#reader submission

Hi there honeyblosso, thank you for sending in your question!

Rock & Roar was the result of a lifetime of my interests colliding - specifically, my love of rock music, animation, and road trip movies! I started developing it in 2012 when I was in college. The first thing that popped into my head was a yellow punk alley cat who went on to become Miles, and the rest of the story and world grew around him until it became what it is today.

The comic will total about 9 chapters. Miles's family will get revisited later in the comic, so I won't spoil that just yet. :)

I used a photo from Grace's new photoshoot for the CC album, so technically Chrissy is on the cover. But I couldn't decide on the album name. Also the reason the mixtapes have more than just 80s metal, is because I'd like to think that Eddie and Chrissy enjoy many musical genres; historically every music genre was influenced by another. The mixtape titled Leather and Lace is Eddie and Chrissy's joint mix. I headcanon that when Eddie goes on a tour in '95, they take turns adding one song each, then mail the tape back and forth until Eddie comes home. The songs are themed to express their yearning to reunite.

…

i’m actually crying right now

chrissy’s nye dress

the album

the ‘i love you more than i hate billy joel’ line on the tape

the shared mix tape

this is all certified old haunts canon 📝

thank you, i’m so moved 🥹

This is in honor of the request of my Mutual @themudbloodradio (Hey Mootie! I said I'd do it and I finally finished it! [Did I sound almost normal talking like that themudbloodradio? That felt unnatural to type lol. I'm to rigid for my own good]) And please keep in mind my beloved readers that this one-shot is separate from the Anti-Scribe canon

The world ended the day THEY showed up. A horrific, elongated man. Skin a chimera of textures. Some parts burned black, others scarred and scuffed to the point of rubbing like stone on bare muscle, and more yet patched pale as if never having seen the light of the sun. All of stretched over ribs that seem to be mere millimeters from breaking skin and which you can see the muscles that both serves to help them move but also sticks their bones in place. As if their body has no room for anything extra beyond barely functioning. What hair they had shaggy and blonde. Mostly obscuring the haunting pale eyes that cut through your soul like a dagger through a sleeping monarch. A mouth filled with red gums leaking translucent white drool which when the world's greatest minds examined proved to be an unmatched sealing agent. The things teeth uneven and crooked in the shapes of fishhooks and flat crushers. But the thing wasn't a hostile monster. Not the bumps in the night you see in shitty horror movies. In the years of recorded history since their emergence the thing hadn't attacked any human or animal even once. It didn't even eat the carrion of the dead. It ate the non-living. Infrastructure was torn down as it ate the metal and scarfed down the concrete. Processed wood, the plants from grass to poison ivy. Even the exploding fruit of Sandbox Tree's does little to the thing. The worst bit was for every poisonous plant or bullet pumped into it by a random hick or military occupation did nothing but slightly damage it. And even then their wounds heal before blood can even be spilled most of the time. Every wound making it harder to hurt. Humanity soon entered an arm's race with the monster's regeneration. But every time a weapon proved effective. It only had at best three or four uses before it was useless like all it's predecessors. And the monster only ever looked sadly at their assailants. As if to look at them reminded them of some long forgotten trauma. And as humanity tried and failed to stop them, they emptied mountains into valleys and turned forests into wastelands. No waste ever left behind so there was never even anything left to help plants row back. No one knew how they decided to move from place to place. All they've seen proved they could probably eat the earth below their feet until they reached the core of the planet, ultimately dooming the planet. And yet for some reason they seemed to randomly go from place to place. Sometimes going from a valley they ate out in Texas to the monument in B.C to Hong Kong, Syndey, Newfoundland, they'd sometimes travel across the globe at times and other times move perhaps a few hundred kilometers over the course of a year. But while the effect was slow it was still gradually noticable. The planet couldn't support the rapid loss of flora and the Earth's tectonic plates would rapidly shift from the beast eating down into the earth. Collapsing subterranean tunnels and causing worldwide sinkholes. Naturally some saw this as a great equalizer or a primoridal force to "save the Earth". Cults formed and people began to follow or seek out the monster. But even they fail to hear their idol's midnight mourning. Staring at the stars as if they sought to devour them as well. But in truth all they thought staring up to the endless beyond is regret. Tears may not fall down their form due to their observed lack of most biological features, but what they murmur that only the wind and stars may hear is the woeful weeping in the form of words that long hold no power,

"I'm....sorry....everyone...you'd...have hated...what I've become...I was just....just so hungry...."

I (M 21) have formed a tight-knit friend group in college. Yay! My closest college friends are the members of my ttrpg group, who we’ll call A, B, C, D, and E. A (F 21) and B (NB 22) have been dating for the whole time I’ve known them, about a year. Last year, A, B, and C lived in the same residence hall and were rarely apart. Now that B has graduated, the plan next year is for A and D to be roommates while C, E, and I live in a similar residence hall. I expect to see a lot of B, who plans to find a job and apartment in this town.

