This day in Great Outdoor Fight history: No strip; must be taking a while to find Sound And Motion.

So I’m about to go to the eye doctor and may not be able to see things clearly when I get back, so let me leave you with this before I go: Zach Weinersmith has some ideas for new chess pieces; I expect to see some of you playing on a board with Bishop-Kickers, Wilderness Preservers, and Gortak The World-Eater at the next BAH!Fest. Get to it, nerds.

Spam of the day:

your cheating partner notice

See, this isn’t very clear. Are you notifying me that my partner is cheating, or is this notice that I have been assigned a cheating partner? If it’s the latter, is this a random thing?

your partner cheating on you

Thank you for the clarification. I’m not sure what you’re getting at, though — Chuck, my EMT partner, doesn’t ride on any other nights or with any other crew. I think maybe you got me confused with somebody else!

This day in Great Outdoor Fight history: We discover who has a gigantic and deep-seated fury at the world.

• Here’s the thing about webcomics — as a wide-ranging method of distribution featuring every possible type of story and creator, whoever you are, you’re going to be rubbing somebody the wrong way. The best-known creators attract the greatest scrutiny, naturally, because a wider audience also gives you a greater chance to be exposed to somebody who just isn’t going to like you. Nobody is universally liked¹.

  Except Anthony Clark.

  His strips delight everybody; he’s the go-to colorist in webcomics; in person he is the sort of person that makes you think to yourself How can one guy be so damn likeable?² A friend of mine who reads webcomics but is mostly what you’d call a webcomics civilian expressed once that any day that started with a new comic from Clark was automatically a good day. And let us not forget the greatest expression of back-and-forth jam comics to ever exist, the Anthony Clark-Emmy Cicierega collaborations known as Laserpony Studios.

  And as of today, Clark’s been doing his Beartato comics for ten years. Beartato, Reginald, Harrison, Gary, and the other agents of whimsy came into public at the same time as The Great Outdoor Fight was running — they could not be any different, but they are just as enduring and delightful to read. Happy Anniversary, Anthony. Your comics are good and you should feel good.

• Via the twitterfeed of John Kovalic comes the news that the the John Locher award (for student editorial cartooning) is now open to webcomics and graphic novelists. Any full-time students between the ages of 17 and 25, you have until 15 April to get in your application, and since opportunities for editorial cartooning are thin on the ground, may I suggest you also drop a line to Matt Bors in anticipation of The Nib’s revival later this year?
• A correction and an additional bit of info from Fleen Senior French Correspondent Pierre Lebeaupin, as regards our mention of Boulet yesterday:
  

  A quick dispatch to let you know that Soaring Penguin Press is, shall we say, incentivizing preorders of the first volume of Boulet’s “Notes” by offering his 24-hour comic the Gaeneviad to the first people who preorder.

  Speaking of which, I’m afraid the ten volumes of Notes are not really “and counting”, as Boulet announced some time ago he would keep doing notes but no longer collect them on paper after volume 10 (sorry, I can’t find the reference at the moment).

  Well, that’s both terrific and disappointing new, respectively. For those who didn’t see it, Gaeneviad is online here, and like his earlier 24 hour comic, Darkness, it’s a delight. Not really a surprise, really, since everything he does is a delight.

Spam of the day:

Look what I found growing in your stomach!

What the hell are you doing in my stomach? Get out of there!

_______________
¹ If you’re thinking of Ryan North as an exception, I have it on good authority that some find him to be disturbingly tall, unrepentantly Canadian, and a setter of bad examples to our youth with respect to holes.

² There is a speculation that Clark being so likeable could theoretically make him unlikeable to a certain sort of deeply insecure and damaged person, but to date the existence of such people remains unproven. It’s possible that CERN would have to get involved to find anyone of such a sour disposition.

This day in Great Outdoor Fight history: We see how fallen fighters are removed from The Acres.

