellow, a Mentally Advanced Series special inspired by a fanfiction which, fittingly enough, was written by Matt Marshall (AKA Blueshift/blue/Yartek/RockLordsRock), who was also the man behind the infamous “JaAm” relettering which effectively inspired all of these projects of mine. It’s like poetry.)

As we’ve already established, making a fancy-schmancy animation was out of the question - but a crudely-edited-in-MS-Paint comic was the next best thing, clearly. I started glancing through IDW Publishing’s official My Little Pony comics - having purchased a few in a Humble Bundle many years ago - but, aside from a couple of promising stories, quickly realised I didn’t have much hope. The comics are just, to put it frankly, not as good or as interesting as the show, and the fact that I’d need to adapt at least two issues at once (over forty pages) to tell any complete story made doing so an unappetising prospect. Furthermore, IDW’s comics are still very much in print, and (as the abridged series show) any such parody would stand on shaky legal ground.

Seeing as I wasn’t about to delve into the dark realm of prose any time soon, and the idea of messing with some other fan’s work rubbed me the wrong way, I decided to give up on my equine dreams and instead turned back to more familiar territory. I glanced over the list of old Transformers Marvel comics, but nothing like those I’d previously relettered stood out to me. I perused the short stories included in Dreamwave’s 20th Anniversary Transformers Summer Special. I even looked into some Fun Publications stuff. Nothing sparked my interest.

Perhaps my most promising lead was “An Arcee Sort of Day”, a vaguely-maligned (as in, “meh”) three-page standalone comic released mere months ago by IDW as part of an anthology - but the poor resolution of the available scan (the comic had been released in its entirety as part of the free preview for the anthology) meant that editing it would be a nightmare, and there was very little in the way of dialogue for me to mess with besides. More than that, the idea of directly mocking a comic from a compilation designed to showcase female creators (particularly one featuring Arcee, who’s been a controversial character in recent years) struck me as tasteless in the extreme. If only I had an easier target!

Oh wait, I did.

IV. Let The Slaughter Begin

If I actually ever read both parts of The Beast Within before starting work on this project, I don’t remember doing so. I do remember reading the Beast’s TFWiki page when I was much younger, and remember feeling like the wiki’s take on the concept seemed disproportionately harsh. To be honest, it was quite vindicating to read the source material and discover that I still agreed with my younger self’s assessment - the problems with the story are not on a conceptual level, but in the execution.

I barely gave myself time to digest the story before diving in and working out how exactly I could mess it up. I knew from my previous comics that the Autobots would all be unrepentant shitheads, so the natural choice was to portray the Decepticons as favourably as possible. Where the Autobots are callous, poorly-spoken, stupid, and divided, the Decepticons would be caring, articulate, intelligent, and united. In the story’s context, these traits would be weaknesses: remember, only the Beast has the killing instinct needed for decisive victory in this endless children’s story. I also knew that everybody in the story would hate Grimlock, and that - unlike with Roadbuster in “PASS” - they’d be right to do so.

That was pretty much the extent of my planning. I gathered up all the pages and started clearing out the text from the speech bubbles. Already, I had something of a problem: the use of the infamous Comic Sans MS font in the first part of The Beast Within was one of its most iconic features, and I wanted to retain that, but my own previous reletterings had canonically established Times New Roman as the “voice” of the Autobots. In fact, as far as those older comics were concerned, Times New Roman was the voice not just of the whole Cybertronian race, but also of the narrator.

The only lines which used a different font were those where I’d chosen to retain the comic’s original lettering, and with Roadbuster’s dialogue. It’s hard to articulate what exactly the joke with Roadbuster was - he seemed like the odd-one-out in the opening panels of the story, so I ran with that by having him be persistently ostracised by the other Autobots. The twist, as you find out when he finally speaks, is that he seems to be the only Autobot who’s unambiguously a good person; the rest bully him for effectively no reason.

In the commentary for “PASS” I released earlier this year, I explicitly ask:

If these are the Autobots… then what were the Decepticons like?

My own gut feeling was, I think, that they were people like Roadbuster - genuinely good individuals who never wanted a fight - and so for this comic I knew I had to give them Roadbuster’s Arial voice. I also knew that I’d have to keep the Autobots’ Times New Roman voice for the most part. The only question, then, was what to do about Grimlock, the combiners, Jetfire, and the narration.

(It’s worth noting that Soundwave and Triton were both Decepticons too, yet they both spoke in Times New Roman. The Doylist reason for this is simply that, at the time, I was happy to have everyone share a voice. In Triton’s case, the Watsonian reason is that he’s trying to mimic the Autobots’ “accent” to better fit in. If I had to make up a reason for Soundwave, I’d say that he’s only recently defected from the Autobots, as a reference to van Feleday’s insane Soundwave-as-an-ex-prisoner-of-war theory. Had Soundwave had a speaking role in the comic, I’m sure I would’ve explored that backstory in his AtoZ profile - but alas, it wasn’t to be.)

In fact, there was initially some ambiguity over who the comic’s narrator would be - if I used Times New Roman, would I have to keep the voice of the same narrator as in the previous two comics? In the end, I decided to draw from my source material: the on-panel narration would be Grimlock’s inner monologue, rendered in full Comic Sans glory, while the "Interlude” would employ a more omniscient third-person voice. That third-person voice is, I think, distinct from the narrator of the previous comics, and feels like a more solemn version of the narrator of the AtoZ profiles I released alongside the commentary for “PASS” (or, indeed, the latest batch included here). Remember, I wrote the first two comics years before all of this recent material. More on the text-only pages later.

When he speaks out loud, Grimlock uses the regular Times New Roman of the other Autobots. In fact, the only dialogue which uses Comic Sans is that of the Beast, which I view as the true externalisation of Grimlock’s feelings. You can also view it as the “real world” (as depicted in the text-only pages) leaking through into the comic’s reality, in much the same way that an aware-of-death adult perspective seeps through into a seemingly-innocent children’s cartoon. The other combiners simply use a slightly bigger font than the individual Decepticons. Oh, and all of the combiners use red text.

In the original toyline, Jetfire was something of an odd-one-out, as he was really a Macross “VF-1S Super Valkyrie” toy licensed by Hasbro from Bandai (who had in turn purchased the molds from the recently-bankrupted Takatoku toys). Both Whirl and Roadbuster have similar origins. I was under no obligation to do anything special with Jetfire’s dialogue, but because of the way he’s introduced in the comic - and as a nod to his shared real-world history with Roadbuster - it felt right to give him his own voice. Though he still uses Times New Roman, the font is scaled up and he speaks entirely in capital letters. His dialogue was a challenge to write, as most of his speech bubbles are very small, but I think this worked out in my favour: his speech often ended up butting up against the bubbles’ outlines, giving the impression that he’s always speaking just a little bit too loudly.

The lettering in the first part of the original comic - aside from being technically legible - is generally shoddy on every level. For emphasis, it alternately uses italics or inconsistent font size. Occasionally, the dialogue switches to lowercase, which kinda gives the impression that everyone’s been shouting the whole time. Most of the text is left-aligned. Some bits of text seem to have been squashed. Most of the narration boxes are parallelograms, but some are plain rectangles. Red hand-lettered text is mostly limited to the combiners’ speech, but also sees use a couple of times for Megatron and Optimus Prime. Some of the combiners’ speech just uses normal red Comic Sans MS text. Meanwhile, the second part switches entirely to black hand-lettered text - presumably from Mr. Gibson - which is a marked improvement in terms of tone and consistency, if a step down in legibility.

It’s interesting to me that, despite my version of the comic sharing the dearth of commas and full stops which plagues the original, it reads very differently. For all its stylisation, it’s my hope that each line I write for these comics comes across realistically - not in the sense that it’s something you’d hear someone say, but perhaps in the sense that it’s something you’d maybe read on the internet. More on that later - first, some miscellaneous notes on the comic’s text:

When I first wrote it, I used the style of self-censorship from “PASS” (and, by extension, the rest of Summer Meme Sundae) wherein the first letter of any curse is replaced by an asterisk. It was one of my prereaders, Tindalos, who noted that “the censoring kinda takes a bit from it”, and I decided that I agreed with him - it felt like I was holding back. You can decide for yourself; I’ve collected the pages with lines that were revised between drafts in an album.

Through pure coincidence, it’s Springer (well, Bulkhead) who gets the first line of dialogue in the comic - just like in “PASS”. In case it’s not clear, the joke is that he thinks he’s safe on the floor and berates Jazz for not doing the same thing, seconds before getting stomped by Megatron. I think this sequence perfectly encapsulates a big part of what I wanted to show about the Autobots: they all criticise one another relentlessly, despite being deeply flawed themselves. It’s a dynamic that, to me at least, actually evokes that of the Autobots in Michael Bay’s movies.

The line “thats me grimlock in the corner losing my religion” is, of course, a reference to R.E.M.’s song “Losing My Religion”, which was itself included as part of writer James Roberts’ “soundtrack” for More Than Meets The Eye. Though he did not appear in the issue for which Roberts selected the song, Grimlock was a recurring character in that series. Hopefully my depiction of the character surpasses that one - though if you ask the people I usually talk to, I wouldn’t be setting the bar particularly high with that comparison.

Optimus uses the insult “grimdick” shortly after Grimlock’s narration provides the example “grimcock”. I intended this to show that, while the dynamic between the two’s been cemented for a good while, Grimlock is always a step behind and still can’t predict Prime’s actions.

Snarl’s line was originally “hey speak for yourself swoop me and grimlock are tight as *hit”, which expresses effectively the opposite sentiment to his final line. The idea that Snarl was okay with becoming part of the Beast was intended to add a bit of brevity to the sequence - but I decided it was better to keep as much emotional impact as possible in the moment.

A more minor change a couple of pages later is Grimlock’s line “how do they do it”, which replaced “love is stupid”. I wanted to expressly draw a parallel between the Beast’s combination and Predaking’s.

The line I’m happiest with is “eat shit megatron this is what you get for being such a fucking weapon”. One of my friends occasionally cracks out the word “weapon” to describe someone - and what better application for it is there than a guy who literally turns into a gun?

Megatron’s line about the “black hole” in Optimus Prime’s spark is a twist on Megatron’s own canonical link to a black hole - an aspect of his original bio which was revisited by Roberts.

I struggled to think of Menasor’s final words. The longer I stared at the panel where he gets torn in half - from which I’d already cleared the speech bubble - the more I was struck by the emptiness of the scene. If one considers Menasor to be a symbol for the Decepticons as a whole, then his silence in that panel is my way of showing that - from this point forth - the Decepticons no longer have a voice; the second part of the comic shows naught but their corpses. Death exists, and nothing is good any more.

None of the text on the final page of the first half remained unchanged between drafts. I wan’t happy with Optimus Prime’s original line at all, and the internal monologue “don’t you deserve happiness” felt a little too serious. The phrase “no u” is the archetypical low-effort comeback, and seemed like the perfect beat to end the first part with.

Prime’s line “gotta jettison some dead weight” is a nod to Astrotrain’s iconic line in The Transformers: The Movie: “Jettison some weight, or I’ll never make it to Cybertron.” I had to check for the exact quote just now and found “jettison transformers the movie” in my search history, so obviously I’d done the same when writing the panel. More than just being a trite reference, I was hoping to draw an obvious parallel and to contrast the unilateral decision Optimus Prime makes on the following page against the more shall-we-call-it-democratic process the Decepticons used in the movie.

I’m probably a little too proud of “big red irredeemable fucking monster of a robot semi fuck”, which is a line that could absolutely only exist in this travesty of a comic.

Jetfire’s use of the phrase “GOTTA BLAST” is a reference to a line spoken by the titular character of the early-2000s CGI cartoon Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius, one which has turned into something of a meme. When I wrote the panel, I intended to imply that Jetfire was aiming to crash into the city - but I think it ended up doubling as foreshadowing for the fact that Jetfire flies his passengers into the sun. Additionally, the meme often sees use as innuendo, which shines through in the following panel: Jetfire expels propellant into the Beast’s face while Bumblebee remarks “gah okay i did not want to see that”. The less said about the sound effect “CHOOOM!”, the better.

Remember how all the text in the first part of the original comic was left-aligned? So’s the text in my version! MS Paint simply doesn’t have the option to change the alignment of your text - I actually had to throw in extra spaces at the start of each new line, eyeballing things until I had an approximation of centre alignment. This is something I never did with “PASS”, and I found that doing so gave me more freedom to squeeze more stuff into the speech bubbles.

As immortalised by countless memes, you can’t rotate text in MS Paint either. I tried to use this to my advantage on the comic’s first page, where the steps between the words in Grimlock’s narration give them a faltering quality.

Grimlock’s narration actually ended up being one of the most challenging parts of the comic to write. I wrote a draft of the first page pretty quickly, but decided I wasn’t happy with it and that I’d have to replace it later - which I did, but only after having written pretty much every single other bit of dialogue.

I think the central conceit of “PASS” - that somebody’s farted and the Autobots are trying to find out who dealt it - didn’t solidify until I reached the second page and looked at Rodimus Prime’s body language. In much the same way, the crux of “The Beast Within (My Pants)” didn’t solidify until it came to writing Swoop’s line.

V. Me Grimlock Not Nice Dino

At some point during the creation of “The Beast Within (My Pants)”, I started thinking a lot about incels.

(To be clear, this is the part of the commentary where things get a bit weird, and I start talking about storytelling decisions which I think were made in poor taste but which I don’t think come across overtly in the comic itself. Feel free to skip ahead to the next section. Or, y’know, stop reading entirely.)

Grimlock is childish, despite his age, and is desperate to be liked - no, respected - at any cost. His only asset is his BRUTE STRENGTH. He hates Prime, but wishes he was Prime. He has trouble treating any of the other Autobots like people. He rages against an outgroup whose ideals are - at least ostensibly - rooted in empathy.

I wouldn’t say “I wrote a comic where Grimlock is an incel”, because that’d be a pretty stupid thing to write and I’d feel pretty stupid saying it.

Looking back at a lot of my previous work on this blog, some things do crop up again and again. In abstract, I’d say that the idea of a character seeking friendship and/or respect - and failing to understand why they can’t find those things - is one that I’ve revisited a couple of times. This was a strong theme in the latter half of Another Son - a story which dealt heavily in misanthropy - which featured a character inspired by Sam Witwicky from Michael Bay’s Transformers. The protagonist of Retrace Steps spent the whole story unable to even ask the question “why am I alone”. Many of the characters in Are You Happy - particularly Mr. Hernandez - deal with similar problems to varying extents.

