I last made an appearance as an unrelated character during a masquerade event, but now I am joining as a regular player, which is very exciting!

So, what is the show?

As for the show, here is the official synopsis.

Spooky Dice Bag follows a team of would-be heroes as they begin their journey to the magical school Strixhaven. Join them on their adventures with the world’s most incompetent chaperone as they meet new friends and learn to work together as a team.

Spooky Dice Bag is a gameplay-driven show that follows players in an online, ongoing Dungeons and Dragons game, combining the collaborative storytelling of the game with the chaos of friends joking around on the internet. The show has been running since March 2022 and currently spans 138 episodes.

My first appearance was on Episode 118, “Masquerades and Cherades”, as a cleric named Hiriluk Hogan, who was a little much. It was a wonderful time and I was excited to come back eventually. Thankfully, everyone in the party was down with me joining the show in general, and we’re finally getting the ball rolling.

Who will I be playing?

As for who I am playing you’ve already seen the character posted to the blog. Say hello to Shal Noctis, a Level 9 Open Hand Monk of an ancient Selunite order.

Shal is a wanderer in search of knowledge about an incident in his (ancient) history and also happens to be undead. How is that going to play out in this party of Strixhaven students? And how is he going to complicate the already complicated plans of fomenting a dwarven revolution in the Underdark?

Shal’s introduction to the campaign is sure to turn some heads and introduce a little mystery and conflict within the existing party. It’s going to be very exciting to see how it all plays out from session to session.

My first regular appearance playing Shal should be in episode 139 or 140.

Where can you find the show?

You can follow the podcast wherever you stream podcasts, but just in case, here is an embedded version of the show feed from Spotify showing the latest episode.

I also have some plans related to coverage of the show here on my website, but I’m not quite ready to announce those details just yet. In the meantime, listen to the episode archive of Spooky Dice Bag and keep an eye out for upcoming releases!

The post I am Joining the Cast of the Spooky Dice Bag Podcast! appeared first on hpkomics.com.

For now, please click here, or the graphic below, to read the update discussing the history of the column and the future of the new version. The full archive of “Panel By Panel” posts can be found on The Duck Webcomics.

For more details about what is ahead, you can check out the first post of the new column that went up earlier today.

The post Panel By Panel Update – Hello, Goodbye, Hello Again? appeared first on hpkomics.com.

So here we are now, after a fairly eventful Tuesday where an impulse could have easily destroyed everything I have worked on over the past couple of weeks. Thankfully, the process was relatively painless and featured minimal downtime. An issue popped up, but DreamHost’s support team did an excellent job of fixing the problem in a matter of hours. I couldn’t be more pleased.

But, here we are, with the site updated further. It is no longer hpkomics.com/blog, but rather just hpkomics.com. This will be my home on the web for the long-term future and include all the material of the old site, albeit with the active blog element.

So, let me lay out some of the highlights.

• First of all, my portfolio is being refreshed with more examples of work I have done, better grouped than the previous version. I am going to be updating this over time, but there isn’t a lot there just yet.
• Under the portfolio, I am also including the archive of the 2023 Daily Doodle project. This page is purely archival and presents the art I did during that time. All images are present, and the page is preserved as it was by the end of the project. There may be some technical issues here and there, but I will fix those.
• Additionally, I was able to successfully transfer over the archive of Hash It Out, the hashtag game I was running on Mastodon. There are 400 links and images that record the game. This is also an archival page, presented as is.
• My commission info is now available here. I will be adding to the page to make it more visually interesting with additional examples. It will be easier to add testimonials should I want to include them.
• On that note, if you want to commission me, I now have a contact form. It is up for more than just commission queries, but I expect that is how it will be used, primarily.
• Lastly, part of my embracing the old school is the creation of a links page. Please check that out and reach out to me (maybe via that contact form) to join me in recapturing the old web.

That is about it for now. Thank you for your time. Let me know what you think about my decision to revamp this blog into my main website, and let me know if you experienced any of the downtime yesterday.

The post Site Update – Portfolio, Commissions, More appeared first on hpkomics.com.

I have two important locations where this can be done. First, on the sidebar of the site, I have a widget that includes an embedded widget that provides the two latest episodes of the show. You can listen to the show from there if you want, but this is more intended as a “latest” episode feature you can open in a new tab.

