104: my mutant power.
Hullo.
I’m going to keep this tight today, as I’ve got a lot of work backing up, and really need to leave space to get on with it. Or, at least, leave space to procrastinate more by putting dumb puns on the Internet. I know my brand.
Contents!
Stuff out!
WicDiv is Lit
Never Say Never Again
So glad
Not Southampton
Loopy Yap
Byyyyeeee!!!
****
Peter Cannon 3, which is mid-way point of our story and our cynical ultraviolent issue. The notes for this should be online in the next few days where I go into it more. It’s a turn the volume up issue, which sets us up for next issue, which is something completely different.
(The whole team have been talking about how amazed we’ve got to to do issue 4 online, which says a lot. We’re very amused and proud)
Preview here. Have fun.
Oh – Cinema Purgatorio 17 is also out, the penultimate issue, and so the penultimate part of Modded. This is also filed under “stuff I’m not sure how I’m getting away with.” I get to do a lot of that at the moment. I highly recommend it.
*
The Image solicits for June are up. Jamie’s main cover is being kept secret for now, for spoilerific reasons, but we did reveal our alternate cover by Olivia Jaimes.
We couldn’t be prouder or more amused. We wanted to do a cover which would simultaneously be completely unexpected and delight everyone, and thought we’d try to get in contact with the mysterious powerhouse behind Nancy’s revival. We did! She said yes. We all grin excitedly.
Oh, talking about Previews…
We’re also on the cover of the June previews with this image Jamie’s done. Which is lovely. I suspect he’ll end up doing a print of it.
Yes, this is some late-period Imperial Phase revival going on.
Er… we sold out of the 4th printing of DIE 1, and as demand has been so outrageous, we decided to go back for a fifth printing. I’m sorry I said it would be the final – I understood it would be, but it the urge was so clearly there it seemed necessary. I’ll be quieter next time. We’re going to massively overprint this one to see if we can really make it the last one. Details here.
Oh – we also include a lovely quote by Matthew Mercer of Critical Role.
“A deliciously dark Phantom Tollbooth-like journey told through a lens of broken humanity and a deconstruction of the role-playing game’s roots. I am entranced.”
Which is delightful.
Oh – DIE 5 out next week, where our first arc comes to its climax. It’s lots of fun.
*
Bombsheller put up the full gallery of photos from the party, which are well worth going to nose at.
It also gives me a chance to say a thing I meant to say last time which I forgot to include.
The party ran on a password system. You said it, you got in. Jazzlyn was mainly on the door.
The password was “Dio invited me to the party.”
To which Jazzlyn answered “And he’s so glad you came.”
I love that.
Last week I mentioned I’d be going to the above con on June 15th? I said it was at Southampton. I was wrong. It’s at Southend, which is a very different place. Details here.
*
Geek and Sundry did an interview about DIE (including both comic and game details) which prompted Jody Houser to post a photo of the playtest we did the day after NYCC.
Which was a lovely time. The game’s off with some playtesters, and now multiple people have read and seemingly understood the manual. This is a surprise.
Jamie and I have both been yapping in podcasts.
Jamie was interviewed by the always-good sktchd about his work. This was done the morning after the ECCC party, so Jamie says he was a little loopy. Talking from experience, loopy Jamie is the best Jamie. Love Loopy Jamie.
Meanwhile, my friend Mink’s podcast comrade Fish was away, so she asked me to step in and join their Tabletop Top Table for an episode. This is a podcast where both people bring a list of their five favourite boardgames in a specific vague category. I was brought in to present my five favourite guessing games. Oh – this was the day after I got off the plane from Seattle, so I’m loopy too.
Loopy!
*
Ranking Roger of The Beat and Scott Walker passed this week.