So this makes, what, practically four stories in a row? I didn’t set out to approach things this way again with this comic, but from the moment I wrote Swoop’s line I knew I didn’t have a choice. When people talk about the Beast’s combination sequence, they talk about how violative it appears. Metal tentacles spring from Grimlock like one of Alien’s chestbursters, penetrating or melding with the other Dinobots’ bodies. After that, the resulting monstrosity ambles around, horrifically murdering its former peers. As much as I can have the characters in the story play this stuff off for laughs, I’ll never be able to erase the undercurrent.

This isn’t supposed to be a direct mapping - a perfect metaphor - and by the time this commentary’s done I hope I’ll have pointed in the direction of some alternate perspectives. It just seems important to put my cards on the table and say that, when I was working on this comic, this is the kinda thing I was thinking about. We thought children were safe with Transformers, and then a gun came and shot people they cared about, and for some reason we were surprised to see that they got upset.

With all of that in mind, I take some solace in the fact that I actually found getting into Grimlock’s head to be extremely difficult. His dialogue was a breeze to write, sure - that’s the outsider’s perspective - but actually trying to construct his thoughts in anything approximating a convincing manner was very difficult. The first draft of his narration literally included the phrase “we live in a society”.

VI. Such Heroic Nonsense

I’ve already touched on Terry van Feleday’s opus a couple of times, but I think it’s worth delving a little deeper into how exactly her analysis influenced this comic. For some reason the idea that nearly five-hundred pages of borderline-conspiracy-theorist-level ramblings about perhaps the most maligned movie franchise of the 21st century might be a tough sell is one which I can’t quite wrap my head around. I’d say that it’s because I’ve read the thing and already know that it’s good, but in truth I was pretty much sold from the moment I found out it existed.

Anyway, I frequently get into not-quite-arguments with internet strangers about Transformers, and during those discussions I frequently find myself saying “a good Transformers story should do X”, and then I have to resist the urge to add “like Michael Bay’s movies” because doing so would completely delegitimise the point I’m trying to make. The problem is that, because I’m deliberately omitting the context of my opinions, they come across as being even more bizarre.

I think that same problem exists in some capacity with this comic, where I’m drawing on sources which are intuitive to me but completely alien even to a typical Transformers fan. I’ve yet to even mention the other primary inspiration for this story, which is even more arcane.

Perhaps it’s important to stress that van Feleday doesn’t offer a typical "theres actually zero difference between good & bad things. you imbecile. you fucking moron" take. Rather - and I realise I’m about to butcher this - she shows how the humans in Bay’s movies give increasing amounts of power to an alien cult leader because their only alternative is to get wiped out by an alien warlord. So in terms of this comic, “Autobots bad” is very much rooted in her reading of those movies, while “Decepticons good” is just something I thought would be funny.

Well, not exactly. I’ve already mentioned Combiner Wars; something that continues to baffle pretty much everyone who watched that show (and its sequels) is that, while it seems to have no idea what it’s doing most of the time, its portrayal of Megatron is an absolute riot. He is absolutely the protagonist of that series, the Only Sane Man in a world of bizarre psychotic caricatures. I think the same kinda holds in the continuity of my comic, only he’s had more time to bring the people he takes in around to his way of thinking.

Let’s not forget the official “good-is-bad” continuity of Shattered Glass, which - while heavily compromised - was the source of many interesting reinterpretations of popular characters. Effective reinterpretations require you to forget what you know about a character and strip them back to the core signifiers, which you can then put to different use. One of the posters in Terry van Feleday’s thread, “Lobok”, observes:

I like the idea that Bay or the writers looked at Optimus Prime and thought "What would a guy who calls himself that really act like?" Imagine you knew or heard of someone, a human, who called themselves the equivalent of "The #1 Bestest Superior" or "King Supreme Ultimate" - do you not picture either a 7-year old boy or a mentally deficient oo-rah alpha male? Maybe the two combined? Seems much more apt than a wise, noble father figure.

Of the course, I don’t for a second think that Michael Bay had any such thought - but the connection still exists for the audience to make. Therein lies one of the greatest unspoken strengths of Transformers storytelling: the sheer breadth and depth of the signifiers at play. Much of what van Feleday did in her thread was to boil down the concepts found in Transformers stories to reveal those core signifiers.

(Almost a year ago, I wrote a piece for the Refined Robot Co. blog which explored some of her findings by delving into the subtextual meanings of the countless alternate modes worn by Megatron over the years.)

By the same token, I think there’s something to be said for the way Grimlock’s alternate mode ties into his portrayal in my take on The Beast Within. He turns into a dinosaur - something which is rooted in the past, extinct, unable to develop - while most of the other Autobots turn into modern vehicles. Kids may love dinosaurs, but they’ll likely grow up to have a stronger interest in cars or tanks. Grimlock is immature almost to the point of childishness; his beast mode is the lizard king, and he doesn’t understand why you won’t bow.

(Obviously I’m making some big generalisations here for the sake of a point - the other Dinobots have their own prehistoric disguises, and kids’ interests develop in varied enough ways that perhaps this link is only noticeable to those who experienced the transition I describe. When I was much younger, I was obsessed with dinosaurs, and would consume all the dinosaur-related media I could get my hands on. Eventually, however, my crippling fear of sea monsters led me to stop reading books about them - I'd turn the page, see a full-spread painting of a pliosaur taking a bite out of a pterodactyl, and shit my pants. Okay, no, that’s a huge exaggeration: more likely it just got to the point where I knew basically all of the cool dinosaur facts already, and suddenly the deep lore of the grim darkness of the 41st millennium or whatever seemed way cooler. I just find it funnier to imagine that my prosperous future in paleontology was averted for fear that I’d discover the last living specimen of a plesiosaur.)

VII. Where’d You Learn To Talk Like That

Back in “PASS”, I think there was some question as to who exactly was the coolest dude; the biggest guy. Rodimus was in charge, but the others didn’t really respect his authority in the end. Although Triton was an underdog in that story, he wasn’t at the bottom of the pack - no, that role went to Roadbuster. Everyone seems to like Ultra Magnus, but it’s never really made clear as to why that is.

Grimlock’s personality and role within the Autobots was pretty much the first thing I solidified when it came to writing “The Beast Within (My Pants)”. I knew that he was the lowest of the low; the nail in every Autobot’s tyre. As Grimlock evolved, so too did Optimus Prime - the second-most-prominent character in the comic. "The #1 Bestest Superior" became a murderous jock, and the Autobots became his cult of personality.

Speaking of cults of personality, I’ve been posting regularly in the Homestuck Discord server since November of last year. There’s no other place like it on the internet, and - truth be told - I’m not sure any explanation of it I could provide would suffice. The server was created by some guy called Makin - at least, we're pretty sure he’s a guy - who nobody’s ever met but who seems to have an uncanny knack for managing online communities.

Major events in that server have been comprehensively catalogued since July of 2017 by long-standing moderator “Drew Linky” in his journal Several People Are Typing. Between the entries and the related materials, it’s probably around half a million words in length. There’s no other document like it on the internet.

For the first fifty or so pages, Drew had no intention of making his document public. Apparently, one of the reasons he wrote it in the first place was as a way of holding Makin accountable - the guy used to be (and sometimes still is) a bit of an ass. Now, I wasn’t around in 2017, so I can’t really comment on the accuracy of the document’s early entries - but as a newcomer I was struck by how different Drew’s depiction of the server was to my own experience there. If I had to guess, I’d say his style of prose and the cherry-picked nature of the document make it seem like a much more hostile place than it actually is.

In particular, Makin effectively starts out as journal’s main villain (alongside various problem users and Homestuck creators) - a capricious and unknowable entity with absolute power over the server - and many of the entries deal in some way with what users jokingly refer to as his “redemption arc”. Of course, in reality, he’s just some guy, and everyone knows that real people don’t have character arcs.

I still haven’t finished reading SPAT, but I was doing so around the time when I was working on the comic. At some point I started to draw parallels between my bizarro version of Optimus Prime and the journal’s bizarro version of Makin, and I decided to play them up. Much of Prime’s dialogue is inspired by Makin’s style of speech, using phrases like “shut the fuck up”, “nobody cares”, “holy shit”, “get fucked”, “lmao”, “literally”, “literally [...] who”, “guys”, “rational” and “you’re welcome”. I just checked and at the time of writing, with the exception of “literally who” and “you’re welcome”, he’s used every one of those phrases within the last week. Oh, and while the word “suckers” isn’t really a Makin quote, in Homestuck it’s associated with the not-quite-biggest-bad evil empress. It bears mentioning again that the complete lack of punctuation in the comic’s dialogue mirrors the most common style of typing I see online, where people drop their capital letters and full stops.

(In fairness, a lot of us kinda talk the same way in that server. I remember one time Makin said “I also need to worry about lmao becoming some kind of anime catchphrase for me”, which cut pretty deep as I’ve been overusing that phrase instead of “lol” or “haha” or whatever for ages. Look, it’s just a funny word to me: in my head I pronounce it “luh-mayo” instead of “el-em-ay-oh”. Like “I throw my sandwich in the air sometimes / saying aaay-oh / I ordered maaayo...”)

In the comic, the self-aggrandising Optimus Prime is hostile and dismissive to those around him. It might all be a front, but it might not. Even though Grimlock hates Optimus, the Dinobot seems to agree with him a lot of the time, and the narrative itself never really manages to conclusively condemn his actions. The name “Optimus” echoes the word “optimise”; so frequently thrown around in rationalist circles. One could even go so far as to say that Optimus Prime’s ultimate goal in the comic is to kill death-in-the-form-of-a-shitposter.

In seriousness, I’m drawing these comparisons in a pretty tongue-in-cheek way. I don’t actually think that the Homestuck Discord server is a cult of personality - even if, to check the user-contributed “SPAT Epilogues”, some of its populace seem determined to behave like it is. Even if this section of this commentary exists. At the end of the day, I’m gonna write what I know, and I like to think that I know a little about online communities and what happens when they go wrong. I wish I could say that “The Beast Within (My Pants)” is a cautionary tale to that effect, but in truth I don’t think it offers any conclusive answers in the same way that “PASS” perhaps did. “Only worry about the opinions of people who actually care about you,” maybe? “Death is an abomination and we shouldn’t let it anywhere near our kids”, perhaps? “You can’t force other people to like you”?

“You can’t force other people to like the things you made”?

VIII. Burnt-Out Toaster Ovens

In the re-released version of “PASS”, it seemed right to throw in something in the way of extra content. I had fond memories of the Seacon profiles published alongside the original “Peace”, and lifted the format to create short bios for all sixteen characters who appeared in the comic. These fitted neatly on a four-by-four spread (though I ended up merging Topspin and Twin Twist’s profiles and throwing in an extra one for Computron, who did not appear in the comic proper).

From the start, I knew I wanted to do something similar for “The Beast Within (My Pants)”. In fact, I already had two text-only pages to work with; each part of the original comic was prefaced with a prose introduction and a note from Mr. Gibson. I decided that I could rework the text-only pages and add another spread of profiles, using the freedom granted by prose to explain away many of the comic’s oddities.

It took me some time to carefully erase the existing text from the scans that I had, using nothing but the brush tool in MS Paint. It took me even more time to work out some potential approaches to take with the text itself. Eventually, I came up with the following ideas:

A flashback depicting Grimlock and Swoop’s breakup.

A conversation between Grimlock and Jazz (or, perhaps, Slash).

“How Ratchet Got His Head Back”, the interlude which I ended up using.

A synopsis of events between “its christmas... so what??” and “The Beast Within (My Pants)”, which ended up being my first stab at the introduction.

Some in-character commentary as Mr. Gibson, which I did end up including.

From the moment I conceived it, I was pretty set on “How Ratchet Got His Head Back”, and it ended up being a breeze to write. I didn’t end up getting a chance to squeeze in the title - a reference to an issue of More than Meets the Eye - as it didn’t really fit the original format of the page. The introduction, on the other hand, proved much more challenging. My main problem was that, were I to preface the story with a text page, I’d be asking them to read a bunch of probably-mostly-serious words before allowing them to read the comic proper. Not the best first impression!

Nonetheless, I gave it a go - you can read my first attempt in the album of the draft pages. It mostly served to lay out the continuity between my three comics. Rodimus Prime’s crew were abandoned on Cybertron by Optimus Prime (presumably Hot Rod changed his name in Optimus’ absence). Megatron, Optimus and their crews crash-landed on Earth, and millions of years later the events of “its christmas... so what??” occurred. Meanwhile on Cybertron, it took a few million years for the other Autobots to wipe out the remaining Decepticons, as seen in “PASS”. Humanity was wiped out by Optimus in retribution for their transgression (a nod to Mr. Gibson’s depiction of Earth as an empty wasteland), prompting the conflict seen in “The Beast Within (My Pants)”. Much of this timeline remains implicit in the final version of the comic.

When I wrote it, I was pretty happy with the way this information was conveyed in the first draft. It was the ever-ardent Gitaxian - one of my long-time prereaders - who made me realise just what a mistake I’d made:

Something was rubbing me the wrong way about that first prose page and I finally realized what it is / Expositing that Optimus is horrible right off the bat takes away a good chunk of the impact the comic had before you added it

He was right. My prereaders’ initial response to the comic was that Optimus Prime’s motivations were completely opaque, and I overcorrected, not realising that his inscrutability was one of the things that made him interesting. You kinda want him to behave like the Optimus Prime you know and love, but he keeps doing weird things and you never really find out why.

Suddenly, I was back at square one - no closer to having a clear idea of how to introduce the comic. Another of my prereaders, gearshift, had the solution:

It's Transformers or some shit. You've seen the cartoon right? The one with the tape guy? Yeah, the tape guy is barely in this one. What do you mean no sale? Look, fuck, it's got the dinosaur guy. He's right on the goddamn cover, you like the dinosaur guy right? Yeah, that's what I thought.

Bitch.

I liked her pitch because it seemed like it’d do a good job of filtering out readers who wouldn’t enjoy the comic. To quote Alexander Wales, author of Worth the Candle:

I kind of hate blurbs and taglines, especially for something so large and varied as Worth the Candle / My ideal synopsis would tell people what kind of story it was without actually telling them that much about the story; it would select for all the people who would fall in love with the story, and select against all the people who would find it a waste of time. / How to actually write that ... I've got no idea.

