Club PA Newsletter #81 (Patreon)

As suggested in the strip, these are uniquely trying times to be a parent.

In his critical media exegesis "Sampling Law," M.C. Paul Barman suggests that media itself has become our natural environment.  I don't know if I can go the whole way with him on this, but it's a very worthy topic for consideration, because we are definitely surrounded by it on all sides.  I'm making it right now and sending it to you!  But promoting and crafting a literacy about media in general is a fundamental parenting task now, in the way you might have talked about which berries are okay.

And that's just about trying to keep them from becoming pawns in someone's political schemes.  When you start talking about keeping their wits about them in a context where a billion dollars is being spent to seize their attention - in a universe where something like gambling has been normalized in free to play games, the games that are "okay" because "they don't cost anything," you can only maintain against it by becoming some stone-faced, implacable fun ruiner.  Gabe has encountered these dynamics so often that he wants to get back to a show idea we had, Parental Guidance, just to give parents some actionable fucking information.

Here's another poem from Lexcalibur II, "Wizard Golf."  There are a few themes that run through the book, things like Sports, The Eyrewood, Pets, that kinda stuff.  Each has a poem or two.  But I thought this one was especially dumb, in the way you want a silly poem to be.

Wizard Golf

Wizard Golf

Is like regular golf,

But the people who play it are wizards.

Sometimes, it is tragic

But they try not to Magic

Well, most of them do.  Except Richard.

We even have art for this one!  Mike had done a bunch of cool shit already for it.

Silently judging Richard,

(CW)TB