The Beat have been on my mind recently, after the Specials/Beat TOTP episode was covered in Chart Music, and I’ve been moving through their music. Two Tone was music of my early youth, and I came back to in my teenage years, and they’re a pure burst of basically everything. Mirror in the Bathroom is the single if you’re not aware, and Too Nice To Talk Too is the one I’ve been obsessing over in the last month, but you can’t go wrong. It’s a far too early to lose him.
But Scott Walker is the one who actually ties into my own biography most tightly, and the tell is always “are multiple songs already on the WicDiv playlist.”
It’s a famously weird career – from the pop early group stuff, into the weirder solo material, into the Singing For Money stage before a complete dive into genuinely proper experimental work for everything since post-1995’s Tilt. I’d start with Scott 4, but Scott 3 is probably a friendlier place.
I’d start with Scott 4, because I literally did. The opening of the Seventh Seal is immediately a “Wait – what is this?” and I’m in. It’s strikingly strange if you haven’t seen the Bergman movie (which I hadn’t at the time, so had no idea it’s basically a reading of the Wikipedia synopsis) and even more strikingly strange when you have (because it is, basically, a reading of the Wikipedia Synopsis, as performed by a fallen angel.)
He sharpened a core point of my aesthetic. Back in 2004, when I met Tom Nullpointer (now of game dev Big Robot) we ended up talking about Walker. Tom is into minimalis generative electronic music, so perhaps predictably wasn’t a fan. After I gushed about Scott 4 he visibly shuddered and noted “but it’s so melodramatic.”
And my inner voice whimpered: but I like melodramatic.
The Seventh Seal is, like the movie, a discussion and meditation about death. Fairly obviously, it’s on the Wicdiv playlist, but it’s also a song which I connect with what I suspect is the closest I’ve ever come to dying. It’s very much One Of Those Phonogram Stories I Didn’t Get To Tell.
I only realised it in retrospect. At the time, it was just all strange hospital rooms and incomprehensible diseases. I spent a week in hospital, with my organs going off. Come Friday, the doctors see my vitals going off, and figure it’s worth just opening me up and seeing what they can remove. So this 23 year old me is told on Friday that I’m likely going to end up with a Colostomy Bag, perhaps for life, with their best guess.
So they knock me out and open me up and when I come to the cheery doctor tells me it was just my appendix. It had been missed in all the tests because it was on the other side of my body. My mutant power.
It’s only after I’m well out of hospital I realise that I had this bomb inside me for a week, and how real that was. At the time, I was in hospital, having lost a lot of weight I didn’t have then, and just a mess, and recovering so I can be discharged.
It’s a week since I fell to the floor in pain and rushed to hospital. It’s only now that one of my room-mates brings in a CD player and a bunch of CDs from the top of my pile by my bed. I don’t blame them for the slowness, because my room was basically a plague pit. This is peak Kohl period, so a week without music at all was hard. Not as hard as organs going off on a tizzy fit, but not good. I’d been reduced to singing loudly Kevin Rowlands covers in the room-sized shower, bawling enthusiastically, which at least was true to Rowlands’ take.
Anyway – the pile of CDs arrive and the I turn to them hungrily. The first two things I turn to are The Flaming Lips the Soft Bulletin and Scott 4. I stop both within the first song, a teary mess, unable to take it. The ordeal and the absence, I couldn’t take music that powerful. Instead, I selected a few more banal, easier records to ease me in. Eventually I was reacclimatised, and listened again, but it took a while.
But I will never forget those few minutes when I shook with numinous terror at something this beautiful and terrible could exist in this world.
TL:DR: Big fan, do like.
As I said I’d keep this short, and I’ve blown it by writing about Scott Walker, let’s actually keep this bit short.
I finalised issue 44 of WicDiv and passed it over to C. That’s the end of the story proper. Striking that off my whiteboard was sad and solemn. Later, I realised it was on what would have been my Dad’s birthday. I immediately ran to check the calendar to see if any of the remaining WicDIv deadlines or releases fell on any symbolically loaded dates.
I think I’m safe.
Kieron Gillen
London
27.3.2019