(Side note: I’m one of the people who fell in love with that story, to the point where I’ll use any opportunity to recommend it to others. It’s maybe my favourite thing written by anyone ever.)

A closely-related issue is that of content warnings: so far as I’ve been able to work out, there is no warning which I can give for “The Beast Within (My Pants)” which adequately selects against people who won’t like it while also preserving its conceptual twists and avoiding colouring the audience’s interpretation.

Getting back to the actual content of the introduction - I wound up writing less than I would’ve liked, leaving the page looking a little sparse, but hopefully making things easier for the reader. There’s relatively little to talk about in the way of trivia here. When I wrote the phrase “cut right to the spectacles” I was probably thinking of Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Cut To The Feeling”. When I mentioned “moist towelettes” I was probably thinking of Hawthorne Wipes. The phrase “truth time” was an iconic - to me, and literally no-one else in existence - line spoken by the trolling narrator of a crack story written by a high school friend of mine, the energy of which I feel like I’ve always been channelling with these comics.

The interlude, on the other hand, is crammed full of references and was a breeze to write. It was the first piece of prose I completed for the project. In general, I was trying to write in a verbose style that would be simultaneously at odds with the bulk of the issue and reminiscent of the prose of veteran Transformers scribe Simon Furman. He was known for using certain distinctive phrases repeatedly in his writing - one such phrase being “like some vast, predatory bird”. The phrase “neither sufficient inclination nor wingspan” is supposed to subtly evoke another Furmanism: “CANNOT, WILL NOT”.

In all likelihood, the interlude would not have existed had I not noticed that Ratchet’s head was in its cartoon colours in the first part of the story, but in its Marvel colours for the second. I had the idea to explain that error away in story - tying into the general schtick of “correcting” the comic - and did so by way of a reference to Ratchet’s original toy, which had a sticker with a face on it behind the windshield rather than a proper head. I was also determined to highlight the fact that Predaking’s legs remain standing for like three pages; I think this minor detail in the artwork is pretty indicative of the fact that Mr. Gibson did a good job.

The way Swoop’s contribution to the combiner is described as “puny” ties nicely to the history established between him and Grimlock in his profile. I like the way the Beast tries to hit Optimus Prime with a “truck-sized fist”. The “antimemetic shielding” was my attempt to explain the recurring disappearances of Optimus Prime’s trailer in a novel way - I did so by namedropping the key phrase from qntm’s There Is No Antimemetics Division; the trailer’s there, you just can’t perceive it and forget that it exists. Finally, “dull surprise” refers to the vague expressions that characterised Dreamwave’s house style.

For the most part, I was able to retain the ordering of the pages as in the original comic, to keep things print-friendly. The one exception to this is the prose page for the second part, which I unfortunately had to move forward so that its cover could fall across a spread. The original comics must’ve included something in the way of backmatter - art cards, perhaps, or adverts - which made up the space.

The huge cast of The Beast Within made creating a profile for every character an impossible task (especially when so many are just crowd-fillers like some of the Technobots were in “PASS”) - but it was perfectly possible to provide one for each non-combiner character with a speaking role.

(If you’ll indulge me in one last barely-relevant tangent as we head into the final stretch of this commentary, there are some rather odd inclusions/omissions in The Beast Within. On the Autobot side, pretty much every 1984-1985 character appears, with the exceptions of Trailbreaker, Hoist, Tracks, Smokescreen, Grapple, Beachcomber, Seaspray, Perceptor and Omega Supreme. The Autobot combiner teams are absent with the odd exception of Silverbolt. Twin Twist - who had been pretty much entirely absent from the original US fiction - makes an odd appearance without his partner Topspin. Steeljaw is the only one of the four 1986 Autobot cassettes to appear. Meanwhile, on the Decepticon side, oddities include the toy-inspired versions of Viewfinder and Spectro (most of the rest of the cast use cartoon-inspired character models) and the omissions of Spyglass and Buzzsaw. Some Decepticon combiner team members - Motormaster, Wildrider, Breakdown, Blast Off and Swindle - only appear in combined form. Just two of the four 1986 triple changers - Springer and Octane - appear in the comic, looking slightly out-of-place in a cast consisting mostly of characters present in the first two seasons of the cartoon. Oh, and the Deluxe Vehicles and Deluxe Insecticons are absent, but that’s to be expected in a cartoon-inspired setting.)

Here’s the first draft of Optimus Prime’s profile:

Unpredictable. Unstoppable. Unrepentant. Many words have been used to describe OPTIMUS PRIME, yet the abrasive leader of the Autobots remains something of an enigma even amongst his followers. He has ruled Cybertron for many millenia, by dint of the fact that he's apparently the only Cybertronian with a shred of competence.

It’s a product of the time where I wanted to really flesh out Optimus Prime and communicate his thoughts clearly to the audience, and as such is pretty blunt with how it characterises him. The final version is a little more subtle, drawing in elements of the scrapped introduction. I figure I may as well go through the other profiles one-by-one to give a sense for what I was thinking:

Megatron initially had a much more personal bio - which seems to have been lost to time - but I wound up cutting much of it to make space for elements of the story’s scrapped introduction.

Starscream draws inspiration from van Feleday’s interpretation of the character - she posited that Michael Bay’s version of the character was actually the Decepticon most loyal to Megatron. The contrast between that interpretation and pretty much every other in the franchise’s history (excluding Shattered Glass Starscream, of course) is pretty funny to me. I tried to use the phrase “fools errands” in as benign a way as possible, which I felt evoked a more traditional relationship between him and Megatron. “Starscream, you fool!”

Razorclaw has little in the way of characterisation in the comic beyond “noble warrior”, and his profile is a wholesale reference to The Chronicles of Narnia: he stands in for Aslan; the rest of the Predacons for the Pevensie siblings. So yes, this version of Razorclaw is a Christ-like figure. As for the witch... maybe Blackarachnia? Eh, who cares. Oh, and the idea of combining with a dead bot was one which cropped up a few times in IDW’s comics, most notably with the Combaticons in Mairghread Scott’s Till All Are One.

Onslaught was in a similar boat to Razorclaw. I found myself drawing from Till All Are One once more, hinting at a (complicated?) romance between him and another teammate.

Blitzwing has only one speaking role in the comic - a shared line with Megatron and Starscream - but I decided to count it for the sake of having a nice set of sixteen characters once more. In Transformers Animated, Blitzwing had multiple personalities, and would change forms depending on which was in control. This interpretation of the character has seen plenty of criticism, so I deliberately tried to come up with something new. I quickly settled upon the idea of tying his vehicle forms to his mood, a metaphor which seemed to dovetail nicely with the way aerial alternate forms were treated in “PASS” and which also allowed me to cement the Decepticons’ supportiveness.

Bulkhead was borne of the realisation that Springer appears prominently in both “Peace” and The Beast Within. This inconsistency is entirely the product of my decision to place my versions of those comics in the same continuity, and I decided to correct it in the tradition of “Bluster” and “Firster Aid” by having them be two separate (but related) characters. I named the new Springer after Energon Bulkhead, who was inspired by “Generation 1″ Springer - the name’s since been used more prominently by an Animated-original character and variations thereof, and is effectively fair game for “Generation 1″ stories. His actual characterisation was inspired by Springer’s behaviour in “PASS” - I liked the idea that Bulkhead bullied Springer, and Springer bullied everyone else in turn. Oh, and I wanted to tie their helicopter modes back to Blitzwing’s profile on a thematic level.

Bumblebee is the only character from “its christmas... so what??” to recur with a speaking role in “The Beast Within (My Pants)”. After scrapping the original introduction I’d planned for the comic, I was left with a single profile to bridge the gap between the two stories. My original idea was that, for their negligence in allowing the humans to steal Bumblebee’s blood, Prowl, Tracks, and Hoist would have been executed by Optimus Prime - though I’m sure he didn’t pull the trigger himself, it’s safe to assume that he didn’t warn them before setting off the nukes.

Ratchet has a characterisation inspired by something “Jonny Angel” posted in van Feleday’s thread: “Ratchet is an ambulance who practices no medicine”.

Jazz is an extremely prominent character in the comic, despite the fact that his only line is a scream in the opening panel. The comic relies on the wider context of the brand to let the audience be invested in him, but in a vacuum it’s kinda funny to see the Autobots fret so much over an effective nobody. Pretty much the entire joke in my version is just a reference to Ryan Gosling’s misguided quest to “save jazz” in La La Land - some of his character’s lines are lifted wholesale to comprise Jazz’s profile, which takes pains to avoid using any kind of pronouns (thereby maintaining the confusion over whether or not “Jazz” refers to the character or the music genre). His profile was the first I wrote.

Ironhide has a role amongst the Autobots loosely inspired by that of Drew Linky (or at least, the version of Drew Linky presented by SPAT) in the Homestuck Discord. I thought there was some symmetry there with Ironhide’s history in IDW Publishing’s comics.

Skids was a tricky character to portray, but ultimately his profile turned out to be one of the ones I’m happiest with. It’s kind of a loose riff on his portrayal towards the back end of James Roberts’ stories, where much of his arc revolved around his relationship with Nautica. According to Word of God, he had unrequited feelings for her - I decided to amp this up by giving him unrequited feelings for everyone. To tie this back to Homestuck, think Eridan/Cronus. Oh, and in terms of the Homestuck Discord server, think your typical hornyposter (and then follow the implications through in terms of Optimus Prime/Makin). The actual name “Skids Maximus” is a play on the way the suffix “Maximus” has historically been used for some combiners, “Optimus Maximus” in particular. I’m convinced I’m not the first person to do a joke like that, but nobody I asked could think of any older examples.

Grimlock was fleshed out pretty well by the comic itself, so I took his profile as an opportunity to expand upon the history of the Dinobots. I saw them as being akin to a group of friends who stuck together throughout school, winding up as an impenetrably toxic and incestuous mess with a ton of deep lore. In a way, there was a time when I was the Grimlock of my group of friends... but we all grew up.

Swoop is Grimlock’s ex-partner, a concept inspired by the other Dinobot combiner we all wish we could forget about. I’m pretty happy with the use of the word “bottom” in this context.

Snarl is based on a combination of various people I’ve known in real life - people who are perfectly nice and reasonable but have zero patience around certain other individuals. From the outside, it’s behaviour that comes across as pretty damn harsh, but - and please note that this is not an endorsement of such behaviour - it’s usually the product of a long period of aggravations.

Jetfire was the last character introduced in the comic, so it felt fitting to save his profile until last. His biography is effectively a mashup of his portrayals in the original cartoon (where he gets frozen in the Arctic Circle) and in Revenge of the Fallen (where he was a Seeker who wound up on Earth), a combination which neatly parallels Bay’s Megatron’s origins. It also references J.J. Abram’s infamous “mystery box” storytelling device, which I intended to mirror the offbeat lack of closure in the comic itself.

The final challenge I faced - one which had hounded me throughout the development of the comic - was what exactly to title it. Titles considered included:

“The BEE” (Tindalos’ suggestion)

“The BEE Within”

“The REEEE Within”

“SHIT” (Gitaxian’s suggestion)

“IM THE BEAST”

“AWWW SHIT” (Fear or Courage’s suggestion)

“AW SHIT ITS THE BEAST”

None of these resonated. Then, almost a whole month later, out of nowhere:

This was the entirety of Daniel111111222222’s contribution to the story - and what a contribution it was.

There were several reasons why I loved his idea. Firstly, it was easy to edit: most of the other suggestions would’ve required me to move lots of letters around, while this one would simply require me to append a few. More importantly, it felt like the title of a Chuck Tingle novel.

The subtitle for the second part - “No Pants” - seemed like a natural choice after that, the idea being that it evokes Grimlock’s inhibitions falling away with his transformation into the Beast. It narrowly edged out “Pants Off”, which I managed to squeeze into the final version of the introduction.

The parentheses in the comic’s title were my own addition, and in retrospect I kinda regret them. They seemed like a good idea at the time, but I’m not sure why. I was wrong to try and improve upon perfection.

IX. Why Throw Away Your Life So Recklessly

So far, the bulk of this commentary has mostly focused on the aspects of this project which I think went pretty well. In a way, that's probably fair enough, because - on balance - I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.

At the same time, I can't help feeling that “PASS” - a comic which I probably threw together in the space of one day two years ago - is both funnier and more meaningful than the one which I spent a couple of weeks on.

When I started working on “The Beast Within (My Pants)” towards the beginning of May, I expected to have the project finished and out of the door by the end of the month. If you glance at the release dates of the various things I made, you'll see that I like to put out major projects on the last day of a month - it's a way of setting myself a deadline and it lets me associate a given project with a given period of time.

My first draft of the dialogue was released to prereaders on the 11th of May; my second on the 13th. Around that point, exam season started to kick in and I decided to prioritise to other projects - the Retrace Steps commentary and the Are You Happy retrospective - which both ballooned out into much longer pieces than I'd planned. I successfully met my self-imposed deadline for those projects and pushed back the release date for the comic to the end of June. I released the first drafts of the text-only pages on the 9th, but the profiles didn't follow until the 24th. By the time you read this, I'll have been working on the project on-and-off for over three months; despite the fact that I was ostensibly on vacation for most of that time, I was somehow busier than I tend to be at university.

For context, it took me just four months to adapt Retrace Steps from a short film script to a webcomic (well, “webcomic”), and that was a process which actually required original artwork. At the time I noted that I needed to re-evaluate the way I approached commentaries, as the amount of time required to produce one of a high standard seemed only to increase - they're extremely valuable to me, and seem to be well-received by the few who read them, but are they justifiable if they take longer to create than the things they comment on?

All of this is my long-winded way of saying that I've probably spent more time thinking about The Beast Within than the vast majority of people who know about it, and that I kinda regret that. See, in the sense that The Beast Within provokes a visceral emotional reaction, it’s a “good comic” - but so too does a punch to the face. The Beast Within is not a good comic. It’s mean and deconstructive and poorly-done. My version is borne of contrarianism and hubris, and softens the blow not one bit.

At the time when I was writing Grimlock's dialogue, I found that my own typing style was becoming increasingly acidic.

The truth is that “PASS” is probably the most successful thing I have ever made, and I wanted to make a comic which would put it to shame, and I failed miserably. In fact, I feel like I’ve made something which only I could ever enjoy. It’s derivative in the extreme. As my deadline for this project drew closer, I resorted to drafting bits of the commentary on my phone in public, and at one point somebody idly asked me what I was writing, and - after failing to think of a convincing lie - I said something along the lines of “it’s kinda a long story, and I wouldn’t enjoy telling it, and you wouldn’t enjoy hearing about it”. They seemed perfectly satisfied by that answer, but I wasn’t.