Secondly, I have a landing page for the show here in the blog that helps promote what we do and also covers my contributions to the podcast. A larger list of episodes is available on the page and can be played from there. This isn’t a replacement for a dedicated podcast player or the actual Supernatural Selection website itself, but it’s still neat. I hope it helps with discovery.

Going Forward with the Podcast

I will also be posting updates here on the blog as new episodes arrive, as well. Expect to see weekly updates regarding Supernatural Selection and The Distraction Hole.

Anyway, that’s just a simple little update. Please give the show a shot, and you can tell them that the blog sent ya.

The post Supernatural Selection podcast is now available on the blog appeared first on hpkomics.com.

This week I write about the webcomic Phantom Force 3000, by HawkAndFloAdventures; my area of focus this time is exploring their growth in their craft since I last covered their work. Please check it out below.

The full archive of Panel By Panel posts can be found on The Duck Webcomics.

Want more thoughts on comics? Just follow my category link to find those specific posts.

The post Panel By Panel Update – ‘Phantom Force 3000’ appeared first on hpkomics.com.

This was a spontaneous project I took on, and I am very pleased to have stuck with it. Though these essays are not individually all that long, they add up to well over 100 pages of analysis and autobiography. They also showcase emergent writing as I change my approach throughout the 31 essays. There is a fair amount of discovery and honing of my approach as you move down the list.

Ultimately, these are incomplete pieces. Many are just drafts and sketches of concepts. Each piece is a seed for a more significant exploration that I may eventually take on in some manner. However, don’t let their draft status chase you away. They can be quite entertaining.

The method I used to write each piece was to watch a movie, and immediately jump over to my desk to write about the movie with no pre-writing or planning. Much of what I would end up writing was the result of discovery and minor editing once I found a thread I wished to explore. Other than that, each of these was written in the span of and hour and published immediately.

Master List of Halloween Essays on Medium

1. WNUF Halloween Special (2013)
2. House of 1000 Corpses (2003)
3. The Devil’s Rejects (2005)
4. The Unbinding (2023)
5. 3 From Hell (2019)
6. Night of the Living Dead (1990)
7. The Return of the Living Dead (1985)
8. Mad God (2021)
9. Candyman (1992)
10. Terrifier (2016)
11. Zombeavers (2014)
12. I Saw the TV Glow (2024)
13. Lord of Illusions (1995)
14. Fright Night (1985)
15. The Call of Cthulhu (2005)
16. A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)
17. Alien (1979)
18. Terrifier 2 (2022)
19. V/H/S/Beyond (2024)
20. Friday the 13th (1980)
21. It Follows (2014)
22. The House of the Devil (2009)
23. The Blob (1958)
24. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)
25. Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982)
26. Salem’s Lot (2024)
27. The Evil Dead (1981)
28. Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (2012)
29. Mystery Science Theater 3000: Werewolf (1996/1998)
30. Trick ‘r Treat (2007)
31. Halloween (1978)

31 Days of Halloween: Working Toward a Book

I have collected enough material to assemble a small book, so I will explore that route in the future. Between what I already wrote, some additional annotations, and planned illustrations, I will have plenty to keep me occupied regarding this project, even though the month is over. This will be at least a few more months of work. I don’t plan on doing much with these in November. I could use the break.

For now, though. I am just glad to have completed this project, and I hope that you enjoy the essays. Please feel free to check them out on Medium and let me know what you think.

The post 31 Days of Halloween 2024 – The Complete Collection appeared first on hpkomics.com.

For 2025, I want to return to the internet of old—away from the walled gardens of the last few years of my life. Instead, I want to turn to flexibility and control of my work outside of the increasingly stringent demands of the various platforms competing for my time. I’m getting older, and I don’t feel the urge to compete for attention, nor am I feeling the demanding presence of websites that make promises that never quite deliver for me because I cannot devote myself to them fully.

I am writing this as I am set to write my final essay for the 31 Days of Halloween essay project that I took on spontaneously this month. For the project, I decided to dust off my virtually abandoned Medium account and published an essay about a horror film, every day, for 30 days straight – 31 later tonight.