• Speaking of, Happy Birthday to the nearest thing this broken world will ever have to a real-life amalgam of Achewood characters, KC Green. He is the best parts of the entire cast except Pat, because Pat’s a jerk and KC is no jerk. Celebrate with some of his comics, or perhaps by pre-ordering Graveyard Quest.
• TCAF announced its second lineup of special guests today, and oh boy is this one talent-heavy show. You got your Boulet (appearing in conjunction with the launch of the English translation of his 10-volumes-and-counting Notes series), you got your Faith Erin Hicks (launching the first volume of a new trilogy from :01 Books), you got your Emi Lenox (launching a new boo, Plutona, co-created with Jeff Lemire), and I guess that means you also got your Jeff Lemire (also launching the second print collection of Descender).

  In addition, the very international character of TCAF’s guest list is on full display, with creators from Germany, Portugal, Japan, Italy, and the very odd lands of Canada and New Jersey [NB: jenniferhayden.com; no link since I’m getting a security warning, but you can visit if you like]. TCAF runs at the Toronto Reference Library on 14 and 15 May.

• It’s Big Round Number season in webcomics — 4000-plus for R Stevens, 5000-plus for Jennie Breeden, and now 5400-plus for Brad Guigar, taking 14 February as the 16th anniversary of his descent into madness pro cartooning, and counting up contributions from five different series plus Patreon naughties and miscellaneous strips that may not rise to level of ongoing series yet.

  The race is not always to the swift nor the battle to the strong, but I think you can bet that cartooning success goes to whoever is stubborn enough to keep improving, keep showing up every day, and to keep developing a laugh that will frighten off scavengers in the night. Happy Big Round Numberday, Brad!

Spam of the day:

Hello Stella. it’s Mike. can you please send my photos from Jake’s wedding? thanks.

I think I’ll reply with this link.

This day in Great Outdoor Fight history: on Saturday, Ray put on the hat and on Sunday, a small band made for the Northeast corner. Today, it’s Leander, The Latino Health Crisis, and a 29-Minute Ab Minder.

• It’s been a bit less than three years since Jeff Smith announced that he’d be launching a webomic called Tüki Save The Humans (and therefore about three and a half since I talked the webcomics model with Smith’s publisher and wife, and one of my very favorite people in comics, Vijaya Iyer); it’s been about 27 months since Tüki launched; it’s been a bit less than two years since it took an NCS award; it’s been a bit less than a year and a half since the first reprint issue of T¨ki hit the stands¹; about a year since Tüki chapter three wrapped up online; about 11 months since Tüki chapter three saw print, and a week or two since the print release of chapter four².

  But the last page of chapter three is still the most recent page online.

  When Iyer and I talked webcomics, when Tüki was announced, the plan was to tell a chapter over about two months of MWF updates, then print it in a traditional floppy comic, then take a break before the next chapter. There were delays (Smith has drawn a lot of pages in his career, and must be careful when repetitive stress injuries even suggest themselves; there was a very scary period of extended hiatus heading into the last act of BONE where I wondered if he’d ever be able to finish), but the model held: online first, then print (presumably, eventually trade paperback style re-reprints). But the webcomic approach isn’t for everybody; hopping over to it isn’t something that will work for everyone that tries it³.

  And that’s okay. This page is devoted to webcomics, sure, but it’s just as much about those creators that make comics that reflect their own voices, comics that — crucially — they own, and Jeff Smith embodies that as much as anybody that’s currently working in the medium. I was buying the issues of Tüki anyway, and I’ll continue to do so because Jeff Smith comic.

  Maybe these new comics go online, maybe they don’t. Smith and Iyer tried something outside their comfort zone, and the fact that they’ve retired the effort is neither evidence that it can’t work for anybody, nor that it was done poorly — it didn’t meet their needs, and that’s all that matters. There’s still more stories of the first human to leave Africa coming, and they’re gonna be good.