Must we justify the things we create? Mr. Jamieson’s attitude seemed to be to say “screw you, I don’t have to justify myself to stupid people” (while pointing at everybody else in the room). My attitude, as evinced by this commentary, has been to justify every aspect of everything I make in excruciating detail, so that if you tell me “I don’t like X” I can say “I already explained why I thought X was a good idea” and you can say “well you were wrong” and I can say “maybe”.

You’ve probably twigged that, throughout this commentary, I’ve referred to the creators of The Beast Within only by second name. At first, perhaps, it came across as some mark of mocking respect - like citing a scientific source - but the real reason is cowardice, not confidence. Some people occasionally put their own names into Google. There’s a couple of people to whom I really don’t want to have to justify myself.

Over a decade after the release of the The Beast Within, Hasbro released a brand new set of Dinobot toys which combined to form Volcanicus. The creators of the Prime Wars Trilogy and of the Earth Wars mobile game gleefully included the new combiner in their stories, and the fandom at large embraced it wholeheartedly.

As her thread drew to a close, Terry van Feleday wrote something which I think about often:

Of course [...] let’s not forget that no matter the amount of earnest work put into something, sometimes it just turns out shit. There’s a strange perception I noticed in critical response where people seem to find it difficult to consider something both earnest or satirical and, well, not very well made. Sucker Punch can’t be an honest indictment of cinematic objectification and a somewhat poorly conceived, almost hypocritical attempt at being more clever than you should. Transformers can’t be an inversion of the traditional hero/villain narrative showcasing the effects of authoritarian propaganda and a meandering, under-focused, often poorly communicated, destructive mess. Maybe it’s a strange entertainment-version of the Just World Fallacy where lacking results must necessarily result from lacking effort, or maybe it’s modern audiences’ strange worship of subversiveness, where a work critical of old tropes must by default be better than the works it’s commenting on throwing to the dustbin of history, but either way, people are extremely resistant to the idea that films they found emotionally dissatisfying could express depth and meaning and tend to dismiss them as another ‘genre film’.

Mr. Gibson is a children’s picture book illustrator. The Beast has no place on his website.

X. Proceed On Your Way To Oblivion

TFNation - the UK’s biggest Transformers convention - has become something of an annual pilgrimage for me, and (as of the time of writing) I’ll be making that pilgrimage in a matter of days. If you see me there, feel free to come over and punch me. Or, y’know, just say hi. I’ll have some limited-edition printed copies of “PASS” to give out. For more information on that - and for infrequent Transformers-related musings and updates on future projects - wander on over to my twitter!

What are those future projects? Well, after the convention I’m planning to release an original short story. It’s not very good, but it’s got a few stylistic similarities to this comic (read: lots of swearing). I might have a little bit in the way of Transformers prose coming out down the line, but can’t really elaborate further on the form that’ll take. I’ve been planning to get back to Huskyquest for ages, and hopefully I’ll finally be able to do so once I settle back down at university. After that, I plan to focus my efforts on prose, so you may as well expect more radio silence from me.

If you’ve made it to the end of this almost-fifteen-thousand-word monstrosity, you, uhh... win all my internet points? Sorry, that’s all I have.

Remind me never to do this again.

#Transformers #comics #The Beast Within #The Beast Within (My Pants) #The Wadapan #14/08/2019

[bookclub4m]

This month we’re reading Fairy Tales, Fables, Legends, Myths, and Folklore. We talk about the internet, oral stories, where to start reading superheroes, the problems with incredibly long books, and more!

You can download the podcast directly, find it on Libsyn, or get it through iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, Spotify, or your favourite podcast delivery system.

In this episode

Anna Ferri | Meghan Whyte | Matthew Murray | RJ Edwards

Books We Read This Month (or tried to read…)

A House of Pomegranates by Oscar Wilde

The Happy Prince and Other Tales by Oscar Wilde

Fairies, Pookas, and Changelings: A Complete Guide to the Wild and Wicked Enchanted Realm by Varla Ventura

Transgressive Tales: Queering the Grimms

Christmas Customs and Folklore: A Guide to Season Rites by Margaret Baker

Hark! Podcast

Jingle Bells written by James Lord Pierpont

Wassailing

Haxey Hood

Boggans - Changeling: The Dreaming

Snap-dragon (game)

Zeus Grants Stupid Wishes: A No-Bullshit Guide to World Mythology by Cory O'Brien

Here Comes a Chopper to Chop Off Your Head: The Dark Side of Childhood Rhymes and Stories by Liz Evers

Ring a Ring o' Roses

Contes et sortilèges des quatre coins du Québec

Les grandes légendes du Québec : un tour du Québec en 25 récits traditionnels

Eye of Newt and Toe of Frog, Adder's Fork and Lizard's Leg: The Lore and Mythology of Amphibians and Reptiles by Marty Crump

Medusa's Gaze and Vampire's Bite: The Science of Monsters by Matt Kaplan

Crash Course Mythology

White as Milk, Red as Blood: The Forgotten Fairy Tales of Franz Xaver von Schönwerth translated by Shelley Tanaka and illustrated by Willow Dawson

Willow Dawson’s website

Contes du Nord illustrated by Kay Nielsen

Kay Nielsen - 43 artworks

Other Media We Mention

Andrew Lang's Fairy Books

PBS Idea Channel

How is Slender Man Internet Folklore?

What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions by Randall Munroe

What If? Website

Links, Articles, and Things

Kelpie: “malevolent water horses”

Jack Zipes: “an American academic and folklorist who has published and lectured on the subject of fairy tales”

Slender Man

Creepypasta (just spooked myself out by watching some videos on Petscop…)

Afrofuturism

The crew of the Argo

Folklore of Quebec

Protein poisoning

Russian Fairy Tales

Baba Yaga

Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie comic series) (Sonic News Network wiki)

Transformers Wiki (read the image captions)

Favourite Folklore/Fairy Tales

The Girl Without Hands (The Handless Maiden)

Vasilisa the Beautiful (girl sent to Baba Yaga’s hut)

The Yule Lads

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Join us again on Tuesday, May 21st when we’ll be discussing Books That Changed Our Lives and Books That Haunt Us!

Then come back on Tuesday, June 4th when we’ll be talking about the genre of Supernatural Thrillers!

#genres

[bb-ma-1]

“Many Ideas” Lecture  Mon. Sept. 28 2020

Gerald doesn’t think ideas come out of thin air

If he isn’t feeling creative, he looks up “100 odd facts”. Creativity needs stimulation

Creativity is a rational response to different forms of stimulation

“Silly Facts” he got off the internet

“Photography is the history of the world accidentally”

Ideas: where do they come from? Something that seems normal to you may seem odd or unusual to someone else.

“Every sentence you write you owe me 2000 pounds”, condense your ideas

“A sentence is often a scene. And if it’s not a scene, what is it doing there?”

Download a talk - getwrightonit.com/animation-price-guide – keep it under 20,000 ?

With animation for young people, scenes typically aren’t more than 3 seconds long

Goal of this exercise is to condense the creative process and control it

At the end of the pre production module, my project should be able to be picked up by someone who doesn’t know me and bring it to fruition. If I’m hit by a bus, it could still be made.

Hannah kept adding more to the summary, stuff that wasn’t on the paper. If she weren’t here, we’d get a different idea to what she actually put down. You need to either put everything on the paper, or omit it. Stick to the plan.

When you write something, speak it out loud.

Keep the “’oh shit’ moment” in mind

Keep the other senses in mind when describing things. I described the temperature (touch) and visuals, but not smell, sound, or taste? Though taste might be more niche.

Keep that level of communication in mind.

Within film, there’s usually three “acts”

Gerald wants me to extend the story?

Source for ideas:

Life stories

Family, grandparents

Dreams

A book you loved as a child

A book you loved as an adult

A poem

A comic/graphic novel

Newspapers, an odd story

Music

Themes - “cars”

Technology

Psychology

Metamorphasis

What if... The world ended tomorrow?

What if... Aliens ruled the world?

What if... you were the king or queen?

Animation in real time - 24 hours

Link two completely different objects

Wishes, careful what you wish for

Folktale

Factual, explaining how things work

Political comment

Gerald suggests we watch Spitting Image (?)

Chain of events

Two or more unusual characters

Animals with human personalities (fables)

Experimental

Abstract

Medical

Any of the ideas discussed ‘mixed together’

  Think heavily about who your audience is, what medium you’d broastcast it on

Gerald wants us to:

rewrite our ideas to fit what we’ve talked about

description of the physical setting, sum up the environment

sum up the idea

each sentence is 20,000. aka, be economic

make these crucial questions the start of our summaries:

the name, what this is? title of the story

what age group is it aimed at?

what technique, how would this be made?

what platform will it be delivered on? (also how long will it be?)

#notetaking

[xenetala]

The Pirate Mermaid Demo Review

I’d rather wait for the full game to do a review, but I have been waiting for several years for this game to come out and I’d like to generate some excitement around it to try garnering some support for the creators.

*Please note: All credit for the images goes to the Navigame team and their beautiful minds.

**Double note: This contains game play spoilers, but I tried to keep actual story content as spoiler free as humanly possible while still giving a review on the game.

That being said, The Pirate Mermaid is a game in development by @navigame-media and has come quite a ways from the original demo.  I still have the first demo on my computer and love seeing how the art style had progressed as well as the character designs.

To show you what I mean, here is the original opening still:

The above is the original game start screen and below is the revamped one.  You can probably see why I’m excited to see where this game will go. :D  I love when you can see how something progresses through time. 

The newer version is much cleaner and I love some of the character changes. P.S. that Shadow figure you see I’m hoping will be Mimi, but I’ll get to that in a moment. :D

GAME PLAY

The game follows like just about any Renpy Otome game does where it’s a choose your own adventure story setting.  The menus are pretty easy to follow and the skip function is a total life saver for replaying parts.  The basic concept for playing the game is to read through the story and make choices at varying points to control the outcome of the tale.

I left the menu for the game controls up on this (mostly because I like being able to see them) and you can see how there are several options for you during the game play itself.  Many of your choices in this game not only dictate the route you can chose to get the date-able characters, but they also affect the Main Character (MC or the girl you play as) development.

This is one aspect I enjoy very much about this game.  You can customize a few aspects of the MC.  As you can see below, you have the ability to name her (not uncommon, but always a plus) as well as choose the color of your pirate’s mermaid fins.  I was a little sad I couldn’t choose just a straight black tail (black is one of my favorite colors) or a few other colors, but at lease I can coordinate with my mer-outfit (which as we know is just as important).

Being able to customize the MC is something that I really love in this game, but there’s another tidbit that’s just as fun.  You have karma ratings!  As a huge fan of games like Infamous and Fable, I love stuff where you can choose to be good or evil (okay so I just like the option of being an evil person XD) and I’m so excited to see how this plays out in the full story.

The karma rating also adds a fun extra bit to the choices you make.  So, you can choose to romance one of the characters and you can create your own agenda.  I LOVE it. 

You can access your Karma rating at anytime by clicking on the heart icon in the menu options.  This also shows you your affection levels with the romance options (more on these in a bit).  For the demo, after you’ve completed it once you’ll get hits to view which choices will boost which karma type.  This is super helpful for those of us that want to complete EVERY achievement in the game and I’m hoping the full game will have this option open up after a full play through.

That’s really the gist of the game play.  It’s a pretty basic Otome style game and that’s fine. After all, who are we kidding?  We only play Otome games for the cute boys and girls you can dream date. :P

CHARACTERS

This is the best part of any Otome game; the who can I date choices. lol Right now there’s three male options open for dating and I’m hoping they’ll come out with a fourth and maybe fifth (though I know the more date options the more work so if there’s only three I’m still happy).

I’ll start this by introducing the MC a bit.

You play as a pirate girl who is searching for the mermaid’s treasure and are a pretty typical fantasy pirate, but not a typical Otome MC.  For those of you (like me) who detest most of the Otome MCs out there (Voltage Inc this is directed at you!); this one rocks.  For once we have a girl with sass and can hold her own.  She doesn’t need to have this unexpected menagerie of male companions to jump in and save her, she isn’t a super clutz all the time, she isn’t scared of her own shadow, and she isn’t some super dense naive damsel (yes I have issues with MCs).  lol You have no idea how ecstatic I am to play a game with a character that doesn’t make me want to rip my hair out.  Thank you Navigame team!

Next up is your companion pet.

Those of us who are Disney girls, you’ll love this.  What main girl is complete without her trusty animal sidekick?  I don’t really know why, but I love the fact that the MC has a funny pet that goes everywhere with her.  Mostly Jack is your trouble making comic relief, but he does have some moments of extreme usefulness.  Of course like any pirate, this bird is obsessed with shiny objects.

Here is date option number one.

This guy is the sorcerer that turns you into a mermaid. He’s a pretty typical Tsundere type and my second favorite of the boys. He’s got silver hair, magic, and is a bit of a stuck up grump like any good Tsun so he’s alright.  I have yet to learn his name (I’m just going to assume it’s Jack and he never tells you because it’s the name of your parrot), but he’s got a monocle so you can’t go too wrong with him.  I also want his coat.  It’s my favorite part of his character design for sure.

This is romance option number two.

This is the mer-prince Mikali and he’s true to his title. Long blond hair, charming, good manners, super nice, chivalrous, and an all around good guy.  This makes him my absolute least favorite option (I don’t like the sweet, innocent, or good guys).  That being said, as you play through the demo you find he’s got some mysterious power or something about him so there may be potential here yet.  Plus, he does have a pretty character design and I’m curious to see if there’s any correlation to the fact that he wears a necklace similar to the the one MC in mermaid form has.  Personal bias against nice guy options aside, who couldn’t love that luxurious blonde hair of his?  Long haired men for the win. 

The next character in the demo is a cute little maid.

This is Mimi.  She’s not a romance option in the demo (yet, but I’m hoping she becomes one), but you can gain her favor by choosing the right options and she is too adorable not to have some strong pirate take care of her (I know I have double standards here, but sweet and cute non MCs are perfect for the MC to romance).  Though, she does have some spirit once she’s over her shyness so I’d really like to see her character flesh out more.  I’m also hoping that if she’s a romance option, she’s a bonus one you can only get after completing the main story or something (only because I’m a sucker for bonus stuff like that).