B is my friend, so this is *almost* fine. Except that while I like A, and I like B, it is painful to hang out with both of them at the same time. B is a fairly jealous person, and they get very upset and mean when A hangs out with friends without including them. When we get lunch together and the topic turns to an interest of A’s that B does not share, B usually ends up monologuing about how much they dislike the interest. These monologues often turn into teardowns of A as a person that the rest of us awkwardly sit through. A and B have a lot of their fights in public, and they’re mean to each other.

At this point, I’ve seen enough meanness that I don’t consider B a close friend anymore, and I’m wavering on A. I like both of them, but the way they’re willing to treat each other in public, especially the way B treats A, throws up a lot of red flags.

Any good options? I’m worried that if I tell A that I don’t like how B treats her, it’ll torpedo my friendships with both of them. C is A’s best friend, E is B’s best friend, and D is about to be A’s roommate, so it’s not like I can avoid either of them. And I do still like them, especially A. When it’s just the two of us, A is a good friend.

What do I do? I’m tempted to bring it up to our other friends, but I don’t like talking behind people’s backs.

Readers sometimes send Bad Advisor their real-ass questions to answer, so the Bad Advisor is periodically going to try her hand at answering them. If you’d like to submit a question for a Good Advice Interlude, use the “ask” form!

What a surprise it is, going on a decade-plus of Bad Advice, to finally have some TTRPG drama on the blog! ("Table-top role-playing games," for the uninitiated.) The Bad Advisor is all too familiar with the Darth Partner/Missing Stair dynamic (h/t Captain Awkward, the Pervocracy) in TTRPG scenarios and it's a real goddamned bummer, because you can mostly scoot away from the DP/MS at a party but when you're stuck at the gaming table with them, woof.

My first inclination, as an old-ass gamer lady, was to simply tell you that B will probably just move the fuck on from your group now that they're graduated and doing non-college things, but that doesn't help you in the moment, and they might not, and frankly DP/MS folks will show up for your entire fucking life if you're a game-type person in many and various modes, and it's good to figure out how you're going to handle them now and get some practice in with not tolerating nonsense in your circle. I'm gonna use some elaborate/belabored RPG metaphors in this response and want to emphasize that it doesn't mean your life is a game! (I also believe TTRPG life is real life, because it's my real life, too!) But you've given me a delightful tableau within which to work.

Your instincts for not just straight-up shit-talking and gossiping about A and B's deal are correct! You will never be able to keep those conversations totally private (nothing that starts in the TTRPG side-chat ever stays in the TTRPG side-chat), and for both A and B, it will suck to inevitably find out that their buds were engaged in such conversations. Is it possible you could safely feel out the other members of the group on the A/B relationship dynamic, as a fact-finding, temperature-taking mission? MAYBE. But it's a very risky maybe IMO, and if you don't love the dynamic, I don't necessarily think you need side-chat validation on this point. You have information the other players may or may not have; you are entitled to act upon it. I think we dispense with C, D, and E. You aren't them, and you can't control what they do or say or feel, and they aren't asking me for advice. But you can model behavior and steer your party!

So. What are you gonna do?

You start by describing B as a friend, but waffle on that some -- you've become less close because you dislike B's treatment of/behavior around A, which is fair! You're allowed to decide, with new information about how B behaves in particular situations, that you don't really like parts of a person, or maybe even that person at all! You don't have to set the whole motherfucker on fire to make your feelings known in a thoughtful, polite, and even kind way; if somebody else (B) blows that shit up, it's on them! They are a whole other person who will act a way in a game/life that you cannot control; the only thing you need to feel good about at the end of your turn is that you did something that was true to you/your character. Because for real, if there's one thing I know about people, it's that telling people to do a thing because you want them to do a thing (such as: "Y'all are miserable and you should split up!") will almost always result in the told-parties doubling down on the opposite of what the telling-party wants them to do. (This is what I do to torture my folks when I am the dungeon-master, because it is what people do!)

Assuming we're talking about garden variety shitty relationship behavior (which is what I think you've described here) and not full-scale abuse in public, I think you have a number of options depending on the situation. I don't mean to suggest that you should accommodate bad behavior; you already know that feels crappy and sows discord and confusion because you're doing it, now, by trying to side-step around the ick. You gotta choose your move depending on where you are on the board.

The next time A and B get into it in front of everybody (during a game, or at the bar, or the coffee shop, or the student union, or wherever), you pretend-roll a charisma check and imagine you got a 15+ and they rolled a combined 3 (because they have??? nobody likes this!!!!), and you say something to this effect: "Hey, A and B? These vibes are not great, can we table this tiff until later?" Repeat as needed! Passive voice/vague antecedents are great in these kinds of situations: "Can folks not get into this right now?"/"Moving on! Let's focus on XYZ!"/"Feels like we're getting off track — can we do ABC instead?"/"Wow! That's kind of awkward and private! Let's not do that here!" If it helps, imagine B is the obnoxious NPC you need to get the bare minimum of compliance out of to continue the game of not blowing up the entire situation. You already have a good bead on what people do when they feel attacked, because you're literally playing games wherein that make-believe happens! People fight back and get defensive! It's a bad scene!