• Know what else we’re gonna see plenty more of? Autobio comics from Jennie Breeden, who was one of the first people I met in this crazy business — one may recall the wisdom that she shared as a just-jumped-into-comics-as-the-job newbie at SDCC in 2006 — and she remains hard at work with The Devil’s Panties seven damn days a week. Which brings us to yesterday and the 5000th comic, or actually the 5189th, as she missed the actual 5000th on … let’s see … this day.

  Breeden joins a select group of completely bonkers creators who have hit this threshold, and we at Fleen both congratulate her and urge her to seek professional help immediately. Mostly the congratulations, though.

Spam of the day:

honey,how are you

Careful, not everybody likes honey.

_______________
¹ And when Smith and I agreed that Dylan Meconis should have won the NCS award; he’s as humble and generous a guy as ever lived.

² It was due on 3 February 2016, but widespread shipping issues meant it got pushed back a week in much of the country.

³ The Foglios have found it tremendously successful; Carla Speed McNeil largely released Voice online before printing, but both Third World and the currently-running Chase The Lady eight pages at a time in Dark Horse Presents. Coincidentally, the Foglios seem to do fewer side-jobs, whereas McNeil is also working on No Mercy and shorter jobs all over the place (Wonder Woman, Smut Peddler, Avatar stories, etc).

This day in Great Outdoor Fight history: Still waiting for the Fight to start; things really kick in tomorrow, though.

• Ordinarily, I’d have run the story that linked to the art as the first item, but this is too big to go anyplace but the lead slot; I trust that Kate will understand. Re: our call two days ago for book purchasers to push Raina Telgemeier from holding 60% of the New York Times Best Seller List to 70%; that didn’t take long. Thanks, book purchasers! Now hold on until Ghosts comes out and make it 80%!
• Now then: Kate Beaton, who all right-thinking folk regard as a treasure and one of the very best creators in both comics, and in any creative medium from the Great White North. Beaton was tapped to provide a show poster for TCAF, and it’s a beaut. More than all the geekly references, it’s also terrific because the message could not be any more clear: TCAF¹ is for everyone. Be sure to thank Beaton when you see her at the Toronto Reference Library on the 14th & 15th of May.
• I got a press release and some sample pages from a guy named Derrick Johnson recently, and I wasn’t going to do much with it — another first release of a webcomic in print form, I see those literally every day, and mention only the ones that grab me in the eyeballs and don’t let go. But something about Johnson’s missive did grab me, and I wasn’t sure exactly what for a couple of minutes. Then it hit me:
  

  I’m a comics creator, that posted comics regularly to my website for a 4 year period in 2007-10. After a long hiatus, I decided to collect the best strips from that time and self-publish a book, The Best of Colored Comics, Volume 1.

  Everybody catch that? 2007-10. Comics creators (like artistic types of all sorts) that I know have a definite tendency to be their own worst critics. The most well-balanced of them can stand to look at their most recent work without berating themselves, but maybe on an 18 month rotating cycle. That is, today’s work is pretty okay, anything from last year is barely adequate, and older than 18 months is fit only to be burned. Of course, 18 months from now, today’s work will fall firmly into the burn category. Thus does skill push itself to improve, on the back of total neuroticism.

  So to read that Johnson worked at Colored Comics for four years, then to set it aside for five with plans to print, then to resume? That’s an act of supreme bravery. The samples that Johnson sent along, I can tell which are older and which are more recent; the new comics on the site reveal that regularly updating or no, Johnson’s been practicing and improving. I can’t imagine what it was like to go through work almost a decade old to prepare it for print, but it’s the most self-challenging and fundamentally optimistic act I’ve seen in quite a while.

