Streaming Live, Tuesdays at 9pm Eastern!

Monday March 23, 2020 • Howard Tayler

TypeCast RPG, which I haven’t blogged about in a while, is still a thing I’m doing on Tuesday nights. It’s a D&D 5e game set in a world of flying cities which are built on the backs of sleeping alien gods.

Join us! Now that we’re doing it remotely, instead of in the studio, everybody has room to flip open their laptops and participate in chat, so it’s quite the multiple-medium experience.

Oh, and there’s a live art-cam, too. Watch me use Copic markers, and sometimes even the Copic airbrush, to do stuff like this just as quickly as I can:

Follow and subscribe at twitch.tv/typecastrpg, and keep us company while we play an intensely social game while being very socially distant.

Over-Reaction is the Best Reaction

Saturday March 14, 2020 • Howard Tayler

We’re self-quarantining here at Chez Tayler, but the State of Utah and the LDS Church are helping things along immensely by canceling school and church for us. We’re extremely fortunate that we already work from home, and are able to steer clear of public places without seriously impacting the family finances.

Rewinding a bit—my asthma is still on overdrive, but we’re otherwise healthy, and free from any COVID-19 symptoms. We’re doing fine. This social distancing thing is something we’re going to take seriously, though, because the best possible outcome is for us to look back on this and say “maybe we over-reacted.”

You see, the next-best outcome is a terrible one. That’s the one where we look back on this and say “It’s a good thing we did all that, but we should have done more, and sooner.” We don’t get that outcome unless neighbors¹ are dying.

The worst outcome, at least for us, is the one where we discover just how sick this coronavirus can make a 52-year-old asthma sufferer, and exactly how deadly it can be to run out of beds and respirators in the ICU. And if we can get through the next few weeks without that happening, perhaps without that ever happening, we might feel like all our precautions were over-reactions.

And the luxury of being alive to whine about over-reacting is one I plan to cherish.

¹ Maybe next-door neighbors, maybe folks from Samaria. We try to define “neighbor” in broad, New Testament terms when it comes to things like this².
² We narrow the definition quite a bit when it’s time to visit a neighbor to ask whether we might borrow a cup of sugar.

Somebody Spoke Too Soon About Being on the Mend

Wednesday February 19, 2020 • Howard Tayler

I’ve been sick for over a month now. The good news is that I’m not down with fever and body-aches anymore, but I’m still exhausted all the time, and my voice is a ragged wreck of a thing which is painful to use. I can only imagine what it’s like to listen to.

This has had an effect on my work, obviously. Keeping up with the comic strip, which is Job One, has been a struggle. Other stuff has fallen completely off, and I feel pretty badly about it because some of what has fallen off is some key tasks for delivering the next Schlock Mercenary book.

I haven’t reviewed any movies in a while, either. I definitely feel well enough to sit down for a couple of hours and watch something, but I don’t feel good about taking this cough into a theater.

My hope is that by the time February 29th rolls around (carrying with it the beginning of my 53rd year as a corporeal Earth-human) I’ll be back in good health, and getting stuff done again. Really, that’s all I want for my birthday.