NEW PROJECTS!

I'm working on a bunch of stuff right now, the first personal zine I've worked on for over twenty years & the Würstreich for D&D 5E, there are a bunch of other things too, but these two are the ones that will probably come out sooner than other things.

From the Würstreich for D&D 5E

"Dungeons & Dragons was the first role playing game I played. I liked how the title said what it was about. I like both dungeons & dragons, & to combine the two is awesome. I played AD&D before I could read with an older friend. We set up on a green, shag rug. There were just books, paper, pencils & mysterious velvet bag. The idea of creating an entire world using just my imagination was incredible, I could remember the feeling of populating my mind with outlandish imagery & I loved it. It felt incredible. Up to that point my brain felt like a black void, with the imagination unleashed it lit up with fantastical imagery. I was also captured by the velvet Royal Crown bag full of gem-like polyhedral dice. I didn’t even understand that they were dice, variable generators, I thought they were toy gems that you would use like money. I would later spot AD&D books in various book-stores & be entranced by their covers. Especially the ones by Erol Otus with his weird & unique color schemes. Finally I bought the game for myself in 1986 when I was ten. I bought it when we were on vacation in Montana. It was on sale at a hobby store. This was the red box of basic D&D. I was getting heavy into Fantasy & Science Fiction, especially Tolkien. It’s important to note that video games were growing exponentially at this point, & were influencing me as well. What I didn’t like was the D&D pulp fantasy, bronze-age feel. I wanted to roleplay in a setting similar to the Terry Gilliam movie “Jabberwocky”. I am specifically reminded by the quote from Monty Python & the Holy Grail, the king rides past two peasants. “How do you know he's a king?” asks one. “He hasn't got shit on him.” I felt like this aspect was missing from the sterile fantasy that was aimed at the public. So, eventually I started to create my own world that would lead to the creation of the Würstreich. The angle is from the gutter."

From PROBLEMS

"I’m 46, I don’t feel old, but I feel older. I haven’t done one of these kinds of personal zines in over twenty years, it’s about time! Lots has happened & the world has a lot of problems to address. I’m feeling creatively & personally satisfied, so this is more about external issues. The world is riddled with problems & I want to weigh in on them or at least ways to approach reality that are more functional. The zine is called Problems for a bunch of reasons. As a nod to my Punk roots, the Sex Pistols have a song called “Problems”, as a Portland Punk reference to the band P.R.O.B.L.E.M.S. with a special dedication to their dead singer Jonny Jewels & I have had more problems personally than I ever have. But, these problems feel manageable to me, like a checklist, I don’t feel like they are going to overtake me. I am very lucky to not be among the Dead Rockers, because I came very close. I use my gift of existence to bring some strategies forward. I used Biden on the cover not because I want to use him like some scary, paper tiger, but because he seems like such an Alfred E. Neuman character. An example of a non-threatening,  transitional president embodying the decrepit nature of the country. A feeble figurehead. We’ve got to make the choice between a dysfunctional, flailing country looking for false hope (Obama or Trump) when we need leadership that speaks clearly that we’ve got a lot of disciplined, hard work to do to steer this country away from a crash landing. I’m willing to put in the work. There are no easy answers, this is just going to take hard, dedicated work & patience, like everything in life. I don’t try to make this into a competition between capitalism & communism, a left/right split is inherently dysfunctional & you need elements of both to thrive. Unity & common cause are more important right now than ideological disagreements."