  Confidence is a major part of creativity, the feeling that putting a part of yourself out there won’t come back to bite you in the ass, that the random cruelties of a thousand internet griefers won’t drag you down. So yeah — if you’re looking for what early work (that improves as you read it, and gets better still past the end) looks like, Derrick Johnson’s your guy. Here’s hoping he continues to develop without falling to the 18 month neurosis, because I want to see just how good he gets. The Best of Colored Comics, volume 1 is US$15 from Johnson, and pay what you want at Gumroad. Check ‘er out.

• Oh, and 4000 is a hell of a big number, minus maybe a couple dozen guest strips, plus more than 700 for the newspapers. Happy Big Round Number Day, Rich Stevens. You’re a goddamn inspiration.

Spam of the day:

Discount COSTC0 MEMBERSHIPS

So I’ve gone from being on the sexy MILFs spam list to the bootleg warehouse-club membership spam list? Guess it’s just a matter of time before I end up on the oatmeal-and-diabetes-meds spam list, then the prepaid funeral services spam list. Welp, it was nice knowing you.

_______________
¹ Indeed, comics, and nerdery, and all fandoms you can think of.

This day in Great Outdoor Fight history: No strip; I suspect that SoRod is napping while Beef makes plans.

• We have mentioned several times the fact that Yuko Ota & Ananth Hirsh’s Lucky Penny (long delayed by repetitive stress injuries in Ota’s drawing hand … so she taught herself to draw with the other muthascratchin’ hand) is approaching publication. Should be here next month from the good folks at Oni Press), and to celebrate, there’s a contest that could net you three (three!) copies of Lucky Penny, if you’re funny enough:
  

  Make up a steamy romance novel for Penny to read for a chance to win copies of Lucky Penny! #LuckyPennyPicks

  See, Penny reads terrible-slash-awesome sounding romance novels (excerpts of which have been shared), and if you come up with the best title for a novel out of Penny’s collection between now and Sunday (Valentine’s Day!) at 11:59pm PST, you could get a copy of the standard edition of Lucky Penny, plus copies of the Kickstarter-exclusive softcover and hardcover editions. Details at the Oni blog, along with the rest of the rules. Think up your best romance novel title (nothing too creepy or rude but definitely suggestive would be my advice) and good luck to all.

• The Cartoon Art Museum continues its traveling roadshow of events while it is between permanent locations; as in the past several months, the Third Thursday of February (that would be the 18th) will see CAM set up in the new location of the American Bookbinders Museum at 355 Clementina Street in San Francisco. Fun starts at 5:30pm and runs until 8:00pm, and will feature live art demos, trivia, food & drink, and is free and open to the public. Creators on hand this month will be Myisha Haynes, Melissa Pagluica, and Liz Mayorga. Check out their work — lots of great looking stuff there.

Spam of the day:

Breaking Story: Trump has been taking a ‘smart pill’ – you have to read this..

If this is Trump on smart pills, I don’t want to see what he’s like when he runs out.

This day in Great Outdoor Fight history: No strip; Beef is undoubtedly deciding who among the gathering hordes will be invited to roll with Son of Rodney.

So much going on, I barely know where to start. Let’s just go in the order of when I scribbled notes to myself.

• Longtime Friend o’ Fleen Eben Burgoon started in [web]comickry with spy spoof Eben07, then moved onto action-adventure spoof B-Squad (and, almost uniquely among creators, managed to repurpose a failed Kickstart into success with the first volume). He’s back with more weird deconstruction of the ragtag-team concept as B-Squad volume 2 launched on the ‘starter yesterday. I was going to write about it yesterday, but honestly when C&H dropped their immediately megasuccessful card game¹ on the world, any other new Kickstart was just gonna be overshadowed and so I pushed back a day.

  And B-Squad didn’t deserve that, so here we are today. One day in, 38 to go, sitting at about 16% of goal, as Burgoon pairs up with five artists to tell five stories and also deal with the worst writing constraint in history: each story, at least one character is going to kick it, as determined by a die roll that Burgoon must then adapt to. They say that writing is about killing your darlings, but what if you put work and love into a character and then the die says they gotta, well, die? Help make it all a bit less painful for Burgoon by at least making financially worthwhile for the creators to deal with the challenge and heartbreak.