Despite publishing every day, the platform’s promise of discoverability and marketing as a place for writers hasn’t resulted in much exposure for me. The project’s intent wasn’t necessarily about building an audience; I am coping unhealthily with a few months of creative draught and my primary goal was to kickstart my composition habits.

In that regard, the kickstarting was a huge success. I have enough work for a book now, an unintended consequence of the volume of writing, but the lack of engagement through the platform was striking.

Medium to Minor Results

Allow me to be transparent about this. As of 1 pm on October 31st, 2024, here is where my engagement currently stands for the month.

Again, while the primary aim of this project was just to shake off the cobwebs and begin writing again, something feels off. Sure it is more engagement of my work than I would have had, had I not taken on the project. Simply having written something gives it a chance to be seen. But it also seems remarkably low for a month of daily engagement.

The reasoning for the lack of engagement could be any number of things, of course; I may not write very well, or my niche is too narrow (ironic that there are a lot of elder millennials obsessed with horror publishing content about the genre). Perhaps my takes on the horror movies were particularly offensive and scared potential readers off.

I’m not here to gripe. I am just explaining my desire to just retreat from this world of platforms.

Medium is just one of many platforms I looked at. I had also considered launching a Substack, but the more I investigated these online publishing ecosystems the less interesting they became to me. Every platform required more engagement than I felt I was ready to put in. I even began rethinking my use of Wattpad for my fiction. The tools were useful but weren’t doing me any favors, and I would feel anxious about keeping up with the users there.

The existing nature of these platforms encourages time sinks, competition, and to a degree, addiction. I already feel overwhelmed by a desire to compete on Medium over the month, and I don’t like it. I choose to not compete, or more to the point, compete on my terms.

So, I am disengaging from the walled gardens.

Welcome to the Woods

For the weekly podcast, I do with my friends, Supernatural Selection, in the third episode I wrote regarding the Dead Internet Theory, I pursued a thread of discourse emergent around a dark forest theory of the internet. At one point, I wrote this:

Instinctively and culturally, we as internet users recognize the growing threat and toxicity of the mainstream web, and we’re retreating to the undergrowth of our dedicated apps. Hell, we’re recording right now through a Discord chat, that sprung from a dedicated Discord channel for our show, where we and like-minded users have found relative safety in isolation from the larger web. Discord is a rotting, hollowed-out stump in the dark forest.

Earlier in the series my co-hosts and I opined for the older era of the internet, the wilderness of the 1990s. I think my desire to retreat to a dedicated blog in 2025, disconnected from companies and the broader content-centered core of the modern internet, is a desire to recapture a bit of that wilderness.

I do acknowledge that I am using WordPress. WordPress is a massive company in the online publishing space, but it also has proven a convenient set of tools to do what I want, on my terms. They’re not sponsoring me or anything, I just want to be upfront that I recognize the contradiction of saying I am moving from the mainstream internet while using one of its most frequently used tools.

So what is it that I want to do? What are my terms?

As far as my purpose for moving into a dedicated website for my writing, three things come to mind; the first is to have a centralized location where you can find my writing.

I do not want to abandon those platforms and pull my existing writing for them – they are valuable markers for my presence on the internet and I know that they will bring a wanderer into my orbit from time to time. Those aren’t going anywhere. However, future writing will emerge here. As for the older work, you can find those links under Publications. Ideally, you will just visit hpkomics.com for all information regarding me and my work. This blog is under that label, sections off just enough to contain things a bit.

My second purpose is to write more. Writing every day was a huge help to me and I feel good about it. I want to keep that feeling going – just not as intensely as over the course of the previous month. I also want to utilize a more flexible space for writing, where I can write what I want, organize it how I wish, and include the various embeds, images, and drawings that inevitably fall into my work.

My third purpose is to control my data, and messaging, and eliminate fees associated with platforms. I have the webspace, why not use it? I have written a lot of SEO content, so why not use those skills?

So, that is where I am at – surrounded the the scrappy trees of a wilder, less tame internet. It’s time to carve out my space.

Also, pardon the sticks. I’m building, here.

Featured image by Joe from Pixabay

The post I Want Back Into the Forest (why I am ditching platforms) appeared first on hpkomics.com.