Sean Äaberg

THE WÜRSTREICH EXPANDS

I know I’ve posted this here already but… I posted this picture of the entire plotted out Würstreich map on the EXPANSIONING Kickstarter! The implication is lots of new DD material in the future!

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I became a vegetarian when I was fifteen or so. I did it for animal rights & environmental reasons. I stopped being a vegetarian when I was 22 because I found that alienating people wasn’t working with the way I wanted to approach life at the time, also I got into eating weird street meat with my old friend Peatre. We would eat things like tongue & brain & other organ meats in Oakland Chinatown & from various Taco Trucks, it was great. It was at this time that I accepted the...

HAND OF DOOM PROCESS

I found the process art for the Hand of Doom - cool to see & I’m glad I took process photos of these things, a sideways blessing of constantly doing social media content for the last… twenty years!

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Part of why I am politically homeless is that I grew up as a hard leftist, but old school style, all about class consciousness & solidarity. As I grew up, I realized that my politics didn’t match up with reality & were driving me nuts. Plus class & race were so aligned with any Bay Area political thought, I just couldn’t get down. I got into Satanism & extreme individualism as a reaction to all that & as a way to break free. After a couple years that stopped scratching...

THE TEMPLE OF MADNESS

The Temple of Madness in 8-bit! It phases in & out of reality.

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Katie grabs the local free papers for me from the areas she takes her hike at. I’m always interested in how these small papers carry themselves, who advertises, what kind of articles are written, etc. These papers are just as boring as the Free Weeklies of the city, but more of a surprise to me. Probably because of having read thousands of free city weeklies for four decades, I’ve read dozens of small-town weeklies for a few years. Still, there is the opportunity to surprise & find so...

SEANIC LEGOS

Jeff Stahl selected LEGOs to match my color scheme! Perfect choice!

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I write two of these on Fridays because I keep the Sabbath!

I’ve been writing about the general incitations for the new expansion boxes on THE EXPANSIONING Kickstarter. These updates have got me thinking about those formative years & how much stuff I was soaking up all the time. Or really how important those early discoveries were to me. My general modus operandi of late has been to express things that are important to me, or bring me great pleasure. The audience can feel it. I st...

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I am aware that I have a unique brain & unique life circumstances. It is with this knowledge that I go into not assuming I know anything about my audience or potential audience. It’s also 2024 & things are topsy turvy. I deliberately don’t go for a narrow assumption & I expect people to be thoughtful with me. The connections I have with people are specific, not broad. HP Lovecraft couldn’t have known that some of his biggest fans were Crust Punks in the East Bay in the 1990s...

COLORS

We’re running a bunch of ads for THE EXPANSIONING Kickstarter & someone commented “Why do they use such horrible colors?” It’s funny, thinking that some colors are horrible, I love my color palette, I know it’s intense, but it stands out. We were just at a game store last week & DUNGEON DEGENERATES still stands out on the shelf compared to all the muted earth tones being used!

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A big part of being an artist is being a filter. My filter is very sensitive to certain things, at least consciously. Certain cultural things drive me nuts, others make me unbelievably happy & are life affirming. My sense of disgust & hatred of things has really softened over time. I used to feel real revulsion at certain things. Now they don’t bug me so much. It makes me & life more tolerable in general. But it’s still there. Like a turd in the corner, a bit of rotting meat l...

THE WART LORD PROCESS

I found the process art for the Wart Lord Scroglin King - having lost my old ability at drawing was a terrible loss but it actually gives me an appreciation for what I did! Go back the Expansioning on Kickstarter if you haven’t already!

DOOOOOOOM!

The EXPANSIONING is going really well, thanks, but it still needs a push from you! We want to increase the amount of DUNGEON DEGENERACY in the world & can only do that with your help! Find us on Kickstarter!

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My kids try to make everything into some kind of moral story. We watched Long Legs yesterday (which was great, Nicholas Cage was great & gross) & they tried to do it with that. I insisted that it was a mystery, that was the point of the story, it wasn’t some kind of morality play. I worked actively to move beyond Good & Evil & that kind of binary thinking a long time ago. This way of looking at the world gets me in trouble with people who want to see everything in terms of g...

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I keep having dreams about living in different, old houses. I decided that this means something about change so I started to think about that a bit. I love old stuff, not out of some sense that old times were better, I just like aesthetic cohesion. It’s harder to see that in the chaos of the present, while it’s easier to cherry-pick from the past or project a vision into the future. We have a lot of people that are clinging to the past, like time traveling hoarders. We have people so obse...

WEIRD DREAM

I dreamed we had just moved into a big old Victorian House I keep dreaming about new houses- we were going on some kind of road trip in a crammed Volkswagen Beetle. I was driving, I was driving ridiculously, on the sidewalk, through people’s yards, but finally I came upon the new Kamala Harris bridge in a very futuristic city- I remember thinking in the dream, “What did she do to get a bridge named after her?” The dream also had a whole Christmas section & a young Will Ferrell was t...