• The ongoing endeavour that is trying to figure out who the heck gets a table at SPX hits a significant date soon; the curated portion of the floor is being allocated, and soon the showrunners will know exactly how many spots will go into the table lottery. Want to exhibit but not specifically invited? Check it:
  

  On February 12, 2016, the lottery registration will become available and the lottery registration period will last between February 12 and February 26, 2016.

  The lottery registration will take place through a web page on the SPXPO.com website. We will provide basic instructions on this page that can also be viewed in the FAQ section below.

  Each lottery registrant will receive an e-mail containing their own randomly generated 6-digit number that you will receive within 48 hours of registering for the lottery.

  Once the lottery registration period is completed on February 26, 2016, we will have a digital coin flipper to determine whether we sort the random numbers by ascending or descending order. The lottery registrant list will then be sorted by random number according to the coin flip, and those tables above the capacity threshold will be selected to exhibit at SPX 2016. The order of the tables below the capacity threshold will determine the wait list. [emphasis original]

  Got that? Friday is the day to start looking at the website for lottery applications. This is a much better system than the frantic rush to apply that SPX used before the lottery system, meaning that timestamps and postmarks and checks received don’t determine who gets in. Two weeks, same chance whenever you apply, and hope to see you in September.

• For those wondering, Queen of Comictopia Raina Telgemeier has topped off a recent move back to San Francisco with the release of the fourth of her newly-colored Baby Sitters Club adaptations and whaddaya know, it’s entered the New York Times Best Seller List in its first week. In slot #1. With five other books (Smile, Drama, Sisters, and two other BSC volumes) in slots 2, 5, 7, 8, and 9. Okay, book purchasers, let’s get that last BSC book on the list so that Telgemeier can have 70% of it to herself (until Ghosts comes out and she hits 80%). It’s her world, comics, we may as well acknowledge it.

• The Nib, lost to a reorg at Medium, has pretty much been Matt Bors’s singular focus for the past eight months or so. First it was the Kickstart to reprint the best of the site, and much of the time since has been dedicated to finding a new home for editorial cartooning on the web that pays. Good news dropping this morning, then:

  First Look Media today announced that they have partnered with award winning cartoonist Matt Bors on his irreverent comics publication, The Nib. Formerly part of the online platform Medium, The Nib will re-launch this summer through First Look Media as an independent daily publication and online newsletter.

  Great news, in fact, but why do I recognize that name, First Look Media?

  Bors will remain editor of The Nib as it joins First Look Media’s family of media properties including The Intercept, reported.ly, and Field of Vision.

  Ohhhh, right, The Intercept — that’s Greg Greenwald and Laura Poitras, the people that brought Edward Snowden’s leaks to light. Damn, this is going to be a match made in heaven, with adversarial journalism committed in both words and pictures. It’ll have been a year spent Nibless, but before long we’re going to have voices back that we haven’t seen as much lately, in one place, both delighting and enraging me, and (most importantly) getting paid. That’ll do, Matt. That’ll do.

Spam of the day:

say hello to these naughty and wild milfs

Why, for the love of all that you might find holy, why would you send me a spam trying to intrigue me on a sexual basis and then write that spam in ficking Comic Sans?

_______________
¹ As of this writing, above US$400K on a US$10K goal, with more than 8700 backers. The FFFmk2 predicts a final funding in the US$1.5million (plus or minus call it US$300K) range, which would be frankly insane if not for the example of Exploding Kittens last year.

This day in Great Outdoor Fight history: Running credit and the relative merits of recumbent Tai-Chi.

