notatypicalprototype

2-YEAR CHEDDAR

from GRAFTON VILLAGE

I usually try to review cheeses virginally - that is, ones that I’ve never had before. In this case, this is a cheddar I’ve had many times before. But I couldn’t leave it off the blog, what with its obvious appeal to leather and rubber fetishists.

As far as cheddars go, Grafton’s 2-year aged isn’t going to shock you. It’s mild, light on the salt, with a slightly sweet and grassy flavour. It’s got a nice texture. It’s dense, more moist than I expected, and smooth.

So what is the deal with the gummi suit on this cheese anyway? Well, cheese has obviously been around a lot longer than fridges. Fresh cheeses like mozzarella are too moist to last very long outside of a cold place (bacteria and fungi do so love damp places), though I don’t think anyone was too mad about eating that stuff quickly. But cheeses that have been aged (and dried) more have some more preservation options, which is where cheese wax comes in. The wax is a physical barrier, stopping fungal spores from landing, and also blocks moisture and air, making the cheese a pretty unfriendly place to grow. Even drier cheeses can be bandaged in cheesecloth and then slathered in lard to preserve them while allowing some ventilation.

As some of you might recall from this essay, I spent the latter half of 2025 working on a comic for the Ships of the Sea Maritime Museum in Savannah, Georgia. Tania Sammons, a curator at the museum who had previously licensed my guide to sailors’ tattoos for a show, wrote to me with an irresistible pitch: four cartoonists would be hired, assigned a vessel from the museum's extensive collection of models, then given six months to produce a short comic for publication in an anthology alongside an accompanying museum display.

How could I say no?

My original brief was to research the Anne, the ship that brought the first colonists to Georgia, but in the aftermath of my dad's death the story took off in directions I couldn't have foreseen.

I'm releasing the whole comic online to coincide with the opening of Drawn to the Sea, the exhibition in Savannah. If you're in the area this week (or anytime over the next nine months!) you can stop in and see all the amazing work that came from myself and fellow artists Avery Hick, Rich King, and Sharon Norwood. Details about the museum show are here.

In the meantime, here's a very personal comic.

Content Warning: this piece deals with suicide and parental mortality. Readers with trypophobia may want to skip pages 14 and 15.

When a client of mine tells me that he became abusive because he lost control of himself, I ask him why he didn’t do something even worse. For example, I might say, “You called her a fucking whore, you grabbed the phone out of her hand and whipped it across the room, and then you gave her a shove and she fell down. There she was at your feet, where it would have been easy to kick her in the head. Now, you have just finished telling me that you were ‘totally out of control’ at that time, but you didn’t kick her. What stopped you?” And the client can always give me a reason. Here are some common explanations:

“I wouldn’t want to cause her a serious injury.”

“I realized one of the children was watching.”

“I was afraid someone would call the police.”

“I could kill her if I did that.”

“The fight was getting loud, and I was afraid neighbors would hear.”

And the most frequent response of all:

“Jesus, I wouldn’t do that. I would never do something like that to her.”

The response that I almost never heard—I remember hearing it twice in fifteen years—was: “I don’t know.”

These ready answers strip the cover off of my clients’ loss-of-control excuse. While a man is on an abusive rampage, verbally or physically, his mind maintains awareness of a number of questions: “Am I doing something that other people could find out about, so it could make me look bad? Am I doing anything that could get me in legal trouble? Could I get hurt myself? Am I doing anything that I myself consider too cruel, gross, or violent?”

This is the world capitalists want to return to.

(Every mini-teaser released by LAIKA so far.)

I saw a post about someone chiding Millennials for not knowing about JKRowlings transphobia, and asking how it is at all possible that people can exist in the world and the internet and, you know, not know.

Which I mean, I get. It is so present in so many of my online spaces that it seems astounding that someone could simply be ignorant! It feels impossible!

But let me tell you a story:

I went on a girls trip with a bunch of friends. All of us are rather incredibly liberal and all of us are incredibly online.

One girl would not stop talking about Harry Potter.

At one point, another girl asked her why she was ok with supporting it, and she had no real clue that JK Rowling was at all transphobic. She had heard that she likes to support Lesbian causes and thought “oh ok cool!” And that was it. She was AGOG with the news and rather horrified.

I must once again emphasize that she was an incredibly online person. She’s a foodie and a restaurant blogger.

Later in the trip we were picking restaurants and I suggested one I found on Google, and she gasped at me. Actually gasped, asking how I could ever be okay picking that one.

The shock must’ve been on my face, because she then told me all of the shitty things that restaurateur does. He abuses staff. Underpays them. Fires them on a whim. Is known for being one of the worst people to his employees in the entire restaurant business on this coast.

And she was so shocked I had never heard of this. Because in her mind, I was just as online as her. And in her online world, EVERYONE knew about this guy.

So I think the moral of this story is: always approach the other person with some empathy. Even online people, even people you think MUST know about how bad people are, may not have heard. It may truly be just them being on a different sphere of the internet than you.

So be gentle, be kind when letting people know they might not have heard about the cancellation of XYZ person. Don’t assume that everyone knows all the same info as you.

These comments for these pictures are reasons why I don't want to engage with fandoms especially on certain platforms like Reddit. It also shows why I think it's best to be wise about where one shares certain things.

Someone shared those to the Arcade subreddit on Reddit because they liked them and wondered where they could get some like them

People there responded using strong words to describe things that are just not to their tastes as if they shouldn't exist for anyone.

Some people think some games should never be played on arcade machines because they never played them that way and they should never be played with joysticks because they only used gamepads to play them.

What they don't realize is people like me exist. Back in the day I preferred Joysticks because I preferred arcade gaming and I actually bought and made arcade sticks for my home systems and used them to play everything including platformer games like Donkey Kong Country and got better with them than with gamepads.

They deride CNC cut cabs but I appreciate how cabs can be made that way these days because IMHO it's elevated what can be produced and has made precision cuts that can make it easier and more accessible.

Those things and home arcade cabs have made home arcades more accessible to me in general.

There's also something to be said for having items of that type that one can customize to their liking without having to hack up and destroy originals thus treading on history. This helps so that those things can be reserved for people who care about those kinds of things as their priorities.

But they should also be aware that not everyone shares those priorities and there's nothing wrong with that.

Enthusiasts may also look down upon cheaper cabinets as being inferior and to some degree they may be correct but apart from what I've already said not everyone can afford the most high end of materials nor is the size and weight of them always practical.

That being said while these cabs actually look quite good to me there's certainly things about them that aren't to my tastes that I would want to be done differently.

Like I wouldn't use smaller unmatted widescreen monitors on them especially with the rest not modified to take into account the size difference. Like the bezel areas on these look too tall making the monitors come off as extra small... and I wouldn't stretch the games to fill the screens either but I don't actually judge people for that.

These cabs seem to also all have monaural sound when I know that some of those games definitely have stereo sound so I wouldn't have made the same choices.

These cabs probably would benefit from at least being equipped with 25" 4:3 LCDs to make the best use of the real estate.

On the other hand I might agree that emulation is better for home use than for commercial use but there is practical reasons why it might be used. Nothing lasts forever and emulation is one tool that people use to help preserve games. It's possible to still enjoy games even if the presentation isn't to someone's tastes or sensibilities..

I can appreciate having a preference for original hardware but I think it's going too far being so elitist and judgemental about emulation especially not in the current economy.

Generally speaking however they look like nice Midway style cabinets to me and I can see why the OP would want something like them.