I don’t know how annoying AT&T associates are in your area, but in my part of the world they’re out of control! I had an Emily like the one featured here slip in during a pizza delivery and utter the award-winning line, “So, you’re getting some ‘za, huh? I just wanted to talk to you about….” Yes, I would love to talk about downgrading my current internet service while I’m balancing a stack of pizzas and a 2-liter!
No more than a couple weeks ago, one of these salespeople noticed the No Soliciting sign after he rang the doorbell, at which point he pretended it was just a social visit. I opened the door and asked him what’s up. “Oh, nothing,” he said, awkwardly crossing his arms and leaning against the porch support. “So, uh… what’s up with you?“
This one marks the first appearance (disappearance?) of Claude, The Invisible Kid!
Beta readers (aka my girlfriend) asked me if Claude is Gruelgo’s son. The answer is: Does Claude even really exist? Who can say for sure who is eating all of Gruelgo’s food and leaving the toilet seat up? Maybe Claude is just a figment of Gruelgo’s imagination. Perhaps Claude is the product of Birgitta meddling in spooky-wooky supernatural stuff. Or maybe I just never thought that far ahead before I put a dumb gag in my silly comic strip!
Aaaaaand here’s yet another project I’m working on at the moment: Gruelgo.com. It’s home to a webcomic I’ve been playing with for the last couple of years. I’ve decided to go weekly with it since it’s so damn fun. You can subscribe to Gruelgo on Tapas and Webtoon!
It’s been a while since I posted here, but I haven’t given up entirely. It’s just that most of my blogging time is now spent on the video game I’ve been working on, Blood Ship. You can follow development of it on Neurocrasher.com.
Here’s some very early game footage:
Be sure to like and subscribe and all that annoying stuff to keep updated on the development!
The trailer for Terminator: Dark Fate proudly proclaims James Cameron has returned to the franchise as producer, suggesting we’re getting the real sequel to Terminator 2. While I appreciate the effort to correct course (because it worked so well for Superman Returns and Neill Blomkamp’s failed Alien sequel), there’s already a reliable indicator that a third Terminator film is probably going to suck. It’s called Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines.
The teaser trailer which was released for T3 over sixteen years ago looked promising. That’s because it didn’t include any footage from the film. Nick Stahl is so miscast as John Connor that the brief flashforward of him leading the future resistance is embarrassingly unconvincing. Later it’s revealed Sarah died of leukemia, which is code for “Linda Hamilton hated the script.” Coffins and cars are bulletproof, the comic relief is eye-rolling, and the father-son dynamic between Schwarzenegger and Furlong has been entirely abandoned. Admittedly, these are all complaints that (probably) won’t crossover to the new film, but there are a couple of problems which seem inherent to any continuation of the saga.
The main reason the previous film was such a strong sequel is the original left the story wide open. T2 had a great what-if? premise: What would happen if someone discovered the future artifacts left in and around the machine press at the end of the first film? It’s unfortunate the characters of T2 arguably prevented any possibility of Skynet by destroying the very objects which led to its creation in the first place (depending on which understanding of the timeline you subscribe to). T3 ignores this inconvenience with a single line about how the robot uprising was merely postponed. I have big problems with an inevitable Skynet. Determinism isn’t a good look on a series which taught us, “There is no fate but what we make for ourselves.”
The other reason T2 succeeded is its villain. We had never seen anything like Robert Patrick’s T-1000 before. In terms of ingenuity and performance, we never saw anything like it again. The villain in T3, on the other hand, is about as inspired as any decision made in a roomful of studio execs. How could anyone, including James Cameron himself, produce an antagonist even remotely as novel as the T-1000, particularly in a series that ended so definitively back in 1992?
I’m not trying to review a movie I haven’t even seen yet. I’ll probably go see it just because I have always been a sucker for Terminator media and it doesn’t matter what I think of the promotional material. But in the words of Guns N’ Roses: Where do we go now? After seeing Terminator 2 for the first time, I spent many years wondering exactly that.
Last year I began working on a comic strip called Gruelgo (an anagram for my last name) and I wrote like two dozen of these things. The problem was I could rarely come up with good strips involving the title character, but had a ton of ideas involving his witchy wife, who was only supposed to be a supporting character. Unfortunately, the world already has a comic strip about a witch, so I abandoned the project.