• Well, that was fast. Between morning break and when I caught up at lunch, the lads over at Cyanide & Happiness launched, funded (about 30 minutes later), and continue to overfund (as of this writing, by about a factor of nine) a Kickstarter for a card game, Joking Hazard. Short version, it appears to be an in-person, competitive version of the C&H random comic generator. It’s Apples to Apples or Cards Against Humanity with pictures. It’s going to fund a million dollars (we can do a proper prediction when the Kickstart’s not two and a half hours old.
• As a quick reminder, the Smut Peddler Double Header Kickstarter is about halfway through its run, and is just shy of US$100,000. What’s more popular? A somewhat rude card game, or hot, hot pornography? Reminder: it can be both! Success of one need not come a the expense of the other.
• Going back to 2011, I’ve been keeping an eye on Tyler Page’s slowly-evolving Raised on Ritalin, a memoir-slash-exploration of mental health issues (specifically, ADD/ADHD) in comic form. It’s been released in chapters approximately 3 – 4 times a year, and today’s latest update bears both the tagline What does the future hold? and a notation that the next chapter will be the last. It’s been a long, sometimes painfully honest story that Page has shared with us, and while I’ll be sorry to see it go, I’ll be happier to know that he got such a monumental project finished and in shape. It’s worth a read from the beginning.

Spam of the day:
Compare and contrast —

local moms need easy sex

and

local mom in need of some very hardsex

Firstly, get your message consistent as to the hardness of the needed sex. Secondly, if you want to make people think of sex, stop using the word mom in any context in my direction because ew.

This day in Great Outdoor Fight history: The weekend saw our several-times-noted episode of Beef recounting GOF lore¹, and the revelation that Beef is not Frederick H Coca-Cola. Today, Polish sausages and pencil necks.

Once again, we have new from Fleen Senior French Correspondent Pierre Lebeaupin; I’m excited to see what he drops us from the continent, the coverage the that rest of us here at Fleen provide is decidedly English-centric (and within that subset of the world’s comics, primarily focused on the US/Canada). The French language has an enormous tradition of comics, more than any other culture except perhaps Japan, and not speaking it fluently (or having time to look things up) has restricted our coverage to either stupidity explosions and whatever cool thing Boulet is doing now.

Also, FSFCPL’s contributions make for less typing, so that’s a bonus. Here’s today’s news from the world of bande dessinées (nouvelles du monde de la bande dessinée):

I got news about a newly released, let’s say, digital comics experiment called Phallaina. Start downloading the app right now, it’s a bit big, and run it as soon as it is downloaded, as it needs to process its own resources for two additional minutes.

While the page is in French, the app has both French and English text, and there is an English teaser trailer (however, the press kit is inexplicably only in French). While they say it’s optimized for tablets (and I have played with it on my iPad), it is also legible on an Android phone (Galaxy S II), though (as some also also report) I indeed had to kill it the first time and it worked the second, so you should have what it needs to experience it.

They claim it’s the first « bande défilée » (literally, “scrolling band”, while sounding like « bande dessinée »), but (besides, of course, the Bayeux Tapestry) I remember http://www.nevermindthebullets.com/ (still online, amazingly enough for a promotional creation) doing the pretty much the same thing, and with web technologies to boot. On the other hand, Never Mind The Bullets has movement everywhere in no discernible pattern, which makes it more confusing than anything; Phallaina is much better done in my opinion.

I have never heard of the author, and I can’t bring you much in the way of context, other than it has the backing of France Télévisions (through the domain: francetv.fr, the credits, etc.), which is nothing less than France’s public TV corporation (think France’s BBC, though restricted to TV).

News via Boulet. I swear, I’m trying to diversify my sources: I now follow a dozen French webcomic authors and related people (some on a secondary Twitter account), and yet all the interesting stuff comes via Boulet.

I can pretty safely say that I never would have heard about Phallaina without this note from Lebeaupin, even though I follow Boulet in English. I’m going to see what’s up with Phallaina first chance I get, and can’t help but wonder if this becomes a platform for more creators and more stories. I can’t help think of what McCloud’s My Obsession With Chess would look like optimized for a modern mobile presentation. Is this me coming around on infinite canvas? Maybe we just needed a way to make the idea not tedious in implementation and technology is finally catching up.