Other people's bad relationships are theirs to solve, so you can treat interactions regarding those relationships as open-ended puzzle games that are not for you to finish. You are the Oracle, not the puzzlemaster. If you get A or B on their own in a safe space where you're not rushed to get somewhere or hungry or otherwise pissy or wanting, why not ask: How does it feel when A/B does that? What would you like to see happen instead when Bad interaction happens? What might you do about that irritating/annoying/weird thing A/B does? Despite what I said in the prior bullet points, your friends are not NPCs, and of course you know this or you wouldn't be asking — they are the main characters in their own lives, and you can neither save nor sink them.

It might be that A and B stay in this weird bad relationship! If it continues to cause bad vibes at the game nights/within your circle, I think you're well within your rights to say, either to one or both of them if they haven't gotten previous messages: "Hey, I like you both, I want to keep doing XYZ fun things with y'all, but this dynamic is actually really, legitimately killing the vibe, because I don't get to see the fun part where y'all make up and feel good about everything, I only see the bad arguing parts and it's just a real downer!" Don't let them off the hook about this! Stand your ground when they come back with "Oh, we're just joking" or "Ah, well, that's just how we are." Okay, they're joking and that's how they are, but it SUCKS TO BE AROUND and if it's not a big deal, they can cut that shit out!

The whole deal blows, and you're in a sorry position to have to navigate it. It just absolutely is a shit situation to have a friend-group whose dynamic is messed up in this way. But you're asking because your interest is in maintaining a collective good-feeling, and I can promise you that skipping the missing stair of A and B's bad vibes (and maybe specifically B's behavior) will absolutely in the long-term result in the precise kind of bad-feeling you're trying to avoid by skating past it today. Resentment, distrust, annoyance, back-channeling — all of the things we build and do to avoid being emotionally honest with people who care about because we think it'll hurt less in the moment, or get better later, or just change, somehow — are also 10000000% guaranteed ways to push us farther apart from the people we love, rather than keep us close and friendly.

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Potter DIY: Shrunken Heads Halloween Decor

By Corrine Adams

Here’s a quick and easy DIY to wow your friends and add some spooky flavor to your Halloween decor.

    What You’ll Need*:

Tin foil

Cling film

Self-hardening clay (You can get this from most craft stores – I prefer a natural brown clay.)

Fake hair (Try the Dollar Tree store or ordering online)

Twine (any kind will do)

Beads (for that extra pop)

Paint (optional)

*Amounts depend on how many shrunken heads you want to make.

  Directions:

Step 1: Make a head shape from tin foil first and then form the clay over it. Pictures of the shrunken heads from The Wizarding World of Harry Potter can provide a look at the official face style.

Step 2: With an oven thermometer, push small plugs of hair into the soft clay on the scalp section. This will take time, and you need to keep your clay moist while you work, so cover it with cling film in between work times.

Step 3: Add bits of twine to the lips, eyes, or anywhere else you want to create a “stitched” look.

Step 4 (optional): You can braid the hair, add paint to the contours of the face, and add shells or beaded jewelry to add a bit of personality to your shrunken heads.

    Step 5: Leave to dry in a dry warm place.

There you have it! The heads will be fragile once dry since they are made of clay, so keep them safe in a bell jar or display case.

Dan Simmons: The Terror

Submitted by Meg Favreau

An anonymous fan submitted this irresistible animation based on a recent well received post.

I love this question, thank you for asking!

The short answer is yes, what we now know as punk was originated by cats, and it developed in largely two places - New York City and London in the mid 70s. "Proto-punk" artists that preceded this movement and inspired what would later become punk, were animals of a few different species; but it was street cats, with their independent streak, who turned out to be the fierce non-conformists that rock music needed at that time, and who took those earlier ideas and created a whole new movement in music and culture.

By nature, alley cats tend to gather in large groups. It was then easy in this environment for musicians to share music and political ideas amongst each other and a whole new genre and subculture grew out of that. These cats were also very territorial, so in many pockets within the punk scene, outsiders weren't warmly welcomed. This is what has happened in the music scene that Miles is a part of, and why it's made up exclusively of cats who've claimed those alleys as theirs.

But as punk rock grew in popularity and spread across the globe, it began to draw crowds of all kinds of animals. By the time punk grew into the Hardcore movement, canines were just as numerous as felines in the scene. Punk gave way to many other genres - such as Gothic Rock and New Wave - and each had different kinds of animals within the bands that represented each of those genres. We'll be meeting some of them throughout the story.

All of this will be elaborated on in the Rock & Roar Wiki, which is currently in progress!