And, the best for last.

This amazingly hot set of mer-pixels is Malik (yeah all of the merpeople so far have names starting with ‘M’) and is the entire reason I want this game so badly!  For those of you who know me and know the routes I like, you’ll know what that means. :D  He’s a complete ass and I love it!  You can just never go wrong with a hot headed, in your face, pushy, jerk.  You just can’t. Even since his original character design, this guy has been my ultimate goal for this game and I’m glad he’s in this demo.  Oh.  Did I mention they gave him the best voice in the game?

That’s it for the characters in the demo.  The fact that you have a merman like Malik to romance should be enough for you to go download the demo and take the survey at the end, but I guess if you still need convincing then read on.

STORY

(Yes I know this is vague and doesn’t lay out story points, but I do not want to spoil things even if all we have is a little bit of the story.)

Okay so this is demo and we only get a little slice of the story, but what’s important here is just how engaging that slice of story is.  Not only did I want to see the game play through once, but even with the replays I didn’t use the skip option as much as I normally do (usually skip is my life).  This game spins a tale that really makes you want to read it.

Yeah it’s a pirate and mermaids which let’s face it isn’t that unheard of and it’s like a spin on Hans Christian Anderson’s The Little Mermaid, but it follows a much more in depth feel.  Between the different romance options alone, you have a complexity that only a choose your own adventure story can give you.  Add to that the karma options and you have the makings of a good tale.  The Little Mermaid is a rather dark tale of unrequited love and though you might be able to go this route in the game, it looks like you could shape up to be an evil queen. :D

As the MC you have a pretty well laid out backstory that you learn early on in the game.  I know treasure obsessed pirate seems really typical, but I like the backstory behind that obsession (I’m also hoping it explains her mermaid form necklace later on) and I like how the game uses that backstory to create a three dimensional character for us to play.

Though the story is really good thus far, I’m really curious to see all of the character’s progression.  The merpeople seem to have a pretty good correlation with each other from their childhood, but I have to know that story.  I am also hoping to see a few more characters pop in.  Not necessarily anything super fleshed out, but it’d be nice to see a guard captain, another maid or two, and a princess or two pop in on a consistent basis.  For one thing, what good romance doesn’t have a good love triangle? ;)

I figure the prince route will have some princess that ends up being your rival, but with the Sorcerer and Malik I don’t see any clear options for some romantic drama.  Not that I’d complain if there was a pretty straight forward conquer/save the kingdom story route instead of a typical romance route (Truthfully I’m not fond of romantic rivals), but considering the fan base for a game like this I’d expect some kind of tension.

Another thing I’d like to see in the story is more with the island that the Sorcerer is living on.  Having Mimi as a possible romance option is great, but I’d also like to see another ‘land path’ option as well.  Maybe a native on the island or some mermaid palace guard who catches you going to the surface one too many times.

That being said, the creators may have stuff like this planned and I have no idea about it because this is just a slice of the story, but I thought it couldn’t hurt to throw my two cents in.

Voices

Having a voice cast in a game always scares me a bit.  Mostly because of all extremely, detestfully, abhorrent, terrible, awful, voice acting choices (The voice actors do their best, but are all too often given the wrong role for their voice) from too many anime companies that end up making their way into games (VIZ, and FUNIMATION I am talking about your battle to see who makes the worst dubs!) I’ve become nervous anytime a game announces a voice cast.  But.  This game did a great job.  I haven’t listened to the Japanese cast, but the English cast is really well matched for the characters.  I was very happily impressed (Okay so I really only cared about Malik’s voice, but that’s not the point here!).

If you still aren’t convinced that you need to go download the demo and take the survey at the end, then perhaps I can tempt you with these few other tidbits in the game.

Chibis

Chibi characters are not something I’m a fan of.  I know in the anime world they are a part of life, but I really fail to see their appeal. :(  Yeah these scenes are kinda cute and at least a little amusing, but they really don’t need to be in chibi form. I get the company appeal to these things since they make easy pop figures (I can’t stand pop figures...), key chains, charms, and other small marketable items for fans, but I still don’t care for ‘em.  I know there are people that adore chibis so if they are your thing, you can rest assured this game will make you happy.

Battle scenes

I had to put that battle scene with Hodge in there. :D I love this place holder for him and only hope he gets eyes and a mouth.  Nothing more.  It just makes me smile to much to see him as a place holder figure. :D

Anyway, there are a few battle scenes and some of them are serious while others are humorous.  There’s not any controls you have like an in RPG, but these are still fun as you can see the battle poses of the MC and characters she’s fighting with/against.

Place holders (this section is more my hopes for the game than actual review)

I actually really like that the crew is drawn this way and I honestly hope they keep them like this.  I feel like the pirate crew is just a means to an end and seeing them as place holders like this just drives the point home that the MC is moving on from them.  Hodge could earn some eyes and a mouth, but i really hope these guys don’t change much.  For some reason the crew just fits best like this.  Maybe it’s because the original demo had the same crew format, but it feels right.

As for the guards, I’m hoping they do have a design for them.  Even if it’s just the same base and only different colored fins or something, I’d rather see some fleshed out guards.  Part of the reason they feel so awkward here is because Mikali and the background are so detailed, yet the guards are just plopped in there.  With the issues MC will run into with the treasury, I think the guards are a more important story plot so I’d like to see them fleshed out (and who doesn’t like merpeople in armor?)

I’m not going to lie, it took me about three play-throughs before I noticed these were place holder maids. DX Even with the detail on Mimi and that background, they don’t feel as out of place as the guards.  Probably because the composition of the image makes it work, but I would like to see another maid or two in the game.

This is another set of placeholders that I like. lol These are the princesses at the party you attend and I am a.o.k. with them staying like this.  Although, I do hope to see at least one with an actual design.  Like the ringleader of the group or something.  The rest can just stay silly little white figures. :D

Now if you still haven’t gone and downloaded the demo, do it right now.  And, don’t forget to take the survey at the end.  Also, go follow @navigame-media to show your support and keep up to date.

P.S. I hope I didn’t give away too much about the game or show more than the creators would like in a review post, but I really, really want to encourage them to keep up with the development.  I know this is a huge undertaking and I feel like this game has some ambitions goals, but I also really, really like it and want more. :D

#the pirate mermaid #navigames #otome #otome game #mermaids #mermen #dating sim #pirates #magic #navigame-media #undersea adventure

[dontshootmespence]

Disney Queen

A/N: A request from @peytonnation that is SUPER FLUFFY. Spencer and the reader have just seen Moana and when they get back, they dance around the apartment to Disney music and she belts out How Far I’ll Go. Enjoy! @coveofmemories

                                                            —-

“That was so cute,” you shouted, hopping into the apartment like the fabled Easter Bunny. You and your boyfriend, Spencer, had just returned from seeing the latest Disney movie, Moana, which you’d begged him to go see. Actually, there really wasn’t a ton of begging - he liked Disney movies much more than  he let on. “And the music was so good! I’m gonna download the soundtrack.”

You ran over to the opposite end of the living room where your iPod was sitting on a table and immediately bought the album from the movie. “You’re so cute when you’re excited about something,” Spencer said. You actually thought that was pretty funny. If anyone got animated (pardon the pun) when they talked about something it was Spencer.

“This coming from man whose eyes light up when he talks about statistics,” you laughed. “How about you give me a statistic about Disney?” You wondered how much he actually liked Disney, or if he was just humoring you. 

“Well from 2006 until 2016, Disney’s global revenue has increased by two-thirds, going from 33 billion to 55 billion,” he said. “And I think only about half of that comes from money you’ve spent.” Picking up your iPod, you ran over to where Spencer was sitting and jumped right next to him. “Haha, very cute. Yes, I love Disney, so sue me!” You leaned back into him and started turning on random Disney songs until you settled on an oldie but a goodie - one you hadn’t heard in a long time. “Dance with me, My Prince Phillip.”

As Once Upon a Dream from Sleeping Beauty began to sound throughout the apartment, Spencer played along, holding out his hand for you and even singing some of the lyrics, but not before giving you another random Disney fact - this one you knew though. “You know this song is also called An Unusual Prince?”

“That I did, Prince Phillip.” You started to sing. “I know you, I walked with you once upon a dream. I know you…”

“…The gleam in your eyes is so familiar a gleam. Yet I know it’s true,” Spencer continued, bringing a smile a mile wide to your face. It wasn’t often that he allowed himself to sing, but if he did, it was in front of you, and it was always sweet. As the song finished up, he turned toward the couch and picked up your iPod, switching to the soundtrack from the movie you just saw. “Now, I could tell there were quite a few songs that you wanted to start singing along to but you stopped yourself because we were in a room full of people, so go ahead.”

How Far I’ll Go started to crest like the water Moana so desperately wanted to be a part of. “Go ahead,” Spencer laughed. “Please, it’s adorable.”

“I’ve been staring at the edge of the water ‘Long as I can remember, never really knowing why I wish I could be the perfect daughter But I come back to the water, no matter how hard I try Every turn I take, every trail I track Every path I make, every road leads back To the place I know, where I can not go, where I long to be.”

As the song found it’s place in your lungs, you started to dance around the apartment, picking up a towel and cleaning the kitchen counter as you did. The words flowed out of you like a river, as corny as that sounded, and Spencer had a blast watching you frolic around the apartment like a kid on Christmas morning. When you looked over, you saw him mouthing the words too. 

“I know everybody on this island, seems so happy on this island Everything is by design I know everybody on this island has a role on this island So maybe I can roll with mine I can lead with pride, I can make us strong I’ll be satisfied if I play along But the voice inside sings a different song What is wrong with me?”

Quickly, you made your way around the apartment, coming to once again rest at Spencer’s side while singing directly into his face. “See the light as it shines on the sea? It’s blinding. But no one knows, how deep it goes. And it seems like it’s calling out to me, so come find me. And let me know, what’s beyond that line, will I cross that line?” You finished up the song and immediately pulled out your phone.

“Are you looking up everything you possibly can about Moana?” he asked with a laugh. It was just like you to find something you liked and then research it to death. 

Not exactly - although you’d definitely be doing that later. “No, what I am doing is seeing if I can recreate Moana’s costume for Comic Con this year.”

“You would make an absolutely beautiful Moana,” he laughed. “But then we can’t go as a pair because I definitely can’t pull off Maui.”

“What about Heihei?” you cackled. “You can be my crazy, weird chicken.” 

He snorted, pulling you down into his lap. “That I could pull off. Or maybe I could just go as a Disney prince. Maybe Phillip?”

“You can definitely be my Prince Phillip,” you laughed. “You already are.”

#spencer reid #spencer reid x reader #spencer reid fluff #spencer reid fanfiction #spencer reid fic #dontshootmespence #disney queen

[feralknights]

Why do you like Skye that much?

because she’s radddddddddddddddddddd

Honestly, dead honestly, it started entirely on aesthetics– Skye was the first character I saw in advertising for the game and literally what got me to stop, read the blurb on Steam, and download the game.  I love elves, I love purple, I love ninjas, and I love techno-fantasy.  Slamming all four of these things together called to me like a siren on the sea, and despite how people in the competitive and pro scenes sandbag Skye, I did not regret it.

I like that she’s not the classic “honor duty honorbound ninja honor but honor honor from honor” stereotype on the ninja front, even if she’s fitting in the femme fatale thing.  I like that she openly snubs the idea of a super-secretive “fabled” organization, and she’s striking out on her own and not being shy about doing it.  Skye makes it clear that she’s going to live her life on her own terms, and to hell with anyone that criticizes her for that decision.

I love that kind of thing.  I feed on it.

I thrive on it.

I’m hoping we get the lore for the game put in soon, because most of what I’ve got written for personal projects (comics, etc.) is rather speculative.  Normally that’s something I don’t like to do, but the themes of the character and the crystaltech/runepunk/tech-fantasy feel of Paladins is so familiar to me that I feel a lot more comfortable writing my own material for fun.

Of course, I’ve said in prior posts that I will gladly talk about anyone on the roster– Skye just tends to be the character I get the most asks about, and I always rep my favorites!

P.S.: My friends have joked I also have a thing for latching onto the underdog/weaker characters in most games and figuring out how to make my own fun with them.  And really, that’s the most important thing– make sure that at the end of the day, you have fun.

#paladins #paladins champions of the realm #skye #palablog

[torontocomics]

Debuting at TCAF 2017 - Instrumental by Dave Chisholm

Published by Z2 Comics

In the small hours of the morning, on a headlong collision into history, ambition, and magic, a trumpeter wails in the apocalypse. “You are making it happen. All the deaths. All the destruction.”Tom is a solid, but not great, musician. While his bandmates are happy to play gigs for themselves at their own clubs, drinking free beer and shooting the breeze, Tom aches for the next level, whatever that is. And as musicians are wont to do in magical fables, he meets a mysterious stranger with a seemingly simple offer: take a battered old trumpet for free, and just enjoy it, no exchanges and no strings. Whenever Tom plays it, the extraordinary music blows away his growing throngs of fans, and deadly mishaps start to follow. Tom may not have sold his soul for the music of the heavens, but he seems to have bargained away something much more serious.

From the critically acclaimed jazz musician Dave Chisholm, Instrumental is a high-spirited, suspenseful, formally inventive, visually musical graphic novel, an epic yet intimate riff on our longing search for what’s next.

Instrumental includes a download of an original jazz soundtrack, composed and performed by author Dave Chisholm.

Price 29.99 CAD

#Instrumental #Dave Chisholm #Z2 Comics #TCAF #TCAF 2017

[mk1comics]

DC April 2017 Highlights: Our “don’t miss this” picks include the Batman/Flash/Watchmen crossover the Button, the Superman Reborn Aftermath storyline and the collected edition of Gerard Way’s  Doom Patrol Volume 1: Brick By Brick 

Our Order books are open for the April 2017 comic solicitations.  Comixology customers can head here to view pull/subscribe & order away.  Mk1 will be working our way through the catalogue and posting our findings to the COMING SOON page as per usual.   More info about the Comixology service and Mk1′s mail order options can be found on our FAQ page.

Full  April 2017 Solicitations from all publishers  can be viewed at Comixology or Previews World.