As usual, Fleen thanks Lebeaupin for his contribution. Going to have to create a tag for posts he contributes to for easy future reference.

Spam of the day:
I’m putting this one behind the cut because it is so awesome I couldn’t find an excerpt to quote. I have to run the entire damn thing verbatim.

(more…)

What a week, what a week. Let’s recap the things that have happened and call it.

• This day in Great Outdoor Fight history: No strip. Ray’s probably dealing with his hat guy to ensure he has the proper hat, and he and Beef are packing up the motorcycle and sidecar for the trip to The Acres.
• The entirely delightful Rene Engström has, indeed, resurrected Anders Loves Maria with remastered art. Compare, if you will, the first two installments against the original version. There’s better pacing for the gag, better sense of space, better use of panel count and size to establish the time. There’s also — crucially — a shift from steam forming a heart in the original final panel to Maria looking gobsmacked. There’s an entirely different emotional payoff in this strip, a revision that could only come from a creator that is looking back with a better sense of who her characters are/were in hindsight, instead of just discovering them. I suspect the swing from idyllic love story to relationship trainwreck¹ and back again is going to have a different timbre (sometimes subtle, sometimes not) this time around. I’m looking forward to reading my favorite [SPOILER ALERT] ultimately heartbreaking story again for the first time.
• Ian Jones-Quartey has been mentioned many times on this page; he is, perhaps, best known for his work on Steven Universe and other collaborations with Rebecca Sugar, but before that he did minis, animated and directed various shows (including The Venture Brothers and Adventure Time), did some kick-ass minicomics, and (oh yeah) a little thing called RPG World². He’s been back-and-forth with Cartoon Network with his own projects (such as Secret Mountain Fort Awesome), and reported been working on a secret project.

  That project has been revealed: CN has picked up his Lakewood Plaza Turbo not as a series, but as their first property outside of broadcast. Specifically, it’s the centerpiece of a mobile game, OK K.O.! Lakewood Plaza Turbo, and the start of an ambitious new direction for the media empire. Now follow me on this: if you’re a network that’s taking a big gamble, making a move that has not been made before by any network, you are not going to make your first project (the one that determines whether or not this gamble goes forward) on somebody you don’t have total confidence in.

  And that confidence appears to have been well placed, as OKKO!LPT currently scoring ratings of 4.5/5.0 on both Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store. There’s probably no good way to determine how many times it’s been downloaded since launch yesterday, but given that the percentage of people that rate downloads is pretty low, having a few hundred (damn near universally positive) ratings in a day means it’s doing pretty well.

  This isn’t a one-off; it’s the start of a new business model for CN, and likely the start of a franchise for Jones-Quartey. Congrats to him, to his team, and to everybody that’s having fun beating stuff up in OKKO!LPT. And if you aren’t one of those people, let me point out that it’s free, so there’s nothing but download time keeping you from playing. You’re welcome.

• In case you missed it, Fleen Senior French Correspondent Pierre Lebeaupin continued his How to curse in French lessons in yesterday’s comments. Don’t say we never taught you anything worthwhile.

Spam of the day:

Your website has to be the elcoertnic Swiss army knife for this topic.

I’m putting that on my next round of business cards.

_______________
¹ Go back through the first run of ALM writeups on this page and you’ll see I spent plenty of time sniffly over those two crazy kids, and plenty of time wanting to boot one or both of them in the skull for being so stupid and cruel. Usually Anders, though — I suspect this time around the motivations for his behavior will be a little more emotionally deep and little less just him being a dick.

² Reminder that you do not ask Jones-Quartey when RPG World is getting finished. Every time he’s asked, he pushes the return date back another month (current estimate: February 2038).