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We’ve been running a webstore for a long time but it got serious in 2012 when we realized we could move a lot of stuff with our magazine PORK. We’d table festivals & easily outsell everybody. In 2015, the tone of the country changed & it was harder to get PORK out there & pins & patches were oversaturated. Bare jackets became more commonplace. It was time to pivot. I had realized that I wanted to do some illustrations for an RPG back in 2006 or so & did work for Labyri...

MÖTORWÜRST

Just a bit of fun.

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I’ve been watching this Azerbaijan Country Life vlog. It’s so relaxing & is such an aesthetically pleasing thing. They work the land, make their traditional foods & are surrounded by flowers & animals that are amazingly not trying to kill each other. A grandma & grandpa just doing their thing. I know it’s a project of controlled reality, highly edited & curated. But! I used to dream of living amongst Punks who would live that way after the nuclear apocalypse. Totally...

DUNGEON DEGENERATES: THE EXPANSIONING KICKSTARTER

New Kickstarter incoming! You asked for it, we're doing it: THREE new expansion boxes for DUNGEON DEGENERATES: Hand of Doom, coming to Kickstarter July 30th at 8 am PST! This time, we have three tiers of discounted pledge slots, with the earliest birds getting all three expansion boxes for just $90! That's 40% off of the retail price! So pledge early to get the lowest possible price! The entire DUNGEON DEGENERATES catalog is going to be available (except the miniatures) with Canada & EU f...

DUNGEON DEGENERATES: THE EXPANSIONING

New Kickstarter incoming! You asked for it, we're doing it: THREE new expansion boxes for DUNGEON DEGENERATES: Hand of Doom, coming to Kickstarter July 30th at 8 am PST! This time, we have three tiers of discounted pledge slots, with the earliest birds getting all three expansion boxes for just $90! That's 40% off of the retail price! So pledge early to get the lowest possible price! The entire DUNGEON DEGENERATES catalog is going to be available (except the miniatures) with Canada & EU f...

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When I was young I considered myself a Progressive because I believe in progress. I was done with anarchists, anarcho-communists & leftism. Then I realized that progress is defined differently by different people. Progress is an agenda, not an inevitability. More rights, more freedoms, sure, but people have a real hard time agreeing on which freedoms are okay & what they mean. This was made really clear to me by the environmentalist & Black sides of leftism, what does progress mea...

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I’ve been watching Portland & Multnomah County council meetings for the last year & a half or so. I stopped because I realized that the confines of these meetings were shutting down my imagination for how I want Portland to be. Taking my stuff before the bean-counters or allowing them space in my brain is the last thing I should do when trying to make a change, they should know my plan & be ready for it upon arrival. I had to open up my mind to the full Smörgåsbord of creative...

GOBLINS

Speaking of Goblins, I’m working with Mustafa Bekir on developing new art for DUNGEON DEGENERATES, turns out I have a very specific idea of what Goblins look like! Not surprising.

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The land needs us. Reality needs us. We went to Mount Hood yesterday, it’s a beautiful area but it reminded me that we have to be gardeners of the places we call home. Places that have been allowed the long process of rewilding are one thing, but allowing our cities to go to seed is a waste. Keeping things orderly, trimming weeds, sweeping streets, picking up trash, painting walls, it ultimately doesn’t cost that much or take that much time or energy but people have been trained to expect...

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I have become one of those corny “every day is a blessing” people. I looked down my nose HARD at those types when I was growing up. I was cynical without having experienced the neverending Smörgåsbord of life. I was MAD magazine cynical, I later saw this as Simpsons cynical & then Daily Show cynical. It's an unearned, protected cynicism that doesn’t actually understand or experience the world. A worldview learned from jesters. A turtle hiding in its shell. Over time I saw that I j...

THE NEXT KICKSTARTER!

New Kickstarter incoming! You asked for it, we're doing it: THREE new expansion boxes for DUNGEON DEGENERATES: Hand of Doom, coming to Kickstarter July 30th! This time, we have three tiers of discounted pledge slots, with the earliest birds getting all three expansion boxes for just $90! That's 40% off of the retail price! So pledge early to get the lowest possible price! The entire DUNGEON DEGENERATES catalog is going to be available (except the miniatures) with Canada & EU friendly ship...

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I listen to a lot of different opinions about how society should work. From deep philosophy of the ancients, to secret societies using occult knowledge to politicians fishing for votes. A lot of these opinions are made by people commenting on the statements of said politicians or philosophers. My opinion in general is that society should work. I don’t want politicians & bureaucrats dealing with anything besides competently solving problems. One of those problems is that people have stro...

FANTASY

Just a reminder, of the point of all this. Also, I want to see Gothic Script Graffiti, would evoke Rammellzee!

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People spend so much time in the virtual world the physical world is hurting. Like a yard that no one is paying attention to, weeds are going to seed, the desirable plants are unwatered & dying off, pests are all over & it looks like a mess. We were out in the Montavilla neighborhood of Portland the other day putting out postcards & flyers, the shop owners were hungry for interaction & connection. Portland is slowly getting it back together, slowly. The whole place feels like ...