"THE BUTTON"  The cataclysmic events of DC UNIVERSE: REBIRTH #1 continue here! The Dark Knight and The Fastest Man Alive, the two greatest detectives on any world, unite to explore the mystery behind a certain blood-stained smiley button embedded in the Batcave wall. What starts as a simple investigation turns deadly when the secrets of the button prove irresistible to an unwelcome third party-and it's not who anyone suspects! It's a mystery woven through time, and the ticking clock starts here!   

Please note for international/licensing reasons Mk1 will not be able to order the USA only lenticular covers for Batman #21 and Flash #21... At this stage we are reasonably confident that we will be able to order the lenticular covers for Batman #22 and Flash #22. (The reason why international stores cannot order the #21 covers is explored here.)

BATMAN #21

BATMAN #21 INTERNATIONAL EDITION

FLASH #21

FLASH #21 INTERNATIONAL EDITION

BATMAN #22 and BATMAN #22 VARIANT

BATMAN #22 LENTICULAR VARIANT

FLASH #22 and FLASH #22 VARIANT

FLASH #22 LENTICULAR VARIANT

Please Note: The Button titles have an early order close off date  and are not listed in the comixology system - order them the old fashioned way by getting in touch with us - contact details are below!)

Please Note2: We will be trying to source the Batman #21 and Flash #21 lenticular covers from alternate sources but pricing and availability cannot be confirmed at this time.

Superman Reborn- Aftermath checklist

DC » Action Comics #977

DC » Action Comics #978

DC » Superman #20

DC » Superman #21

DC » New Super Man #10

DC » Supergirl #8

DC » Superwoman #9

DC » Trinity #8

New Mini Series

DC » Batman The Shadow #1 (of 6)

Collected Editions 

DC » Doom Patrol Vol. 1: Brick By Brick TP (MR)

DC » Blue Beetle Vol. 1: The More Things Change (rebirth) TP

DC » Batman Detective Vol. 2: Victim Syndicate (rebirth) TP

DC » Flash Vol. 2: Speed of Darkness (rebirth) TP

DC » Hal Jordan & the Glc Vol. 2: Bottled Light (rebirth) TP

DC » Supergirl Vol. 1: Reign Ot Cyborg Supermen (rebirth) TP

DC » Superwoman Vol. 1: Who Killed Superwoman (rebirth) TP

DC » Wonder Woman Vol. 2: Year One (rebirth) TP

DC » Adam Strange the Silver Age Omnibus Vol. 1 HC

DC » Batman Arkham Mister Freeze TP

DC » Batman New Gotham TP

DC » Batman By Azzarello & Risso Deluxe Ed HC

DC » Batman By Scott Snyder & Greg Capullo Box Set 2 TP

DC » Batman Zero Hour TP

DC » Batman Wildcat TP

DC » DC Universe By Mike Mignola HC

DC » Deadman Dark Mansion of Forbidden Love TP

DC » Doctor Fate Vol. 3: Fateful Threads TP

DC » Last Days of the Justice Society of America TP

DC » Flintstones and Jetsons Vol. 1 TP

DC » Green Arrow Vol. 8: The Hunt For the Red Dragon TP

DC » JLA Year One Deluxe Ed HC

DC » Harley Quinn Vol. 6: Black White & Red All Over TP

DC » Raven TP

DC » Suicide Squad Vol. 6: The Phoenix Gambit TP

DC » Supergirl Vol. 3: Ghosts of Krypton TP

DC » Superman the Final Days of Superman TP

DC » Superman Wonder Woman Vol. 5: Savage End TP

DC » Superman Adventures Vol. 3 TP

DC » Teen Titans Go Ready For Action TP

DC » Wonder Woman By John Byrne Vol. 1 HC

DC » Wonder Woman the Golden Age Omnibus Vol. 2 HC

DC » Everafter From the Pages of Fables #8 (MR)

Full DC Solicitations are listed here. 

—————————– 

Links for  APRIL 2017 Shipments:

Full Dark Horse Solicitations

Full DC Solicitations

Full IDW Solicitations  

Full Image Solicitations

Full Marvel Solicitations

Full BOOM Solicitations

Full TITAN Solicitations

Full Valiant Solicitations

Everything from every publisher shipping from April 2017.

The Previews Catalogue can also be viewed over at PREVIEWS WORLD - here’s the link.  If using the PREVIEWS WORLD method download the TXT file - either delete the unwanted items or copy the wanted items into an email and send it to [email protected] (or just copy direct from the webpage).  We will respond with a price quote and place your order once you confirm acceptance.

We will be adding new posts from the April 2017 offerings as we uncover them.  Check out these pages for more Mk1 Monthly Previews:  January 2017 , February 2017 and March 2017.

The How to Love comics blog has an excellent beginners guide to reading new comic solicitations - check it out here.

#mk1april 2017 #comics #coming soon #dc comics

[thebibliomancer]

50 More Days of Comics! 36/50: TRIGGER #5 (2005)

Here’s a thing I know nothing about!

Well, I do know something. Its published under Vertigo and Vertigo is DC’s mature readers imprint. Its where your Fables and Y: the Last Mans, Constantines, Swamp Things, and Lucifers live.

And according to the cover blurb, because TRIGGER has a cover blurb like a fancy Immortal Hulk, its “an intricately layered dystopian thriller.”

The premise appears to be that in the not too distant future, next Sunday AD, 87% of America’s corporations have consolidated into Ethicorp which keeps society clean, happy, and productive with media, drugs, sex, and low crime and has the corporate motto “We Get the Bad Out!” which isn’t at all terrifying.

And Ethicorp does all this by secretly employing mind controlled assassins known as Triggers who take care of whatever Ethicorp sees as “bad.”

In the fifth issue, a woman, Vidalia Riordan gets dressed to go to work, apparently sexy work, when Ethicorp does a satellite lightning brain upload on her, apparently programming her to seduce and kill a man.

One of her handlers worries that maybe she’s getting “pulled” up for duty too often, more than the neuro-techs recommend. Because between the memory downloads and the brainwipes, who knows how fucked up her brain is getting.

The other handler says, basically, ‘don’t you worry about blank, let me worry about blank, asshole.’ Also he seems to be planning a coup against the Ethicorp CEO and president.

Three hours later, another guy. Carter Lennox, possessor of a fine bowlcut. And he seems to be on the drugs. And his body is going around and talking to people and doing things but he’s a helpless observer.

It seems like Carter Lennox is one of the Triggers and whatever drug he was given leaves him aware, but in no more control, when the Trigger is “pulled.”

Oh. I just got that.

Carter: “We seem to coexist in the same body... Well, screw that. I hated having a roommate in college, so I’m not about to put up with it now. What this guy doesn’t know is that this time I’m ignoring the handkerchief around the doorknob. Stop moving! I”m in control! I’m in -- Son of a bitch, this is it. I’m going on a mission. I’m going to kill someone.”

Carter is unable to do anything to stop himself as he goes to a locker and finds a mask and a gun and assorted other murder tools.

Nor is he able to stop himself as he infiltrates a villa, killing the guards. Although he does kind of admire himself, attributing his sweet moves to years of track and fencing in college.

And he wonders how he knows who the target is. Because he doesn’t know. But apparently he does. He guesses that its downloaded directly into the brain when a Trigger is activated.

His body breaks into a locked room and finds

Carter: “This is the vilest shit I’ve ever seen.”

Lets say that it doesn’t appear legal in multiple ways.

Carter’s body shoots the guy, tranqs and mind wipes his reluctant bed fellows, and then sets it up so it looks like the guy and his bodyguard shot each other.

So he may have killed several people against his will but he’s not feeling too bad about it.

Carter: “[Ethicorp] thinks they’ve eliminated this kind of decadence from society -- with their censorship and their mass-controlling of every aspect of our lives. Making life pure and white -- fast and easy. But all it’s done is driven this perverted malevolence deeper from the surface -- giving it a power to strike from the shadows.”

Isn’t that the case with anything that’s made illegal though? I don’t really get the point you’re making, Carter. They obviously don’t think they’ve eliminated the decadence if they have special mind-controlled assassins they use to shoot pedophiles in the face. It seems more like they’re proactively eliminating it. Via bullets. To the face.

Still Trigger Carter then heads to a hotel room to meet up with Vidalia. While she’s in the shower, Regular Carter tests his position by chanting “Reach for the pen” until Trigger Carter does. Which confuses the Trigger.

But then Vidalia (Trigger Vidalia??) comes out and starts seducing Trigger Carter.

Which freaks out Regular Carter. Because he had a dream about Vidalia and he’s realizing that its because Trigger Carter has been having an affair with her.

And also because Vidalia and Trigger Carter shit talk Regular Carter and his wife. Because Regular Carter is married. And he’s freaking out because he doesn’t want to be a cheater even if its not him driving.

Carter: “No, Carter... don’t do this. The dream was bad enough. This is wrong. She’s just a girl. Amelia, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry...”

That’s actually kind of fucked up.

But in a bit of a humorous note, the actual sex is censored by having the panel covered up with a big “ETHICORP MORAL QUALITY CONTROL: Edited under Code B-17” card. They get the bad out.

After the fact, Carter is piecing things together and decides that this needs to end. Its time he takes control back. Like the pen thing, he forces his body to go to the mirror and then... I dunnoooo. He says he’s back in control now and that the drug had a delayed effect but then his reflection punches him and asks “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

So who knows whats going on.

In a subplot that also got a few pages, a Ms. Myers investigates the Triggers because she thinks they framed a Harold Myers. Maybe a family member.

She goes to talk to an Isaac who can look at the gun she found and look into it for her.

He goes into some nonsense about how even when you file serial numbers off, there was still an invisible impression of them beneath the surface but now thanks to Ethicorp technology, serial numbers can be filed off at a molecular level with lasers but you can still find the impression at the submolecular level if you know how to look??

Sure.

So in exchange for a date, Isaac finds that the submolecular serial number flags this gun as one that was supposed to have been destroyed at the Grimes Weapon Disposal facility five years ago. And Grimes is owned by an Ethicorp dummy corporation.

The plot thickens, like a bad soup or a good pudding.

#50 more days of comics! #TRIGGER #but not studio trigger or chrono trigger or the psychological term #these triggers are censorship assassins #if i were actually reading this i'd be gone the instant anyone dropped the phrase political correctness

[roalbalove-blog]

Comics Android Mod Unlock All

New Post has been published on https://apkmodclub.com/comics-android-mod-unlock-all/

Comics Android Mod Unlock All

Comics

Size: 43.86 MB | Version: 1.12.3 | File Type: APK | System: Android 2.3 or higher

    Description :

Are you ready to explore over 100,000 digital comics, graphic novels and manga from Marvel, DC, Image, and more? By downloading the comiXology app, you can buy books in-app and get instant access to all your titles on all your devices. Need help finding something to read? Start a 30-Day Free Trial of ComiXology Unlimited and choose from over 10,000 comics, graphic novels and manga (currently available only to US-based customers). Whether this is your first experience with comics or you’ve been a fan for years, get ready, because comiXology is going to change the way you explore the world of super heroes, sci-fi, crime noir, horror, and more! Here’s just a small peek at what makes us your digital comics hub: ComiXology Unlimited is a subscription service that allows fans to read thousands of comics, graphic novels and manga, like Civil War, Guardians of the Galaxy: Cosmic Avengers, Ms. Marvel: No Normal, Attack on Titan, Adventure Time, Peanuts, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Lumberjanes, Saga, Transformers. These are just a few of the great titles from Marvel, Image Comics, Dark Horse Comics, IDW Publishing, BOOM! Studios, Dynamite Entertainment, Kodansha Comics, Oni Press, Valiant Entertainment, Archie Comics*, Fantagraphics Books, Humanoids, and so many more than we can name in this limited space.

Features of apps :

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قالب وردپرس

[game-refraction]

Episode Two of 'Batman: The Enemy Within' Premieres October 3

Citizens of Gotham City,

Today we are excited to share the official trailer for episode two of Batman: The Enemy Within, a new five-part episodic game series that continues Telltale’s unique take on the Caped Crusader. You can download the trailer by following the links above.

The death of a villain at the hands of a mysterious assassin was just the beginning. As explosions rock Gotham, Batman races to meet a new foe, but encounters a force that may cause even the Dark Knight to fall. In the guise of the billionaire, Bruce meets John Doe’s ‘friends’ and becomes enmeshed in a plot where the only way out is to go deeper in. But at what cost?

Episode two, ‘The Pact,’ launches October 3 on Xbox One, PlayStation 4, PC, and Mac. In addition, both episodes one *and* two will become available on iOS and Android-based devices that same day. Going forward, new episodes will launch the same day on all platforms.

A special ‘Season Pass Disc’ for Xbox One and PlayStation 4 will also be available at retailers starting October 3 in North America and October 6 in Europe. The disc includes the first episode of the season, as well as download access to all subsequent episodes as they are released.

This new season will be accessible to both returning fans and newcomers alike, though players’ choices from the first season of Batman: The Telltale Series will optionally carry over into The Enemy Within. This season will also include Telltale’s unique multiplayer ‘Crowd Play’ feature, which allows friends and family to engage with the adventure together by helping to decide the direction of the story from any mobile device with an online connection.

Rendered to look like a living, breathing comic book, Telltale’s vision of Batman features an award-winning cast of talent including Troy Baker, who returns to reprise his role as Bruce Wayne, as well as Anthony Ingruber, who will reprise his fresh take on ‘John Doe,’ better known to fans as The Joker.

Batman: The Enemy Within will be a standalone product separate from the first season of Batman: The Telltale Series and is licensed by Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment and based on DC’s iconic character. Episode two, ‘The Pact,’ has been rated ‘Mature’ by the ESRB.

About Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment

Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, a division of Warner Bros. Home Entertainment, Inc., is a premier worldwide publisher, developer, licencor, and distributor of entertainment content for the interactive space across all platforms, including console, handheld, mobile and PC-based gaming for both internal and third-party game titles.

About DC Entertainment

DC Entertainment, home to iconic brands DC (Superman, Batman, Green Lantern, Wonder Woman, The Flash, etc.), Vertigo (Sandman, Fables, etc.) and MAD, is the creative division charged with strategically integrating its content across Warner Bros. Entertainment and Time Warner. DC Entertainment works in concert with many key Warner Bros. divisions to unleash its stories and characters across all media, including but not limited to film, television, consumer products, home entertainment and interactive games. Publishing thousands of comic books, graphic novels and magazines each year, DC Entertainment is one of the largest English-language publishers of comics in the world.

About Telltale, Inc.

Telltale is a leading independent developer and publisher of games for every major interactive platform, including PC, home consoles, and mobile devices. It also pioneered the episodic delivery of digital gaming content.

Founded in 2004 by games industry veterans with decades of experience, Telltale quickly became an industry leader, with numerous honors and awards from the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences, BAFTA, IMGA, and more. In 2012, Telltale was named Studio of the Year after establishing a model for successful episodic game creation and digital publishing.

  Episode Two of ‘Batman: The Enemy Within’ Premieres October 3 was originally published on Game-Refraction

[yatterzuk]

This Week on Windows: Netflix, Taskbar, Spring Sale in the Windows Store

https://www.youtube.com/embed/DStQ9STfYu4?version=3&rel=1&fs=1&autohide=2&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&wmode=transparent

We hope you enjoyed today’s episode of This Week on Windows! Head over here to learn more about the partner devices bringing Windows 10 Creators Update experiences to life, check out five ways to get started personalizing your taskbar and stay tuned for more than 100 deals on games, apps, movies & TV and music with the Spring Sale in the Windows Store, starting April 11!

Learn more about what’s powering Project Scorpio in this article by Digital Foundry:

Get your very first look at the technology powering #ProjectScorpio. @digitalfoundry has the scoop: https://t.co/jxVbICxtwR pic.twitter.com/D7jS4ateVm

— Xbox (@Xbox) April 6, 2017

//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

Here’s what’s new in the Windows Store:

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Rent Rogue One: A Star Wars Story from $4.99

As the Empire continues to gain power, a group of rebel spies will risk everything to steal the plans to their enemy’s most terrifying new weapon: the Death Star. Rent the epic adventure Rogue One: A Star Wars Story ($5.99 HD, $4.99 SD) today on Digital HD in the Movies & TV section of the Windows Store. Can’t get enough Star Wars? Buy the Digital Six Film Collection now through April 10 and get a $5 gift card to spend on even more movies, games, apps, or music! For additional details, visit this link.

Split

When three teenage girls are abducted by a man with multiple personalities, they must figure out which of those personalities might help them escape…and which will do anything in their power to stop them. M. Night Shyamalan’s terrifying thriller Split ($14.99) is available now in the Movies & TV section of the Windows Store, two full weeks before Blu-ray.

Buy The Wolf Among Us for $24.99

From Telltale Games, the team that brought you The Walking Dead, comes The Wolf Among Us ($24.99), a gritty, violent and mature thriller based on the award-winning Fables comics. As Bigby Wolf – THE big, bad wolf – you’ll soon see that a brutal, bloody murder is just a taste of things to come in a game where every decision can have enormous consequences.

Buy Archer, Season 8 from $14.99

Season 8 marks a new era for this hit animated series as hardboiled spy/private eye Sterling Archer embarks on a mission to find his partner’s killer in 1947 Los Angeles. Watch the premiere of Archer ($19.99 HD, $14.99 SD) now in the Movies & TV section of the Windows Store.

Have a great weekend!

The post This Week on Windows: Netflix, Taskbar, Spring Sale in the Windows Store appeared first on Windows Experience Blog.

This Week on Windows: Netflix, Taskbar, Spring Sale in the Windows Store was originally published on Yatterz

[viralhottopics]

Inside Chrome: The Secret Project to Crush IE and Remake the Web

Chrome development team from left, Mark Larson, Brian Rakowski, Darin Fisher, and Ben Goodger Photo:Joe Pugliese

Brian Rakowski walks to the whiteboard in a small conference room in Building 41 on Google’s Mountain View campus. A lanky, gregarious man in his twenties, Rakowski is the product manager of a top-secret project that’s been under way for more than two years. The weekly Monday meeting of managers or “leads,” as Google puts it in its nonhierarchical way will be one of the last before the upcoming launch. Rakowski writes 12 items on the board with a black dry-erase marker. The first is “State of the Release.” It’s late August, and the release in question is called Chrome, Google’s first Web browser. Since a browser is the linchpin of Web activity the framework for our searching, reading, buying, banking, Facebooking, chatting, video watching, music appreciation, and porn consumption this is huge for Google, a step that needed to wait until the company had, essentially, come of age. It is an explicit attempt to accelerate the movement of computing off the desktop and into the cloud where Google holds advantage. And it’s an aggressive move destined to put the company even more squarely in the crosshairs of its rival Microsoft, which long ago crushed the most fabled browser of all, Netscape Navigator. A Google browser has been rumored for so long that most people have stopped talking about it. But the folks in this room know that the talking will soon begin again. Chrome is due to rock the Web just 16 days from this meeting. It turns out the state of the release is … not so bad. At Release Build Minus One ideally, the last version before the public beta hits the streets there are only five “blocking” bugs, all of which Rakowski and team deem fixable. “Things are looking good,” says Mark Larson, one of the tech leads. “What are we missing?” asks Sundar Pichai, Google’s vice president of product management. “What’s keeping you up at night?” “It’s not Chrome,” says Darin Fisher, an engineer who coauthored the first prototype. That gets a laugh because everyone knows he’s got a 10-week-old at home. Rakowski takes a red marker and puts an X next to the State of the Release item. The Google browser is one step closer to reality. Why is Google building a browser? A better question is, why did it take so long for Google to build a browser? After all, as Pichai says, “our entire business is people using a browser to access us and the Web.” “The browser matters,” CEO Eric Schmidt says. He should know, because he was CTO of Sun Microsystems during the great browser wars of the 1990s. Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin know it, too. “When I joined Google in 2001, Larry and Sergey immediately said, ‘We should build our own browser,’” Schmidt says. “And I said no.” It wasn’t the right time, Schmidt told them. “I did not believe that the company was strong enough to withstand a browser war,” he says. “It was important that our strategic aspirations be relatively under the radar.” Nonetheless, the idea persisted and rumors percolated. After a 2004 New York Times article quoted “a person who has detailed knowledge of the company’s business” saying a browser was in the works, Schmidt had to publicly deny it. But behind the scenes, the subject remained a running argument between Schmidt and the founders. As a kind of compromise, Google assembled a team to work on improvements for the open source browser Firefox, spearheaded by browser wizards Ben Goodger and Fisher. (Both had worked with Mozilla, the nonprofit organization behind Firefox.) Another hiring coup came when Linus Upson, a 37-year-old engineer whose pedigree includes a stint at NeXT, signed up as a director of engineering. “This was very clever on Larry and Sergey’s part,” Schmidt says, “because, of course, these people doing Firefox extensions are perfectly capable of doing a great browser.” Sure enough, in the spring of 2006, the Firefox group began talking among themselves about designing a new app. They loved Firefox but they recognized a flaw in all current browsers. When Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and the codebase at the heart of Firefox were originally conceived, browsing was less complex. Now, however, functions that previously could be performed only on the desktop email, spreadsheets, database management are increasingly handled online. In the coming era of cloud computing, the Web will be much more than just a means of delivering content it will be a platform in its own right. The problem with revamping existing browsers to accommodate this concept is that they have developed an ecology of add-on extensions (toolbars, RSS readers, etc.) that would be hopelessly disrupted by a radical upgrade. “As a Firefox developer, you love to innovate, but you’re always worried that it means in the next version all the extensions will be broken,” Fisher says. “And indeed, that’s what happens.” The conclusion was obvious: Only by building its own software could Google bring the browser into the cloud age and potentially trigger a spiral of innovation not seen since Microsoft and Netscape one-upped each other almost monthly.

Chrome: Here’s What Shines

Google wanted a browser optimized for cloud computing, with a design emphasis on simplicity and speed. Key features:

Speed Blazing fast JavaScript engine opens the door to more advanced Web applications.

Navigation The “omnibox” combines the search and address boxes, and pop-up thumbnails show your most-visited destinations.

Availability The open source software was launched in over 40 languages, but Windows only; Mac and Linux versions are in the works.

Reliability Tabs run in isolation, so if one crashes, no others are affected. Also, you can drag tabs to create new windows.

Privacy Browsing history is now searchable and editable; incognito mode offers private surfing.

One key change they had in mind was something called a multiprocess architecture, the system that helps the computer keep going when an application crashes or freezes. Why not extend that idea to browsers, so if something crashes in a tab, the other tabs are unperturbed? Also, for that matter, why not set things up so that you can drag an existing tab to create a new window? Starting from scratch had other advantages. You could design it to look cleaner and run faster, the twin dogmas of the Google corporate religion. Around June 2006, Goodger, Fisher, and another former Mozillan named Brian Ryner cooked up a small prototype. Their first big decision involved the choice of a rendering engine, the software that processes the HTML code of a Web page into the stuff that appears on your screen. The two major open source options were Gecko, used by Firefox, and WebKit, which powers Apple’s Safari browser. The word was that WebKit (which had already been adopted by the group developing Google’s Android mobile operating system) could be nasty fast three times as fast as Gecko, in one example. In a few weeks, they had a simple application running WebKit on Windows that kept going even when a Web page crashed a tab. Early on, Goodger recalls, “our prototypes had a picture of a little tab that was unhappy, and if a tab died you’d see that. It was the first piece of personality in the product.” Not long after that, Brin and Page came by to check in on the furtive beginnings of their browser. “I remember sitting at my desk, which at the time had a stuffed snake running along the back of it,” says Pam Greene, an engineer on the team. “Sergey was bouncing on one of those exercise balls, watching Darin give a demo, and petting the snake.” No one will say exactly when the browser project got the official green light. Pichai recalls an executive meeting when Schmidt no longer seemed as opposed as he had been. If Google did go for it, the CEO said, the team had to produce something very different from Explorer and Firefox. In addition, a Google browser would have to be fast, and it would have to be open source. Which, of course, was exactly what the team already had in mind. In any case, by the autumn of 2006 the line between unofficial concept and formal project had been crossed. “One Friday, there was a meeting called with like an hour’s notice,” engineer Brett Wilson says. “We were told, ‘The management is thinking about doing our own browser what do you think about that?’ Everybody was a combination of excited and freaked out.” Part of the freak-out was they knew full well that building a competitive browser was a massive undertaking. There were also mixed feelings because of the group’s attachment to Firefox, an icon of open source development and a hedge against Microsoft’s dominance. “The fear was that people were going to read this as sabotaging Firefox,” says Erik Kay, an engineer who joined the team in October 2006. The Googlers were mollified by the fact that their browser would be 100 percent open source: Google’s innovations could potentially find their way into the Mozilla codebase. “We really want to make Firefox successful, as well as other open source browsers,” Upson says. As part of Google’s Firefox effort, Pichai had been meeting with Mozilla head Mitchell Baker, and at some point he told her about Google’s project. Baker now says a Google browser is a mixed bag for Mozilla and Firefox. She sees the effort as a vindication of Mozilla’s belief that browser choice is essential. “If Google comes up with some good new ideas, that’s really great for users,” she says. “Competition spurs the best in us.” But she also understands that many of her users will download Google’s app. “We expect people will try it and come back,” she says. “Mozilla exists because independence is important.”

The Illustrated History: To introduce Chrome and its development team, Google asked noted artist Scott McCloud to create a 32-page comic (available online) that depicts the browser’s two-year gestation and special features.

A less weighty issue was what to dub the product. After considering some ridiculous codenames (Upson says they were so awful that he took the un-Googly step of a top-down veto), the project borrowed its moniker from the term used to describe the frame, toolbars, and menus bordering a browser window: chrome. One more hire was key. Because Chrome was supposed to be optimized to run Web applications, a crucial element would be the JavaScript engine, a “virtual machine” that runs Web application code. The ideal person to construct this was a Danish computer scientist named Lars Bak. In September 2006, after more than 20 years of nonstop labor designing virtual machines, Bak had been planning to take some time off to work on his farm outside rhus. Then Google called. Bak set up a small team that originally worked from the farm, then moved to some offices at the local university. He understood that his mission was to provide a faster engine than in any previous browser. He called his team’s part of the project “V8.” “We decided we wanted to speed up JavaScript by a factor of 10, and we gave ourselves four months to do it,” he says. A typical day for the Denmark team began between 7 and 8 am; they programmed constantly until 6 or 7 at night. The only break was for lunch, when they would wolf down food in five minutes and spend 20 minutes at the game console. “We are pretty damn good at Wii Tennis,” Bak says. They were also pretty good at writing a JavaScript engine. “We just did some benchmark runs today,” Bak says a couple of weeks before the launch. Indeed, V8 processes JavaScript 10 times faster than Firefox or Safari. And how does it compare in those same benchmarks to the market-share leader, Microsoft’s IE 7? Fifty-six times faster. “We sort of underestimated what we could do,” Bak says. Speed may be Chrome’s most significant advance. When you improve things by an order of magnitude, you haven’t made something better you’ve made something new. “As soon as developers get the taste for this kind of speed, they’ll start doing more amazing new Web applications and be more creative in doing them,” Bak says. Google hopes to kick-start a new generation of Web-based applications that will truly make Microsoft’s worst nightmare a reality: The browser will become the equivalent of an operating system. Google also brought in reinforcements to implement the multiprocess architecture that allowed each open tab to run like a separate, self-contained program. In May 2007, it acquired GreenBorder Technologies, a software security firm whose technology was designed to isolate IE and Firefox activities into virtual sessions, or “sandboxes,” where malware intrusions couldn’t mess with other activities or data on your computer. When the deal was announced publicly, tech pundits wondered whether it meant that Google was going into the antivirus business. Only after the acquisition did GreenBorder’s engineers learn that their job was to construct sandboxes for the tabs of a new browser. “It was confusing,” says Carlos Pizano, one of the GreenBorder hires. “They would not say what they wanted to sandbox.” The team was growing, but the process never got bogged down in bureaucracy. In the project’s early stages, Chromers would all have lunch together at a table in one of the Google cafs. Soon even the largest table couldn’t accommodate them all. Working in an open source spirit, every engineer was free to check out any piece of code and tweak or improve it. Rakowski always tried to keep things light, one day awarding tins of chrome polish to the best bug catchers. As the plumbing aspects of the product fell into place, activity focused on user interface. From the beginning, the Chrome team hoped that its visual presentation would be so understated that people wouldn’t even think they were using a browser. The mantra became “Content, not chrome,” which is sort of weird given the name of the browser. (“We’ve learned to live with the irony,” Mark Larson says.) The clearest expression of this comes when you drag a tab containing a Web application like Gmail to its own separate window and specify that you want an “app shortcut.” At that point, the tabs, buttons, and address bars fall away and the Web app looks pretty much like a desktop app. Welcome to the cloud era.

Any tab in Chrome can be dragged out to start a new window.

When deciding what buttons and features to include, the team began with the mental exercise of eliminating everything, then figuring out what to restore. The back button? No-brainer. The forward button? Less essential, but it survived. But if you’re a big fan of the browser status bar that meter that tells you what percent of a page has loaded you’re out of luck with Chrome. And then there was the bookmarks bar. At first, engineers thought they could kill it. Chrome introduces several new navigation methods, including one where the browser figures out where you want to go next with no typing required. And when you do type something in, you use the “omnibox,” a combination of address bar and search box: Just tell it what you’re thinking and it delivers a Web address, search results, or popular destinations that fit your query, all in non-intrusive text underneath the box. It’s a bulked-up version of “I’m Feeling Lucky.” Still, user tests showed that some people just love to navigate by clicking on the bookmark bar. The compromise: If the user has previously configured the bar in IE or Firefox, Chrome will import the setup. Otherwise, users won’t have a bookmark bar unless they choose to. It’s incredible that something as potentially game-changing as a Google browser has stayed under wraps for two years. It wasn’t until mid-2007, about a year into the project, that the team let employees outside the group even see what they were doing. At the first of a series of Tech Talks featuring the current prototype (events designed, in part, as a way of recruiting internally for the ever-growing team) the reaction was volcanic. Googlers broke into spontaneous applause when various features, like dragging a tab into a new window, were demo’d. As the number of people who knew about Chrome increased, the inevitable occurred word did leak out to a blog or two, yet nothing came of those stray items. No reporter put it all together. “I think it was because rumors about Google browsers have been around so long it’s like sightings of Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster,” Upson says. On the eve of the launch, Pichai shares some of his ambitions for Chrome. How many people will use it? “Many millions,” he says. “I want my mom to use it. I want my dad to use it.” The Google imprimatur doesn’t assure success, but Pichai believes that even if Chrome doesn’t snare huge market share, its innovations will improve the landscape. “We benefit directly if the Web gets better,” he says. As launch approaches, the team has just moved into new space in a freshly renovated building on the Google campus, and there’s another all-hands gathering in the biggest conference room available. It’s standing room only. Milk and cookies are provided. After some initial business, Rakowski hands the floor over to Goodger. The rumpled engineer talks about the benefits of making Chrome an open source product the code will be publicly released and a community will emerge to determine the browser’s evolution. “We’ll be able to scale our testing efforts,” he says. “It’ll enable people to do things we haven’t thought of. And it’ll generate trust that we’re not doing something evil.” As the meeting breaks up, the energy level is over the top, and not just because of the sugar rush. The Chrome team is close to unleashing the product that Google was destined to create. First, though, there are five bugs to swat. Senior writer Steven Levy ([email protected]) also writes about Jay Walker’s in the October issue of Wired.

Infographic: Chrome Enters the Battleground of Browser Development

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from Inside Chrome: The Secret Project to Crush IE and Remake the Web

#Inside Chrome: The Secret Project to Crush IE and Remake the Web

[allcheatscodes]

fable iii xbox 360

http://allcheatscodes.com/fable-iii-xbox-360/

fable iii xbox 360

Fable III cheats & more for Xbox 360 (X360)

Cheats

Unlockables

Hints

Easter Eggs

Glitches

Guides

Achievements

Get the updated and latest Fable III cheats, unlockables, codes, hints, Easter eggs, glitches, tricks, tips, hacks, downloads, achievements, guides, FAQs, walkthroughs, and more for Xbox 360 (X360). AllCheatsCodes.com has all the codes you need to win every game you play!

Use the links above or scroll down to see all the Xbox 360 cheats we have available for Fable III.

Check PC cheats for this game

Genre: Role-Playing, First-Person RPG

Developer: Lionhead Studios

Publisher: Microsoft

ESRB Rating: Mature

Release Date: October 26, 2010

Hints

Getting More Time As King

Being a king or Queen can go by very fast. So To get more time do your first royal tasks then stop at going to the aururoan Cave if you stop there and don’t do the quest thedays will stop counting down.

Zelda Reference

On your way from the Morningwood Fort to Morningwood, you’ll pass through a graveyard. I was randomly reading some of them when I came across a special one. As you take the path to the town, there will be LOTS of tombstones. On the left side as you leave the graveyard, there will be a lamp and some tombstones to the left of it. The closest tombstone to the lamp in the front row is the one you want. I won’t spoil it.

Gold Key Door Locations

Gold Keys are used to open the Gold Key Doors. The Gold Key Doors are located all throughout Albion. You need a Gold Key for each door, to open it. Treasure can be behind each of the doors. Collecting all Silver and Gold Keys will also get you the “I Am The Keymaster Achievement.” Any key can be used for any door, so choose wisely! A fifth Gold Key is in the Sanctuary.

Gold Key Door 1: On your way down the path in the Catacombs under Bowerstone Castle, there is a Gold Door. Since you need a key you have to return later when you have access to the castle with a key. Inside you’ll find 30 Guild Seals!

Gold Key Door 2:In the Sunset House area, enter the main gate and take a right as soon as you set foot on the lawn. A winding path leads back to the Gold Key Door here. It’s directly across from the gazebo. Inside this Gold Key Door you’ll find a Legendary Weapon.

Gold Key Door 3: In Mourningwood you can access the Ossuary through a door in the graveyard after completing two side quests: Bored to Death and Gone but Not Forgotten (which involve Sam, Max and the Normanomicon). In the Ossuary, turn left just as you enter to find the Gold Door. Beyond it is a sarcophagus you can open for a Legendary Weapon.

Gold Key Door 4: In the Reliquary under the Academy in Brightwall Village you can find a well-hidden Gold Key Door. To get to it, you’ll need to complete the Special Delivery (Dweller Camp) and The Ancient Key (Academy) Side Quests. In the latter Side Quest you can lead Saul to a secret library in the Reliquary. Here you can make out a Flit Switch on the wall — it takes four shots from a firearm to activate it. Head up the stairs and through the door on the left. Here is a melee Flit Switch you can smack. It will float down below so vault off the edge and smack it again. After taking on the wave of Hollow Men, stairs and platforms will align to lead to the Gold Key Door. There are five chests in the area beyond called The Prism with the various pieces of the complete Highway Man Costume.

Easy Kill

I’ve killed alot of balverins (the werewolf looking things). I’ve tried lots of different attacks and discovered that white balverins are vulnerable to magic. However I don’t know what the brown are vulnerable to but I will discover that soon.

Duplication Cheat

There’s a quick, easy glitch that allows you to dupe gold or anything else. You just need a 2nd controller with a 2nd character logged into your game. Then use player 1 to “gift” player 2 whatever you want to dupe, then leave player 1’s sanctuary. Have player 2 go into his sanctuary and find the gift. Now have him reject the gift to send it back to player 1. Immediately have player 2 leave his sanctuary then immediately drop him from the game. Now player 1 has a rejected gift in his sanctuary and player 2 will not be saved, meaning when you reload him, he will also have a gift the game didn’t save as being rejected. Dupe! You can dupe up to 100k gold at a time using this.

Boundaries

All enemies can’t go past a certain area, so you should learn where that is, and you can pick them off one at a time because since your are not techincally in their area they won’t attack.

Sand Defense

To easily deal with the sand fury’s cast a large aoe weavedvortex+whatever spell you like and keep it large and the will stay outside it’s range but when you release the spellthey assume it’s over but since vortex keeps going they’ll get caught up in it and take signifigant damage either killing them or giving you a chance to finish them off with a shot from your gun.

Conquer Of Understone

The only enemys enemy hobbe corpses revived by understones defenses as well as a single machine enemy which is only average just hack/slash and shoot your way through and it’ll be over quickly the only threat comes from being overwhelmed.

Shadowed Defense

To easily defeat the shadows and dark minions without risking getting knocked out just cast a weaved spell of vortex and whatever spell you prefer just press b to cast a lv 1 AOE spell and the shadows and minion will not touch you though it’s strongly reccommended not to try on anything stronger.

Portal’s Companion Cube

After you become King (or Queen), you can get a Royal Quest to go meet Page in the old resistance HQ and go track down the crime lord. In one of the cells (where Hobbe is worshipping), by some boxes and crates, is a wooden COMPANION CUBE from Portal!

Change Tatoo Colors

If you collect all of the 30 Auroran flowers, you can then change the color of your tatoos (dye them)other colors at any time by going to the temple in Aurora.

Cheats

Non-stop Money Cheat/Glitch

You need an additional controller for this cheat. Step 1: Start your game with Controller 1 then use Controller 2 to log in with another profile and press START to join the game.

Step 2. Using controller 1, go up to controller 2’s character and press LB to send gifts – you will enter the Sanctuary.

Step 3: A blue bag will appear to the right of your main character. Place all of your main character’s money in the blue bag and then exit the Sanctuary.

Step 4: With controller 2, press START to go to the Sanctuary. Approach the gift bag and check it – BUT SELECT REJECT.

Step 5: Press START to leave the Sanctuary and then press DOWN on the D-Pad while facing your main character to exit the game and press START again to return.

Step 6: Switch to controller 1 and check the gift pedestal for a duplicate of your Gold.

Repeat Steps 2 through 6 to get all the money you want! NOTE: Do NOT go over 999,999,999 Gold or your game will freeze.

Money Cheat And Legendary Weapon (Video Cheats)

Unlockables

Avatar Awards

Crown : Become the ruler of Albion.

Royal Boots : Win the support of the Dwellers.

Royal Shirt : Win the support of the Bowerstone.

Royal Trousers : Win the support of the Swift Brigade.

Easter eggs

Big Blue Box Create Easter Egg

Any time after you have witnessed Reaver’s cruelty outside of his main factory, you will have access to the entrance. Just to the left, as you enter, there is a pile of boxes with a small opening around the side. Head around to the back of it and you’ll find a small crate with the Big Blue Box logo on the sides of it – that’s the developer’s logo!

Lionhead Logo Easter Egg

Access Driftwood over the bridge in in Millfield after completing the side quest “Restoration” (by paying 750 Gold). Go to the end of the beach and turn left to look at the tall Spire. Swim as far as you possibly can towards the Spire and look down into the water and there should be a Lionhead Logo in black at the bottom. It’s not exciting, but it’s neat that it’s out there.

Glitches

Currently we have no glitches for Fable III yet. If you have any unlockables please feel free to submit. We will include them in the next post update and help the fellow gamers. Remeber to mention game name while submiting new codes.

Guides

Currently we have no guides or FAQs for Fable III yet. If you have any unlockables please feel free to submit. We will include them in the next post update and help the fellow gamers. Remeber to mention game name while submiting new codes.

Achievements

Achievement List

The Guild Seal — Unleash your heroic potential. 10G

And So It Begins — Win the support of the Dwellers. 20G

Swift Justice — Win the support of the Swift Brigade. 20G

The Resistance — Win the support of Bowerstone. 50G

Distant Friends — Win the support of Aurora. 20G

The Ruler of Albion — Become the ruler of Albion. 80G

For Albion! — This is where you *spoiler* the great, big *spoiler* and then it all *spoiler*. 80G

Save The Princess! — Rescue the princess from the evil Baron. 10G

Ghost Brothers — Make sure Max and Sam get home in time for tea. 10G

Tragical-Comical-Historical — Help the celebrated thespians Lambert and Pinch put on the world’s greatest play. 10G

The Dark Sanctum — Reinstate an ancient, evil temple. 10G

Island Paradise — Establish the island of Driftwood. 10G

Knight Jumps Chesty — Defeat Chesty at his own game. 10G

Coronation Chicken — Perform a royal judgement while dressed as a chicken. 10G

Spellweaver — Combine two gauntlets to cast a “woven” spell. 5G

Archmage — Cast all 15 possible spell combinations. 20G

Total Warrior — Kill enemies with melee, ranged and spell attacks. 10G

Pull! — Send an enemy flying into the air and kill him while he’s airborne. 10G

Gunning For Glory — Kill 500 enemies using firearms. 20G

If It Bleeds, We Can Kill It — Kill 500 enemies using melee weapons. 20G

Wizard’s Revenge — Kill 500 enemies using magic. 20G

Super Hero — Fully upgrade your Melee, Ranged, and Magic abilities on the Road to Rule. 50G

You Can’t Bring Me Down — Complete Fable III without being knocked out in combat. 50G

My Weapon’s Better Than Yours — Complete 3 unique upgrades on one of the legendary weapons found around Albion. 25G

I’m The Keymaster — Collect all 50 Silver Keys and 4 Gold Keys. 30G

Flower Power — Collect all 30 Auroran flowers. 30G

Gnome Invasion — Destroy all 50 gnomes. 30G

Brightwall Book Club — Collect all 30 rare books for the Brightwall Academy. 30G

Digger — Dig up 50 items. 15G

We Need Guns, Lots Of Guns — Collect all 50 legendary weapons. They won’t all appear in your world, so trade with other Heroes! 20G

Fashion Victim — Collect every item of clothing. 20G

He’s a Woman. She’s a Man — Wear a full set of clothing intended for the opposite sex. 5G

Dye Hippie, Dye — Dye each part of an outfit you’re wearing a different colour and have long hair. 5G

Hand in Hand — Hold hands with someone. 5G

Long Distance Relationship — Get married to another Xbox LIVE player. 10G

Cross-Dimensional Conception — Have a child with another Xbox LIVE player. 10G

Online Merger — Enter into a business partnership with another Xbox LIVE player. 10G

Barrel of Laughs — Kill 30 enemies with explosive barrels. 10G

We Can Be Heroes — Earn 1,000 gold in henchman wages in another Hero’s world. 10G

Kaboom! — Score 2000 on the Mourningwood Fort mortar game. 10G

Lute Hero Tour — Play in each town as a 5 star lute player. 10G

Touched By A Hero — Use touch expressions to interact with 20 different people. 10G

Popularity Contest — Make 20 Friends. 15G

Remodeling — Remodel 5 different houses by changing the furniture. 10G

Magnate Personality — Build a property empire worth 2,000,000 gold. 50G

Crime Spree — Get a 15,000 gold bounty placed on your head. 10G

Henry VIII — As ruler of Albion, get married 6 times and kill 2 of your spouses. 10G

Chest Grandmaster — Unlock all of the chests on the Road To Rule. 40G

Tough Love — Save the maximum amount of Albion citizens. 10G

Adopt Or Die — Adopt a child. 5G